Tag Archives: Bea Girmala

LAPD

Internal Police Commission Calendars Show Commissioners Regularly Attending Social And Ceremonial Events With LAPD Brass — And Meeting Very Regularly — Very Privately With Charlie Beck — Michel Moore — Other LAPD Command Staff — With Private Meals At The Pacific Dining Car — Langer’s — YXTA — They Were Briefed On LAPD Facial Recognition In 2018 — Even Though The Department Publicly Lied And Denied Their Use Of It Until September 2020 — They Have Scheduled Breakfasts Tuesdays At 8 AM — So Many Commissioners Have So Many Private Meetings With Michel Moore That Brown Act Violations Seem Unavoidable — And More!

September 28, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

NOTE: This post is about Police Commission Calendars from 2013 through 2020, and they’re here on Archive.Org.

The Los Angeles Police Commission theoretically oversees the Los Angeles Police Department via powers enumerated in the City Charter at §570 et seq. Although these powers are pretty broad, e.g. they include the power to recommend that the Chief be fired subject to approval of Council, the Commission doesn’t do much with them at all, as you surely know if you’ve ever attended one of their meetings. They act more like collegial collaborators with the police than any respectable oversight body ought to do.

You’ll have seen that the only people in the room who’ve spent any time at all thinking about police oversight are members of the public there to give comment. The Commission itself is overly friendly with the police and exceedingly hostile towards any members of the public who are not also overly friendly with the police. And it turns out that this impression of unseemly collaboration between overseers and overseen is also accurate outside public view.

The Commissioners have regular private meetings with the Chief and other members of LAPD’s command staff, sometimes over a meal. For instance on January 17, 2018 Steve Soboroff and another person had lunch with Beck at YXTA, a gentrification bar on Skid Row which apparently has good carne asada. Soboroff and Beck met regularly before Beck retired, often at YXTA but sometimes at Langer’s and elsewhere. On March 6, 2018 Soboroff had breakfast with Dominic Choi at the Pacific Dining Car.
Continue reading Internal Police Commission Calendars Show Commissioners Regularly Attending Social And Ceremonial Events With LAPD Brass — And Meeting Very Regularly — Very Privately With Charlie Beck — Michel Moore — Other LAPD Command Staff — With Private Meals At The Pacific Dining Car — Langer’s — YXTA — They Were Briefed On LAPD Facial Recognition In 2018 — Even Though The Department Publicly Lied And Denied Their Use Of It Until September 2020 — They Have Scheduled Breakfasts Tuesdays At 8 AM — So Many Commissioners Have So Many Private Meetings With Michel Moore That Brown Act Violations Seem Unavoidable — And More! →

Business Improvement Districts

Bunches of New Media District BID Documents And More Evidence Of This Blog’s Popularity Among City of LA Employees

December 30, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Photograph of busted light in the Media District taken by Media District BID Executive Director and preconviction malfeasant Lisa Schechter.

This is just a quick announcement of some new documents from the Hollywood Media District BID. We have the BID’s 2014 and 2015 tax returns as well as minutes from all Board and Committee meetings from February through December 2016. I also got a ton of emails from Laurie Goldman and Lisa Schechter to and from the City of L.A. They’re not ready to make available yet, though. The Media District BID, alone among all BIDs of whom I request records,¹ provides emails to me in native .eml format. This is absolutely ideal for my own research for a number of reasons, but it does create some obstacles in distribution.² Hence I’ll be making those emails available as necessary and will put them all on the Archive if I ever manage to get a batch eml to PDF converter working properly.³

Anyway, you can find the new material:

At Archive.Org
Or locally:
- Minutes
- Tax Returns

And turn the page for a quirky little item showing our eternal popularity amongst City of LA employees!
Continue reading Bunches of New Media District BID Documents And More Evidence Of This Blog’s Popularity Among City of LA Employees →

Venice Beach BID

In 2015 Bonin Aide Debbie Dyner Harris Sought To Leverage “Extremely Unusual” Outsized City Assessment For Venice Beach BID Into Voting Seat On Board Of Directors But City Attorney Said No! Freaking! Way! Conflict! Of! Freaking! Interest!

