Category Archives: Los Angeles City Government

Charter Schools Fought For Years To Reduce The Power Of LAUSD’s Inspector General To Oversee Them — In 2018 Internal Chaos In The Office Of The Inspector General Led To Restructuring Which Effectively Reduced Oversight Of Charters — According To The California Charter School Association “should be seen as a major win by and for the charter community.”

October 6, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

The Los Angeles Unified School District has a particularly powerful oversight office, the Office of the Inspector General, known in the trade jargon as OIG. And in 2018 the School Board failed to renew then-IG Ken Bramlett’s contract. According to LA Times education reporter Howard Blume, pro-charter board members Monica Garcia, Kelly Gonez, and Nick Melvoin voted against renewal, which was enough to deadlock the board and prevent Bramlett’s return. Blume also noted that Bramlett had aggressively investigated some charter schools, in some cases leading to criminal charges being filed, and that charter schools had been clamoring for limits on OIG’s ability to investigate them but he stopped short of saying that Bramlett’s fall from grace was due to charter school influence.

And later a bunch of overwhelmingly salacious details of a number of really appalling and quite serious hostile work environment complaints against some of Bramlett’s senior subordinates came out along with credible accusations that Bramlett had at best failed to take these complaints seriously. Regardless of the validity of the uproar, and it seems quite valid indeed to me, this had the effect of directing most of the media attention away from charter school involvement in Bramlett’s downfall. Not entirely, though. For instance, Kyle Stokes, education reporter with KPCC, did mention that charter schools had been seeking to limit OIG’s role in overseeing them, although in that same article noted that “sources who spoke to KPCC said that concern over charter oversight was not a factor in the board’s thinking”

But newly published internal documents from the Los Angeles Advocacy Council, a shadowy organization run by the California Charter School Association and about 20 local charter school leaders, paint a very different picture. In fact LAAC and the CCSA give themselves credit for taking advantage of the chaos at OIG in order to effectively remove oversight of charter schools from OIG’s purview.

Not only that but they claim to have kept quiet about the issue in order to protect their public image. In the same document they also claim that they were asked to do so by unnamed people in the District who promised CCSA and LAAC that “they would handle it, and they followed through” Given some statements in another document it’s not impossible that convicted felon and then Board member Ref Rodriguez was one of these unnamed people. The charterites were thrilled by the outcome of their work against OIG oversight, announcing that it “should be seen as a major win by and for the charter community.” Perhaps this media strategy underlay Stokes’s sources’ comment about charter involvement in Bramlett’s non-renewal.

And recently we learned from this same set of records that, for instance, LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner allowed charter school lobbyists to write at least one of his major policy speeches. And that Board member Nick Melvoin leaked information about confidential legal strategies to them and let them write Board resolutions.

Given the magnitude of these revelations it’s pretty plausible that someone in the District was conspiring with CCSA and LAAC to take advantage of chaos in OIG to implement the charters’ desire to be free of meaningful oversight. It’s plausible, but it is in no way acceptable. It’s bad enough to reduce oversight of charter schools, which receive so many millions of dollars in public money. But to reduce it in response to their demands, according to their plan, and to do this in secret while they pretend to the world not to have been involved, is absolutely intolerable. Intolerable but, as I said, given recent events, not surprising. Read on for links to and detailed quotes from relevant documents.
Continue reading Charter Schools Fought For Years To Reduce The Power Of LAUSD’s Inspector General To Oversee Them — In 2018 Internal Chaos In The Office Of The Inspector General Led To Restructuring Which Effectively Reduced Oversight Of Charters — According To The California Charter School Association “should be seen as a major win by and for the charter community.” →

LAPD

After Valley News Group Ran An Article Exposing Fern Peskin-White’s Secret Homeless-Hating Vigilante Facebook Pages Her Homeless-Hating Vigilante Buddies Targeted And Harassed Publisher Kathleen Sterling And — Like The Book-Burning Nazis That They Are — Openly Conspired On Freaking Facebook To Destroy Copies Of The Newspaper Whose Truth So Offended Them — (I Have Screenshots By The Way!!) — And Then Galaxy-Brained Genius Valley Cop Karen Rayner Said It Wasn’t A Crime Because She Said It Wasn’t A Crime — But In Three Seconds On Google I Discovered That It Is A Crime — So Now For The Sake Of What’s Left Of Their Credibility LAPD Must Arrest And The City Must Prosecute These Cop-Loving Criminal Book Burners — Their Names Are — Sheila Johnson — Mike Pettit — Noni Kay — Donna Tamara Trent — Diana Bernard Katayama — Houman Salem

