LOS ANGELES

RACE RIOT OR NOT?-The 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance is at hand, and the corporate media again routinely portray this historic event as a race riot resulting from the acquittal of four policemen who viciously beat up Rodney King, an African-American motorist. The media then systematically report that inter-ethnic and police-community relations in Los Angeles are much improved. Case closed since another “riot” is no longer in the cards. 

But was this event really a race riot – not a class riot based on extreme inequality -- and have its underlying causes been truly ameliorated by overhauling the Los Angeles Police Department and reporting improved inter-ethnic relations? 

The answers do not just depend on facts. They also depend on which theory of racism you subscribe to. While the facts are extraordinarily complex, we do know the following: 

The civil disturbance lasted for three days, from Thursday, April 29 to Saturday, May 1, 1992, although the City of Los Angeles maintained curfews and marshal law until the following Monday, for a full five days. When the city lifted the curfew, there was short-term intervention by public agencies to aid residents and businesses whose structures were damaged or destroyed during the event. This was soon followed by Re-Build LA (1992-97) a private sector initiative whose legacy is 259 boxes of non-digitized files at the Loyal-Marymount University library. There was also the official Christopher Commission report, whose focus was the conduct of the LAPD, including police reform proposals. 

But there were no prosecutions related to the 55 people slain between Thursday and Saturday. The media suggested they were victims of random bullets or other rioters shot them during looting. Since there is no evidence for these suspicions, it is just as likely that police officers or merchants protecting their buildings and stores murdered these 55 people. 

Based on the number of people arrested, (between 10,000 -13,000 of whom 52 percent were Latino, 10 percent white, and 38 percent Black), wounded (4,000), deported (several hundred), killed (55), looted or torched buildings (4,000), lost jobs (40,000), and damaged property ($1 billion in 1992 dollars), this was the second most destructive civil disturbance in U.S. history. Only New York City’s 1863 anti-draft riot was larger! While the two events are similar in their length and damage, they have a major difference. Historians have extensively researched the 1863 insurrection in New York City, while, at least until its 25^th anniversary, social scientists, public officials, filmmakers, artists, pundits, and journalists mostly ignored the 1992 Los Angeles event. 

It is the perfect example of a structured absence, an epochal historical event that has been methodically overlooked for a quarter century. In the language of George Orwell’s “1984,” it was flushed down the memory hole. 

Based on my reconstruction, LA’s 1992 civil disturbance moved through three stages: 

Stage 1 began in the late afternoon of Thursday, April 29, after the Simi Valley acquittals of the four police officers who attacked Rodney King. The response was largely spontaneous, beginning with several widely rebroadcast televised incidences of inter-racial violence in a largely African-American neighborhood. 

By the end of Thursday afternoon, looting and arson also began. It targeted particularly disliked stores and swap meets. Most ominously, an enormous cloud of dark smoke enveloped Los Angeles. In non-riot areas, such as West LA, pandemonium resulted. Nearly all employees left work early to join their families at home, picking up children at schools where teachers and staff refused to remain on-site. 

There were also more spontaneous events protesting the trial in different parts of the Los Angeles, mostly minority neighborhoods in south Los Angeles and Pico/Union, with pervasive political graffiti, typically “No Justice, No Peace." Demonstrators also targeted and torched overtly political targets. These included a military recruitment center, a City of Los Angeles multi-agency office that included an African-American LA City Council member’s field office, as well as many black-owned businesses. 

One of the most interesting political targets was a commercial center, WLCAC, funded through anti-poverty programs. Local residents physically chased its founder, Ted Watkins, through WLCAC’s grounds, but he managed to escape. 

By Thursday evening, on the streets of south Los Angeles, one of the locations where the rebellion began, a party atmosphere developed without any evidence of racial or ethnic friction, partially explaining why whites comprised 10 percent of those arrested. People were just people, partying on the streets, often sharing “free” consumer items grabbed from the stores. 

As for the notoriously brutal Los Angeles Police Department, they were stunned by events. They withdrew from the epicenter and only watched events. Likewise the Los Angeles Fire Department was overwhelmed, and it could not save many buildings. 

As a result, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley declared Marshal Law and imposed a curfew, eventually on the entire city. He also requested intervention from the State of California and Federal Government. They responded on Friday, sending in the National Guard from northern California, as well as the California Highway Patrol, Federal marshals, police and sheriff brigades from many other jurisdictions, and Marines from Camp Pendleton. 

These complex events, though anecdotal, belie the media spin that Los Angeles had a race riot, similar to many American cities at the end of World War I, or a 1960s-style ghetto rebellion. 

Stage 2 was the second day, when 4,000 federalized National Guard troops arrived in Los Angeles to augment the overwhelmed Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff. Nevertheless, this is when most of the arson and looting took place. Near my house, in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile area, I watched people ram a station wagon through an appliance store plate glass window and then fill up their car with TVs. 

I also remember hearing radio news reports about looting at a drug store on Western Avenue, north of the I-10, in what we now call Koreatown. The reporter described a completely multi-racial crowd consisting of Asians, Latinos, Blacks, and Anglos, all grabbing consumer goods off the shelves. It was during this second day that the civil disturbance spread over the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area, and also leapfrogged to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Tampa, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and even several European cities. 

Stage 3 appeared on Saturday, after most of the political protests and high intensity “discount shopping” subsided. At this point, organized crime joined the fray, targeting specific stores, such as Samy’s Camera, which was then located on Beverly Boulevard near LaBrea. At the camera store men armed with automatic weapons held neighbors at bay while they shot the locks off of the door. 

They then went into the store and selectively grabbed the most expensive camera equipment. By this time the entire city was under Marshal Law and police forces and federal troops patrolled the entire city until May 24, including areas that had or little or no demonstrations, looting, or fires. The press reported that the National Guardsmen’s rifles were loaded and aimed at pedestrians, with the safeties turned off, as they patrolled LA’s streets in military trucks. 

Saturday, by the way, was also May Day. Despite the enormous police and military presence, there were May Day rallies in Watts and in downtown Los Angeles, along with many smaller demonstrations focused on police misconduct and poverty issues. These events were highly political and were met with an enormous inter-agency police response, but no one was attacked or arrested for demonstrating. 

How do we interpret this story? 

Clearly, most press coverage continues to portray these events as a race riot. The total militarization of the civil disturbance was presented as efforts by elected officials to protect the public, not commercial property or institutions, even though much of the subsequent Federal and Rebuild LA aid efforts focused on rebuilding stores that had been looted or burnt down. 

Nevertheless, a look at immediate press coverage, such as the next issue of Newsweek, presented the uprising as a class riot, a conflict between have-nots and haves. It was only later that government and media spin machines repackaged this civil disturbance, with its major multi-racial class component, as a race riot, not an economic uprising suppressed by an integrated military and police response. 

Nevertheless, the overwhelming data and analysis confirms that the 1992 civil disturbance was primarily an urban rebellion focused on property, with strong political and economic components, not a race riot. The misperception that it was a race riot largely results from the several televised racial attacks at the very beginning of the events. Furthermore, by focusing on the ethnicity of burned-out merchants, rather than their economic role, many television viewers were also misled to believe that the attacks on their stores were racially based. 

Which Theory of Racism? The classic theory of race relations, developed by W.E.B. DuBois and Oliver Cox, dominated social science until the 1940's. It considered racism to be institutional. It originated with slavery and colonialism and evolved into laws maintaining apartheid and segregation, supporting ideologies and social-psychological attitudes (prejudice), and discriminatory acts, usually called bias and bigotry. According to this theory, the purpose of these laws and beliefs is to sustain economic exploitation in which some ethnic or racial groups are super-exploited. Because racism generates so much inequality and because this inequality then produces acts of individual and collective resistance, geographical segregation usually allows this resistance to be quarantined. 

According to this theory, prejudiced attitudes and prejudiced behavior, including racist mobs and pogroms, result from racism. They are not its cause. This theory, interprets LA’s 1992 civil disturbance as primarily a multi-racial urban rebellion directed against business and government institutions that the participants held responsible for economic exploitation and political repression. Scattered incidences of interracial violence were not the main event. 

The competing contact theory of racism presents the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance as a race riot in which the Simi Valley trial acquittal of white police officers provoked anti-white violence by African-Americans. This theory is based on ideas of supposedly innate ethnocentrism and xenophobia refined in the 1940s through such famous scholars as Gunnar Myrdal, author of “An American Dilemma.” The contact theory has been the dominant theory in the field of race and ethnic relations ever since. It argues that racial and ethnic categories are obvious and self-evident to people. Individuals automatically know which ethnic or racial group they are in and what groups other people are in. They largely and “naturally” see the world divided into these various national and sub-national groups. 

Humans are essentially genetically hardwired to see their own group positively (ethnocentrism) and other groups negatively (xenophobia). When different groups have contact, these natural processes kick in. At the more benign end of the contact spectrum, prejudice spontaneously appears. At the extreme end, inter-racial or inter-ethnic contact results in violent race riots, sometimes even in genocide. According to this theory, contact produces “organic” prejudice resulting from people reacting negatively to obviously perceptible group differences. These prejudiced attitudes, in turn, result in prejudiced behavior, which aggregates into racist practices and patterns. 

In terms of Los Angeles, there are scattered facts that support the contact theory, such as the televised beating of a white, Latino, and Asian motorist. Others point to the burning of Korean-owned stores in many neighborhoods. 

As for the arson and looting, the same acts occurred in the 1965 Watts Rebellion, but then the target was another middleman minority, Jews. In both cases, scattered merchants were burnt out, with little evidence that their ethnicity, rather than their economic niche, was the cause of arson. 

Furthermore, in the case of 1992, many of the merchants who got burnt out operated in Latino neighborhoods, like Koreatown, which had nothing to do with Black grievances against the police. In fact, the 1992 statistics indicate that the LAPD arrested more Latinos than Blacks, yet the press never reported widespread friction between Latinos and Koreans. 

My conclusion is that the overwhelming data confirms that the 1992 civil disturbance was primarily an urban rebellion based on economic inequality, not a race riot. Newsweek was correct when they called it a class riot. Furthermore, the role of the police, reinforced by the corporate media for over two decades, was to stop the rebellion, protect property, and squelch its political dimension, not separate warring racial and ethnic groups. 

This leads to the next question, then. Could it happen again? According to the most recent public opinion poll, conducted by Loyola Marymount University, an increasing number of Angelinos – over a majority -- think another civil disturbance is likely to happen. According to the lead investigator, Prof. Fernando Guerra, “Economic disparity continues to increase, and at the end of the day, that is what causes disruption. . . People are trying to get along and want to get along, but they understand economic tension boils over to political and social tension.” 

Considering City Hall’s role in promoting economic inequality through real estate speculation, General Plan Amendments and Zone Changes benefiting property owners, wide scale demolitions and dislocation, and the resulting gentrification, the public is not apparently bamboozled by reports of LAPD reforms and feel good stories about ethnic fusion restaurants.

(Dick Platkin reports on local planning issues for City Watch. Progressive Planning published an earlier version of this article. Please send any questions, comments, or corrections to: [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS-One of the most disturbing and regrettable trends in today's news reporting is the systematic and often premeditated failure to even mention highly relevant facts that, if addressed, would cause the reader to come up with a completely different interpretation or conclusion. 

A recent case in point can be found in KPCC 89.3 FM reporter Kyle Stokes' article: “What should LAUSD do about its ballooning benefits costs?”  Stokes approaches this issue through the respective positions of incumbent LAUSD Board Member Steve Zimmer and his challenger, charter schools-backed opponent Nick Melvoin. He asks each how he would deal with the looming $13.6 billion unfunded health and other benefits package obligations, but nowhere in the article does he mention that, for the last eight years, LAUSD has been "dealing" with this problem by systematically and illegally targeting and removing (with fabricated charges) teachers at the top of the salary scale and/or others about to vest in expensive lifetime health or other retirement benefits. 

Approximately 93% of the thousands of teachers who have and continue to be targeted for removal from their senior teaching positions at LAUSD find it difficult to get others to believe that they did nothing wrong or that this kind of heinous, illegal behavior is even going on. People just don't want to think the LAUSD administration would have any motive for acting this way. 

If nothing else, the magnitude of how far in the red LAUSD is with its health and other benefits programs offers an even greater motivation for LAUSD to target its more senior, expensive employees. To quote the late Vito Corleone, "It's just business." 

And why hasn't the State of California gone after LAUSD to defend these senior teachers and other targeted certificated and classified employees? If (and more likely when) LAUSD goes bankrupt, it’s the State of California that will be left holding the bag to bail them out. This clearly represents a conflict of interest for the state when it comes to defending wrongfully charged teachers whose greatest actual "crime" is being too expensive.

But if LAUSD can save $60,000 a year in salary and benefits a piece by getting rid of high seniority teachers -- in an attempt to balance the benefits budget that is billions in the red and could bankrupt the system in the next two years -- then perhaps LAUSD’s reprehensible actions against its targeted employees will offer a compelling reason for someone in a position of legal or journalistic authority to ask what the hell is going on. After all, it's not as if LAUSD has made any attempt to hide what they have been doing. 

KPCC's Kyle Stokes feels compelled to disclose in his article that Professor Fernando Guerra of Loyola-Marymount, who he cites, is on the KPCC Board. However, when it comes to disclosing the significantly more relevant information about how much money KPCC receives from corporate-controlled foundations that are moving to privatize public education with non-profit charters run by for-profit corporations, that somehow is not worthy of discussion.

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH-Twenty-five years after the 1992 LA Insurrection, we are deluged by retrospectives and analyses. Many of them are excellent. All ignore one of the bedrock causes – a corrupt judicial system. 

As some of the documentaries mention in passing, many Blacks believed that finally with the trial of the four police officers, there would be some modicum of justice. After decades of being harassed, beaten and railroaded into prison by a predatory police department, many believed that the Rodney King case would hold the occupying army to an accounting.   

