A FIRST PERSON REPORT--As some of you know, I have filed papers to run for the Los Angeles City Council in the 15th District. Those who know me best have asked, “What took you so long?” (Photo above: this article’s author, James Preston Allen.) 

Quite simply, I’ve been busy serving as an interested observer of this political circus for the past 35 years. 

In that role, I kept a sharp eye out for those with enough fire-in-the-belly or enough patience for the nonsense to pursue careers at City Hall. 

My frustrations with the current occupant of the 15th District council seat comes down to a laundry list of complaints that I share with many community members with whom I have spoken over the past few weeks while gathering nominating signatures. I will share that list once my nominating petition is qualified and I’m placed on the ballot. 

In the meantime, I’ll share some of the impediments that are set up to discourage any actual participation in the exercise of participatory governance. 

First is the remote and obscure location of the Elections Division of the Los Angeles City Clerk’s office, which is not at Los Angeles City Hall. 

The Election Division is in a nondescript industrial building off the 101 freeway east of downtown hidden behind Union Station on Ramirez Street at space # 300. Without MapQuest, you might not ever find it! 

It is beyond my comprehension why there isn’t a City Clerk’s office in every district of the city. But this is just one of many hurdles to actually running for public office. 

Another hurdle is the ethics commission’s myriad of conflict of interest forms -- forms that once completed makes you feel naked and completely circumspect about running for public office.

When you are done with the forms, they hand you 100 blank nominating petition forms with instructions in 12 languages on three sheets that must be kept stapled together. You have less than 30 days (depending on when you filed) to gather a minimum of 500 signatures. At the time, I thought, “What could be simpler?” 

After getting the nominating petition forms, I raced back to the Los Angeles Harbor to round up everyone I know to sign my petition only to find that a good half of the people in our district who could be registered to vote are not. 

Around 40 percent of property and business owners here are registered to vote someplace else like Palos Verdes, Carson or Long Beach -- not in of Los Angeles. 

It begins to sink in that a lot of those who have financial interests in the city are not of the city, but have great influence over it. 

The hunt for qualified registered voters is less daunting than Diogenes looking for an honest man in Athens. But it’s still a bit like searching for Waldo. The other option is using verified voter registration lists and going door-to-door like a Fuller Brush man. 

Still, as the petition sheets are filled up and the confusion of who is and who is not a Los Angeles registered voter is sorted out, one of my canvassers informed me that the librarian at the local library stopped him from collecting signatures on that property. 

Then, he hands me the Los Angeles Public Library’s “Rules of Conduct.” There are 15 rules in all. Number 12 on the list prohibits “petitioning…without the express permission of the City Librarian.”

I was appalled by the Library Commission’s edict as it totally flies in the face of common sense. So, I called the local librarian and complained. I was then told that only “the top dog City Librarian” can grant me dispensation, like the Pope, to petition outside a city library for the privilege of running for a city office. 

“Are you kidding me? What part of the First Amendment don’t you understand?” I asked incredulously. 

This is the very public institution that is dedicated to support free speech, free press and that inherently supports the right to petition our government and yet they have a policy prohibiting it.

I made five phone calls -- one to the head librarian, one to the city clerk’s office, another to the city attorney’s office, and lastly to the ethic commission. 

Ultimately, I got special permission from the main library to gather petitions outside a city owned public library. But it was only after I made a very impassioned plea for some sanity to the Los Angeles Public Library that was I granted permission to canvas for nominating signatures on public property. 

I will once again state my case. This was a First Amendment matter with free political speech, the right to petition our government and the free expression of these rights in the public domain at stake.

This matter is not just about my personal campaign. It’s about how the city itself stands in the way of public participation in our most cherished tradition of self-governance. That I, as an individual, have to “ask permission” from some distant bureaucrat to exercise our right of suffrage on public property is a fundamental abridgment of this right. 

The real hypocrisy is that this is being done by an institution whose very mandate is the conveyance of free speech through literary offerings. Consider this a formal protest that must be addressed immediately. 

These, my fellow citizens, are just some of the many issues that keep one from running for public office instead of sitting on the fence and watching the circus go by.

(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.

