Month: May 2020

LOCAL NEWS

• Black Lives Matter – LA organized and led a protest in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, joining continuing protests in cities across the nation to demand justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and demanding accountability for 601 people killed by police in LA County. Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Greg Chauvin on Monday, while on the ground handcuffed and pleading that he could not breathe. Taylor was murdered in her home by police officers in Louisville in March. The Los Angeles protesters successfully blocked the 101 Freeway, where a police car drove violently through a crowd of protesters, and gathered outside of District Attorney Jackie Lacey’s office. Black Lives Matter – LA further called on LA City Council President Nury Martinez to convene a special city council meeting to reject Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposal to spend 54% of the city’s general fund on the LAPD, and instead adopt the People’s Budget, which has been developed with input from more than 20,000 residents and activists, to defund police and provide funding for services that help and strengthen Los Angeles communities.  A full statement from DSA-LA on the murder of George Floyd can be read here, and the national statement from DSA can be read here. DSA-LA demands an end to the mass murder of Black and Brown people at the hands of U.S. law enforcement, and DSA-LA will fight alongside Black Lives Matter-LA and other BIPOC-led groups to dismantle the systems that uphold capitalism and white supremacy, which include police, prisons and detention centers.

• On Thursday, regulators at the California Public Utilities commission voted to approve PG&E’s reorganization plan to exit bankruptcy. The approval came despite widespread community outcry and public comment mobilized by DSA and other groups, and opposition from over 200 local elected officials. DSA will continue to organize to fight for energy democracy and to turn PG&E into a public and worker owned utility.

• Activists are continuing car protests to draw attention to the COVID-19 outbreak and unsafe conditions at the Otay Mesa and Adelanto ICE detention centers, and to demand that detainees be released. Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia was the first ICE detainee to die in US custody, but many other detained immigrants fear he will not be the last. He died in San Diego’s Otay Mesa, which has the largest coronavirus outbreak of any immigration detention center. He had lived in the US for over 40 years. Some of those detained with him notified medical staff many times, but Carlos was merely instructed to fill out multiple “sick cards,” and given ibuprofen. Immigrants are being held on civil offenses, not criminal, meaning they could be released at almost any time. Although 91 detainees have been released as part of the court order, many fear for the lives of those that remain. 

• Big Oil has lost its appeal to stop California cities and counties from taking it to court to seek damages for the impact of climate change. The lawsuits target Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal Dutch Shell as being responsible and seek to make them pay for damages from climate change as well as for infrastructure to prevent future impact.

• A former close aide to Councilmember Jose Huizar pled guilty to criminal racketeering, the fourth such plea deal stemming from an ongoing federal corruption probe into City Hall “pay to play” real estate deals. Council President Nury Martinez and Mayor Garcetti have now both asked Huizar to resign. The plea agreement can be read here; as part of the agreement, evidence emerged that Huizar had used a bribe from a Chinese billionaire to privately settle a sexual harassment suit brought by a former staff member.

• A new citywide program will move $100 million of federal relief into a fund designed to help “qualifying” Los Angeles renters keep up with their rent during COVID-19. In announcing the program, LA City Council President Nury Martinez acknowledged that the housing department would likely be overwhelmed by demand. The program is designed to cover renters by making payments directly to their landlords.

• The County Board of Supervisors met on Wednesday. A debate as to whether to seek a variance that would allow cities within the county to reopen piecemeal, as each individually hits recovery benchmarks, split the board 2–2 and was moved to a closed session. Opponents argued that the piecemeal approach would disadvantage the communities of color that have been hit hardest by COVID-19.

• Many of the cities within LA County with the highest infection rates neighbor the city of Vernon, where there have been outbreaks at numerous industrial plants. The city has only a few hundred legal residents — most of Vernon’s thousands of workers live nearby.

• Coronavirus infection rates in LA County jails are nearly 60% in some locations. More than 1000 inmates out of 13,000 have tested positive and over 5000 are currently under quarantine.

• Anti-lockdown protests are being attended by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys (designated by the FBI as having ties to white nationalism), and by armed militias that advocate for civil war. Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice who studies extremism, says that their intermingling with other participants, who have a wide variety of concerns, is concerning because the extremists can recruit as well as create an environment that is a “petri dish for conspiracy theories and bad information, as well as aggressiveness.” Many of the anti-lockdown protests are funded by wealthy conservative groups, including the family of Secretary of Education Betsy Devos.

