LOS ANGELES

EDUCATION POLITICS-This is the third post in a series. We’ve been deep diving into a Unified Enrollment scheme, a top priority of the charter lobby, that’s being pushed on LAUSD officials without a discussion of policy implications and almost no public input. 

In the first post, we laid out some of the scholarly research that finds Unified Enrollment systems exacerbate inequitable access to schools. They’ve been funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation in New Orleans and Denver. 

In the second post, we revealed a process that looks a lot like the iPad scandal, complete with secret meetings to lobby board members and slick, pseudo-public presentations. Policy implications are not on the agenda. 

In this post, as promised, we’ll introduce the privatizers who have infiltrated the school district to advance the interests of the charter lobby. 

Conspiracy theory? Hardly. This just looks like the new business model. Since the iPad scandal, privatizers have had to find new ways to move their agenda. The scandal made direct corporate lobbying behind the scenes too risky. But there’s no need, if you have managed to plant your sales force inside the school system itself.  

The District personnel pitching the Unified Enrollment scheme are not just any LAUSD employees. They are Broad and Walton acolytes, trained and placed in the school system to move the corporate reform agenda forward from the inside. 

Ani Bagdasarian Packard started working at LAUSD while corporate reform poster boy John Deasy was Superintendent. For two years, she worked in LAUSD as a Broad fellow, just as Broad’s education empire shifted its focus. Previously a training academy for Superintendents, it would now focus on lower level staff “to make it easier for superintendents to define policy agendas, influence public opinion, coalesce political forces, and advance bold reforms on the ground,” according to a Washington Post article from that time. 

Bagdasarian Packard is now “advancing bold reforms on the ground” as Program Policy Development Advisor for LAUSD. 

In her presentation to LAUSD’s Early Education and Parent Engagement Committee on February 28, 2017, Bagdasarian Packard explained that after the technology scandals that led to John Deasy’s ouster from LAUSD, “…my colleague and I decided to move forward with this, and we worked with IT to go with solution B, Plan B.” 

Her colleague? 

Maybe she was talking about Jodie Newbery, who presented with her at that meeting as well as at last week’s Bond Oversight Committee (BOC) to try to get the secret project funded with $24 million in school construction bonds. 

Newbery was also hired when Deasy was Superintendent, in October 2011. 

Where did she come from? Her three previous positions were in charter school promotion, according to her LinkedIn profile. First for the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence and then for the California Charter Schools Association. Her most recent job was as "Senior Manager, Walton Family Foundation Grant and Los Angeles School Development." Then she made the jump to LAUSD as Program and Policy Advisor, Portfolio Management. That doesn't require a conspiracy theory. How much more explicit could you get? 

So a couple of low level co-workers inside LAUSD are behind a major policy shift for the District? 

That is bold. And could be great, if it meant that LAUSD was truly becoming receptive to bottom-up innovation. But the dynamic seems to be about something other than welcoming diverse input. 

At the BOC, District administrative staff balked when BOC member Rachel Greene asked what Board policy the project was advancing before approving its funding. The answers were vague at best. District staffer Diane Pappas said the policy was Board approved in the Superintendent’s Strategic Plan. She neglected to mention that the Board has refused to vote on the Strategic Plan. Anyway, she said, they'd been meeting privately with individual board members to get buy-in. 

I have found no evidence that a policy decision about Unified Enrollment has even occurred. 

The BOC agenda materials claim that the Unified Enrollment System falls under the catch-all “School Upgrade Program” which is for “upgrading, building and repairing school facilities to improve student health, safety and educational quality.” Seems like a stretch in this case, as it did when Deasy used the same rationale to use bond funds to pay for the iPad Common Core Technology Project. 

Just as with the iPad scandal, District staff is pushing hard. When BOC member Stuart Magruder, largely credited with first putting the brakes on the iPad boondoggle, asked if they were sure the District could meet the short timeline for Common Enrollment, Pappas answered, “We’re ready.”

Bagdasarian seemed more than ready. “These are just some snapshots of what it will look like” – she stopped herself -- “What it ‘may’ look like,” she said in the February presentation. 

And what multi-million dollar “reform” would be complete without a PR campaign? 

Reports of a new coalition to advocate for the inclusion of charters.  

