Los Angeles: May 2008 Archives

By Doug Dowie

Correspondent

Editor's Note: I welcome contributions to this blog from everyone. It's about the experience of L.A. in all its richness and diversity. Many people have worked long and hard to make L.A. a better city and the better we understand each other, the more likely will be to succeed. This contribution is from Sandy Sand, a longtime community journalist and activist.

By Sandy Sand

Community Correspondent

My own island or a shack on a small lake somewhere is looking better and better all the time.

Living in L.A. is looking worse and worse.

But then, L.A. never looked good to me, just as living in the suffocating heat of the Valley never looked good to my oldest daughter, who I dragged here from West L.A.

I was uprooted from East Lansing, Michigan, by my parents whose brothers and sisters preceded us here.  I liked the visits we made here, but move here?

No, it wasn't for the young me, and besides, I'd just gotten a brand new sled and my very own shoe ice skates.  The sled didn't come to L.A. with me, but the skates did; I still have them and they still fit.

It was also the last winter that it really snowed. I mean snowed! Drifts up to the second story windows. Ever try to walk up a snowdrift to peek into a friend's window and say hi, because she was in bed with the chick pox you gave her? Bummer! We could have had so much fun trying to navigate that drift together.

It looked solid, but it wasn't. Before I could say red, red robin, the snow pile had drifted up to my waist and I realized it was not only a lost cause, but I'd snowed myself into thinking I could do it.

Besides the fun of that, the fire department had flooded a field that was close enough to walk to with ice skates slung over one shoulder with one banging our chests while the other kept patting us on the back.

You can't do that in L.A. without plowing your way up overcrowded mountain roads or driving to a rink, if there is still such a thing here.

In L.A., in the Valley we plow our way through traffic to go anywhere at any time of day. Drive time is all the time.

To be perfectly honest, I am a golf fanatic.

For years now, I wake up at the crack of dawn every Monday and Tuesday and dial into the L.A. city golf reservation system with one phone in my left hand and one in my right.

Sometimes I get straight in when the system opens at 6 a.m. but more times than not it takes me dozens, even hundreds, of redials before the recorded voice says: "Welcome to the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks teetiime reservation system....to reserve a teetime press one..."

It's so bad that Francois our cockatiel does perfect imitations of a busy signal. But I am an expert at making reservations and almost always able to get one of the earliest teetimes for Saturday and Sunday for me and my pals.

I am not an expert golfer. In fact, I'm terrible and I cheat all the time. But I do love the game. It gets me out of my head, connects me with the birds and the trees and the sky above and with my friends for a few hours.

There's a fraternity among golfers, and that's especially true among municipal course golfers, a camaraderie that comes from playing on working class facilities where the sand traps are like concrete, the greens bumpy, and the fairways covered with bare spots and muddy patches even in the heat of summer.

I'm not complaining, a cowpatch would be fine with me. But that's not true for all municipal course golfers, the ones who take it seriously and have the skill to hit the ball straight and far. They are given to bitching about the marshals who drive around oblivious to slow players, the condition of the courses and the soaring fees the city is charging.

Right now, with City Hall paralyzed by its financial mismanagement, they are up in arms over plans to price city courses out of the market, cut back in maintenance and give away a contract for golf carts that fails to maximize revenue to the treasury.   

It's a small world isn't it, small and funny and fine -- at least for people in the tight little circles of influence where opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies abounds.

Take the case of Northeast San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes who, while nobody was watching largely because he has been so invisible, took steps to strip the City of L.A. and its citizens of their basic right to decide land use issues by letting developers do almost anything they want like tear down houses and put up apartments.

It should be noted that his skullduggery was aided and abetted by the fact the Daily News no longer has anyone in Sacramento and the Times still doesn't care about such mundane matters as the well-being of the city.

But word does get around and on Friday Rick Orlov reported Fuente's deceit and a brushfire of outrage quickly spread across the city.

(Strike up the appropriate music by clicking here to get in the right mood for what follows)

With a little help from his friends, Fuentes has concocted a measure, AB212, that  "would limit the ability of the city to make zone changes in areas where the community plan is not consistent with the general plan," according to Orlov.

That lack of consistency is everywhere since the general plan is a fraud and the community plans outdated.

Fuentes' goal is affordable housing -- a code word for taxpayer subsidized housing for the poor and densification of neighborhoods all across L.A.

Now I don't know at this point who would get rich from Fuentes' effort to strip the people of L.A. and their government of control of land use but an examination of how he came to be an elected official and how this legislation came to be might be instructive.

