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
Tag Archives: Gunmen
Second Volume of BID Patrol Reports Now Available on Amazon
We are pleased to announce the availability on Amazon of the second volume of Hollywood BID Patrol reports. This volume covers the years 2012 through 2014. Free PDFs of this (and of all our other publications) are available via our “Publications” page. You can see the announcement of the previous volume for a more detailed description of the contents. The original documents reprinted are also available.
Hollywood Farmers’ Market Patrons Can Even Wash Hands After Not Shitting In Public Street
We’ve argued that the HPOA consciously chooses to deprive the homeless of access to bathrooms, and is thus culpable for the broken lives and pain caused by the collateral consequences of these hundreds of arrests over the years. We’ve discussed the fact that the HPOA not only sets these people up for arrest by not having public restrooms available and then compounds their crime by arresting them, but they also mock them for the fact that they’re forced to shit in the streets.
Continue reading Hollywood Farmers’ Market Patrons Can Even Wash Hands After Not Shitting In Public Street
So-Called “Donation Stations” in Hollywood and Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich: A Curious Instance of Convergent Evolution
And it doesn’t stop with propaganda, either. There are actual machines involved. See, e.g., page 5 of the Summer 2014 HPOA Newsletter, in which Kerry promotes machines that people can put money into instead of handing it personally to panhandlers. This, says she, is “a positive option for passersby to contribute change to help people.” These machines cost $2500 a pop and they’re looking at getting 12 of them. That comes to $30,000 altogether, which is actually about 2% of the HPOA’s annual security budget. There’s some serious purpose at work or the HPOA wouldn’t be willing to spend such an outrageous amount of money,7 but we’ll be damned if we can see what it is. Fortunately, we have an analytic tool that will let us understand everything and then explain it to you!
Continue reading So-Called “Donation Stations” in Hollywood and Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich: A Curious Instance of Convergent Evolution
BID Patrollies Mischarge Obviously Innocent Man, Display Habitual Arrogant Unprofessionalism, Disregard for Law, Decency
Man: You let me go or you die.
BID employee: Why would I die?
Man: You let me go or I’ll get hurt.
BID employee: How are you gonna hurt us?
Man: [Unintelligible] … but you will let me go, it’s not valid.
BID employee: Well we can’t let you go, that would be you, uh, trying to subvert the legal process…by your…
Man (interrupting): Whaddaya mean you can’t let me go? OK [Unintelligible]
BID employee: We’re required by law to deliver you to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Man: For what?
BID employee: We, we tried to keep you out of that business. You kept disrupting the business…
Man: [Unintelligible] Why did you fucking put me in this car, you punks? What if I kick you in your head right now? What if I kick you right in your head, you little punk? What if I kick you right in your head? You let me out of this car, now. And you don’t bring me to jail or I will kick you somewhere.
BID employee: OK, we’ll take you to the office and get you out there.
Man: You better…you better not put me in no jail cell, punk.
BID employee: OK, we won’t…we won’t.
Man: I didn’t say nothing wrong to you or him. I’m arguing with him. I argued with that last one in the store. I did nothing illegal or wrong.
BID employee: OK.
Man: Now you’re fucking harassing me. Don’t you fucking take me to jail in this car. If you harass me at all I won’t forgive you. I never will. You’re gonna pay. You’re gonna pay with your life. Cause I’m gonna kill you with a knife. [Lengthy unintelligible part]
BID employee: You know, when you whisper, I can’t hear you. My hearing’s bad.
Man: [Continuing to be unintelligible]
BID employee: You’re gonna find me and burn me up? Is that what you said?
Man: [Continuing to be unintelligible]
BID employee: Ah, you realize you’re making terrorist threats, right?
Continue reading BID Patrollies Mischarge Obviously Innocent Man, Display Habitual Arrogant Unprofessionalism, Disregard for Law, Decency
U.S. Army Veteran Complains About BID Patrol’s Reckless Firearms Behavior. Steve Seyler Dismisses Fears as “a tad over emotional.” Investigation Ongoing?
This morning on my way to work, I was standing waiting to cross the street when I look over and see the gentleman on the left in the picture attached, grasping his weapon as if to draw his fire arm all while chatting away with the gentleman on the right. As I continued to wait to cross the street, I noticed the gentleman on the left start to pull out actually draw his weapon about 4-5 inches out of his holster. All the while standing chatting with his partner. I am ex army infantry, when we even had our hand TOUCHING our holstered weapon, there better had been a life threatening reason to even touch our holstered weapon.
Continue reading U.S. Army Veteran Complains About BID Patrol’s Reckless Firearms Behavior. Steve Seyler Dismisses Fears as “a tad over emotional.” Investigation Ongoing?
A Shameful Thing
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
Monica Yamada and the Hollywood Vicinage
Continue reading Monica Yamada and the Hollywood Vicinage
How to Enforce the Law
Each member of a legislative body who attends a meeting of that legislative body where action is taken in violation of any provision of this chapter, and where the member intends to deprive the public of information to which the member knows or has reason to know the public is entitled under this chapter, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
Now, that intent element is a little sticky. Evidently it’s not a crime “to deprive the public of information” if you’re just ignorant of the law or too arrogant to understand that the law applies to you or whatever. But at least some members of some groups subject to the Brown Act must be guilty of a misdemeanor when, e.g., they explicitly deny members of the public access to documents which the Brown Act states explicitly must be made available to the public “immediately.” When a member of a body subject to the Brown Act says “no, you can’t look at the document,” the intent is clear. The member “has reason to know” the law because it’s their job to know the law, them being a member of a Brown-Act body. Bang! Misdemeanor. Then how does the law get enforced in such a case?
The procedure is laid out in the Act itself (§54960 et seq.). Either the DA or a member of the public can go to court and ask for injunctive relief of various kinds or else “any interested party” can write a letter to the criminals, point out their crime, give them 30 days to think about it, and allow them the option of promising never to do the crime in the future albeit without admitting that they actually did it in the past. As far as we can see, no one has ever gone to jail for violating the Brown Act (although see this story about a guy in Illinois who placed a whole county board of supervisors under citizen’s arrest).
Continue reading How to Enforce the Law