Cue PEAPS-LA, a coalition of nonprofit education reformers to champion Unified Enrollment. The Partnership for Equitable Access to Public Schools Los Angeles includes Parent Revolution (of Steve Barr and Ben Austin acclaim) and Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (of Antonio Villaraigosa and Marshall Tuck acclaim), among others. 

So once again, all the pieces are in place, and the public only gets a seat to watch the result. With the iPads, the scandal surrounded alleged private lobbying efforts by corporate execs at Pearson. This time, the lobbying is hidden in plain sight, by LAUSD staff themselves. All they need now is the School Board's green light. No discussion necessary.

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

CORRUPTION WATCH-In the April 27, 2017 issue of CityWatch, Dave Bell wrote an article, “Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?”  Judge Richard Fruin has answered that question in his seventeen page explanation again rejecting the Hollywood Target Store. The reason that partially-finished monster is still looming over Sunset-Western can be summed up in one word -- Garcetti. Since Judge Fruin must use “legalese,” he cannot come out and act like a Biblical prophet pointing at King David proclaiming, “Thou art the man!” 

By the way, Petitioners did not sue after the store was partially built. Target started building after the case was already in court, knowing that a 74-foot store was illegal. It was a cynical ploy to tell Judge Fruin that it would be an economic waste not to allow the Target Store to continue constructing the illegal store. And Judge Fruin was not favorably impressed. 

Judge Fruin’s legal reasoning in again rejecting the Target Store made it clear that the problem rests with the City and not with the Petitioners. And when the judge refers to the City, he clearly means Garcetti. Garcetti was then the councilman who insisted that Target violate the law back in 2008-2009. After the court rejected the first Target Store, Garcetti insisted on appealing. The case has been all the way to the California Supreme Court and back down, but the City, i.e. Garcetti, does not listen. 

The City Persists in Violating the Law 

In 2016 the City tried to do another end-run around Judge Fruin and the law, the same way Garcetti and his love-child project at 5929 Sunset had tried to do by demolishing the facade of the Spaghetti Factory. As a result of those Garcetti machinations, that huge residential project sits vacant. Nonetheless Garcetti had the City give his buddies at CIM Group $17.4 Million. 

Then in 2015, the courts rejected The Millennium (Earthquake) Towers in Hollywood as a violation of the law. These last two cases were before Judge James Chalfant. 

Garcetti also subverted the law with his 2012 Update to the Hollywood Community Plan. In January 2014, Judge Allan Goodman rejected the Hollywood Community Plan Update as based on “fatally flawed data and wishful thinking that subverted the law (CEQA).” 

These legal loses are not the fault of the City Attorney’s Office which has to follow the directions of its client, the City. That means when the City Attorney tells Eric Garcetti that a project is illegal and he should follow the law, the City Attorney still has to show up in court and put on the best face possible. If Garcetti would heed the wise advice of the City Attorney’s Office, the City could operate more smoothly and would not be spending millions on attorney fees to lose cases. There was also the $1.3 billion sidewalk case that came with $15 million in attorney fees. 

The Issue in Target II 

The fundamental issue in this recent Target case is whether the City could make a major change in the zoning law, i.e. the Specific Plan “SNAP,” without conducting an Environmental Impact Statement (EIR). Think of an EIR as like a final exam: if you skip the final, you fail the course. Duh! Maybe, trust fund babies who went to Harvard-Westlake are allowed to buy their way out of final exams. Who knows? 

Thus, Garcetti decided that there was no need to have the final exam for the recent change in SNAP. Garcetti has yet to learn that just because he says something, does not make it so. He may be able to fool the voters, but he cannot fool the professionals. If he had listened to the City Attorney back in 2009, Hollywood would have probably had a Target by 2010. If he had listened to the legal professionals in early 2016, he would not have insisted on adding a Subarea F to SNAP without conducting an EIR. 

A Brief History of SNAP 

The citizens and professionals who drafted SNAP took years to classify every single parcel of property within its area as belonging to one of five Subareas A through E. SNAP rejected the idea of a Subarea F as it did not want mega-stores. SNAP is a new zoning law that became effective in March 2001. When Garcetti decided to ignore it in 2008, SNAP was less than a decade old – not some ancient zoning code which had become out dated. 

