Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Business Improvement Districts, Homeless Issues, LAPD

Chinatown Business Improvement District Chief George Yu Calls Self-Electrocution Of Homeless People “Natural Selection” — Yu Told LAPD Officer Stephen Nichols Not To Repair Dangerously Altered Streetlight Wiring — So That More Homeless People Would Die When They Charged Their Phones — Because “that will be the only way that the City will take care of business” — And LAPD Officer Stephen Nichols’s Response To Yu’s Homicidal Mania? — And I Quote — “☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺”

September 2, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

Homeless people need cell phones to survive, and charging them is a perennial problem. Although the City of Los Angeles could very, very easily put electrical outlets on streetlights they refuse to do so, which leads to the dangerous but necessary practice of makeshift rewiring by unhoused people. As revealed by this newly obtained email conversation, in March 2019 this was happening regularly in Chinatown.

LAPD Officer Stephen Nichols told George Yu, the unhinged megalomaniac leader of the reprehensible Chinatown Business Improvement District, that if Yu gave him a list of affected lights he would personally deal with the unauthorized wiring. But Yu told him not to do that. Yu cited a recent electrocution death in Westlake and told Nichols:

“Lets let BSL do their work. I would prefer natural selection like the Westlake incident to happen as that will be the only way that the City will take care of business.”

When Nichols finally got Yu’s point, which took a surprising amount of discussion, he thought it was hilarious. Nichols’s entire response: “☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺” Here we see the thoroughly disgusting spectacle of an LAPD officer, sworn to protect and to serve, sharing a laugh with a notorious psychopath over the tactical political utility of mass electrocutions of homeless people.
Continue reading Chinatown Business Improvement District Chief George Yu Calls Self-Electrocution Of Homeless People “Natural Selection” — Yu Told LAPD Officer Stephen Nichols Not To Repair Dangerously Altered Streetlight Wiring — So That More Homeless People Would Die When They Charged Their Phones — Because “that will be the only way that the City will take care of business” — And LAPD Officer Stephen Nichols’s Response To Yu’s Homicidal Mania? — And I Quote — “☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺” →

Homeless Issues, Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles City Government

A Brief Discussion Of How Homeless Encampment Sweeps Are Scheduled In The City Of Los Angeles — Or At Least Part Of The Process — The Whole Thing Is Driven By Housedweller Complaints — Filtered Through Council Districts As Political Patronage — LAHSA Involvement — Every Kind Of Outreach — Is Basically A Cover For Relocation — The Only Actual Goal

August 6, 2020 Mike Leave a comment

A couple days ago it came out on Twitter that a lot of people in Los Angeles don’t understand how homeless encampment sweeps get scheduled and why, in particular how encampments to be swept are chosen. I promised to write a post about it, and here we are!¹ Part of the reason for the delay is that the story is really complex, so I’m just going to talk qualitatively about how encampments end up being targeted by Council Districts and leave the rest for another post or two.² For instance, the City has two kinds of sweep teams, which are CARE and CARE+, but I’m not going to talk about the differences,³ which are probably important, but not for this post.

Each Council Office has a staffer whose job is to work out their District’s sweep schedule with LA Sanitation. I think that ordinarily every request for a sweep in a given District goes through this San contact.⁴ The scheduling is done by email as well as by editing Google Docs, and the emails occasionally reveal the reason a given encampment is being targeted. Here are the sets of records this post is mostly⁵ based on. If you’re interested in the subject it’s really worth looking at these. There’s a lot more information there than I’m using here:

⬟ Some 2020 Emails Between CDs and LA San

⬟ Housedweller Complaints to Juan Fregoso About Echo Park Encampments — From 2019 and 2020

⬟ CD15 Emails With LA Sanitation — January through May 2020
Continue reading A Brief Discussion Of How Homeless Encampment Sweeps Are Scheduled In The City Of Los Angeles — Or At Least Part Of The Process — The Whole Thing Is Driven By Housedweller Complaints — Filtered Through Council Districts As Political Patronage — LAHSA Involvement — Every Kind Of Outreach — Is Basically A Cover For Relocation — The Only Actual Goal →

Announcements

Lots of Documents, and Not of the Usual Sort!

July 21, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, 99 years ago in 1916. Her truth, like that of John Brown, goes marching on in Los Angeles in 2015.

Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of a bunch more documents, some of them really interesting, and none of them of the sort we’ve usually featured here. First of all we are adding the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to our list of scrutinizees, albeit in a fairly desultory manner. Documents we obtain will be available from the usual menus above, and here is a link to that page. We kick things off with a couple years worth of form 700s from the Commissioners and the Executive Director. For almost certainly nefarious reasons, the city of Los Angeles, unlike other more enlightened cities in California, does not require BID board members or high-level employees to file financial disclosures (although this may be changing soon, fingers crossed!), so obtaining these forms was the only way to get any insight into Kerry Morrison’s finances insofar as they relate to her work for the HPOA. And now, like Jesus Christ hisself, we have saved the best for last, so the good stuff is after the break!
Continue reading →

Hypocrisy

You didn’t build that

October 11, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

When businessmen try to recreate Los Angeles from scratch they end up with some horrifying misbegotten travesty like CityWalk or Santa Monica. They don’t know how to make a real Los Angeles. If tourists knew how to make a place like this there’d be at least one out East of San Bernardino where tourists come from, and there’s not. Tourists don’t know how to make one either.
Continue reading You didn’t build that →