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.
Tag Archives: Hollywood Entertainment District
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.
Anyway, this morning, we noticed, strolling through the pleasant environs of Ivar and Selma, that not only are there porta-potties provided for the rich folk who shop at the Market, but there are even portable hand-washing stations, shown in the images above. We expect the porta-potties. That’s an expected level of hypocrisy. And we do appreciate hand-washing, both in ourselves and in others. We expect that the BID Patrol will arrest homeless people for sitting on the sidewalk but not even warn Farmers’ Market patrons for violating the same law.
Continue reading Hollywood Farmers’ Market Patrons Can Even Wash Hands After Not Shitting In Public Street
First Volume of BID Patrol Reports Now Available on Amazon
Nathan Bedford Forrest, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, and the Vicious Crypto-White-Supremacism of the Hollywood Area BIDs
You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’1
From 1865 through nineteen-fifty-something, politicians and demagogues, e.g. Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the first incarnation of white businessman’s social group the Ku Klux Klan and Woodrow Wilson, erstwhile president of white supremacist organization Harvard University, could just use the magical incantation of “nigger, nigger, nigger,” and their will would be done.
But, as Lee points out, things started to get more complicated. Instead of saying “nigger,” white supremacists had to talk about states’ rights, and, later taxation. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy, which got him elected in 1968 using those precise codewords which his audience heard as “nigger, nigger, nigger,” the same Southern Strategy that a star-struck Lee Atwater is glorifying to the heavens as he breathlessly describes its genius.
By now, though, we’re well into the 21st Century and by now, as the incomparable Steven Johnson has so convincingly argued, everyone is way, way smarter than they used to be.2 These days, even talking too vigorously about taxation will expose one as a revanchist white supremacist. Lee Atwater died unlamented by sane people in 1991, so he didn’t get to see the present state of the progression he so enviously described above. A new vocabulary was needed to maintain white supremacy and, as humans are so very adaptive, a new vocabulary was developed. And wouldn’t Lee have been proud?
Continue reading Nathan Bedford Forrest, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, and the Vicious Crypto-White-Supremacism of the Hollywood Area BIDs
Complete Set of Andrews International BID Patrol Reports Now Available
The image of the cop writing the ticket is by Chris Yarzab, is released under the CC BY 2.0, and is available from the Wikimedia Foundation here.
Hollywood BID Patrol Sought in 2013 to Hire Off-Duty LAPD Officers for Video Monitoring
Here are a couple of documents regarding the Hollywood Entertainment District BID Patrol’s request to be allowed to hire off-duty LAPD officers to monitor live video feeds. I’m seeking more information regarding this matter and will make it available as it comes in. There’s something interesting going on here in that the BID patrols already represent an effort to privatize policing in Los Angeles, thereby making it more opaque to public scrutiny. If they hire actual LAPD officers for privately assigned work this really exacerbates the problem, doesn’t it? The documents are embedded after the break and can be downloaded here and here.
Continue reading Hollywood BID Patrol Sought in 2013 to Hire Off-Duty LAPD Officers for Video Monitoring
Sarah Besley, Urban Planning, Freeway Overpasses, Moral Panics, Confirmation Bias, Idées Fixes, and Sitcom Nazis in Hollywood
“Why, it’s a game. Father told it to me, and it’s lovely. We’ve played it always, ever since I was a little, little girl…the game was just to find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas.”2
Now, Pollyanna gets a bad rap these days, but she’s our hero, really. We haven’t the space to defend her, though, because we have to analyze a May 2014 blog post by Sarah Besley, evidently the Associate Executive Directrix of the Hollywood Property Owners Association and stuff.
Check it! Sarah Besley is scared of freeway overpasses:
[An overpass] may be one of the worst statements EVER to anyone who visits and certainly to anyone who lives in or around it – especially if their community has been severed in half. An overpass literally says: this community favors cars over people and I dare you to walk underneath me and emerge on the other side alive. This is the message I’ve been getting for the past couple years as I commute from Los Feliz, along Franklin Avenue, down Argyle…3
But wait! Maybe Los Felizites are scared of freeway overpasses because they don’t have any there?4 The terror of the unknown is formidable and possibly overwhelms slurbians when they come to the big town.5 Hollywoodies, living in raw urban splendor in the very heart of the city, surely just take them in stride, don’t they? The answer would appear to be yes, even on Sarah Besley’s testimony:
I’ve started noticing the unexpected number of pedestrians walking from the hills north of Franklin into downtown Hollywood with their yoga mats, shopping bags, or strollers in tow. I’m struck by the fact that people seem to walk so confidently underneath what seems to me like a very scary place.
Continue reading Sarah Besley, Urban Planning, Freeway Overpasses, Moral Panics, Confirmation Bias, Idées Fixes, and Sitcom Nazis in Hollywood
A Short History of Dehumanization Through Defecation
It’s not discussed in the article we’re citing, but it’s surely plausible that such degradation made it easier for the SS to go about their unholy work of genocide. No matter how cruel the project, the guards carrying it out were still human beings, and is it not easier to send millions of people to their deaths if they’re smeared with their own shit and therefore, at least in that one sense, not fully human? Or to move them away from their native land so that you and your totalitarian buddies can move in? This principle has been rediscovered throughout history by those who have need of such a tool.
Which brings us back around to Steve Seyler, bully boy bossman of the BID security patrols and Reinhard Heydrich of the HPOA’s campaign to ethnically cleanse Hollywood of its homeless untermenschen.
Continue reading A Short History of Dehumanization Through Defecation
So-Called “Donation Stations” in Hollywood and Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich: A Curious Instance of Convergent Evolution
And it’s an undeniable fact that Kerry Morrison and the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance are, against the express will of Jesus Christ, obsessed with discouraging people from giving money to panhandlers directly. Just the briefest glance at any of their newsletters will convince you of this. In particular, see page 7 of the Summer 2014 issue, in which Kerry Morrison asks herself and, by extension, you, the reader, if she should give money to panhandlers (SPOILER: no!). Kerry gives no real reasons at all here or anywhere, so far as we can see.
Admittedly she gives what seem like reasons at first glance, e.g. she asserts that the homeless will spend the money on alcohol and then get arrested by the BID patrol for drinking it in public, but there’s no explanatory force here. Kerry’s the Executive Directrix of the HPOA and thus the big boss of the BID patrol. She is a woman under authority, with soldiers under her; and she says to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes.3 If she doesn’t want people getting arrested for drinking in public, all she’s gotta do is tell her gunmen to stop arresting them. There’s no need to propagandize against giving money to the poor if the goal is merely to arrest fewer people.
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 Patrol Bosses at Andrews International Include Hollywood Amongst “L.A.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods,” Lie About a Bunch of Other Stuff Too
This momentous announcement was accompanied by a subpage with the same title, which comes with a heavily illustrated PDF with the same text. It’s not at all clear just what the heck they’re blathering on about, which is why we’re going to explain it all to you after the break!
Continue reading BID Patrol Bosses at Andrews International Include Hollywood Amongst “L.A.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods,” Lie About a Bunch of Other Stuff Too