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Stories tagged with “Los Angeles”

NEWS FLASH

Los Angeles Sheriff Department Sued For ‘Widespread Pattern Of Violence’ Against Inmates | The ACLU filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department alleging “widespread abuse against inmates.” According to the 77-page suit, Sheriff Lee Baca and other officials allowed deputies to beat non-resisting inmates and allowed jailers to form “gangs that identified themselves with tattoos” and use “ritual beatings of inmates to win prestige with fellow deputies.” The department has been accused of such abuses “for decades,” even before Baca was elected in 1998. The ACLU reported on the abuse last year, spurring the FBI to launch its own investigation into the department. Baca acknowledged that “the department could improve” and began hearing inmates’ complaints and installing cameras in jails to deal with the violence. The department spokesman still insists however that “there is no gang mentality in our jails.”

By Tanya Somanader on Jan 19, 2012 at 2:50 pm

NEWS FLASH

Wind Storm Cripples Los Angeles | “A powerful wind storm with gale-force gusts left much of the Los Angeles area strewn with toppled trees and downed power lines on Thursday, slowing rush-hour traffic and knocking out electricity to over 300,000 customers,” Reuters reports. “Public schools in Pasadena and 11 other districts in San Gabriel Valley, northeast of Los Angeles, were closed for the day.” Winds gusted to speeds ranging from 40 to 60 miles per hour and higher. A 2006 global warming study predicted that Santa Ana winds like these would become more likely in the November-December period.

NEWS FLASH

Next Week LA Will Vote On Resolution Calling On Congress To End Corporate Personhood | As journalist David Swanson reports, next week the Los Angeles city council will be voting on a resolution calling on Congress to amend the Constitution to effectively end corporate personhood. Last month, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced the OCCUPIED constitutional amendment that would make it so that corporations could not seek the rights of persons. Numerous other cities are considering similar resolutions — find a full list here.

By Zaid Jilani on Dec 1, 2011 at 2:45 pm

Special Topic

LA Mayor Says He Evicted Protesters Out Of Concern For Children, But City Has 13,000 Homeless Kids

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 30, 2011 at 9:45 am

Last night, the city of Los Angeles reversed its long-standing policy of mutual cooperation with Occupy Los Angeles and raided the encampment on the steps of city hall, evicting protesters. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he decided on the eviction when he learned that children were sometimes present at the camp:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he decided it was time to evict Occupy L.A. protesters from the City Hall lawn after learning that there were children staying there. Given the smattering of assaults and other incidents reported at the camp, “the chaos out there could produce something awful,” he said in an interview with The Times.

Certainly, looking out for the welfare of children is an appropriate concern for the city. But it’s unclear how clearing the occupation encampment rather than working with protesters would result in a better situation for the kids present. After all, the city had been working with protesters to maintain the encampment for months, and had secured almost full cooperation with all regulations and demands.

An even more pertinent point is that Los Angeles already has thousands of children on the streets. A 2011 report estimated that there were 13,500 homeless students in the area. One would hope that if the city of Los Angeles was willing to send thousands of riot gear-clad police officers to evict an encampment of nonviolent protesters supposedly out of concern for children, that it will be making an even more intense effort over the coming days to alleviate the situation of the thousands of homeless children in the city. Perhaps the city could even team up with a broad-based social movement protesting economic injustice to do it.

NEWS FLASH

VIDEO: 1 Percenter Doubts ‘Anyone Great’ Ever Came From The 99 Percent | The Village Voice finds an amusing video taken during a Nov. 17 mass march of 99 Percenters in Los Angeles. An interviewer talks to a man in a business suit deriding the protesters and identifying himself as being in the top 1 percent richest Americans. “Have you ever heard of anybody great that’s come out of the 99 percent?” asks the man in the suit. “The Beatles!” replies the interviewer, getting the man in the suit to concede there may be four great 99 Percenters. Watch the exchange:

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 28, 2011 at 1:35 pm

NEWS FLASH

LAPD Arrest Several Protesters But Leave Encampment Standing | In a victory for Occupy Los Angeles, it has now been six hours since the original deadline established by the city for protesters to vacate their space at City Hall and police have not uprooted the encampment. Several protesters who blocked an intersection were arrested, however.

