Call In or Write to Oppose Mayor Garcetti’s Police Raises As Housing & Community Investment Lose Millions

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 69)

I’ve been to Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, San Salvador, and Guatemala City, among others. With the exception of the latter two, all of these cities are larger than L.A. proper. But in none of them did I see thousands of encampments of unhoused people as I’ve seen in Los Angeles.

Over the next year, experts estimate that the number of unhoused people in California due to rising unemployment from coronavirus can grow by up to 20%, from 150,000 people currently to 180,000.

In Los Angeles County, which contains more than 40% of the unhoused population in California, that can mean an increase of up to 12,000 more people on the sidewalks over the next twelve months.


That’s 1,000 families left to L.A.’s concrete every four weeks. And if Project Roomkey shows us anything, it’s that given two months, the city of Los Angeles can barely manage to get well short of 3,000 of its 15,000 most vulnerable unhoused citizens into a hotel room.

Exactly what would be the point of “reopening” Los Angeles, then, if all we have are more people in tents crowding below freeways, at schools and libraries, and around grocery stores and restaurants?

At the same time, the mayor’s proposed budget, which slashes $9 million from housing and community investment next year for a total of $81.1 million but increases the police budget by over $122 million for a total of $1.9 billion, is in the motions for approval by City Hall over the next four weeks.

That’s four weeks of time for residents in Los Angeles to use their first-amendment rights to express opposition to this proposal.


I ask readers to imagine if just half as many people who flocked to the city’s beaches and park trails over the weekends called in to their local Council Member’s offices or Board of Supervisors’ office to demand they rescind their support for the mayor’s budget in its current form.

Mayor Garcetti and each Council Member and Board Supervisor are supposed to be our elected officials, after all, not Kings and Queens of our fate; each of these representatives is supposed to advance our interests given that they’re paid for by money from our income, sales, property taxes, and more.

See below for two directories, one for L.A. City council members and the mayor’s office, and another for the L.A. Board of Supervisors:

Mayor’s Office & City Hall Directory
L.A. County Board of Supervisors Contact Info

The office of the City Clerk also features a little-known form online for the public to write in a comment for the public comment portion on items considered by the L.A. City Council, listed below:

Office of the City Clerk for Public Comment Form

Not sure how to start? Feel free to contact yours truly for some ideas.

J.T.

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Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 56

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In a recent interview with Gustavo Arellano for the L.A. Times, Patrisse Cullors, a leader of the movement to reform L.A. jails and co-founder of Black Lives Matter, discusses “lessons” from the coronavirus over these last two months:

“The coronavirus is telling us, and when I say us, I mean the world, what organizers have been saying for a very long time: which is [that] we live in a capitalist system that benefits only a few, that is laser-focused on money over people…and [that] you would think in the middle of one of the biggest pandemics we’ve seen in our lifetime, that it would shift the course for everybody. But in fact that hasn’t been the case.”

Walking through Los Angeles, it’s clear how much of the city still depends on its business–or capital–particularly its small business, for significant portions of its movement; restrictions or not, people continue populating the city streets making exchanges, reducing, canceling or acquiring debts, and in effect maintaining their advancement towards another meal, another check-point, another logarithm.

Not far along from the small businesses, a great many people left behind for failing to submit to the motions of this renter’s town, or this place belonging to no one or nothing but the movement itself, also conduct business, though in what might be called a hyper micro-economy, taking care of the most fundamental needs for themselves with what they can afford from bodies worn by constant exposure to the concrete.

What’s also true is that each movement has its costs. The more that people populate a place, the more of that place’s ecosystem they affect; with more food comes more packaging to throw out, as with more electricity comes more bandwidth to extend, and on. Eventually every system requires an update; even the mayor’s press briefings are an example of this, going from five days a week recently for L.A. residents to now twice a week.

But what if we could update the capitalist system that Cullors calls attention to, in order to allow more people to reduce their work–and the costs accrued–in the same way?

In the midst of a world that continues spinning on its axis, coronavirus notwithstanding, it may seem like a waste of time to ask about “some day” in a future or theoretical world other than the one right in front of us.

But if we don’t ask about this update, and move forward incrementally towards it, it’s not just that we may find ourselves at the losing end of a wasted opportunity costing only more human life and health. It’s that, as the last two months, and as the last twenty years, and indeed as many decades prior show: wasted opportunity for a change when time calls for its is precisely what costs people their lives.

In any case, the honorable Ms. Cullor says:

“I don’t know what elected officials are going to do. But I know that the people of Los Angeles who have always cared about Los Angeles, who’ve cared about Los Angeles and the country. We are going to continue to do the work.”

J.T.

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War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (1980)

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In the days since an ebullient Back 2 School 2 Party, I’ve had the privilege to rest and restore myself from the frenzy of so much organizing. One of the key activities in this “decompressing” process has been getting back to los beloved libros. In an effort to spread the joy of reading, then, here is another brief book review, this time on a little-known story by a major organizer in American history: Huey P. Newton’s War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (1980).

I can only imagine how demoralizing it was for Mr. Newton to describe the harrowing experience that led to the publication of this work, which describes how in less than ten (10) years his entire life was uprooted, distorted and destroyed by a branch of government whose authority was never approved by Congressional Hearing (see FBI), but which would nevertheless work “behind the scenes” to eradicate the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) efforts to free Black and other minorities from the second-class citizenship over a hundred (100) years after the Reconstruction period that followed the US Civil War (1861-1865). As Mr. Newton points out in the opening pages of his analysis:

“By 1966, the United States had experienced a recent series of disruptions in several of its major urban Black population centers—Harlem, Watts, Chicago and Detroit. Numerous organizations and leaders representing groups of Black people—e.g., SCLC (Martin Luther King, Jr.), the Black Muslims (Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X), CORE (James Farmer), NAACP (Roy Wilkins)—had repeatedly articulated the causes of these riots or urban rebellions: high unemployment, bad housing, police brutality, poor health care, and inferior educational opportunities.”

