Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-This column has received two unsolicited telephone calls from the same LAPD Detective asking the same question about the same subject. . .a year apart.
A year ago, the supervising sleuth from the agency’s Legal Affairs Division, Discovery Section, called me to ask why are you asking for this information about a public records request that I made at that time. Last week, he called me again asking an updated version of the same question: why are you still asking for this information?
So let’s pause to point out that it is dangerous and intimidating, dare I say Kremlin-esque, for an armed government agent with the power to arrest, cite and kill and who will always get the benefit of the doubt in a court of law, to ask why an individual is seeking public records and information.
It is none of the government’s business and borders on police harassment and abuse to do so. It might also make the Detective an accessory to a crime if it is discovered that the calls were made to help cover-up police misconduct or to help hide criminal activity from the light of day.
The LAPD might want to re-read that last paragraph. . .
The LAPD knows that I have written hundreds of columns about local government corruption, failure, and abuses. When they poke around in ways that are unseemly, such as these calls, it is a flashing red light that I might be on to something.
So, let’s continue. . .
In between the Detective’s two calls, the LAPD denied my public records request for its Computer Assisted Dispatch (CAD), which would show where certain personnel were sent on certain dates, including but not limited to Getty House, which is Mayor Eric Garcetti’s official residence at 605 S. Irving Boulevard, as opposed to his privately owned home. Unlike a police report, it is far more difficult to doctor a CAD report because, like the board game Jenga, if you move one piece improperly, the entire structure can come crashing down.
I told the Detective when he called me that second time last week that the LAPD hiding those records in no way means that this column is going to stop pursuing them. He refused to explain why the LAPD does not want the public to know where its officers were dispatched on a few days a year or two ago.
This is the shell game that the LAPD is now playing.
Prior to this, the LAPD’s tactics with this column were to threaten my freedom and safety, resulting in my suing it and the LA City Attorney’s office, winning myself a check earlier this year for $10,836 of taxpayer moolah, the lion’s share of which was for the malicious misconduct of a Deputy City Attorney named Jonathan Peralta Bislig, who now has to deal with complaints about his misconduct this column subsequently made to the State Bar of California and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
Before that, the LAPD’s tactics to disrupt my efforts were more like the Keystone Cops, like the time its undercovers followed me to a City Hall meeting where theirs were the only unfamiliar faces in the room. There, the cops feigned interest in the agenda items and asked dumb questions after raising their hands to speak, which is not how questions are asked at City Hall meetings. But how did I know they were cops? Because each time they raised their hands, their un-tucked golf shirts rose over their bellies and exposed their hidden firearms in the otherwise secure City Hall. This, and the fact that another LAPD big wig named Andy Smith, who subsequently left the agency to become Chief of the Green Bay Police Department, sat immediately behind me trying to look over my shoulder at what I was writing.
Back to the story at-hand. . .
The LAPD never turned over those CAD records to me. But when the LAPD called demanding to know why I wanted the information contained in them I was under no obligation to tell the Detective the truth. In our two verbal discussions, as well as several email exchanges with LAPD Chief Michel Moore, I led them to believe that I am seeking “A” when in fact I am seeking “B,” as evidenced by my use of the carefully chosen phrase on my records request “including but not limited to.”
So let’s shed a little light on the story. I am trying to determine where a high-ranking LAPD “fixer” named Captain Art Sandoval, and other officers, were dispatched during a few days a few years ago. What harm could come from that? (Coincidentally, his wife, Captain Patricia Sandoval is one of the LAPD big wigs who ordered me out of a City Council meeting a few years back and yelled at me on camera to intimidate me from seeking greater access for these stories).
So when I called out the LAPD’s ongoing shell game at its Commission meeting last week, the LAPD’s chain of command had directed the Detective to contact me and find out why this column hasn’t quietly gone away.
What did the LAPD think this column was doing with its time between the Detective’s first and second calls a year apart? Moving on to bigger and better things?
Whatever your family calls it, there is tsuris, agita and aggravation in dealing with the LAPD because of its uncanny inability to be open and transparent, even during one of the worst years in its history.
Even as it pledges to do better, its latest bright idea is a shell game.
The LAPD might want to ask Councilmembers like Herb Wesson and Curren Price and Mayor Eric Garcetti how their shell games with this column turned out.
There’s more than one way to get to the truth, because for every bully with a stick, there will always be bigger bullies with bigger sticks, like the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office which are currently performing a DOJ colonoscopy on corrupt Los Angeles politicians and their enablers. Some of them face long federal prison sentences, like Mitch Englander, who once Chaired LA City Council’s Public Safety Committee (which oversees the LAPD) and was an LAPD reserve, and who wants to spend fewer years behind bars and might know a thing or two.
Think that can’t happen? That’s precisely how the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal broke; a bad dude in deep trouble gave the feds a tip.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is nominated for a 2020 Los Angeles Press Club journalism award for Best Political Commentary, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Downtown News, and the Los Angeles Times in its Sports, Opinion and Entertainment sections and Sunday Magazine, among other publishers. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