• Los Angeles County is reopening despite still being the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in California. All retail stores are now allowed to have in-store shopping at 50% capacity; personal care services such as barbershops and salons can reopen; restaurants can resume dine-in services; faith-based services can resume at 25% capacity or 100 people, whichever is lower; flea markets, swap meets and drive-in movie theaters can open; and public protests can also take place at 25% of a location’s capacity or 100 people, whichever is lower. Social distancing and the requirement to wear face masks remain in place.

ELECTIONS

• California now faces a second suit to prevent the move to a vote-by-mail November election. The new suit, brought by the Republican Party, is in addition to the suit filed previously by a conservative group and Repulican Darrell Issa. President Trump has repeatedly undermined confidence in the democratic process by attacking the use of mail-in ballots as “rigged,” and is falsely claiming that California is distributing ballots to noncitizens and that people will send in hundreds of thousands of fake ballots.

LOCAL NEWS

• People’s Budget LA, a coalition of activist groups including DSA-LA’s Street Watch, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, and Ktown for All, mobilized opposition to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed budget cuts and flooded social media and public comments periods in an outcry over proposed spending on LAPD at the expense of social services. On Thursday the City Council declined to approve the budget and referred the budget to committee for further discussion, meeting the activists’ demands for more time for public input. The coalition will now pressure the City Council to pass a People’s Budget, centering human services and defunding the LAPD. Currently, police funding takes up over half of LA’s budget. DSA-LA member and endorsed LA City Council candidate Nithya Raman pointed out that “all of the proposed cuts to services total $230 million. LAPD officer pay is simultaneously being increased by $144 million. If officers were to receive the same pay they did last year, we could be saved from two-thirds of the cuts.”

• Health officials announced on Wednesday that LA has reached an important milestone in the fight against coronavirus, with the transmission rate now slightly below 1, meaning that on average every person with COVID-19 infects less than one other person. Simulations show that if this transmission rate is maintained then just 9% of Angelenos will have contracted the virus by December. However, even a slight uptick in the transmission rate — to 1.5 — could result in nearly half the city becoming infected by December. For this reason, county health officials continue to stress the importance of residents abiding by social distancing guidelines even as the city’s lockdown begins to ease.

• The University of California announced that it has fully divested from all fossil fuels, becoming the nation’s largest educational institution to do so and capping a 5-year effort to move the public research university’s $126 billion portfolio into more environmentally sustainable investments. The movement against fossil fuels has bloomed to encompass more than 1,100 faith, educational, government, corporate and nonprofit institutions, with $14 trillion in assets, in the last decade. Among them, more than 50 universities have committed to full or partial divestment.

• After a federal judge ordered LA County to carry out a “humane relocation” of unhoused residents underneath the city’s freeways, local officials have submitted preliminary plans that include a rapid expansion of safe parking sites and pallet shelters, as well as safe campsites based on a pilot program implemented by the West Los Angeles VA. The judge’s order requires that all unhoused residents living under overpasses must be offered an alternate space in a shelter with access to health and hygiene services before police can order them to leave, and that this offer must be given with advance notice. 

• Gov. Newsom’s Project Roomkey, a plan to house thousands of unhoused Californians in hotel rooms across the state, is rolling out far slower than anticipated. Only half of the 15,000 rooms leased for the project have been filled. 

• School support staff, teachers, and superintendents are warning that the school budget cuts proposed by Gov. Newsom could threaten the ability of schools statewide to reopen safely. 

• A 74-year-old man committed suicide in the Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield. Choung Won Ahn had expressed concerns over contracting COVID-19 due to his many pre-existing health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart problems. 

• The Guardian has published a deep look at six prisons in California where the failure to implement basic protocols to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has preceded “rapidly escalating outbreaks,” with some fearing worse to come.

