Tag Archives: LAPD

Ever Wonder If You Are Blocked By Your Councilmember On The Twitter?! — We Have The Answer! — Also City Attorney! — Also The Mayor! — But Nury Martinez — And Herb Wesson — And Mike Bonin — And Mitch O’Farrell — They Won’t Even Answer The Damn Requests — Oh, Almost Forgot To Say! — Deputy City Attorney And Insufferable Rich Boy Strefan Fauble Wants To Be Sure You Know — Mike Feuer Isn’t Muting Any Twitter Users But If He Were — The List Would Be Exempt From Release Under The CPRA! — Yeah Right, Strefan Fauble! — Stick To Art Collecting And Leave The CPRA Lawyering To Others!

April 14, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

For about two months now I’ve been looking into the practice of Twitter users being blocked or muted by official City of Los Angeles accounts. I’m still gathering evidence, but yesterday it came out that Police Commission president Steve Soboroff blocks a bunch of users who’ve never even interacted with him, so I thought it’d be timely to write up the information I have so far. This issue is of special interest in these latter days given that in 2018 a federal judge ruled that it is unconstitutional for Donald Trump to block users on Twitter.

What I can offer you today, friends, is Twitter block/mute information for eleven of the fifteen council districts, the City Attorney, the Mayor, and a small selection of official LAPD accounts.¹ There’s also an interesting line of hypothetical bullshit from deputy city attorney Strefan Fauble² about some pretty technical claims about CPRA exemptionism,³ but that, being übernerdlich, is way at the end of the post.

Most of the accounts blocked are porn or spam, but Jose Huizar and David Ryu are notable exceptions. Both reps block accounts that are obviously controlled by actual individual people. Huizar’s list is by far the most extensive, and includes wildly inappropriate blocks like @oscartaracena and @BHJesse.

My research on this question is ongoing, mostly hindered by the City of LA’s familiar foot-dragging CPRA methodology. Turn the page for a tabular summary of the results I have so far along with a brief discussion of how Strefan Fauble is still on his CPRA bullshit.
Continue reading Ever Wonder If You Are Blocked By Your Councilmember On The Twitter?! — We Have The Answer! — Also City Attorney! — Also The Mayor! — But Nury Martinez — And Herb Wesson — And Mike Bonin — And Mitch O’Farrell — They Won’t Even Answer The Damn Requests — Oh, Almost Forgot To Say! — Deputy City Attorney And Insufferable Rich Boy Strefan Fauble Wants To Be Sure You Know — Mike Feuer Isn’t Muting Any Twitter Users But If He Were — The List Would Be Exempt From Release Under The CPRA! — Yeah Right, Strefan Fauble! — Stick To Art Collecting And Leave The CPRA Lawyering To Others! →

Homeless Issues, LAPD

In 2018 LAPD Hollywood Division Senior Lead Officer Paul Jordan Threatened A Homeless Man — Intimidated Him Into Moving To Another Neighborhood — To Please A Mob Of Angry Delusional Homeowners — Who Along With The LAPD Characteristically Think That A Bunch Of Crap They Just Made Up Is More Important Than People’s Actual Lives — And Dan Halden — Mitch O’Farrell’s Hollywood Field Flunky — And David Ryu Flunkies Catherine Landers And Rachel Fox — And Deputy City Attorney Steve Houchin — And Hollywood Division Chief Boss Cory Palka — All Of Them Read Jordan’s Account Of This Threat — And Were Silent

April 12, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

I just received a reasonably large set of emails from the LAPD involving Hollywood zillionaire, racist police-caller, and Hollywood Media District BIDdie Ferris Wehbe⁴ and LAPD Hollywood Division Senior Lead Officer Paul Jordan. I was looking for material involving the Hollywood Forever Cemetery fiasco but ended up with a bunch more evidence about what the LAPD motto means with respect to our homeless brothers and sisters when the cops think no one is watching but the hateful homedwellers to the whims of whom they’re paid to pander.

You’ll find a lot of interesting stuff in there, but the text for today’s sermon is this conversation from February and March 2018. The participants are the usual rageball gang of housedwellers, possessed with the usual heaping dose of what passes for righteous wrath among the propertied classes, Hollywood cop Jordan, and various City staffers, including Mitch O’Farrell flunky Dan Halden, a couple of jokers from CD4, deputy city attorney and, at that time, Hollywood neighborhood prosecutor Steve Houchin, and Hollywood Division Commander Cory Palka.

