“Blakeman looked possessed or possibly on drugs. His behavior got more bizarre throughout the morning.”For background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on the suit.
Well, when I decided to start collecting the pleadings in Spencer v. Lunada Bay Boys, I had no idea how much material it was going to involve. By the way, the full collection is available here on Archive.Org. In any case, a bunch more stuff hit PACER last night. It consists of allegations by Victor Otten, plaintiffs’ attorney, that Bay Boys defendants Brant Blakeman and Alan Johnston are stonewalling court-ordered discovery and that “there is a clear pattern emerging that the individual defendants are withholding and/or destroying evidence and misusing the discovery process.”
There are links and brief descriptions of the new material after the break, as always, but first I have some interesting details about defendant Alan Johnston’s cell phone. It seems that on December 12, 2016, the magistrate judge, Hon. Rozella Oliver, issued an order to compel defendant Alan Johnston to hand over two cell phones and corresponding passwords to the plaintiffs:
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED THAT that Mr. Johnston overnight his cell phone(s), both his old, water damaged phone and his current phone to his counsel. Mr. Carey1 is directed to hand over the cell phone(s) to Todd Stefan at Setec Investigations, 8391 Beverly Blvd #167, Los Angeles, CA 90048, the party chosen by Plaintiffs to conduct the examination of the phone.
Mr. Otten and Mr. Carey shall reasonably cooperate to agree upon a set of search parameters to guide Mr. Stefan’s forensic investigation of the phone(s), including text messages, contacts, photographs, and videos by December 14, 2016. If the parties cannot agree upon a set of search parameters, they shall submit their proposed search parameters to the Court by December 14, 2016. Mr. Johnston is ordered to cooperate as necessary with Mr. Stefan with respect to passwords. Defendant Alan Johnston is ordered to pay the cost of the forensic investigation within 10 days of his attorney being sent a statement.
A really pretty archetypally Californian road in the really pretty archetypally Californian City of Palos Verdes Estates, which is a really pretty archetypally Californian example of the kind of hell on earth that gets created around here when zillionaires are allowed to own entire cities and operate them according to customary zillionaire practices.This is just a short note to memorialize the fact that a bunch of paperwork was filed in the case of Cory Spencer v. Lunada Bay Boys. I have added the new material to the Archive.Org page (look for docket numbers 204 through 207). There are links to and brief descriptions of the new material after the break. Don’t forget to look at the plaintiffs’ responses to the defendants’ interrogatories, which aren’t always available to the public via PACER. In this case they were put on the record as part of a lawyer’s declaration. And also don’t forget that there’s an upcoming hearing on the plaintiffs’ motion to certify the case as a class action, scheduled for Tuesday, February 21 at 10 a.m. in Judge Otero’s courtroom 10C in the First Street Courthouse downtown. Continue reading City Of Palos Verdes Estates Tells Federal Court That One Of The Plaintiffs’ Experts Ain’t Expert Enough, Other Documents Filed Including Many Responses To Interrogatories→
Looming reality in the form of the 1st Street Federal Courthouse as seen from the shores of Lunada Bay. Is it getting closer? Is it just an illusion? We will find out on February 21, 2017 at 10 a.m.!See here for yesterday’s post on this matter and if you need background take a look at this excellent article from the Times on the suit.
Well, just one day after I decided to add Cory Spencer v. Lunada Bay Boys to my PACER watchlist, an avalanche of opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion to have the thing turned into a class action suit hit the RSS feed. It’s all pretty interesting, and I have uploaded it all to the Archive.Org page that I made yesterday to host all this stuff on. There is a list of new items with links after the break, but the common theme of many of them, as exemplified in the Objection to Plaintiffs’ Evidence in Support of Motion for Class Certification, a 112 page behemoth with which most if not all of the individual defendants seem to have joined in, seems to go something like this:
There is no such thing as the Lunada Bay Boys.
But if there is such a thing as the Lunada Bay Boys, none of the defendants are members of it.