LATINO PERSPECTIVE--Latinos who are born in this country are hardworking folks, and perhaps those who come here without papers take work as a family duty to them and their families. Work for Latinos is no joke, It’s how they survive, thrive and prosper. 

It’s also true that Latinos three times as likely as the general population to start their own business. In an interesting article in thehill.com Mike Lillis and Rafael Bernal confirmed this assessment. However, there is a report by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) that found that cultural and economic factors have hampered the growth of Latino-owned businesses at a cost of trillions of dollars. 

The lost growth amounted to a $1.38 trillion “opportunity gap” in 2012 alone. “Latinos tend to open businesses with “personal motivations” rather than as a result of identifying market opportunities.” And that because of this, Latinos are less likely to pursue capitalization opportunities that put full ownership at risk, limiting their prospects for growth, the SLEI found. 

The Hill reported that Hispanic business leaders say the lack of access to capital was accentuated by President Obama's regulatory measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. 

“Hispanic businesses have it twice as bad. Under the Obama administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was so draconian that they over-regulated the financial services industry,” said Javier Palomarez, president of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC). 

Republicans in Congress have vowed to repeal the majority of Obama's economically significant regulations once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.  

Despite their limitations, Latino-owned businesses are still the fastest-growing segment of small businesses in the country, generating around $400 billion in annual revenue, according to the Congressional Hispanic Conference. What is also interesting is that Latina-owned businesses have led the charge. 

The number of businesses owned by Hispanic women grew 206 percent between 1997 and 2014, compared to 68 percent growth of women-owned businesses in general, according to a report by American Express. 

This all makes sense because many Latinos open businesses based on personal needs not business trends, that is why I say that for Latinos business is very personal. 

President-elect Trump has promised that he will create an environment in which those who want to open or grow a business will be able to do so, and those who want a job will be able to find it. Last week he said that Japanese tech billionaire Masayoshi Son will invest $50 billion in new start-ups in the United States. 

The businessman has pledged to create 50,000 new jobs in the Unites States over an unspecified period of time. Son, who is the founder and chief executive of SoftBank, one of Japan’s largest tech companies, owns the US the mobile carrier Sprint. 

Maybe what Mr. Trump can also do is to find a Latin American billionaire and convince him or her to do the same but focusing on Latino businesses. Or perhaps, deregulating the financial industry as Republicans have promised to do will do the trick. – Only time will tell.

(Fred Mariscal writes Latino Perspective for CityWatch. He came to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 1992 to study at the University of Southern California and has been in LA ever since. He can be reached at [email protected].)

-cw

IMMIGRATION POLITICS--"If cities have to make a stand for basic human decency, then we're going to make that stand," wrote Somerville, Mass. Mayor Joseph Curtatone.

With Donald Trump's inauguration just over a month away, it will soon become clear whether he intends on using beginning days in the White House to try to follow through on his promise to end federal funding for sanctuary cities. Scores of such cities, however, are standing resolute, with officials from over three dozen of them publicly reaffirming their commitment to "basic human decency."

Sanctuary cities, like Los Angeles, sometimes called Fourth Amendment cities, as The Atlantic's CityLab has described, offer some protection to undocumented immigrants because they "keep local policing and federal immigration enforcement separate by asking local police to decline 'detainers'—non-binding requests from ICE asking for extended detention of inmates they suspect are deportable." 

In contrast to claims made by proponents of harsh immigrant crackdowns, research has shown that "designating a city as a sanctuary has no statistically significant effect on crime." In fact, it is harsh immigration policing that can negatively impact the whole community.

According to a new tally by Politico, out of a total of 47 sanctuary cities, "officials in at least 37 cities (listed below) have doubled down since Trump's election, reaffirming their current policies or practices in public statements, despite the threat of pushback from the incoming administration, and at least four cities have newly declared themselves sanctuary cities since Trump's win."

"There is no definitive list of U.S. sanctuary cities because of the term's flexible definition," the publication notes, and that itself may make it more problematic for Trump to ban the federal funds.

As Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, explained to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting last month, "sanctuary cities are understood as places that protect the undocumented immigrant and provide a haven for them and provide the opportunity for immigrants, irrespective of their status, to be welcomed, to be productive citizens in their respective communities, and to engage in the civic life of the cities."