October 2, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

You will recall that after K-Town For All, Knock.LA, and LA Magazine broke the huge story in August about LAPD officers, most notably Sean Dinse, participating in private anti-homeless vigilante Facebook groups helmed by former LAPD volunteer Fern Peskin-White, a local advertising paper, the Valley News Group, ran their own version of the story on August 15.

This inspired the thuggish vigilante Facebook warriors to launch a campaign of abuse, harassment, and threats against Kathleen Sterling, the head honcho of the VNG. And subsequently, when the LAPD banned its officers from participating in the vigilante groups and announced a public meeting in September to discuss the matter, Sterling gave them notice of the horrifying treatment she’d suffered at the hands of their Facebook fans and how, because of their terroristic tactics, she was frightened to attend the public meeting.

Her email to them is well worth your time to read, and is filled with despicable facts that showcase the appalling thuggery of Fern Peskin-White’s unhinged minions. Sadly I do not have time to write about all of this, but one episode is essential. Sterling told LAPD officers Al Mendoza, Sean Dinse, and Duc Dao, that:

… members of that group were harassing me, trying to put my home address on Facebook and threatening me – and I heard nothing from you. They are also dumping our papers from our distribution points – which is blatantly illegal.

And she attached four screenshots from the group, showing that these self-proclaimed law and order worshipping cop lovers were indeed conspiring to dump and actually dumping her papers. So for instance we have cop lover Donna Tamara Trent telling her partners in crime “EVERYWHERE YOU GO IF YOU SEE THEM GRAB ALL THE COPIES IF YOU CAN. I KNOW A FEW PLACES THAT HAVE THEM. TRASH THEM.” And we have cop lover Sheila Johnson sending her partners in crime a picture of a stack of these free papers and being told by cop lover Houman Salem to Trash it. Cop lover Sheila Johnson agreeably replies that “[she] will try to get what [she] can.”

Then we have cop lover Noni Kay telling her partners in crime that “I threw the one away inside Juicy Ladies.” To which cop lover Diana Bernard Katayama replied with a photograph of a bunch of copies of the paper inside a trash can and telling her partners in crime that she is “off to fined [sic] more.” The set closes with cop lover Mike Pettit telling his partners in crime that he “took care of all the trash at Albertson’s Calabasas” and providing an extensive list of distribution points for his co-conspirators to attack.
Continue reading After Valley News Group Ran An Article Exposing Fern Peskin-White’s Secret Homeless-Hating Vigilante Facebook Pages Her Homeless-Hating Vigilante Buddies Targeted And Harassed Publisher Kathleen Sterling And — Like The Book-Burning Nazis That They Are — Openly Conspired On Freaking Facebook To Destroy Copies Of The Newspaper Whose Truth So Offended Them — (I Have Screenshots By The Way!!) — And Then Galaxy-Brained Genius Valley Cop Karen Rayner Said It Wasn’t A Crime Because She Said It Wasn’t A Crime — But In Three Seconds On Google I Discovered That It Is A Crime — So Now For The Sake Of What’s Left Of Their Credibility LAPD Must Arrest And The City Must Prosecute These Cop-Loving Criminal Book Burners — Their Names Are — Sheila Johnson — Mike Pettit — Noni Kay — Donna Tamara Trent — Diana Bernard Katayama — Houman Salem →

LAPD

LAPD Chief Michel Moore’s 2018 Notice On LAPD Use Of Personal Social Media Accounts Does Not Bode Well For Officer Sean Dinse’s Renewed Participation In Former LAPD Volunteer Fern Peskin-White’s Private Anti-Homeless Vigilante Facebook Group — Not To Mention The Fact That He Rejoined Seemingly In Defiance Of A Direct Order

October 1, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

No doubt you recall the whole to-do out in the far west Valley having to do with former LAPD volunteer Fern Peskin-White and her various secret anti-homeless vigilante Facebook groups, highly problematic for having LAPD officers as members even as other members were cracking jokes about burning out the zombies and any number of other horrific forms of terrorism.

