One of 649 people arrested, handcuffed, and chained to a bench for drinking in public by the Andrews International BID Patrol in 2010. Was there “a threat towards any officer” here, Stevie?On September 28, 2010 Media District BID safety patrol officers handcuffed a man because he was drinking in public and wandering around in traffic. This triggered an extensive investigation by Universal Protection Service, the company which manages security for the BID. You can read all 13 pages of it here. The level of concern on the part of the investigator, Daryl Whitt, is remarkable:
Here is the recap of my interviews with the officers involved with the detainment/arrest on 9-28-10.
There are still some gaps in their stories that I have been unable to close. The main issue as I see it is that CPL Garcia reacted in the wrong manner. He should have never advised the officer to place handcuffs on the subject as there was no threat towards any officer.
BID Security Boss Steve Seyler and Kerry Morrison targeting residents of Hollywood for paranoid countersurveillance…look again! It’s creepy-crawly former LAPD Chief James Davis and an unnamed albeit extraordinarily serious woman jabbing a pen at the people of Los AngelesWikipedia is a perfect source for information about James Edgar Davis, erstwhile Chief of the LAPD and, amongst his chiefly peers, tied for second place with Daryl Francis Gates, the two of them behind only William Henry Parker III when ranked by sheer, unrelenting, untempered, unexcused, unreflected-upon, psychopathic brutality. James Davis was famous for letting not truth, not justice, not love, not mercy stand in the way of the almost visionary level of violent frenzy up to which he kept his troops constantly whipped. Most stuff on Wikipedia is made up and a lot of it is harmful. The people that work for Wikipedia are mostly petty tyrants, sadists, and torturers, convinced that their evil is done in the service of a greater good because their insane leader told them that was the case. The same story is true the reign of James Davis as Chief of the LAPD as well.
Davis’s crazed antics were so reprehensible that even his official LAPD bio has to acknowledge this reality in surprising detail. It’s worth reading the whole thing and, as well, reading Joe Domanick’s fine history of the LAPD up through the Spring of 1992, To Protect and Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams, to understand the role that Davis’s lunacy incarnate prepared the way and made the paths straight for both the 1965 and the 1992 popular uprisings. We’re concerned here, though, with only one essential aspect of Davis’s legacy: The Red Squad. Read from the contemporary LAPD’s statement on the matter:
With his return to office in 1933, Chief James E. Davis deployed a “Red Squad” to “investigate and control radical activities, strikes, and riots.” By today’s standards, the Squad’s tactics were intolerable, but its members had the blessing of government officials and the business community. In referring to individuals deemed subversive, one Police Commissioner voiced his views by declaring: “The more the police beat them up and wreck their headquarters, the better. Communists have no Constitutional rights and I won’t listen to anyone who defends them.”
Despite its disavowal by today’s ostensibly more sane LAPD, Davis’s red squad persisted far into the 20th Century. In his fine history of such American police political surveillance units, Protectors of privilege : red squads and police repression in urban America, Frank Donner explains that One of literally hundreds of creepy spy photos of citizens of Hollywood legally engaged in legal activities covertly taken by the Andrews International BID Patrol anti-homeless red squad since 2007
The Los Angeles red squad was above all characterized by an undiluted nativism and a blatant patron-client relationship with local business interests, which was openly proclaimed against the local labor movement over the years…1
Well, these days, the LAPD can’t spy on political dissenters any more, and plus the “local labor movement” was, at least until the phoenix-esque rise of SEIU and its ideological kin, pretty much burnt/napalmed/incinerated by “local business interests.” But all that red squad apparatus didn’t just vanish. As with so many of the tools of oppression forged by the white ruling classes of Los Angeles in the Twentieth Century, political surveillance of citizens engaged in entirely legal activities was transferred over to and/or eagerly taken up by Business Improvement Districts, who have subsumed most of the municipal functions related to the “intolerable…by today’s standards…” “blatant patron-client relationship with local business interests…” Read on for a host of examples of the BID Patrol spying on the citizens of Hollywood for purely political reasons and, Stasi-like, keeping creepy files full of the fruits of their voyeurism-under-color-of-law. Continue reading Andrews International BID Patrol Runs Ideological Countersurveillance Operations Against Residents of Hollywood, Hearkening Back to Bad Old Days of James Davis and the LAPD Red Squad→