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 28, 2011 at 9:45 am

NEWS FLASH

As Los Angeles Prepares To Evict Occupy Los Angeles, 51,000 People Remain Homeless There | Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has given a “12:01 a.m. deadline for Occupy Los Angeles protesters to clear their encampment from the City Hall Lawn,” acting on orders from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who says that the demonstrators must vacate out of concern for “public health and safety.” Yet the ironic thing about forcibly removing the protesters at Occupy Los Angeles over concerns related to public health is that more than 50,000 people in the city, including thousands of children, remain homeless and possibly on the streets every single night. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority estimated earlier this year that more than 51,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County.

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 27, 2011 at 7:43 pm

NEWS FLASH

Occupy LA Seeks Restraining Order Against Police Raid | Earlier this week, a Boston judge granted a temporary restraining order preventing a Zuccotti Park-style raid on Occupy Boston. Yesterday, lawyers affiliated with Occupy Los Angeles filed a court motion seeking a restraining order against a similar raid being conducted on their encampment. Chief Deputy City Attorney William Carter will be dispatching attorneys from his office to oppose the request in Superior Court this morning.

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 18, 2011 at 9:30 am

Climate Progress

The Real Lessons of Carmageddon: How Small Behavior Changes Come with Big Payouts

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jul 20, 2011 at 11:42 am

This past weekend Los Angeles residents survived “Carmageddon” – a closure of 10 miles of highway on interstate 405 in southern California between the “101” and the “10” freeways. But the real story about the lessons we can draw from last weekend’s glimpse into a less car-dependent metropolitan mega-city.

CAP’s Jorge Madrid and Brennan Alvarez have the story.

Hailed by the media as a disaster-level disruption in weekend mobility, the closure of a major traffic artery that links two sides of the country’s second-largest city went off without much incident at all.

In fact, according to numerous twitter and facebook updates, real-time online Google traffic monitoring, and round-the-clock coverage by the LA Times, roads and highways throughout the city were uncharacteristically clear throughout most of the weekend.

LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared “mission accomplished” on Sunday afternoon after the massive 2-day, 11-lane, repair and improvement project was completed 17 hours ahead of schedule – without so much as one major traffic jam, worker injury, reported road rage incident, or disruption in hospital, emergency, or airport operations.

“A lot is said about the fact that this is the car capital of the United States,” Villaraigosa said. “Everybody has seen we can get out of our cars every once in a while and survive.”

While all this could make for an amusing “only in LA” punch line, the real story is far more important to our national dialogue about mobility in America’s metropolitan centers. It also highlights the importance of crucial infrastructure investments, especially during challenging economic times.

Read more

Alyssa

‘Wilfred’ is Essentially Frodo In Los Angeles

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 24, 2011 at 9:49 am

Wilfred, which premiered on FX last night, strikes me as an odd combination of Harvey, Pineapple Express, Donnie Darko, and…maybe Old School, or some other movie in which a fussy and neurotic male protagonist is at least temporarily liberated by acting wildly out of control. I tuned in because I’m interested in the trend of unmotivated male protagonists, and I wanted to see if the show had something new to say in that vein.

It does, in that Elijah Wood’s Ryan is clearly established as depressed, rather than simply a slacker. We first meet him printing out a suicide note (clearly labeled as the third revision of said missive) and looking like Frodo post-Mount Doom but pre-Valinor, as if maybe he had gotten a haircut and was still trying to hack it in the Shire as a gainfully employed hobbit. The problem is, we don’t really have a clear idea of why Ryan’s so depressed, why he’s so terrible to the sister who is trying to help him find a job, or what dreadful thing he’s been through to make hanging out with a horny, scatological, pot-smoking personified dog look like a better alternative to figuring out how to be a plausible adult.

The thing that makes the show work for me to the extent that it does is that the show seems aware of its own untenable premise. “Wilfred, how is this going to end?” Ryan asks his new dog friend after a day of smoking weed, humping waitresses (“Do you always feed your dog nachos?” “No, but he worked out today.”), stealing a closet’s worth of cannabis plants, and defecating in their neighbor’s boots. But some of the crassness of the show just feels like it’s reaching, like when Ryan’s sister declares of a delivery she performed earlier in the day “She wasn’t Asian American, Ryan. She was real Asian. I had to do so much slicing and dicing down there, it looks like a goddamn Benihana.” Wilfred probably shouldn’t try to be Louie, since I’m not sure it has a sense of the truths it wants to tell in the same way Louis C.K. does. It’s better at the moments when it’s more genuinely strange, like when Wilfred gets anxious about whether his real owner will come to reclaim him, and when the show emphasizes his non-humanness. Whether it can make that oddness a strength, rather than falling into derivative weakness, remains an open question.

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