There’s really nothing atypical about the story. It begins, as so many of these episodes do, with an imaginary claim that things are getting worse, that the median melanin level in a previously placid caucasian paradise is rising, crime is exploding, turpitude is raining down like the mighty waters, and so on. The florid semiliteracy of this initial cri de coeur, though, is kind of unique and so is presented here with the weirdo capitalization, made-up words, and idiosyncratic spelling all intact, is not standard:

Seems Like there’s this sergeancy of Brazen Homeless youth and some older that are wondering around the De Longpre Park neighborhood looking for Crimes of Opportunity!

The fear and anger and hate escalate through familiar delusional stages albeit with uniquely weird particular details. Homeless people are shitting in the bushes! They’re naked in the driveway and showering with the hose! They’re having sex on the lawn! At eleven in the morning! The church attracts them by handing out free food! The 7-11 attracts them by selling hot food!

They’re drinking beer! They’re making people nervous! They’re setting up tents in permit parking neighborhoods, which everyone knows is not allowed!⁵ They don’t pay property taxes! And bills! Like normal people! We need to form armed vigilante gangs! Like we had in the good old days! Let’s have a neighborhood meeting!⁶

And eventually they focus their rage on one particular tent, although it’s certainly not clear that the person living there has had anything to do with the enumerated atrocities.⁷ And in one of the most explicitly articulate statements of official City policy towards the homeless we’re likely to see, Hollywood Division Senior Lead Officer Paul Jordan explains what happened next:

On Feb 21, 2018, at 3:46 PM, Paul P Jordan <32285@lapd.online> wrote:

Hi Judy,

I had a nice conversation with the young man inside the tent today. Needless to say, his tent is gone and he will not be returning to that location. I also went to the LGBT Center and spoke with Andrew, who is now aware of this individual, and will be spoken to by the LGBT staff. Please keep me posted if he decides to return.

PJ

And then? Well, Officer Jordan gets the immediate gush of goopy approval that such thuggie boys live for⁸ and the very next day David Ryu flunky Catherine Landers is back to discussing the terms of the upcoming neighborhood meeting. There’s no outrage from these City staffers, no note to Paul Jordan telling him that it’s against the law for police to go around threatening homeless people to get them to move, no nothing.

And no surprise from me, either, because I’ve just read too many emails exactly like these ones to be surprised anymore. But I’m still mad that this is the level our City government is at, that not only do they break the law and oppress the poor to placate the rich but they don’t even try to hide it. Turn the page for a transcription of the conversation.
Continue reading In 2018 LAPD Hollywood Division Senior Lead Officer Paul Jordan Threatened A Homeless Man — Intimidated Him Into Moving To Another Neighborhood — To Please A Mob Of Angry Delusional Homeowners — Who Along With The LAPD Characteristically Think That A Bunch Of Crap They Just Made Up Is More Important Than People’s Actual Lives — And Dan Halden — Mitch O’Farrell’s Hollywood Field Flunky — And David Ryu Flunkies Catherine Landers And Rachel Fox — And Deputy City Attorney Steve Houchin — And Hollywood Division Chief Boss Cory Palka — All Of Them Read Jordan’s Account Of This Threat — And Were Silent →

LAPD, Lawsuits, Public Records Act Pragmatics

LAPD Produces Three Records From The Regional Public Private Infrastructure Collaboration System In Response To My CPRA Suit!

March 18, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

In February, my hand forced by the mindless obstructionism of the City of Los Angeles with respect to compliance with the California Public Records Act, I filed a petition asking a judge to compel them to hand over two classes of records. First were private person’s arrest forms generated in Hollywood in 2018. The point here is to be able once again to track arrests by the BID patrol after their appalling 2016 contract amendment took these records, at least for now, out of the reach of the CPRA.

The second kind of records I’m seeking in the suit are postings to the Regional Public Private Infrastructure Collaboration System, familiarly known as RPPICS. This is some kind of cop bulletin board that a lot of BIDs have access to, and the LAPD claimed that everything on the system could be withheld from me under the so-called investigative materials exemption to the CPRA, found at §6254(f).