One of three mysterious signs at Selma Park which appear to restrict the park’s use to children and caregivers only, even though the LA Recreation and Parks Department has stated explicitly that Selma Park is open to the general public except for the playground.The Andrews International BID Patrol has been arresting people without children and ordering people without children out of Selma Park in Hollywood at least since 2008, as shown by their very own reports to the Joint Security Committee. They justify these actions by claiming that Selma Park is “for children and parents only.” And indeed, there are three signs in the general park area which state this as policy.1 We wondered how this park had come to be off-limits to all the citizens of Hollywood and so directed our faithful correspondent to find out. His first stop was the May 2008 BID Patrol Report, wherein it is stated that:
On 05-31-08, we participated in ‘Family Day at Selma Park’. The park had been a hostile environment for children as certain people used the space for sleeping, urinating in public, and drug and alcohol abuse. We attempted to address this problem along with Kerry Morrison and her staff, Council 13 staff, LAPD, and the City Attorney’s Office. As a result, signs were made signifying that the park would now be only available for people with children. We hung the signs and began enforcement. For several months we have been advising violators and asking them to leave the park. One of the legitimate, Recreation and Parks Commission approved, signs at Selma Park stating that use of the playground is restricted to children and caregivers.
This, of course, is a typical destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it tactic of the HPOA. They can’t just kick homeless people out of the park, so they kick everyone out of the park except people with children. Christ, they’d probably privatize the entire city if they could, just so they could arrest homeless people for being in it. Anyway, we thought we’d find out what the Department of Recreation and Parks had to say about this. Imagine our surprise when our correspondent received a letter from the RAP Commissioners stating explicitly that
“Selma Park is a pocket park that is open to the general public, and is not limited exclusively to only children. The existing signage at Selma Park which indicates that adults without children are prohibited from the restricted area was installed for the designated children’s play area only.”
Some of the BID Patrol’s anonymous warriors. We’re taking on the project of identifying these people.Today I’m pleased to announce a bunch of new documents. First of all there is a ton of new information on the HPOA’s sleazy sweetsy-heartsy lease of city property for a homebase-slash-mothership for its cleansy-upsy crew. So much that we started a whole subpage for the matter. What’s new are some emails between CD13 and the HPOA about the lease and the actual lease application filled out by the HPOA as part of the leasing process. This includes beaucoup info about the inner workings of the HPOA, including full federal tax returns for 2011 and 2012. Read it!
Next there’s the first set of documents in our new project to identify by name, photograph, and badge number, every BID patrol officer currently working the streets of Hollywood and as many of the past officers as possible. I’ve set up a new subpage dedicated to this endeavor, and the first two documents can be found there. They’re invoices from A/I to the HPOA for personnel, listed by name, for the week beginning August 14, 2015. Also get them here: HED BID and S-V BID.
Kerry Morrison chooses which of the two masters she’s gonna love and, consequently, which she’s gonna hate.In the last two weeks, two cataclysmic changes in the the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority‘s mission have made it, in not just our opinion but in the opinion of any sane observer, impossible for Kerry Morrison to ethically continue to serve as both a LAHSA Commissioner and the executive directrix of the HPOA. Since as of a few years ago she was earning $192,794 per annum1 from the HPOA we’re guessing it’s not that job she’s gonna quit. What happened is this: both the Los Angeles City Council and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are poised to ask LAHSA to (a) decide where across the city to locate service centers for the homeless and (b) to stop breaking up homeless encampments. Kerry Morrison counting a homeless person, no doubt using the local methodology that “[f]ederal officials are disputing,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Unfortunately, Kerry’s masters on the BID Boards expect her to target the homeless for hyperenforcement even as they scoff at the very idea that homeless human beings have rights and, accordingly, she’s directed her flunkies (we’re talking about you, Steve Seyler) to arrest homeless people in encampments and for any other random thing that pops into their heads. She can’t ethically do both, for, as a wise man once said:2
No one can serve two masters, for either he
will hate the one and love the other; or else
he will be devoted to one and despise the
other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.