Adding a New Subarea F Was a Huge Change in SNAP 

Adding a Subarea F which would allow mega big box stores in Hollywood was a significant change to SNAP. It required the City to conduct a new EIR to assess the impacts on Hollywood if the streets were filled with these warehouse type mega-stores. 

Starting back in 2008, Garcetti could have cooperated and allowed Target to build a legal store with its parking underground. If then-Councilmember Garcetti had permitted Target to construct the type of facility the law allowed, the store could have been operating by 2010. Instead, there has been close to a decade of lawsuits; we may very well face another decade of them. 

The decision is up to Garcetti. Does he want to guarantee that Hollywood has no Target Store while he spends millions on attorneys to take the same matter to the appellate court, then on to the Supreme Court, only to be told, “You cannot graduate from high school without taking the final exam?” 

In the end, what are Hollywoodians going to get? Endless Garcetti litigation? Or will Mayor Garcetti allow Target to construct a legal store? Don’t expect a resolution to this fight or construction on the Target store … any time soon.

(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.

THE BUTCHER SHOP-Measure C? Charter reform of the police disciplinary system? On the May 16 runoff ballot? Seriously? Wonder why people are so cynical?

Right now, the improvements made by the LAPD in the 25 years since those scary nights of the LA riots are hailed as the way forward for big city police departments. Communities across America look to Los Angeles for a way out of Ferguson and Cleveland and Florida – and the bad old days of the LAPD. 

Instead, Measure C represents a step backwards for police reform and accountability at a time the LAPD and the LAPPL should shine and lead. 

As the recommendations of the Christopher Commission were implemented in and after 1992, the composition of Police Review Boards (BOR) changed from all sworn to three-member panels that include one civilian along with two LAPD officers at the level of Captain or above. At the time, the police union opposed the change. 

During the charter reform years, both panels debated changes to police discipline, seeking to be fair to the workers and to the community they serve.

There’s not a lot that’s as reliable in the City of Los Angeles as a report from the City Legislative Analyst (CLA). Here are their numbers: 

ANALYSIS OF OUTCOMES

According to the LAPD, the Department concluded 287 BOR hearings from 2011 to November 2016. In 229 cases, the Chief directed an officer to a BOR hearing with the recommendation that the officer he terminated. The remaining hearings were cases in which an officer opted to have a hearing on a demotion or suspension.

According to LAPD, BORs returned a guilty verdict in 190 cases, but only recommended removal of the officer in 112 cases. Less than half of the officers directed to a BOR by the Chief with a recommendation that they be removed from employment were actually terminated after the hearings. Similarly, in the 58 Opted Boards for demotion or suspension cases over the last six years, BORs have acquitted 15 officers and have concurred with the Chiefs recommended disciplinary measures in only 12 cases. 

Civilian Voting Patterns

When evaluating the merits of an all-civilian or majority-civilian BOR panel over a panel made up of sworn officers and a civilian, the Council may wish to consider the voting history of civilian Hearing Examiners. During the period from 2011 to November 2016, civilian Hearing Examiners were consistently more lenient than their sworn officer counterparts. In the 39 Directed BOR cases where the Chief recommended termination but a BOR acquitted accused officers, the civilian member voted for acquittal in every case. During this period, 16 of the remaining 190 termination cases heard by BORs were decided by 2-1 margins. In each case, the Hearing Examiner voted for the more lenient option. 

Civilian BOR members have also voted for reduced penalties in every case where a BOR found an officer guilty of misconduct, and have also consistently voted for lesser punishments or acquittals in Opted Boards dealing with demotions or suspensions. As in Directed Boards, civilian BOR members did not vote in the minority in demotion or suspension cases, and have been reliable votes for either lesser penalties for misconduct or for acquittal. During this period, there were 4 demotion or suspension cases decided by a 2 to 1 margin. In all cases, the civilian voted for the more lenient outcome. 

On the other side of the building, a May 2 report from the Inspector General to the Police Commission delineates 25 specific recommendations for action. From the LA Times’ Police panel calls for more LAPD reforms to address racial bias, discipline and community policing: “Los Angeles police commissioners approved a wide-ranging set of recommendations on Tuesday that called on the LAPD to improve how it guards against possible racial bias by officers, strengthen community policing and evaluate the department’s discipline system.” 