The judicial system played a far greater role in causing the uprising than by merely moving the trial to a bedroom community of police officers. For decades judges in the criminal courts had been lynchpins in the abuse, unjust jailing, and murders of Blacks by “the system.” After the disgraceful judicial elections in 1986 where the public had thrown three justices off the Supreme Court for not killing enough people, trial court judges knew their careers were tied to a high conviction rate. While one appellate decision had tried to stop these abusive judges by limiting the use of lying jailhouse informants to railroad people into prison, the bulk of those judges were of like mind: “if they’re not guilty of this, they’re guilty of something.” 

While the “white” community still lives in denial of the corrupt nature of the judicial system, the Black community was (and still is) not so naive. That knowledge was a major factor in the explosion after the Rodney King verdicts. Even with videotaped evidence, the courts made certain that the police officers were set free. The Black community knew that calling the courts “halls of justice” was a mockery and a fraud. 

Back then, as now, society lived in denial. While the LAPD was an occupying force, no one would admit that the ring leaders of the predatory system were the judges who knew their careers were buttered on the side of brutalizing minorities. Judges did far more than look the other way at police perjury or the concealing of exculpatory evidence. Some judges engaged in witness intimidation and active collusion with assistant DAs in order to convict people without regard as to whether or not they were guilty. 

Many judges like Judge Jacqueline Connor had served as Assistant District Attorneys and were not only aware of the perjury and falsification of evidence -- they expected it, they encouraged it, and they engaged in it. When Judge Connor was upset that a witness in a case pending before her had rebuffed the DA’s demand that he commit perjury in order to support a falsified police report, Judge Connor lodged a bogus complaint against the witness with the State Bar. The witness happened to be a lawyer. Her State Bar complaint was structured to sound as if it had been made by the defendant, but she insisted that the State bar keep her identity a keep secret. 

After her bogus complaint was revealed as judicial obstruction of justice, the Commission on Judicial Performance found that it was fine for a judge to intimidate a witness in a case pending in her courtroom. That was after the 1992 Insurrection, but before the Ramparts Scandal, where the criminal court judges, including Judge Connor, again played a key role. 

The Christopher Commission Report covered-up the role that judges played in the years of civil rights abuses; everyone blamed only the LAPD. While there is no doubt the officers did many horrible things (like attempting to murder Javier Ovando  and when he was only paralyzed, prosecuting him for attempting to kill the police officers) the judges also played a pivotal role in the misconduct. They had the power to stop these gross injustices against Blacks and Latinos and others who displeased the police. Not only could the judges have held police officers who committed perjury responsible, they could have held the prosecutors who used perjured testimony liable for their misconduct. Instead, some judges showed prosecutors how to intimidate witnesses.

Mentioning the existence of corrupt judges has always been taboo. As related in a prior CityWatch article, some federal judges have recently begun a crusade against prosecutorial misconduct, but they also tippy-toe around the role played by California state court judges. Judge Kozinski indirectly blames the state courts by saying that they suffer from an “epidemic of misconduct” because judges “turn a blind eye” to misconduct. 

On both the criminal and civil sides, judges and justices do far more than “turn a blind eye.” They actively encourage and engage in hideous misconduct, turning the state court system into a capricious scourge on the Constitution in which no one can predict when an abusive judge will alter evidence, lie outright in his or her opinions to railroad innocent people, or intimidate attorneys into abandoning their clients. 

Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, in writing his concurring opinion in Curiel v Miller, (2016) 830 F.3d 864, suggested that the California Supreme Court needs a new composition, beginning with a new Chief Justice. Leopards do not change their spots and criminally abusive judges and justices of the California judiciary are not going to reform themselves.   

Will the corrupt judiciary result in another insurrection in South Los Angeles? Probably not. Much of the Black community has dispersed to the Inland Empire and north to the Newhall area, if not completely out of state. The area is now heavily Latino. To the extent it has “illegals,” the community knows the necessity of keeping a very low profile. Garcetti’s gentrification should soon further decimate the community, but that does not mean that judicial abuse will stop. 

Just because certain demographic changes indicate that LA won’t have the same reaction in the same place where it occurred in 1967 and 1992 does not mean society itself is safe from a corrupt judiciary. Wherever they live, minorities and the poor will be disproportionately victimized by abusive judges. Others are foolishly naive if they think that a lighter shade of skin makes them safe from the same judicial injustices.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRAFFIC WATCH--According to The New York Times, the car used to be “king” in the city (municipality) of Los Angeles. “'A Different Los Angeles', The City Moves to Alter its Sprawling Image,” was another story that seeks to portray the nation’s second largest municipality as having fundamentally changed.

Following this now popular meme, a Slate story in 2016 referred to Los Angeles becoming “America’s next great transit city.” Los Angeles has surely become America’s greatest transit tax city, with Los Angeles County voters in 2016 approving a fourth half-cent sales tax increase principally for transit since 1980. Yet transit's market share has fallen, not only in the nation's largest county but even in the city of Los Angeles.

The Ascent of Transit: A False Narrative

The Los Angeles political establishment and media is virtually unanimous in its praise for the now quarter century old rail system. Yet, despite more than $15 billion being spent on rail transit the already meager levels of transit commuting in the city have fallen further, while solo driving has risen to an all time high. Unless platitudes are more important than results, rail’s success is a false narrative. People are driving more and using transit less according to the American Community Survey for 2015.

The share of city of Los Angeles residents commuting by transit fell from 11.2 percent in 2010 to 9.5 percent in 2015 (Figure 1, note truncated axis). The 2010 figure was the highest decennial census year transit figure in the period starting in 1980. Just five years later, in 2015, however, the city of Los Angeles transit commuting share had fallen below 1980 levels.

In 1980, 10.8 percent of the city’s commuters used transit, a figure that fell to 10.5 percent just before the initial Long Beach “Blue Line” opened in 1990. While new light rail lines and the Metro (subway) line opened after 1990, transit’s market share fell further, to 10.1 percent by 2010. During the 2000s, transit commuting rose 1.1 percentage points to the 11.2 percent figure, propelled by unprecedented gasoline price increases. But progress was short-lived as the share dropped to 9.5 percent in 2015.

City of Los Angeles Surge in Driving Alone

At the same time, commuters were turning even more to driving alone. In 2015, 69.8 percent of work trip access was by solo drivers. This represents a substantial increase from the 66.8 percent drive alone share in 2010. From 1980 to 2010, driving alone edged up slightly, much less than the increase in the last five years. In 1980, 65.1 percent of commuters drove alone. In 1990, a nearly identical 65.2 percent drove alone. In the last five years, driving alone has risen more than the entire previous 30-year increase in the city of Los Angeles.

The news could get worse. According to new American Public Transportation (APTA) data, total ridership on all Los Angeles County MTA services dropped more than five percent from 2016. The APTA reported decline is astounding, since the highly touted extension of the Expo light rail line to downtown Santa Monica opened in 2016. Even more astounding is that the expensive, at least seven line (counted at radial line ends plus the transverse Green Line) system has added not a soul to transit ridership on the Los Angeles MTA bus and rail system since 1985. Not all MTA service is in the city of Los Angeles, however, the APTA data could presage a further transit market share decline in the city with the American Community Survey data due in the Autumn.

All of this is consistent with the larger trend in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (which includes Los Angeles and Orange Counties). Overall, the transit work trip market share in the metropolitan area fell from 6.1 percent in 2010 to 5.1 percent in 2015. The MTA 2016 decline is likely to push this figure lower.

The Illusion of a "Different Los Angeles"

Yet to read the press and media accounts in Los Angeles, one might be inclined to believe an alternate reality that LA transit is ascendant.

Christopher Hawthorne, who teaches urban and environment policy at Occidental College told The New York Times that the recent defeat of a development moratorium, along with approval of the transit tax and an affordable housing measure is “a very clear statement from the voters that they want a different Los Angeles.”

The voters may want a different Los Angeles, but apparently commuters are sufficiently happy with driving and have been for the more than a quarter century since rail transit was restored to Los Angeles. This is not surprising, since the average commuter can reach 60 times as many jobs by car in 30 minutes in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as by transit. (30 minutes is the average one-way commute time in the metropolitan area). Data is not available for the city of Los Angeles (see: “Access in the City”). 

However, it is a generally hopeless task for transit to be an alternative to the automobile, except for trips to and from the urban core (downtown and nearby). The reality is that it could take as much as the total income, every year, of a metropolitan area to provide transit that could effectively compete with the car throughout a metropolitan area for work and other trips.

Platitudes do not ride, people do. At least with respect to the implied transit ridership increases and forsaken cars, the “different” Los Angeles is an illusion, completely inconsistent with reality.

(Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University. This perspective was posted originally at New Geography.) 

-cw

DEEGAN ON LA-One of the city’s under-publicized scandals is the long-running shotgun marriage between city council members and developers using the Ellis Act to force tenant evictions throughout the city. 

Anyone that has been caught in this compact between developers and council members knows how devastating these evictions can be. They lead to despair, sometimes homelessness, and definitely serve to shut down affordable housing in neighborhoods since any replacement housing is priced at higher, market rate levels. 

Once today’s affordable housing is removed there will be no substitute -- just new housing at significantly higher prices. Once affordable rent-control housing is taken away, it is gone forever. 

A degree of unscrupulousness is evident and not surprising when you consider that, according to the Coalition For Economic Survival, “Ellis Act evictions are being done by developers who have owned the property less than a year…[and have] “been corrupted by large developers whose sole objective is to acquire rent-control housing, destroy it, evict tenants and replace the existing housing with high-priced luxury housing.” 

The Ellis Act is a three-decade old state law originally intended to help small landlords exit the rental business, but developers have figured out how to use it to drive their profit engines. Twenty-thousand rent-controlled units, home to low and moderate income tenants, seniors, disabled and working families, were destroyed between 2001 and 2016, according to CES. 

The long and abusive use of Ellis Act evictions throughout the city is reflected on this map that was created by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Coalition for Economic Survival. 

Could that be changing? 

Help may be on the way for tenants at risk of being evicted by landlords that use the Ellis Act, a state law with good intentions enacted in the 1980’s originally intended to help small landlords exit the rental business, but that has morphed into a device to vacate a building so it can be turned by developers into condos or market rate housing. 

Two motions passed by the LA City Council in the past couple of sessions may bring some order, as well as some relief for tenants. One, Motion CF14-0268-S5, “to modify the Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) in order to strengthen provisions relating to the enforcement of the Ellis Act and the preservation of RSO units,” was signed into law by the Mayor on April 19. 

The other is Motion CF17-0203, directing “the HCID (Housing + Community Investment Department) and the Planning Department to track the cumulative net gain/loss of affordable housing units [i.e. covenanted units and RSO units] in the City, and regularly post this information online as a public dashboard that includes cumulative data as well as annual and quarterly accounting.” 

There are currently 630,000 units stabilized with caps on rent increases and additional protections for tenants under the City’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance. That’s what will be tracked. 

Together, these motions and the apparent new understanding by council members of the crisis state of Ellis Act evictions should help ease anxieties by tenants that their housing will be swept away from under them. 

Both motions passed without dissent, although not all council members voted. The motion to modify RSO’s was introduced by Gil Cedillo (CD1) (in the heat of a very tight race to retain his council seat) and seconded by Mike Bonin (CD11). Council members Jose Huizar (CD14) and Joe Buscaino (CD15) were absent for the vote. 

Huizar may have missed one important vote, but was key in the second vote to track housing by introducing the motion that was seconded by Marqueece Harris-Dawson (CD8). All council members voted for that one except Paul Krekorian (CD2), who was absent for the vote. 

This more clearly brings into focus and lets the council members understand what tenants already know: that they are being squeezed out of affordable housing in neighborhoods they call “home.” To tell an evicted tenant there is “affordable housing” at another, more distant location, is not a viable solution. 

Time will tell how serious the politicos are about reining in the out-of-control developers. Council members Huizar and Cedillo serve on the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) committee (Huizar is chair) so they are in the catbird seats to be among the most vigilant observers and enforcers of land use and development in the city. Now, with these two motions, they have some added resources to protect renters.

(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

KEY RACE VOTER GUIDE--The many resistance marches in this ‘speak up’ era make me optimistic and are encouraging, but what about increasing and improving engagement and participation in local elections?

I understand and appreciate that this upcoming Los Angeles election is the penultimate election of the year (Jimmy Gomez and Robert Lee Ahn will face off in another local election for the 34^th Congressional District on Tuesday, June 6, a special election forced after Xavier Becerra left Congress to become California’s Attorney General) and that soon enough local elections will coincide with national elections. All that’s a good thing, in my opinion.

Local elections matter. Working families need to be able to count to eight on the Los Angeles City Council. Can we? How far over can the LAUSD board bend for the Charter Schools’ lobby? As current schoolboard member Steve Zimmer said, just after the election: “Looking ahead to the runoff, Zimmer said he hoped that voters understood what’s at stake. 

‘Voters have a stark choice,’ he said, ‘between whether we can make more dreams come true for kids through working together with our teachers and parents or whether we’re going to return to the politics of conflict, competition and confrontation.’”

“Why, you may ask, is this special election taking place on April 4, a month after the un-special municipal primary and six weeks before the even less special municipal general election? Because election officials are heartless and cruel.” Hillel Aron explains it all in the LA Weekly: Yes, Los Angeles, It's Time for Another Election.

And in the March 15 LA Weekly he sets us all a bit straighter on the actual turnout numbers in Los Angeles city elections (what HAS happened to Mariel Garza’s objectivity?): Actually, Voter Turnout in L.A.'s Last Election Wasn't That Bad There’s a graph, too.

“The [above] chart, put together by Mitchell for the delight of his Twitter followers, shows voter turnout in LA municipal elections since 2003. It excludes even-year statewide and national elections, which have much higher turnout. As you can see, projected turnout for the 2017 primary election – 18.5 percent – dwarfs  the 11 percent turnout of 2015, when there was no mayor's race. It fell a bit short of the 21 percent turnout in 2013 – but that was a highly competitive mayor's race to fill an open seat. 