So Valley Chief Jorge Rodriguez convened a public meeting a few weeks ago and he and Chief Michel Moore announced that LAPD officers would no longer participate in these vigilante groups. But then, apparently in violation of a direct order from his superior officer, Sean Dinse rejoined the group on Friday, September 27, 2019.

I have heard some speculation about the relevance of the fact that Dinse rejoined using his personal Facebook account rather than an official LAPD account, and I thought that it might be a good time to review a 2018 notice by Chief Michel Moore on LAPD use of social media which covers precisely this issue.

Note that I wrote about this item a few months ago in relation to a larger release of records having to do with LAPD and social media. The current episode with Dinse and the vigilante anti-homeless Facebook groups gives it a currency and a context that it did not have at that time, so I think it’s worth bringing up again. The key bit here is that, according to Moore,
Continue reading LAPD Chief Michel Moore’s 2018 Notice On LAPD Use Of Personal Social Media Accounts Does Not Bode Well For Officer Sean Dinse’s Renewed Participation In Former LAPD Volunteer Fern Peskin-White’s Private Anti-Homeless Vigilante Facebook Group — Not To Mention The Fact That He Rejoined Seemingly In Defiance Of A Direct Order →

Los Angeles City Council, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Mike Bonin Has Recently Produced Hundreds Of Megabytes Of Emails In Response To My Public Records Suit Against His Office — Here Are Links To All Of Them — Along With Some Well-Deserved Mockery And A Transcription Of A Housedweller Rant By Venice Physician Melvin Scheer — Slightly Unique In That It Explicitly Links The Olympics With Homeless Displacement — And Possibly With Mass Slaughter — “Mexico City Style”

September 30, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

In June of this year I was forced to file yet another lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles to enforce my rights under the California Public Records Act in the face of their habitual reflexive intransigence, this time against CD11 over emails having to do with those goddamned planters. Well, as I have already reported, the City caved immediately and began handing over records.

And just recently I got another set of goodies from them with a little bit of interesting stuff in it, so I thought it was time to catch you all up on the story, provide links to the goodies, and mock and shame yet another unhinged homeless-hating housedweller, this one seemingly promoting Mexico City style mass killings by the Olympics Committee.¹

Let’s start with the links. These are all the emails at issue in this suit that I’ve received so far. They’re not in any kind of order, and, as usual, the City has engaged in its usual passive aggressive scrambling, crooked scanning, chronological disordering, and so on, so, by design, they’re pretty much impossible to sort through and understand globally. But they’re still worth reading, of course! There’s a lot of material here, downloadable via bittorrent if that’s the way your pleasure tends, or by straight links:
Continue reading Mike Bonin Has Recently Produced Hundreds Of Megabytes Of Emails In Response To My Public Records Suit Against His Office — Here Are Links To All Of Them — Along With Some Well-Deserved Mockery And A Transcription Of A Housedweller Rant By Venice Physician Melvin Scheer — Slightly Unique In That It Explicitly Links The Olympics With Homeless Displacement — And Possibly With Mass Slaughter — “Mexico City Style” →

LAUSD

A Secret Powerpoint From The California Charter Schools Association Reveals 2019 Lobbying Priorities And Strategies — In Particular They Consider Positioning Themselves As Champions Of Equity And Equality But Worry That Their Supporters Might See That As “Mission Creep” — They Consider Supporting Equal Access To High Quality Schools But Worry That Such A Position Might Alienate The “Choice Wing” Of Their Base — They List Among The Greatest Threats The Bare Possibility That Charter Schools Might Be Required To Earthquake Proof Their Buildings To The Same Standard As Public Schools — In Short This Is A Seething Stew Of Privilege — And Arrogance — And Clueless Self-Exposure — In Other Words More Of The Damn Same Stuff!

September 28, 2019 Mike 3 Comments

As you must know by now the California Charter School Association is the premiere wingnut loony tunes mouth-frothing privatization advocacy organization in the state. And we’ve been learning an unprecedentedly awful² lot about them since June due to a huge set of records³ released by Green Dot Charter Schools in response to a request I made of them under the California Public Records Act.

