Tag Archives: McDonald’s

Analysis of Public Urination Arrest Reports Reveals BID Patrol Ignorance of Meaning of Word “Public,” Illuminates Importance of Rule of Law in a Free Society

March 14, 2016 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Public urine in Hollywood belongs in a public restroom. But what counts as public?

While poking around BID Patrol arrest reports recently obtained from the HPOA by our faithful correspondent, we noticed a weird, repetitive quirk in the ones relating to LAMC 41.47.2, which forbids public urination. The arresting security guards uniformly either ask their victim if he or she knew of the existence of public restrooms close by or else they note in their report that there were public restrooms close by. Now, whenever one finds this kind of textual consistency in police reports it’s possible to be sure of two things. First, there’s some element of the crime that they’re trying to make sure is definitely established. Second, that they’re probably lying. In this case, it was hard to see what element might be related to the proximity of public restrooms. The law doesn’t mention them, and is not subtle in the least:

No person shall urinate or defecate in or upon any public street, sidewalk, alley, plaza, beach, park, public building or other publicly maintained facility or place, or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view, except when using a urinal, toilet or commode located in a restroom, or when using a portable or temporary toilet or other facility designed for the sanitary disposal of human waste and which is enclosed from public view.

But a little googling revealed the explanation, among other interesting things. First, public urination wasn’t against the law in the city of Los Angeles until 2003. We’re guessing that there was no pressing need to make it so because vagrancy laws could be used against public urinators as desired until they were definitively destroyed in 1983.¹ So maybe outlawing public urination wasn’t as urgent as, e.g., squashing drinking beer in the park (which was outlawed in LA only in 1983) and also, the LA Times suggested that previously public urinators were charged with littering, but that the City Attorney decided that that was bogus. In any case, the Council file on the matter shows, surprisingly, that it took more than four years to get the prohibition passed into law. There doesn’t seem to have been any public discussion of the matter before it passed, either, although it may be just that the online materials from that long ago are fragmentary.

Second, the LA Times article quoted the objections of members of the Los Angeles Community Action Network and other homeless advocates to a law which criminalized essential bodily functions of the homeless, and in response, after the law was passed, according to the Times, “Council members pledged that people would be prosecuted only in cases when there is a public toilet nearby that they failed to use.” So this is why, no doubt, the BID Patrol feels that it has to note the locations of nearby “public” restrooms in its arrest reports. Their weirdo interpretation of the meaning of “public” also shows why it’s necessary to put things like the “public restrooms available” pledge in the law itself. Actually, once the law is passed, it doesn’t matter what Councilmembers say they meant it to mean, it only matters what it says. This is how the rule of law works in a free society. Also, isn’t it very suspicious but unfortunately not surprising that they put the fuzzy-wuzzy warmsy-hugsy interpretation of the law in the paper but not in the statute books?

And that’s not the worst thing about this nonsense. Even if the City Council intended the law to be enforced this way, even if the freaking Mayor ordered the LAPD only to enforce the law this way, none of that would reign in the BID Patrol. They are essentially beyond the control of public policy and beholden only to the written letter of the law.² As we’ve discussed before, according to LAPD Commander Andrew Smith, if a citizen’s arrest is made, the LAPD must accept custody of the arrestee even if the arrest was made contrary to public policy.

We look at some specific examples after the break, and also provide links to all mentions of the words “public” and “restroom” in both the 2007 and the 2013 BID Patrol arrest reports so you can see for yourself what’s going on.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

World-Renowned Magazine The New Yorker Confirms in Current Issue that Our March 2015 Reporting on Carol Massie’s Self-Delusory Misrepresentation of her Business Model Was 100% Accurate

October 28, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald's queen Carol Massie who, in direct contradiction to high McDonald's corporate-level mucky-mucks, thinks her business is not all about the bucks. — Jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s queen Carol Massie who, in direct contradiction to high McDonald’s corporate-level mucky-mucks, thinks her business is not all about the bucks. Despite its appearance this is not a surveillance picture. It’s just a picture with that surveillance aesthetic!

