Sheriff to investigate why bailiff handcuffed court spokeswoman

From the Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokesman
says the department has begun an internal affairs investigation into
why a deputy acting as a bailiff detained and handcuffed a Superior
Court spokeswoman inside a downtown Los Angeles courtroom.

Sheriff’s
spokesman Steve Whitmore says deputy public information officer Vania
Stuelp was handcuffed Tuesday after she refused to
leave the area usually occupied by attorneys and would not follow the
deputy’s directions. He says Stuelp was not arrested.

Whitmore
says Stuelp walked into the well area to inform a French television
crew they could not film in a certain area of the court.

Court was not in session at the time.

Whitmore says a sheriff’s sergeant arrived recognized her as the court spokesperson and directed that she be released.

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Big gun with a big gun*

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Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich Monday posed with an AR-15 confiscated in a raid by LAPD officers in the 77th Street Precinct.

The gun, and several others were seized as part of the county’s DISARM program, officials said.

Reporter Brian Day attended an Antonovich press conference downtown Monday morning, but had some difficulty getting answers to a couple of key questions.

Like, why does Antonovich care about stuff that happens outside the Fifth *Supervisorial district?

How many guns of this caliber have been seized in the San Gabriel Valley?

Unfortunately he didn’t get answers to those questions. Just a nice photo of Antonovich with a ton of guns.

*I’ve corrected this post. As Tony Bell points out below, Supervisor Mike Antonovich represents the Fifth Supervisoral District. My bad. The rest stands. Officials told Brian the guns came from the 77th Precinct, which is outside the Fifth District.

I would still like to know how much of the money and guns that were seized as part of DISARM came from the San Gabriel Valley?

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Not the Times

parody of the Los Angeles Times Web site had me laughing this morning, especially this story about the “creepy” Burger King mascot, complete with mugshot:

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For months, he’d been sneaking into customers’ homes at dawn, disrupting their slumber with offers of cholesterol-rich breakfast items.

“People were definitely creeped out,” an LAPD spokesman said. “But there wasn’t much we could do besides tell them to get a restraining order.”

Then, three months ago, the frozen-faced mascot apparently snapped, leaving a trail of bodies, blood and curly fries. Police were baffled at first – crime scene tests indicated the killer’s DNA consisted solely of polystyrene resins and Thousand Island dressing. h/t Fishbowl LA 

 

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More Monrovia Madness

Looks like another cop has filed a discrimination suit against the Monrovia PD.

This time the cop is saying he’s being discriminated against for testifying in a previous case. I wonder how the Monrovia media machine is going to spin the latest story. Here’s what Nate McIntire will report in tomorrow’s paper:

MONROVIA – A Monrovia police officer has filed a lawsuit against the city alleging he was harassed and retaliated against for cooperating in a previous racial discrimination case against the Monrovia Police Department.

Matthew Donald Thompson said he provided statements supporting the claims of racial discrimination and harassment filed by Glenn Cobb, a former Monrovia police officer who sued the department in 2006.

Cobb settled with the city, which admitted no liability, in November 2007.

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Hate or free speech?

When Pasadena blogger Aaron Proctor recently attacked activist Virginia Hoge,she noticed.

Here’s her response (posted as a comment here):

When former candidate for mayor, Aaron Proctor, (whose site is linked
to on this blog) posted this defamatory post about me – which included
ugly graphic sexual slander – the Pasadena blogging community was
completely silent.


http://www.proctorformayor.com/2008/05/22/step-by-step-heart-to-heart-left-right-left-we-all-fall-down/

I think we have lost the ability to see “hate”. I mean, if this post
isn’t hate, what is? Does the right to “Free Speech” cover…this?
No, I do not think it does.

The weird thing was, what made Proctor so angry was my writing about my
research on Rene Amy. I hadn’t even mentioned Proctor, yet he reacted
to it like he himself had been “stung”.


Why?

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Introducing Brian Day

Please welcome Brian Day to Crime Scene. He’s the newspapers’ night cop reporter and as plugged in as anyone I know when it comes to crime in the SGV.

Brian, who is two decades and two years younger than me, will be posting stuff that I can’t get to and other stuff he thinks is relevant.

He likes Monday Night Raw, plays the guitar, smokes Marlboro reds, wears boxers, eats at Pizza Hut and In-N–Out  almost exclusively, and attends Cal State Fullerton where he’s studying Journalism.

 

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A night on the town (*updated)(**updated)(***updated)(****updated)

Last night I attended a meeting of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).
The group put together a distinguished panel of experts to discuss the new media, blogging and ethics.

On the panel were:
Attorney Terry Francke, of CalAware.
Writer Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles at Slate.com
Attorney Jack Lerner, a USC expert in intellectual property and technology law
Kevin Roderick, Pulitzer Prize winner and publisher of LA Observed.
**Roderick modestly points out he was editor on two undertakings that won the LA Times news staff Pulitzer Prizes.

