Tag Archives: Misdemeanors

Pardon Me, Would You Have Any Grey Poupon? Wildly Inappropriate Hilarity At FDBID Board Meeting About Burn Treatment For BID Security Guards Reveals Not Only That Zillionaires Don’t Care A Whit About The Well-Being Of The 99.9% But Also That They Actually Are Perversely Obsessed With Mustard Varieties — BID Operations Director Randall Tampa Admits That The Point Of Arrests Of Homeless People Is To Harass Them Rather Than To Enforce The Law, Asks Property Owners To Tell Tenants They Won’t Even Have To Testify In Court If They Report The Homeless

March 16, 2018 Mike Leave a comment

Well, yesterday I was blessed¹ to attend a meeting of the good old Fashion District BID, and you might even have noticed that I uploaded video² and wrote a long and hilarious³ post about it. But these meetings are so rich in a weirdly Freudian way that there’s a neverending fount of subjects bubbling up from each and every one, and yesterday’s was no exception.

For instance, watch and listen here as unexpectedly professional Director of Operations Randall Tampa informs the BIDdies whose minion he is about an elderly disheveled white arsonist loose in the district.⁴ At one point, it seems, the arsonist lit a dumpster fire and BID security were the first on the scene. I’ll let Randall Tampa take it from here:

And in one case [the fire location] was a twenty yard rollup that was under a building. And our safety team smelled it, got there, saw it. And they wheeled the trash bin out. And they actually burned their hands. But the fire department got there, put it out, told them to put mustard on their hands. I guess that’s the new cure for minor burns.

And turn the page for some discussion, another episode from the meeting, and a complete transcription of Randall Tampa’s remarks.
Continue reading Pardon Me, Would You Have Any Grey Poupon? Wildly Inappropriate Hilarity At FDBID Board Meeting About Burn Treatment For BID Security Guards Reveals Not Only That Zillionaires Don’t Care A Whit About The Well-Being Of The 99.9% But Also That They Actually Are Perversely Obsessed With Mustard Varieties — BID Operations Director Randall Tampa Admits That The Point Of Arrests Of Homeless People Is To Harass Them Rather Than To Enforce The Law, Asks Property Owners To Tell Tenants They Won’t Even Have To Testify In Court If They Report The Homeless →

Hollywood BID Patrol, Miscellaneous

LAMC 41.47.1: This Seemingly Unknown Municipal Bathroom Law Could Change the Whole Public Urination Discussion in Los Angeles, but it has Never Been Used

June 7, 2016 Mike 3 Comments

These signs are hanging all over the City of Los Angeles, and it turns out that they're completely unenforceable. — These signs are hanging all over the City of Los Angeles, and it turns out that they’re completely unenforceable.

Arrests for public urination/defecation are a fundamental tool in the war against homeless people in Los Angeles, as well as being a major part of the BID Patrol’s work in Hollywood. In 2015, for instance, the BID’s data shows that about 8%⁵ of the arrests that Andrews International made across the two HPOA BIDs⁶ were for public urination/defecation, which is a violation of LAMC 41.47.2.

When the City Council passed LAMC 41.47.2 in 2003, they were roundly (and rightly) criticized by advocates for the rights of homeless people, who pointed out that it was inhumane to criminalize an activity that is necessary to sustain life without providing a practical alternative. My colleagues have written before about how Councilmembers responded to this by promising informally that it wouldn’t be enforced if there were no nearby public restrooms and by promising to install more public restrooms around the City. However, they failed to amend the actual statute, which has led to widespread abuse.⁷ And 13 years later there aren’t significantly more public restrooms.

However, there is another part of the public urination law, LAMC 41.47.1, which is never even mentioned in discussions of the issue, and yet it is not only relevant, but radically, transformatively relevant. It was adopted by the Council in 1988 and says:

If restroom facilities are made available for the public, clients, or employees, no person owning, controlling, or having charge of such accommodation or facility shall prohibit or prevent the use of such restroom facilities by a person with a physical handicap, regardless of whether that person is a customer, client, employee, or paid entrant to the accommodation or facility. Employee restrooms need not be made available if there are other restroom facilities available on the premises unless employee restroom facilities have been constructed or altered to accommodate the physically handicapped and such facilities are not available elsewhere on the premises.

This has the potential to change the entire conversation about public restrooms, public urination, and homelessness in Los Angeles.
Continue reading LAMC 41.47.1: This Seemingly Unknown Municipal Bathroom Law Could Change the Whole Public Urination Discussion in Los Angeles, but it has Never Been Used →

Hypocrisy

Rogue Real Estate Zillionaires CIM Group Continue Rampaging Hollywood Crime Spree and Hypocritical Support for Continued Incarceration of Homeless

April 9, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

First page of Order to Comply posted in the window of the CiM Group crime scene at Sunset and Gordon. The second page is available here. — First page of Order to Comply posted in the window of the CiM Group crime scene at Sunset and Gordon describing their rabid outlawry, scofflaw shenanigans, and general contempt for the rule of law. The second page is available here.

We’ve written before about the rogue real estate zillionaires CIM Group and their scofflaw shenanigans, from infiltrating their Brown-Act-flouting minion Monica Yamada onto the BIDs’ Joint Security Committee to their bribery, permit-condition-ignoring, and general villainy. They are lately, of course, famous for having so egregiously ignored the terms of a deal with the City over their building at Sunset and Gordon that a judge voided their permits and told them to evict all their tenants.

And just now, on April 3, 2015, the LA Board of Building and Safety Commissioners slapped an “ORDER TO COMPLY” on the window of the Sunset/Gordon building which states:

An investigation of various complaints received by the Department has revealed that the subject apartment building is being used as a hotel without the required permits and Certificate of Occupancy.

Therefore, you are hereby ordered to stop the unapproved use and occupancy as a hotel on or before April 10, 2015.

So it’s illegal, but they’re still renting it out as a hotel. First we gotta wonder how would they be doing that? There’s no sign on the building. Find out after the break!
Continue reading Rogue Real Estate Zillionaires CIM Group Continue Rampaging Hollywood Crime Spree and Hypocritical Support for Continued Incarceration of Homeless →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

A Pot to Piss In

November 3, 2014 kohlhaas Leave a comment

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.

A public urinal in Paris, France c. 1865

The Hollywood Property Owners Alliance is really, really, really opposed to people pissing on the streets of Hollywood. They’re so opposed that in 2013 they spent over $132,000 to combat it, at approximately $1500 per pissing incident.¹ Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. It’s safe to assume that the HPOA BIDs have their hearts dead set against public pissing.

But why are all these people pissing in the streets?
Continue reading A Pot to Piss In →