After a number of requests and a few lengthy meetings of the MichaelKohlhaas.org ethics committee we have decided to make unredacted copies of Steve Seyler’s reports to the HPOA/CHC Joint Security Committee available to our readers. They are currently available via the menu in the header (direct link here). As we’ve mentioned on a number of occasions, these reports are not pretty. We feel, however, that exposing their ugliness to the world is more important than protecting the already-violated privacy of their subjects.
Anyway, Seyler’s bête noire is something called Taaka Vodka. He has effectively criminalized its possession in the BID-occupied areas of Hollywood:1
He’s also obsessed with a brand of vodka called Borski, to the point where he seems overjoyed that it was involved in the BID patrol’s thousandth arrest of 2013:3
Seyler has, like the guy whose hat graces his head in the satirical picture above, evidently inspired his officers to form a mystical cult whose rituals include some kind of idolatry involving Taaka:2
Continue reading Steve Seyler, Vodka Nazi
Broomfield’s film exposes the fact that the City of Los Angeles allowed a serial killer to operate with impunity for 22 years, murdering untold numbers of women. Neither the LAPD nor the City government took the case seriously because the victims were black women, many prostitutes or drug addicts. This point was made repeatedly and convincingly, both on screen and during the Q&A after the film, by stars Pam Brooks and Margaret Prescod, who has been pressing the LAPD about the killings since 1986, thereby earning the wrath of, among other geniuses, Darryl Gates, our city’s second worst mistake. Gates, in his inimitably idiotic way, called Prescod and her compatriots in the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders “dummies” for even raising the issue.
Broomfield’s stunning work shows that Prescod and her allies have been right all along, though. The film gives an irrefutable performative demonstration of the fact that the LAPD has never taken this case seriously: In 2009 the LAPD knew of one survivor of the killer’s attacks. In 2014, before Broomfield started filming, that one survivor was still the only one known. But in the course of filming Brooks managed to locate and arrange for Broomfield to interview not just one additional woman who survived the Sleeper’s attacks but four. How is it possible that a serious investigation could leave such major witnesses to be discovered, and not even discovered by the police, four years after a suspect’s arrest?
It’s unconscionable. The City of Los Angeles will never live down the shame of having, through racism and indifference, abandoned dozens or hundreds of its most vulnerable citizens to a cruel thrill-killer (or killers; the true extent of the damage may never be known). It couldn’t have happened without the utter dehumanization of these women, each and every one someone’s child. According to Joshua Kleinfeld of Northwestern University, “in Southern California, police slang in the early 1990s for the murder of drug dealers, gangsters, prostitutes, and other lawbreakers was the vivid and extremely disturbing term, ‘NHI (no humans involved) Homicide.'”2 And once the police and white Los Angeles have dehumanized people to the point that they can be killed without consequence, killers will flourish. Why wouldn’t they?
Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Promotes Mindset that Aids, Comforts Los-Angeles-Area Serial Killers
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.
But why are all these people pissing in the streets?
Continue reading A Pot to Piss In
Seyler is, of course, speaking to his bosses, so he has to make sure they understand what they’re getting for their money. And what are they getting?
Continue reading Sidewalk With BID Patrol
Steve’s narratives of the homeless people of Hollywood lack any consciousness of the fact that these are human beings with human lives that he’s dealing with. They have no power, no voice, no property, they have nothing. They are harried and tormented by Steve’s Andrews International Security guards. It’s not enough that Steve’s guards scream at and arrest the homeless for activities which are not only lawful but completely normal if done in a house: sleeping, sitting, urination, defecation, but he mocks them with epithets and has them photographed like trophy animals in the process.
His reports betray no evidence of compassion or even a basic understanding of the fact that these people are homeless as the result of social processes beyond anyone’s control. Instead he fills his reports with self-serving anecdotes about his horror-movie-boyscout guards helping blind men across the street and buying hungry people pizza interspersed with immature jokes about shit on the streets and illicit vodka. Is he unaware that his ordained purpose is not helping and saving but moving homeless people out of the steamroller path of businessmen and their plans for tourism and development? He can’t possibly be, which makes his pretense and his weird antics even more disturbing.
And the members of the Joint Security Committee, who have evidently received these reports for years without either seeing how disgusting they are or putting an end to them (if only for the sake of public image) are as guilty or more so. It’s plausible that Steve can’t help the fact that he’s a bully-boy who ended up with too much power for anyone’s good, but Kerry Morrison at least seems like a decent, kind person. I can’t believe she hasn’t seen how bad this is. Certainly the LAPD, LASD, and City Attorney’s Office liasons to the BID ought to know better; they’re professionals. Real police don’t act like this (at least not in public). It’s a shameful thing.
Continue reading A Shameful Thing
I’m pleased to announce our new Documents page, also available through the menu on the header in all its arboreally structured glory. We hope to build this into a repository of records we obtain under the California Public Records Act. So far we just have one item prepared for publication, a report by Steve Seyler of Andrews International Security to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID. This is the document that Kerry Morrison originally refused to let me read at the meeting. I can see why she was reluctant because it’s not pretty. We’ve redacted it here to try to preserve some shreds of dignity in an ugly set of circumstances. Of course the unredacted original is available on request from Kerry.
San Francisco is exactly what easterners expect from a city and the weather’s better and the executioner’s face is always well hidden. So they “get it” immediately and love it instinctively, like tourists love Denny’s because the food’s the same wherever they are. Frisco dwellers crave this universal approval, too. They’re addicted to an extent where, like junkies, they need a big dose of tourist-love-bombing daily just to feel normal. Like sex addicts, they continually need yet another piece of strange or they’ll forget they exist. For over a hundred years they’ve been letting this addiction distort their city’s culture and politics to make it even more pleasing to easterners.
Continue reading Frisco Dwellers don’t ♥ LA; Never Have, Never Will
Each member of a legislative body who attends a meeting of that legislative body where action is taken in violation of any provision of this chapter, and where the member intends to deprive the public of information to which the member knows or has reason to know the public is entitled under this chapter, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
Now, that intent element is a little sticky. Evidently it’s not a crime “to deprive the public of information” if you’re just ignorant of the law or too arrogant to understand that the law applies to you or whatever. But at least some members of some groups subject to the Brown Act must be guilty of a misdemeanor when, e.g., they explicitly deny members of the public access to documents which the Brown Act states explicitly must be made available to the public “immediately.” When a member of a body subject to the Brown Act says “no, you can’t look at the document,” the intent is clear. The member “has reason to know” the law because it’s their job to know the law, them being a member of a Brown-Act body. Bang! Misdemeanor. Then how does the law get enforced in such a case?
The procedure is laid out in the Act itself (§54960 et seq.). Either the DA or a member of the public can go to court and ask for injunctive relief of various kinds or else “any interested party” can write a letter to the criminals, point out their crime, give them 30 days to think about it, and allow them the option of promising never to do the crime in the future albeit without admitting that they actually did it in the past. As far as we can see, no one has ever gone to jail for violating the Brown Act (although see this story about a guy in Illinois who placed a whole county board of supervisors under citizen’s arrest).
Continue reading How to Enforce the Law
