Steve Seyler in 2014, one day before he told Kerry Morrison that he was going to “have the Officers slow down a little more…” The effects of that statement continue to be felt in Hollywood.Recall that the Andrews International Hollywood BID Patrol arrested more than 40% fewer people in 2015 than they did in 2014, and that this precipitous drop was almost certainly due to our scrutiny. Well, newly obtained figures show that as of Week 12 of 20161 the BID Patrol had arrested only 130 people. This is an annualized rate of
Recall that in 2015 the BID Patrol arrested 606 people, so this projected figure represents a projected 7% decrease from last year’s already strikingly attenuated figures.
Furthermore, by week 12 of 2015 the BID Patrol had arrested 169 people, compared to only 130 this year. This represents a stunning 23% reduction from 2015’s level. For the sake of comparison, note that by week 12 of 2014 the BID Patrol had already arrested 261 people. Thus 2016’s week 12 total is less than half of the 2014 figure from the same week.
The view from Ramirez Street. The entrance to the Archives is by the loading dock in the mid-right area of the image.A recent trip to the lovely City Archives on Ramirez Street, my absolute favorite of all city agencies,2 yielded up a bunch of really interesting stuff from 2001–2003. So much so that I started a new page for it. It took me three hours to look through two boxes of BID records (out of more than 400), so I’m sure there will be much more of this stuff to come. There’s a list of some highlights after the break, but check it!
In 2003 the BID’s expiring security contract with Burke Security, the predecessor of Andrews International, was put out for bids. Aaron Epstein, yes, the same one whose nuclear bomb of a lawsuit established the subjection of BIDs to both the Brown Act and the California Public Records Act, thereby making this blog possible, and a large group of his fellow Hollywood BID stakeholders3 sent a letter to then-mayor James Hahn complaining that they:
believe[d] that the District’s board of directors and executive director have not conducted a fully open and competitive process to ensure that property owners receive the finest security service for the lowest competitive price (the current two year contract exceeds $2 million). Moreover, we believe that the board and executive director have failed to be objective in the process and have allowed the contractor, Burke Security, to function in ways that do not provide the maximum benefits to the property owners and merchants.
Even in 2003 the BIDs had captured the regulatory function of the City Clerk’s office to the point where they were warning Kerry Morrison that people were scrutinizing her sketchy behavior rather than using the power of the purse to make her be not so shady. The fox wasn’t guarding the henhouse–the lunatics were (and are) running the asylum.
If you read the letter you’ll see that they’re talking about practices that are still retained by the current BID Patrol: custodial arrests rather than observe-and-report, unseeming over-coziness with the staff of the HPOA, and so on.4 The copy I obtained came with a couple of handwritten notes5 from a Clerk’s office employee suggesting that they warn Kerry Morrison that people were watching so she should follow the rules. This, obviously, is not the kind of behavior one would expect from a regulatory agency. Why didn’t they tell Kerry Morrison to follow the rules because the law required her to? Continue reading A Trip to City Archives Yields Fascinating Historical Material Including 2003 HPOA Stakeholder Rebellion Over Shady and Neurotic Behavior by Tronson and Morrison During Security Provider Bidding Process→
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 20136 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.
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.
John Tronson and Kerry Morrison at the March 17, 2016 meeting of the HPOA Board of Directors. Despite appearances, Ms. Morrison evidently did not throw that pencil at anyone during this meeting.Recall that last month the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance spent a good 40 minutes yammering on about a misbegotten plan of Peter Zarcone’s and Bill Farrar’s to have their armed minions, the BID Patrol, stay out way past everyone’s bed-time in order to put the old kibosh on the herds of outta-control dark-skinned people who, at least in the BIDsies’ fantastically fretful obsessive delusional view of things, occupy the Boulevard on weekend nights. Well, Zarcone got transferred, Steve Seyler backed off the plan, and Kerry Morrison told the Central Hollywood Coalition on March 8: “Yeah…it’s not happening.” A good friend of this blog wrote to Mitch O’Farrell asking him not to pay for this nonsense, and we found out just a couple days ago that as early as February 22, O’Farrell staffers Rodriguez and Halden had concerns about the plan that they took to their boss. We can’t say for sure (yet) what drove the dispositive stake through the heart of Bill Farrar’s vampire baby, but whatever it was, evidently no one explained the full extent of the deadness to John Tronson.
