What’s happening today?
Police commissioners take up RV dismantling contract, pretextual stops and robot dogs
The Board of Police Commissioners is meeting today and they’re taking up a one-year renewal of a contract with SA Recycling, which dismantles RVs as part of a program that the city says complements its homeless encampment sweeping program, CARE+. Meanwhile, advocates have recently documented CARE+ sanitation workers conducting towing operations at Penmar Park where RV residents live, including one on Sept. 17, in which the owner of the van arrived just as workers were starting to pry open his van door. “Luckily he was able to jumpstart his van, and they didn’t take his dogs,” narrates Peggy Lee Kennedy, who operates Venice Justice Committee, a citation clinic (Kennedy has also conducted a survey of Westside RV dwellers who have cited law enforcement, private security companies and vigilantes as the top source of harassment for them).
At that recent Penmar Park operation, Kennedy also documented someone who she said was also filming the operation. She described this person as someone who operates a YouTube page. “He thinks he knows it all,” she said of this person, even though, in her estimation, “he’s kind of a dick.”
The panel is also taking up the big topic of pretextual stops, via an inspector general report on the LAPD’s 2022 policy on this practice. Earlier this year, the LA City Council urged the board to prohibit officers from using minor violations as a pretext for pulling people over, to help them track down people for more serious violations. While the practice has been considered discriminatory — with community and advocacy groups argue the consequences outweigh any benefits — many LAPD officials have continued to maintain that it aids their investigations. The written public comment submitted for this meeting include those from ACLU Southern California and the League of Women Voters, Community Coalition, People for Mobility Justice and Catalyst California that urge the Board of Police Commissioners to ban such pretextual stops.
Also on police commissioners’ plate today is a report by LAPD officials on the use of “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle,” which are also often referred to as “robot dogs.”
LA county leaders to take some big budget votes; also taking up ethics panel appointment, and a better way to understand who is homeless in LA county and where they’re homeless
The LA County Board of Supervisors is taking up the final major phase of this year’s budgeting process, with some possible votes today on a series of adjustments to a spending plan earlier this year. The LA County CEO has summarized the proposed changes in a report and is set to make a presentation at today’s meeting — rhe budget items on what is known as the “supplemental budget” are 89 through 95 on the agenda. Some of the other items in that group are recommendations from the director of Homeless Services and Housing on the affordable housing program, and recommendations by Public Health and Health Services department officials.
Other items to watch at today’s meeting is the Governance Reform Task Force’s nomination of Michael Woo to the county’s new Ethics Commission and a presentation on earthquake preparedness.
And there is a motion that calls for a more comprehensive analysis of the homelessness crisis than what the annual “point-in-time” homeless count has been able to provide. That motion states that “the annual Point-in-Time Count is an important regional, state, and federal measure of homelessness, but it is designed to provide a point-in-time snapshot rather than a complete explanation of the conditions driving changes in individual communities. It may not fully capture neighborhood-level conditions, seasonal patterns, changes in the number of unsheltered dwellings, or the operational factors affecting inflow into homelessness and exits to permanent housing. Supervisorial District and city-level figures also require careful interpretation because estimates for unsheltered people residing in dwellings are not calculated at every geographic level.”
The motion says that a “comprehensive countywide review of homeless count results, over multiple years, together with available administrative and system performance data is needed. Such a review could examine changing economic conditions, housing affordability, migration patterns, outreach capacity, shelter and interim housing availability, service utilization, permanent housing placement rates, and other factors that may contribute to increases or decreases in sheltered and unsheltered homelessness.”
What just happened?
Authors Jenan Matari and Nora Lester Murad have sued the city of LA, after their LA Public Library talk last December — planned as part of a Read Palestine Week program — was cancelled by library officials. Sam Levin of The Guardian reports that their lawsuit accuses the city of “free speech violations, discrimination and breach of contract.” The LA Reporter (which publishes this newsletter), covered the cancellation of the event, and a letter staffers circulated seeking an apology from library administration, including to the teen patrons who had helped plan the event. Library patrons, including Palestinian Americans, gave public comment at a Library Commission meeting in Feb., along with both authors Matari and Murad, to protest the cancellation. One person called the cancellation a “frightening precedent.” The ACLU Southern California and the National Coalition Against Censorship have also written to library officials raising their own concerns.
Chris Modrzejewski, who helps head up a prominent lobbying firm, M Strategic Communications, was seriously injured earlier this month, and his 24-year-old son, Jack Modrzejewski, was arrested on suspicion of being intoxicated and ramming a Ford Bronco into his father, reports Clara Harter of the LA Times. The firm that Modrzejewski helps lead was recently retained by the cold storage warehouse company Lineage, after a June 17 fire at their Boyle Heights facility. Mrodzejewski has an extensive lobbying record at LA City Hall. He was also policy director in Richard Riordan’s mayoral administration in the latter part of the 1990s. The Times article says that the younger Modrzejewski’s LinkedIn biography (which does not load up when clicked) lists him as working for LA28, the committee coordinating the 2028 Olympics.
LA Podcast offers up an informative chat about the big sweeping changes happening in LA County government, featuring journalist Robert Greene of Los Angeles Rules, which focuses on local governance. Greene, who has been following the implementation of the voter approved Measure G very closely, was part of the editorial board of the LA Times for many years, and before that, while at the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, he wrote a column called Charterama that followed Los Angeles city’s charter reform process from 1996 until 2000.
Use the robot dog to investigate corruption at LA28.