“The most recent citywide election where, like this year, a mayor was running for a second term was in 2009, when Antonio Villaraigosa was up for re-election. That year, turnout was ... 18 percent. Exactly what it was this year.

“‘If people were looking for signs that you’re going to have this crazy engaged electorate in every election now that people are protesting in the airports and watching Sean Spicer press conferences, if you were to think that that would lead to more people voting, you’d be wrong,’ Mitchell says. ‘This turnout seems to be pretty consistent with prior past elections.’”

We vote, we win. The more people who register and vote, the better off we’ll all be.

Speaking about upcoming local elections, I’m as mired in that muck as anyone else plus I spent 20+ years driving Figueroa. And while I’ve witnessed incumbents voted off the City Council beyond MAV (Joy Picus and Joan Milke Flores to name two) I’ve never, ever seen the LA Times withdraw an endorsement. 

Me? I love reading Tony Butka’s writing on northeast Los Angeles. He thinks what I think about the race in CD 1: 

“I also like Gil. He’s a hard guy to get to know, and he does not have that “hi, how are ya’” plastic veneer of the true professional politician -- like Eric Garcetti or Herb Wesson, who smile at you even though they’d do you in without even a flicker of emotion. At the same time, I know that Gil has always had a real passion for the under-represented like the undocumented and dreamers, even though those people mostly don’t vote and have a very healthy distrust of government. He’s demonstrated these qualities going all the way back to when he ran SEIU Local 660 (now SEIU Local 721) in LA County. And that was at a time when these opinions were not without controversy. Same for the California state legislature.” 

Here's one of the “grafs” that irked me most:

“Cedillo was a champion for immigrants during his time in the state Legislature, particularly those who are undocumented, and that good will surely counted for a lot in this heavily immigrant district. But how long can he coast on that?” Mariel Garza opinion piece in the LA Times on March 20 

I know Gil Cedillo, and he’s never coasted, not now, not ever.

(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch and is a retired union leader now enjoying her new La Crescenta home and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected] or on her new blog ‘The Butcher Shop - No Bones about It.’)

-cw

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EDUCATION POLITICS--LAUSD keeps trying to put its technology demons behind it. But the ghost of tech projects past is still haunting. Yesterday, it visited the school board room during a Citizen’s Bond Oversight Committee (BOC) hearing. 

At the meeting, Chief Information Officer Chief Shahryar Khazei promised an end to the past streak of “massive failures of Biblical proportions,” such as the iPad scandal and the MiSiS crisis (student information system) that sent former superintendent John Deasy packing. 

But a sweeping technology agenda item #7 (page 81), encompassing four huge projects, seemed awfully resistant to being coaxed into the light. What could be seen looked eerily familiar. All were being pushed by LAUSD administrative staff without any meaningful public input. 

The four projects: 

• Learning Management System – $23 Million – A platform that allows for personalized learning, online gradebook, deployment of professional development, teacher/student/parent communication, teacher collaboration, and integration with other instructional tools. 
• Unified Enrollment System – $24 Million – Unified Enrollment will provide a one-stop online search engine and application system that allows families to locate and save their school program preferences, rank schools, submit a placement application. 
• Enterprise Reporting System – $8 Million – A self-service report generator for MiSiS, Welligent, MyData (existing data systems). 
• 40 School Telecommunications Modernization Projects – $24 Million – Replacement of telephone and P.A. systems at school sites. 

That last one might be the only project that seemed to reflect what voters intended when they passed five school bond measures. Is an enrollment system used in a school district’s central office an operating expense? If so, it might need to be paid for out of the General Fund rather than the Bond Fund. The BOC seemed unconcerned about that though. 

Standing at the bond trough, administration staff from the I.T. department strangely touted the Learning Management system as so good that the country of Uruguay uses it. 

Really. 

The Learning Management system and Unified Enrollment system raised so many questions that two committee members tried to divide the matter to allow the other two projects to be voted on unencumbered. Ultimately, all four projects remained together, but a vote failed for lack of a quorum. Why the BOC bothered to vote without enough active members present is a mystery. Only six of the Committee’s ten members even attended the meeting, and a whopping four of the 15 seats are vacant.

Without a recommendation from the BOC, the projects are still expected to advance to the School Board for its May 9 meeting. The rules call for a hearing, not for approval. 

Whether the School Board will vote without the information that seemed to be lacking for the BOC is anybody’s guess. With the Unified Enrollment alone having a price tag of $24 million, one would think that both the advisory BOC and the School Board would get to see a budget, or at least a list of items that the $24 million would buy. Or is it lease? Or is it develop? Is it hardware or software? Is training for users included? We don’t know because the RFP #2000001340 is under a “Cone of Silence”.

BOC member Rachel Greene got the stink eye more than once during the meeting, maybe for interrupting the expedited presentation to ask some exploratory questions. Greene, a parent who represents the PTA on the committee, wondered if the School Board had even voted on a policy of Unified Enrollment before the BOC would approve spending $24 million to implement it. She said that before heading down the road toward what might be a district wide enrollment lottery system, it would be helpful to know the Board’s policy intent. 

“Cart before the horse?” she asked. 

CEO of Project Management and Digital Innovation, Diane Pappas tried to reassure the BOC by explaining that they had been meeting privately in individual board members’ offices and had gotten their buy-in. 

So much for public scrutiny.

Continuing to make their pitch, I.T. staff said that of course the Board backed this policy. After all, Unified Enrollment was even in Superintendent Michelle King’s Strategic Plan. 

They must have missed the memo -- or news articles -- reporting the Board’s refusal to vote on the Superintendent’s Strategic Plan. 

If this is where the Unified Enrollment policy exists, it hasn’t been approved by the Board. So far, all we have are sales jobs. (I wrote last week about the slick presentation at the Early Childhood and Parent Engagement Committee meeting.) 

BOC member Greene's comment about approving a bond before approving the policy that justified it applies equally to the whole process. Instead of a truly public process, the LAUSD administration seems to have done an end run: a sales job on the Board of Education in private meetings, without the benefit of input from critical or moderating points of view. It seems the BOC was expected to harvest in public what had already been planted and watered in private. A thumbs-up from the little-known BOC would have taken the heat off the Board of Education and made its vote a foregone conclusion. 

It seems the only lesson we’ve learned from the iPad fiasco is that the iPad deal was bad, but nothing about the flaws in the process that produced that terrible deal. 

Let’s bring the ghost out into the spotlight. We’ll look at who’s driving this in my next post.

Concerned about LAUSD's Universal Enrollment? E-mail, call or write your school board member:

  213-241-6387[email protected]
  213-241-6385[email protected]
  213-241-6388[email protected]
  213-241-6382[email protected]
  213-241-5555[email protected]
  213-241-6180[email protected]
  213-241-8333[email protected] 

And the Superintendent:
[email protected] 
213-241-7000

(Karen Wolfe is a public school parent, the Executive Director of PS Connect and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-Say hello to Judi, a perfect dog I rescued from the deadly Los Angeles Animal Service’s East Valley shelter several years back. Her story is a perfect example of just one of the ways that LAAS loses millions of dollars each year while city officials look the other way.

This is a perfect week to tell Judi’s story because City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee addresses departmental budgets for the coming fiscal year, including that of LAAS, starting on Monday. 

In the City of Los Angeles, the vast majority of dogs are unlicensed. If your dog happens to have one, and you ignore the “official” license renewal postcard from LAAS, your and Rover’s names will be purged from the system and you will never get another notice asking for that money. That’s never as in ever. 

Take a look at that postcard. 

It has no dog’s name, license number, amount owed, due date or whether proof of inoculations or spay/neuter is needed. It is no wonder that despite ongoing pet population problems and no spay/neuter law, LAAS sells roughly the same 100,000 dog licenses annually for a city that – a decade ago – was estimated by Mayor Villaraigosa’s office to have more than 1 million dogs! People simply ignore the cards and the city stops asking to be paid. 

LAAS loses that money not only for that year, but for each subsequent year of each dog’s life. And that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of dogs who were never licensed in the first place.

Do you know whose names fell out of the system when they ignored LAAS’s dog license renewal postcard? None other than City Council president Herb Wesson and his Pro Tem Mitch Englander, both of whom were delinquent for years, and who only paid what they owed after I made a Public Records Act request for those records, though LAAS now refuses to turn over other such records.   Wesson paid a late fee for each year his licenses were past due, but Englander did not; more lost revenue. 

Not that LAAS does, or ever has, used money wisely, efficiently and honestly, but LAAS’s financial failures result in poor care for the city’s homeless animals; lack of fully funded spay/neuter programs; un-air conditioned transport vehicles for the animals in sweltering weather; and as my CW colleague Phyllis Daugherty regularly points out,  severe understaffing at LAAS (both in the shelters and an embarrassingly low number of Animal Control Officers out in the field) has resulted in life-threatening injuries so much so that a loss of life seems inevitable. 

This was one of the issues I documented with precision at Wesson’s request after our lengthy meeting in his office on January 3, 2014 during which he said he would call for an audit – guaranteeing that it would be seconded by City Councilmember Paul Koretz (“to give Koretz cover”). But Galperin’s audit sidestepped each of the LAAS issues identified for him, presumably to keep them from embarrassing Mayor Garcetti. For two years, Galperin dodged doing an interview on his audit and now that it is two years later, after agreeing to do an interview, he has stated through his spokesperson, that the audit is now ancient history. 

Each year that LAAS did not send a license renewal for Judi, I contacted LAAS GM Brenda Barnette. Nothing was resolved, and most years, no reply. 

In 2014, I again contacted Barnette, Councilmember Paul Koretz (whose committee oversees LAAS), Barnette’s Assistant GM John Chavez, Garcetti’s LAAS Commissioners and their administrative aide, and Patty Whelan, who at that time, was Garcetti’s liaison to LAAS, though her primary “qualification” for the job (which she treated as a virtual no-show when it came to meetings) was that her mother was the top personnel executive for the city. 

I got no reply, let alone a solution. 

They didn’t contact me for Judi’s 2014 license fee, or her 2015 or 2016 fees, either. 

So I ran an experiment. In 2016, I went online to buy a $55 dollar three-year license for Judi and other dogs adopted in one form or other through the non-profit rescue that I founded. I paid a total of $220. LAAS took the money, but never asked for the dogs’ spay/neuter certificates or proofs of vaccination.

LAAS never followed-up even though month after month has passed. 

To prompt them, I poked at the hornet’s nest and challenged the charge through my credit card company which, correctly, denied my challenge. I only did it to see if LAAS would get its act together. It didn’t. To this day, LAAS, which never contacted me about this issue, has no idea how much money it failed to collect in dog license fees; whether the amount paid is correct (since a license fee for a spayed or neutered dog is significantly less expensive than for an intact dog) or whether Judi and the other dogs are properly altered or vaccinated.

One would think that if they check up on anyone, it would be an LAAS watchdog of more years than I care to count…. 

So when Councilmember Paul Krekorian and his City Council colleagues start talking cash with LAAS, he should raise Judi’s name, this article, and demand some answers, because failure to collect revenue is only one of the ways this department, under Mayor Garcetti, has failed Los Angeles.

And there are plenty of other examples to share. 

As for Garcetti, his failure is the direct result of his and predecessor Antonio Villaraigosa’s firing of capable volunteer Commissioners whose lives are dedicated to humane issues -- replacing them with people who have little, if any, background for it. Case in point: the new LAAS Commission President is Larry Gross….a renown and leading advocate….not for humane issues, but rather, tenants’ rights.

All this has happened because, with Garcetti, the appearance of being successful is more important than admitting fault, starting fresh and making things work better.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport.  Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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LEANING RIGHT--May Day!  May Day!  The LA Times Editorial Board gets it wrong again, and shreds both its credibility and subscribing membership yet again!   

So how well has the City and County of LA done with only one major paper editorializing and spinning reality? 

And when do the thorny issues surrounding legal and illegal immigration finally get confronted by the Times Editorial Board? 

As a former subscriber and former regular reader of the Times (since childhood), I feel kinda bad because I've met and befriended many a Times reporter who adheres to principles, balance, and reality. But it's nice to be free of the kooky, alternative world of the Times Editorial Board (which is a different group of people than its reporting staff). 

But while the Times overall readership continues to spiral downward (partially because of the global trend away from print readership), its editorial board continues to please its loony/lefty adherents while annoying a greater number of current/former regular readers who recognize the Times' continued decline into its self-made oblivion formed of ivory tower irrelevance ... 

... and an irrelevance that has Orwellian overtones. 

Whether one loves or hates the Times, one can't ignore the fact that Trump won this past election because so many Americans have "had it" with the biased and "we know more than you" attitudes of newspapers (like the Times) that fly in the face of Common Sense. 

And whether one loves or hates the Times, a not-so-big secret is that while a mere hundred days of President Trump has federal laws and policies changing more rapidly than anyone could have ever guessed, in response the City and County of Los Angeles and the State of California have been lurching angrily leftwards for a variety of reasons that all ignore an inevitable bankruptcy of the state and its cities. 

The immigration question is, as with other issues, tied to the fact that the middle class is shrinking in California, and our governmental budget is being paid for by a shrinking and over-taxed minority holding up the state: 

1) University of California President Janet Napolitano's vow to protect "immigrant students" from President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigrants flies in the face of a damning audit of the UC system. 

The top staff of the UC president's office overpaid top staff and mishandled budget money, while hiding $175 million in surplus money while calling for bigger budgets and higher tuition costs.  The Times reporters do their job, while the Times Editorial Board actually has the nerve to defend Napolitano while admitting her screwups. 

And while other papers are not so quick to defend Napolitano, too many of us are missing the big picture: 

There is no one in either Sacramento or among the UC Regents defending the struggling, exhausted California taxpayers in restoring affordable tuition with the same vigor that they are protecting "immigrants". 

2) Of course, there are two infuriating and confounding realities for us all to confront in California--and President Trump was elected by many of the other fifty states to avoid having the entire nation fall into the same trap that we now are stuck with in California. 