These records are so rich, so complex, so voluminous, that it’s taking me freaking forever to go through them, sort them, write about them, and I’m therefore laying them on you in increments. And the increment at hand is this powerpoint presentation, created by the CCSA in August 2018 to explain the next year’s goals and fears to their members. I have also exported this as a PDF for ease of use.⁴ There are also JPEGs of the slides at the end of the post if that’s better.

And my goodness, what a revealing heap of steaming and pernicious arrogance we have here. Under recent wins, for instance, we learn that the CCSA “Conditioned Legislature to defeat a half dozen harmful policy and budget proposals in preparation for less reliable Executive branch.” That’s the California Charter School Association right there telling how they “conditioned” the Legislature in preparation for Gavin “Less Reliable than Jerry Brown” Newsom’s ascension to the throne.

And further down the line we learn the assumptions behind CCSA’s policymaking agenda for 2019, probably actually for always, but I don’t (yet) have the evidence. And again, what’s revealed is appalling but not surprising. For instance they pledge that “CCSA will seek compromise on legislation that minimally constrains flexibility but only in exchange for new entitlements.” This item casts the CCSA’s support of SB126, which makes it exceedingly clear that charters are subject to both the CPRA and the Brown Act, in an interesting light.

Perhaps in 2018 they thought that this new law only “minimally constrain[ed] flexibility” and that they were going to get a bunch of goodies in return. But I’m willing to bet they’re rethinking that concession now given that the fruits of a single CPRA request have subjected them to months of pain-writhing exposure, some scathing articles in the Los Angeles Times, and may ultimately end the career of their manchild knight in shining hair product, Nick Melvoin.

And their listing of what they see as the greatest threats against them for 2019 is very instructive as well. I’m not up on the details enough to comment on all of these but the ones I do understand are as appalling as the rest of it:
Continue reading A Secret Powerpoint From The California Charter Schools Association Reveals 2019 Lobbying Priorities And Strategies — In Particular They Consider Positioning Themselves As Champions Of Equity And Equality But Worry That Their Supporters Might See That As “Mission Creep” — They Consider Supporting Equal Access To High Quality Schools But Worry That Such A Position Might Alienate The “Choice Wing” Of Their Base — They List Among The Greatest Threats The Bare Possibility That Charter Schools Might Be Required To Earthquake Proof Their Buildings To The Same Standard As Public Schools — In Short This Is A Seething Stew Of Privilege — And Arrogance — And Clueless Self-Exposure — In Other Words More Of The Damn Same Stuff! →

Lawsuits, Los Angeles City Council, Public Records Act Pragmatics

This Is Not An Instant Replay! — In Fact It Is For Real A Whole New Lawsuit Against The City Of Los Angeles For Failure To Comply With The Public Records Act — And This One’s Against CD14 Just Like The One From Two Weeks Ago — Looking For Emails Between Richelle Huizar And City Staff — More Isaiah Calvin Nonsense — Claims It Is Clearly In The Public Interest To Withhold Her Emails — Maybe A Certain Segment Of The Public I Could Believe — That Segment Consisting Only Of Richelle And Jose Huizar — But The Rest Of Us Need To Read These Damn Emails! — And — You Know — I Am Betting That We Will!

September 24, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

Maybe you recall that about two weeks ago I was forced by the weirdly intransigent refusal of CD14 rep Jose Huizar’s staff to comply with even the most minimal requirements of the California Public Records Act into filing a petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court pleading with a judge to hang these blockheads by their toes in Grand Park until they freaking handed over the goods.

And because egregious, shameless, absolutely appalling noncompliance is a pattern and practice of these jokers over at CD14 well, today I was forced for the same reasons but a different request, to file yet another writ petition. You can get a copy here, written by the dogged and able Doug Ecks, who’s also handling my previous petition against Huizar’s office and who successfully handled a similar matter against Gil Cedillo earlier this summer.

Here I was seeking about three years of emails between Richelle Huizar and CD14 staff including Jose Huizar. Richelle Huizar was long seen as Jose Huizar’s anointed heir to the CD14 dynasty, but in the wake of his fairly super-sized legal problems she made the probably wise decision to withdraw from the race. And she wasn’t likely to be mere bycatch, either. Her position as a fundraiser for JH’s former high school was at the very center of the scandal.