• “A restaurant worker without papers has to work twice as hard. You have to constantly say: ‘I’ll do it.’ The day someone is out sick, you have to cover. You can’t get sick. You can’t call out. It’s a hard road to walk,” says Oscar, who now is out of work. Being undocumented, he is not eligible for unemployment or a stimulus check. Undocumented workers account for 10% of the US labor force, and there are about a million undocumented workers in the food and beverage industry. With the government failiing to provide relief to the undocumented community, many groups including DSA-LA are engaging in solidarity campaigns and mutual aid to address the dire circumstances of undocumented Californians. In April, California announced a $125 million relief fund specifically for undocumented workers, however during this week’s rollout, it met a fate similar to that of other COVID-19 relief funds, with its administration being rapidly overwhelmed by a deluge of claims, and most predicting the fund to be fully drawn down very quickly.

• A full timeline of Elon Musk’s erratic behavior on Twitter can be found here, preceding his decision to restart production at Tesla’s plant in Fremont on May 9, flouting shelter-in-place orders. Tesla’s HR department told employees on Wednesday that operations were returning to normal and their attendance policy was resuming as of this week at both their Fremont assembly plant and their Sparks, NV, battery factory. Musk and Tesla dropped a suit filed against Alameda County, and Musk said he would move Tesla’s headquarters out of California and threatened to move manufacturing and future projects away as well. 

ELECTIONS

• Judicial Watch (a conservative activist group) and Republican congressional candidate and former member of Congress Darrell Issa filed a legal challenge to block Governor Newsom’s executive order to direct state elections officials to mail a ballot to every voter and conduct an all-mail November election. Newsom’s order would make California the first state to move to an all-mail election in response to the pandemic; the Republican National Committee also said it was weighing legal options in response.

Local News

A federal court judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plans to pump more water into the Central Valley, after the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Environmental Protection Agency and half a dozen environmental groups filed two lawsuits against the administration, arguing that the plan would cause irreparable harm to species protected by state and federal law.Democrats in the California State Senate introduced a series of proposals to address the economic impact of COVID-19. The proposals include a plan to allow qualified renters 10 years to repay missed rent payments directly to the state, while the state would compensate landlords through tax credits that could be sold for cash. A second bill focuses on allowing debt forbearance and postponement, allowing homeowners to request forbearance on mortgage payments for a year and allowing borrowers of auto loans, payday loans and other forms of debt options to postpone payment with increased consumer protections. Senate Democrats are also developing an economic stabilization plan in which individual and corporate taxpayers could prepay a decade’s worth of income taxes at a slight discount in order to provide the state with immediate funding for short-term economic relief programs. Governor Newsom announced the state is facing a projected $54.3 billion deficit, has called for cuts to public school spending and government services and has requested federal assistance to prevent billions in further budget cuts. The deficit is attributable to a collapse in state tax revenue, the costs of COVID-19 response and the growing numbers of residents signing up for health and social services due to economic hardship. Newsom is proposing a 10% pay cut to state employees as part of a plan to reduce spending, and union leaders from SEIU Local 1000 are planning to offer and negotiate an alternative plan. The deadline for legislators to pass an operating budget is June 15.  California is struggling to drive down its coronavirus cases and has not seen a sustained decline in deaths over the past month even as it takes steps toward reopening. This may be the result of two factors: 1) Essential workers are being put at increased risk — a study in the San Francisco area found that 90% of cases are coming from those who must leave their homes to work; and 2) People are experiencing stay-at-home fatigue, with some flouting social distancing to return to beaches and other crowded places. AB-3121, the “Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” has passed out of the California Assembly Judiciary Committee with an 8–3 vote in favor. The vote broke along party lines. It will next be voted on by the Assembly Appropriations Committee.An ICE employee working at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, which is privately owned and operated by GEO Group, has tested positive for COVID-19. This comes as reports that 943 of the 1,788 detainees tested nationally for coronavirus have returned positive results. The first death of an ICE detainee from COVID-19 occured at San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center last week. Activists from the LEAP coalition, a citywide coalition of environmental justice and frontline health and housing groups, are calling on Mayor Garcetti to restore $800,000 in funding, and to guarantee full funding, for the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office and the Climate Emergency Commission in the 2020-21 budget. In 2019, the coalition partnered with the Mayor and the City Council to approve these structures to facilitate a just transition toward a fossil-free economy, however the funds were not included in Mayor Garcetti’s latest budget, released in April. The City Council has until June 30 to approve the budget.Pressure is mounting in the probe into corruption at Los Angeles City Hall, with a real estate consultant pleading guilty to a racketeering charge and agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Documents make clear that the investigation is into City Councilman Jose Huizar, who is alleged to have accepted cash bribes and other enticements in exchange for helping secure approval for a major development project.This week the LAPD released body-camera footage of one of its officers, Frank Hernandez, violently beating a homeless Boyle Heights man. The release, which occurred after a third-party cell phone video had gone public, led to an outcry. Hernandez’s lawyer claimed that the man had punched Hernandez in the chest, but the bodycam footage does not support this. Hernandez has been involved in three prior on-duty shootings in his career. Los Angeles public schools will start classes on August 18 regardless of whether their campuses reopen. Many details remain to be worked out for reopening, such as class sizing and scheduling to meet social distancing guidelines, as well as the issue of whether masks would need to be worn by students and teachers — which the district does not have the resources to provide. This planning is taking place as Governor Gavin Newsom just announced major funding cuts that could lead to teacher and staff layoffs.  Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that all Angelenos will be required to wear masks when outside, with the exception of small children and those with certain disabilities. This announcement came as Los Angeles began to open up some businesses for curbside pickup and beaches for active recreation. Officials continued to caution that reopening will be a slow process and extended the stay-at-home order indefinitely on Tuesday.

