Mary Rodriguez | Michael Kohlhaas dot org

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 →

Of course, from that minute at 5:00 a.m. on February 6, 2017, that the Los Angeles Times, house organ of this city’s zillionaire political elite, endorsed his opponent, damn hippy upstart bike rider Joe Bray-Ali, Council District 1 incumbent Gil Cedillo was effectively thrown under the bus. But just like in every western movie ever made, it’s not the shot that knocks the hero off his horse that hurts,⁶ but rather the subsequent nibblings of a thousand attack-ducks that really ends the guy’s career.⁷

Which is why it’s so interesting to note that on the very same day that the Times announced that incumbent Cedillo no longer enjoyed the support of L.A.’s zillionaires and was thus fair game for the death by a thousand nibbles, Mr. Attack Duck himself, CD13 scheduler Dave Cano, smelt the way the wind blew, jumped on the anti-Gil train and donated $125 to Joe Bray-Ali. And does any one at all think that council staff donate money to non-incumbents without the permission of their bosses? It’s never going to happen in a zillion years.

The incumbent is almost always reelected, and the Councilmembers all badly need one another’s good will in order to maintain their patronage system. Thus Dave Cano’s donation was effectively an endorsement of Joe Bray-Ali by Mr. Mitch himself. If you don’t believe me that this is an incredibly rare event, turn the page for some half-assed perfunctory comparative analysis which, as half-assed as it might be, as perfunctory as it certainly is, is nevertheless pretty darn illuminating.
Continue reading Further Proof That The Political Elite Of Los Angeles Have Thrown Gil Cedillo Under The Bus: Mitch O’Farrell’s Scheduler, David Cano, Contributed $125 to Joe Bray-Ali’s Campaign, Which Is Effectively An Endorsement Of The Damn Hippy Bike Rider By Mr. CD13 Himself! →