A “habitual or common drunkard” on the streets of Hollywood. It is a misdemeanor in California to sell alcohol to this guy but the BID Patrol chooses or is directed by the HPOA not to enforce this law against liquor dealers, preferring to arrest the guy himself. We gotta wonder why that is!We have previously noted that the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance arrests an awful goddamned lot of people for drinking in public. Furthermore, they maintain an utterly schizophrenic attitude about public drinking, arresting the homeless while not arresting the non-homeless for this most natural of human activities. We have suggested that the BID could solve this problem by merely ceasing to enforce this ridiculous law, but our finely crafted arguments have thus far been ignored, making us feel much as the habitually bad-rapped King Canute must have done when dealing with that whole wave thing. King Canute, habitually bad-rapped by a bunch of ignorant internetties, gracing an illuminated page with his illustrious visage.But we’re not discouraged! We live to serve! We have more unsolicited advice for the HPOA. Even though we think their focus on Hollywood’s putative public drinking problem borders on either the delusional or the deliberate employment of the good old Große Lüge for the usual unsavory and genocidal purposes, we do understand that their livelihoods depend on keeping the arrest rates high. We figure that it’s at least plausible that they don’t want to stop arresting people because they’ll be out of a job if they do. As Albert Einstein1 used to say, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
First we need a little background on how the HPOA sees the purpose of the BID Patrol. According to executive directrix Kerry Morrison (in an email to our tireless correspondent which was almost certainly written, given its exquisitely lawyeresque quasi-literate lack of concrete content, by Minneapolitan Jeffrey Charles Briggs, the HPOA’s attorney for such matters) “they make citizen arrests with respect to conduct LAPD is empowered to cite but lacks resources or the command decision to do so.” The semantics is clear though the syntax is muddy. The BID Patrol arrests people that the LAPD could arrest but just doesn’t for some reason. The point, of course, is that the BID Patrol gets to be selective about who they arrest, wielding California’s overflowing cornucopia of stupid misdemeanors like a bloody scythe in the fields of Hollywood and thereby, they seem to think, discouraging homeless people from hanging out in the BID. This sentiment was stated even more clearly than Jeff Briggs (or Kerry Morrison, whoever it was) could bring themself to do by an anonymous BID Officer, who once chortled in both his joy2 and in range of a video camera that “You don’t challenge the BID officers. The BID officers have the authority to arrest you. What we do is blessed by the staff at Hollywood Division. We’re helping them out. The HPOA tries to stop the flow of cheap alcohol into Hollywood by asking people nicely not to sell it anymore. Let it flow, say we!
Now, we’re almost to the suggestion, which is based on the at-least-plausible theory that when trying to solve drug consumption problems it’s more effective to attack the supply side rather than the demand side. The BIDs have made some minor moves in this direction, evinced e.g. by an article in their Spring 2014 newsletter in which Kerry Morrison claims that “two owners of area liquor stores … are working with us to minimize sales to our homeless neighbors who suffer from alcohol addiction.” But, vide Canute again, this is never gonna happen. You can’t stop suppliers from fulfilling a demand by asking them nicely. That money’s not going to be left on the table. The BID knows this when it comes to the homeless. They could ask them nicely to leave, but they, reasonably given their goals, don’t bother. Instead they just fucking arrest them. It turns out, and now we’re at the point finally, that they could be doing the same thing to the liquor store owners and employees although, for whatever reasons, they choose not to. Read on for details! Continue reading HPOA Chooses Not to Arrest Law-Flouting Liquor Dealers, Proving its Selective Enforcement Intended to Eliminate Homeless Rather than Cut Hollywood Crime→
I am pleased to announce the availability of about 4GB of images, obtained from the HPOA under the California Public Records Act. The main archive page is here. You can see a listing of the files for individual download here. I rot13-ed the filenames to protect people’s privacy somewhat.1 You can get the whole batch via bittorrent which, as always, is most efficient if you want local copies of these pictures. I’ll be organizing these into thematic PDF flip-books and publishing them at the Archive and on Amazon over the next couple weeks, but as it may be a while I thought I’d make the raw images available now.
If you don’t know what rot13 is you need to get your internet user’s license renewed post haste!
A veteran of a foreign war in the process of getting arrested on Hollywood Blvd. by power-hungry BID Patrol officers, putting the lie to John Tronson’s disingenuous, self-serving, mendacious contention that “the LAPD or the BID Patrol, nobody is gonna ask anybody to move who’s just resting for a couple minutes cause they need to rest. “We’ve written previously about John Tronson, who, for whatever reason, is no longer president of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID Board of Directors, and his disingenuous, self-serving, mendacious contention that the state of California has no need for the saintly Senator Carol Liu‘s recently introduced SB608, the Right to Rest Act. According to Tronson:
You know, I mean, it, the, the, the reality, the LAPD or the BID Patrol, nobody is gonna ask anybody to move who’s just resting for a couple minutes cause they need to rest. This is just another vehicle to, you know, allow permanent, facilitate, the living on the sidewalk. John Tronson at the Joint Security Committee meeting on April 9, 2015, a guy who will lie about how LAMC 41.18(d) is enforced by the BID Patrol. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, as the judge will instruct Tronson’s jury at the time when all accounts are settled.