So if you look at some of the anti-immigrant organizations, Center for Immigrant Studies has a broader definition of sanctuary city, where they define sanctuary cities as any city that is friendly towards immigrants. So where I live, for example, New Haven, Connecticut, it's considered a sanctuary city under their definition, because the city implemented a program to offer city identification cards to any resident of the city, irrespective of their status.

So if you go by that broader definition, there are hundreds of sanctuary cities in the United States, and many of them are already engaged in acts of defiance, publicly letting the federal government know that they will do absolutely everything they can to protect immigrants in their communities.

That broader definition seems to apply to Boulder, Colo., where city leaders are hoping to pass an ordinance before inauguration day to make it a sanctuary city—though whether or not the term 'sanctuary' actually ends up in the ordinance is unclear at this point.

Santa Ana, Calif., as Politico writes, is like the Vermont cities of Burlington, Montpelier, and Winooski in that it declared itself a sanctuary city post-election.

"The day after Donald Trump got elected, our kids were falling apart emotionally. They thought their parents would be deported," the Los Angeles Times quotes said Sal Tinajero, a Santa Ana City Council member and local high school teacher, as saying. 

"The reason you're seeing this push now is that us leaders ... want to tell them they are going to be protected. If they are going to come for them, they have to come through us first," Tinajero said.

Somerville, Mass., meanwhile, is among the cities on Politico's tally that have reaffirmed their commitments. In an open letter published last month, Somerville Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone wrote, "We will not turn our back on our neighbors. Our diversity is our strength. Since we became a sanctuary city [in 1987], our crime rate has dropped more than 50%."

So "for anyone who claims that cracking down on sanctuary cities has something to do with high crime or a stagnant economy, Somerville stands as a flashing, neon billboard for how wrong that thinking is," he continued.

"If cities have to make a stand for basic human decency, then we're going to make that stand. We saw a presidential campaign based on fear and a desire to ostracize anyone who could be categorized as different. That may have swung an election, but it provides us with no roadmap forward. Tearing communities apart only serves to tear them down. We're going to keep bringing people together, making sure we remain a sanctuary for all. We are one community. We've got values that work. We know what makes America great," Curtatone concludes.

Also among Trump's anti-immigrant promises is a pledge to deport "more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country"—which he clarified to mean people who haven't actually been convicted of a crime.

Politico's list of 37 cities that have reaffirmed their commitments to being sanctuaries is below:

Appleton, Wisconsin
Ashland, Oregon
Aurora, Chicago
Aurora, Colorado
Austin, Texas
Berkeley, California
Boston, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Chicago, Illinois
Denver, Colorado
Detroit, Michigan
Evanston, Illinois
Hartford, Connecticut
Jersey City, New Jersey
Los Angeles, California
Madison, Wisconsin
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Nashville, Tennessee
New Haven, Connecticut
New York, New York
Newark, New Jersey
Newton, Massachusetts
Oakland, California
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Phoenix, Arizona
Portland, Oregon
Providence, Rhode Island
Richmond, California
San Francisco, California
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Seattle, Washington
Somerville, Massachusetts
St. Paul, Minnesota
Syracuse, New York
Takoma Park, Maryland
Tucson, Arizona
Washington, D.C.

(Andrea Germanos writes for Common Dreams … where this piece was first posted.)

-cw

PERSPECTIVE--Accounting topics usually do not show up on the radar, especially in times when other news topics are red hot. There is, however, a conceptual transition worth noting with wide ramifications.

Good accounting is not just desirable; it is vital. Business and the general public require the best possible financial information in order to transact and invest in confidence.

Regardless, it makes sense for the cost of accounting changes to favorably correlate with the benefits.  For example, spending a fortune to analyze or report on an obscure, immaterial activity is hardly a sound course of action.  A cost vs. benefits standard should be applied when a widespread accounting change is entertained.

The largest accounting change in the last 10 years (perhaps one of the largest ever) is underway. It’s ASC 606. ASC stands for Accounting Standards Codification and is the source for what is commonly known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).  666 might be a more appropriate code number.

The key objective of 606 is to create consistency for reporting revenue across all industries for customer contracts. Current GAAP is more industry specific. This amounts to a transition to  a one-size-fits-all approach from one which recognizes unique business practices.