Remember back in March 2015 when we reported on the weirdly racist meanderings of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce flunky Marty Shelton as filtered through the unrepressed id of jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s queen Carol Massie, who, in a surprising-even-for-her outburst at a meeting of the Sunset-Vine BID Board blamed Hollywood nightclub owners for ruining everything because they run “…these businesses who don’t really care about anything except that they make a profit.”??

At that time, we responded, quite reasonably even if we do say so ourselves, to the effect that:

Carol, here’s a newsflash: your company destroys rainforests, destroys the health of the world’s people, exploits its employees, destroys everything, because it doesn’t “really care about anything except that [it] make[s] a profit.” That’s what McDonald’s does.

Well, now it’s time for us to confess. We didn’t really know that for sure. We were just guessing. For all we knew at that time the corporate overlords of the mighty McDonald’s machine were all sitting around back in good old Oak Brook, Illinois, where they have pitched their mansion, just not caring at all about money cause money can’t buy them love or whatever. We just made a claim that sounded plausible and kept our fingers crossed that we wouldn’t end up in trouble. Well, we were right!
Continue reading World-Renowned Magazine The New Yorker Confirms in Current Issue that Our March 2015 Reporting on Carol Massie’s Self-Delusory Misrepresentation of her Business Model Was 100% Accurate →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

HPOA in Criminal Conspiracy with LA City Attorney to Abuse Intellectual Property Law in Never-Ending War on Constitutional Rights of Hollywood/Highland Street Characters

June 16, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

You probably thought that Batman was the good guy, but it's time to admit that you were wrong. Here he is, not just terrorizing poor innocent tourists who don't know any better than to allow themselves to be victimized, but he's also flagrantly violating trademark law. If he were as honest as we'd been led to believe he'd be hauling his own self off to jail instead of macking on helpless tourist girlies. — You probably thought that Batman was the good guy, but it’s time to admit that you were wrong. Here he is, not just terrorizing poor innocent tourists who don’t know any better than to allow themselves to be victimized, but he’s also flagrantly violating trademark law. If he were as honest as we’d been led to believe he’d be hauling his own self off to jail instead of macking on helpless tourist girlies.

Stories of the rich and powerful abusing intellectual property laws to stifle free expression, shut down criticism of their terroristic conspiracies against humanity, lock away little old ladies because their grandkids misuse bittorrent, wantonly slaughter cute lil bunnies, and so on, are as common in the tech press as dandelions on the expansive and suspiciously green lawns of Hancock Park before the gardeners show up on Thursday morning.

Sesame Street Characters performing for US Navy personnel in a manner which, presumably, the BID finds acceptable because there are no tourists involved. Read more about guys in Elmo suits after the break.

This post-capitalo-apocalyptic legal technology, the use of which reached its supernova-esque apotheosis earlier this month with the City of Inglewood’s mind-blowingly shenaniganistic attempt to assert copyright in video of city council meetings,¹ it turns out was being used by our friends at the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance to try to shut down the by-them-much-reviled street performers in a shameless criminal conspiracy with their aiders and abettors at the the City Attorney’s office and the LAPD as late as last August. Although our bosom BIDdies seem to have met with little success, except, evidently, in the case of Elmo of Sesame Street, their futile attempts are quite telling. Read the actual evidence here and our commentary on them after the break.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Supposedly Neutralized Vine Street Tree Vandal Rage, Overkill Increases; New Attack Destroys More than Trees!

June 13, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Although the BIDs seem to feel they've caught the Vine Street Tree Vandal, our correspondent noted the pictured damage this morning. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the vandalistic attacks have targeted not only trees but their paraphernalia as well. — Although the Sunset-Vine BID seems to feel they’ve apprehended¹ the Vine Street Tree Vandal, our correspondent noted the pictured damage this morning. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the vandalistic attacks have targeted not only trees but their paraphernalia as well.