The 54-page report, Review of National Best Practices, pulls extensively from the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015 “Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing”: One of the Task Force’s overarching recommendations is that law enforcement culture embrace a “guardian mindset” to build public trust and legitimacy, and that agencies adopt the concept of procedural justice as the guiding principle for their policies and practices, both external and internal. As part of this process, the Task Force recommended that agencies “acknowledge the role of policing in past and present injustice and discrimination” and the difficulty this poses in building community trust. 

“We need to keep looking for ways to continue to make this department the best it can be,” said Matt Johnson, the panel’s president, in response to the report. “We need to continue engaging meaningfully with questions about community trust, race and use of force. I believe that these reports and recommendations provide a path forward to doing just that.” 

Council President Herb Wesson told the LA Times on January 24 City Council approves ballot measure that could put more civilians on LAPD discipline panels that, as far as he is concerned, this is just a start: “I believe that once we open this door, it will be easier for us to open it again and again if we want to make additional changes,” he said. “Is this perfect? No. Is it flawed? Yes. But I do believe that it’s a step in the right direction.” 

In its strong endorsement against the measure, the LA Times’ Measure C pretends to be about police reform. Instead, it's a noxious sleight of hand. Vote no begins: “Seldom has an effort to alter Los Angeles’ governing blueprint been as clever and underhanded as Charter Amendment C, a little-noticed measure on the little-noticed May 16 city ballot that would change how police officers are disciplined for misconduct. Seldom have city officials been so sly in their effort to slip something so noxious past L.A. voters.” 

Here's what the League of Women Voters Los Angeles say Measure C would do:

Measure C would amend the City Charter to give the City Council the authority to allow a police officer accused of misconduct to choose to have the case heard by a Police Department Board of Rights panel composed either of: a) two police officers with the rank of captain or above, and one civilian chosen from a list of carefully screened professional mediators, as is currently the case, or b) three civilians. Measure C does not define the criteria for who would serve on this 3-member civilian panel. Police officers could choose whether to have their case heard by the traditional Board of Rights or the civilian Board of Rights. 

On Larry Mantle’s Air Talk, April 27, We debate Measure C: Should all-civilian boards review police disciplinary matters? PPL President Craig Lally argued that it’s a matter of fairness, that there’s an inherent conflict because everyone reports to the same Chief and that they’re always worried about the impact “bucking a decision” might have on future promotions or assignments. “There are four captains suing right now,” he noted, after rendering not guilty determinations. “They’ve experienced reduction in rank, didn’t get promotions they should’ve received.” 

Peter Bibring responded on behalf of the Southern California ACLU and a growing coalition opposing the measure: “Given that civilian examiners are more lenient than sworn examiners in every instance of dispute and more than half of the cases referred from BOR’s are overturned, this would make it dramatically harder to hold the police accountable; this is not a measure to increase transparency or accountability.” 

WHO’S ORGANIZING AGAINST MEASURE C? 

From Bike the Vote:

Measure C – the lone item on the May 16 general election ballot for most voters in the City of Los Angeles. The Measure, which is backed by the L.A. Police Protective League, purports to increase civilian oversight of the L.A. Police Department, but is in actuality a deceptive ploy to reduce accountability. Bike The Vote L.A. joins organizations concerned with civil rights, social justice, and police reform – including ACLU of Southern California, Black Lives Matter L.A., Community Coalition, L.A. Community Action Network, and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, among others – in opposing this harmful measure. 

Organizing opposition is starting to show up to call out this cynical, hypocritical move by LA’s pols:

Share this powerful video message from LA-CAN: Los Angeles: Vote NO on Charter Amendment C on May 16!  

Rabbi Jonathan Klein of CLUE (Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice) says of his organization’s opposition to the measure: “A transparency measure suddenly appearing on an off-cycle ballot, that sneaked up on us and which lacks a published communal rebuttal argument?  If the appearance of this ballot measure feels so unexpected, is supported by the very agencies that community groups believe need more oversight, why should anyone trust that this is what it says it is?  Sure enough, the ACLU and others have the data that lead us to believe that this might actually DIMINISH true civilian oversight. Both CLUE and our Black-Jewish Justice Alliance (in partnership with the SCLC) oppose Measure C.” 