There is much to say about the benefits of consistency, but plain vanilla does not necessarily deliver the disclosure the public needs in an increasingly complex world.

If anything, ASC 606 increases the complexity of evaluating customer contracts by requiring revenue determination at various points in time. Basically, the economic substance of the affected contracts remains the same, so it is mainly a matter of timing of when the revenue hits the books.

OK, not so bad, but the current method has been working well for a long time. (A side note: the Enron-type disasters of the past were due to lax compliance with internal controls.  No change in revenue recognition principles will prevent a recurrence. The objectives of ASC 606, as well as any other accounting change, are not intended to address fraud, abuse or lack of due diligence).

Is 606 worth it? The benefits are arguable. And for all the talk about consistency, some industries are exempt from the scope! Eventually, it is likely other exemptions will be made.  After all, industries and products are not static.

Companies have and will incur significant costs to implement it.  The sad part is no one really knows how much. There is no national tracking tool in place.

My guesstimate of the price tag is based on the ratio of accounting, IT and auditing costs to revenue, roughly 5%.  The aggregate revenue for S&P 1500 companies is $13 Trillion, so it works out to around $65 Billion, or about $43 Million per company, if you figure that major conversion efforts require an equivalent of around 10% of the  5%.  The cost will be disproportionately worse for smaller companies, and probably even worse for nonpublic firms.

Companies can make substantial improvements to reporting and control systems for that kind of money, improvements which can provide greater protection and quality of information to the shareholders and stakeholders than playing with the timeline for revenue recognition.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) purports to consider the cost to the private sector of its decisions, but it missed the boat here. One author even suggested that ASC 606 was pushed forward to justify FASB’s efforts in the wake of its failed attempt to converge US GAAP with International Financial Reporting Standards – an objective that grew out of the Norwalk Agreement of 2002, the inspiration for 606. 

Fourteen years of futility comes at a pretty high price…and difficult to explain when you have little to show for it!  Reminds me of DWP’s decision to implement its new billing system rather than man up to the public and admit it would be a disaster.

The conversion, which for the largest companies started ramping up in earnest a couple of years ago, will run through 2017.  The implementation date is in 2018 (2019 for nonpublic companies).

Afterwards, addressing post-implementation glitches will undoubtedly cost a bundle. As cousin Eddy told Clark Griswald in Christmas Vacation about the Jelly-of-the-Month Club, “Clark, it’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year through.”

In this case, years to come … and as useful a gift as fruit cake.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].)

-cw

CORRUPTION WATCH-A grand assemblage of knaves, fools and moral Lilliputians rule the city Los Angeles. Do not expect that to change. 

Recently, a few Americans have shown concern for Fake News. They realize that Fake News has real consequences as when a fool shows up at a pizza shop with an automatic weapon to “self-investigate” Hillary Clinton’s role in a child abuse ring in Washington D.C. 

In Los Angeles, Judge Alan Goodman warned the public about our own form of Fake News: Information from the City of Los Angeles. In January 2014, Judge Goodman ruled that Eric Garcetti’s update to the Hollywood Community Plan was based on lies and myths, which Judge Goodman described in polite legalese, saying that the city’s planning was based on “fatally flawed data” and “wishful thinking.” 

When the City published stories about how Hollywood has been revitalized and that its population is growing at a robust rate, when in fact is was deteriorating and rapidly shrinking, this was Fake News. Based on the continuing Fake News that Hollywood is still the center of the universe and hordes of people are descending up the town, one huge mega-project after another is being unanimously approved the LA City Council. And the approvals are justified by the endless Fake News emanating from City Hall. 

Hollywood’s “official” population fluctuates as frequently as Donald Trump tweets. Just as no one can find the millions of illegal votes that were cast for Hillary Clinton to disguise the “fact” that Trump won the popular vote, no one can find the real Hollywood population. In its April 2006 Notice of Preparation for its latest Update to the Hollywood Community Plan, the Garcetti Administration claimed that the population was 206,000 people, citing “SCAG’s 2016 RTP” (that is, the 2016 Southern California Association of Government’s Regional Transportation Plan.) Fake News. The SCAG 2016 RTP has no data at all for Hollywood. The only “Hollywood” which the RTP mentioned is West Hollywood. 

