Earlier today the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the homeless property case, Shayla Myers and Catherine Sweetser, filed a massive application for contempt and sanctions against defendant City of Los Angeles due to their (alleged but totally plausible) recalcitrance in complying with the discovery process. Just now Deputy City Attorney Ronald Whitaker filed a declaration in opposition to this application. There’s nothing that new here, although it’s interesting to see that the City is sticking to its largely discredited claim that
in order to search emails, they need the email addresses of each individual LAPD officer. With the help of our investigator, we have tried to identify each of the individual police officers, of which there are over 400, assigned to the Central Division within the relevant timeframe. The LAPD’s IT department requires us to manually match up each officer name with their serial number, as that is how officers are identified in their email addresses. That process is and has been ongoing.
Continue reading Late Night Declaration Filed by Ronald Whitaker Opposing Plaintiffs’ Application for Contempt and Sanctions in LACAN/LACW v. City, CCEA
Tag Archives: Emails
CCEA Job Descriptions, Emails, Images and Emails from Richard Bloom’s September 2015 Visit to the Hollywood Entertainment District

Continue reading CCEA Job Descriptions, Emails, Images and Emails from Richard Bloom’s September 2015 Visit to the Hollywood Entertainment District
Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition Planning Move to Hollywood and Gower; HPOA Security on Alert
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Continue reading Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition Planning Move to Hollywood and Gower; HPOA Security on Alert
San Francisco Police Department Fulfills Experimental CPRA Request in 23 Days (!) and Provides Emails in an Actually Almost Usable Format
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Anyway, on December 21, it occurred to me to make experimental requests for innocuous records to various police departments around the state and then, depending on the results, write to the Los Angeles Police Commission about how other cities around California are, somehow, able to abide by the law. I abandoned that aspect of the plan because, as fate would have it, the very next day a bunch of people sued the LAPD over their flouting of the Public Records Act, obviating the need for any letters from me. But the requests were still out there, so I let them ride.
Berkeley and Long Beach still have failed to acknowledge my requests, even though it’s been 24 days since I sent them. This is in spite of the fact that Berkeley has a city-wide guide to CPRA requests and a far-reaching open government ordinance. The difference between Berkeley PD’s nonresponsiveness and the LAPD’s is that Berkeley has an administrative procedure to encourage city departments to follow the law whereas Los Angeles has nothing of the sort. I’m not going to go that route because I don’t have time, but it’s nice to know it’s there. I don’t know exactly what’s up with Long Beach, but have no plans to press them.
However, the City and County of San Francisco, which also has a sunshine ordinance (the League of Women Voters thinks it was the first such municipal statute), followed the law scrupulously (with one minor lapse). I asked for the last 100 emails between the SFPD and the Union Square BID. And here is what they sent. They didn’t supply them in the native format I requested, which they’re required to do by law, but even here they did better than the LAPD. I’ll describe the interesting formatting compromise they (unilaterally) made after the break. Again, LAPD and the rest of the City of Los Angeles have a lesson they could learn from this.
Continue reading San Francisco Police Department Fulfills Experimental CPRA Request in 23 Days (!) and Provides Emails in an Actually Almost Usable Format
New Documents, Mostly Routine, although Assistant LAPD Chief Jorge Villegas Explicitly Acknowledges Limitations of Arrests as a Tool for Addressing Homelessness
![Assistant Chief Jorge Villegas, LAPD: "As you know [homelessness] is an extremely complex issue to address. It is not as simple as simply making an arrest. As you know, we cannot arrest [our] way out of this complex social issue."](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Villegas-DC.jpg)
Continue reading New Documents, Mostly Routine, although Assistant LAPD Chief Jorge Villegas Explicitly Acknowledges Limitations of Arrests as a Tool for Addressing Homelessness
Kerry Morrison Evidently Solicited Some Favor in October 2014 from LAPD on Behalf of Outlaw Developer CIM Group, Peter Zarcone and Deputy Chief Terry Hara Concerned to Avoid “[Creating] a Perception of [LAPD] Being in the Pocket of a Private Developer”
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I only have this little snippet of the email chain, so I don’t yet know the favor Kerry was asking nor the outcome of the ask. I have requests out for the rest, though, and I’ll provide new information as it comes in. I will say that I’d prefer that the LAPD would be concerned more with the reality of not being in the pocket of a private developer than the perception of it, but maybe that’s idealistic. And I’d say that the fact that Kerry Morrison even felt free to ask him for anything on behalf of CIM shows that probably the LAPD essentially is already “…in the pocket of a private developer.” Why did she think that asking him would yield results if similar requests in the past hadn’t already worked? My collection of BID/LAPD emails is presently too fragmentary to allow the drawing of many solid conclusions, but the amount of it that has to do with real estate is surprising.
So if Peter Zarcone is worried about creating a perception of LAPD being in the pocket of a private developer, maybe the best thing would be to have his subordinates stop acting like they’re in the pocket of the entire freaking real estate industry. Maybe the best thing to do when he receives what’s almost surely an improper request from Kerry Morrison is to tell her that it’s not the job of the police to facilitate the real estate industry’s criminality, or even its non-criminal daily business. Maybe that would be more effective. Read full transcripts after the break if you don’t like PDFs:
Continue reading Kerry Morrison Evidently Solicited Some Favor in October 2014 from LAPD on Behalf of Outlaw Developer CIM Group, Peter Zarcone and Deputy Chief Terry Hara Concerned to Avoid “[Creating] a Perception of [LAPD] Being in the Pocket of a Private Developer”
Lots of New Unsorted Emails Between HPOA, LAPD, the Media District BID, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and CD13