The earliest of nine photos taken by the BID Patrol at Cameron Diaz’s star ceremony.On June 22, 2009, Cameron Diaz got a star on the Boulevard out in front of the Egyptian Theater. Someone, sometwo, or somemany Andrews International Security peeps were there, snapping pictures at a rapid rate of speed.
We’ve heard so darn much about the NSA and all the evil stuff they can learn via metadata, so we thought we’d try some of the same moves on this sequence of images, of which we have nine in our possession. Here they are all in a row (click to enlarge), and you can see and get the individual full-sized files after the break:
An astounding number of BID Patrol officers on Ivar Avenue by the library, June 30, 2015, milling around not being charged criminally for degrading everyone’s quality of life by openly displaying their guns and their self-evident willingness to use them, thus creating the imminent fear that they’ll kill anyone who disobeys them.Watch here for the final bit of a Hollywood BID Patrol operation on Ivar Avenue on June 30, 2015. There are about 12 of them milling around on the sidewalk after, evidently, having kicked out a bunch of homeless people, most probably on the basis of suspected violations of disgraceful LAMC 41.18(d). Of course, if you know the spot you’ll know that there are homeless people there essentially all the time, only very rarely getting kicked out by the BID Patrol.
So what horrific incident was it that required the presence of about a dozen of Hollywood’s finest1 on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon on Ivar Avenue? Murder, rape, homeless encampment, street-preaching? The amazing thing is that no one there seemed to know for sure except, we assume given that the principle of charity requires us to assume that the BID Patrol both has reasons for its actions and at the same time knows what those reasons are, the officers themselves. A witness to the June 30, 2015 incident who also had no firm idea of the BID Patrol’s intention, but was willing to exert effort to come up with a shared theory that fit the known facts, proving that he, unlike the Patrol, has not yet placed himself outside of normal human society.
One witness, though, spent the time and the effort to share his theory on the BID Patrol’s motivation with our correspondent. This is what David Graeber calls “interpretative labor,” an activity which, as Graeber has it, “much of the everyday business of social life” comprises, an activity in which people with guns, made stupid by their own potential for state-sanctioned violence, do not typically engage, as they clearly do not in this case:2
Thank you for filming, cause they only pulled up when I started talking about God and Jesus. I was just talking about God and Jesus and taking the Illuminati down, and every day they don’t never bother nobody, and let them sit here, right? Well, all of a sudden today I came and started talking about God and Jesus and taking down the Illuminati, cause I’m in the middle of a documentary, all of a sudden they get a hundred calls a day. God bless us all, the Holy Spirit, in Jesus’ name.
We didn’t catch this guy’s name, but we sure did catch his white privilege boo-hoo-hoo swelling violins rage rant pity party nostalgia speech…We’ve written before about the cataclysmic flood of white privilege rage rants unleashed by Fabio Conti’s cri de coeur for the BID Patrol to stop coddling the homeless and start, we don’t know, killing them or whatever it takes to get them out of Hollywood, and the present post concerns yet another boulder in that avalanche of angst. We’re going to comment on the unnamed white privilege rage ranter’s rant (you can see the fellow’s picture somewhere in the vicinity of this sentence) one line at a time. You can read his whole speech after the break and watch it here if you’re so inclined.
…our effort to clean up the neighborhood is kinda like salmon swimming upstream.
No. First of all, salmon swimming upstream are beautiful, delicious, and nutritious. You people in the BID are none of these things. Second, you’re not trying to “clean up the neighborhood,” you’re trying to ethnically cleanse the neighborhood. Salmon swimming upstream are beautiful, nutritious, and delicious. The BID Patrol is none of these things, innit? One is at least plausibly laudable. The other is a violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Also, your metaphor is deeply flawed. Salmon like swimming upstream. It’s what they’re born to do. It’s the crowning glory of their lives. They surely, if they could speak, wouldn’t be whining about it.
You know, we have the state and the city working against us by allowing people to sleep on the sidewalk, you know, all night long, because it’s the humane thing to do.