Upon investigation, we discovered that SCAG had done some other demographic analysis for Hollywood’s population, but never found that Hollywood’s population was as high as 206,000 people. The highest number that can be extrapolated from the SCAG data was 204,700. When this Fake News was shared with the City, the Garcetti Administration chose to stick with the fake numbers. We know the reason. This Fake News supports the false need to construct all the mega-projects. 

Then in November 2016, mirabile dictu, the Garcetti Administration announced that Hollywood’s 2015 population was 210,511 people. Does that mean that the April 2016 NOP had missed 4,500 people or that between December 2015 and April 2016, Hollywood’s population had declined by 4,500? Don’t bother asking…it’s all Fake News! 

People are accustomed to Fake News. In fact, people prefer it. Megyn Kelley hit the nail on the head in 2012, when she doubted Karl Rove’s insistence that Mitt Romney was winning the presidential election by asking, "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?" 

Megyn Kelley’s diagnosis was correct – people invent the news that makes them feel better, or in the case of Los Angeles, justifies the perpetuation of a criminal enterprise which we call the Los Angeles City Council. Oh, that LA had Megyn Kelly instead of the LA Times, whose motto is “All the news that the elite wants you to believe.” 

Poor Edgar Maddison Welch from Salisbury, North Carolina, who drove all the way to Washington to self-investigate the pizza parlor. At least Mr. Welch’s “self-investigation” placed him far ahead of the Angelenos who merely accept whatever Fake News gushes forth from City Hall. 

Fake News Has Real Consequences. 

While the false story about child-molesting at the pizza parlor was an extreme aggravation for its owner, the Fake News from LA City Hall has had a devastating impact on all of Los Angeles. In a report the Garcetti Administration never thought the public would find, the City admitted in November 2015, that in 2013, the last year for which it had data (why the 2 year lag?), it had constructed “150% [of the] units needed by above moderate income earners,” adding to the 12% vacancy rate of such apartments constructed in the last decade. The City said that a 5% vacancy rate was equilibrium. Generally, when the vacancy is 2.5 times equilibrium, one does not push ahead with plans to construct even more vacant housing. 

Why is LA City Hall so committed to Fake News? The main reason is that the City is run as a criminal enterprise whose function is to siphon off public money to make a few landowners very wealthy while everyone else suffers. 

This phenomenon is not new. Over 100 years ago in its 1915 Study of Street Traffic Conditions in the City of Los Angeles, civil engineers warned that a few land owners would want to restrict office and industrial usage to the core of the city in order to make themselves wealthy. But the engineers explained, with sound mathematics related to Los Angeles geography, that the city had to allow all segments of the community, offices, homes, industry, community and civic center to expand outwards in unison. In other words, decentralization was essential. 

Restricting the distribution of all segments of the community, however, resulted in massive projects to be built in areas like Bunker Hill, Century City, and Westwood while at the same time turning the Valleys into bedroom communities. Separating those dense office areas from the residential communities would then require expensive transportation projects to convey so many people from the 5,000 square mile county to a few tenths of square miles of the Bunker Hills, Century, City, Westwood, and now to DTLA and Hollywood. 

Like the serfs of the 1400s, Angelenos have come to accept this arrangement as the natural order of life. Should it be brought to the attention of Angelenos that their city leads in all the negative indicators and lags in all the positive indicators for quality of urban life, we have endless Fake News from City Hall to falsely assure us that we’re still the premier destination city. 

Will Angelenos Act Before it is too late? 

No. It already is too late. Besides, the criminal enterprise is firmly established and everyone wants it to continue. Look at the people throwing their hats in the ring to run of City Council in March 2017. How many are willing to give up the chance to become the Lord of their Council Fiefdom? None. 

Is there any City Council candidate who will relinquish the power to have each and every item he or she places on the City Council agenda unanimously passed? If so, please step forward. 

Nor is there any danger that the criminal enterprise where every developer gets unanimous approval for projects will go away soon. Judge David Fruin has declared that the City is above the law. 

According to this learned jurist, Penal Code 86, which criminalized the vote trading agreement that is the glue that holds the LA City Council together, is Non-Justiciable – beyond the power of the courts. It does not matter what laws the California State Legislature passes; the Los Angeles City Council does not have to follow any law unless it voluntarily chooses to do so. 

