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Before and after APD encounter.
Yeah, I’ve been busy with several things that haven’t quite made it onto the blog yet. For example, my concert last Saturday with my singer friend Perry Van Dran included the first of my “Songs of the OC Homeless” – a song in memory of Fermin Vincent Valenzuela, the homeless father who was tased to death last July by Anaheim police. (Remember that? It was before the killing of Adalid Flores and last week’s killing of Steve Salgado, right around the time they killed Danny Rendon, and a few months after they killed Gustavo Najera. If you’re keeping score at home…)
Thanks to Vincent’s family for telling me enough about him to write this song, which is in Cumbia style – the rhythm that’s so popular in barrios like the one I live in:
My name is Vincent Valenzuela, from sunny Anaheim,
Where law enforcement acts like being homeless is a crime.
But I mind my own damn business and I’ve never hurt a fly,
At most I nod and smile at all the people passing by.
Wo… I walk the streets till the sun goes down.
Wo… And I sleep in Maxwell Park.
And I want to see my son, ‘Cause I miss him every day, But oh, they tased my life away.
They locked me in a closet when I was just a little boy,
So four walls make me nervous now but freedom gives me joy.
And I’ll slay the Chupacabra just for Vincent Junior’s sake,
‘Cause I love my little fam’ly like a fat kid loves his cake.
Wo… I walk the streets till the sun comes up.
Wo… And I sleep in Maxwell Park.
And I want to see my daughter, ‘Cause I miss her every day, But oh, you tased my life away.
I’ll have about ten of these songs, alternately sung by a male and a female. Most of them aren’t about actual characters, but just common situations and typical stories of things the OC homeless experience… although I am going to end up with a reggae piece for Kelly Thomas (who loved reggae according to Baxter.) Meanwhile the People’s Homeless Task Force is preparing to return to the Anaheim Council next Tuesday to repeat our demands to rescind the Camping and Storage Ordinances, and re-open park restrooms 24-7. ‘Cause, look, the homeless are still getting their stuff taken by cops:
In the next video, of the last Anaheim Council meeting, just before the 2 hours and 17 minutes mark (jeez, don’t watch the whole thing!) you can hear Police Chief Raul Quezada blithely assure concerned councilmembers that the only property his officers take from the homeless is whatever’s been abandoned for 24 hours:
Which is really funny, because in this next video he is flatly contradicted, not only by the testimony of numerous homeless people themselves, but his own “homeless outreach” officer himself, Sgt. Conklin, who admits that his team does NOT bother waiting or “tagging” property before seizing it:
This Quezada dude, I’ve been sticking up for him a long time, but I can’t any more. I used to think he really didn’t know what some of his more rogue officers (gang unit, homeless unit) were up to, but adding all of this to his documented lies about the Ku Klux Klan melee last year, it’s obvious that he understands his main job as bullshitting politicians, public and press.
A troubled relationship to the truth.
One more new video from the tireless Roussan, see the homeless being jailed for being in a park after hours, just last night – the “Camping Ordinace” at work:
**********
Finally, ONE MORE POLICE MURDER earlier this week
– this one in Santa Ana.
Santa Ana’s on fire right now. How many more unarmed, fleeing, young (mostly Latino) men are going to be shot fatally in the back by OC police until some kind of breaking point happens, and what’ll that look like? We were at his family’s place this afternoon at their funeral fundraiser, and the SAPD gang unit drove by slowly and tauntingly. Here’s a witness describing what happened Sunday night, to our friends at InLeague Press:
“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”
–Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
The late 18-year old Salgado with his infant daughter.
Too great: Melissa McCarthy as Trump spokesman Sean Spicer –
And Alec Baldwin as Trump calling world leaders, egged on by Steve Bannon as Death –
We owe this new Administration thanks for the best SNL pieces in decades!
Hmm… I guess the Alec Baldwin one you’ll have to see here:
http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/02/05/alec-baldwin-just-destroyed-trump-bannon-snl/
Pretty amazing stuff. McCarthy was especially hilarious.