First, illegal immigrants broke the law to enter the United States, while legal immigrants did not break any laws...and to confuse the two groups is a raw slap in the face to those who believe in the rule of law.  There very much IS a difference between legal and illegal immigration. 

Second, children who are here because their parents broke the law are hardly to be blamed for their parents illegal actions...but how much should they and their parents benefit because of those illegal actions?  Do children of bank robbers get to keep the stolen funds from those banks? 

Feel free to ask legal immigrants about illegal immigrants...and you will untap a fury that makes "nativist" Americans' anger appear to be a slight annoyance in comparison. 

Legal immigrants believe in a rule of law and have fled their countries of origin to escape the consequences of lawlessness, while illegal immigrants (and more importantly, their knowing and money-grubbing employers) all-too-often are more than happy to break the law when it serves their purposes. 

So when Baltimore and other states and local governments start asking and instructing prosecutors to avoid charging illegal immigrants with minor, non-violent crimes to avoid immigration enforcement by the Trump administration, the same question comes up as it does with UC tuitions and taxpayer rights: 

Since when did the rights, needs, and prioritization of illegal immigrants (and their employer/politician enablers) become greater than those of native-born citizens and legal immigrants who are following the rules and laws of this nation...and do we even value those rules and laws, anymore? 

3) While one in eight children in California schools have an "undocumented" parent, the question of whether our educational budget and priorities becomes more difficult to answer. 

Because if an illegal immigrant has three children who are educated from K-12 at roughly $10,000 per year, the resultant $400,000 spend on those three children begs the question of what our amount spent per student would be if we enforced immigration law in California... 

...and where that $400,000 could go if it were spent on legal citizens and legal immigrants, who pay by far more in taxes than illegal immigrants.  Roads?  Adding on to our UC and Cal State system? 

So while the children can't be blamed for the actions of their parents, when DO we take the parents to task for appropriating funds from the taxpayers that are NOT legally theirs?   

Should the children be forced to pay out-of-state college tuition to make sure they don't benefit from their parents appropriation of others' tax funds, and to reimburse the taxpayers for their parents' illegal actions? 

Should those here illegally for decades be given a slap on the wrist, or be made to pay a much larger fraction of the six-digit figure they have inevitably taken from their neighbors?  Perhaps should their employers pay? 

Or should the United States freeze and confiscate any U.S. assets from the illegal immigrants' countries of origin that we could use to reimburse the taxpayers? 

In the end, it comes down to whether those here illegally (and their lawbreaking employers) owe the taxpayers and law-abiding citizens and legal immigrants of California, or vice versa. 

4) Finally, while the Times Editorial Board continues to call Trump a "bully" and demand he do better on immigration, it could just as easily be concluded that the Times Editorial Board, and those judges and state/local politicians who are thwarting federal law, are the real bullies. 

Because what SHOULD we do to those employers of illegal immigrants, and those employers who violate the intent of foreign hiring laws to save on employer wages ... and who who really are at the center of this problem and are a big reason we now have Trump as our President?  

Whether it is California IT workers, or whether it is Disney, or whether it is Silicon Valley, American workers are being shafted and destroyed by ruthless employers (some proclaiming to be liberal and loving of "diversity") who will do anything to reduce labor costs. 

So while many on May Day will be protesting Trump and his policies, including those on illegal immigrants and those who feel workers' rights are being hurt by Trump, it will not be hard to critique those doing the marching as undermining their own causes: from the environment to workers' rights to income inequality, California and its cities are doing everything wrong by promoting lawbreaking. 

In short, the Times Editorial Board continues to lead local and state government down the wrong path, and will continue to believe God is on their side (if they even sanction a belief in God) while sending those still gullible enough to adhere to the Board's views down the rabbit hole that is our City and state's misguided direction. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to wonder when it's our turn to flee the City of the Angels, or even to leave the state altogether, in order to find a community that's not overdeveloped, and where both attainable employment and the cost of living allows hard-working middle-class families to thrive and prosper the way they used to back when California was once the Land of Opportunity.

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He was co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chaired the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

-cw 

THE PREVEN REPORT--Those of you who voted for Proposition HHH, the $1.2 billion homelessness-reduction bond measure which passed in November 2016, might be wondering, “Where’s my money? Have any homeless people been given housing yet?” 

The guy you want to talk with about that is Rushmore Cervantes, the General Manager of HCID, the agency tasked with implementing construction paid for by Proposition HHH. Fortunately, he just testified a few days ago at the Budget Hearings, so here’s your answer from the horse’s mouth: 

 “Recently, we were able to get $75 million worth of bond proceeds … to fund 9 projects, 440 units of permanent supporting housing; all totaled 615 units.” 

Wow! That sounds great.  

Only wrinkle is that documentation handed out at the Administrative Oversight Committee’s meeting on April 25th seems to convey a different story. Those documents agree with Rushmore Cervantes that there are 9 projects, but in the documents almost all the projects are refurbishments, not new units of housing, and the dollar amount is around $10 million, not 75.   

If Mr. Cervantes wouldn’t mind publishing the plans he has for those 440 units the public would be grateful. 

Also on the topic of where Prop HHH money is being spent, Mr. Cervantes had this to say: “We’re going to be able to charge against the bond from the point of underwriting until the time it’s placed in service.” 

Red flag. 

“We have staffing requests now that we’ve received approval for several positions and I believe there are 5 more in the queue for potential determination.” 

Red flag. 

Once these projects are put in service that will obviously cause a burden on the back end that is monitoring those covenants and monitoring those loans.” 

Burden monitoring loans? 

Red flag. 

When managers talk about needing to beef up on staffing, it’s time to grab your wallet. The HHH bonds should not be squandered on massive staffing and administrative fees. That’s the oldest trick in the book.  

Ominous developments which hurt the public’s interest.  

The Prop HHH measure states that allocations of money will be recommended by the Civilian Oversight Committee, an idea which for many Angelenos creates a desirable impression— that a group of thoughtful  advocates for the homeless will use their expertise to craft an effective and humane policy, but in fact that was changed.  Now, the system will be that each city council member will bring projects to the council for approval. 

Isn't that precisely the process which causes pay-to-play? Isn’t that what voter initiatives are for, to circumvent that form of corruption? 

New rule: only 5% of the bond money can be used to have outside organizations build projects. Everything else will have to be spent by the city, where there will be no RFPs and the cost will be decided internally. 

Red flag. 

On April 25, 2017, the Administrative Oversight Committee held a special meeting, which was recorded on audio. Every committee under the sun in LA City government has its audio posted online so that the public can understand how their tax dollars are being spent. And yet the Prop HHH committee, despite mounting pressure, simply refuses to post the audio?  

Why? 

It’s worth thinking about. Because on Wednesday the Prop HHH team announced that they will not be posting online any audio recordings for any of their meetings at any point in the future. 

Red flag.

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and Joshua is a teacher.)

-cw

AT LENGTH-It was some 25 years ago when I stepped into the bar at Ante’s Restaurant looking for Tony Perkov only to find my nemesis Rod Decker, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer. Back then, he was a vocal racist with whom I had exchanged more than a word or two regarding his casual use of racial epithets. That night television screens across the United States displayed the police beating of Rodney King. 

Walking into Ante’s, I was taken by surprise. Decker, sitting at the bar with his back to the door, could see me walking-by in the mirror behind the bar. Before I could say anything, he turned around and said, “No lo contendre, pardner,” in an affectation of Spanglish. “That was a completely unrighteous bust.” 

This ended a months-long conflict that started at this very same bar with me standing up one night after one of his racist rants. I threw my hat on the bar and told him in no uncertain terms, with a helping of Anglo-Saxon swearing, that I wasn’t going to put up with his shit anymore! There was dead silence as everyone looked into their drinks and pondered my words. 

The moral to this story is that words do hold power and they often divide us, but in the end, actions — our own or others’ — speak louder in defining us and occasionally bringing opposites together.

The past year in the political fervor ramping up to the November presidential elections, two of San Pedro’s neighborhood councils elected majorities supported by the Saving San Pedro Facebook activist group opposing the homeless with very disparaging postings. One of the first actions they took after gaining power was to institute the obligatory Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of every meeting. 

I objected on various grounds -- not the least of which being the “under God” portion, which was not part of the original pledge, and which now can be argued separates rather than unites Americans, making us not so “indivisible.” 

Subsequently, both Coastal and Central San Pedro Neighborhood Councils have become so divided that they are dysfunctional and have not addressed the homeless crisis at all. Rather, they have spent an inordinate amount of time battling amongst themselves over petty issues, such as Neighborhood Purpose Grants, and battling the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment over meeting dates and places and Brown Act violations. Basically, the inability to run a meeting or collaborate with others on their own councils stands in their way. This sounds a lot like Congress, doesn’t it? 

At one point, the former president of Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, after he was forced to resign, posted on Facebook that city funding of neighborhood councils was a waste of taxpayer monies and the city should use the revenue for fixing sidewalks. 

Clearly, this is the vision of many people who gain political position for the first time and are shocked to realize that governing is not the same thing as having an uprising. This is akin to what is happening to Trump and his supporters. This is also the problem of people who are constantly opposing whatever it is they are against and never offering a positive solution to the issues at hand. 

This brings me back to the issue of Los Angeles City Hall, the homeless crisis and the Democratic leadership of the city. 

The liberal leadership of the city, the state and even those in Congress have all become united against everything President Donald Trump has campaigned on: the immigration ban, the wall and deportation orders; rolling back EPA regulations; and the reform of the national health care law. But what you haven’t heard from them are alternative solutions. 

At City Hall in Los Angeles, they have proposed and passed a $1.2 billion bond to address housing for the homeless while at the very same time amending Los Angeles Municipal Code 56.11 to shorten the legal notice time from 72 to 24 hours on homeless encampment sweeps. Has this actually solved anything or just exacerbated an already bad situation? The homeless population hasn’t declined even though the city and the county continue to throw money at the issue. 

It’s a fine act of resistance to oppose Trump’s threats against sanctuary cities and file lawsuits against his blanket executive orders on Muslims. I actually applaud these actions. 

Yet, the more Trump pushes his agenda, the more he drives centrist Democrats into taking measures to resist. However, most of the liberal electeds are calling upon activists to do their bidding for them, while at home, they defend an uncertain status quo. A significant uprising against all things Trump in Los Angeles just might also take down City Hall’s power structure as the city’s 35 communities have grown tired of being treated as disempowered vassals of a city, while their needs go unmet. 

There is no glue that keeps this city or perhaps even this nation “indivisible” as we the people take some great liberties in being divisive! There is nothing in our Constitution or charter that says we must be united, except in name only. We’ve even fought a Civil War and had many civil uprisings to prove this point. The riot 25 years ago in LA is still referred to in South Central as an “uprising.” 

Yet, it is a very good thing that Mayor Eric Garcetti comes out with this announcement on Trump’s threats to our city: 

Today’s ruling by Judge Orrick [blocking Trump’s order] is good news, and reminds us that people’s rights transcend political stunts. The Constitution protects cities’ right to create humane, sensible policies that keep our neighborhoods safe and our communities together. It is time for the federal government to stop attacking cities and scapegoating immigrants, and begin focusing on the hard work of comprehensive immigration reform. I will keep working to defend the rights of all our residents — including immigrants — and fighting to protect our own federal tax dollars, which Angelenos want to invest in keeping their families safe and our city strong. 

It would be consistent with this statement if the mayor felt the same way about protecting our rights against the abuses of city government. However, it would be quite another thing to see Garcetti leading a march on the federal building with the other liberal council members showing solidarity with the grassroots resistance and then proposing the visionary reforms that were first enunciated in 1944 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his Second Bill of Rights: 

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are: 

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; 

• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; 

• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; 

• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; 

• The right of every family to a decent home; 

• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; 

• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; 

• The right to a good education. 

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world. 

If and when the Democratic leadership decides to stand up for its historic core values both here in Los Angeles and in our legislatures, that is when our nation has a chance to become united again and the Democratic Party can find its soul. 

Until then, they will look more like Republicans arguing over healthcare reform than a party prepared to govern for the economic security of the people.

(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy - Don't listen to that man with the white cap - he might say something that you agree with!" He has been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen…and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GUEST WORDS--Luxury condominiums compete with foreign banks on the new skyline of Koreatown. On a Saturday night, 20-somethings crowd the sidewalks, huddling around food trucks, circling in and out of karaoke bars, biryani places, barbecue joints, and a high-rise driving range. This same neighborhood, and other swathes of Los Angeles, seemed doomed 25 years ago when more than 2,000 Korean business were damaged or destroyed during the three days of civil unrest that followed the infamous verdict in the prosecution of police officers who beat Rodney King.

The distance LA has traveled between then and now marks a journey that has landed this city in a place very much of its own making. There have been strides and setbacks, and not everyone will agree about what constitutes progress or why some big problems remain unresolved. But, if this is a different city— we would say a better city—than the one that burned in 1992, the explanation lies in decisions Angelenos made about how they govern themselves.

First though, the LA story of the past quarter century has to begin with hitting bottom after 1992. In 1994, the Northridge earthquake struck, killing 57 people, injuring thousands more, and costing billions of dollars in property damage. That same year, California voters, including a majority in Los Angeles County, backed the Prop 187 ballot initiative, which prohibited unauthorized individuals from using state-run public services. The isolation, anger, and racial tensions of the 1990s continued with police scandals that eroded trust.

But those scandals also produced reform efforts that, haltingly, created a new model of community-centered law enforcement. And then, in the early 2000s Los Angeles began moving toward a shared destiny, as the region’s economics and demographics shifted.

In 1992, the non-Hispanic white population accounted for 41 percent of Los Angeles County, according to census data; that population now composes only 28 percent of Los Angeles County residents. That happened because whites left, and the non-white population grew not with immigrants but with their children. The flow of new immigrants to Los Angeles peaked in the 1990s as other destinations offered lower living expenses and better job opportunities. The big numbers already here largely stayed in place and made families. Children of immigrants now account for more than one in five residents, the highest share of any major metro.

The remains of a commercial building smolder, as another building burns out of control, in Los Angeles, early on the morning of April 30, 1992, after riots broke out in response to the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. Photo by Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press.