The Law May be Pernicious, but it is not Fake. 

The problem with placing the City Council above the law is more serious than a lone self-investigator showing up with an automatic rifle. Our infrastructure has crumbled, the homeless rate has escalated, the crime rate is out of control no matter how much Garcetti tries to have the LAPD fudge the data, the Family Millennials and the high-end employers are fleeing the city for places like the Texas Triangle. 

Alea jacta est.  The die has been cast for our future tax base which, for a generation going forward, will have lower skilled wage earners and a higher percent of children and elderly retired. Just as Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon sealed the fate of the Roman Republic, Judge Fruin is sealing LA’s fate of being ruled by a criminal enterprise.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. 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.

GUEST WORDS--Under Lee Baca’s leadership people were racially profiled, women were molested, immigrants were deported, and there were many walls built to keep specific people away. Sound like a certain President-Elect? He also married someone who emigrated from Asia, had a self-proclaimed law-and-order reputation, gave celebrities special treatment, served with a second-in-command who was just as corrupt, and condoned a historically violent, racist organization without specifically admitting to personal acts of violence or racism. This organization was not the Ku Klux Klan, but the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. 

So how did Los Angeles topple the oppressive power of former Sheriff Lee Baca after electing him to hold it? And how were we able to simultaneously form a Civilian Oversight Commission to put power in the hands of the people? Leaders emerged. 

On December 6, 2016, exactly 151 years to the day the 13th Amendment was ratified, former Sheriff Lee Baca is scheduled to face a federal judge and the prospect of 20 years in prison for obstruction of justice. Organizations like Dignity and Power Now are largely responsible for this, due to their uplifting the dialogue of formerly incarcerated people and building social and political pressure. 

Five years ago, a year before I put a hashtag in front of Black Lives Matter and sparked a global movement, I began leading a movement in Los Angeles. My brother had suffered a concussion after being severely beaten by deputies in the county jail, so I developed a performance art piece that sparked a coalition that shaped an organization, called Dignity and Power Now (DPN.) We would stand for hours outside the county jails and talk to people, a majority of them Black and Brown. Their stories of abuse were not being reported on the news, so we held press conferences. Solutions were not on the politicians’ agendas, so we showed up until they were. People wanted to end sheriff violence and implement accountability, so we demanded civilian oversight of the sheriff’s department. 

The first time the county supervisors voted on implementing a civilian oversight commission we showed up with 300 formerly incarcerated people who shared their stories of oppression and resilience. The supervisors voted 3-2 against it. We didn’t stop. We continued organizing, holding events, and meeting with supervisors and candidates. Four months later, on December 9, 2014, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted in favor of civilian oversight. 

The commission will be functional by January, and although it’s a huge step in the right direction, it is not perfect. They still need the power to subpoena the sheriff’s department and other agencies involved in custody operations. That would require a change to the county charter and a public vote.

The fact that there is former law enforcement, including a former LA County sheriff’s lieutenant, appointed to the commission raises serious concerns about whether it will protect incarcerated Black and Brown people, which is what the community and I have urgently fought for. And while we succeeded in electing a new sheriff, last year use of force in the jails went up 40%. We just elected Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger to the LA County Board of Supervisors, giving it its first female majority and democratic supermajority, but just before that the board approved a new women’s jail and a new mental health jail, ignoring the research that has proven that jails can never be effective sites of care. 

There is more ground to cover that could have grave impacts for those criminalized and incarcerated under a law-and-order presidency. Every day the choices that Donald Trump makes stirs the country’s attention, but the leadership worth looking to isn’t that of high-ranking political figures -- it’s that of the people on the ground. If you look to Los Angeles you will find leaders creating law enforcement accountability and fighting for Black lives. If you look to Oakland, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Toronto you will find the same. 

This year people can associate December 6 as the day Lee Baca will go to trial, or the anniversary of the 13th Amendment, or as another day closer to when we will be subjected to a Trump presidency. Or, collectively, as a movement, we can choose to see it as another day that we will show up in our communities and we will lead.

(Patrisse Cullors is a Los Angeles-based artist, organizer, and freedom fighter. She is also the co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter. This piece first appeared at HuffingtonPost.com. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.