Tag Archives: Andrews International Security

Contracts between HPOA and Andrews International Security Now Available

This picture has nothing to do with anything in this post.
This picture has nothing to do with anything in this post.
I am pleased to announce the availability of the 2007-2012 and the 2013-2018 contracts between Andrews International Security and the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance as well as the proposal that A/I submitted in 2012 in order to win that most recent contract. These are available here or directly from our static storage here.

The Berlin Wall image is public domain and available here from the lovely openclipart.org.

Share

Steve Seyler, Vodka Nazi

Steve Seyler, the Vodka Nazi
Steve Seyler, the Vodka Nazi
If you read through Security Kahuna Steve Seyler’s reports to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID you will notice, among many other weirdly inappropriate obsessions displayed by the man in his semi-literate prose, a fixation on the brands of alcohol that his victims are drinking when arrested. When his officers take their trophy pictures of arrestees they hold the open containers in the frame with the brand visible, and Seyler evidently can’t resist giving his opinion. What this has to do with law enforcement we don’t know.

Anyway, Seyler’s bête noire is something called Taaka Vodka. He has effectively criminalized its possession in the BID-occupied areas of Hollywood:12014.07.07.seyler.vodka.1

He’s also obsessed with a brand of vodka called Borski, to the point where he seems overjoyed that it was involved in the BID patrol’s thousandth arrest of 2013:3
2013.12.09.seyler.vodka.2

Seyler has, like the guy whose hat graces his head in the satirical picture above, evidently inspired his officers to form a mystical cult whose rituals include some kind of idolatry involving Taaka:2
Continue reading Steve Seyler, Vodka Nazi

Share

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Promotes Mindset that Aids, Comforts Los-Angeles-Area Serial Killers

Lonnie David Franklin, Jr.
Lonnie Franklin
We were lucky to be able to attend the first L.A. screening of Nick Broomfield’s new film, Tales of the Grim Sleeper yesterday at the Egyptian Theatre thanks to the American Film Institute (see trailer here).1

Broomfield’s film exposes the fact that the City of Los Angeles allowed a serial killer to operate with impunity for 22 years, murdering untold numbers of women. Neither the LAPD nor the City government took the case seriously because the victims were black women, many prostitutes or drug addicts. This point was made repeatedly and convincingly, both on screen and during the Q&A after the film, by stars Pam Brooks and Margaret Prescod, who has been pressing the LAPD about the killings since 1986, thereby earning the wrath of, among other geniuses, Darryl Gates, our city’s second worst mistake. Gates, in his inimitably idiotic way, called Prescod and her compatriots in the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders “dummies” for even raising the issue.

Broomfield’s stunning work shows that Prescod and her allies have been right all along, though. The film gives an irrefutable performative demonstration of the fact that the LAPD has never taken this case seriously: In 2009 the LAPD knew of one survivor of the killer’s attacks. In 2014, before Broomfield started filming, that one survivor was still the only one known. But in the course of filming Brooks managed to locate and arrange for Broomfield to interview not just one additional woman who survived the Sleeper’s attacks but four. How is it possible that a serious investigation could leave such major witnesses to be discovered, and not even discovered by the police, four years after a suspect’s arrest?

It’s unconscionable. The City of Los Angeles will never live down the shame of having, through racism and indifference, abandoned dozens or hundreds of its most vulnerable citizens to a cruel thrill-killer (or killers; the true extent of the damage may never be known). It couldn’t have happened without the utter dehumanization of these women, each and every one someone’s child. According to Joshua Kleinfeld of Northwestern University, “in Southern California, police slang in the early 1990s for the murder of drug dealers, gangsters, prostitutes, and other lawbreakers was the vivid and extremely disturbing term, ‘NHI (no humans involved) Homicide.'”2 And once the police and white Los Angeles have dehumanized people to the point that they can be killed without consequence, killers will flourish. Why wouldn’t they?
Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Promotes Mindset that Aids, Comforts Los-Angeles-Area Serial Killers

Share

Los Angeles, the Great White Spot of America

May Company advertisement from the Los Angeles Times on May 17, 1925
Racially charged May Company advertisement from the Los Angeles Times on May 17, 1925. Click to embiggen.
Yes, friends, it’s true. Los Angeles, now the most ethnically diverse place in the United States,1 was once known as “the great white spot of America.”2 Look at the May Company advert there to your right. Read the fine print:


White, the dominant note in the season’s fashions! The cool, pure, fresh, tubable3 white, that will give such splendid service, and such satisfaction in this charming city of the Southland!

Trade and fashion journals have long predicted the vogue of white. Paris has acclaimed it! Los Angeles has accepted it! And the fad is on! Never could a fresher fashion predominate. White, with its cool freshness and Summery appeal, is particularly suited to Los Angeles, the great white spot of America.

You can’t make this stuff up, although really, who’d want to?
Continue reading Los Angeles, the Great White Spot of America

Share

A Pot to Piss In

NOTE (December 2015): Please read this retraction to provide context to this post. We remain right about many of the issues discussed, but we were dead wrong about the BID’s opposition to public toilets. They support them.