So given her years-long embroilment in the ongoings at City Hall, and given the fact that everyone does everything by email these days, I thought it would be illuminating to take a look at these records. But alas, it was not to be. Jose Huizar staffer Isaiah Calvin eventually handed over a pathetic 51 pages of material, insanely redacted, obviously exceedingly, ludicrously incomplete.
Continue reading This Is Not An Instant Replay! — In Fact It Is For Real A Whole New Lawsuit Against The City Of Los Angeles For Failure To Comply With The Public Records Act — And This One’s Against CD14 Just Like The One From Two Weeks Ago — Looking For Emails Between Richelle Huizar And City Staff — More Isaiah Calvin Nonsense — Claims It Is Clearly In The Public Interest To Withhold Her Emails — Maybe A Certain Segment Of The Public I Could Believe — That Segment Consisting Only Of Richelle And Jose Huizar — But The Rest Of Us Need To Read These Damn Emails! — And — You Know — I Am Betting That We Will! →

LAPD, Public Records Act Pragmatics

The Story Of A Request For Emails From LAPD — And All The Ridiculous Reasons They Propounded For Not Producing — And How They Then Produced!

September 17, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

On January 13, 2019 I asked the Los Angeles Police Department for emails between CD13 staffer Dan Halden and any LAPD employee from January 1, 2016 through December 31, 2018. Yesterday, eight months later, they produced emails from October and November 2018 with the promise of more to come. How we got to this point is the subject of today’s post.⁵ Here’s what the request said exactly:

Per my rights under the California Public Records Act, please provide all correspondence between anyone who works in the Los Angeles Police Department AND daniel.halden@lacity.org, for the time period of January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2018. Correspondence is defined as all emails, texts or other communications.

To be honest, when I made this request in January 2019 I was expecting LAPD to refuse to produce the records on technical grounds,⁶ And on January 18, 2019 they did exactly that. They gave two separate and mutually contradictory reasons for refusing to produce.

First they told me that “[y[our request does not describe the records sought clearly enough to permit my staff to determine whether any responsive documents exist.” This claim is based on the CPRA at §6253(b), which requires of requests that they “reasonably [describe] an identifiable record or records”. LAPD’s second reason for refusing to produce was that it would be too much work:

A search of email communications and correspondence for “anyone who works in the Department” would be unduly burdensome for the Department as interpreted in the “public interest” provision of section 6255 of the Act, and would require a separate search of each individual email account of approximately 14,400 Department email accounts.

Continue reading The Story Of A Request For Emails From LAPD — And All The Ridiculous Reasons They Propounded For Not Producing — And How They Then Produced! →

LAUSD

Bobby Canosa-Carr — Director Of Secondary Education At The Accelerated Charter Schools — Admits On Camera That TAS Routinely Enrolls Unprepared Students In AP Classes — This Practice Improves The School’s Ranking Based On AP Enrollment — But LAUSD’s Proposed School Performance Framework Will Rate Schools On AP Success Rather Than Enrollment — Which Will Lower TAS’s Ranking Because — Entirely Predictably — These Underprepped Students Don’t Pass — In Other Words Rather Than Enrolling Students In Classes They’re Ready For — And Therefore Can Benefit From Academically — TAS Has Been Setting Students Up To Fail In Order To Boost Its Ranking — And Now They’re Mad That LAUSD Might Downgrade Them Because Of This Pernicious Practice

September 15, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

If you follow LAUSD issues in the news you will have heard of the newly proposed School Performance Framework, a rating system ostensibly meant to improve something about schools but much more likely to be part of the wicked plans of its proponents, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez, to break up our public school system and hand over the still-valuable fragments to their zillionaire masters in the charter school industrial complex.

Whatever the ultimate purpose, though, of this proposal, and despite the fact that it was written for Melvoin by the privatizers themselves, it nevertheless has at least some charter schools very nervous about how they might fare under the new rating standards, which would correlate to some extent with measurable quantities, like e.g. student test results and course grades and which would rate each school on a highly simplified five star scale.

