Standard Plating Company at 826 E. 62nd Street, Los Angeles. Like the Hollywood Gower Plaza, this property has been in Alyssa Van Breene’s family for four generations. She’s not bragging about it on the internet, though, possibly because, rather than being associated with glamor and glitz, it’s associated with poisons saturating the land and the groundwater.When first we met Ms. Alyssa Van Breene, round about the middle of 2015, she was out in Boyle Heights, shooting off her privileged mouth about street vending and how it must be forbidden because she and her strange BIDfellows “…work very hard to keep the sidewalks clean, safe, and hospitable for all pedestrians: tourists, workers, residents, and students.” Make a note of that “clean” bit. It’s going to come up again later.
When next we met Ms. Alyssa Van Breene she was boasting in her Board bio that her family had owned the northeast corner of Hollywood and Gower for four freaking generations, as if this were some kind of accomplishment to be proud of, predicated as it was and is on the white supremacist real estate policies that made Hollywood what it is today. The human face of white supremacy, hypocrisy, and wanton saturation of the earth and water of South Los Angeles with poisons.
And when last we met Ms. Alyssa Van Breene, she was sitting in a room watching, not protesting, a gang of her white supremacist BID buddies laughing it up with Cowboy Cory Palka of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division about how fucked up South Los Angeles is. And really, this is how we meet her every month, as the HPOA plots to turn its BID Patrol into a tool for the LAPD to avoid civilian oversight, as they arrange the destruction of their own records to avoid criticism, as the BID Patrol continues to arrest the homeless merely to harass them, as they plot and plan to keep arresting street vendors, not to mention illegally destroying their wares, and so on. Her silence, obviously, equals her consent. The famous four-generation Dulgarian/Van Breene strip mall at Hollywood and Gower is the non-toxic side of the holdings of Alyssa Van Breene’s people.
But we had assumed, without evidence or even much thought, that her destructive activities were confined to Hollywood, that yes, she was willing to oppress non-zillionaires by arresting them, mocking them, and chasing them out of Hollywood, but that that was the extent of the damage.
So what a surprise it was when the almighty Google turned us on to the fact that her mom, Dickie Van Breene (née Dulgarian) and her uncle Duke Dulgarian (and a bunch of other Dulgarians, but they don’t concern us here) were sued every which way but loose in 2013 in Federal Court by Kamala Harris and the California Department of Justice for illegally dumping a bunch of poisonous shit at a nickel-chrome plating factory in on East 62nd Street in South L.A. that they all inherited down the generations along with the Hollywood and Gower property, the economic benefits of which inure to Alyssa Van Breene just as surely as do those of the famous strip mall. You can read the initial complaint here, and it has some interesting history in it: Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Board Member Alyssa Van Breene: Financial Beneficiary of a Century of Poison-Saturated Environmental Racism in South Los Angeles→
George Islas (Badge #128) falsely arrested a man in Selma Park on September 17, 2009.
If you haven’t kept up with our investigations into Selma Park, here is good starting place. The short version is that in 2007 the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance illegally placed signs in the park stating that it was for children and caregivers only and proceeded to arrest some people and eject others from the park for the next 8 years until I got the signs removed by Recreation and Parks. When I first asked her for records on the matter, Kerry Morrison told me 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)…” Another victim of Andrews International Security, falsely arrested in Selma Park on September 17, 2009.
Well, I then requested copies of all arrest reports and daily activity logs, and they’ve been trickling in at the glacial pace that Kerry seems to find acceptable for meeting her legal obligations under the California Public Records Act. Every new batch has revealed that, even if Andrews did tell Kerry that they didn’t arrest people for merely being in the park, they were not telling the truth. The same is true for the 2009 material, which is on Archive.org. In particular I found another case of a man arrested in Selma Park, accused of nothing more than being there without children: Continue reading Andrews International Arrest Reports and Daily Logs from 2009 Available, Another Victim of False Arrest at Selma Park Uncovered→
The BID Patrol can’t make its numbers just arresting one homeless person at a time.(I apologize in advance for this necessarily data-heavy post, but it’s essential information).
In 20131 the BID Patrol arrested homeless people at more than 57 times the rate that the LAPD did. Furthermore, they were responsible for more than 1% of all arrests made in the entire City of Los Angeles that year even while working only 0.13% of the hours that the LAPD did. Approximately one in fourteen arrests of homeless people in the entire city of Los Angeles that year was made by the BID Patrol.
According to an order that just hit PACER, the parties in the LA Catholic Worker and LA Community Action Network suit against the Central City East Association and the City of Los Angeles are meeting on April 5 to discuss settling the case. You may recall that a hearing on an application for contempt was already set for that date. According to Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wisterich, who’s handling discovery matters in the case, and whose order postponed the hearing:
The court has been informed that a settlement conference has been scheduled for April 5, 2016, at 9:30 a.m. To allow the parties to devote their full attention to exploring the possibility of settlement, the hearing is continued to May 4, 2016, at 11:00 a.m.
