Month: December 2020

Housing Justice

• Nithya Raman was sworn in as a councilmember this week! At her first session, she introduced two motions addressing services for the unhoused. The first directs the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to focus on more proactive outreach methods. The second calls for work to begin developing a new drop-in site in her district, where unhoused Angelenos can receive walk-in services such as showers, medical care, or help finding housing. Meanwhile, a Los Angeles Times op-ed places Nithya Raman’s upcoming battles in the context of decades of LA NIMBYism.

• Community activist group Downtown Crenshaw Rising have reported that the latest attempt from outside developers to purchase and redevelop the Crenshaw Mall has failed, following sustained community pressure. “This is a tremendous Black community victory and testament to the power of the people,” reads a public statement from DCR chair Niki Okuk.

• The Hillside Villa Tenants Association met yesterday to demand, alongside housing activists, that the city follow through on plans to use eminent domain to purchase Hillside Villa, using unspent federal funding from the CARES Act.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Reported in KNOCK.LA: A recent Loyola Marymount University study shows strong local support for defunding the police, even as many Angelenos do not report a profound dissatisfaction with the job the LAPD is currently doing. According to the study, 57% of Black participants explicitly support proposals to “defund the police,” while overall support for “proposals to redirect money” received 62% support.

• Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva finally made an appearance before the Civilian Oversight Commission after a year of failing to appear, even in the face of subpoenas. At the meeting, Villanueva and the commission discussed deputy gangs: Villanueva asserted they are largely a thing of the past, but commissioner Robert Bonner countered that the Banditos, a gang that operates within the jurisdiction of the East LA Station, has continued to ink new members.

• Witness LA has rounded up some of the criminal justice bills that have been introduced in this session of the state legislature. Some of these are refreshed versions of bills that were inspired — during the last legislative session — by the demands for justice made during the George Floyd uprising, but which notably failed to advance after pushback from police unions.

• At this week’s meeting of the LAUSD school board, the discussion of how to reimplement the $25 million defunding of the school police budget that the board voted for last June was scheduled to begin. That has now been delayed until January 12, following demands from activist groups to have more upfront involvement in the process.

Climate

• The South Coast Air Quality Management District Governing Board, whose elections received substantial coverage this month, adopted two Community Emissions Reduction Plans last week, effective in Southeast Los Angeles and Eastern Coachella Valley. This is in line with the recently passed AB 617, which requires that high-priority regions be annually selected for the development and implementation of community air monitoring systems.

DSA-LA Elections

• DSA-LA elections are coming up soon! Voting will be open from December 13 to December 20. Get to know the candidates for steering committee, branch coordinators, and all other offices at the candidate forum tomorrow, Saturday the 12th, from 3:30pm to 5:30pm. And in the meantime please check out candidate statements here.

Criminal Justice Reform

• George Gascón was sworn in as Los Angeles County district attorney on Monday. His office immediately implemented major changes. These include an end to the use of “gang enhancements” to add years to criminal sentences based on a defendant’s alleged gang affiliations. Gascón also announced that his office will end cash bail, will never seek the death penalty, and will be proactive in releasing current prisoners who become eligible under the new guidelines.

• Gascón’s office has also immediately dismissed the charges against Emanuel Padilla, a protester who was arrested on charges of “wrecking a train” in the aftermath of an action in Compton demanding justice for Andres Guardado. The first deputy prosecutor tasked with carrying out the dismissal refused to do so: Gascón’s reforms have met with some initial internal resistance over the first week of his term.

• On Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast, Terrance Stewart discusses how policies approved by cities and police departments over the last three decades have created a housing nightmare for people of color. Stewart, who holds a master’s degree from UC Riverside, discusses the struggle his family has faced to find housing because of his arrest almost a decade ago.

• LAPD officer, “Cop-Infuencer” and unabashed Trump supporter Toni McBride — who in April of this year shot and killed Daniel Hernandez — is now attempting to sell branded merchandise on a website that promotes police violence. In doing so, has she violated LAPD policy?