Get the facts! Share the facts! Time for voting! Sign the pledge to vote no on C here and share this information with all your LA-voting friends! Yes on Los Angeles moving forward – No on C! No on cynicism! 

(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.’) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MCDONALD REPORT-From neighborhood activists to city planners, everyone knows that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council love transit-oriented development. What many people don’t know, and what LA politicians would rather not discuss, is that it’s fueling gentrification in the nation’s second largest city.

UCLA researchers dropped that fact bomb about transit-oriented development in LA last August. 

Teaming up with the Urban Displacement Project at UC-Berkeley, they released a study with several alarming findings. In their own words, they wrote: 

1. Areas around transit stations are changing and many of the changes are in the direction of neighborhood upscaling and gentrification; 

2. Examining changes relative to areas not near light-rail or subway projects from 2000 to 2013, neighborhoods near those forms of transit are more associated with increases in white, college-educated, higher-income households and greater increases in the cost of rents. Conversely, neighborhoods near rail development are associated with greater losses in disadvantaged populations, including individuals with less than a high school diploma and lower-income households (read that again… it’s the very definition of gentrification); 

3. The impacts vary across locations, but the biggest impacts seem to be around the downtown areas where transit-oriented developments interact with other interventions aiming to physically revitalize those neighborhoods. 

UCLA provides a map and data to back up those hard facts. If Garcetti and the City Council haven’t done so already, they should take a long, hard look. 

In fact, Paul Ong, director of UCLA Luskin’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, says California politicians should use the report to ensure that “progress” through development is “fair and just.”  

Unfortunately, LA elected officials hate public dialogues about the Big Picture definitions of “progress,” and they spend little time considering what’s “fair and just” development for the masses. 

Instead, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council talk about creating a more “environmentally sustainable” city by cutting down on car usage. Hence, the need for more apartment complexes and mixed-use buildings near bus or rail stops — known as transit-oriented development. 

Developers and politicians, though, regularly greenwash controversial developments for political cover. What’s worse, serious plans for a more “economically sustainable” city for the working- and middle-class — teachers, garment workers, senior citizens, struggling artists, among others — are nearly non-existent at LA City Hall. 

Unsurprisingly, UCLA and UC-Berkeley researchers also found that “Bay Area municipalities have in their books many more anti-displacement policies than municipalities in LA County.” In the city of Los Angeles, Garcetti and the City Council have implemented few substantive and specific anti-displacement policies. 

It’s one big reason why, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, more than 22,000 rent-controlled apartments have been taken off the market since 2001. An LA Times graph shows that disturbing trend dramatically up-ticked during Garcetti’s time as mayor. 

All in all, as stewards of the nation’s second largest city, LA politicians have shown that they are not interested in addressing the impacts of gentrification-inducing transit-oriented development. So what are they interested in? 

Maintaining power. Or, put another way, keeping their jobs and possibly landing better ones. Politicians do that by raising lots of money, which helps them fend off challengers on Election Day. Enter the deep-pocketed developer. 

For years, developers have been key benefactors for LA politicians. They contribute enormous sums of campaign cash and other political money — such as giving to a politician’s favorite cause or “officeholder” account, a kind of slush fund that elected officials use for dining and travel expenses.

Garcetti, in fact, established a non-profit called the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles. It has attracted big bucks from developers and various companies  — in its first year, Garcetti collected a whopping $14.6 million.  

The Coalition to Preserve LA, which sponsored the development reform initiative known as Measure S, found that developers and other bigwigs in the real estate industry (also known as LA’s “real estate industrial complex”) forked over at least $6 million in campaign contributions to city politicians since 2000.  

That’s a conservative number. It’s probably much higher. 

In the past year, for example, the LA Times reported that billionaire developer Rick Caruso shelled out hundreds of thousands to L.A. politicians and their causes while seeking City Hall approvals for a luxury housing tower for the super wealthy. One beneficiary was Garcetti’s non-profit, which accepted $125,000 from Caruso. 

The billionaire developer, by the way, greenwashed the controversial mega-project, a gigantic high-rise plopped down at a gridlocked intersection. To the aggravation of neighborhood activists, Caruso promoted it as a transit-oriented development. 

