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OP/ED - If you read my Juneteenth Column, you know that I'm fed up with all the shootings of Black and Brown people in the City of LA. So, today, I woke up to texts from my neighbors about yellow crime tape near our building and a TRIPLE shooting, with one 17-year-old boy dead (and another 17 year old boy shot), all of which took place THIS SUNDAY MORNING in my Beverly Grove hood! So, all of this took place around 4 AM on Beautiful West Third Street, not too far from the World Famous Joan's On Third. So, we have yellow tape blocking 3rd Street in both directions between Croft and Orlando, police cars, and a Blue KABC News Van whizzing by...are you gonna take OWNERSHIP of all these homicides, Karen Bass?? Because it looks like it's gonna be a Hot Bloody Summer here in the City of LA. Mayor Bass has her TWO guns, so she's good!
Criminals can be brazen in the “nice” parts of the City of LA because they know about the woeful LAPD response times. But the good news is that Mayor Bass is hiring new cops. The bad news is that Mayor Bass gave a 2nd Five Year Term to Eric Garcetti's Police Chief Michel Moore (who famously collected a Lump Sum Payout of 1.27 MILLION Dollars in 2018 after doing the Retire-Unretire Dance with Mayor Garcetti AND on whose watch the commercial stretches of my Beverly Grove hood were Destroyed during a Full Evening of Riots & Looting & Arson Fires) and Moore has LOWERED LAPD's Hiring Standards...you can look forward to More LA Crime AND Multi-Million Dollar Lawsuit Settlements paid for with your tax dollars.
And the Award for Most Ridiculous Headline goes to LAist for its June 14 headline: “Mayor Bass Wants To House 17,000 Angelenos. She's 80% Of The Way There” A cheerleader headline, if ever there was one. You can't buy that kind of publicity. Kind of like the way the El Segundo Times covered the mayor’s race for Bass. Caruso's 100M couldn't buy that kind of coverage.
In ONLY Six Months?? Two weeks prior, LAist reported that “Bass acknowledged that the City has encountered challenges with data collection that they were working to resolve…” Looks to me like they Rounded Up! So what's The Magic Number? 14,381. So roughly 14k, which the Lazy Local MSM went to town with...Mayor Bass DID take Ownership of (this Highly Suspicious Ridiculously Large) More Than 14,000 Homeless Housed Number...which must be dominated by (ridiculously overpriced) apartments and tiny homes (now coming online that were) created by HUGE taxpayer money during a prior mayoral administration with a Prior City Council. Garcetti's in India (thanks to Mommy and Daddy lobbying for him in DC...no joke...for that gig), so he can't complain.
That's the only gig he could get in politics after doing SO MUCH damage to the City (and, frankly, the County too) of Los Angeles that it will LITERALLY take us DECADES to climb out of the hole he put us into...The Late March “100 Days In Office” Number from Bass' Office was 3,873, btw, so that's a jump of OVER 10,000 in LESS THAN 3 MONTHS. Now, the LA Times Should Have Been ALL OVER that Math.
It was All Over the News! How could she accomplish that so quickly?? Well, I'm calling BS on that number. She didn't even have the time to staff up...she's still using Garcetti staffers and slowly announcing new hires. I would LOVE it if the LA Times ripped into that 14k number, but apparently their City Beat team is too busy shining up their Pulitzers (and, more importantly, too afraid of their Boss' Daughter Ultra-Progressive Nika Soon-Shiong) to REALLY dig into that number. Then, on Sunday June18 (a mere 4 days after her 14k number was All Over the News), Bass went on CNN
WITH JAKE TAPPER (just so the MSM wouldn't miss the BIG CHANGE in the Conversation), we got a red herring distraction headline, whose only goal seemed to be to prevent the MSM digging into the Very Suspicious 14k Number...”Karen Bass wants street homelessness to end by 2026”. THAT conveniently took over the Super Lazy Local News Cycle. So now Mayor Bass wants you to focus on the long game...and please don't dig into that 14k number. Suddenly, she thinks she can solve The HUGE LA Homeless Problem by the end of her first term, even though during campaign debate video that I watched, there was a clear contrast between Candidate Bass and Caruso. He said he would solve it by the end of his first term, when she wouldn't make that commitment.
Then, at the End of June, the Yearly LA Homeless Numbers came out, they were BAD, and the wheels came off the Mayor Karen Bass PR Train. Suddenly, the LA City Council Members had political cover to attack the New Administration! Newish headline from LAist: “$40M Has Been Spent To House 1,400 People In LA Motels. 6% Have Landed Permanent Housing“ So now we have A New (and much more reasonable sounding) 1400 (fourteen hundred) Number being discussed in Council Committee right before a Nice Long Vacay for Our Oh-So-Deserving (Almost) Quarter Million Dollar A Year Salaried LA City Council Members (each one of the 15 of them gets over 200k per year...no wonder so many of them stepped down from the CA State Legislature for a pay bump). And seemingly lots of screams of “I'm shocked” and “I didn't know” (paraphrasing) from the most powerful men in the City. Demands for Transparency! I love it!
Let's start with which motels and hotels are being used (ALL OF THEM), how many rooms, and how much money. Because you know the El Segundo Times ain't gonna print all of that info...they're in cahoots with the people in charge re hiding that info from the public...supposedly it's about privacy (rights of the homeless), but really it's about “Knowledge Is Power” and we want to protect our incumbent politicians like we always have from controversial news...also why The Times hasn't been all over the kill numbers at the half dozen LA City “shelters” over the years, DECADES really...because, if they had thrown a huge spotlight on that, it would have saved Tens or Hundreds of Thousands of Animal Lives, but the politicians would have gotten upset because they would have had to properly budget the Animal Services Department instead of starving it. Too bad Nika isn't an Animal Shelter Activist !
Oh, we did recently get One Big Hotel in Downtown LA from the LA Times...they threw us some informational crumbs. The context was the hotel workers striking because they need to pay for their houses that are far away, which causes their long commutes. The Times interviewed a Union Leader, who seemed like he couldn't care less about the homeless people continuing to get served at the Big Downtown Hotel (roughly 150 bux a night of taxpayer dollars per room). Are you surprised? Last year, the LA City Council (and our former “green” Mayor Garcetti) made the hotels clean rooms daily (unless a guest opts out) because it was a Union demand, which wastes water, electricity, AND natural gas (including washing and drying towels and sheets, etc)...The Big Three Utilities. They couldn't care less about the Environment. But they'll demand you switch to all electric (no natural gas) for your appliances and residential buildings! So look forward to a future with LOTS of power outages, the working poor not being able to afford electricity, really high DWP bills, and not enough water.
Because the only “green” our politicians REALLY care about is $$$ Like repeatedly cutting Bus Service over the years (see my previous “LA Metro is Still Greedy & Evil Under Mayor Karen Bass” column), making Traffic worse so that we'll agree to pay higher Sales Taxes and ultimately agree to Congestion Pricing.
Oh, and according to Reddit, the hotel strikers were deliberately making loud noise in the Early AM hours to disturb and keep awake Anime Convention Visitors from out of town...nice show of humanity!
(“The Angry Angeleno” is the nom de plume of Yuval Kremer. Yuval is a Registered Democrat; a Cali-Camp, Harvard-Westlake (pre-merger), USC, and Loyola Law School Alum; and a former ballot candidate for Mayor of LA (failing to prevent Mayor Garcetti's reelection) and LA County Supervisor (ran against Sheila Kuehl, Katy Yaroslavsky's former boss). The opinions expressed by Yuval are his and his alone (not those of CityWatchLA), but will likely be yours soon!)
