Well, Kerry, Jesus had two things to say about this and we have just one.
Continue reading Oh the Irony: Kerry Morrison, Proponent of Loud Music to Repel Homeless, Herself Complains Publicly About Loud Music in Restaurants
I’ve reported before that the BID Patrol’s arrest rate in 2015 was over 40% smaller than it was between 2007 and 2014. The new evidence in this video suggests that actually only 313 of these were full custodial arrests (as opposed to 606, as I previously thought), making the actual decrease from 2014 to 2015 more than 70%. Here is the spreadsheet containing the 2015 totals. Note that there are 606 total arrests listed, and that these include 313 “Al Ref” arrests. You can see the arrest total summary spreadsheets from 2007 through 2015 here.
The phrase “Al Ref” almost certainly refers to “alcohol referrals.” These were discussed by Steve Seyler at the March 2015 Joint Security Committee meeting, where he stated:
We are starting to see some early trends. Arrests are down by 56 compared to this time last year. This is largely due to a strategy change in our enforcement of drinking in public. These arrests have accounted for about 60% of our arrest year after year. That number is holding true for this year as well. We still believe that it is important to curtail public drinking as this has a direct effect on assaults and other crimes.
Our new approach involves more warnings and more importantly referrals. We have
made 56 such referrals so far. If the person is agreeable, we give them a warning and
information about local Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and other resources. We will
attempt to gather data to see if this will bring positive results.
This theory is further confirmed by the fact that the arrest report number included in the title of the video file is #15-0517R, where the “R” almost certainly stands for “referral.” Add that to the fact that there seem to be NO arrest reports with an “R” appended to their numbers among the 2015 BID Patrol arrest reports I recently obtained from Kerry Morrison, so that either those numbers don’t refer to custodial arrests or Kerry Morrison was lying when she told me that she’d produced all of them.3
Continue reading “Hold Your Beer Up and Smile.” Video Suggests that So-Called “Referral” Arrest is Actually Just a Warning, Demonstrating that 2015 BID Patrol Arrest Rate is Down 70% from 2014; Far More than Previously Thought
I’m pleased to announce a huge amount of records, mostly from the Andrews International BID Patrol. These include arrest reports and daily logs, which bring our coverage up to the end of 2015. I put these on the Archive because the amount of material would overwhelm our hosting plan. There are individual links after the break and also here.
Note that there’s something fishy about the 2015 arrest reports. There are fewer than 350 of them, when the 2015 totals spreadsheet claims 606. This may have something to do with a new category for 2015 called “alcohol referral.” If these turn out to not be genuine custodial arrests we will have reduced the BID Patrol arrest rate by far, far more than I previously thought.
Also there are:
And some more emails from the Fashion District BID. These are prepared in the inimitably complete manner of Rena Leddy and cover the time from January 2015 through March 2016. They have to do with street vending and such topics:
Finally, there are over 6 GB of 2015 BID Patrol videos. I will be putting the videos on our YouTube channel soon, but that takes a lot of time, so I thought I’d make them available here first.
As I said, look after the break for individual links to our complete collection of A/I BID Patrol arrest reports and daily logs 2007-2015.
Continue reading Many Years Worth of New Documents: Arrest Reports, Daily Logs, Photographs, Videos, Fashion District Emails
On April 11, 2016, the Court granted the Fourth Stipulation filed by the parties to extend the time to file responsive pleadings to the Complaint, with the current extension set to expire on June 1, 2016.
This was evidently good enough for Judge O’Connell, who, roughly contemporaneously, filed an order granting the request by extending the deadline to July 18. So that’s where we’re at with the street vending suit; another quiet month.
Continue reading Settlement Talks in Street Vending Lawsuit Seem to be On Track; Judge O’Connell Extends Response Deadline to July 18
Recall that, towards the end of March of this year, the parties to this case began making noises about a potential settlement. This evening, all parties to the suit, begun in 2014, filed a Joint Progress Report on the Status of Potential Settlement. They evidently reached a tentative agreement on April 5, and, according to this status report:
The parties have been diligently working to draft the final terms and language of the settlement agreement and to obtain approval from all parties to finalize the agreement.
The parties remain confident that they will be able to reach final agreement on all matters and will be able to obtain approval from all parties to settle this matter in its entirety.
They promise to update the court on the status of this settlement on July 26, 2016.
seleta.reynolds@lacity.orgWe recently moved into the middle of Hollywood Blvd — into a retail storefront. I hope you can stop by and see us sometime! We call this the “mid-BID”6 — and it’s the section of the Boulevard that still suffers from the doldrums.7
That said, we have a lot of meetings in our office, and in the past several of weeks, [sic] we’ve had a couple of people get tickets for parking at a meter beyond the two hour timeframe. In these two cases, the person ran out to put a few more quarters in the meter to buy some time, and when they went out, there was a ticket for violating the two hour time. (So, it was not an expired meter.)8
Well, the big news here is not that zillionaires don’t know that meter feeding is illegal. Even a lot of non-zillionaires don’t know.9 The big news is not even that zillionaires are too cheap to park around back on Schrader or Cherokee for $10 like everyone else who’s going to hang around the Boulevard for more than two hours or that they’re too cheap to get their zillionaires’ club, the HPOA, to freaking validate parking for them. The big news is not even that Kerry Morrison somehow thinks it’s OK to involve the freaking General Manager of the freaking Los Angeles Freaking Department of Transportation in a freaking PARKING TICKET problem; zillionaires naturally think their problems are so sensitive and important that they can only be handled by the boss.
The big news, friends, is that Seleta Reynolds actually did handle the complaint. She instructed her subordinate, Bruce Gillman, to write to Kerry and smooth the ruffled feathers and so on. The tickets didn’t get fixed, and we suppose that marks some progress for this formerly corrupt city of ours, but emails were exchanged for over a month on the subject. How many parking ticket complaints made by non-zillionaires get that kind of sustained attention, we wonder. From now on, we’re writing to Seleta with all our parking ticket woes, and we encourage you to do the same, fellow Angelenos. Here’s her contact information:
You can tell her we sent you. Meanwhile, read below the fold to find out what this has to do with zillionaire paranoiac delusions about food trucks and more hypocrisy about small businesses.
Continue reading Kerry Morrison Goes Straight to LADOT Boss in Attempt to Fix Parking Tickets for Board Members, Admits to Habitually Flouting City Parking Laws, Whines About Food Trucks Being Subject to the Same Laws as Everyone Else
Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell filed an order today in Santiago et al. v. Fashion District BID et al. setting a settlement conference to convene on Wednesday, June 22 in front of magistrate judge Charles Eick. These things are surely top secret, so there’s nothing to report or to attend, but I thought I’d drop the filing on you. It suggests that nothing much is going to happen in this case for a few weeks, anyway.
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 Smith10 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?
Continue reading LAHSA Commissioner and BID Boss Kerry Morrison Conspires to Use Illegal Amplified Classical Music at Night to Repel Homeless Sleepers on Vine Street: “This is a Fairly Elegant Solution”