In particular amongst the anxious ones there are our old friends at The Accelerated Schools, whose August board meeting I managed to videotape a few weeks ago, capturing, among other interesting episodes, a weirdo white supremacist soliloquy by board president Juli Quinn. And among these episodes was a discussion led by TAS⁷ supreme commander of secondary instruction Robert “Bobby” Canosa-Carr about the proposed rating system.
Continue reading Bobby Canosa-Carr — Director Of Secondary Education At The Accelerated Charter Schools — Admits On Camera That TAS Routinely Enrolls Unprepared Students In AP Classes — This Practice Improves The School’s Ranking Based On AP Enrollment — But LAUSD’s Proposed School Performance Framework Will Rate Schools On AP Success Rather Than Enrollment — Which Will Lower TAS’s Ranking Because — Entirely Predictably — These Underprepped Students Don’t Pass — In Other Words Rather Than Enrolling Students In Classes They’re Ready For — And Therefore Can Benefit From Academically — TAS Has Been Setting Students Up To Fail In Order To Boost Its Ranking — And Now They’re Mad That LAUSD Might Downgrade Them Because Of This Pernicious Practice →

Homeless Issues, LAPD

LAPD Meeting About Cop Participation In Private Anti-Homeless Vigilante-Loving Facebook Pages Elicits Very Public Anti-Homeless Vigilante Outrage From Self-Proclaimed Good Citizen Valley Dwellers — Deputy Chief Jorge Rodriguez Commits To No Senior Lead Officers Allowed In Fern Peskin-White’s Creepy Secret Treehouse — And It’s A Matter Of Deep Import To LAPD — Because Chief Michel Moore Showed Up And Unequivocally Told Everyone That The Facebook Pages Were “Filled With Hate” — “We’ve Got To Stop This [Participation] Right Now” — And Valley Dwelling Vigilante Cosplay Terror-Addicted Freaks Very Upset That Bloggers Who Don’t Even Live In The Valley Dare To Criticize Them

September 11, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

Monday evening, September 9, 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department held a meeting at Topanga Station to discuss the controversial-once-exposed participation of a bunch of its putatively estimable senior lead officers, notably Sean Dinse and Duc Dao, in a couple of creepy private anti-homeless vigilante-loving rage-filled Facebook groups, recently written about extensively by what the founder of these hate sites, Fern Peskin-White, or at least her dishonest hack of a lawyer has called, in a letter that’s practically a self-contained model bar exam question on California’s anti-SLAPP statute, “radical left-wing activists.”⁸

These groups are filled with two not-necessarily distinct populations. There are angry Valley dwellers who think it’s salient or funny or just even acceptably normal to be kidding-not-kidding about poisoning homeless people or shooting them with bullets and so on, and then there are a bunch of LAPD officers. The point is ostensibly for the cops to share info with the Valley dwellers and respond quicker than 911 or whatever but in practice what it looks like to people free of participant bias is that the police are indifferent to if not supportive of the hate, the anger, and the threats of violence.

And that they facilitate vigilantism in theory or practice by supplying these Facebook warriors with very personal information about their targets, none of which is good PR for LAPD. In fact maybe it’s even conduct unbecoming an officer or something actionable, so Jorge Rodriguez, head supreme LAPD Valley chief boss, possibly at the direction of his boss Michel Moore, kicked all the cops off the page and fired Fern Peskin-White from her cushy job as unpaid cop volunteer.

This action even further enraged the already mouth-frothing Valley dwellers, and so this meeting was called. And I went to the meeting! And took video of the first two hours! And here it is on YouTube! And also you can watch or download the full resolution version here on Archive.org if that’s useful to you! And read on for a click-through guide to the highlights of the meeting!⁹ Continue reading LAPD Meeting About Cop Participation In Private Anti-Homeless Vigilante-Loving Facebook Pages Elicits Very Public Anti-Homeless Vigilante Outrage From Self-Proclaimed Good Citizen Valley Dwellers — Deputy Chief Jorge Rodriguez Commits To No Senior Lead Officers Allowed In Fern Peskin-White’s Creepy Secret Treehouse — And It’s A Matter Of Deep Import To LAPD — Because Chief Michel Moore Showed Up And Unequivocally Told Everyone That The Facebook Pages Were “Filled With Hate” — “We’ve Got To Stop This [Participation] Right Now” — And Valley Dwelling Vigilante Cosplay Terror-Addicted Freaks Very Upset That Bloggers Who Don’t Even Live In The Valley Dare To Criticize Them →

Homeless Issues, Los Angeles City Council, Municipal Ethics, Public Records Act Pragmatics, The Race Card

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

September 10, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

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.
Continue reading 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 →