Kerry Morrison is a commissioner of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, an organization whose mission statement claims that their purpose is:

To support, create and sustain solutions to homelessness in Los Angeles County by providing leadership, advocacy, planning, and management of program funding.

One of these solutions, according to a newly obtained email from Morrison to LAPD Captains Cory Palka, bosom buddy of Hollywood white supremacists, and Peter Zarcone, is evidently to blast classical music at homeless people until they go away:

Hi Captains,

There is a big foyer in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theatre on Vine Street.

For quite some time, this have [sic] been a favorite sleeping place for homeless individuals in the BID.

About a year ago, we encouraged Gil Smith¹ to try an experiment (had heard about this from another BID): play classical music all night long and see if that would drive away the sleepers. Sure enough, it had an immediate impact and cleared them out.

As anyone with sense could have foretold, this didn’t end well. The people who actually live in the neighborhood, unlike Kerry Morrison and her alien army of occupation, the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, couldn’t sleep either. They complained, and the music was shut down. But Kerry’s not giving up:

I am going to try to run some interference on this with the property manager over there…because this is a fairly elegant solution…

And what’s the property manager supposed to do here? It’s a violation of LAMC 116.01 to play music loudly enough to disturb sleeping people at night. The property manager can’t stop the residents from calling the cops. And why is Kerry Morrison, commissioner of LAHSA and zealous advocate for hyperenforcement of laws much, much more minor and picayune than this one as long as they’re to be enforced only against the homeless, conspiring with the Executive Producer of the Montalban to break the law by playing amplified music at night? Why is she conspiring to cover up these crimes by proposing to get the property manager of 1600 Vine Street to stop his tenants from reporting these violations to the police?

Conspiracy is a crime too, friends. In fact, it’s at 182 PC, which states in pertinent part:

(a) If two or more persons conspire:
(1) To commit any crime.
(5) To commit any act injurious to the public health, to public morals, or to pervert or obstruct justice, or the due administration of the laws.
…
They are punishable as follows:

…by imprisonment in a county jail for not more than one year, or pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170, or by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.  

Notwithstanding the conspiracy to violate LAMC 116.01, obviously playing music in the middle of the night to wake people up, probably even the freaking homeless people count here, is “injurious to the public health.” Just because they’re trespassing doesn’t mean they give up their right not to have their health injured. Otherwise Kerry Morrison could be proposing to just, we don’t know, spray them with anthrax or something as a deterrent. She can’t do that, why should she be able to use musical torture to chase them off?

Running interference with the property manager, as Kerry Morrison proposes to do here, is “pervert[ing] or obstruct[ing] justice, or the due administration of the law” if the purpose is to get the residents not to call the cops when the law’s being violated or to allow her criminal conspiracy to continue unabated. Finally, right down the street from Ground Zero of the recorded music industry in Los Angeles Kerry Morrison is conspiring to give public performances of what are almost certainly copyrighted works.² Has she paid the required royalties? Do Kerry’s buddies (and members of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce) at Capitol Records or their trade industry friends at the RIAA know about this plan? Because they’re famous for their overzealous enforcement of their rights.

What kind of zillionaire privilege does it take to email the cops confessing your guilt to a whole litany of crimes like this? And what kind of deeply perverse interpretation of their duties must Palka and Zarcone have to read this spontaneous admission of guilt and do nothing about it? By the way, this is not the first time Kerry has publicly confessed to breaking the law. She remains unarrested, though, so we suppose she knows what she’s doing.

And what’s next? Is LAHSA going to solve the homeless problem in Los Angeles County by herding homeless people to the San Bernardino County line using sound trucks playing Mozart? They’re already skating on thin ice with respect to the acceptability of their homeless-criminalizing bullshit tactics as far as their federal funding is concerned. How are they going to explain this one to HUD?

And what’s up with using classical music? Obviously if the point is to chase away homeless people who are trying to sleep any noise will do.³ Well, it turns out that using classical music to deter social undesirables is some kind of weirdo Caucasian zillionaire cultural trope. Kerry Morrison is right in the cultural mainstream of her people. We have neither the time nor the stomach to analyze this smirking smugness⁴ in its larger context, but it did make us think we might head over to the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance and play a little repellent music of our own. Maybe we can repel the repellers with a taste of their own damned medicine. And would they call the cops on us? Certainly. Do we care? No. See you there, friends!

Image of Commissioner Kerry Morrison is taken from the LAHSA website, which makes it a public record and therefore in the public domain in the great state of California.

1. Executive Producer at the Montalban.
2. Probably the music itself isn’t copyrighted, but the performances themselves almost certainly are.
3. Interestingly, another statute, LAMC 115.02, forbids the playing of anything but music and the human voice in public through an amplifier.
4. We, who are so very cultured and appreciate classical music for the culturally superior unit of conspicuous consumption that it so rightfully is seen to be by our peers, are wise enough to the ways of our metaphorically bloodsucking inferiors to know that they are repelled by it, much as their nonmetaphorical counterparts, the vampires, are repelled by silver, another famous culturally superior unit of conspicuous consumption…or something like that, we imagine.