I am pleased to announce the availability of about 1.3 GB of images, obtained from the HPOA under the California Public Records Act. The main archive page is here. You can see a listing of the files for individual download here. I rot13-ed the filenames to protect people’s privacy somewhat.1 You can get the whole batch via bittorrent which, as always, is most efficient if you want local copies of these pictures. I’ll be organizing these into thematic PDF flip-books and publishing them at the Archive and on Amazon over the next few weeks, but as it may be a while I thought I’d make the raw images available now.
If you don’t know what rot13 is you need to get your internet user’s license renewed post haste!
Image of man explaining democracy to the BID Patrol is a public record.
I am pleased to announce the availability of about 4GB of images, obtained from the HPOA under the California Public Records Act. The main archive page is here. You can see a listing of the files for individual download here. I rot13-ed the filenames to protect people’s privacy somewhat.1 You can get the whole batch via bittorrent which, as always, is most efficient if you want local copies of these pictures. I’ll be organizing these into thematic PDF flip-books and publishing them at the Archive and on Amazon over the next couple weeks, but as it may be a while I thought I’d make the raw images available now.
If you don’t know what rot13 is you need to get your internet user’s license renewed post haste!
A veteran of a foreign war in the process of getting arrested on Hollywood Blvd. by power-hungry BID Patrol officers, putting the lie to John Tronson’s disingenuous, self-serving, mendacious contention that “the LAPD or the BID Patrol, nobody is gonna ask anybody to move who’s just resting for a couple minutes cause they need to rest. “We’ve written previously about John Tronson, who, for whatever reason, is no longer president of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID Board of Directors, and his disingenuous, self-serving, mendacious contention that the state of California has no need for the saintly Senator Carol Liu‘s recently introduced SB608, the Right to Rest Act. According to Tronson:
You know, I mean, it, the, the, the reality, the LAPD or the BID Patrol, nobody is gonna ask anybody to move who’s just resting for a couple minutes cause they need to rest. This is just another vehicle to, you know, allow permanent, facilitate, the living on the sidewalk. John Tronson at the Joint Security Committee meeting on April 9, 2015, a guy who will lie about how LAMC 41.18(d) is enforced by the BID Patrol. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, as the judge will instruct Tronson’s jury at the time when all accounts are settled.
He’s talking, of course, about the despicable LAMC 41.18(d), which prohibits sitting on sidewalks in the absence of a parade and which the Right to Rest Act is meant to send to a well-deserved oblivion. But, you know, perhaps we’re being too harsh on John Tronson. Perhaps it’s really true that the BID Patrol will not arrest people just for sitting on the sidewalk. We mean, the evidence seems to suggest that, on the one hand, they will arrest homeless black people for it but, to be sure, they will not arrest non-homeless, non-black people for it. Today’s series of videos reveals that sometimes, even when the citation reads LAMC 41.18(d), the real charge is contempt of cop. Continue reading Don’t Challenge the BID Officers. Don’t Challenge Our Authority Next Time. All I Did Was Sit the Fuck Down! Do You All See What’s Going on in Your Goddamn City?→
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→
I am pleased to announce the availability on Amazon of a four volume set of pictures of people arrested by the Andrews International BID Patrol in 2007. I set it up in both color and in black and white, since the color printing makes for a high price. As always, free PDFs of the books are available as well and, as always, these are sold at cost. These images are part of a much larger image dump which you can get from archive.org here. This is useful as it allows you to get the complete 4.7G of images via bittorrent, which is far more efficient than http for such large amounts of data. In any case, here are links to the books and the free PDFs:
Rabid but honest racist son-of-a-bitch Lee Atwater. As he famously said about the renowned Southern Strategy, ‘[y]ou start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you.’ And what should we do we do about that in Hollywood in 2015, Lee?The late Lee Atwater, erstwhile bought-and-souled Robert Johnson of the Republican party, in a rare moment of lucidity, once explained how white politicians enforced and maintained white supremacy in the United States in the last half of the Twentieth Century:
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. Everybody uses this same picture of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the first Ku Klux Klan, looking like he just finished eating the body of a lynched ex-slave but he’s still hungry for more, so we thought we’d use it too.
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. Woodrow Wilson, vocal admirer of D. W. Griffith’s seminal work of cinematic white supremacy. Why do white people have such thin lips?