Continue reading Lots of New Unsorted Emails Between HPOA, LAPD, the Media District BID, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and CD13
Scope of BID Patrol Surveillance, Counterintelligence Far Broader than Previously Thought: Email to LAPD Demonstrates Long-Term Tracking, Unsupported Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, Drug Use Against BID Opponent

It’s from Kerry Morrison to LAPD officer Mark Dibell about Eric, written in September 2014, 33 months after the January 2012 surveillance photographs of the man were taken by the BID Patrol. The subject line is “A matter for Vice.” TL;DR is that Eric “…had a routine of harassing and filming the BID patrol…” and so Kerry Morrison and A/I tracked his movements, photographed him, and almost three years later, wrote to the LAPD on behalf of his new landlord, Kelly Vickers of Eastown Apartments, reporting past, evidently unsupported, allegations of “sexual misconduct…and drug use” among other things. The subject line suggests that Kerry is trying to get this guy in trouble with the Vice squad as a service to one of the property owners in the BID.
How does anyone think this is OK? How does the BID carry on a three year vendetta against this guy for filming their security guards? Sure, Kerry claims it’s because of “sexual misconduct…and drug use,” but really, if the guy was provably up to those things why all the emails and subterfuge? Why not just call the actual cops and make an actual police report like actual non-creepy-zillionaires have to do in such circumstances? It’s pretty unlikely anyway that one can move into a fancy douchebag-serving apartment paradise like Eastown without a criminal background check, so the “allegations” remain only allegations. And even if he was or is guilty of “sexual misconduct…and drug use,” how is investigating that the business of the BID Patrol? They’re freaking security guards, not spies, not detectives.
The City of Los Angeles is famous for using BIDs to implement policies which it itself has been forced to eschew, but this kind of spying, which the contemporary LAPD has explicitly disavowed, reveals this dynamic to be playing out on an entirely unsuspected level. Read the whole thing here or after the break.
Continue reading Scope of BID Patrol Surveillance, Counterintelligence Far Broader than Previously Thought: Email to LAPD Demonstrates Long-Term Tracking, Unsupported Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, Drug Use Against BID Opponent
LAPD Senior Systems Analyst’s Declaration in LACW Lawsuit Provides Further Insight into LAPD’s Secretive and Cavalier Attitude Towards Public Records, Legal Obligations
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Continue reading LAPD Senior Systems Analyst’s Declaration in LACW Lawsuit Provides Further Insight into LAPD’s Secretive and Cavalier Attitude Towards Public Records, Legal Obligations
Tempers Flare in Federal Court as Voluminous New Filings in LACW, LACAN v. City of LA, CCEA Case Reveal Inside Story of Lengthy, Painful Discovery Process

Anyway, you can find all of the new pleadings here in the subdirectory, dated December 8, 2015. First there is a brief motion to compel discovery from the city of LA, necessary because getting camels through the eyes of needles is easier than getting documents out of the city of Los Angeles. This was foreshadowed by something I missed in the the joint stipulation, discussed in my post the other day:
The City and Plaintiffs have met extensively regarding Defendants’ responses to Plaintiffs’ Requests for Production and will likely require Court intervention to resolve their disagreement
It seems that, however, as I recently reported, the CCEA at least is complying with discovery requests. There’s a little bit more detail after the break, including some sample prose laden with negative feelings in a manner not so commonly found in pleadings. I hope to write on a number of specific items later today or quite soon, especially the controversy over production of emails, an area where the city of Los Angeles is infamous for flouting the law.
Continue reading Tempers Flare in Federal Court as Voluminous New Filings in LACW, LACAN v. City of LA, CCEA Case Reveal Inside Story of Lengthy, Painful Discovery Process