And it’s these last ones that seem to have cracked the case. Last Thursday the City of Los Angeles, in the person of Deputy City Attorney Jonathan Bislig, sent over this letter admitting that the City possessed responsive RPPICS material that was not exempt and yet had not been produced. And they attached four pages of material, constituting three responsive records. There’s a transcription of the letter and of one of the RPPICS items after the break, and here are links to all three:

This is not only hugely important because we finally get to see some material from the hitherto top secret RPPICS, but also because the fact that the City released previously withheld material as a result of a suit means that I’m the “prevailing party” and therefore that the City has to pay my lawyer. This was held in the monumental 1991 case Belth v. Garamendi, which interpreted §6259(d) of the CPRA thus:

In this case we hold that Government Code section 6259, subdivision (d), mandates an award of court costs and reasonable attorney fees to a plaintiff who prevails in litigation filed under the California’s Public Records Act. We further hold that the plaintiff has prevailed within the meaning of the statute when he or she files an action which results in defendant releasing a copy of a previously withheld document.

This release is also hugely important because it shows really clearly that LAPD’s original denial was completely bogus. There’s nothing investigative at all about these three records. They falsely characterized them that way purely so they didn’t have to produce them, or even search for them, for that matter. It’s shameful that LAPD, and the City of Los Angeles as a whole, treats its mandated duties under the CPRA so lightly. It’s also shameful that the only means to enforce compliance is a lawsuit.

Together, these shameful facts mean that the only possible strategy is to keep suing them until they get their act together. It’s going to be expensive for taxpayers, who have to foot the City’s legal bill and also the requester’s in successful cases, but as Sigmund Freud famously said, if you don’t pay you don’t get better. More news as I have it, and turn the page for some transcriptions.
Continue reading LAPD Produces Three Records From The Regional Public Private Infrastructure Collaboration System In Response To My CPRA Suit! →

LAPD

It Appears That The University Of Southern California Is In Violation Of Its Memorandum Of Understanding With LAPD — USC Police Are Required To Submit Regular Reports Describing Their Activities And Giving Various Statistics — According To LAPD Discovery In Response To A CPRA Request There Are No Reports — Given The Vast Off-Campus Area That USC Cops Cover It Is Disconcerting That There Is No Way To Know What They’re Doing — And It Is A Massive Dereliction Of LAPD’s Duty To The People Of Los Angeles That They Evidently Are Allowing USC To Shirk Its Legal Reporting Duties

March 15, 2019 Mike 3 Comments

So it turns out that security guards at private universities can actually be peace officers under California law if certain conditions are satisfied. This is authorized by the Penal Code at §830.75, which lists the fairly minimal conditions. They include a requirement that “[t]he institution of higher education and the appropriate local law enforcement agency have entered into a memorandum of understanding.” Once the conditions are met, the law allows the security guards to act as police officers on public property within a mile of their campus.

And the University of Southern California has taken full advantage of this opportunity, entering into the appropriate MOU with the Los Angeles Police Department so that its security guards, collectively known as the Department of Public Safety, have the arrest power and are allowed to exercise it within the boundaries of the map shown above. I obtained a copy of this MOU from LAPD under the CPRA, and it’s well worth reading.

If you’re paying attention at all you’ll have heard that this situation, with USC policing a vast off-campus area in neighborhoods whose residents are mostly poor, mostly black or brown, is intolerably abusive. Sahra Sulaiman, for one, has been writing about it for years on Streetsblog. See e.g. this 2013 overview and this more recent description of yet another appalling incident.

When the LAPD is involved in activities like this, well, it’s not so easy to stop them, but it is at least possible to use the Public Records Act to try understand what they’re up to. This is not so clearly possible with USC, since they’re a private school and not prima facie subject to the CPRA.⁹ But the MOU does provide for some transparency about USC operations.

In particular take a look at Article 5, which requires all kinds of reporting about police activities by USC, all of it to be submitted to LAPD.¹⁰ USC DPS is required to submit reports of significant incidents, daily reports of calls, weekly crime statistics, monthly reports of all activities pertaining to the exercise of the powers granted by the MOU, and other stuff besides.

So naturally I asked LAPD for copies of all of these reports from 2018 and 2019 under the CPRA.¹¹ And imagine my surprise when the LAPD told me this afternoon that they didn’t have any records. They even said that they asked Southwest Division to look for them, which was the right thing to do as they’re the designated recipients under the MOU.

So if LAPD Discovery is telling the truth and no one actually has copies of all these reports that USC is supposed to submit, then USC is in violation of the MOU and they certainly ought to stop patrolling off-campus immediately and have all the powers granted to them under its terms suspended until they come back into compliance.