December 18, 2016 Mike 2 Comments

I’ve written before on how the City of Los Angeles arranges for itself to be lobbied by BIDs for various reasons. Now it appears that even this usual arrangement wasn’t enough for Mike Bonin and Debbie Dyner Harris at CD11 with respect to the Venice Beach BID. In particular, during the formation process, in December 2015, Dyner Harris emailed Miranda Paster asking if she could have a voting seat on the BID Board of Directors:

Hi Miranda, how are you? I hope all is well. I am checking on something we had discussed a while ago, but I can’t find in my notes. I wanted to confirm whether or not the City, as 1/3 paying member of the BID,⁴ is allowed to be a voting member on the BID board.

Miranda Paster replied a few days later, stating:

We opt out of sitting on the Board because it may appear to be a conflict of interest. We can sign the petition for a BID and we cast a ballot for the Prop 218 balloting. However, we do not sit on the boards and vote.

Debbie Dyner Harris doesn’t like this at all. She evidently really wants to be on this board!⁵ Continue reading →

Announcements, Miscellaneous

Deputy Chief Beatrice Girmala Reads This Blog!!! And Pete Zarcone and Some State Department Anti-Terrorist Hack Engage in Homosocial Bonding by Insulting Bill Farrar!! NO GIRLZ ALLOWD!!

July 7, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Between them, Girmala and Seyler account for 64% of the hits on this blog!

This morning our faithful correspondent rode the good old Red Line to the South, to the East, to the Civic Center, to the good old LAPD Discovery Section, where he was privileged to scan maybe a thousand pages of emails between various LAPD luminaries and the BIDs. There’s some serious and important stuff in there, and you’ll be reading about a lot of it here. But there’s also some silly stuff, and we’re breaking out a couple of the goofiest for you here tonight.

Valorie Keegan and Tom LaBonge in 2008, before this blog was even a gleam in Mike's eye... which is why they can afford to laugh! — Valorie Keegan and Tom LaBonge in 2008, before this blog was even a gleam in Mike’s eye… which is why they can afford to laugh!

First we have this little gem, where some lady named Valorie Keegan, who is the current vice chair of the Hollywood Police Advisory Board but beyond that even the Google doesn’t seem to know exactly what she does, emails a link to our humble blog straight to LAPD Deputy Chief Beatrice Girmala! And which article is it a link to? It’s this old crowd pleaser about Pete Zarcone and the appearance of corruption at the LAPD. Valorie even admits that our conclusion is true. How’s that for validation from the top?! Chief Bea didn’t seem to have much to say back to Valorie, but if you look at the detailed summary at the top of the email, you’ll see that Chief Bea forwarded the email to someone. Our next task? Find out who! Maybe our readership isn’t 92% Kerry Morrison and her lawyers. Maybe we’re a big hit over at 100 W. First Street as well!

And then there’s this meaty little slab of boys-will-be-boys. It seems that a girl made it into the State Department, despite the large handpainted “NO GURLZ ALLOWD” sign nailed to the bottom of the tree. She emailed Captain Pete and a bunch of other boyz thusly:
Continue reading Deputy Chief Beatrice Girmala Reads This Blog!!! And Pete Zarcone and Some State Department Anti-Terrorist Hack Engage in Homosocial Bonding by Insulting Bill Farrar!! NO GIRLZ ALLOWD!! →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

That Time in 2012 When Kerry Morrison’s OCD Street Character Rage Incited Rabid, Frothing-at-Mouth Angry White Property Owning “Bull[ies]” to Attack Jane Ellison Usher and Tamar Galatzan with “Repeated Kicks to the Head”

May 14, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Kerry Morrison in 2012 explaining to Jane Ellison Usher why it's so important to get rid of street characters in Hollywood. — Kerry Morrison in 2012 explaining to Jane Ellison Usher why it’s so important to get rid of street characters in Hollywood.