• An article in Knock.LA chews over the election results for all the criminal justice propositions that were on the ballot this year in California.

Election Fallout

• President-Elect Joe Biden has nominated California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to be secretary of health and human services. This would mean that Governor Newsom may soon be choosing the successors for both Becerra and Kamala Harris. (And perhaps Dianne Feinstein as well.)

• The California State Legislature returned to session this week, after November elections returned Democratic party supermajorities to both the Assembly and Senate. California’s current eviction moratorium expires January 31.

Climate

• L.A. Taco spoke about climate issues facing southeast Los Angeles with Elizabeth Alcantar, the 26-year-old mayor of Cudahy, who this week ran for a seat on the highly influential governor’s board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (but lost a close race).

• Related, L.A. Taco, in cooperation with Capital & Main, ran a summary of the events that led up to the environmental disaster at the Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon. The issue drew national attention after the decision was made by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice to let Exide off the hook for damages. The piece recontextualizes the event as resulting from decades of negligent oversight from California state government.

City Politics

• A new budget report issued by Los Angeles City Administrative Officer Richard Llewellyn Jr. recommends the layoffs of nearly 1,900 city employees — with more than half being police officers. If approved, the LAPD would operate with the lowest number of officers since the mid 1990s. And it could even result in the closure of police stations. The layoffs are an attempt to close a budget gap that is expected to reach $675 million by June.

• LA City Councilmember Kevin de León has laid out a plan to turn vacant CalTrans-owned homes in El Sereno’s 710 corridor into affordable housing — with current El Sereno residents to get priority as renters. Reclaim and Rebuild Our Community, an El Sereno–based neighborhood group, occupied 20 of these homes last month before being forcibly removed by the California Highway Patrol.

Coronavirus Relief

• In response to rising COVID-19 numbers, new stay-at-home orders have been issued by the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, and the state of California.

• The patchwork of laws protecting tenants from being evicted during the pandemic is falling apart, with the federal eviction ban set to expire on December 31. Meanwhile, new research, which compares the outcomes in states that have already resumed eviction proceedings with those that haven’t, finds that evictions have already been responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of COVID-19 and thousands of unnecessary deaths.

• Meanwhile, Mayor Garcetti has co-authored a proposal that tries to address this crisis by immediately returning all tenants’ security deposits as one-time payments. In exchange, tenants will be required to make monthly payments to purchase an insurance policy to protect their landlords. See Twitter for early commentary.

Housing Justice

• Last week, Councilmember Gil Cedillo proposed purchasing the Hillside Villa Apartments to maintain it as affordable housing for the tenants who live there. An essay in KNOCK.LA examines the low cost of that purchase relative to other city expenditures.

• Also in KNOCK.LA is a nice piece of media criticism examining the dehumanizing language regularly used on local TV news to refer to Los Angeles’ housing-insecure and unhoused residents.

Labor

• In early November, the Department of Labor established a new regulation to freeze farmworkers’ wages under the H-2A agricultural guest worker program for the next two years. This past Monday, the United Farm Workers filed a lawsuit in a California federal court to challenge this decision. The arbitrary and punitive measure to freeze workers’ wages will only cause harm to those who are already the most economically vulnerable.

• Ed Asner is the lead plaintiff among ten actors who are suing the SAG-AFTRA Health Plan after new restrictions excluded them from receiving health benefits.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• At the coroner’s inquest into the police killing of Andres Guardado, both deputies involved in the shooting and both sheriff’s detectives investigating the killing refused to cooperate, instead asserting their Fifth Amendment rights. As the purpose of the inquest is only to establish cause of death, the judge was uncertain if the Fifth Amendment applies.

• Following outcry over sheriff’s deputies covering their names with duct tape at a protest this week, Sheriff Villanueva has gone on record flagrantly sanctioning this behavior. Deputies will now only be required to to display their badge numbers.