That same year, the Party would be founded in Oakland, California. It wouldn’t last more than 14 years. But during its lifespan, the BPP served as a “vanguard,” to borrow one of Newton’s terms, which would not only extend the spirit of Black Liberation Theory passed down from the blood and ashes of Malcolm X and MLK Jr., but which would “evolve” that spirit to meet the needs of a new “postmodern” world dawning after the “radical sixties” era in the United States. A world which would nearly leave the Black community and other minorities completely behind, if not for the revolutionary spirit and action of thinkers like Mr. Newton, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and other major intellectual and social figures of the times.

To be sure, War Against the Panthers is not a “tell-all” expose of the BPP and its legacy, but it’s a close and fact-based look at the methods of infiltration used by institutions such as the FBI, CIA and even the IRS and others, which set out to destroy the party’s Breakfast and other ‘Survival’ programs in Oakland, Chicago, New York and many more major cities across the U.S. For this same reason the dissertation is a very brief read containing a handful of facts, figures, and memorandums obtained through litigation by attorneys for the Panthers in cases against the FBI and its counterparts for violating the Panthers’ rights to privacy, freedom of speech, and other political freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

In 2019, “privacy” and the right to privacy is a word and phrase I read mostly when articles are referring to the internet, and more specifically, when they’re referring to which companies are spying on Americans’s phones and web browsers (virtually all of them, though one might ask: does it still count as spying if we clicked “yes” in the disclosure agreement?).

Yet Newton’s dissertation is an example of just what kind of actions can be taken against any American when the major power players deem them a “threat to national security,” or even just expendable or collateral damage. The analysis is therefore also instructive in the matter about why ‘[the] people’s’ rights are still worth defending; the issues of privacy and the right to organize oneself privately, politically or otherwise are not just legislative or “abstract” issues, but truly personal ones affecting every American today. As Mr. Newton points out, if even just one power player can deploy their leverage against any one group or person to destroy the rights of their citizenship, then it follows that all power players are given permission to misuse their leverage against all [the] people:

“…governmental efforts at destruction of the Party, successful in varying degrees, were only thwarted or held in abeyance when they reached their logical consequence: destruction of the right of dissent for all groups, a right indispensable to the functioning of a democratic society.”

I salute Mr. Newton and his comrades for their invaluable bravery in living, breathing, and exposing this parable. At least for JIMBO TIMES, the people will know: these are legends not far at all removed from our time. The text is free online for any one to read, and has full approval from The L.A. Storyteller.

J.T.

A 7th Grade Student’s Poem for Black Lives in Los Angeles

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Black Potential

by Te’Aunee Turner

We are BLACK, We are BROWN and we are even more than what they make us seem.

They make us seem weak, worthless, and they use us as scapegoats.
But the fact is
We are
Preachers,
Teachers,
Singers,
Fighters, and
Leaders.

Don’t you try to put US down because they already tried,

They insulted us like HARRIET TUBMAN
They abused us like EMMETT TILL
They disenfranchised us like MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
THEY EVEN TRIED TO MAKE US SLAVES,
BUT WE BROKE THEM DAMN CHAINS.

WE are BLACK
I am BLACK
I AM BLACK
I am BRAVE, COURAGEOUS, and DETERMINED
And let it be known,
I ain’t no BURDEN.

So do not UNDERESTIMATE our potential,
MY POTENTIAL
My BLACK POTENTIAL.

Because Harriet Tubman helped free her people from chains,
So Rosa could sit,
So Martin could march,
And finally, so Obama could lead.

I can be the next Michelle
I can be the next Harriet
I can be the next Maya Angelou,
This is because of African-American leaders who fought for our Rights.

Now, I fight for my Rights.

About the author: Te’Aunee Turner is a 7th grade student in Los Angeles. In Te’Aunee’s own words, she hopes her poem shows others “[that] being equal is not treating someone with an advantage because they’re in a higher class, or taking advantage of others because they don’t have money. This is how our great African American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nipsey Hussle got killed. The whole point of this is for people to see others for who they really are so we can treat each other more equally.”

Te’Aunee’s sister, Dasia, and Language Arts teacher, Ms. Morales, also provided support for this poem.

J.T.

Dear Sisters: Black Lives Matter

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Your pain, and the bravery in your hearts to share what you feel, are embers of light in a world that insists on living in darkness.

Your endurance through chaos, and your will to survive through its reams, are layers of strength for those who will follow in your footsteps.

You’ve heard before that you have to keep fighting, and that you have to keep pushing,

And you will hear this again.

But tonight, I encourage you to put your arms down, and to lay your heads back.

Tonight, I encourage you to simply find somewhere to rest.

And to reach out to one another, to hold one another, and to assure each other of one thing, if only just one thing:

That you are not alone.

And that your pain will not be in vain.

Your struggle is the world’s struggle, as it is humanity’s struggle, and as it is the struggle of the future.

And in your fight to bring light to our society, you reflect the orbit of a world fighting to survive in a galaxy full of darkness.

Thank you for shining so brightly in this journey, and for your resilience through its tremors.

And know that you are seen.

That you are heard,

And that you will always be acknowledged and appreciated.

From the center of the earth,

To the edges of the universe,

Through time and space,

And even beyond,

Thank you once again, dear sisters; indefinitely.