The LACC community must now reclaim its campus from the L.A. County sheriff’s department

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 97)

Andrés Guardado’s and Terron Jammal Boone’s deaths at the hands of L.A. County sheriff officers in Los Angeles this past week cannot go in vain: they serve as crucial reminders that the people of Los Angeles can settle for nothing less than reclaiming their spaces from the police state before police cause more harm.

Even at this time of heightened tensions between communities of color and law enforcement across America, the L.A. County Sheriff’s department has shown no willingness to ban or even begin discussing a ban of its fatal policies against Black & Brown civilians, even after killing two Black & Brown men within just days of each other during the week of June 14th. At a meeting at L.A. City Hall this past Monday, June 22nd, L.A. City Council Member Curren Price said of Andrés Guardado’s death:

“He was shot by a sheriff deputy, but as far as the community’s concerned, he was shot by police, by law enforcement…That tragic death just underscores the conversation that’s happening all over this country.”

In East Hollywood, since March 16th of this year, sheriff deputies have guarded more than 1.5 million square feet of LACC’s campus, making it completely inaccessible for thousands of nearby students, workers, and other community members, the vast majority of whom are people of color and immigrants, but who also count African-American, disabled, elderly folks, and trans people within the community.

Signs posted around the campus state that authorized persons must “check-in” with the L.A. County sheriffs to be allowed on campus, but how can such a procedure possibly feel safe for Black & Brown people?

At first, the campus’s closing-off was admittedly in line with the uniform policy across L.A. County, under the notion that it was a precautionary measure against COVID-19 infection. More than three months later, however, when much of the city is “reopening” due to data suggesting we may now be getting ahead of the virus–at least, according to our public officials–the LACC campus continues idling by aimlessly, with sheriff SUVs and other vehicles guarding off the entrance. It does not feel safe for Black & Brown people, but is probably most dangerous to the scores of unhoused residents who set up their tents around the area.

Only a few weeks ago, I recall passing by the campus while an African-American woman sat on the curb on Heliotrope drive, perhaps resting from a jog or workout, only to have two sheriff officers call out to her from behind the fences separating the campus from the sidewalk, presumably to make sure she wasn’t “posing a threat.” It shouldn’t need to be stated that if not for one or two slight gestures, she could have been moments away from being shot, but time after time, we forget this is exactly how it happens across America.

Moreover, I’m confident that several more of these types of instances have taken place around the campus grounds, but that they’ve gone mostly unreported since Black, Brown, and other working-class communities have simply come to view such harassment from police officers as typical.

Instead of having armed law enforcement encroaching upon unarmed citizens who actually reside in the community, LACC’s campus should now be making space accessible to these groups.

For one, the campus can be used as a testing site for COVID-19, or as a location for limited exercising, as is the case at Dodger stadium and Elysian Park in Angeleno Heights. For another, LACC’s benches should be made accessible once again for pedestrians looking to take refuge from the exhausting rush of car traffic along Vermont avenue. The campus’s green spaces should be made accessible again for picnicking or some other respite. There is also much that can be done with the campus’s air conditioning to help the local community cool off over the oncoming summer. One way or another, it’s time to innovate. But whatever alternative use for campus instead of clustering large groups of people, one thing is abundantly clear:

The L.A. County Sheriff’s department has no grounds to be left as overseers of the college. It belongs most of all to students, student workers, and the various other civilians who make up the community in the “community college.”

If any of this sounds extraordinary, remember that even the Los Angeles Public Library community has taken its own Board of Commissioners to task, calling for the board to divest in police at our public libraries, since police only serve to intimidate and incarcerate our city’s most vulnerable populations there, and even to intimidate Black & Brown library workers into “walking a fine line” lest they be labeled as a threat by police officers. Only in America.

It’s therefore time for members of the LACC community to call for the reopening of our campus, hand-in-hand with the dismissal of armed law enforcement in order to ensure our safety and to prevent any more unnecessary bloodshed and loss of life for our families. If the weeks since the unrest in Minneapolis have shown anything, it’s that after marching, there is organizing, making our voices heard, and standing resolutely in our pursuit of a safer world for our health and well being. We deserve nothing less.

J.T.

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A tattered and damaged building at Vermont & Beverly stands next to a recently renovated hotel in Los Angeles

You Are Allowed To Press Reset, Los Angeles

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 89)

For nearly two hours today a disruption hampered phone networks all across Los Angeles and throughout the country. It was almost a glitch in the whole observable universe, as our once-familiar smart-phones were bereft of function and exposed for their hollow cores. One had to simply put the phone down and figure to try again later. It was strange. It was suspicious. It was also quite liberating.

The fact of the matter is that at the speed at which information now travels, there can never be enough ‘keeping up’ with the latest development just as there can never be enough ‘doling out’ of it. But it is helpful to take a break. Your memory, and perhaps even your skin, will thank you for it, according to some experts.

This Tuesday, I personally don’t plan to wait for another glitch to ease my mind from the day’s infinite stream of events. I have much to read, before much more to write.

While resetting my mind may not be as simple as doing so with my phone, I’ve got a feeling that for that same reason, making the effort can prove far more rewarding. Now, if only more of that L.A. City Council would come to the same reasoning.

J.T.