Bill Farrar at the February 18, 2016 meeting of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance.Emails sent to me this evening by CD13 staffer Dan Halden show that as early as February 22, 2016, he and fellow staffer Marisol Rodriguez “had concerns” about the now-defunct plan to have Mitch O’Farrell fund an expansion of BID Patrol hours in Hollywood at the request of the LAPD. A/I vice president Bill Farrar led a lengthy discussion on February 18 at the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Board of Directors meeting in which everyone showed an astonishing amount of enthusiasm for this questionable plan. The emails also show that on or before February 22, Farrar met with LAPD Deputy Chief Bea Girmala, evidently trying to gin up support from her for the plan. It also seems to be implicit in the emails, although not definitively established, that Peter Zarcone’s transfer from Hollywood to 77th Street was not a factor in the decision to kill the plan. You can find some background, a little analysis, and a really bitchin’ picture of Chief Girmala after the break. Continue reading O’Farrell Staff Members Rodriguez and Halden Had “Concerns” About Now-Defunct Plan to Fund Extended BID Patrol Hours, A/I VP Bill Farrar Also Lobbied Deputy Chief Girmala for Support for Plan→
BID Patrol officer Robert E. Reyes (badge #117, on left) illegally arrested a man in Selma Park in 2008.
We’ve been writing for 6 months now about how the HPOA put up phony signs in Selma Park in Hollywood (illegally) declaring it off-limits to adults unaccompanied by children and how the BID Patrol spent the next eight years falsely arresting people and ejecting them from the park, until we got the signs taken down by the City in September 2015. Kerry Morrison told our faithful correspondent 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)…” Man arrested in 2008 for being in Selma Park without a child.
Well, we’ve been receiving the BID Patrol’s arrest reports and daily activity logs for a while now, and recently we obtained the complete 2008 set (arrests here and daily logs here). We’ve known that Kerry’s claim was wrong for a while now (e.g. see here) and the 2008 materials provide even more evidence that she was misled by Andrews International10regarding their course of conduct in illegally arresting multiple people in the park over the years.
Well, getting records out of the Downtown Center BID is like pulling teeth from a fricking hippopotamus,11 but after almost four months and one exceedingly detailed complaint to the Los Angeles City Clerk about their general bloody-minded uncooperative stonewalling, they have released a bunch of records relating to their public relations firm, Macy + Associates.12 You can find this material here on the Archive. Note that they’re, as usual, mercilessly and certainly illegally redacted. I’m working on this, but I don’t expect any results quickly.
Also, the big prize, obtained yesterday, is 2007 arrest reports and daily activity logs from the Andrews International BID Patrol. These are also on the Archive:
Peter Zarcone at the February 18, 2016 meeting of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Board of Directors meeting.
On Thursday, February 18, 2016, the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance met. The main topic of conversation was a request from LAPD Captain Peter Zarcone, commanding officer of Hollywood Station, to the BID to arrange for the BID Patrol to work until 4 a.m.13 The idea seems to be that this would relieve the LAPD somewhat. The HPOA has been in conversation with Mitch O’Farrell, who is said to be eager to pay for some or all of this project out of his discretionary funds. There was also a brief mention of plans to deputize the BID Patrol so that they would be able to issue citations. I will be writing much more about this, but I wanted to get it up here soonest, since it ended up taking far longer than I expected to transcribe the discussion, which went on for over forty minutes. You can see the first part beginning here, and it’s continued in the second part here. Transcription after the break. Continue reading LAPD Asks HPOA to Arrange for Late-Night BID Patrol Hours, HPOA Agrees to Pilot Program; Mitch O’Farrell Said to be Eager to Pay Costs. Also, Plans to Deputize BID Patrol May be in Works→