For starters, you need to know Fuentes is a tool of City Councilman Richard Alarcon and former City Council President Alex Padilla, who is now a state senator.

As I've watched the circus that passes for politics in L.A. over the years, that phrase often has popped into my head so it was amusing when I heard someone near me last night at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association meeting murmur a similar sentiment.

It was near the end of Councilwoman Wendy Greuel's talk and she was answering a question about why for so long garbage collection was provided out of taxes like police and fire services, a basic commitment of City Hall to the people, and now the city is recovering the full cost of garbage collection.

Now here's the most capable member of the City Council talking gibberish as if no one in the room is smart enought to know the simple truth: The city squandered all its tax dollars and has no chance in hell of getting two-thirds of the voters to approve higher taxes so they're charging for services that have long been free.

That way the public doesn't get a say, which is the point to be sure. The less say the public has, the easier it is for the mayor and council to have sweetheart deals with city unions and sweetheart deals with Arab oil sheiks who want to profit from city-subsidized developments.

This item was written by long-time community activist Noel Weiss, an attorney who played a key role in winning City Hall support in 2006 for doubling tenant relocation payments.

By Noel Weiss

West Side activist

Levels of trust begin to grow when people from the community can have 'heart to heart' discussions with the police; with the City Attorney; with the educators; with the politicians; with each other. The Watts Gang Task Force is a clearinghouse of not just ideas, but of emotions (both negative and positive).
 
So that is why, for example, the Watts community can put on a three day carnival which closed down (lawfully) some City streets and which drew people from throughout the community - gang and non-gang alike. People knew what was expected of them. The 'interventionists' from the community were there to provide a buffer, with the police providing  the ultimate back-up. There was not one incident even though rival gang members came.
 
Having pulled this off, and of course, there was no press coverage of the good news, the Community, the police, the interventionists, the churches, everyone, could take pride and satisfaction in being able to accomplish something which other parts of the City probably take for granted .
 
At the task force meetings, there is generally a Deputy Chief of Police, a Commander, and the local captain. This kind of concern and compassion results in a reciprocal kind of respect - such that now when there is a hint of a potential problem, a direct line (literally) exists between the community leaders (interventionists) and LAPD, so that the Police can, with confidence, know what is happening, what is being done, and what needs to be done to quell any problem.
 
In short, there is trust being built between the police and the community. This is important because the gangs rely on a lack of trust in order to stir up trouble and swell their ranks.

You got to feel for Russ Stanton. He comes from nowhere to land one of the plum jobs in American journalism as editor of the Los Angeles Times just as the bottom falls out of the industry.

So he's facing round after round of staff cuts and worsening morale and the challenge of reinventing the newspaper in the Internet age and then BANG -- the Times' shoddy journalistic practices blow up in his face.

First, there was the Chuck Philips fiasco. Philips is a reporter who has been repeatedly accused of carrying the water for the such questionable characters as Suge Knight in the rap music scene wars that led to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls among others,

Yet, the Times apparently did nothing to investigate allegations Philips breached industry ethical standards. I say apparently because when Philips earlier this year wrote a story accusing Sean "Puffy" Combs of complicity in a criminal attack on Shakur, only one senior editor vetted it for content and it went up online and ultimately into the paper.

It didn't take long before the blogosphere exposed several fatal problems: The story was based on falsified documents and anonymous sources, and was so badly reported that the Times had to run a front-page retraction. It now faces enormous costs to settle the matter.

And now accusations that are potentially even more serious have surfaced that grow out of the Anthony Pellicano case, the Hollywood private eye who ran roughshod over the law and common decency in numerous cases involving celebrity clients.

The probe of Pellicano began after then Times reporter Anita Busch was threatened to scare her off a story. With Pellicano's conviction last week, Busch went public with her experiences in an interview with blogger Patrick Frey at Patterico.com. She called for an investigation into Pellicano's relationships with Philips, Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton, Newton's wife Karlene Goller who is the Times' in-house lawyer and other journalists.

In a series of posts in recent days at Patterico.com, Frey, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, has questioned Philips' relationship with Pellicano and why he wrote stories challenging the government's case against him; why after Pellicano was indicted for the threat against Busch, Goller suggested the private eye be hired to investigate the threat against Busch, and why Newton kept a gift of a paperweight from Pellicano on his desk long after he was suspected in the Busch threat.

Journalism is a noble calling -- or at least that's what so many of us believed throughout our careers.