Fabio Conti, white privilege rage ranter of the month at the BID Joint Security Committee meeting of July 9, 2015: the Hollywood homeless are armed and dangerous!! Why is this allowed even though they SCARE ME?!At the July 9, 2015 Joint Security Committee meeting, BID Board member Fabio Conti, after Andrews International Security head BIDdie-boy Steve Seyler told a what-passes-for-heartwarming story about shipping some homeless lady out of state on a bus, flipped the fuck out about heavily armed and dangerous homeless people on the streets of Hollywood and how A/I ought to stop with the rapport-building, bus-ticket-buying, and donut/sandwich handing-out and start arresting all of them right now. Says Fabio: STOP BEING SO NICE TO THE HOMELESS!!! The “the purple guys” downtown “…keep the area pretty clean…” of homeless human garbage. The Hollywood BID Patrol must do the same!
Steve Seyler showing his good side to the camera at the July 9, 2015 meeting of the BID Joint Security Committee meeting.
Under ordinary circumstances a faux pas like Fabio’s would probably be politely overlooked but these are no ordinary times, it seems. Instead it triggered an avalanche of white-privilege-rage-ranting that derailed the meeting for what seemed like an eternity and was actually over 30 minutes of this approximately 70 minute long meeting. The asylum was so being-run-by-the-inmates that Hollywood Entertainment District BID Board President Monica Yamada, not habitually the most aware person in the room, had to shut it down. But not before the display of an unbearable montage/barrage of peel-the-face-off shots that had most of the attendees showing their true colors in a remarkably nauseating performative contradiction of Jesus’s usually on-target admonition about the truth. Mostly the truth will make you free but sometimes it just makes you sick.
Even the sense that God gave these good God-damned geese by the LA river just North of Los Feliz Blvd. will suffice to understand that when Steve Seyler blithers on about rapport-building through donut distribution he really means ARREST EVERYBODY RIGHT NOW!!
For instance, usually, of course, at these meetings and in other venues, Steve rattles on about how cuddlesy-warmsy-fuzzly-wuzzly his officers are but everyone there knows that that’s just the velvet glove over the iron fucking fist and that he’s just spreading the goodwill-ambassador bullshit for the delectation and over-the-eyes-wool-pulling of the public. This much is obvious to anyone with a fraction of the sense that God gave a good God-damned goose. In this instance, though, under relentless pressure from Fabio, whose position is that “we’re to a point where, you know, we cannot be kind,” Steve was forced to admit his homeless-people-on-the-sidewalk policy out loud, in public, on camera:
“…we’re gonna start out with a nice approach, hey, please, time to get up, businesses are open, you gotta get off the sidewalk, we’re here to help you, you know, blah blah blah blah, please, please, pretty please, and then, you know, ultimately we’re going to put the cuffs on you…”
Steve’s not usually so open about the fact that all the donuts, all the sandwiches, all the heartwarming coziness, it’s all just a formality. “…ultimately we’re going to put the cuffs on you…”
The only people in the room who talked and didn’t seem insane1 were two LAPD liaison officers (whose names, unfortunately, we didn’t catch), who patiently explained to everyone that “…the sky’s not falling…” However, as long-time readers of this blog are well aware, there is very little in this world that can get the attention of a white person who’s hell-bent on confusing comfort with safety. The LAPD guys were completely ignored. Sanity will not prevail, not in this room at this time.
Another attorney from California that we’d have all been better off without, singing the blues in Beverly Hills in 1962The emails are available here. There’s a lot of chaff, as usual, but a lot of tasty morsels as well. My colleagues will certainly be giving this material the fine-toothed comb treatment in the future, but I thought it’d be nice to announce the availability of the documents to satisfy your hunger and thirst for the truth which, as is well-known, shall set you free.
Picture of famed future president and California attorney is, according to Wikimedia, in the public domain. Take that, Helen Gahagan Douglas!
![Kerry Morrison counting a homeless person, no doubt using the local methodology that "[f]ederal officials are disputing," according to the Los Angeles Times.](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Kerry-makes-a-comnnection.jpg)