Now coming of age, this huge generation of young people has grown up navigating cultural and racial differences. According to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center, second-generation Latinos and Asian Americans are much more likely than members of their parents’ generation to have diverse friends, feel comfortable with interracial marriage, and get along with people of other groups. By necessity, that has become the default attitude in L.A.’s school corridors and playgrounds.

Of course, a whole lot of young people, members of minority groups and growing up without many advantages, could have spelled trouble in the streets. But, as this second generation came of age, crime dropped—a lot. The violent crime rate was more than six times higher at the time of the unrest than it is today. As crime declined and this new home-grown population of cosmopolitans matured, Angelenos began making investments in their collective future.

Over the past decade and a half, voters repeatedly have endorsed tax increases to expand affordable housing, homeless services, school construction, and transit development in the region. These investments benefit everyone in the region, not just specific neighborhoods or populations. The success of these recent ballot measures, which often required support from supermajorities of voters, exemplifies Angelenos’ willingness to take responsibility for the common good.

Los Angeles also has repeatedly chosen to invest significant funds in the city’s arts and cultural resources over the past 25 years, enabling us to examine our history, heal past trauma and racial divides, and build a shared and inclusive cultural identity. Annual income for Los Angeles County arts-related nonprofits is estimated at $2.2 billion, and the arts and creative industries account for nearly 1 out of 6 jobs in Los Angeles County—a significant part of our economy.

These investments allow organizations like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to defy national trends by increasing audiences and revenue, and to provide a wide range of diverse communities with performances and educational programs. Meanwhile, small theaters, studio spaces, and storefront galleries have become focal points of neighborhood regeneration. Simply put, the arts increase social capital and provide a rich cultural landscape in which civic vitality can thrive.

Among the most encouraging developments are moments of civil dialogue that have brought diverse populations together around shared objectives, and there is a valuable example near the burn zone of 1992.

The flow of new immigrants to Los Angeles peaked in the 1990s as other destinations offered lower living expenses and better job opportunities. … Children of immigrants now account for more than one in five residents, the highest share of any major metro.

Consider the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone, one of the first three designated zones (the others were in Philadelphia and San Antonio) under President Obama’s signature anti-poverty initiative that provides preferential status and technical assistance on federal grant applications. The Central Los Angeles Promise Zone encompasses Hollywood, East Los Angeles, Pico Union, Westlake, and, perhaps most significantly, Koreatown. These neighborhoods are collectively home to 165,000 people, 35 percent of whom live in poverty.

Like many urban neighborhoods on the edge of a central business district, this area just west of Downtown Los Angeles had seen slow deterioration of its housing stock, a loss of jobs, weak transportation infrastructure, and growing homelessness in the years leading up to the civil unrest. After much of Koreatown was destroyed in the civil unrest, representatives of many economic interests and a variety of ethnic communities found common cause in the process of drafting redevelopment plans based on public-private partnerships, such as the Wilshire Center/Koreatown Redevelopment Project Area.

Now, more than two decades later, the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone is bringing the community together again to identify shared goals and desired outcomes around good jobs, safe streets, and improved educational opportunities for young people in the community. This process alone has not directly solved problems, but proposed solutions have a much better chance of becoming real when they are based on a deliberative process of community engagement and collective goal setting.

Lastly, Los Angeles has chosen policies that treat the undocumented population as part of the civic family. And they are, literally, a big part. One of every 10 adults in Los Angeles County, and the parents of one of every six kids in the public schools, are undocumented immigrants: one million people, the largest concentration in the country. The region’s commitment to including the undocumented in plans for the future goes way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies in law enforcement. Angelenos, often in concert with the state government, have helped ensure that unauthorized immigrants have access to health care, public education, drivers’ licenses, and community policing that unambiguously aims at protecting them and their neighbors.

They are part of us. That realization developed slowly, and it applies not just to the undocumented. Los Angeles was a city of contested spaces and tribal rivalries 25 years ago. It’s not that now.

(Roberto Suro and Gary Painter are professors in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, which is co-hosting a two-day conference April 27-28 that will reflect on the 25 years since the 1992 civil unrest and look at the new community revitalization opportunities facing Los Angeles. Visit socialinnovation.usc.edu for more information. This retrospective was posted first at Zocalo Public Square)

-cw

INSIDER REPORT--Last week, as far-right political agitators made plans to descend on Berkeley, California, I heard that some members of the Three Percenters militia movement would be among them. Having gone undercover with a border militia last year, I went to Martin Luther King Jr. park to observe them and a hodgepodge of other right-wingers seeking to hold their second "free speech" rally in less than two months in the historically liberal college town. Anarchists and left-wing activists—who viewed the event's "free speech" billing as nothing more than cover for white supremacist and fascist groups to gather—organized a counter-demonstration called "Defend the Bay." Here's what I saw. 

At 10:45 a.m. I arrive at the park, which is surrounded by flimsy, three-foot-high traffic-orange plastic mesh. It's sunny and warm. At the entrance, the police are inspecting bags, confiscating anything that could be considered a weapon. They take knives, mace, a stun gun, bear spray, an ax handle, and a can filled with concrete. The park is split down the middle with more orange mesh, creating a six-foot buffer between the left-wing side, represented largely by black-clad "antifascists," or "antifa," and the right-wing side, with pro-Trump banners and American flags. Antifa protesters are holding a large banner saying "FASCIST SCUM YOUR TIME IS DONE." The other side is facing them with a banner that reads "Defend America." There is a lot of shouting. Riot police file in and form a line between the two groups.

I walk into the right-wing side. A group of white men with matching comb-over haircuts are wearing skull half masks and shouting at the left-wing side. I pull out my phone and start to film the skull guys.

"Are you with us?" one asks.

"I'm a journalist," I say.

"Get the fuck out of here then," another says, shoving me. I continue filming.

"Fake news!" one says into a megaphone pointed at my face. He wanders off and starts chanting, "Build a wall! Build a wall!" Another puts up his fists and shuffles his feet like a boxer.

Nearby, I overhear two men discussing the nuances of their white nationalism. One has a shield made of skateboards painted with the flag of the black sun of Odinism, an archaic symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis. The other calls himself a National Socialist. When I photograph them, they both sieg heil.

Another man, with an American flag wrapped around his face, tells me he came to defend "Western civilization." Nathan Domigo, a 30-year-old ex-Marine and the head of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, is milling in the crowd. Later in the day, he'll be filmed punching a woman in the face during a street brawl. (After the video goes viral, the woman, Louise Rosealma, says she has been facing harassment and death threats.)

The right-wing side is almost entirely male. Some are dressed in motorcycle half helmets, ski goggles, gloves, and various forms of ghoulish masks. One is wearing a shirt that says "Proud Supporter of the Muslim Ban." Another's shirt says "Straight Pride." They aren't entirely white. A Latino man wearing a protective vest goes around shouting "Latinos for Trump!"

I talk to an African American man in a Trump "MAGA" hat who says his name is Malechite. He tells me he came up from Los Angeles to show support for the president because Trump is "a businessman." "He's all about building the entrepreneurs up. It's about people owning stuff, having businesses, owning houses, cars, things of that nature. We don't need these things, but we like to have these things. We gonna stand for something." I ask whether he thinks Trump is racist. "He's our president," he says. "There's nothing we can do about that, so it's either work with this man or go against the grain, and it could be a horrible four years for us."

Many of the signs people carry relate to free speech or references to the obscure, online subcultures of the far right. A few carry the green flag of the Republic of Kekistan, a fictional country for internet trolls invented on 4chan. One man is holding a sign that says "Da Goyim Know," a 4chan meme about uncovering Jewish conspiracies to run the world. Another sign says "Green Lives Matter" with a picture of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character appropriated by the so-called alt-right, the loose-knit movement of white supremacists and other bigoted groups that gained attention in the 2016 election.  

Some people on this side came in from other parts of the country. A white man named Ian Herrin tells me he came from Colorado Springs to be "part of the movement." He says he was inspired to come by Lauren Southern, an alt-right activist and writer. Southern is walking around in a helmet surrounded by a security entourage of Proud Boys, a group of self-proclaimed "Western chauvinists" led byVice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes. I approach a man dressed head to toe in camouflage, who wears a mask reminiscent of Jason from Friday the 13th. Mike won't tell me his last name, but he says he's from Orange County, California, and a member of the West Coast Patriots Three Percent, a militia-type prepper group that does armed paramilitary training. "The last rally when they shut down Milo, it kinda pissed me off," he tells me. "Everyone has a right to say what they want to say, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. That's what the Second Amendment—uh, First Amendment—is for."

There are perhaps a few hundred protesters in total, with the right appearing to slightly outnumber the left. At the front line between Trump supporters and antifa, there is a white man in a Spartan helmet with a red, white, and blue crest. He is wearing a GoPro on his chest, American flag shorts, and a Trump flag on his back, like a cape. "I ain't no fascist!" he shouts across the line at an antifa protester. A woman next to him, in a pink MAGA hat with an American flag painted on her cheek, shouts at the antifa man, "You're a fucking piece-of-shit terrorist! That's what you guys are: fascist terrorists!"

"Suck a dick!" the Spartan shouts to the antifa man.

"I love sucking dick!" the antifa man shouts back.

Suddenly, there is a loud bang, possibly from an M-80 firecracker, on the right-wing side of the demarcation. The men in skull masks rush across the barrier and start punching people. Dozens of people are brawling, throwing punches, curling up on the grass, taking kicks. The police slowly move in. "Let the cops take care of it!" someone from the pro-Trump side shouts. "Fall back!" They go back to their side. People resume shouting at each other. Some police officers start filming the crowd. A Berkeley man walks around offering people Hershey's kisses. His shirt says, "Empathy as the basis for action is key to a better world."

By late morning, under a stand of trees several hundred feet back from the front line, people gather in front of a stage to hear the event's speakers. Three Percenter militiamen dressed in camouflage stand with their backs to the stage, looking out over the crowd. Their flag, and others from far-right groups, hangs from a tree. Speakers include Brittany Pettibone, a writer for AltRight.com who pushes the conspiracy theory of "white genocide." A man from a group called Based in LA identifies himself as a "gay, Christian, Trump supporter" and says, "If you wanted to call me a faggot, you can do that." An Oathkeeper leader calls for a round of applause for the Berkeley Police Department "because they didn't run" from the antifa.

Kyle Chapman, known as "Based Stickman," takes the stage. Chapman became a figurehead of far-right street brawlers after a video went viral of him breaking a wooden signpost over the head of an antifa activist during the clash in March over Milo Yiannopoulos's thwarted Berkeley appearance. "No longer will we cower in the shadows," Chapman says. "It is time we push back against the assault on freedom-loving Americans! This assault comes from all directions—the mainstream media, corrupt government officials, crony capitalism, and our education system which indoctrinates our youth. But today we stand opposed to one specific threat. And that threat is domestic terrorism!" he shouts, pointing in the direction of the left-wing side. "They have been relentless in trying to annihilate our constitutional right of free speech. They have destroyed and buried our communities. They are intent upon the destruction of Western civilization. Enough is enough! Your days are numbered and Americans will rise up against you!" The crowd cheers. Later, Chapman is arrested by Berkeley police on a warrant for the March assault.

An African America woman from LA, wearing a Trump T-shirt and an American flag bandana, takes the microphone. "Do I look like a racist?!" she says. "Do I look like a Nazi?! I am a black American!" Another M-80 explodes in the distance. "African Americans are being put in categories as Muslims. We are not Muslims! We are not from Africa! We are black Americans. And for all you mothers and fathers out there: Protect your daughters because the Muslim Brotherhood believes in marrying nine-year-old girls. They are kidnapping these little girls in America. We as Americans have to take matters into our own hands."

"We love you!" someone shouts.

"Black Americans helped build this country. We were brought here 400 years ago as slaves and we have developed this country for anybody to be here to enjoy!"

"Except for the illegals!" someone shouts.

"Except for the illegals," she repeats, laughing nervously. "Black Americans built the White House on the backs of slaves and we'd be doggoned if we let these foreign people come to our country and take America away from us. We will fight you tooth and nail and we will conquer our country back! We will fight for Donald J. Trump!"

Nicki Stallard, a white trans woman, takes the stage. She is from the Pink Pistols, an LGBT "self-defense" group whose membership grew after the Orlando shooting. They reference the tragedy as a reason to support Trump's Muslim ban. "Now I know that with many of you here we may have disagreements," Stallard says to the crowd, "but how many here love the US Constitution? Say yeah!"

"Yeah!"

"How many of you support the Bill of Rights? Say yeah!"

"Yeah!"

"I'd like every single one of you to turn to the person next to you and high five them." The crowd ripples with slapping palms. "Because you are brave. You are standing up here for the First Amendment, for free speech. It's kind of funny. They say anti-fascism," she says, pointing at the antifa, "but boy, they are surely demonstrating how they've perfected it. They don't have brown shirts. They have black shirts. But they are still authoritarian fascists. America was founded on freedom. We don't necessarily have to like each other, but we have to defend each other's right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. America is about freedom, not slavery, not submission, not authoritarianism. If you agree with me, say yeah!"

"Yeah."

The counterprotesters, she says, are "Americans in Name Only: ANOS. Okay? ANOS. If you agree with me, say yeah!"

"Yeah!"

Around noon, a group of people dressed in black come up the street with a sound system blasting YG's song "FDT." The left-wing sidesteps over the orange fencing and pours onto the street, singing the chorus, "fuck Donald Trump." Trump supporters chant: "USA! USA!" People stare each other down along the front line. Soon, bottles and rocks start to fly through the air. The street erupts in punching and kicking. Hundreds of people flock to and surround the spasms of violence.

It goes on like this for nearly two hours. The riot police are conspicuously absent. The left-wing side makes attempts to break through right-wing lines and enter the park. The groups face off, brawl, and retreat over and over again. When the leftists get close to the stage, the leader of the Three Percenters orders his men to rally up and take defensive positions. The man in the Spartan mask yells out a battle cry, lunging into the left-wing side, and someone pepper sprays him. He takes his shirt off, squirts milk into his eyes from a spray bottle, and continues fighting.