This isn’t just some kind of technicality, either. If USC DPS is going to operate on public property, detain and arrest citizens of Los Angeles who aren’t remotely interacting with USC property or employees, and so on, then we have a right to keep track of what exactly they’re up to. If they actually haven’t been submitting these reports, or if LAPD isn’t retaining them or is hiding them, then it’s impossible for us to understand USC’s operations on our streets, which is unacceptable.

On the other hand, obviously, it’s possible that LAPD is either lying or mistaken, either of which would be completely not at all surprising to anyone who’s dealt with them before. So I asked Southwest Division to put me in touch with whoever is their USC liason, and I asked USC senior vice something or other Todd Dickey, who signed the most recent amendment to the MOU, to please let me know what’s going on. If and when I hear back from them well, you’ll read about it here. Meanwhile, turn the page for all the transcriptions.
Continue reading It Appears That The University Of Southern California Is In Violation Of Its Memorandum Of Understanding With LAPD — USC Police Are Required To Submit Regular Reports Describing Their Activities And Giving Various Statistics — According To LAPD Discovery In Response To A CPRA Request There Are No Reports — Given The Vast Off-Campus Area That USC Cops Cover It Is Disconcerting That There Is No Way To Know What They’re Doing — And It Is A Massive Dereliction Of LAPD’s Duty To The People Of Los Angeles That They Evidently Are Allowing USC To Shirk Its Legal Reporting Duties →

CD13, Homeless Issues

Emails From CD13 Reveal Identities Of People Who Installed Anti-Homeless Planters In Hollywood Along Cahuenga Blvd And Lillian Way — And Their Absolutely Appalling Conversations About — For Instance — Denying Homeless People Food To Encourage Them To Move — So Far There’s No Evidence That CD13 Was Directly Complicit — But They Sure Didn’t Do Anything To Stop Them — And Hollywood SLO Eddie Guerra — The Illegal Donation Solicitor — Certainly Was Complicit — Eddie Guerra: “Unfortunately We Are In The Displacement Business” — Eddie Guerra: “[Homeless Displacement] Is Too Sensitive To Discuss Over Email.” — Eddie Guerra: “Power Washing Doesn’t Chase Away Homeless, It Just Makes The Sidewalks Cleaner And They Like It!”

March 13, 2019 Mike 1 Comment

A quintessential slogan of my mother’s generation of feminists is that the personal is political. And this is as true and as profound as it ever was. But it’s also worth remembering that the political is personal. The powers of government are tools, weapons, wielded by individual human beings making daily conscious choices to use these public resources to further their personal goals, no matter how much they want to pretend otherwise, that they’re doing the will of the people or some other abominable abstraction.

And one of the things I do here at MK.Org is to expose these choicemakers, to smoke them out of the holes in which they huddle, all carefully camouflaged round with weighty principles and abstract whatnot, to reveal the little men crouching behind those shimmering curtains.¹² This project is viable because, well, you know all that bad stuff that “the City of Los Angeles” does? It’s all being done by individual people, mostly organized via email, and therefore subject to the California Public Records Act.

And one of these bad things that these privilege-addled sociopaths do is to install illegal and appalling planters and fences on our public sidewalks so that there’s no room for tents. They’ve done this in Venice, they’re doing it in Koreatown, and they’re doing it in Hollywood as well. So I asked my good friends at CD13¹³ if they could give me all their emails about these Hollywood ones and, today, they gave me a bunch!¹⁴ You can find them all here on Archive.Org, along with a bunch of pictures I took of the planters.¹⁵

One of the things we learn from these emails is that the people who attack homeless residents of our streets by installing these antisocial planters do it for really stupid reasons. For instance, Jennifer Mullen of Quixote Studios just doesn’t like the smell of marijuana, at least not if homeless people are smoking it. She thinks it gives customers the wrong impression of her business. Her email address is jenniferm@quixote.com.

And Andrea Kim of Lucky Scent, located at 726 N. Cahuenga Blvd 90038, doesn’t like the fact that homeless people own bikes and sometimes ask people for money. Even people who arrive in Ubers! Her colleagues Adam Eastwood and Franco Wright agree with her that this is intolerable behavior. Their email addresses are, respectively, andrea@luckyscent.com, adam@luckyscent.com, and franco@luckyscent.com.