It’s about time that they gave Steven Bannon more focus than they do Kellyanne Conway, whom they’ve focused on mostly because it’s such a good part for Kate McKinnon. But she’s just watered down Ann Coulter, while Bannon is not-particularly-watered-down Josef Goebbels.
*Yeah, we would love to see Bannon dressed in his black outfit with the riding crop interrogating ISIS captives on late night TV. SNL is awesome!
These police chiefs seem a lot more interested in good publicity than good police work. In fact, they have conflated the two things in their own minds.
It seems that Chief Quezada photo op with Murray, taken a couple of election cycles ago, (don’t we have a picture of them) was an indication that he was going to continue with Murray’s and Kring views on the APD policies. Who sets the APD approach to public safety, including the homeless community? The Chief of Police and his deputies, the City Manager, the Mayor and/or the City council?
Does the People’s Homeless Task Force have a web page or other media to keep people informed of their proposals? Maybe some the Task Force’s concerns will be adressed in the City’s State of the Union next Tuesday “State of the City: Innovations in Addressing Homelessness, Drug Abuse, Connecting Residents”. There is a whole section on homelessness in the city’s newsletter.
http://www.anaheim.net/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=760
The Anaheim Republican Assembly will hold a meeting, which according to a press release “will address the homelessness crisis”. Good initiative, something for the Anaheim Dem Club could consider.
I wasn’t aware that this ARA meeting is about the homelessness crisis, this plus reading Mayor Tait statement on immigration, also in the city’s newsletter (Anaheim Continues to Foster Community Ties as Nation Debates Immigration), changed my mind to protest at this meeting.
Who would believe that people who hardly demonstrated before, are now doing so? :
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/trump-743136-district-percent.html
LA Times Feb 5, 2017 – Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need-
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/#nt=notification
FWIW
*Sorry to butt in, but did you guys see the numbers of homeless that died on the streets this last year? Brutal.
No, but keep us in suspense without a link to find out.
And “wait, there’s more”-
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/city-743539-shelter-drake.html
Does Buena Park count its Code Enforcement funding as its “Homeless Assistance”, or is it contributing to the Armory or County Shelter funding ?
MEANwhile, our Nobel Peace Prize – winning ex- Prez set all time records for bomb / drone strikes and refugee production worldwide, without much fanfare.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/18/obamas-bombing-legacy/
Sad that none of those funds were instead redirected to our DOMESTIC “refugees”.
BBORW – Please go spend the night in a sleeping bag in the area next to the Board of Supervisors office. Come back and give us your Investigative Report about Public Health and Safety of our community there. Don’t forget to take your cardboard box to sleep in as well…..it will be a lot warmer. And whatever you do….don’t poop your pants…..the smell disturbs the County workers on their way to their 5th Floor offices.
A nice suggestion, but trying in vain to relate anything in your replies to any points made in my posts takes every last speck of my little available spare time. Perhaps you can take your own suggestion and then report back.
Quezada offered his own qualifier on how they take stuff. They tag and store it IF, it is not a health risk, which includes excessive filth, urine, blood vomit, or other fluids etc. Now what percentage of a homeless person’s stuff does NOT fit that description to some extent? So because the cops have determined things excessively filthy to be a health threat and they are unable to store it, they are able to toss it. Nobody on Council caught it, and the Chief continued his storytelling.
I don’t recall his making any mention of the County Health Department being involved in such determinations, do you? They should be. I’d bet that they’d agree that being without shelter poses a greater threat to the person who might be sharing a tent with some of their own body fluids.
I believe that homeless who live on the street do have to, in essence, sign away SOME (not all) of their rights to the protections of the state. Having befouled property confiscated by the state might reasonably be one of those protections that they forsake; the same goes for visiting another person’s tent.
But, since the health hazard to the fluid-emitting individual IS probably worse, this suggests that we DO need to to ensure that the homeless have some safe spaces to properly dispose of those fluids and semi-fluids. Maybe we need to have some bathrooms where “not everything goes” (as in “leave them nice for the taxpayers and their kids) and others where “most anything goes” — and (as I’ve heard the Mayor suggests in his speech on Tuesday) empower the homeless themselves to clean and maintain the latter.
Removing and discarding without due process is still stealing. For some tents (less so other possessions) it might not take a WHOLE LOT of due process — but there still does need to be some.
None of it adds up. The stuff that’s deemed unhygienic gets discarded. Most of the stuff does not, it goes to some storage depot (I’ll get more details from Lou or Roussan) where the owner can pick it up later; but the place is hard to get to, and rarely open.
And THAT is the stuff that gets grabbed after sometimes just a few minutes of being left alone.
This looks like a great resource for excellent graphics. (Winships, take note!)
http://fortune.com/2017/02/07/met-museum-public-domain-images/
In the “Can’t make this $h!t up !!” department-
http://www.ocweekly.com/news/anaheim-councilwoman-lucille-krings-new-aide-dirty-ex-cop-failed-candidate-steve-lodge-7887196
Yeah… damn Gabriel beat me to that story. I’ll probably have my own take on it.
It was all the talk at Tuesday’s meeting. Everyone stuck in something snarky about it at the end of their speech. I said “Lucille, DisLODGE!”
Somewhere Greg posted the liability question regarding city properties if used for homeless purposes. I wonder if the state law mentioned in this post would apply:
” A state law allowing emergency sleeping cabins could work for San Diego too.
By Jeeni Criscenzo
On September 27, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 2176 into law, authored by Assembly Member Nora Campos. The bill first passed on the Assembly Floor on August 30 by a vote of 73-0 and then in the Senate by a vote of 39-0. Effective January 1, 2017, the bill amends the California Shelter Crisis Act (Govt. Code §§8698 – 8698.3) to authorize a five year pilot program in the City of San Jose. The city must first declare a shelter crisis, as defined by Govt. C. §8698(d). Then, the City may create an emergency bridge housing community, as defined in Govt. C. §8698(e), for the homeless, which includes temporary housing in new or existing structures on City-owned or City-leased property.”
http://sandiegofreepress.org/2017/02/san-jose-solution-emergency-shelter/
Looks interesting. The story doesn’t seem to mention liability, but the concept would certainly apply to the Karcher property.
What about this paragraph?
“The bill authorizes the city to adopt by ordinance reasonable local standards for emergency bridge housing communities in lieu of compliance with state and local building, housing, health, habitability, or safety standards and laws. “
It says that they don’t may not have to comply with various codes. It does not say that they can’t be sued for negligence for injury.
Maybe it will be (or even has been) clarified to say so.
The government is not the least bit worried about “liability” except, maybe as a dodge to avoid doing anything substantive.
What the government really doesn’t want is to make a situation worse by condoning camping, setting up a “safe zone” etc. or even a low-maintenance compound. And they are right to be worried, mostly since they haven’t got a clue about what to do – except making the grand, expensive gesture that makes the pols look like they’re doing something. Hence a homeless shelter that will require transportation logistics and all sorts of bureaucracy – just the sort of things homeless people will love.
Your second paragraph may be correct, but I don’t see why you think that you can justify the confident assertion in your first paragraph.
I can believe that this may be your personal experience of government, and it may help explain your cynicism about government, but it’s not true of my firsthand and secondhand experience of government.
Yes, they are concerned about liability, for two reasons. First, because of the usual reasons that property owners and those having events are usually concerned about liability. Second, because as elected officials they can “lose in the court of public opinion” even if they aren’t found to have acted wrongfully in court.
The federal government has the right under the Tort Claims Act to brush away most lawsuits it doesn’t want to entertain. And yet somehow the Federal Circuit that hears their appeals stays in business. Doesn’t this suggest to you that the federal government IS actually concerned about liability — because it intentionally leaves itself open to lawsuits?