City Of Los Angeles Sued Yet Again To Enforce Compliance With The Public Records Act — This Time It’s Over CD14’s Obstinate Refusal To Produce Emails Between Staffer Joella Hopkins And Various City Officials — Mostly Having To Do With Homeless Issues — CD14 Commo Deputy Isaiah Calvin Risibly Claimed That Dozens If Not Hundreds Of Emails Were Exempt As Attorney Client Privileged — But I Obtained Some Of These From Other Sources And — He’s Lying — Or Confused — Or Both — But That Doesn’t Matter Under The Law — Hence This Petition

This is just a very quick note to announce that due to CD14’s well-known and weirdly intransigent refusal to comply with even the most minimal mandates of the California Public Records Act I have been forced to file a writ petition against these outlaw City officials seeking to enforce my constitutional right to read their damn emails.

On December 30, 2018 I asked Paul Habib and some other Huizar staffies for “emails between joella.hopkins@lacity.org or ari.simon@lacity.org and at least one of 34490@lapd.online or 32511@lapd.online or gita.oneill@lacity.org or kurt.knecht@lacity.org.” Note that the two police there are Marc Reina and Deon Joseph respectively. They hummed, hemmed, hawed, and noped and eventually produced 62 pages of ludicrously incomplete emails. For instance, they produced the first page of a 14 page thread about Night on Broadway but not the other 13 pages. And crazy stuff like that.

And they claimed, possibly due to the inclusion of Deputy City Attorneys Gita O’Neill and Kurt Knecht in my request, that they had withheld some material under the attorney/client privilege. But you know, and this is good CPRA practice, when possible I like to hit up as many agencies as possible for the same or overlapping material. It’s the best way not only to get complete sets of stuff but also to check whether responses are honest. And, sadly, often they are not.

Like for instance, in this case, where parallel requests to the LAPD turned up many, many records responsive to my request to CD14 but which they didn’t produce and, therefore, had claimed were A/C privileged. I certainly don’t want to tip my hand by showing all of them, but here’s one. It’s a multi-email thread between Hopkins, Marc Reina, and some other cop, no attorneys even involved, discussing whether Huizar has time to show up for some ceremonial LAPD crapolo.¹ That’s how dumb Calvin’s exemption claim was.

I asked them a few times to reconsider, but they would not. As you know, then, the state legislature, in their infinite wisdom, has left me no recourse under such circumstances but to file a petition. So that’s what I did, or, actually, my attorney, Doug Ecks, did on my behalf. Stay tuned for news!

I know English speakers are more familiar with the feminine form of this noun, but everything to do with ceremonial LAPD crapolx is very very extra masculine. Hence…

Michael Kohlhaas dot org

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