Elections

Democrat Christy Smith conceded defeat to Republican Mike Garcia in the race to fill the seat vacated by Katie Hill in California’s 25th congressional district. Hill had picked up the seat as part of 2018’s “Blue Wave” of Democrats; it will now flip back to red. Donald Trump was an active booster of Garcia’s campaign, making characteristically unfounded charges of electioneering after the Democrats succeeded in opening an extra voter station to serve the city of Lancaster. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endorsed Smith. Smith and Garcia will face each other again in November, when they will be running for a full congressional term.

Local News

After renewed national outcry, a white father and son in Georgia have been arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man. Arbery was jogging in his neighborhood when he was confronted and killed in what Arbery’s father and others have called a modern-day lynching. A newly released video shows Gregory McMichael and his son Travis waiting with guns in a pickup truck blocking the road when Arbery approached, and they immediately attacked him as he tried to avoid them. The shooting occurred on February 23, but no charges were initially brought, with the first assigned prosecutor recusing herself due to McMichael being a former employee of her office. The second prosecutor also recused himself, after a month on the case, due to a complaint by Arbery’s family that his son worked in the prosecutor’s office where McMichael used to work. Prior to his recusal, the second prosecutor sent a letter to the police department saying there was insufficient probable cause for an arrest. The killing of Arbery occurred just three days prior to the eighth anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death. The US food supply system has been upended by the Coronavirus as huge shifts have resulted in a massive increase in food bank use at the same time that produce rots in fields and meat processing plants close. The existing system that linked farmers, meat processors, truckers, food distributors, restaurants, grocers and food banks collapsed when restaurants were forced to close, which sharply decreased overall demand. Now grocers are passing on less food as they struggle to keep pace with bulk purchases by customers; other sources, such as leftover food from movie productions, have also vanished. The result is desperation, with food distribution points that give directly to hungry Californians seeing their supplies exhausted minutes after opening.