As for Abbey Jackloski of the Hollywood Production Center, well, she doesn’t even feel like she needs to give reasons for her hatred of the homeless residents of Lillian Way.¹⁶ She just tells the thoroughly corrupt LAPD officer Eddie Guerra that “that would be amazing” if he could just get rid of them so they can install more planters. Her email address is abbey@hollywoodpc.com.

And last but in no way at all least we have the freakishly hip post-creatives¹⁷ at HQ Creative Office Freaking Space, who own this rusty space alien at 720 N. Cahuenga Blvd. And they also don’t need a reason. Their in-house sorceress of hipness, Na’ama Termechi, sends an email to disgraced SLO Eddie Guerra and is all like “Homeless exist. Squelch them, please.” And he does and says put in some plants when they’re gone and then Termechi and her conspirators put in the meanest, rustiest, horriblest appropriators of public space imaginable, as pictured at the top of the post. Her email address is naama@hqdevelopment.net.

But none of that nonsense is as interesting as this months-long email conversation¹⁸ between LAPD officer Eddie Guerra and a bunch of people who own property along Cahuenga Blvd and Lillian way north of Melrose and south of Santa Monica Blvd. He tells them to put in planters, he tells them how to put them in, and off they go, talking about getting donations from local nurseries and pushing homeless people away to somewhere else.
Continue reading Emails From CD13 Reveal Identities Of People Who Installed Anti-Homeless Planters In Hollywood Along Cahuenga Blvd And Lillian Way — And Their Absolutely Appalling Conversations About — For Instance — Denying Homeless People Food To Encourage Them To Move — So Far There’s No Evidence That CD13 Was Directly Complicit — But They Sure Didn’t Do Anything To Stop Them — And Hollywood SLO Eddie Guerra — The Illegal Donation Solicitor — Certainly Was Complicit — Eddie Guerra: “Unfortunately We Are In The Displacement Business” — Eddie Guerra: “[Homeless Displacement] Is Too Sensitive To Discuss Over Email.” — Eddie Guerra: “Power Washing Doesn’t Chase Away Homeless, It Just Makes The Sidewalks Cleaner And They Like It!” →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, LAPD

52.4% Of All Arrests In The Entire City Of Los Angeles For Public Urination/Defecation From 2009 Through February 2019 Were Made In Just Six LAPD Reporting Districts In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID — Yet More Proof That Business Improvement Districts Oppress Homeless People Through Selective Enforcement — And More Proof That The Hollywood BID Patrol Is Completely Off The Chain — And Has Been Running A Private Police State For Years — With The City’s Full Blessing And Collusion Of Course

March 8, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I learned from some data released by the LAPD that 73% of all arrests for public marijuana use in the entire City of Los Angeles between 2016 and 2018 took place in the Hollywood Entertainment District BID.¹⁹ This is obviously a crime much more likely to be committed by homeless people, since they don’t have a private place to smoke marijuana. Here’s what I said then about the BID’s outrageous rate of arresting homeless residents:

The HPOA BID Patrol is famous for its aggressive arrest policies. In 2013 they were responsible for more than 7% of the arrests of homeless people in the entire City of Los Angeles. Their arrest rate has dropped precipitously in the last few years, but it is still unbelievably high. But since 2016 they have refused to provide data on their individual arrests in response to CPRA requests, so it hasn’t been possible to tell who they were arresting and why.²⁰
And it turns out that LAPD will release these spreadsheets pretty quickly, and just recently they released a couple containing all arrests for violating LAMC 41.47.2, which is the public urination law. And a quick analysis reveals a very similar result. That is, there are essentially six LAPD reporting districts in the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. They are 636, 637, 645, 646, 647, and 666. There are 1135 reporting districts in the City, but these six in the BID accounted for 52.4% of all the public urination arrests in the City from 2009 through 2019, a total of 887 arrests out of 1,693.

Contrast this with Skid Row, which is encompassed by 11 reporting districts.²¹ Between 2009 and 2019 these 11 reporting districts accounted for only 35 arrests for public urination. That is less than 4% of the arrests in the Hollywood Entertainment District. Obviously the difference isn’t due to less public urination in Skid Row, it’s due to extreme differential enforcement. It’s really unlikely that the LAPD on its own would create such a disparity. If the BID patrol isn’t making all these arrests, nevertheless the BID must be the ultimate cause.