Last month we broke the story of Kerry Morrison’s insistence that street characters on Hollywood Blvd. must be outlawed to curb terrorism while carving out a performative exception for the Ku Klux Klan’s Hancock Park operations. One of the incidents described there was a terse summary from HPOA Board minutes about how some meeting was tense because the City Attorney’s office had “…dropped the ball…” and they walked out of the meeting (due to shame or something).

Jane Ellison Usher in May 2009, three years before the HPOA's receiving repeated kicks to the head from Kerry Morrison and bullying friends — Jane Ellison Usher in May 2009, three years before receiving “repeated kicks to the head” from Kerry Morrison and “bully[ing]” friends.

Well, we recognize a whitewashing when presented with one, so we directed our faithful correspondent to investigate further, and, with the assistance of ever-helpful Mike Dundas of the City Attorney’s office, he came up with this little gem right here, which is an email from Special Assistant City Attorney Jane Ellison Usher⁶ to Kerry Morrison, Joe Mariani, and Leron Gubler, taking them to task for allowing their psychotic crazed white property owner constituents to berate Ms. Usher and her colleague Tamar Galatzan⁷ over a perceived, albeit delusionally so, inaction with respect to the ~~TERRORISM~~ street character problem at Hollywood and Highland. Ms. Usher’s description is far, far more plausible than that of the anonymous minutes-taker quoted above and far, far less flattering to the crazed HPOA-ites than is their own description. In particular:
Continue reading →

Hollywood BID Patrol

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

March 16, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

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 →

Hollywood BID Patrol

BID Patrol Wakeup Call at Sunset and Vine Captured on Video this Morning

February 27, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

BID Patrol officer Mike Ayala (badge #107), prompted by a complaint from Starbucks, encourages a homeless woman to leave the corner of Sunset and Vine.

This morning at about 8:00 a.m. BID Patrol officer Mike Ayala (badge #107) and his partner, whose name we don’t yet know, told a woman camped out at the Southeast corner of Sunset and Vine that she’d have to move on because the management of the Starbucks there had complained. Our correspondent happened to be walking by and caught the last nine minutes of the incident on video. Naturally, not much happened. Even the BID Patrol is going to think twice about arresting someone on a nonsense LAMC 41.18(d) charge while on camera. There were two interesting things about the episode, though.
Continue reading →

Business Improvement Districts

In Rare Conflict with BID LAPD Deputy Chief Beatrice Girmala Exercises Totalitarian Veto Power over Private Real Estate Transactions in Hollywood, Insinuates that Protecting, Serving Homeless is Waste of LAPD Time

August 28, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Exceedingly powerful LAPD officer Bea Girmala, pictured here with sidelong-glancing former Inglewood PD guy Steve Seyler who, we gotta admit, has nothing to do with this story, but here he is in the picture anyway.

OK, listen up! Long-time readers¹ of this blog will recall that in 2010 and 2011 the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, the Media District BID, some LAPD folks, and some random neighborhood residents all engaged in a “mediation process” of some type, mostly aimed at getting the food coalition to move its nightly feeding program out of the BID. The whole document is well worth reading, stunning as it is vis–à–vis its truly astonishing level of crazy, but we’re focusing on just one episode. Let us now lay out the dramatis personæ.

First we have facilitator Peter Robinson, now at Pepperdine. We don’t have much to say about him except that, according to his Pepperdine bio, he’s got an excellent sense of humor. He’d have to have, wouldn’t he?

Official LAPD photo of Deputy Chief Girmala, cop extraordinaire and interferer-by-proxy in the private real estate dealings of citizens of Hollywood.

Second, we have then Hollywood Patrol Commanding Officer (now Deputy Chief) Beatrice Girmala,² who, although not actually present at the moment about which we write, was nevertheless in control of everything that transpired in a way in which we, free citizens of a constitutional republic, do not expect to be associated with our police. We are certainly pragmatists, though, and understand that once the police can gun us down on the streets with impunity they can a fortiori randomly interfere in our lawful business dealings as well. Read on for the real crazy!
Continue reading →