Local News

Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, a detainee in San Diego, became the first to die of COVID-19 while in ICE custody. His death occurred just one day after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled a US District judge’s ruling to decrease the population at California’s Adelanto ICE processing facility, one of the largest immigrant detention facilities in the country, to a level that would allow the remaining detainees to maintain a social distance of six feet from one another. Eduardo Robles-Holguin became the sixth inmate to die from COVID-19 at Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, and family members of inmates took to the streets outside the prison to demand justice and safety for incarcerated people. Terminal Island is the location with the largest outbreak of COVID-19 in the federal prison system, with 620 inmates and 15 staff members infected as of May 5. Video footage of an LAPD officer brutally and repeatedly punching a man during an arrest in late April in Boyle Heights has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation, and activists are calling on District Attorney Jackie Lacey to prosecute the officer. The LAPD announced they would conduct an internal review after the video footage spread online this week. The officer has been involved in three prior on-duty shootings. DSA-LA’s Street Watch coalition organized with unhoused activist Davon Brown to seize a hotel room in the DTLA Ritz-Carlton and demand that Mayor Garcetti follow through and commandeer empty hotel rooms to provide safe shelter for the unhoused during the pandemic. The Ritz-Carlton gets $270M in taxpayer subsidies and yet at least 900 rooms remain empty. The LA City Council has so far voted only to publicly identify hotels that have refused to take part in Project Roomkey, a joint effort by the state, county and city to shelter the county’s unhoused in vacant hotel rooms. The program, which is restricted to only the elderly and “medically vulnerable,” aims to find rooms for 15,000 of the county’s estimated 60,000 unhoused. But as of yet, rooms have been found for only 1,800, the program is voluntary, and some hotels have resisted participating.Meanwhile, outside of Los Angeles, several hotels that have willfully participated in Project Roomkey have faced pushback from neighbors and from their own municipal governments. Judges permitted Los Angeles County to issue restraining orders against the cities of Bell Garden and Norwalk, both of which had attempted to prevent hotels from taking part in the program. In Covina, protesters chanting “not in my neighborhood” and “safety first” were ultimately successful in convincing a local hotel owner to back out. Rent strikes are spreading in Los Angeles and across the country as economic desperation compounded by the pandemic further worsens the housing crisis and radicalizes tenants. Membership in the LA Tenants Union has more than doubled since the start of the crisis, and most of their now 8000 members participated in a citywide rent strike on May 1. These strikes are estimated to be the largest since the 1930s. According to one estimate, the federal government could expand existing housing subsidy programs to cover all qualified low-income renters and those newly eligible due to the pandemic for just $100 billion a year, a mere fraction of the trillions handed out by Congress to large corporations in the series of bailout bills passed already. The LA City Council unanimously passed a measure that will allow tenants to sue landlords who violate the city’s eviction rules for those affected by COVID-19. The measure allows judgments of $10,000–$15,000 to tenants of these “unscrupulous” landlords. Tenants will still be required to pay back all missed rent within a year of the end of the emergency. Council President Nury Martinez presented this measure as the last word on rent relief from the city. “While we have done everything that we can, neither the mayor [nor] the Los Angeles City Council has the legal authority or the financial ability to do more,” she asserted in a speech following Mayor Garcetti’s signing of the bill into law. Frustrations continue to grow as many more file for unemployment. California’s Employment Development Department says it has processed 3.5 million claims since mid-March. 2.7 million claims have been filed in the last month, and the state has decided to waive certification requirements until further notice. This comes as news breaks today that US unemployment has reached 14.7% and that 20.5 million jobs were lost in April alone. Businesses in LA County such as “car dealers and other types of brick-and-mortar stores — including florists and those that sell toys, music, books, clothing and sporting goods” are reopening today with curbside pickup. Officials caution that this is not a return to normal, as LA County accounts for over half of the COVID-19 deaths in California.

Elections

Ahead of the May 12 special election to replace Katie Hill in Congressional District 25, Democrats argued that black voters are being disenfranchised by the unbalanced placement of voter centers. “Lancaster is the single most diverse part of the district, and yet the nearest voting center is nine miles away,” said LA County Democratic Party Chair Mark J. Gonzalez.

Happy May Day!

Happy May Day to all the comrades in struggle today! DSA-LA’s Political Education Committee shares this short pamphlet of assorted May Day histories, memories, and songs compiled as both a celebration of our radical tradition and as a call to commit (and recommit) to our collective fight for an ambitious and emancipatory political horizon. As Martha Foley says in these pages, “We are not alone! There are others, many, many others and we triumph!” Solidarity forever!

