Carol Schatz’s duplicity laid bare by Venn diagrams!UPDATE (3/17 9:40 a.m.): Just now the City Clerk sent out the agenda for a special meeting of the City Council tomorrow morning, amended to include the very change described in this post, requested by Carol Schatz only yesterday. Now THAT is political juice. Disgusting.
Carol Schatz, she of the zillion dollars an hour paycheck, just this evening with respect to Council file 14-1656-S1, on homeless people’s property, had a letter to the Council appear, advocating a change in conjunction from “and” to “or” in the proposed statute. Here’s what Carol Schatz had to say about the current proposal:
The ordinance from the City Attorney transmitted to the PWGR committee1 only leads to a violation if a person refuses to remove a tent and obstructs removal.
And why is this bad, Carol? Pray, do tell:
This is unreasonable in light of limited city resources. It would require the continued involvement of the LAPD to have tents deconstructed on a daily basis, which is not practical or the best use of resources. It also does not meet the City’s goal of decriminalizing homelessness.
And not only that, but look:
This is unfair to homeless individuals, business owners, residents and other community stakeholders.
You read it here second, friends! Carol Schatz is concerned that some City law is unfair to homeless people.2 Carol Schatz, the homeless people’s friend! Well, anyway, that line about the proposed law not decriminalizing homelessness is true, at least. Arresting homeless people because they won’t remove their tent and obstruct its removal “…does not meet the City’s goal of decriminalizing homelessness.” After all, it provides a way to arrest people, and only homeless people are affected. So what’s her solution? We are glad you asked! Read on for details: Continue reading Shame, Shame on Carol Schatz: The Zillion Dollar Woman’s Duplicity is Revealed by Propositional Logic Even Though She Just Wants to be Fair to “Homeless Individuals”→
Public urine in Hollywood belongs in a public restroom. But what counts as public?While poking around BID Patrol arrest reports recently obtained from the HPOA by our faithful correspondent, we noticed a weird, repetitive quirk in the ones relating to LAMC 41.47.2, which forbids public urination. The arresting security guards uniformly either ask their victim if he or she knew of the existence of public restrooms close by or else they note in their report that there were public restrooms close by. Now, whenever one finds this kind of textual consistency in police reports it’s possible to be sure of two things. First, there’s some element of the crime that they’re trying to make sure is definitely established. Second, that they’re probably lying. In this case, it was hard to see what element might be related to the proximity of public restrooms. The law doesn’t mention them, and is not subtle in the least:
No person shall urinate or defecate in or upon any public street, sidewalk, alley, plaza, beach, park, public building or other publicly maintained facility or place, or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view, except when using a urinal, toilet or commode located in a restroom, or when using a portable or temporary toilet or other facility designed for the sanitary disposal of human waste and which is enclosed from public view.
But a little googling revealed the explanation, among other interesting things. First, public urination wasn’t against the law in the city of Los Angeles until 2003. We’re guessing that there was no pressing need to make it so because vagrancy laws could be used against public urinators as desired until they were definitively destroyed in 1983.1 So maybe outlawing public urination wasn’t as urgent as, e.g., squashing drinking beer in the park (which was outlawed in LA only in 1983) and also, the LA Times suggested that previously public urinators were charged with littering, but that the City Attorney decided that that was bogus. In any case, the Council file on the matter shows, surprisingly, that it took more than four years to get the prohibition passed into law. There doesn’t seem to have been any public discussion of the matter before it passed, either, although it may be just that the online materials from that long ago are fragmentary.
Second, the LA Times article quoted the objections of members of the Los Angeles Community Action Network and other homeless advocates to a law which criminalized essential bodily functions of the homeless, and in response, after the law was passed, according to the Times, “Council members pledged that people would be prosecuted only in cases when there is a public toilet nearby that they failed to use.” So this is why, no doubt, the BID Patrol feels that it has to note the locations of nearby “public” restrooms in its arrest reports. Their weirdo interpretation of the meaning of “public” also shows why it’s necessary to put things like the “public restrooms available” pledge in the law itself. Actually, once the law is passed, it doesn’t matter what Councilmembers say they meant it to mean, it only matters what it says. This is how the rule of law works in a free society. Also, isn’t it very suspicious but unfortunately not surprising that they put the fuzzy-wuzzy warmsy-hugsy interpretation of the law in the paper but not in the statute books?
And that’s not the worst thing about this nonsense. Even if the City Council intended the law to be enforced this way, even if the freaking Mayor ordered the LAPD only to enforce the law this way, none of that would reign in the BID Patrol. They are essentially beyond the control of public policy and beholden only to the written letter of the law.2 As we’ve discussed before, according to LAPD Commander Andrew Smith, if a citizen’s arrest is made, the LAPD must accept custody of the arrestee even if the arrest was made contrary to public policy.
BID Patrol officer Robert E. Reyes (badge #117, on left) illegally arrested a man in Selma Park in 2008.