There was heavyweight discussion on several issues. Francke suggested Thomas Jefferson would have been a top blogger, if blogs were around back in the 18th and 19th Centruies.
Kaus suggested SPJ’s ethics rules don’t necessarily apply in the digital age.
Lerner discussed recent case law, including the Apple vs Bloggers case.
Roderick talked about his blog, and how it got off the ground as a conservative political destination of choice when he leaked an LA Times editor’s memo on abortion.
Joel Bellman, former Her-Ex opinion page editor, who is now Zev Yaroslavsky’s press deputy, MC’d the deal. I like him because he’s admitted anonymous source and level-headed moderator, especially when the conspiracy kooks come out. (And they did)
***Bellman points out I promoted him above his pay grade at the Examiner.

“You inadvertently promoted me at the Her-Ex. I was an editorial writer and rotating op-ed columnist – I was NOT the opinion-age editor (that distinction belonged to Gary Spiecker, an excellent fellow and longstanding assistant editor of the LA Times Sunday Opinion section.)”

My big question of the night for the panel was what’s your home page? and what web sites do you regularly visit.

Got some interesting responses:
The Arts and Letter Blog is apparently well respected.
The Drudgereport got some notice, especially from Kaus who cited its more even-handed approach in recent years.
NYTimes.com also received kudos, especially from Bellman, who said it’s the best newspaper site out there.
“Loads fast,” he said.

Roderick also noted the healthy blog exchange taking place in the San Gabriel Valley. Noting that there are several “political blogs” and anonymous blogs getting a lot of attention.
* Looking at my notebook There were a couple of links I forgot.
* Kaus mentioned he was a fan of lukeford.net An LA area blog.
* Roderick mentioned the FOX 11 LA blogs, noting they are “mostly insipid.”
* He praised others like John Schwada’s.
****I should really work harder to check this stuff out before I post!
****From Bellman for Roderick:

…the site I meant to reference last night was not Arts & Letters Daily but Arts Journal, another very high quality site with many smart and interesting voices. The arts blogger whose name I couldn’t remember is Tyler Green., whose site is Modern Art Notes.

http://www.artsjournal.com/
http://www.artsjournal.com/man/

*****Just realized I don’t know how to spell Kevin Roderick’s last name. (It’s been changed to the proper spelling throughout)

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My mirror site

Crime Scene (and the family of LANG blogs) is moving to a new server. The address will be the same, and in fact, if it goes without a hitch, you probably won’t even notice a thing.

As a precaution, and until the move is complete, I’m putting up a mirror site here: http://sgvcrime.blogspot.com, I’ll be posting there until the move is complete.

Thanks for you patience.

Frank

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Moratorium on murder

Back in the late 80s, when I was a copy boy at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, I worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. While we had computers, there were also a whole room full of printers churning out copy from the wires.

My shift back then ended around midnight, or whenever the first copies of the morning paper rolled off the presses and into the mailroom. Needless to say, LA was a big city, I was young and constantly looking for ways to get out early and head to Corky’s Bar across 11th Street.
Chuck Hubbs, the night city editor, always had other plans for me.
“Check the wires,” he’d say in a deep, intimidating voice. ‘See how many bodies are piling up.”
I’d run back to the wire room, rifle through reams of paper looking for stories from a UPI service called Metro Wire, and stuff from City News Service or the AP, which at the time was just across Hill Street.
Invariably, there’d be a killing somewhere, some more brutal than others. Chuck or I would type it up and it would make an inside roundup a lot like the “Region Briefs” we run in the newspaper now. Invariably I ended up at Corky’s well after midnight. Fortunately Betty, the owner kept the place open til 3 or 4 some mornings, probably to soak her Karaoke clients for a few extra bucks. We always ran tabs.
Twenty years later, the bodies are still piling up. I wonder how old Chuck would react to this story from Dave Z in Tuesday’s LAT:

The Los Angeles City Council dropped plans Tuesday for a symbolic moratorium on killing, deciding instead to use the upcoming anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to promote peace.

Council members had been asked by a handful of activists to declare a 40-hour ban on murder and other violence, a concept one critic quickly derided as “silliness.”

After a 45-minute debate, the council reworked its resolution, saying the city’s opposition to homicides should last more than a single weekend.

“A moratorium on violence and killing is something we should support 365 days a year and every minute we live,” said Councilman Richard Alarcon, who represents part of the San Fernando Valley.

I’m guessing on Friday night Chuck would send me into the wire room, ask about the body count and he’d proceed to file the roundup. We’d repeat the routine Saturday and Sunday and on Monday morning some enterprising reporter would do a story about the number of violent deaths during the city’s moratorium on murder.

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