A man in an InfoWars T-shirt stands on top of a dumpster and gyrates to the antifa's music. A comrade dancing with him wields a Pepsi can.

Two men who appear to be cops film the scene from a nearby rooftop. At times, it feels like a war zone, yet the violence becomes ritualized and predictable. Various participants get seriously pummeled and bloodied. People on each side retreat for care from their medics or to debrief with friends and comrades. Away from the fighting, there is an "empathy tent" set up by a small group of people with a sign saying, "Want to talk? We listen." It is empty.

By 2 p.m., the right-wing Trump supporters charge up a street toward downtown Berkeley, chasing antifa. Some antifa attempt to stop their momentum, picking out individuals to fight with. A group of antifa pull a fence into the street, but the right-wingers plow through it. A man in a skull mask jump-kicks an antifa activist. People cough from breathing tear gas.

Soon, roughly 100 Trump supporters, members of the alt-right, Proud Boys, militiamen, and neo-Nazis swagger into downtown Berkeley. From their point of view, the ability to say whatever they want has been triumphantly upheld in a city known as the lefty home of the free-speech movement.

But the left continues to confront them. For the next hour, hostilities continue to ebb and flow. A right-wing guy shouts at an antagonist, "This is funded by Soros! You are fighting for the man! Do your research!" A Trump supporter pulls out a knife but backs down after being surrounded by opponents. A man blows bubbles over everyone. Both sides throw some more punches, but they have become less committed. People have been fighting for hours and most seem to be fading. A local man sets up an easel and begins painting the scene.

A block away, police stand near their cars. I approach an officer and ask why they haven't intervened more during the last couple of hours of mayhem.

He shrugs. "That would be a good question for the chief of police."

"I've been seeing people get beat up all day. I haven't seen you guys around much."

"Mmmhmmm. Okay. And?" By the end of the day, they will have arrested more than 20 people, on charges including assault with a deadly weapon, battery, and committing a criminal offense while wearing a mask. (The Berkeley PD didn't respond to my request for comment, but in a written statement disseminated after the event, it said, "The Berkeley Police Department remains focused on protecting the peaceful expression of free speech and will continue to develop criminal cases and seek prosecution against all those who infringed on the rights of others and participated in riotous acts." It added that "police will be reviewing social media video footage to identify and arrest anyone involved in crimes on Saturday.")

By mid-afternoon, people slowly trickle away and the remaining members of the far-right contingent march back down the street, cheering. A man plays a snare drum as if he's some marching soldier from the Civil War. The day's events suggest that violent street battles between the far right and left could continue, perhaps here—with right-wing demagogue Ann Coulter scheduled to speak on the University of California-Berkeley campus on April 27—or perhaps in other cities. As the rally fizzles out, several people point their cameras at Chapman, a.k.a. Based Stickman. "Boston, Seattle, we are coming for you," he says. "You will no longer take our constitutionally protected rights from us."

A bearded man standing next to him in goggles, a bike helmet, and a Captain America T-shirt let's out his best menacing

(Shane Bauer is a senior reporter at Mother Jones … where this special report originated … and recipient of numerous awards, including the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. He is also the co-author, with Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, of A Sliver of Light, a memoir of his two years as a prisoner in Iran. )

-cw

A SPECIAL REPORT--It’s Monday afternoon in Bellflower, a small suburb in southeastern Los Angeles County, California. Juana, 34, and a neighbor from her apartment complex are watching their sons. (All names in this story have been changed to protect undocumented people’s identities.) It’s one of Juana’s two days off per week from the luxury hotel she works at in Beverly Hills as a housekeeper. 

The two boys, both 3 years old, are playing on the couch in the small living room that doubles as a dining area, with a kitchen tucked into a corner. Aside from helping watch over the children, Juana’s neighbor holds a gaze through an opening in the front window curtain, and eventually spots someone outside. “That’s the man with the gas company,” she tells Juana in Spanish. “It’s fine if you want to open the door when he knocks.” 

Both women are originally from El Salvador. They help one another with ordinary neighborly tasks like saving a washer in the building’s laundry room for a load of clothes. As women from Central America who are terrified of Donald Trump, they watch one another’s backs the way immigrants and refugees would under a new administration that partly came into power on the promise of mass deportations. These days, the women say, every knock on the door, every step outside, and every ride on public transit merits scrutiny. 

I spent the better part of a week with Juana – morning, noon and night – to try to make sense of her life under Trump, watching her calculate and recalculate even the smallest decisions in her life.

The man at her door, it turns out, works with an energy-savings assistance project and he’s here to let Juana know she’s eligible for a free, brand-new refrigerator. He just needs to confirm she qualifies for the program, which rewards low-income residents with energy-efficient appliances. He enters the tiny one-bedroom apartment to inspect the existing refrigerator, as Juana explains there are three others living here: her husband Roberto, her 9-year-old daughter Bella and her son Bobby. The man jots down some notes and leaves. 

Juana’s friend – who currently has an open asylum claim after fleeing El Salvador with her then-toddler son two years ago – is part of an informal support network that helps keep Juana safe as an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles, the place she’s called home since shortly after arriving here in 2006. Conversations between the women persistently return to the issue of immigration; Juana’s husband, Roberto, is undocumented, while her children are both United States-born citizens.

Later, she tells me that had her friend not been there to inform her that the man wasn’t an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, she wouldn’t have opened the door. Instead, she would have hidden inside all day and into the night. 

ICE employs what it calls a sensitive location policy, which dictates that agents should take considerable measures to avoid enforcement actions at hospitals, schools and churches. Yet since Trump assumed office, ICE has detained a woman at a hospital, a father a few blocks from his daughters’ schools and a group of men leaving a church shelter where they were keeping warm. 

“Did you hear about the young woman who entered on a visa from Argentina and talked to the press?” Juana asks me one evening. She’s referring to Daniela Vargas, who was detained by ICE moments after speaking at a news conference. Juana knows the story of every high-profile detention and deportation since Trump took office. Although ICE’s policy discourages agents from targeting people at the site of a public demonstration like the one Vargas addressed, that didn’t stop her from being detained. “It’s a risk for us to talk to reporters,” Juana reminds me. 

A few weeks ago, Juana was on her way to work on a Metro train when she saw a friend’s Facebook post about ICE’s presence at Union Station – a stop she wasn’t headed toward but which, nevertheless, is on the same line she was riding. When her shift ended, she asked her friend at work for a ride back home, rather than risk the train. She avoided public transportation entirely for the next five days. 

In addition to verifiable news about ICE’s enforcement, and warranted warnings from her network of supportive friends, false rumors have also taken root in Juana’s life and have caused her to drastically alter her decision-making. She’d long planned to send her daughter, Bella, to visit El Salvador for the first time, either during winter or spring break, but heard that immigration agents – with vicious dogs – were swarming LAX. Although there’s no evidence of this, the rumor alone is enough for Juana to completely avoid an airport she’s visited in the past. Juana’s fear means Bella can’t visit her parent’s homeland – at least until Trump leaves office. 

Juana does have rights as an undocumented immigrant, but she’s not sure what those rights are. The labor union she belongs to holds know-your-rights workshops, but she’s terrified that if she attends, her co-workers will figure out her status. Only one friend at work knows Juana is undocumented; she fears if more find out, it could all be downhill from there. 

Aside from the psychological toll the constant vigilance since Trump’s election has taken on her, Juana is also risking her physical health. While she has employer-based health insurance through Kaiser, she canceled an annual physical because the fake document (which contained her real name and birthday) she was previously using to identify herself, has expired. “There are a lot of racist people,” she tells me. “What if one of them starts questioning me about my documentation?” Although she’s been struggling with digestive issues and poor circulation, she’s willing to forgo a doctor’s visit because of her uncertainty. 

I explain how she can use another form of identification to go to Kaiser, like a passport. Sometime later, she shows me her Salvadoran passport and wonders why her initial panic stopped her from thinking about using it as a different form of ID. What Juana knows about this administration hurts her – but what she doesn’t know about her rights under Trump harms her, too. 

Juana came to the United States in 2006, when she was 23. El Salvador’s civil war had ended in 1992, but the vast rift between the haves and have-nots that largely fueled the war lives on – and it continues to inform the country’s violence. 

Juana had done especially well in mathematics in school but her family couldn’t afford to send her to college to prepare for her dream of becoming an accountant. Instead, she worked factory jobs after graduating high school. She came to the U.S. at a time when there were no real options for her to escape poverty at home. In the decade she’s been gone, El Salvador has exploded with a kind of violence that scares her far more than the threats from Trump’s administration. 

“The first tragedy we lived through was in 2011, when my mom’s older brother couldn’t pay the rent,” she says. The rent she’s referring to isn’t a payment made to a landlord, however, but payments extorted by local gangs. Her uncle was killed. Then, in 2012, a second uncle was killed because he, too, couldn’t pay the rent. That left one uncle behind, who came to the U.S. that year and was granted asylum here. 

In 2013, her aunt came to the U.S. and was also granted asylum along with her two children. That year, however, Juana’s father was shot in the legs but can apparently still walk. “I can’t really tell you how well my dad is doing,” shrugs Juana. “I haven’t seen him since before he was shot.” 

In 2015, her brother-in-law, an undercover cop who had helped put away several gang members, was killed after his boss set him up for a pay-off. His wife, Juana’s sister, became a target after it was rumored that she was a police informant. Her sister went into hiding along with her 11-year-old daughter before fleeing north. They were apprehended just over this side of the U.S. border but were soon released pending an asylum hearing. 

But there’s no such process that Juana thinks is currently available to her – she can be an undocumented immigrant, but not an asylee. This, despite the fact her family has consistently been hunted down in El Salvador, a place she’s seen grow increasingly violent from a distance. “I can’t imagine myself back there,” she says. 

Juana wakes up at 5 a.m. on her workdays, Wednesday through Sunday. Roberto does custom construction work six days a week and has Sundays off – which means the two rarely get to spend a day together. Roberto drives and has a license under California’s undocumented driver program. The license, which is part of a database, is marked to distinguish his undocumented status, but Roberto says it’s better to be licensed and insured than to fly under the radar. Juana never got a license and the car she was using for short errands started acting up recently; instead of getting it fixed, she’s opted to stop driving. It’s too risky now, anyway. 

It’s still dark out and Roberto yawns while he puts his boots on. “There’s no rest here,” he tells me, adding that it’s all work and bills in the United States. He works 48 hours a week earning $12 an hour as an independent contractor. The pay could be worse but it’s challenging every April when the couple forks over their share of taxes to the government. 

By 5:35 a.m., Roberto is warming up the car. Bella is walking with her backpack on as Juana carries a sleeping little Bobby in a blanket. They all get into the car and drive a few minutes over to the friend who will watch the children; she’ll walk Bella to school and back, and watch Bobby all day. By 6:10 a.m., Roberto drops Juana off at a rail stop. 

Juana works the 8 a.m. shift cleaning rooms. She likes the union job and its perks – but as with any job, it comes with its challenges. People who can drop a thousand dollars a night on a hotel stay tend to be demanding. Some can say inappropriate things. There was a fistfight between two guests at the hotel several months ago and the police were called. She didn’t think much of it then, but is terrified of being near police since Trump got elected. 

After an eight-hour shift, Juana walks back to the bus to begin her commute home, along with her friend from work – the one who knows she’s undocumented. This afternoon we’re all walking down a posh but ill-designed residential Beverly Hills street that’s become a throughway for heavy traffic, when the driver of a new sports car almost runs us over. Juana and her friend keep walking as if nothing happened. She tells me later that some Beverly Hills residents assume that because of our skin color, we’re all housekeepers and are therefore not worthy of common courtesy. Confronting the driver could result in further scrutiny from law enforcement – so rather than say anything to him, the women ignored the incident. 

On the last train back home, I spot a sheriff’s deputy quickly board the car in the front of us. As soon as I let her know, Juana calmly puts her phone away and tries to distinguish the deputy through the shadows caused by the sun beginning to set on Los Angeles. For the next three stops, Juana trains her eyes on him without flinching. If I didn’t know what she was doing, I’d guess she was zoning out. She’s not. 

When we detrain, Juana asks me to look back and confirm the deputy’s not following us. He’s not, I assure her. She explains she was extremely alarmed because he was alone when he should have been with a partner, since that’s how they always patrol railcars. Even for people terrified of law enforcement, one deputy shouldn’t garner more trepidation than two deputies, but in Juana’s case, it makes sense. There was something out of the ordinary and it required closer examination – this time, her complete attention to make sure the deputy wasn’t an ICE agent. 

Immigration enforcement is a system – abstract and difficult to put your finger on. Sure, Juana fears the system, but that fear has also caused her to fear individuals, too: the obliging appliance man, the imaginary Kaiser receptionist, the obnoxious sports car driver – they all present a potential danger to an undocumented woman surviving the Trump era.

(Aura Bogado is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has written for the Guardian, Teen Vogue, Mother Jones and the Nation. This piece was co-produced by The American Report and Capital and Main.)

-cw

GUEST COMMENTARY--In recent years' videos of law enforcement in action have become commonplace. Departments have adopted video cameras to record their deputies and officers in action, bystanders have posted cellphone videos of police action, and surveillance cameras have captured images which have been replayed on local and national media.  

Cameras have proven to be another tool to improve officer safety and accountability, enhance training and improve prosecution of criminal cases. Review of videos by officers has proven valuable in the accurate documentation of criminal activity as well as an enhancement to subsequent testimony and presentation of evidence in court.  

We expect video recordings will increase deputy sheriffs' effectiveness by documenting crimes and refuting frivolous claims of police misconduct. Time and again, we have seen that some of the best evidence against made-up tales of law enforcement abuse is the complete, unedited video footage of an incident captured in its entirety and with proper context. 