We’ve been writing for 6 months now about how the HPOA put up phony signs in Selma Park in Hollywood (illegally) declaring it off-limits to adults unaccompanied by children and how the BID Patrol spent the next eight years falsely arresting people and ejecting them from the park, until we got the signs taken down by the City in September 2015. Kerry Morrison told our faithful correspondent that “A/I says that after looking into this, it is unlikely that any arrests ever were made by A/I in Selma Park with specific regard to the signs and penal code section you recite (as opposed to public urination, drinking, and other reasons)…” Man arrested in 2008 for being in Selma Park without a child.
Well, we’ve been receiving the BID Patrol’s arrest reports and daily activity logs for a while now, and recently we obtained the complete 2008 set (arrests here and daily logs here). We’ve known that Kerry’s claim was wrong for a while now (e.g. see here) and the 2008 materials provide even more evidence that she was misled by Andrews International1regarding their course of conduct in illegally arresting multiple people in the park over the years.
Downtown Russell Brown stumping for Jose Huizar.Our fateful faithful correspondent recently completed a magnanimously opalesque tour de farce of historicalisticism concerning a wildly successful 2010 plot by a bunch of bitchy BIDsies along with then-councildude Eric Garcetti, le petit ami chéri de toutes les dames mignonnes des BIDs, to ruthlessly destroy a perfectly reasonable proposal from the City Ethics Commission to make it easier to figure out who’s supposed to register as a lobbyist. Well, as part of his research he ended up transcribing not just the nonsense spewed by best-BIDdie-buddies Garcetti and Morrison, but a bunch of other tangential nonsense as well. Some of it’s fascinating in its own right, and we’re planning to write about it from time to time, starting this evening with a pluperfect portion of paranoia from Downtown L.A.’s own pallidly prophetic Russ Brown himself!
Historically-minded observers of the Downtown Los Angeles politico-sociologico-ethnomethodologico-cultural scene will remember Mr. Brown as the erstwhile boss-boy of the Historic Downtown BID, ignominiously forced out of his BIDship by the Board for reasons that surely aren’t being stated, and then ignominiously reinstalled two weeks later when Jose Huizar pitched a fit for reasons that surely also aren’t being stated and then… well, you get the idea. These days he’s doing something with neighborhood councils and remains the subject of artful advocacy blog Step Down Russ Brown which, though currently dormant, may any day rise, like Lazarus, from its pallet to scourge yet again the corridors and crannies of Downtown zillionaire-dom. Enough of that, though. Turn the page for the quotes! Continue reading The Paranoid Prophecies of Downtown Russell Brown, July 2010 Edition→
BID Patrol officer Mike Ayala (badge #107), prompted by a complaint from Starbucks, encourages a homeless woman to leave the corner of Sunset and Vine.This morning at about 8:00 a.m. BID Patrol officer Mike Ayala (badge #107) and his partner, whose name we don’t yet know, told a woman camped out at the Southeast corner of Sunset and Vine that she’d have to move on because the management of the Starbucks there had complained. Our correspondent happened to be walking by and caught the last nine minutes of the incident on video. Naturally, not much happened. Even the BID Patrol is going to think twice about arresting someone on a nonsense LAMC 41.18(d) charge while on camera. There were two interesting things about the episode, though. Continue reading BID Patrol Wakeup Call at Sunset and Vine Captured on Video this Morning→
Carol Schatz, how big was your salary in 2012?!Our recent post on how much the Downtown Center BID paid Carol Schatz in 2012 has been so popular that we thought (we don’t live in Hollywood for nothing!) that we ought to publish a sequel. See the headline for the content. You can read the tax return here or click on the image below. Note that with the money the DCBID paid her in 2012, she grossed more than $3.5 million that year. This works out to more than $100,000 per year for 35 years.
Image of Carol Schatz was produced by the office of Jose Huizar, making it a public record.
Kerry Morrison in 2010 explaining to a homeless man why she’s allowed to sit on the sidewalk but he isn’t.In 2011 the Andrews International BID Patrol arrested 103 people in Hollywood for violating the despicable LAMC 41.18(d), which, truly truly, outlaws sitting on the sidewalk in the absence of a parade. We have written oh so many times about how the BID Patrol does not arrest non-homeless violators of this law, and how this selective enforcement is particularly egregious in the case of the Hollywood Farmers’ Market. Well, imagine then, our surprise to read in an L.A. Weekly article from January 2011, our own Kerry Morrison, discussing how, even though she does not live in Hollywood at all and is probably far more at home at the Larchmont Market, held for some reason only zillionaires can grok at the same time as the Hollywood one, she thinks people who do live in Hollywood are a bunch of zombie NIMBYs from Hell cause they didn’t want to move the iconic Hollywood Farmers’ Market to some random parking lot due to the toys-from-pram whinging of the Film School at Sunset and Ivar. The point she seems to be making is that if the Market was moved, there would be more room for everyone and it would be a win-win situation all round, especially if you only ask the zillionaires, which seems to be Kerry’s modus operandi in such matters. Says Kerry, vis-a-vis crowded conditions:
Sometimes I actually have to sit on the curb to eat my pupusa. It seems like there’s so much opportunity for some expansion and breathing room — i don’t personally see how that would affect the urban charm.”
