We here at MK.org find that these words are as true now as they were 101 years ago. You will recall that we recently received a treasure trove of emails pursuant to a Public Records Act request to the HPOA. In these documents we’ve uncovered two very interesting remarks by Steve Seyler, most exalted pooh-bah of BID security.
Continue reading What Publicity Can Do
After a number of requests and a few lengthy meetings of the MichaelKohlhaas.org ethics committee we have decided to make unredacted copies of Steve Seyler’s reports to the HPOA/CHC Joint Security Committee available to our readers. They are currently available via the menu in the header (direct link here). As we’ve mentioned on a number of occasions, these reports are not pretty. We feel, however, that exposing their ugliness to the world is more important than protecting the already-violated privacy of their subjects.
The Berlin Wall image is public domain and available here from the lovely openclipart.org.
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
I was rereading Great Expectations this morning and came across the following, which could as well be about Sharyn Romano as Mrs. Joe:
[She] was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion
The image of Charles Dickens is in the public domain.
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.