Local News

California is facing a record low turnout in 2020’s census. With conventional canvassing and door knocking impossible, advocates worry about undercounts in vulnerable communities. You can take the census online here. On April 28th, International Workers Memorial Day, Trump used the Defense Production Act to compel meat processors across the country to stay open, or reopen, despite the plants being the site of some of the highest rates of COVID-19 transmission nationwide. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union reported the same day that at least 20 meat processing plant workers had died and 5000 had been hospitalized or were showing symptoms of the virus. In addition to forcing these plants to stay open at the expense of workers’ lives, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Labor Department are vowing that the federal government will defend employers against worker lawsuits over workplace exposures during the pandemic. The move comes at a time when some state governments are also signaling to workers that they will lose continuing unemployment benefits if they decline to return to their workplace out of concern for their health and safety. Immigrant detainees at ICE detention centers continue to report being on hunger strike for their release and for protections against COVID-19 as the number of confirmed cases among detainees and employees grows daily. Incarcerated immigrants at Otay Mesa, site of the largest outbreak of any detention center nationwide, report that ICE is massively underreporting cases in detention. ICE has tested only 705 out of 30–40,000 detainees as of this week, with 60% of those tested coming back positive. Thus far, 70% of federal prison inmates tested have been positive for COVID-19. A federal judge this week upheld Trump’s recent executive order that uses nativist arguments of “protecting American workers” during the pandemic to bar green cards for many for a period of 60 days or more. Administration officials have indicated to supporters in private calls that the order is a preview of more long-term restrictions to immigration. According to the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning council, more than 1,100 physical and verbal attacks against Asian Americans have been documented since late March across 46 states, with women more likely to be targeted than men. Activists in California are calling on county supervisors to denounce discrimination and hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the FBI issued an intelligence report warning of an increase in hate crimes “based on the assumption that a portion of the US public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations.” Echoing historical xenophobic and racist tropes used against Asian Americans and communities of color, President Trump, other politicians, and media figures have repeatedly used the phrase “China virus” to refer to the pandemic rather than the terms “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” used by public health officials. Incidents can be reported to Stop AAPI Hate here. Some law enforcement agencies are publicly pushing back against the Judicial Council’s April 6 emergency bail schedule, which lowers bail for low-level crimes to $0 statewide in an effort to reduce crowding in jails and combat the spread of COVID-19. “These misguided judges and the professional apologists for criminals saw an opportunity to utilize COVID-19 to advance their dangerous views on incarceration,” said the head of the San Jose police union. In November, California will vote on SB-10, which will eliminate cash bail permanently and replace it with a risk-based system. A Northern California police officer is under investigation after a viral video of the officer punching a 14-year-old African American boy while pinning him to the ground was released by the boy’s family, creating nationwide outrage. Tanya Faison, founder of Black Lives Matter Sacramento, noted that this was the third encounter in the past year in the Sacramento area that involved police officers over-policing children of color. In June, Sacramento police officers put a spit hood on a 12-year-old boy, and in July, three 13-year-old boys were held at gunpoint by a Sacramento police officer, Faison said. This week the California Labor Secretary has created a separate portal for the Pandemic Assistance Program. Self-employed and gig workers can now apply for $600 a week and receive compensation for any wages lost or diminished since March 29. Many are still struggling to access the original EDD Unemployment website, and although the state has planned to hire more staff, 43% of those who have already applied are waiting to receive benefits. Conservative groups have filed a lawsuit against Governor Gavin Newsom, after Newsom’s announcement on April 15 that the state would allocate $75 million in aid for undocumented immigrants as part of a plan to provide $125 million in aid for those without legal status. The plan, allocating $500 per adult, would be financed partly by NGOs. This does not cover even basic necessities in Los Angeles, where the average rent alone is $2,375 for a one-bedroom apartment. Governor Gavin Newsom detailed four stages for California to begin loosening stay-at-home orders. The first phase, which we are currently in, involves the state increasing its testing, contact tracing, stores of personal protective equipment, and hospital surge capacity, while also having essential workplaces make physical and workflow adaptations and encouraging behavioral changes by individuals. Hitting benchmarks here will enable Phase 2, which allows for lower-risk sectors to gradually reopen with modifications that maintain social distancing guidelines, including some retail stores, manufacturing sites, offices where telecommuting is not possible and some public spaces like parks and trails. This phase will also require wage replacement, to allow sick workers to remain at home. Phase 3 will allow for the reopening of higher-risk workplaces, while Phase 4 will mark the end of stay-at-home orders and permit the reopening of the highest-risk events, like large-scale concerts, conventions and live-audience sports. To achieve Phase 4 will require coronavirus therapeutics to be in place. Beginning May 4, LA City Council will resume weekly meetings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Elections

The California Attorney General’s office is reviewing whether Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey’s husband should be charged with a crime. David Lacey pointed a gun at Black Lives Matter activists outside the Lacey home on March 2, prior to the primary election. Jackie Lacey is in a runoff election with challenger George Gascon; primary election results at the precinct level are now mapped here.