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By Escalating the Police State, Mayor Garcetti Is Officially L.A.’s First White Supremacist Mayor of the 21st Century

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 73)

History now records that every injury inflicted on defenseless protestors in L.A. this week comes from a mayor whose billion-dollar police force could bulldoze and bully unarmed citizens protesting the modern-day lynching of Black bodies only so much. Even after an annual budget of more than a billion dollars for weapons and training for this force, to still call for Governor Newsom’s support to smother free speech and the right to assembly in Los Angeles says a lot.

At this critical moment in our nation’s history, by calling the National Guard to intimidate and arrest defenseless protestors, Mayor Garcetti is now the first white supremacist mayor of L.A. in the 21st century, no better than a “Proud Boy” thug in Atwater Village claiming “defense” of white supremacy as his uniform glorifies blood spewed from Black & Brown skin.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the mayor’s curfew and call for the national guard on Saturday night comes less than 12 hours before the president’s designation of the so-called “ANTIFA” (abbreviated from ANTIFASCIST) association as a “terrorist group,” despite providing no evidence to support the claim that the group, which is known as a loose coalition of anti-racist activists, engages in anything related to terrorism.

That is, unless the official policy of the state is that any movement against white supremacy is so offensive to whiteness it must be deemed “terrorist.” The open-air prison is now in plain sight. Enter prison warden Garcetti.

But the mayor’s decision to escalate police reinforcements rather than deescalate their numbers doesn’t just place him in the company of Donald Trump. It also comes at a time when mayors across urban cities in the United States have a choice to either stand with their fellow citizens in calling for an end to Jim Crow policies for Black and Brown bodies, or stand against them, supporting only an extension of those same policies. Just one of these choices historically costs Black and Brown civilians in the United States their lives. Garcetti has chosen the latter.

Consider also that the mayor, like Governor Newsom, certainly calls on the federal government to support the state and L.A.’s economic shortcomings this year due to reduced tax revenue. So why can’t they stand with L.A. calling on the state and federal government to stop sanctioning the killing of unarmed Black people?

Additionally, I encourage every reader in Los Angeles to consider the following:

Exactly what gives Garcetti the right to escalate police forces at this time? And why is L.A. City Council not convening during these hours to veto the mayor’s invitation of the national guard to our city? What expertise for crisis management has Garcetti shown during seven years of shoving & arresting unhoused citizens instead of sheltering them? And how competently has his team performed during just the last two months in which they’ve failed to house even 3,000 of L.A.’s 15,000 most vulnerable unhoused residents?


Moreover, L.A. City Council’s failure to convene at this time also reveals the body is weak outside the realm of green lights for real estate tycoons, with its council-members sitting disparately at this time and apparently without prior knowledge of any of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s orders. This is a clear example of what democracy does not look like.

J.T.

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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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Why All 15 L.A. City Council Members Should Now Resign

J.T.1 Comment

(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 60)

Following George Chiang’s guilty plea in the FBI’s case against Council Member Jose Huizar, I am firmly of the belief that all fifteen members of the L.A. City Council should now resign, pack up their bags, and try their luck elsewhere. The reason is very simple:

The fact that Huizar’s back-door dealings with L.A. taxpayers’ money could even take place at city hall over the last three years (at minimum) shows a complete and utter failure of oversight.


We’re supposed to live in a country with “checks and balances” to govern power and prevent abuse. I don’t know about the rest of Los Angeles, but I know that when I cast my vote for my elected officials here, I do not sign up for the FBI’s knock at their door to serve as that check and balance. It’s a waste of my time and my money, and that of millions of other taxpayers’.

But since it’s clear that the council members are incapable of checking and balancing each other, and that even the L.A. Ethics Commission needs the council’s permission to have it regulate itself, the writing is on the wall: It’s time for a shake-up. A real gravitational one.

The whole council’s resignation shouldn’t seem like an unreasonable order, either. Voters can also demand to recall the officials. Less than 20 years ago, voters in California recalled Gray Davis and installed a Hollywood superstar with no prior experience in office to the state’s highest office. In the city of Los Angeles, recalling a local official is supposed to take between 50,000 – 100,000 signatures.

At a time when nearly 2.3 million workers in L.A.’s formal economy are without work, what’s the cost of registering them to vote and having them sign off on checking a broken institution at City Hall governing their tax dollars?


And I’ve got to be honest with you, Los Angeles: the state’s republicans have certainly already started their petition online to recall Governor Newsom for “violating civil liberties.” I’ll let readers look that one up themselves. Who am I kidding, here it is.

In any case, while the council’s collective resignation is obviously technically possible, I admit that the record on such bold action after prior scandals in Los Angeles makes that highly unlikely. So in the meantime, here’s some more data for you to enjoy during your morning commute, or breakfast, or sleeping in…

Mitch O’Farrell, who’s served as the representative for the 13th district in Los Angeles for almost seven years, has taken home at least $1.1 million taxpayer dollars since first stepping into the office on June 29th, 2013. He is not the only council member with these earnings. Go and see for yourself at the L.A. City Employee Payroll website.

Mitch O’Farrell’s Salary from 2013 – 2018
The 13th District: Atwater Village, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Historic Filipinotown, Rampart Village, East Hollywood, Hollywood, Little Armenia, and more.

During those same five years, more than 10,000 residents in the city of Los Angeles lost their homes due to high rent, low wages, and unemployment, ending up on L.A.’s streets.

J.T.

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