After a number of requests and a few lengthy meetings of the MichaelKohlhaas.org ethics committee we have decided to make unredacted copies of Steve Seyler’s reports to the HPOA/CHC Joint Security Committee available to our readers. They are currently available via the menu in the header (direct link here). As we’ve mentioned on a number of occasions, these reports are not pretty. We feel, however, that exposing their ugliness to the world is more important than protecting the already-violated privacy of their subjects.
Tag Archives: Joint Security Committee
In Characteristically Cynical Move, Corporate Scofflaw CIM Group Infiltrates Minion Monica Yamada Onto BID Security Committee
The purpose of the Joint Security Committee is, we suppose, to oversee the operations of Andrews International Security, with whom the BIDs contract to provide patrol services. The mission the BIDs have given to A/I2 is explained in the 2014-15-WORK-PLAN-FINAL-VERSION1-1:
Continue reading In Characteristically Cynical Move, Corporate Scofflaw CIM Group Infiltrates Minion Monica Yamada Onto BID Security Committee
Steve Seyler, Vodka Nazi
Anyway, Seyler’s bête noire is something called Taaka Vodka. He has effectively criminalized its possession in the BID-occupied areas of Hollywood:1
He’s also obsessed with a brand of vodka called Borski, to the point where he seems overjoyed that it was involved in the BID patrol’s thousandth arrest of 2013:3
Seyler has, like the guy whose hat graces his head in the satirical picture above, evidently inspired his officers to form a mystical cult whose rituals include some kind of idolatry involving Taaka:2
Continue reading Steve Seyler, Vodka Nazi
Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Promotes Mindset that Aids, Comforts Los-Angeles-Area Serial Killers
Broomfield’s film exposes the fact that the City of Los Angeles allowed a serial killer to operate with impunity for 22 years, murdering untold numbers of women. Neither the LAPD nor the City government took the case seriously because the victims were black women, many prostitutes or drug addicts. This point was made repeatedly and convincingly, both on screen and during the Q&A after the film, by stars Pam Brooks and Margaret Prescod, who has been pressing the LAPD about the killings since 1986, thereby earning the wrath of, among other geniuses, Darryl Gates, our city’s second worst mistake. Gates, in his inimitably idiotic way, called Prescod and her compatriots in the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders “dummies” for even raising the issue.
Broomfield’s stunning work shows that Prescod and her allies have been right all along, though. The film gives an irrefutable performative demonstration of the fact that the LAPD has never taken this case seriously: In 2009 the LAPD knew of one survivor of the killer’s attacks. In 2014, before Broomfield started filming, that one survivor was still the only one known. But in the course of filming Brooks managed to locate and arrange for Broomfield to interview not just one additional woman who survived the Sleeper’s attacks but four. How is it possible that a serious investigation could leave such major witnesses to be discovered, and not even discovered by the police, four years after a suspect’s arrest?
It’s unconscionable. The City of Los Angeles will never live down the shame of having, through racism and indifference, abandoned dozens or hundreds of its most vulnerable citizens to a cruel thrill-killer (or killers; the true extent of the damage may never be known). It couldn’t have happened without the utter dehumanization of these women, each and every one someone’s child. According to Joshua Kleinfeld of Northwestern University, “in Southern California, police slang in the early 1990s for the murder of drug dealers, gangsters, prostitutes, and other lawbreakers was the vivid and extremely disturbing term, ‘NHI (no humans involved) Homicide.'”2 And once the police and white Los Angeles have dehumanized people to the point that they can be killed without consequence, killers will flourish. Why wouldn’t they?
Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Promotes Mindset that Aids, Comforts Los-Angeles-Area Serial Killers
A Pot to Piss In
NOTE (December 2015): Please read this retraction to provide context to this post. We remain right about many of the issues discussed, but we were dead wrong about the BID’s opposition to public toilets. They support them.
But why are all these people pissing in the streets?
Continue reading A Pot to Piss In
Sidewalk With BID Patrol
Seyler is, of course, speaking to his bosses, so he has to make sure they understand what they’re getting for their money. And what are they getting?
Continue reading Sidewalk With BID Patrol
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
Documents
I’m pleased to announce our new Documents page, also available through the menu on the header in all its arboreally structured glory. We hope to build this into a repository of records we obtain under the California Public Records Act. So far we just have one item prepared for publication, a report by Steve Seyler of Andrews International Security to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID. This is the document that Kerry Morrison originally refused to let me read at the meeting. I can see why she was reluctant because it’s not pretty. We’ve redacted it here to try to preserve some shreds of dignity in an ugly set of circumstances. Of course the unredacted original is available on request from Kerry.
Clips from the October 16, 2014 Meeting of the HPOA
Continue reading Clips from the October 16, 2014 Meeting of the HPOA
Seyler: Arrest ’em all to send a message (updated)
Continue reading Seyler: Arrest ’em all to send a message (updated)