He’s talking, of course, about the despicable LAMC 41.18(d), which prohibits sitting on sidewalks in the absence of a parade and which the Right to Rest Act is meant to send to a well-deserved oblivion. But, you know, perhaps we’re being too harsh on John Tronson. Perhaps it’s really true that the BID Patrol will not arrest people just for sitting on the sidewalk. We mean, the evidence seems to suggest that, on the one hand, they will arrest homeless black people for it but, to be sure, they will not arrest non-homeless, non-black people for it. Today’s series of videos reveals that sometimes, even when the citation reads LAMC 41.18(d), the real charge is contempt of cop. Continue reading Don’t Challenge the BID Officers. Don’t Challenge Our Authority Next Time. All I Did Was Sit the Fuck Down! Do You All See What’s Going on in Your Goddamn City?→
And just now, on April 3, 2015, the LA Board of Building and Safety Commissioners slapped an “ORDER TO COMPLY” on the window of the Sunset/Gordon building which states:
An investigation of various complaints received by the Department has revealed that the subject apartment building is being used as a hotel without the required permits and Certificate of Occupancy.
Therefore, you are hereby ordered to stop the unapproved use and occupancy as a hotel on or before April 10, 2015.
Steve Seyler of Andrews International Security, BID Patrol Pooh-bah, offers $4 to a lady cop presumably for services to be rendered. This would be $5.20 if it were a gentleman cop, assuming the whole 77¢ thing pans out.Update April 24, 2015:The Instagram account discussed and linked to in this post has been made private, breaking the link and embedding. It’s a shame we didn’t take screenshots, but we just don’t usually expect people to reveal stuff that they’ll realize they’re ashamed of when it’s noticed. See 2 Corinthians 4:2.
Steve Seyler, the big bad cheese of Andrews International Security, and, it seems, on information and belief, a man who will play pimpa claus by paying $4 to a lady cop for one reason or another, is, as long-time readers of this blog know all too well, the high mucky-muck of the BID Patrol. We hope he’s getting value for his money and that he was able to expense it. One of our main themes here is the overly cozy relationship between the HPOA and the LAPD, but this is really taking things a little too far, innit? The officer in question seems to be Senior Lead Officer Julie Nony, noted in the LA Times for “root[ing] out … encampment[s] of … transients” and who posts to instagram as nokneej. For instance, look here for her posing with a whole nother lizard.
That’s it! There’s not really much point to this post other than to showcase the image, which is one of about 5 gigs of ’em which we recently obtained from the HPOA under the California Public Records Act, to mention that we should have another image dump on our hands this week if all goes well, and to link to that patently offensive song by LA’s own RHCP. Carry on!
Image of Steve Seyler pimping it with Julie Nony is a public record. Image of Julie Nony with Steve Seyler mini-me is embedded and, as we all know, if we don’t host it we don’t violate nuthin’!
Berkeley BID Patrol officer giving a performative demonstration of Homer’s maxim that “the blade itself incites to violence.”The Downtown Berkeley Association is the shell corporation that runs the Downtown Berkeley BID, founded in 2011. By now you’ve probably seen the video, filmed by a brave citizen journalist, of a Berkeley BID Patrol officer1 punching a homeless man over and over and over again because he felt “disrespected” by him. The story made the international press.
Now, Berkeley is far, far off our beat, and, deep down, despite the divers desperate, damp dreams of our local Hollywood BIDs about the gentility and grace of our silicon-addled red-headed stepchildren to the north, we generally find ourselves unable to give even the teensiest shit about what shenanigans they get up to north of Pacoima. However, this case requires comment, shedding some light as it does on the ultimate source of the lies with which we who cover the BIDs are habitually showered.
According to Andrews International, BID Patrol officers “are demonstrating what can be accomplished through sensitivity, compassion, and proactive outreach.” In other words, Fuck you!According to Andrews International:
[B]udgetary constraints leave local police little choice but to focus primarily on reactive enforcement, [but] CAPS officers have the resources and support to actually serve as agents of change in the community. In partnership with law enforcement and assisted by community interest groups, social services agencies, and local businesses, CAPS officers focus on bridge building and problem solving.