It’s worth noting here, by the way, that public urination was not even illegal in Los Angeles until 2003. Even at the time it was opposed by LACAN and others because the intention was obviously to further the criminalization of homelessness. In response, “Council members pledged that people would be prosecuted only in cases when there is a public toilet nearby that they failed to use.” But such pledges aren’t worth the toilet paper that’s smeared with them, and, as everyone who’s paying attention knows, the law has only been used as the anti-homeless weapon it was obviously intended to be.²²

And, it turns out, mostly so used by the most toxic BID in the City, the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. Turn the page for some nifty maps showing the relationship of these six reporting districts to the BID boundaries as well as a histogram showing the freakishly uneven distribution. Click the image to enlarge.
Continue reading 52.4% Of All Arrests In The Entire City Of Los Angeles For Public Urination/Defecation From 2009 Through February 2019 Were Made In Just Six LAPD Reporting Districts In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID — Yet More Proof That Business Improvement Districts Oppress Homeless People Through Selective Enforcement — And More Proof That The Hollywood BID Patrol Is Completely Off The Chain — And Has Been Running A Private Police State For Years — With The City’s Full Blessing And Collusion Of Course →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, LAPD

Reefer Madness Is Alive And Well In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID! — Between 2016 and 2018 73% Of All Citations For Public Marijuana Use In the Entire City Of Los Angeles Were In the Hollywood BID — The Venice BID Is A Distant Second Place With 8% — Leaving A Mere 19% — Which Is Only 170 Citations — For The Entire Rest Of The City Of Los Angeles

February 19, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

Even though marijuana use in California was formally legalized recently, it’s still against the law to use it in public per the California Health and Safety Code at §11362.3. And apparently Lolita Lopez, investigative reporter at NBCLA, is doing a story on how this plays out in Los Angeles, because on February 2, 2019 she filed a CPRA request with the City for a list of citations under this law from 2016 to the present. Her request was successful, and a few days later the LAPD handed over this spreadsheet, organized by reporting district.²³

And public marijuana use is one of those laws that’s custom-made for differential enforcement against homeless people. Thus it occurred to me to take a look at this data in conjuction with BIDs, which are one of the main engines of differential enforcement in Los Angeles. And the data revealed something really interesting. There were 887 citations in the two years covered by the data. Of these citations, 645 occurred in only 6 reporting districts, which precisely cover the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. Also 71 occurred in two others, which precisely cover the Venice Beach BID. The other 171 were spread out pretty evenly across the whole rest of the City.

This means that 72.7% of all citations for public marijuana use in the entire City of Los Angeles since 2016 were issued in the Hollywood Entertainment District BID. And 8% were issued in the Venice Beach BID. It doesn’t take any kind of fancy statistical analysis to prove that this is a really significant result, almost certainly linked to Kerry Morrison and her BID’s well-known tactic of arresting every homeless person that they can lay their hands on for the most trivial possible matters, such as drinking in public or urinating in public. Evidently now we can add smoking marijuana in public to this list of homeless-criminalizing tactics employed by the BID.

The HPOA BID Patrol is famous for its aggressive arrest policies. In 2013 they were responsible for more than 7% of the arrests of homeless people in the entire City of Los Angeles. Their arrest rate has dropped precipitously in the last few years, but it is still unbelievably high. But since 2016 they have refused to provide data on their individual arrests in response to CPRA requests, so it hasn’t been possible to tell who they were arresting and why.²⁰

However, each arrest that the BID Patrol makes results in some kind of action by the LAPD. And given that the LAPD doesn’t seem to expend much effort in arresting anyone for public marijuana use outside the BID, it’s not unreasonable to assume that these figures are a proxy for the BID’s interest in the differential enforcement of this law. If they’re not making these arrests themselves then the arrests are the result of some BID policy.