The LA Times also uncovered the shocking “Sea Breeze Scandal.” Perhaps illegally, developer Samuel Leung, who also needed City Hall to green light a luxury housing mega-project, funneled more than $600,000 to Mayor Eric Garcetti and other LA politicians. 

In the end, Caruso and Leung got what they wanted. 

As one can see, political money is also part of the gentrification equation. Developers shell out beaucoup bucks to L.A. politicians, and Garcetti and the City Council return the favor by approving transit-oriented and luxury developments. Developers then make tens of millions in profits, politicians have fatter campaign chests, and residents get hit by a wave of gentrification.  

Adding insult to injury, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council are selling out the working- and middle-class for what amounts to chump change. One’s life, home, and family are worth much more than $125,000.

(Patrick Range McDonald, an award-winning journalist, was senior researcher and website editor for the Coalition to Preserve LA.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BELL’S VIEW--The other day a video posted on Facebook drew my attention. In it, a motorcycle moves in slow motion toward the middle of an intersection and a certain crash with a left-turning car. I could see where this was heading, but I couldn’t look away. I have no real desire to watch a motorcyclist pinwheel through the air and crash to the pavement (he survived, thanks to his helmet), but I watched anyway.

So many events I have seen I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never get the video of the Tamir Rice shooting out of my head. And I don’t suppose I should. Maybe this destruction of our illusions – the illusion that we can prolong our innocence through looking away – is the price we have to pay to bring any real change to the world. We live in in-between times, where one person’s truth is another’s lie. How can that be possible? I’ve never completely bought the old chestnut that there are two sides to every story. Tamir Rice was a thirteen-year-old boy playing in the park. I don’t care what the grand jury said. 

Another slow-motion wreck sucking my attention these days is the continuing saga of the Joe Bray-Ali (photo above) campaign to unseat incumbent City Councilman Gil Cedillo – the 70’s B-movie villain currently ignoring his constituents in Council District 1. As anyone following the story knows, Bray-Ali either had his character assassinated or his true identity revealed last week when LAist broke the story of Bray-Ali’s former career as an Internet troll. The story prompted Bray-Ali to publicly attempt to recreate John Hurt’s chestbuster scene from the first Alien movie. He apologized, but he didn’t do it. He’s only human, but he’s not that guy. He made mistakes, but he was only trying to do the right thing. 

Flailing, he revealed a few other juicy indiscretions (tax evasion, marital infidelity, and tagging, in that order) and promised to explain it all later as he blithely reassumed his campaign persona. Meanwhile, the old Joe came out swinging on a few Facebook threads, where he just couldn’t seem to help himself. In one, he trotted out a list of some of the crazy misdeeds (bigamy anyone?) of our current City Councilmembers, including Mike Bonin’s long-past meth habit. How, one commenter asked, is Bonin’s triumph over addiction comparable to your Mr. Hyde impression on Voat? 

How indeed? One truth has emerged: Bray-Ali’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington shtick is not exactly the real thing. He’s brash, he’s bold, he’s – either – racist, sexist, and transphobic, or some kind of satirical anthropologist employing the awesome power of the n-word to move us all toward positive social change. 

The question remains whether Bray-Ali’s move-along, nothing-to-see-here approach can sweep him into the Council chambers on May 16th. A few prominent Bray-Ali supporters have jumped ship, while others have either drunk the kool-aide or just admitted they don’t care. I sympathize fully with the impulse to support the lesser of two evils. City Hall needs a shakeup. The question District1 voters have to ask themselves is: how much is too much?

Bray-Ali’s explanations have been satisfying only to the rubberneckers and the kool-aide drinkers. The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword, but, at this point, Bray-Ali needs to get hold of something sharp and cut out the rotten bits. Words just aren’t going to do it this time. As a proponent of the power of language, I’ve never felt so adrift. Debate has evolved away from a means of challenging ideas and into a method of silencing our opponents. Shame, humiliation, degradation, and name-calling – all dressed up as free speech – work only to drive speech into hiding, oblivion, or meaninglessness. Joe Bray-Ali has seen this process from both sides – from give and take – and now he’s in the fight of his life with the beast we’ve all been feeding since the turn of the millennium.

