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 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 Usher1 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 Galatzan2 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 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”→
This is what I miss the most about Long Beach.Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, due to the stunning reluctance of the LAPD to comply with the simple mandates of the California Public Records Act (which has led to at least one lawsuit against them, filed by the heroic Stop LAPD Spying Coalition), I’m running an experiment in which I requested 100 emails to and from BIDs from each of three California police departments (which comes to an end with this latest development).
We’re out here having fun in the warm California sun!It’s been a while since I’ve announced a pure, old-fashioned document dump, but the records just keep pouring in, and I have loads of them to lay on you this evening. First, from our friends at the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, we have pretty much all their Quarterly Reports, even going back to the 1990s. I also put these on the Archive:
BIDs are required to send these reports to the City Clerk, who keeps them on file. They contain detailed narratives of the BIDs’ activities and are invaluable for understanding what’s going on. I have a ton of these from other BIDs as well, but they’re not quite ready for prime time. If there’s something you need urgently, though, drop me a line and I will try to fix you up.
Also, courtesy of the much-more-helpful-lately-than-she-has-been-in-the-past Suzanne Holley of the Downtown Center BID we have a massive pile of Central Area Crime Control stuff from the LAPD. This is valuable because getting it out of the LAPD would be practically impossible, and yet here it is. See what Compstat output looks like and much else of interest.
Hollywood Property Owners Alliance staff members implementing their new document retention policy. What have you got to hide, friends?!Longtime readers of this blog will recall that one of my very first successful CPRA requests of the HPOA yielded a bunch of emails between AI and the HPOA from October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014. In fact there were 69 of them during this 43 day period, or more than 1.5 per day. There’s no reason that this period wouldn’t be representative, so we might expect over 500 emails total for 2014. However, I didn’t get around to asking for the rest of the 2014 emails until November of last year and didn’t receive them until January of this year. They are available here, all (only) 90 pages of them. Incredibly, HPOA supplied more distinct emails from October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014 than they did for all the rest of 2014 when asked a year later. Statistically, therefore, it’s almost certain that they deleted a bunch of stuff. They handed over significantly more emails from 2015, almost 9 MB of them. In all cases there’s demonstrably material missing, e.g. only a small fraction of the weekly reports from AI are present. It wasn’t clear at all what was going on, although I certainly had my suspicions, until a few things happened: Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Formalizes Ongoing Document Destruction Policy Involving Thousands Upon Thousands of Public Records, Seemingly just to Thwart Our Investigations→
Here are a bunch of documents that I published on The Archive this morning. There’s some interesting stuff in there as well as the usual boatloads of chaff:
Emails between HPOA and Andrews International from 2015. This is supposed to be all of them. It may be all that the HPOA has on hand, but it’s certainly not all that were sent. I’ll be writing on this soon, I hope. I had to redact these lightly because they included a number of social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and a home address. Not cool!
Emails between Carol Schatz and Mike Oreb of the LAPD. Part of the same project. This is supposedly everything from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2015. I don’t see how that could be right, but I also don’t see how to prove it. There’s some moderately interesting stuff in here, but nothing momentous.
Rena Leddy, Managing Director of the Fashion District BID and MK.org CPRA Hero of the Fricking Year!!Just this morning I received, via Dropbox, every one of Kent Smith’s emails for the month of July 2015. You can see all 1098 of them on the archive. Most of it’s dismal mass-blasted junk, of course, but even a lot of that is interesting. E.g. search in there for CCA (Central City Association) to see bunches of their bulletins, like this one, advertising special guests Jessica Borek and Matt Rodriguez. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find out what was said there, but at least we know it happened. Yet another smoking gun, as if it weren’t clear enough that Marie Rumsey is a big-time lawbreaker.
The most amazing thing about this document dump is the formatting. They’re PDFs, which often is a bad sign for emails, although these are text-based1 so they can be searched reasonably effectively. Too many agencies think somehow that a scanned PDF of a printed email satisfies CPRA’s requirement that electronic documents be produced in native formats. These PDFs are on a level I’ve never seen before, though. First of all, the links are live, including the links to remote images. Also the links to attachments are live and the attachments are embedded in the PDFs. For instance, look at this email about anti-street-vending strategies from Marie Rumsey to various people. It has an actual schedule of actual meetings with Councilmembers that CCA set up for street vending opponents attached, and you can click on it and read it! Or here it is if you’re lazy. This is the real deal! Look at the properties in that last item and see that Marie Rumsey spent 2015 breaking the revolving door ordinance to an even greater extent than anyone here imagined. Also take a look at this email from Jessica Borek to the gang which comes with a copy of a Power Point thing by Jessica Borek about the Coalition to Save Small Business strategy as well as a marked-up copy of ELACC’s proposed framework. This is the real deal, friends! It’s what CPRA was actually meant to yield. Continue reading Fashion District BID Executive Director Kent Smith’s Complete July 2015 Emails Now Available. FDBID Managing Director Rena Leddy Wins MK.org Excellence in BID Transparency Award!→
Carol Schatz in January 2008 at Bringing Back Broadway.I have a number of interesting documents to announce this morning. There are emails to and from Eric Garcetti’s office in 2015:
Last week attorneys for Los Angeles Catholic Worker and LA Community Action Network filed an application requesting that the City be held in contempt for its misfeasance in what has turned out to be painful, drawn-out discovery process. This morning, mere minutes ago, plaintiffs’ attorney Shayla Myers filed a supplemental declaration in support (along with an exhibit) in which she states:
I am producing this supplemental declaration to update the Court about facts which Plaintiffs have discovered since the ex parte motion to hold the City in contempt was filed. In particular, Plaintiffs have discovered that certain representations by the City of Los Angeles appear to be inaccurate. While the City of Los Angeles has maintained since July 2015 that it cannot do a global search of emails in the possession of the LAPD, Plaintiffs discovered at a deposition of the Person Most Knowledgeable on behalf of the City on February 22, 2016 that the LAPD employs e-discovery software that allows the LAPD to search all emails sent and received by LAPD officers since March 2013, that the software is designed to facilitate global keyword searches, and that when the LAPD has done such a search in the past, it was completed within a week.
Anymore, the astonishing beauty of the city of Berkeley is only skin deep.Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, due to the stunning reluctance of the LAPD to comply with the simple mandates of the California Public Records Act, I’m running an experiment in which I requested 100 emails to and from BIDs from each of three California police departments. The SFPD was the clear winner here, supplying me with the goods in a mere 23 days. Late last week the city of Berkeley weighed in with two sets of emails (one and two). Most of the content isn’t especially interesting if you don’t know the dramatis personae; it’s the same old song about the homeless, about behaviors, about activities, about protecting investments, and so on and on and on. I did spot one interesting episode, which I discuss after the break. Also, I will note that the Long Beach PD still has not fulfilled my request (although they are discussing it with me), and of course the LAPD ignores everyone and they’re still being sued because of that. Is it a coincidence that the two cities that follow the law have municipal sunshine ordinances while the two that do not lack such laws? I doubt it very much. Continue reading Berkeley Police Department Fulfills Experimental CPRA Request in 59 Days→