A public urinal in Paris, France c. 1865
A public urinal in Paris, France c. 1865
The Hollywood Property Owners Alliance is really, really, really opposed to people pissing on the streets of Hollywood. They’re so opposed that in 2013 they spent over $132,000 to combat it, at approximately $1500 per pissing incident.1 Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. It’s safe to assume that the HPOA BIDs have their hearts dead set against public pissing.

But why are all these people pissing in the streets?
Continue reading A Pot to Piss In

Share

Sidewalk With BID Patrol

Image from Steve Seyler's September 8, 2014 report to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood BIDs
Image from Steve Seyler’s September 8, 2014 report to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood BIDs
Our faithful readers will have been delving eagerly into Steve Seyler’s reports to the Joint Security Committee as we’ve made them available. The image to the right is typical of the weirdly voyeuristic self-serving propaganda that fills these documents.

Seyler is, of course, speaking to his bosses, so he has to make sure they understand what they’re getting for their money. And what are they getting?
Continue reading Sidewalk With BID Patrol

Share

A Shameful Thing

Hollywood, November 1, 2014, 8:15 a.m. P.D.T.
Hollywood, November 1, 2014, 8:15 a.m. P.D.T.
The second redacted report from Steve Seyler to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID is available here. I don’t actually feel equal to the task of describing in serious terms how upsetting this material is, but I’m going to try my best to match the gravity of the subject.

Steve’s narratives of the homeless people of Hollywood lack any consciousness of the fact that these are human beings with human lives that he’s dealing with. They have no power, no voice, no property, they have nothing. They are harried and tormented by Steve’s Andrews International Security guards. It’s not enough that Steve’s guards scream at and arrest the homeless for activities which are not only lawful but completely normal if done in a house: sleeping, sitting, urination, defecation, but he mocks them with epithets and has them photographed like trophy animals in the process.

His reports betray no evidence of compassion or even a basic understanding of the fact that these people are homeless as the result of social processes beyond anyone’s control. Instead he fills his reports with self-serving anecdotes about his horror-movie-boyscout guards helping blind men across the street and buying hungry people pizza interspersed with immature jokes about shit on the streets and illicit vodka. Is he unaware that his ordained purpose is not helping and saving but moving homeless people out of the steamroller path of businessmen and their plans for tourism and development? He can’t possibly be, which makes his pretense and his weird antics even more disturbing.

And the members of the Joint Security Committee, who have evidently received these reports for years without either seeing how disgusting they are or putting an end to them (if only for the sake of public image) are as guilty or more so. It’s plausible that Steve can’t help the fact that he’s a bully-boy who ended up with too much power for anyone’s good, but Kerry Morrison at least seems like a decent, kind person. I can’t believe she hasn’t seen how bad this is. Certainly the LAPD, LASD, and City Attorney’s Office liasons to the BID ought to know better; they’re professionals. Real police don’t act like this (at least not in public). It’s a shameful thing.
Continue reading A Shameful Thing

Share

Documents

I’m pleased to announce our new Documents page, also available through the menu on the header in all its arboreally structured glory. We hope to build this into a repository of records we obtain under the California Public Records Act. So far we just have one item prepared for publication, a report by Steve Seyler of Andrews International Security to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID. This is the document that Kerry Morrison originally refused to let me read at the meeting. I can see why she was reluctant because it’s not pretty. We’ve redacted it here to try to preserve some shreds of dignity in an ugly set of circumstances. Of course the unredacted original is available on request from Kerry.

Share

How to Enforce the Law

Residents of Hollywood trying to attend a BID meeting
Residents of Hollywood trying to attend a BID meeting
The Brown Act is the California law governing public meetings. It’s serious business. § 54959 states that


Each member of a legislative body who attends a meeting of that legislative body where action is taken in violation of any provision of this chapter, and where the member intends to deprive the public of information to which the member knows or has reason to know the public is entitled under this chapter, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Now, that intent element is a little sticky. Evidently it’s not a crime “to deprive the public of information” if you’re just ignorant of the law or too arrogant to understand that the law applies to you or whatever. But at least some members of some groups subject to the Brown Act must be guilty of a misdemeanor when, e.g., they explicitly deny members of the public access to documents which the Brown Act states explicitly must be made available to the public “immediately.” When a member of a body subject to the Brown Act says “no, you can’t look at the document,” the intent is clear. The member “has reason to know” the law because it’s their job to know the law, them being a member of a Brown-Act body. Bang! Misdemeanor. Then how does the law get enforced in such a case?

The procedure is laid out in the Act itself (§54960 et seq.). Either the DA or a member of the public can go to court and ask for injunctive relief of various kinds or else “any interested party” can write a letter to the criminals, point out their crime, give them 30 days to think about it, and allow them the option of promising never to do the crime in the future albeit without admitting that they actually did it in the past. As far as we can see, no one has ever gone to jail for violating the Brown Act (although see this story about a guy in Illinois who placed a whole county board of supervisors under citizen’s arrest).
Continue reading How to Enforce the Law

Share

Seyler: Arrest ’em all to send a message (updated)

Steve Seyler explains it all for you
Steve Seyler explains it all for you
Steve Seyler, high muckamuck of security at Andrews International, gave a lengthy report at yesterday morning’s meeting of the Sunset-Vine BID and Hollywood Entertainment District Joint Security Committee meeting.

Continue reading Seyler: Arrest ’em all to send a message (updated)

Share