On May 16th, the voters in District 1 have a choice – but the choice is all Joe’s at this point. He needs to find a way to the other side of the wall he’s built for himself. And he needs to do it fast.

(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.)

-cw

EASTSIDER-Mendacity is generally defined as “an act of not telling the truth.” It also has a bunch of helpful synonyms, like deceit, deception, falsification, fraud and lying. I think it is a great word, and according to the Cambridge Dictionary, “Politicians are often accused of mendacity.” 

After a great deal of searching, I believe that I have found the poster child for mendacity in the form of California Senator Steven Bardford, who recently introduced SB 163, which makes it easy for political candidates to live outside the district they want to represent. 

Obviously a great mind at work. The reason that we have residency requirements is that we have a new political class, the lifer elected officials who go wherever there are safe races after being termed out in their current gigs. The idea is that, at a minimum, an elected official should live and work in the district that elected him or her. You know, like the pre-term-limits days, when politicians actually had roots in the communities they represented. 

Well, no mas, and if Senator Bradford has his way, no penalty for living far away from the community you seek to represent. 

I am obliged to mention a few examples of elected officials who got in trouble over this. Yvonne Burke, of course, but she got a pass by declining to run again for office. Our very own Richard Alarcon (and his wife) who got convicted of perjury and voter fraud, but later got it tossed out by an appeals court on the grounds that the judge gave “improper jury instructions.” 

On the state level, Senator Roderick Wright got popped for the same thing, lying about where he actually lived. In this case, I guess the jury instructions were ok, because the appeals court upheld the conviction last year. 

While Alarcon and Wright are the poster children for this kind of behavior, they are far from the only ones. As the Sacramento Bee reported back in 2014, there’s a whole list of them.  

Most go unprosecuted, partly because of the fact these are not slam dunk cases, and I suspect most also get a pass because the District Attorneys who should prosecute these cases are elected officials themselves. Take a look at some of these unindicted conspirators in the Bee article. 

What’s even scarier is that the Federal Government, a fountain of legerdemain, simply finesses the whole idea that you should live with the folks you represent. Under their rules, you only have to live in the state where you are running for office. Logical for senators, but for gerrymandered congressional districts? C’mon. 

Under that rubric, Darrell lssa could run to replace Xavier Becerra in the 34^th Congressional District special election. Or maybe McClintock. 

Actually, at the federal level running for office where you don’t live has become a favorite sport. Recently, Roger Hernandez ran from outside against Grace Napolitano, who won her own seat by running from outside the district. It’s enough to give a person a headache. 

My personal favorite is Tom McClintock, a seriously conservative republican from Ventura, who makes Rand Paul look like a lefty. Back in the 80s, he ran for office and became an Assemblyman and State Senator, until he termed out. I remember him as a forerunner of Howard Jarvis with his “no new taxes” stance, and in fact, they are joined at the hip to this day. 

Tom ran for almost everything in California outside of the legislature; Controller (1994 and 2002), the recall election over Grey Davis in 2003, and Lieutenant Governor in 2006 -- all unsuccessfully. Thereafter, he abandoned Sacramento. In a masterpiece of irony, Mr. McClintock, a self-stated arbiter of morality and ethics, went all the way up to Sacramento (actually the Gold Rush country east of there) to represent the 4^th Congressional District. Long way from Ventura, and a great graphic example of what I’m talking about in residency requirements. 

The Takeaway 

The first question is whether or not this residency stuff is cheating. You bet it is, and it is an insidious craven kind of cheating, further insulating our elected officials from us, the troops. It also encourages the lifetime permanent politician class, since they can move from place to place depending on their best shot to have the lobbyists, special interests, and political consulting firms get them their next gig in the ladder of the lifer politician. 

In other words, this system blows a hole in the term limits laws akin to “the mother of all bombs.” 

People who we elect from geographically created districts are supposed to live in those districts -- hopefully to even work, live and play there. That provides the essential connection between us and those who govern us. Otherwise, they might as well all simply live in Sacramento, or Washington, or LAX, or in homes bought for them by lobbyists. 

I believe that by “legalizing” a felony, the author is guilty of compounding a felony to help out the political class -- thus eliminating any sense of actual physical connection to the governed. As such, I award Senator Steven Bradford the first Bodacious Mendacity award! And yes, it is a really, really great award. 

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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