In this age of videos, one concern that law enforcement leaders now face is that the public believes that they know the whole story after a snippet of video on from an incident is captured posted online or shown on television. Unfortunately, while outwardly compelling videos images tell only part of the story, they often do not depict what occurred before and after an incident. Those few moments in time do not provide context and may not reveal the subtleties behind an encounter, what led up to it and the totality of what occurred during it. It is understandable that for most people a collage of images might be all they need to pass judgment, and this leads to a  disconnect as to why law enforcement leaders and prosecutors cannot come to the same quick judgment. 

The narrow scope of a video lens cannot show a deputy's perception of what occurred or in some cases what actually occurred. Cognitive science research has clearly demonstrated that perceptions and memories are not literal representations of reality, and a deputy's behavior is affected by our perceptions of reality not necessarily reality itself. A peace officers' actions reflect their perception of the event from their point of view. 

Videos, whether they be cell phones or body cameras are a tool to document events; they are not the whole story. Interactions with the public, particularly stressful situations such as uses of force, are dynamic and deputies are not able to stop and take notes or record information as cameras can. That is why we have long been a strong proponent of having deputies review videos of incidents before writing their report. Viewing a video allows them to recall details more accurately or at the very least account for those details they didn't perceive or do not remember. The fact that something is recorded doesn't mean the entire context of an event is captured, as this New York Times video documents.  

A complete airing of all the facts can often end up in a different conclusion. For example, as video of three LAPD officers led to public outcry and a civil lawsuit, a federal jury later unanimously rejected the civil rights lawsuit after examining all the facts, and not just focusing on the most sensational piece of video "evidence." In another high-profile case, after repeated airing on television, it was later revealed in court that a video used by a gang member and his attorney to smear the good names of two honest police officers had been doctored. 

We certainly do not quarrel with the use of videos. In fact, they often provide key evidence which can exonerate deputies and officers in the face of questions regarding the use of force actions or claims of misconduct While on television crimes can be solved in in an hour, the intricate legal issues often seen on videos, including those related to law enforcement training, department policies and procedures, control and perception, take more than an hour to analyze. 

Despite their usefulness, it is critical that everyone understands that videos have limitations. Videos are only part of the evidence in an incident, not "all the evidence."  This key point needs to be remembered every time there is a claim that a snippet of video "proves" what happened in any incident. 

(The Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS) is the collective bargaining agent representing more than 7,900 deputy sheriffs and district attorney investigators working in Los Angeles County.)

-cw

PLATKIN ON PLANNING--If your email box is like mine, it is filled with invitations to Saturday’s Climate Change march and rally in Wilmington’s Banning Park. This rally begins at 11 AM, and it will be followed by a march to the nearby Tesoro Refinery, 1331 Eubank Avenue, in Los Angeles.

If you are already going to this rally, the three articles I discuss below will give you a deeper understanding of why this march is so important. Plus, I end with specific suggestions about what you can pursue locally to adapt to and, more importantly, to mitigate climate change. 

If you haven’t thought about going to the rally, or are on the fence, then please check out the articles I link to below. I consider their authors – Bill McKibben, John Bellamy Foster, and Michael Klare -- to be the best U.S. writers on climate-related issues.   What I appreciate is their accessible writing style and thorough scientific knowledge about climate change. But, more importantly, all three writers dig deeply into the economic, political, and social processes responsible for global warming. These are not writers who fall back on a vague concept of human-caused climate change. Instead, they identify the industries, companies, political forces, and politicians most responsible for what all three writers consider inevitable terracide if not abruptly stopped.

If this strikes you as alarmist, then you are absolutely right. Despite their differences, all three writers are alarmists, and they explain, in painful detail, the political and economic processes that are already leading to planetary-wide destruction. Furthermore, even though their solutions differ, all three call for deep systemic changes beyond their harsh critiques of the Trump administration and of trendy life-style changes dubbed “going green.” 

The lead story in the week’s issue of The Nation, On April 29, We march for the Future, is authored by Bill McKibben, this country leading climate writer, advocate, and political organizer. Widely known through his many articles and appearances, McKibben is also the founder of Saturday’s Climate March in Washington, DC, and in many other cities, like Los Angeles. 

McKibben describes our current situation in these unsparing words: 

“It is hard to avoid hyperbole when you talk about global warming. It is, after all, the biggest 
thing humans have ever done, and by a very large margin. In the past year, we’ve decimated the Great Barrier Reef, which is the largest living structure on Earth. In the drought-stricken territories around the Sahara, we’ve helped kick off what The New York Times called “one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War II.” We’ve melted ice at the poles at a record pace, because our emissions trap extra heat from the sun that’s equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima-size explosions a day. Which is why, just maybe, you should come to … a series of big climate protests that will mark the 100^th day of Trumptime. Maybe the biggest thing ever is worth a day.” 

McKibben’s solutions largely rest on a combination of mass political pressure on both political parties and extensive technological change. His goal is to keep as much carbon in the ground through total bans on fracking and the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. He also calls for the full transformation to renewables: solar panels, bikes, buses, electric cars, wind power, and improved batteries. His ultimate goal is the elimination of all new fossil fuel infrastructure and the transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. 

In Trump and Climate Catastrophe, University of Oregon environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster carefully describes the combined political and economic processes that have lead to the current climate catastrophe. Like McKibben, Foster considers the current crisis to be much larger than Donald Trump. And like McKibben, Foster thinks Trump’s efforts to stop climate research and fully deregulate the fossil fuel industry could move the existing current climate crisis past the point of no return. In Foster’s words: 

“The effects of the failure to mitigate global warming will not of course come all at once, and will not affect all regions and populations equally. But just a few years of inaction in the immediate future could lock in dangerous climate change that would be irreversible for the next ten thousand years. It is feared that once the climatic point of no return—usually seen as a 2°C increase in global average temperatures—is reached, positive-feedback mechanisms will set in, accelerating warming trends and leading, in the words of James Hansen, … to “a dynamic situation that is out of [human] control,” propelling the world toward the 4°C (or even higher) future that is thought by scientists to portend the end of civilization, in the sense of organized human society.”

Where Foster disagrees with McKibben is over the latter’s faith in a transformation to renewable energy. In Foster’s words, “Even though a conversion to renewable energy is hypothetically conceivable within the system, capital’s demand for short-term profits, its competitive drive, its vested interests, and its inability to plan for long-term needs all militate against rational energy solutions.” In other words, the economic and political barriers of modern capitalism will effectively block the total technological energy transformation that McKibben calls for. Foster is not opposed to such an energy transformation in theory, but in practice he believes that the political barriers cannot be overcome without a parallel economic transformation. 

As a result, Foster comes to a dire conclusion; we can continue to live under capitalism or we can make the wide-ranging political and economic changes that will ultimately prevent imminent planetary catastrophe. But, we cannot have our cake and eat it too: we can choose one or the other, but cannot choose both.   

Foster calls his alternative political/economic program eco-socialism. He also points out that many others have reached the same radical conclusion, such as Eric S. Godoy and Aaron Jaffe in their October 31, 2016, op-ed piece in the New York Times, “We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution.” Their point, like Foster’s, is that we are now at a critical juncture in human history. Governmental and corporate allegiance to fossil fuel profits has become a death knell to humanity. We must now assure that a dangerous economic system ends, not the planet and human civilization. The choice is stark, but it is ours. chael Klare’s recent article, Climate Change is Genocide: Why Inaction equals Annihilation, first appeared on-line at TomDispatch and then was widely republished. 

Like McKibben and Foster, Klare, who teaches at Hampshire College, contends that humanity is at the precipice. Emerging conditions in Africa reveal what this catastrophe eventually portends for the entire planet. In Klare’s words:

“The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists agree that any increase in average world temperatures that exceeds 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era -- some opt for a rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius -- will alter the global climate system drastically.  In such a situation, a number of societies will simply disintegrate in the fashion of South Sudan today, producing staggering chaos and misery. So far, the world has heated up by at least one of those two degrees, and unless we stop burning fossil fuels in quantity soon, the 1.5-degree level will probably be reached in the not-too-distant future. Worse yet, on our present trajectory, it seems highly unlikely that the warming process will stop at 2 or even 3 degrees Celsius, meaning that later in this century many of the worst-case climate-change scenarios -- the inundation of coastal cities, the desertification of vast interior regions, and the collapse of rain-fed agriculture in many areas -- will become everyday reality.

Klare’s program is not fully articulated in his Tom Dispatch article, but he does spell it out in more detail elsewhere, and he also calls for readers to join one of the April 29 Climate Marches. More specifically, Klare proposes that those who understand the calamity already underway work on two fronts. The first is broad political struggle, similar to McKibben, especially against the Trump administration, as well as a full energy transformation. The second is local actions that can proceed with or without hostile laws and regulations from the Trump administration. 

Therefore, let us consider a few of these local actions, especially since the effects of climate change are already appearing in California as more intensive forest fires, droughts, heat waves, tree dies offs, beach erosion, and heavy rains. 

What you can do at the local level: As I have previously written at CityWatch and Progressive City, despite weak leadership in both major parties on climate issues in Washington, DC, there is still much we can achieve at the municipal level. 

Extensive urban tree planting: As explained by a recent LA Times investigative study of tree die-offs in Southern California, climate change plays a decisive role.   It expresses itself as five years of drought, which weakened trees, followed by an extremely wet year in which insects now thrive, including invasive species. The result is millions of dead trees, with no end in sight. Therefore, we need to accelerate our planting of a highly diverse urban forest in Los Angeles so future combinations of extreme climate events, plant dise ases, and invasive species will not devastate entire neighborhoods. 

Once achieved, this vigorous urban forest will reduce CO2 levels, which have recently reach 410 parts per million (ppm). Trees can also filter out other dangerous air pollutants, such as particulate matter. In addition to climate change mitigation, trees also play an important role in adapting to climate change by creating shade that protects us from heat waves and makes walking more inviting, while buffeting heavy rains and allowing percolation into aquifers. 

Alternative Transportation Modes: Los Angele already has a range grass roots group that advocate for more transit, bicycle infrastructure, and pedestrian improvements. While all these options require money, they also need public supporters who are fully engaged. They must write articles and letters-to-the-editor, heavily lobby elected officials, make their case at public meetings and hearings, organize participatory events and demonstrations, and when necessary, engage in civil disobedience. 

California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA): On one hand, we have a powerful tool to understand the climate impacts of plans, programs, and public and private projects. It is the California Environmental Quality Act, which also provides elected officials with a lever to stop or downsize projects that contribute to global warming. On the other hand, our elected officials have a developer-guided political agenda to reduce the scope and power of CEQA. Since the developers have no intention of changing this cozy relationship, it is up to local activists to drown out and expose the City Hall pay-to-play that is contributing to terracide. 

Conclusion? When Saturday’s march is over, roll up your sleeves for the long haul. Through CityWatch, you will get some report cards and action plans for the tumultuous years ahead.

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He recently taught courses in sustainable city planning at USC’s Price School of Social Policy, where he used articles by the three authors cited in the above column. Please send any comments and corrections to [email protected].)

-cw

THE PREVEN REPORT-It was “La La Land” at City Hall…the Greatest Show on Earth! Bungee jumpers (photo above) plunging from impossible heights -- and Mayor Eric “move-over-Scott-Joplin-there’s-a-new-sheriff-in-town” Garcetti jamming hard on the piano. (He’s good. See photo, below left.) 

Not advertised but taking place at the same time on the 15th floor of City Hall East was a magnificent pick-pocket demonstration by the Prop HHH Administrative Oversight Committee (AOC), headed by Richard Llewellyn, who made the unorthodox leap from being Eric Garcetti’s personal lawyer to being the Chief Administrative Officer of the City of Los Angeles. The public couldn’t believe its wallet was gone. How’d they do that? 

Since we last wrote about this group, things have gone from bad to worse. 

Prop HHH was a great victory for Mayor Garcetti, no? He was proud to have led the charge, and wasn’t shy about saying so on TV. 

So why the sudden secrecy? Don’t they want to keep that Great Spirit going? Fill the room with excited members of the public? Celebrate our progress towards ending homelessness in LA?  

Apparently not. Just the opposite. Now, it’s round-the-clock evasion, obfuscation and silly tricks. 

Is this because they’re doing a great job?  Are they planning a surprise party? 

It’s time for the public to send a message to Mayor Garcetti and his team: We are watching. It is not OK to persuade Angelenos to give money for a cause they believe in only to have that money diverted to serve an alternate agenda.  

Here’s some specific demands: 

Meeting agendas must include links to all supplementary materials to be discussed at the meeting -- and audio recordings of those meetings should be posted without delay -- just as every other meeting does. 

The AOC discussed the need for the city to be compensated for the time it spends on work related to Prop HHH. It would take the form, in effect, of a “commission” on each project.  

The precise percentage has not been determined, but it’s not a good sign that when co-author Eric Preven asked what the commission would be on a $3.5 million project and, as the presenter started to answer the question, the CAO shushed the staffer, saying that they weren’t taking questions from the floor. He then authorized another employee to not-answer the question. 

It's true the proposition allows for the City to recoup “costs incidental to issuing the general obligation bonds,” but those should be minimal. And that phrase does not give permission to set up a “billable hours” system.  

It’s the City’s job to handle various funding sources. If we’re going to take a commission off every HHH project, then let’s go to the car dealership model. There are slow months and busy months in any job. You don’t get paid extra for the busy months.  

Also, the bond will save the City money by, as the bond says, mitigating “financial pressures on the General Fund.” 

Something’s got to give. If Mayor Garcetti keeps pushing forward with his public-unfriendly agenda (why else would his team be hiding themselves away?) then public outrage will mount until the whole ugly story winds up on the front page of the New York Times. There is such a thing as bad press, and it’s called “being accused in a national newspaper of stealing money from the homeless.”  

Alternatively, the Mayor can throw in the towel on his agenda, open up the whole process, and wind up on the front page of the NY Times as a star. La La Land forever!

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LEANING RIGHT--While I believe that my previous article about creating an LA countywide rail network that makes sense to most commuters tied the idea of science to policy fairly well, I regret that my more recent article about tying science to politics and policy didn't make my case as I wish it should have. 