But if some or all of the defendants are members of it, they didn’t do any of the stuff alleged in the complaint.
But if they did do some or all of the stuff alleged in the complaint, they didn’t do it to the plaintiffs.
But if they did do it to the plaintiffs, there wasn’t really any cognizable damage.
But if there was cognizable damage, it’s not really possible to figure out who was damaged.
The City of Palos Verdes Estates (PVE) along with their Chief of Police take a slightly different tack in e.g. their opposition to the motion for class certification. Their theory seems to be that since one plaintiff said something nice about the PVE cops in 2016, they must be innocent all the way back to 1966. Perhaps that even makes sense (?!)
The incomparable Emily Alpert Reyes has the story in this morning’s Times and we have the primary sources, hot off of PACER! As long as I was getting these pleadings, I figured I’d go ahead and get the ones from the case he filed last July as well,4 and all of them are available here:
A rich white Palos Verdes surf gang thug attacks a visitor to the public beach at Lunada Bay.The story of the violent zillionaire surf-localism gang known as the Lunada Bay Boys and the ongoing federal lawsuit against them is well-explained in this L.A. Times article. Essentially generations of rich white surfer boys in Palos Verdes estates have for decades violently intimidated any outsiders who wanted to visit the public beach at Lunada Bay and they’re finally being called to account in federal court.7 So I finally had time to investigate the matter on PACER, and collected a ton of pleadings and orders on Archive.Org. Note that most of the early documents, including the initial complaint, are presently sealed because one of the defendants, now known as N.F., is a minor but was named in the early pleadings.
Of particular interest are twenty declarations made by various victims of the Lunada Bay Boys over the years, collected by the plaintiffs in support of their motion to certify the suit as a class action, which document endless sordid details of the astonishing violence and idiocy of the Lunada Bay Boys over multiple generations and many decades, as well as the complicity of the police and city government of Palos Verdes Estates. This material is so interesting that I made these twenty documents into a single eBook, with a table of contents and pagination and so on, to make them easier to read on a tablet or whatever. You can download a copy of that here from the Archive. Here are a couple examples of what’s in there, and there are plenty more after the break.
From the Declaration of John Macharg:
I was surfing Lunada Bay the morning of Jan. 29, 2016. The waves were big and my surfboard leash broke. My surfboard drifted to shore by the rocks near the patio. When I reached my board, David Melo walked down the patio stairs and immediately started harassing me by making statements like “You only come around here when the waves are good.” I responded by telling David that he had no right to question how or when I surf the Bay and that localism in general was wrong headed, unfair and illegal. At that point, Sang Lee butted in and began to argue with me. I told Sang that Lunada Bay was public property and did not belong to him. Sang poured out a portion of the beer that he was holding onto my head. I asked Sang if he was trying to start a fight and said “There is a cop right here.” Sang replied “It’s just beer.” There were several officers on the patio deck and one was observing from just a few feet to my right while I argued with Sang and David.
From the Declaration of John Carpenter (31 years on the Riverside PD):
During our walk down to the beach at Lunada Bay [in 1983 or 1984], we did not encounter many people. However, once we paddled out, we experienced Lunada Bay’s localized culture firsthand. There were about 6 surfers in the water, all of whom were male. Almost immediately after we paddled out, the other surfers started yelling at us, saying “you guys don’t belong here” and “get out of here.” They also called us names and cursed at us. These surfers also aggressively violated surf etiquette – they would drop in on my waves and cut me off. This behavior was dangerous because it required me to pull off a wave, which could have resulted in the waves pummeling me or could have caused me to crash into the nearby shallow rock reef. The experience was frustrating and dangerous because I risked getting injured by a Bay Boy each time I tried to surf a wave.
After about 45 minutes of suffering from the Lunada Bay Boys’ harassment, Sue and I felt too uncomfortable so we decided to leave. When we got back to the car, we discovered that Sue’s car antenna had been mangled and that someone had vandalized the car by smearing surf wax on it. They wrote derogatory words about Sue being a woman. Based on my friends’ experiences and my 45 minutes of trying to surf at Lunada Bay, I was almost positive that the Lunada Bay Boys were responsible for this vandalism.