Our faithful correspondent, walking north on Vine Street early this morning, noticed that a jacaranda tree, individually one of the most favored targets of the BID bête noire locally known as the Vine Street tree vandal, was not only newly revandalized but that its wooden support apparatus² was also, for the first time in our experience, destroyed as well. Is it a coincidence that the vandalized tree is right in front of jittery little psychopath Carol Massie’s McDonald’s at the corner of DeLongpre and Vine?
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Featured, Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, The Race Card

Black, Brown, Poor, Nightclub Patrons Are Ruining Hollywood According to Hollywood Chamber Chair Marty Shelton and McDonald’s Owner Carol Massie

March 19, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Jittery little psychopath Carol Massie: "These kind of people" (Hollywood nightclub patrons) use drugs, cause "mayhem," and are catered to by "businesses who don’t really care about anything except that they make a profit." — Jittery little psychopath Carol Massie: “These kind of people” (Hollywood nightclub patrons) use drugs, cause “mayhem,” and are catered to by “businesses who don’t really care about anything except that they make a profit.”

Marty Shelton, Board Chairman of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, wants to turn Hollywood into a sundown town. According to Marty, nightclub patrons who are “decidedly minority, brown and black, and my guess, from a lower economic strata,” are “not appealing at all” and you won’t find that a wealthy apartment dweller “from Sunset and Vine was at Janes House hanging with the homies.”

Here’s the backstory: Last weekend a bunch of people from the Sunset-Vine BID and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce took what they call a “midnight walk” around Hollywood Boulevard. They wander around the Boulevard from midnight until 3 a.m. so they can see how the other half lives in Hollywood. And they don’t like what they see. They don’t like it one bit.

At the March 17^th meeting of the Sunset-Vine BID board of directors, Fabiolus Cucina owner Fabio Conti read aloud from an email that Marty sent to the participants describing his reaction. You can watch the relevant segment here, and there’s a transcription after the break. It’s worth reading or hearing the whole thing, because our poor journalistic tools can’t begin to do justice to the offensive craziness to be found therein.

Marty, here’s a newsflash: the city of Los Angeles is “decidedly minority, mostly brown and black.” That’s the way it is here, and the fact that it’s like that in Hollywood at night is a GOOD thing. The fact that it’s NOT like that in Hollywood during the day is the problem. We know it’s too much to ask of the BID, the Chamber, and their minions that they solve this problem, but it’s not too much to ask that they refrain from making it worse by pushing their apartheid policies on our lovely city. If “brown and black” people don’t “mesh with the new high-income residents coming in along with ofc tenants” then let those tenants live somewhere else, like, I don’t know, Minneapolis. Our city is “decidedly minority” and we LIKE it.

After Fabio read aloud this abhorrent piece of racist posturing, jittery little psychopath and owner of multiple Hollywood-area McDonald’s franchises Carol Massie weighed in with another weirdly delusional take on the subject:

Thus spake Carol Massie: You know, one of the problems, I think, and this is from going to security meetings. I think that the patrons do have a lot of money. And they, that’s why they cater to them, and that’s why some of the nightclubs [unintelligible] these kind of people, because they do have that kind of money, and they pay a lot of money for the drink…for, for, for getting into the building. It’s not so much the drinks cause they do other things instead, because after hours it’s mayhem. But whatever they look like, they have money from somewhere and they’re bringing it to these businesses who don’t really care about anything except that they make a profit.

Jittery little psychopath Carol Massie's McDonald's at DeLongpre Avenue and Vine Street, just sitting there not "really car[ing] about anything except that they make a profit." — Jittery little psychopath Carol Massie’s McDonald’s at DeLongpre Avenue and Vine Street, just sitting there not “really car[ing] about anything except that they make a profit.”

Carol, here’s a newsflash: your company destroys rainforests, destroys the health of the world’s people, exploits its employees, destroys everything, because it doesn’t “really care about anything except that [it] make[s] a profit.” That’s what McDonald’s does. And “these kind of people”?! And “they do other things instead”?!? And “money from somewhere”?!?! “MAYHEM”???!!?!!

And if you don’t think “these kind of people” are good for Hollywood, why do you keep the drive-through window at your Vine Street restaurant open 24 hours? Who do you think wants an Egg McMuffin at 3 a.m. if not nightclub patrons in Hollywood? Do you “really care about anything except that [you] make a profit?” Put your money where your mouth runs off and stop making money off “these kind of people,” why don’t you? We don’t want to seem naive. Rich white racists are racist, but for God’s sake, don’t talk about it on camera.
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