We were society's watchdogs, democracy's infantry, doing the dirty work of ferreting out the truth about what was really going on in our government, our society. We took no prisoners, threw our verbal bricks at windows on both sides of street.

Or so we thought.

Of course, that wasn't my experience for the most part. The watchdogs were our bosses, making sure  we didn't go too far. Only the truly talented had the right to exercise the First Amendment to any real degree. The rest of us sneaked in the truth, if we could, between the lines the same way good journalists at Pravda did.

Some of us with an excess of passion also formed an underground. We pushed the rules of corporate journalism to the edges and took our chances. Sometimes we went too far, sometimes we succumbed to alcoholism, or gave up and joined the fraternity of public manipulators in the world of public relations experts, lobbyists and political staff.

The collapse of newspapers in particular and news media in general that's now under way has robbed even the most diehard journalists I know of all illusion. The game is up. At my former paper, four great journalists have quit in just a few weeks -- all for public relations where they will earn a much better living, have more fun and salve their wounds knowing there is life after your dream is over.

Soon, a friend said recently, there will be no journalists left for all the PR types to manipulate.

And that's the point of this: Manipulation of the media is far more sophisticated than the media and that's been true for a long, long time. It's a big reason our government at all levels is doing such a poor job of serving the people and such a good job of serving itself.

Antonio Villaraigosa was his usual charming self last night when he dropped by the latter-day secession group Valley Vote to spend 90 minutes or so auditioning his re-election pitch and addressing concerns from overdevelopment to overpaid city workers.

He even said nice things about me even though we disagree on a lot of issues. I got to chat with a lot of these truly concerned citizens who have worked long and hard for a better city whether it's L.A. or the Valley.

Before the mayor arrived, I got a chance to make my own pitch which is that nothing great will happen unless business, civic, social groups of all types across the city unite around a handful of core issues -- like quality schools, safe streets, healthy neighborhoods and good jobs -- and become the third force in city politics equal to the unions and developers/contractors/lobbyists.

Both Antonio and I were warmly received which tells you a lot about the decency of these people and their eagerness to embrace anyone who offers any hope at all at making L.A. a better city.

What intrigues me about everyone who lives inside the bubble of City Hall -- is how the world they operate in makes such perfect sense to them when it seems so corrupt to me. This is true of every politician and staff member and bureaucrat I know even ones who are cynical about what's going on.

Somehow, they can't see that inflated salaries and benefits, civil service rules that reward and protect low achievement and sloppy contracting practices that give away fortunes are the problem.

The mayor is certainly no exception.

His scheme to raise taxes, fees and rates while cutting services almost seems to make a kind of insane sense when you listen to the innocence with which he says that every new dollar he takes in from the public, he'll reduce services by $1.50. He blithely explains away giving pay raises that far exceed inflation even as the economy was sinking, even blaming the economists for not predicting things would be as bad as they are.

As always, he rests his case on the reduction in crime and makes the city's new plans for massive development without community input sound like smart growth.

I'm not going to belabor the point because I'm putting up video of the event. It's the first time I ever tried to shoot with a video camera or post it online. So it'll be pretty amateurish at best. Click here for his answer to a question on city salaries, the Tennie Pierce case is here and here for the first segment of his talk, Part II is here, Part III is here.

UPDATE: I've spoken with Ben Austin who is now working part-time as an assistant city attorney mainly working on litigation involving health care providers and he's paid somewhat less than the salary in the city database. He also works part-time for the Green Dot charter schools on educational issues, an arrangement approved in advance by the City Ethics Commission officials.

Personally I like Rocky Delgadillo, L.A.'s City Attorney, and Ben Austin, the Democratic political consultant Rocky hired as his "director of communications" when he took office back in 2001.

But when I start going through the city salary database put up by the Daily News  along with hard-hitting stories on the outrageous pay of city workers, I find this entry: 

CITY ATTORNEY     ASST CITY ATTORNEY     AUSTIN,BEN B     $119,031.66  

And that makes me mad as hell.

Throughout city government -- government at all levels really -- there are vast public relations operations paid for by the taxpayers.

For the most part, these aren't people who spend a whole lot of time communicating what is actually going on behind the scenes to the public, or providing the public useful information to better understand what government is actually doing.

They are there for one purpose and one purpose only: To make the politicians look good, to make the bureaucrats look good. In fact, their principal mission is to mislead the public about what's going on.

By the time I was 14, my friends and I thought we had figured out something very basic about the American political system and reduced our insight to a very simple slogan: What difference does it make?