Due to this negative experience, I have not returned to surf Lunada Bay. When I recently heard that the intimidation and exclusionary behavior at Lunada Bay is still occurring – more than 30 years after I experienced it firsthand – I was shocked. As a law enforcement professional, I know that the conduct taking place at Lunada Bay is no different than criminal gang activity. Like a criminal gang, the Lunada Bay Boys have taken over a public place and use intimidation tactics to scare others to stay off their turf.
In response to this conduct, the City of Palos Verdes Estates’ police should have taken action to address the issues and treat the situation like a gang injunction. For example, they should have set up cameras, conducted surveillance, and prosecuted wrongdoers based on the complaints they received. Instead, the City and the police ignore the complaints or take down reports of aggression but then fail to follow up and investigate and prosecute the wrongdoers.
Morning in Valley Village in 2007.In September, local activist group Save Valley Village filed suit against the City of Los Angeles and the City Council alleging in their petition that
The Councilmembers of the Los Angeles City Council operate according to an agreement, i.e. The Vote Trading Pact, not to Vote No on any Council Project in another council district and said agreement by its very terms requires reciprocality, also called mutuality, whereby the agreement not to Vote No by one Councilmember is given in exchange for the other Councilmember’s not to vote No on a Council Project in his/her council district.
There’s no place on earth like Venice, so why shouldn’t the destruction of BIDs in California begin in Venice?A couple weeks ago, a group of brave and determined residents of Venice filed a writ petition against the City of Los Angeles and the Venice Beach BID asking the court to set aside the ordinance that created it, to force the City to redraw the BID’s boundaries in accordance with the law, and, most interestingly, to order the City to contest the assessments levied against City-owned properties in the BID. You can read a copy of the initial petition:
Or here — on the new dedicated page, also available through the menu structure above.
Or here — directly from static storage; see the titles better!
They argue that their residential properties will get no special benefits from the BID, which violates the California Constitution. They argue that many of the proposed activities of the BID, specifically the security program, are inherently incapable of providing special benefits. And most interestingly from the point of view of general anti-BID theory, they argue that the City has a duty to its citizens to scrutinize the BID plan to be sure that City-owned parcels included in the BID actually benefit from being in the BID, and that by rubber-stamping the BID proposal, the City has abdicated this duty. If this argument succeeds it will shake the very foundations of BIDs in Los Angeles, which rely to various extents on the automatic yes votes provided by City-owned property. This automatic approval, by the way, was set up in 199811 via Council File 96-1972 which, in pertinent part, includes a directive to:
REQUIRE the City Clerk to sign off on Proposition 218 ballots and support petitions for property-based BIDs, unless the Council directs otherwise.
Marisa Tomei: “Please honor this building and its architect, Kurt Meyer, with a Historic Cultural Monument designation.”I reported briefly last week on the whole to-do about the City’s wanton approval of a Frank Gehry megaplex at 8150 Sunset and, more recently, on the extremely weird fact that the Council’s PLUM12 Committee forwarded proposed historic-cultural designation of the Lytton Savings building on to the full Council without a recommendation, even though CD4 Councilmember David Ryu explicitly favors the designation. This is just a brief update with links to more documents.
Jasmyne Cannick.The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the most excellent local LAPD critic Jasmyne Cannick14 filed suit against the City of Los Angeles and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck last week. The suit alleges, completely plausibly, that the LAPD arrested her during November 2014 protests about the shooting of Michael Brown, the same series of protests, incidently, which gave rise to Chua v. City of LA, in retaliation for her highly critical reporting on the LAPD in general and Charlie Beck in particular.15
Anyway, the Times story is great as far as it goes, but, as usual, it doesn’t contain much of the wonky details that we love around here. It doesn’t even mention that the suit was filed in Federal Court. But it was, and I went out and got copies of the primary sources:
