Whipped Cream Difficulties

Friday’s LAT had an interesting article about the tensions between LAPD beat officers and the homeless in downtown LA. Specifically, the homeless beer vendors:

One by one, his customers approached, handing over $1.50 for cans of Colt 45, Steel Reserve or Heineken that he kept hidden in a blue cooler beneath a shopping cart. Government checks had arrived a few days before. Business on skid row was good — as it has been all year.

Yeah, yeah, illegal, yeah, yeah, alcohol drives crime on skid row, yeah yeah. But I have to admit that my first reaction was “Damn, I wish Austin’s homeless were that entrepreneurial.” Seriously, it’d be kind of nice to be able to walk down the street and pick up a cold bottle of something to sip on for $2.50 or so. (This being Austin, you couldn’t get away with selling that Colt 45 or Steel Reserve crap on the streets. You’d have to go with the local craft brews; Shiner Bock in bottles, maybe some Fat Tire. Leave the malt liquor to the gas stations.)

Come to think of it, you don’t even have to limit yourself to beer, and all the problems associated with that. There are times when, if that guy on the street corner wasn’t panhandling for cash, but had a cooler full of ice and cold sodas and bottled water, damn sure I’d give him at least $2 bucks for a cold drink when it is 103 degrees out there. I know someone who tried this experiment a while back, but I’ll let him report in comments if he wishes.

(And before you jump on my case: I know the problem is more complex than I’m making it sound, and selling bottled water and sodas on street corners isn’t a surefire way to get folks from homelessness to prosperity. But providing a useful good and/or service to a willing customer beats begging for bucks in my mind.)

Hey, remember Maywood? The city that couldn’t get insurance, and had to disband the police department and much of the municipal government, in large part because the cops were out of control? That Maywood?

Well, cops are going to be cops, right? And if they aren’t cops in Maywood, they’ve got to end up somewhere, right?

Guess where they ended up.

If you said “I bet they ended up with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department”, you get to drink from the firehose.

Should being employed by Maywood be a bar to signing on with LACSD? Given the level of misconduct and corruption in that department, I think a case can be made that yes, former Maywood officers should not be employed in law enforcement anywhere. But let us set aside the generalities for the moment and focus on specifics. Some of the former Maywood officers hired by LACSD included:

• one who got drunk at a friend’s house, left and shot at the house with his duty gun, was stopped by police and denied any knowledge of shots being fired, and was ultimately convicted of “a misdemeanor of discharging a firearm”.
• Another one who was actually being investigated by Maywood for perjury, “a probe that was never concluded because the agency had disbanded”.
  

  A court had found that the officer had “deliberately and calculatedly” testified on the stand about information that had been suppressed, according to the report. In another instance, that officer was accused of trying to hit a police commissioner with his car, then threatening several others involved with the commission. According to the report, the investigation into the incident was not thorough.

• A third who was fired from one department for “dishonesty”.

There were apparently four “questionable” applicants from Maywood hired (the article does not mention why number four was considered questionable) out of an unknown number of applicants from Maywood. As a reminder:

At least a third of the then-37 member force had left other police jobs under a cloud or had brushes with the law while working for Maywood.

There’s a strange and noteworthy story in today’s LAT. Brian C. Mulligan is a high-ranking executive with Deutsche Bank (“a managing director and vice chairman”). Mr. Mulligan is also pursuing a $50 million damage claim against the city of Los Angeles.

According to Mr. Mulligan, he went to purchase “medical marijuana products” at a local dispensary on the night of May 15th. (Mr. Mulligan says they “help him sleep”. I was unaware that insomnia was a condition that you could prescribe marijuana for, but in retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised.)

Mr. Mulligan goes on to claim that law enforcement officers detained him, “walked him to a run-down apartment complex and told him to go to the fourth floor”. According to Mr. Mulligan, he panicked and fled from the police in the direction of Occidental College, which was nearby.

According to the LAPD, two officers responded to a report of a strange man trying to break into cars at a local Jack in the Box. While responding to that report, a second similar report came in. The two officers found Mr. Mulligan near Occidental. Their report says he matched the description of the man trying to break into the cars, he was “drenched in sweat and walked with an ‘unsteady gait'”, but he passed field sobriety tests.

The LAPD report goes on to state that Mr. Mulligan told the responding officers he had used both marijuana and “white lightning”, which the LAT claims is another name for “bath salts”. “He said he hadn’t slept in four days, was going through a divorce and felt depressed, the report said. Mulligan also said he was being chased, according to the report, which nonetheless described him as calm, lucid and cooperative.” Mr. Mulligan denies telling the LAPD officers any of this.

The officers drove Mulligan to his Toyota Prius, which they searched; Mulligan’s attorney said he had not given them permission.

Search incident to arrest?

They found his Irish passport and enough cash that they called in a supervisor, said the report, which did not specify an amount.

That seems odd. If I find enough cash to get a supervisor involved, I’m darn sure noting the exact amount (and counting at least twice) on my report.

Mulligan’s claim pegged the cash at about $5,000, a sum he said he normally carried for business travel. Then police took Mulligan — whose cellphone and passport remained in his car, his attorneys said — to the nearby Highland Park Motel, a low-rent building across from homes with barred windows.

That also seems odd. If they felt he couldn’t drive or otherwise take care of himself, shouldn’t they have taken him into formal supervised custody? Doesn’t dropping him at a “low-rent” motel set you up for exactly this kind of problem?

(The LAPD report claims Mulligan asked to be dropped off there. Mulligan denies this, and says “he was taken there against his will and told ‘he could not leave, under threat of death.'”)

At the front desk, Flanagan said, the officers took away Mulligan’s car keys and forced him to pay the roughly $40 room bill. They also gave him back the cash they’d found in his car, said another Mulligan attorney, Valerie Wass.

Since everyone seems to agree that Mulligan was dropped at the motel, I’m not exactly shocked they made him pay the bill up front. I’m not saying dropping him there was a good idea in the first place, but if they did drop him there, someone’s got to pay for the room…

…one officer escorted Mulligan to Room 208, which he said did not have a telephone. He eventually cajoled a clerk into returning his keys, his attorney said, and ran away from the motel. This week, a motel employee said he could not recall the incident.

I kind of think I’d remember something like this, if I were a clerk. Then again, I wonder if anyone actually talked to the clerk who worked that night (the LAT doesn’t specify that), or if that clerk is even still working at the motel.

In any case, the same two officers encountered Mr. Mulligan later on that night (actually, around 1 AM the following morning). Mr. Mulligan was allegedly “trying to open the passenger-side door of an occupied silver van”. The van drove off, the officers told Mr. Mulligan to get off the sidewalk, Mr. Mulligan cursed at them, and apparently ran off. (That’s the LAPD’s account: Mr. Mulligan’s lawyers apparently dispute that he was trying to open the van door, or that he cursed at the police.)

The officers soon gave chase, the report said. “At that point,” Mulligan’s claim said, “he was in such great fear that he believed the LAPD officers were not truly LAPD officers but may be impostors bent on robbing or killing.”

So he didn’t recognize these officers as the same ones who took him to the motel earlier? Or he did, but he thought the ones who took him to the motel were imposters? Do you often go to “low-rent” motels with people posing as police officers? What was the point of checking him in and making him pay the bill if they were imposters planning on “robbing and killing” him?

Anyway, the LAPD chased Mulligan down. They claim he went into a fighting stance and charged the officers, who took him down and arrested him. Mulligan’s attorney, of course, denies that his client charged the officers. And:

No charges have been filed against Mulligan, though a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, which handles misdemeanor crimes, said the incident was under review.

I’m not sure what to make of this, as I have a lot of trouble believing that either side is telling the whole truth about what went on that night. There doesn’t seem to be any dispute about the whole “checked him into the ‘low-rent’ motel” part of the story, though, and that strikes me as being a big deviation from what I’d expect to be proper procedure. Was the LAPD trying to cut a rich white guy a break? Or…?

I have written previously about the “dirty DUI” case, as the SFChron puts it. In brief, Christopher Butler and his PI agency were taking money from women involved in divorce/custody cases to set up their husbands on DUI charges.

One of the people who provided evidence against Butler and his cohorts (including former Contra Costa County Deputy Sheriff Stephen Tanabe) was a reserve officer named William Howard. Howard has been a reserve officer with the sheriff’s department for 19 years.

He was fired on Tuesday.

A department spokesman, Jimmy Lee, described Howard’s release as an internal matter and declined to discuss it.

Haven’t had one of these in a while now. Let’s open up the bag and see what’s inside.

Caltrans, the state transportation agency, owns “hundreds of houses spanning a corridor through Pasadena, South Pasadena and Los Angeles”. These homes were purchased as part of a plan to extend the 710 freeway, and are supposed to be bulldozed when the extension is built. At this point, it looks like the extension is on indefinite hold.

So?

The agency has spent $22.5 million since 2008 to maintain the homes, but transportation officials are “unable to demonstrate that the repairs were necessary, reasonable or cost-effective,” according to the report by the California State Auditor, which was sparked by a Times investigation.

In one case, the agency spent $103,443 on a new roof. That leaked.

“Bees were also coming in,” Jones said. “It was like a plague.”
The shoddy work sparked a fight with state officials that eventually led to Jones’ eviction from the home he and his wife had lived in for about two decades.

But wait, there’s more!

The state is also losing $22 million per year because tenants, including 15 state employees, are paying far below market rates for rent. Other homes, some of which have been recognized as historical landmarks, have been boarded up and empty for years.

And more!

For one of those vacant houses, state officials recently estimated it should have cost $56,000 to repair a roof and replace the garage. But the cost soared to more than $184,000 after it was expended to include “miscellaneous interior repairs” — a coat of paint and upgrades to two bathrooms. “Caltrans could provide no evidence of the need for additional work,” the investigators said.

And even more: auditors traced the money to the Direct Construction Unit of the Department of General Services. The “Direct Construction Unit” apparently does the general repair work for state owned buildings. So basically, this was one branch of the state government taking money out of the pocket of the other branch. Which is fine; even if you’re just taking money from one pocket and putting it in another, you’ve got to account for it, right?

Except that the Direct Construction Unit was tacking on a 20% “management fee”. And they were hiring subcontractors “for minor chores as a kind of window dressing to ‘achieve the appearance’ of meeting goals to include small businesses in state work. ” It looks like the subcontractors may have known people inside the DCU: one particular subcontractor “repeatedly bought the exact items it would sell to the unit days before the jobs were put out to bid”.

And the punchline: this contractor was buying items at Home Depot and selling them to the DCU at an average markup of 35%.

And a by the way: “Four of the state employees found living in the houses worked for the Department of General Services.”

But, hey, LA isn’t the only city in California, right? Right. There’s also San Francisco. San Francisco has a sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi. Sheriff Mirkarimi has a domestic violence conviction on his record; based on my understanding of federal law, that bars him from possessing a firearm. Which is kind of a problem, if you’re the chief law enforcement officer of a major city.

Yesterday, the San Francisco Ethics Commission found, on a 4-1 vote, that Sheriff Mirkarimi had engaged in “official misconduct”.

Apparently, this doesn’t mean that he’s actually fired: the Board of Supervisors needs at least 9 out of 11 votes to terminate him.