A month ago I retired from the Daily News, a month without the identity as a newspaperman, a month without reading a newspaper.

It's strange on many levels all that's happened, and getting my news online only through websites run by corporations and blogs run by individuals is part of that new experience.

I'm a novice to say the least at blogging, learning bit by bit the technology and the art of blogging. I still write like a journalist in long takes, instead of short takes that blogging requires, a few paragraphs at a time.

But for the first time in my life, after 44 years as a reporter and editor, I'm writing publicly under my own name what I think and what I know in the way I want to. No rules but my own. No bosses. No journalistic standards except my own..

It's liberating. Not having a job is liberating. It may seem odd to many that a long-time journalist is finding the exercise of his right of free speech and of the press to be a new experience. But that's the way it is. The news business is just that, a business that manufactures products according to industry standards and consumer expectations. Not one professional journalist out of a thousand has the talent, skill and permission to  exercise the First Amendment in any meaningful way, though most struggle to bring at least some of themselves into the work they produce.

I'm not sure anybody should care about this postinig but it's my blog and I feel like talking about what's been happening in my life.

You got to feel sorry for poor City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. He's become the living embodiment of the cliché about no good deed goes unpunished.

A year ago, Rocky announced with Councilwoman Janice Hahn and Mother of Watts founder "Sweet" Alice Harris at his side that he was going to make Markham Middle School in Watts the poster child for a new anti-gang school safety initiative

"Mend Markham" involved everything from school uniforms to teacher empowerment to mentoring and adult supervised after school play with nearly $1 million in public and private funds.

Overlooked was checking out the criminal backgrounds of the people in charge of the school, particularly Assistant Principal Steven Rooney  who was transferred from Fremont High to Markham last fall after beating a rap for allegedly having sex with an underage student who refused to testify in court about their two-year fling. The transfer was part of LAUSD's notorious "dance of the lemons" policy to move its losers to one bad school after another, ensuring that the neediest students get the worst education.

Now Rooney is in jail accused of using force and molesting three teenage girls at Markham. So much for student safety. So much for protecting them from fear and violence.

But that didn't stop Rocky from sending out a mass mailing on April 29 boasting that his "Blueprint for Safer Schools, based on our Markham Middle School Safety Initiative...should inspire a dialogue about how we can do things differently with an eye toward ending fear and violence in our schools."

Roosters in Woodland Hills 

Thanks to my wife's indefatigable early morning dog walking, I have discovered there are roosters in my neighborhood and some people are running mini-chicken farms.

That seems really nice to me, a throwback to the idyllic time when the Valley was nearly all ranches and farms.

But the commissars of the city, specifically in this case Councilwoman Janice Hahn and Councilman Tony Cardenas, see something sinister and something obnoxious about the roosters. So they have put on Wednesday's agenda a measure to limit the rooster population to one per household although an exemption would be made for Hollywood film and TV producers.

Better they should have limited gang members or high school dropouts to one per household, but no, they have decided roosters are a priority problem.

This is a reader's unfiltered and unverified posting in response to the Grape Street Crips and Councilwoman Janice Hahn controversy. Since it's already available in the comment section of the item headlined Janice Hahn's gang tattoos, it may as well be visible to everyone while it is being checked out.

The basic facts are in the record. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo sought an injunction on Feb. 15 -- an action that was announced in a press release and not at a news conference as the reader states -- to close down a PCP drug house in Watts and won a judgment shutting down the drug house on April 3. The Los Angeles Times reported on March 27 that 13 Grape Street Crips were indicted on PCP charges.

Clearly, there is more to the story that Fox News broke last week.

Hey Ron -

The name of the "gang leader/drug dealer" who had the confidential LAPD
computer printout in his private vehicle ... Alphonso Foster.  (And he
was released from the police station that night)

Turns out that he was recently indicted and arrested in connection with
one of the largest liquid PCP seizures in US history (40 gallons) which
occurred in Missouri in 2006.  He is in federal custody now.  He was
working with and for Internal Affairs to set up Moreno and Garcia and
get them removed from the Jordan Downs Housing Projects.

Deputy Chief Berkow tried to get the City Attorney's Office to remove
Alphonso Foster from the Grape Street Crip injunction list by going
through DCA Marty Vranicar.  The C/A's Office did not remove Foster
from the list and retained the injunction violation case that Foster
had pending in court.