The situation in Venice is a little less clear, as the Venice Beach BID only started its security work sometime in 2017, and the Boardwalk is a likely place for the LAPD to practice its own style of selective enforcement without needing a BID to encourage it. But the moral of the story is still very clear. It’s illegal to smoke marijuana in public in Los Angeles, but effectively it’s illegal only if you’re homeless and only if you’re in the Hollywood BID. Turn the page for maps and charts!
Continue reading Reefer Madness Is Alive And Well In The Hollywood Entertainment District BID! — Between 2016 and 2018 73% Of All Citations For Public Marijuana Use In the Entire City Of Los Angeles Were In the Hollywood BID — The Venice BID Is A Distant Second Place With 8% — Leaving A Mere 19% — Which Is Only 170 Citations — For The Entire Rest Of The City Of Los Angeles →

LAPD, Lawsuits, Public Records Act Pragmatics

Los Angeles Police Department Sued To Enforce Compliance With California Public Records Act — At Issue Are Two Classes Of Records — Both Of Which LAPD Claims Are Investigative And So Exempt From Release — First Are Private Person’s Arrest Forms — Necessary To Track BID Patrol Arrests — Second Are Reports From RPPICS — Some Kind Of Top Secret Cop Tracking And Discussion System — Putatively For Anti-Terrorism

February 8, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

The LAPD has been notoriously bad at complying with the California Public Records Act. So much so that in 2017 the ACLU sued them for systemic violations of the law, which is in addition to any number of small-scale suits based on individual violations, like e.g. Stop LAPD Spying has had to sue them twice, once in 2015 and again in 2018.

These suits were based on the LAPD’s longstanding habit of completely ignoring CPRA requests, often for years at a time. However, since the City of LA started using the NextRequest CPRA platform the LAPD has gotten quite a bit more responsive, although they can still take a maddeningly long time to respond and produce records.

This welcome improvement in LAPD responsiveness does not mean that all is well in Cop-CPRAlandia. They will still arbitrarily deny requests and then cut off the conversation, and they did this to me twice in 2018. Sadly, the CPRA provides no recourse at all for arbitrary unjustified denials beyond the filing of a lawsuit,²⁴ which is what the path I was forced to follow by the LAPD’s extraordinary and unsupportable intransigence. You can read the complaint here, written by the incomparable Abenicio Cisneros, and/or see transcribed selections below the break.

There are two issues at stake. In the first place, remember back in 2016 when Kerry Morrison and her merry gang of curb-stomping thugs at Andrews International Security altered their contract to be able to withhold public records from me? That left me with no way to tell exactly who said curb-stomping thuggie boys arrested, information they naturally wanted to obscure from me because they tend to arrest the wrong people and rather than mend their ways they prefer to cover up their misdeeds.

But last year I discovered that every time the BID Patrol arrests someone they fill out a form for the LAPD. Here is an example of one. As it’s essential to find out not only how many arrests the BID Patrol makes²⁵ but who they’re actually arresting, I requested that the LAPD give me all of these forms from Hollywood from 2018. They refused, and that is my first cause of action.

The other issue has to do with some Orwellian slab of web app crap known as the Regional Public Private Infrastructure Collaboration System. I learned about this from some emails I got from the Downtown Center BID in response to a CPRA request. You can see the emails here on Archive.Org, but they’re not that interesting. They mostly just announce that new information is available on RPPICS, and since they won’t give up the goods, there’s no way to tell what that is.

But this kind of public/private collaboration sharing between police and security is famous for being misused for political surveillance and other illegal and antihuman activities. The LAPD and private security already get up to enough of this in open emails, as does the freaking BID Patrol. Imagine what they’re doing in secret. But we don’t have to imagine, we can make CPRA requests! Which is what I did, asking LAPD for a year’s worth of postings so as to learn what the heck these people were up to in their little secret world. Again, they denied my request, and this is my second cause of action.

And turn the page, if you will, for a few technicalities about the LAPD’s exemption claims and transcribed selections from the petition itself.
Continue reading Los Angeles Police Department Sued To Enforce Compliance With California Public Records Act — At Issue Are Two Classes Of Records — Both Of Which LAPD Claims Are Investigative And So Exempt From Release — First Are Private Person’s Arrest Forms — Necessary To Track BID Patrol Arrests — Second Are Reports From RPPICS — Some Kind Of Top Secret Cop Tracking And Discussion System — Putatively For Anti-Terrorism →

Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles City Government

The Deep State In Los Angeles — How Dennis Zine Wanted To Take $30,000 Out Of His Salary In 2013 And Give It To The LAPD’s Mounted Platoon — To Buy A Tractor, Of All Things — Possibly For Anti-Terrorism Purposes — Or Maybe Just For Moving Horseshit From One Place To Another — But Holly Wolcott — At That Time Executive Officer In The Clerk’s Office — Did Some Weird Back-Channel Voodoo On The Council File — Put It Into “Continuation Pergatory [sic] Never To Be Agendized Again” — Which Certainly Raises A Question As To Who’s In Charge Over At 200 N. Spring Street

January 31, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

I recently obtained a huge batch of emails between former City Clerk June Lagmay and present City Clerk Holly Wolcott back when she had Shannon Hoppes’s job as Executive Officer. I haven’t managed to prep them all for publication yet, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. See e.g. this recent post about lawsuits against the Downtown Center BID and how the City propped them up for five years by refunding a half million dollars in assessments to an angry plaintiff.