On January 25, 2016, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles sent a scathingly forthright letter to the LA City Council arguing that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, on whose commission Kerry Morrison serves, falsely stated in its 2015 Continuum of Care application for more than $110 million in federal funding for homeless programs that the City of LA was going to stop criminalizing homelessness by amending its abhorrent, unconstitutional LAMC 56.11 to eliminate criminal penalties for the storage of personal property on sidewalks. This copy was distributed by HPOA Executive Director Kerry Morrison to the Central Hollywood Coalition Board of Directors at their February 9, 2016 meeting. It has annotations inscribed by an unknown hand (probably Kerry Morrison’s). They are fascinating, and we discuss them below.
If you’ve been following the amendments to the ordinance as originally adopted (most importantly here and also here) LAFLA’s allegations will come as no surprise to you. The City of Los Angeles, it seems, is completely unwilling to stop arresting homeless people, even if it puts hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding at risk.
Now, we’re not as sure as LAFLA is that LAHSA actually lied. Here’s what HUD asked (see p.10 of the application for context):
Select the specific strategies implemented by the CoC to ensure that homelessness is not criminalized in the CoC’s geographic area. Select all that apply. For “Other,” you must provide a description…
Here’s how LAHSA responded:
on Nov 17, 2015, the LA City Council amended the ordinance [LAMC 56.11] to remove sanctions and criminal penalties, reducing sanctions further than the initial municipal code.
And here’s what LAFLA said with respect to this:
…the implication was that any amendment would remove all criminal penalties and sanctions. The amendments as proposed by the City Attorney do [no] such thing.
So LAFLA reads an implicit “all” before the word “sanctions,” which would make LAHSA’s statement false on its face. However, it’s also possible to read an implicit “some” before the word “sanctions,” which would make the statement true, but deeply deceptive since “all” is a more natural assumption regarding the tacit quantifier. Either way LAHSA not only looks bad, but is putting the money, not to mention their credibility, at risk. After all, if the feds think you’ve lied to them, they are exceedingly unlikely to be convinced by your slippery, clever, alternate reading of what you said.
Also, isn’t it interesting that putative changes in LAMC 56.11 were the only example LAHSA gave of the City’s steps towards decriminalizing homelessness. They didn’t touch the also abhorrent LAMC 41.18(d), which forbids sitting on the sidewalk in the absence of a parade. They didn’t even mention it, which is also deceptive. This is the BIDs’ favorite anti-homeless law, and it’s enforced in an openly selective manner against homeless people. At some point HUD is going to notice this, and, as we have predicted before and predict again now, this will be the rock that the BIDs’ ship founders on. The City won’t be able to do without the money, the BIDs won’t be able to do without the law, but the City will be able to do without the BIDs in their present form.
Foul whisperings are abroad. Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine than the physician. God, God, forgive us all!
It never occurred to us—Carol Massie, Lady Macbeth…hmmm…
Watch, listen, and learn as Central Hollywood Coalition BID-Boardies Brian Folb and Carol Massie misunderstand everything about everything about homelessness in Los Angeles. We suppose that one of the big drawbacks to being a zillionaire is that you end up thinking you’re the sun and the rest of the world orbits around you and then you expose your delusions in public, maybe even on camera, and then you get mocked (to witness which, if you’re wondering, is why you’ve all been summoned here today!)
Kerry Morrison at the February 9, 2015 meeting of the Central Hollywood Coalition’s Board of Directors, in the midst of a characteristically inarticulate expression of disgust with government bureaucracy and the general unfairness of it all.Kerry Morrison, speaking at the February 9, 2016 meeting of the Central Hollywood Coalition’s Board of Directors, filled the boss-guys and boss-gals in on the California Franchise Tax Board’s like, TOTALLY UNFAIR, ongoing audit of the tax-exempt status of the CHC. The upshot seems to be that some guy a while ago forgot to pay some fee, and things escalated through no fault of Kerry’s, to the point where, because bureaucrats are dumb and mail letters to the wrong place, the FTB is auditing the CHC but a lot of records are missing because 12 years ago is a long time and how can they expect that we would still have them?!? There’s also a looming problem, unmentioned here by Kerry, in that the CHC, like all BID management companies, signed a pledge to the City of Los Angeles that they would “…notify the awarding authority [the Los Angeles City Clerk] within 30 calendar days after receiving notification that any governmental agency has initiated an investigation which may result in a finding that the contractor did not comply with any federal, state, or local law in the performance of the contract…” Kerry didn’t mention anything about this clause, and we don’t (yet) know whether the CHC is complying with it. Stay tuned for info on that.