C/A Delgadillo was then seeing how the Moreno/Garcia lawsuit was
evolving into a real bad situation for the city of LA (his office led
by DCA Beth Orellana is defending the City in federal court against
Moreno and Garcia).   Delgadillo then made a self-serving move.  He
knew that Foster was indicted and to be arrested so he made a large
public spectacle of closing down Foster's mom's house at 10330 Lou
Dillon in Watts, deeming it a gang house and drug producing location
for the Grape Street Crips.  It was a major press conference in
February 2008.

Ask people in L.A., Madrid, Paris, London, Sydney, Berlin, New York and Singapore what they want from city government and you'll find the answers are similar around the world.

Better services, a fair share of services, empowerment, accountability.

That's the finding of a recent global study of those eight cities by Accenture management consultants.

If that sounds a lot like what drove the Valley secession movement a decade ago or what is stirring the citywide discontent today, it is.

Rick Orlov in the Daily News on Monday characterized the L.A. segment of the study this way: "Most Los Angeles residents love the city but are troubled by the high cost of living, the lack of government accountability and a widespread sense that no area is getting its fair share of services - the same sentiment that fueled the San Fernando Valley secession drive."

It was 20 years ago on Jan. 30 that Los Angeles reacted with horror to the murder of 27-year-old graphic artist Karen Toshima, killed by a stray bullet during a shootout between rival gang members as she walked on a Westwood street.

Her murder shocked the city and attracted national attention. The LAPD tripled patrols around UCLA and 30 officers were assigned to a task force to find her killer. Politicians staged press conference and vowed to take strong measures to quell the gang menace, even promising to hire 150 more cops for the underpoliced city.

TIME magazine concluded its article, noting that "this is not likely to end the debate over life and death in Los Angeles. Not many of the 387 gang-related killings in Los Angeles County last year ended with a press conference announcing an arrest."

The New York Times focused on the backlash in the black community over the attention the Toshima murder attracted, noting it "brought anger from some blacks who, while deploring the Toshima killing, said that no such concerted police and media attention attends the numerous killings of innocent blacks by gangs in the predominantly black south central part of Los Angeles...

''We are tired and we're not going to take it anymore,'' Congresswoman Maxine Waters, then a state legislator, was quoted as saying.

Sound familiar?  It is because so little has changed.Gangs still flourish in much of the city, terrorizing vast neighborhoods, engaging in mayhem and murder.

But nobody wants to get serious about what to do about it.

We get mad about it. We study it. We politicize it. We see an endless parade of innocent lives lost and vast areas of the city living in terror.

And yet we lack the political will to take the kind of action needed.

Here's some steps that could be taken right now without further debate:

Go through the lists of the thousands of gang members already identified as criminals under the 30 or so gang injunctions and determine with federal immigration authorities which of them is in America illegally and deport them.

Say it ain't so Janice, say your posture as an anti-gang crusader who wants yet another tax on the law-abiding people of L.A. isn't the delusion of someone who doesn't have a clue about what she's doing?

Fox News last night tattooed the San Pedro councilwoman with the political pedigree with a devastating report, months in the works, about how Hahn screwed over two tough good cops and made a hero of Betty Day, the mother of a notorious family of members of the Grape Street Crips.

The cops, Ryan Moreno and Chuck Garcia, are suing the city, claiming Hahn in collusion with LAPD brass forced them off the gang beat in Watts because of their aggressive attack on hoodlums and drug dealers.

Fox reporter Chris Blatchford suggested the information that led to pulling Moreno and Garcia off the street came from the gangs in an orchestrated effort to undermine their crackdown on the criminals.

The devastating report adds political pressure for City Hall to stop coddling criminal illegal immigrant gang members.

Passions already are running high over the murder of Jamiel Shaw II and mayoral candidate Walter Moore's campaign for a tough law forcing the cops to turn over all illegal immigrants  identified in state law enforcement records as gang members to federal immigration authorities for deportation  

The debate has locked up over Special Order 40, under which police have a longstanding don't ask, don't tell policy on immigration status, but there's a lot that can be done immediately that I don't see how anyone can question.

I've talked to a lot of cops over the years and most of them question just how effective the city's 30 or so injunctions are against gangs. But they do believe the quickest and surest way to weaken the gangs is to go after the thousands of gang members named in the injunctions who are in this country illegally.

These are not just your everyday gang members. They are specifically identified as criminals by name in the injunctions issued by the courts so it doesn't take a federal task force or any changes in Special Order 40 to get them out of the country.

And it certainly doesn't take the gang tax proposed by the naive Ms. Hahn.

It just takes the political will at City Hall to protect the law-abiding, instead of the criminals.