Note that “CAPS officers” are how Andrews International refers to BID Patrollies when they’re trying to bullshit their way into more work like they do for the HPOA. And just look at the BID Patrol guy to your right, serving as an agent of change in the community, building bridges, solving problems! A BID Patrol officer serving as an agent of change in the community, building bridges, solving problems. In other words, Fuck you!And they’re not just flipping off one another back in BID Patrol secret headquarters during their weirdo macho team-building rituals, they’re out on the street, arresting people for things that aren’t crimes in sane places, like drinking beer on the street, and flipping off their victims, too. Continue reading Andrews International BID Patrol: Welcome to Hollywood, Now Fuck You!→
Heladero chained to a bench in 2007 courtesy of the BID Patrol. José Huizar’s proposed ordinance would end this kind of sadism in Los Angeles, but the BIDs, with the connivance of CCA and Rodriguez Strategies won’t give up so easily. “It is our God-given right to handcuff the heladero!”Watch, listen, and learn1 as Marie Rumsey of the Central City Association and PR flackette Jessica Borek of thuggish PR RICO Rodriguez Strategies fill in the HPOA board on their strategic schemes to allow the BID Patrol to continue to arrest, shackle, and humiliate the ice-cream man. These people are so power-mad they want to ban bacon dogs, the national food of Los Angeles!(Transcription, as always, after the break).
Even after all this time, it’s hard to understand why these people are so dead-set against legalizing and regulating something that’s not only happening now, but is going to be happening in the future because it’s an integral part of the culture of Los Angeles. We have some ideas, but whatever their reasoning is, we don’t think it would be too much to ask that they tell the truth while they’re opposing it. Marie Rumsey of the Central City Association at the March 19, 2015 meeting of the HPOA Board, lying through her teeth about pretty much everything.
First of all, Marie Rumsey wants you to know that there are only nine health inspectors for all of LA county and there are 50,000 street vendors. The point is that it’s unlikely that food vendors would be inspected sufficiently. Let’s forget, just for a second, that currently none of the vendors are inspected, so inspecting ANY of them would improve public health. According to Bloomberg, there are 10,000 illegal food vendors in Los Angeles (granted, out of 50,000 vendors total, but health inspectors don’t worry about balloon-sellers, do they?) That’s lie number one, Marie. Next, we can’t find hard data for the number of health inspectors in LA County at the moment, but a moment’s googling told us that in 1989 there were 47 of them, and in 1997 there were 161. That the number has dropped to 9 in 2015 seems beyond implausible. That’s lie number two, Marie.
John Tronson, striking a weirdly skeptical pose at the March 19, 2015 meeting of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID Board meeting, just prior to lying about everythingLook and listen as the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance discusses SB608, known as the “Right to Rest Act,” introduced by the saintly, incomparable Senator Carol Liu. You can read a reasonable summary of what this law would do here: “The Right to Rest Act of 2015 seeks to protect the basic human rights of people to rest by outlawing municipal laws that criminalize homelessness and the acts of resting, sharing food and practicing religion in public.”
You can read a transcription of the whole discussion after the break. One salient bit spewed forth from John Tronson, erstwhile president of the HPOA, who ranted thusly:
You know, I mean, it, the, the, the reality, the LAPD or the BID Patrol, nobody is gonna ask anybody to move who’s just resting for a couple minutes cause they need to rest. This is just another vehicle to, you know, allow permanent, facilitate, the living on the sidewalk
Kerry Morrison and John Tronson at the Joint Security Committee meeting on March 12, 2015, conspiring telepathically to arrest EVERYONE for violating LAMC 41.18(d)
There are so many problems with this. First of all, John, you’re just wrong when you say “nobody is gonna ask anybody to move who’s just resting for a couple minutes cause they need to rest.” In fact, your own BID Patrol will arrest people for violating LAMC 41.18(d) when they’re just resting on the sidewalk, let alone ask them to move on for merely sitting down. People, both homeless and not, are harassed every day in the BID for sitting on the sidewalk, forget about actually camping. You were formerly president of the board, and thus in charge of the BID patrol, and if you don’t know this happens it’s willful ignorance. You either know or have reason to know you’re wrong. You’re a liar. But that’s not all (it never is). Continue reading The Right to Rest Act: John Tronson Says Arresting Homeless is Good for Them, Kerry Morrison Huffs and Puffs at Idea that Homeless People Have Rights at All→
We have written before about the BIDs’ hysterical, dishonest opposition to City Councilman José Huizar‘s proposal to legalize street vending. We’ve discussed the fact that many of the BID board members who oppose this law are themselves criminals, although not the kind who get prosecuted for their dirty deeds. We’ve written about how their froth-mouth rage at this relatively small move in the direction of sanity puts them in opposition to democracy itself. But we haven’t yet written about the very human cost of continuing to outlaw street vending in Los Angeles. Continue reading Don’t Incarcerate the Ice Cream Man→