The Scientific Method, in a nutshell, states that a person's observations, or a group of people's opinions, are NOT proof, and that that person or group of people do not KNOW anything; they just believe it with a good reasonable guess. Spending money based on what one knows, or has observed, is not scientific "proof" but rather an educated guess ... but statistics and data can easily fall into bias and a distorted view that leads to a distorted conclusion. 

What's true:  environmental regulations and law did help the smog situation between the 1970's and the present in LA County. 

What's also true: smog existed even in the era where only Native Americans lived in the LA basin, because the San Gabriel Mountains and the easterly winds from the Pacific Ocean would allow campfires to cause a mild form of smog. 

What's also true still: exploding the population of the LA basin without enough water, mobility, environmental and utility infrastructure is not sustainable and cannot possibly lead to a reliable, long-term water/air/soil environmental scenario. 

These are observations, but in theory I don't "know" anything.  And neither does the LA Board of Supervisors, the LA City Council, and all the other do-gooders who usually end up performing and implementing policy that helps a few but hurts the majority. 

Do people need affordable housing?  Yes--particularly true when they have children. 

Do people need open space for recreational and psychological purposes?  Yes--particularly true when they have children. 

Do people need clean and sufficient water, affordable food, and affordable utility to allow for comfortable (and healthy) temperatures in their homes and workplaces?  Yes--regardless of age. 

Has the city and county of Los Angeles built more for middle-class housing and needs?  Decidedly not.  The "policy makers" of Sacramento and Downtown LA keep harping on the need to help the middle class, but yet it's no secret that the middle class is shrinking throughout this state and that our three-class society is rapidly devolving into a two-class society. 

Do observations of historical, economic, and political experiments in extreme left-wing, top-down societies (such as the former USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, Greece, and other nations) support the notion that this sort of policy-making leads to improved health, quality of life, prosperity, and environmental standards for the average citizen in those nations. 

Decidedly not. 

There is a difference between "liberal" (open-minded, self-sufficient, sustainable) and "progressive" (keep making laws, top-down government, always finding new ills to "fix" at the taxpayers' expense), and we are going to have to figure out which is better, liberal or progressive. 

(Ditto between conservative/common sense versus right-wing dogma, by the way) 

So when we have a Planning Commission that unanimously approves a monstrosity overdevelopment that is virtually 3 times as tall as anything anywhere in the adjacent region of the Westside, and is vigorously opposed by local Councilmember Mike Bonin, is that "liberal" or Big Brother politics by that Planning Commission? 

Is it scientifically valid, when just about every traffic and neighborhood analyst states it's acceptable to build at 40-50 feet maximum, but not 80 feet, and that it's a traffic/environmental failure? 

Furthermore, it's nowhere near a rail station, unlike the large development of residential/commercial structures at the Red/Orange Line intersection in North Hollywood. So it's NOT transit-oriented development, but rather transient-oriented development. 

Just because the Planning Commission, Mayor Garcetti and Sacramento scream "BUILD! BUILD! BUILD!" does not make that approval good science, or consistent with human quality of life or health. 

Just like "SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!" does not make for good economic policy. 

And as the middle class leaves California to go to either Texas or other states, the economy of California appears to be filled with mobility for an elite few/wealthy, while filled with roadblocks and shredded dreams for the average man or woman (particularly if they're trying to make a living in the private sector). 

Is this science based on observation?  Yes, and on experience, and based on the ability to discern that we can't build our way out of traffic, overpopulation, urban blight and the like. 

Is it "proof"?  No--that's NOT how the Scientific Method works. 

But the "theory" that overbuilding and not shoring up our infrastructure as we overbuild, and overdensify in the suburbs (while creating new "downtowns" that were never built for being that dense) is hardly scientifically invalid. 

It may be my theory, or the theory of a few of us, but I'm sticking with it. 

Because to do otherwise would be to throw away everything my eyes, ears, and memory has taught me throughout my whole life ... and would it be scientifically valid at all to ignore it based on some "feel-good" idea of how the world "ought" to be, rather than what the world actually is?

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He was co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chaired the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

-cw

RANTZ AND RAVEZ-The 70 Year Anniversary of the Los Angeles Police Reserve Corps was celebrated on Saturday evening, April 22, at the Skirball Cultural Center in the hills adjacent to the 405 freeway and Mulholland Drive. There were celebrities present, along with active and reserve LAPD police officers and their families. Chief Charlie Beck came to greet arriving guests along with members of the LAPD Command Staff. Even former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca attended the banquet to show his support for the men and women of the LAPD. 

Dr. Phil McGraw was honored for his unwavering support for law enforcement officers across America. Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander was also honored as an LAPD Reserve Officer along with Bob Keller, a retired LAPD Sergeant and Reserve Officer Coordinator and current elected official in the city of Santa Clarita. Throughout the festivities of the evening there was great and sincere recognition for the Reserve Officers from the 21 Patrol, Traffic, Air Operations and many specialized divisions throughout the city. Officers were acknowledged for their true and unselfish dedication to the people of Los Angeles. One reserve officer was even recognized for his 50 years of service to the people of our City. 

Noticeably absent was Mayor Garcetti, the City Attorney, the City Controller, all LA City Councilmembers except for Councilman Mitchell Englander (who was recognized and honored during the event) and all five of Mayor Garcetti’s appointed members of the Los Angeles Police Commission. 

This lack of attendance by elected officials and members of the Los Angeles Police Commission tells the story of just how little those people who make the decisions in Los Angeles care about the citizens who volunteer to try and keep LA safe as members of the Los Angeles Police Reserve Corps. 

My ride on the Metro Orange and Red Lines to downtown on a Friday night. 

There was a man threatening to jump from an overpass on the 110 freeway during the evening commute time last Friday evening. I was invited to a judicial dinner at the Biltmore Hotel and did not want to be late. Since I was in the West San Fernando Valley and did not want to get caught up in traffic gridlock as reported on KNX Radio, I decided to take the Metro Orange Line to the Red Line in North Hollywood and hopefully arrive on time.  

I missed the first bus and had to wait for the second one to arrive. I boarded the Orange Line Bus and headed to North Hollywood. I was the only person on the bus wearing a suit. There were the usual public transit riders listening to music on their cell phones and eating and drinking on the bus. The ride went smoothly. I arrived in North Hollywood only to miss the Red Line Train that left just as I approached the boarding area. I waited around 20 minutes and took the next Red Line headed for Union Station. When I sat down, I immediately felt liquid on my pants from something that had been spilled. So now I was wearing whatever it was on suit my pants. Once I found a dry seat and sat down again I started to question why I chose to take public transit rather than drive my car. 

We finally arrived at the Pershing Square station. I left the train and walked the short distance to the Biltmore Hotel and located the event in the banquet room where everyone was already seated. I found the seating chart and located my seat at table 15. The program had already begun; people were eating their salads. Around 30 minutes later, a person arrived and was seated to my left. This individual was the Consul General from Egypt. We discussed his late arrival. Somehow he had ended up in San Pedro and had to drive back to downtown for the event. His delay could have been caused by the individual who was threatening to jump. 

The evening concluded and I walked back to the Pershing Square Red Line station and waited for the rail car to arrive. I boarded the train and headed to the North Hollywood Metro Station. While traveling on the train, I noticed a large amount of trash on the floor of the rail car. At one of the next stops, a Metro employee wearing an orange vest and pushing a large gray trash can boarded the train but stood there doing nothing. He ignored the trash on the floor and exited after a few stops. I don’t know if he was just lazy or if it “was not his job” to pick up the trash. My evening of adventure concluded at the Canoga Park Metro parking lot where I walked to my car and drove home.  

I did not notice any law enforcement personnel on any of the Metro vehicles I rode. The lack of visible presence of law enforcement personnel is one of the reasons many people refuse to use the Metro bus and trains to get around Los Angeles. Personal safety is critical when utilizing the Metro. Stats reveal a significant drop in the number of people that ride the public transit lines in Los Angeles. 

Metro is now charging for parking in the North Hollywood Parking lots. The cost is three dollars. Just another reason to avoid taking the Metro in Los Angeles. 

They tricked you once again! 

Senate Bill 1 established a new formula to rip more money out of your pocket when you purchase gas or diesel fuel. The current gas tax is increasing along with diesel fuel and your license plate fees. 

What the Establishment failed to tell you is that all the components of the gas, diesel fuel and license plate surcharges include a clause allowing for inflation. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, all the prices in the new gas formula are tied to inflation and the same goes for car registration. As your fees increase, remember to blame the Governor and the Sacramento politicians who voted for this and pulled another one over on you. 

The articles you have just read are a true reflection of my most recent experiences residing in Los Angeles. I welcome your comments and observations at [email protected].

(Dennis P. Zine is Honorary Mayor of Woodland Hills, a 30-year retired LAPD Sergeant, Elected Charter Reform Commissioner, Former Los Angeles City Councilman and current LAPD Reserve Police Officer.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

HEALTHY CA ACT CLEARS FIRST HURDLE--With close to 1,000 supporters rallying outside, California's Senate Health Committee on Wednesday advanced a single-payer healthcare bill that has been described as a potential "catalyst for the nation." 

The Healthy California Act (SB562) would create a universal health system (covering inpatient, outpatient, emergency care, dental, vision, mental health, and nursing home care) for every California resident. Unveiled last month, the bill has the support of National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association, who held a rally at the Sacramento Convention Center Wednesday followed by a march to the state capitol and a presence in the committee room. 

"The most important thing today was the breadth and depth of support by the dozens of people lining up to back the bill, representing 250 organizations across the state," said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association. "These are organizers who are going to be with us to make the Healthy California Act the law of the land in California."

Supporters got one step closer to that goal on Wednesday, when the Health Committee approved the bill 5-2 after a nearly three-hour hearing. State Sen. Richard Roth said his office had gotten more than 1,000 calls from constituents on the single-payer plan.

The opposition has also reared its head. Courthouse News Service reported: "Several of the groups that have lined up against SB 562 have made political contributions to current members of the Senate Health Committee, including chair Ed Hernandez (D-Montebello), Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), and Richard Roth (D-Riverside). Each member voted in favor of the bill Wednesday."

Still, according to the Los Angeles Times, "Democrats and Republicans alike signaled unease with the major question still unanswered in the legislation: how the program would be paid for."

But Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara, the bill's co-author, said a detailed financial study would be completed in May, before the bill is heard in the Appropriations Committee—its next stop, having cleared the Health Committee hurdle. Lara chairs that committee.

"With today's vote we are closer to being able to say, once and for all, that healthcare is not a privilege, it's a human right," Lara declared. "Every family, every child, every senior deserves healthcare that costs less and covers more, and California has a chance to lead the rest of the nation toward universal care."

State Sen. Toni G. Atkins, also a Democrat and the bill's other co-author, praised the committee members, saying: "They see clearly that the time is right for us to give all Californians the peace of mind that comes with knowing that they and their families will have access to quality healthcare, no matter who they are, how much money they have, or who's in power in Washington, D.C."

Indeed, LA Times reporter David Lazarus suggested in March that the GOP's attempt to gut the U.S. healthcare system could in fact bode well for single-payer efforts like California's.

As Paul Y. Song, co-chair of the Campaign for a Healthy California and Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) board member, wrote earlier this week, "[t]he fact is that our legislators can no longer turn a blind eye while California remains hostage to a federal government run by a heartless majority who recklessly controls the purse strings in favor of tax cuts for the 1 percent while refusing to view healthcare as a right. As the 6th largest economy, California needs to think boldly and look at what all major industrialized nations do."

"The answer has been there all along," said Song. "But, in order to get a healthcare program for the people, it must come from an unprecedented groundswell by the people. We must hold our elected officials publicly accountable and demand what we are already paying for and readily deserve. The [Affordable Care Act] pointed our state and nation in the right direction, but the time for real universal healthcare is now and the opportunity to do so is golden and now!"

To that end, PNHP announced Wednesday that U.S. Rep. John Conyers' (D-Mich.) Medicare-for-All bill has amassed a record number of House co-sponsors: 104.

Justice Democrats, a group holding the party accountable for its stance on universal healthcare, tweeted: "Congrats to Cali! #SB562 has made it through Senate Health Committee. Here's to making it national."

(Deirdre Fulton writes for Common Dreams  … where this report was first posted.)

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COMMON DREAMS REPORT--A new report shows that many previous estimates of global sea level rise by 2100 were far too conservative, the Washington Post reported, and the research comes as new maps and graphics from Climate Central vividly show how disastrous that flooding will be for U.S. cities.

The report, Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic, found that previous estimates of sea level rise didn't account enough for the fast pace of melting ice in the Arctic and Greenland. 

The Post writes:

The assessment found that under a relatively moderate global warming scenario—one that slightly exceeds the temperature targets contained in the Paris climate agreement—seas could be expected to rise "at least" 52 centimeters, or 1.7 feet, by the year 2100. Under a more extreme, "business as usual" warming scenario, meanwhile, the minimum rise would be 74 centimeters, or 2.4 feet.

The report explored a minimum rise scenario, but not a maximum or worst-case scenario. However, a separate report (pdf) published at the end of the Obama administration by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) did just that, and found that in the most extreme case, the sea in some locations will rise a stunning eight feet by the century's end.

Illustrating how devastating this would be, Climate Central created 3D visualizations of what U.S. cities will look like in NOAA's most extreme scenario.

(President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort would be completely drowned in the most extreme scenario for sea level rise. (Image: Climate Central)

Rising seas alone may displace over 13 million people in the U.S., dispersing climate refugees and reshaping inland cities, as Common Dreams reported last week.

See more examples of Climate Central's visualizations here and here, and find a 2D map of sea level rise projections here. 

The ominous new research come as President Donald Trump continues to dismantle climate policies, boosts the fossil fuel industry, and considers pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

But even Trump won't be spared from the looming disaster, Climate Central observes, showing that the projected sea level rise will completely flood the president's Mar-a-Lago resort.

(This is a Common Dreams report.)

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