Hollywood Property Owners Alliance staff members implementing their new document retention policy. What have you got to hide, friends?!Longtime readers of this blog will recall that one of my very first successful CPRA requests of the HPOA yielded a bunch of emails between AI and the HPOA from October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014. In fact there were 69 of them during this 43 day period, or more than 1.5 per day. There’s no reason that this period wouldn’t be representative, so we might expect over 500 emails total for 2014. However, I didn’t get around to asking for the rest of the 2014 emails until November of last year and didn’t receive them until January of this year. They are available here, all (only) 90 pages of them. Incredibly, HPOA supplied more distinct emails from October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014 than they did for all the rest of 2014 when asked a year later. Statistically, therefore, it’s almost certain that they deleted a bunch of stuff. They handed over significantly more emails from 2015, almost 9 MB of them. In all cases there’s demonstrably material missing, e.g. only a small fraction of the weekly reports from AI are present. It wasn’t clear at all what was going on, although I certainly had my suspicions, until a few things happened: Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Formalizes Ongoing Document Destruction Policy Involving Thousands Upon Thousands of Public Records, Seemingly just to Thwart Our Investigations→
Here are a bunch of documents that I published on The Archive this morning. There’s some interesting stuff in there as well as the usual boatloads of chaff:
Emails between HPOA and Andrews International from 2015. This is supposed to be all of them. It may be all that the HPOA has on hand, but it’s certainly not all that were sent. I’ll be writing on this soon, I hope. I had to redact these lightly because they included a number of social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and a home address. Not cool!
Emails between Carol Schatz and Mike Oreb of the LAPD. Part of the same project. This is supposedly everything from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2015. I don’t see how that could be right, but I also don’t see how to prove it. There’s some moderately interesting stuff in here, but nothing momentous.
On Monday, March 21, 2016, there was a hearing on the plaintiffs’ application to have the City of Los Angeles held in contempt for its failure to comply with discovery orders in the ongoing lawsuit against the City and the CCEA over the illegal confiscation of the property of homeless people. Recall that the plaintiffs asked the Judge to award them more than $40,000 in fees and to declare that the City was at fault as a punitive measure.
Well, the order resulting from that hearing just hit PACER, and the plaintiffs got some but not all of what they asked for. In particular, they were awarded $38,818.49 in fees. Judgement on the rest of the plaintiffs’ requests was deferred. There will be another hearing on April 5, 2016, at 10:30 a.m. in in Courtroom 690 of the Roybal Building, presumably after which the rest of the matters will be decided. According to the order, by 48 hours in advance of the hearing,
The City is directed to complete its production, serve supplemental responses to the requests for production, respond in writing to the questions asked in plaintiffs’ March 15, 2016 letter from Myers to Whitaker, serve a complete and detailed privilege log, file and serve a report describing the status of its compliance with this and other court orders, and pay the sanctions awarded by this order…
Cory Palka, new boss of the Hollywood Division, speaks to an organized gang of exceptionally jolly white supremacists on St. Patrick’s day.Watch and listen to LAPD Captain Cory Palka speaking at the most recent meeting of the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance. Captain Cory recently replaced the now transferred Peter Zarcone as Hollywood honcho, and evidently a good-will-drop-in mission to the local zillionaire’s club is de rigueur in that situation.
You can read a transcript of the ongoings after the break, as always, but today we’re focusing just on a little bit of unplanned, unscripted joking around, for in such situations, according to Sigmund Freud (as our friends at Wikipedia put it), we can discern “…forbidden thoughts and feelings that the conscious mind usually suppresse[s] in deference to society.” Har-de-fooking-har-har-har!
The fun began when Kerry Morrison, her inimitably sycophantic affect in full flower, told Cpt. Cory that she had a surprise for him! (This bit starts here).
KM: I have one fun thing to show you. When you were here, I remember you said “Ooooh! I really want one of those star placques!” So I made this up for you for 2013–2014 and then I kept texting, like I want to go down and tour 77th Division.
And Cowboy Cory Palka has a little joke about this: CP: You don’t want to go to 77th…
Now, it’s hard to see what’s funny about that, right? We mean, really, what’s funny? But the HPOA thinks it’s fookin’ hilarious. Just watch.
White people in Hollywood laughing it up about 77th Street Division.So really, what’s so funny? There’s no clue in Cpt. Cory’s follow-up remarks, either, although we do get the sense that he almost talked about, just barely refrained from mentioning, the dreaded “those people”:
Totally different environment. My first year in 77th Street I had fifty murders and then last year I had thirty three. And I remember, I was telling my daughter we were doing some great things down there, and she was like “Great things? Man, pretty dangerous down there.” And I had ten when I left this year, so, Pete still has ten, I haven’t had any, I’ve been here, this is my second week, so, it’s just a different community and with a whole different set of challenges. Um, that’s a whole different discussion, so…