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→
Real cops write too, not just BID Patrol pretenders. This one’s writing a ticket, not a report. But it is happening in Hollywood, anyway!I haven’t had time to update the relevant documents page yet, but for now an apparently complete set of Andrews International reports to the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID about its BID patrol activities is available from our static storage here. This is a lot of new material to digest but we’ll be working our way through it and reporting on what we learn, if anything.
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.
Donuts: The fuel of terrorism. BID Patrol Officers in Vine Street Winchell’s taking a break from strongarming the homeless into leaving the streets of Hollywood.Amongst the emails between Andrews International Security and the HPOA recently obtained by our correspondent, we find a document entitled ANDREWS INTERNATIONAL BID HOMELESS PERSON DIRECTIVE. You can download a copy here or find an embedded copy after the break. There is much of interest in this document, but today we’re looking at the following bit:
If a BID Officer observes a person who, because of their homelessness commits one of the following misdemeanors:
Obstructing passage on sidewalks
Living or sleeping in a vehicle
Loitering in a restroom
Littering
Use of facilities, e.g., sleeping on a bus bench for other than intended purpose
Public nudity as is necessary to carry on the daily necessities of life
Building a structure in a park or public right-of-way
Trespass on or in public or private property
The Officer may offer such individual(s) the option of going to an available shelter in the surrounding Hollywood community as an alternative to arrest. If the homeless person accepts the offer of assistance, no arrest shall take place and arrangements shall be made to transport the homeless person to the shelter.
This was legal in 1942 and, by God, it’s legal now.
Pass over the dyslexic parrot-like legalese. Pass over the semiliterate, unparseable sentences. Pass over the absolutely unintelligible yet still horrific phrase “sleeping on a bus bench for other than intended purpose.” Consider for now just the fact that in June 2014, five months before the date on this document, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found LA’s law against sleeping in vehicles to be unconstitutional.
So Andrews International Security, with the full knowledge and consent of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, has directed its officers to give homeless people sleeping in their cars a choice between arrest or coerced relocation to a homeless shelter. This, despite the fact that common sense, human decency, and the goddamned Ninth Circuit all agree that people have a constitutional right to sleep in their cars, whether or not it’s “because of their homelessness.” Continue reading BID Patrol Directive Orders Unconstitutional Coercion of Hollywood Homeless for Sake of Social Cleansing→
What if you shoplifted but it was really felony burglary and then someone died because of what you done and that person would have invented a way to prevent an asteroid from hitting the earth and killing EVERYONE?!? You’d be responsible for genocide under the FELONY MURDER LAW!! You know you’re not supposed to commit genocide, don’t you, you maniac?!Look and listen here as a smarmy, self-satisfied little BID Patrol guy whose name seems to be Baxter interrogates his victim, who evidently stole a bottle of Justin Timberlake™ perfume of some sort. (NOTE: We made the video private at the request of the subject. The transcript is accurate, and you can obtain a copy from Kerry Morrison under the CPRA like we did if you want one)
In the video (complete transcription after the break), Baxter, in his smarmy cop interrogation tone of voice, gets the man to admit that he entered the store intending to shoplift. This used to be a favorite creepy cop trick for inflating minor charges beyond all reasonable proportion. Once on a time California Penal Code §459 could be used to charge such an act as burglary instead of mere theft. Security minions such as Baxter, not content with merely protecting the interests of their employers, would routinely use this nasty little loophole to overcharge people. Why? That’s just what they do, these icky little lawboys. It’s how they keep score in their psychotic little game.
Of course, as with all such nonsense, it ends up being the people of California who pay the price. Not just the petty criminals who get overcharged into oblivion, whose lives get ruined by undeservedly severe criminal records and the horrific collateral consequences that ensue, but also the taxpayers who have to support prisons full of nonviolent people, support courts and jails and probation offices and all the apparatus necessary to track and control the people dumped into the justice system by creepy private security henchmen who are so pleased with their delusory cleverness that they film themselves in the act so they can laugh about it later with all their cop buddies…
![Rabid but honest racist son-of-a-bitch Lee Atwater. As he famously said about the renowned Southern Strategy, '[y]ou start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you.'](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Lee_Atwater_1989.jpg)