Today’s topic, also based on selections from this material, is a vignette about an attempt by former Councilmember Dennis Zine to donate $30,000 from his salary to the LAPD’s Mounted Platoon to buy a replacement tractor, maybe to move horseshit around?²⁶ The Council File is 13-0064-S4, and you can read the LAPD’s report on the donation as well. On February 11, 2013 Holly Wolcott emailed Karen Kalfayan, possibly with the office of the Chief Legislative Analyst,²⁷ to ask if the money was coming out of Zine’s salary as Councilmember.²⁸

Subsequently Lagmay emailed Wolcott to alert her that the item would be heard in committee on February 22. After the meeting Lagmay emailed Wolcott under the subject line “interesting” to tell her that the item was continued to an unspecified future date, and then Wolcott replied, taking credit for the whole thing: “Yes, that was due entirely to my intervention…….since I couldn’t keep it off the agenda that is what we all decided to do with it. … It will die in continuation pergatory, [sic] never to be agendized again hell now. [sic]“ Lagmay’s reply expresses pure admiration: “You one powerful woman.” And who is “we all” in Wolcott’s narrative? Some anti-tractor cabal? Isn’t the Committee in charge? Very weird.

That’s the story! And I don’t know if it’s good or bad for Dennis Zine to give a tractor to the LAPD. It’s probably bad, because what good are the cops gonna get up to with heavy equipment?²⁹ But good or bad, ideally the City is run by elected officials exercising their lawful powers lawfully granted to them by the people rather than by appointed functionaries using scheduling jujitsu to kill off properly introduced motions by leaving them to “die in continuation pergatory, [sic] never to be agendized again hell now. [sic]“ And turn the page for transcriptions of everything!
Continue reading The Deep State In Los Angeles — How Dennis Zine Wanted To Take $30,000 Out Of His Salary In 2013 And Give It To The LAPD’s Mounted Platoon — To Buy A Tractor, Of All Things — Possibly For Anti-Terrorism Purposes — Or Maybe Just For Moving Horseshit From One Place To Another — But Holly Wolcott — At That Time Executive Officer In The Clerk’s Office — Did Some Weird Back-Channel Voodoo On The Council File — Put It Into “Continuation Pergatory [sic] Never To Be Agendized Again” — Which Certainly Raises A Question As To Who’s In Charge Over At 200 N. Spring Street →

LAPD, Public Records Act Pragmatics

City Of Los Angeles Files A Creditable Brief In Opposition To Appalling Los Angeles Police Protective League Anti-SB1421 Petition

January 22, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

Last week in the appalling lawsuit filed by the appalling Los Angeles Police Protective League seeking to prevent the LAPD from releasing records newly made public by SB1421, the City of Los Angeles filed a surprisingly unappalling opposition brief arguing that the records ought in fact to be released.

The LAPPL’s lawyers, Rains Lucia Stern St. Phalle & Silver, have been filing these lawsuits all over Southern California, and so far they’ve managed to get injunctions against releasing the records in San Bernardino and Orange Counties as well as, of course, in the City of Los Angeles. I thought I heard somewhere that not every government has opposed these suits, but I can’t verify it, so forget that! But, as I said, the City of L.A. did file an opposition, and you can find a transcription of selections below.

You may recall that the LAPPL’s argument is that it’s unfair to apply the law retroactively because officers made career decisions based on the confidentiality of these records. The City of Los Angeles, in response, says that releasing the records would not in fact be retroactive application because the law applies to records that the City has in its possession now.

They also argue that it wouldn’t be a retroactive application of a law because it doesn’t change the consequences attached to the actions of the officers related in the records. They argue that releasing old records was the intention of the legislature, and finally that the legislature does have the authority to change privacy protections that apply to existing records.
Continue reading City Of Los Angeles Files A Creditable Brief In Opposition To Appalling Los Angeles Police Protective League Anti-SB1421 Petition →