Last Night @ City Council

by FORTHE Staff  |  Published May 16, 2018 in Journalism

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   Police Body Cams   

In the most contentious agenda item of the night, the Council voted to approve a contract that will equip LBPD officers with body cameras from Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, Inc. for the duration of a year-long pilot program.

Chief Robert Luna said about 200 cameras will be deployed in two patrol divisions during the pilot program, but did not specify which ones.

The first field deployment of the body-worn cameras is expected to be in July, according to a memo to the city council from the LBPD.

Before the vote, Councilmember Suzie Price (CD-3)—also an Orange County senior deputy district attorney—stressed that she’d like to see the cameras implemented throughout the department sooner, expressing concern that a slow rollout could affect officer accountability and make the city vulnerable to fraudulent excessive-force lawsuits.

“A one-year pilot program is a very long time for Axon,” she said, citing her experience working with other law enforcement agencies. The cities of Huntington Beach and Los Angeles had pilot periods of 90 days for Axon body cameras before department-wide deployment.

In fact, Long Beach is behind many other cities in the region when it comes to adopting body cameras for law enforcement personnel. Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Fullerton, Anaheim, and Riverside County have already equipped all officers or deputies with the technology.

Luna justified the length of the pilot program by saying he wanted to be sure the city’s technological infrastructure could reliably handle the data load required by the body camera system.

“We do have some challenges historically in regards to our outdated technology from a city perspective,” he said during a back-and-forth with Price.

This will be the second pilot program for body-worn cameras the LBPD has undertaken. Previously, the department tried out cameras and auxiliary equipment from Dell and Utility Associates, Inc. for over a year beginning in November 2016.

Ultimately, the department found the technology “did not suitably meet the needs of the department and the city.”

Axon will provide the body camera equipment to the city for free during the pilot period, though a staff report said operating and maintaining the system will require three full-time positions, at a cost of $350,000 from the General Fund.

We ran Axon through our 2017-2018 Long Beach political campaign contribution database and did not find any contributions associated with the company.

    Bike Share Program   

Tomisin Oluwole
Ode to Pink II, 2020
Acrylic and marker on paper
14 x 22 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

The city awarded a contract to Brooklyn-based Social Bicycles, Inc. to provide equipment for Long Beach’s bikeshare program. It was the only bid received by the city, which had previously ended its contract with CityHop in August 2017.

Social Bicycles will pick up where CityHop left off and provide the last 100 bikes to fulfill the program’s original goal of 500, plus another 500 approved by the Council in March, eventually bringing the total to 1,000.

In 2013, Long Beach received $2.2 million in funding from the California Transportation Commission for the bikeshare program, and enough of those funds are still available to cover the new 100-bicycle contract that the Council approved last night. After that, new bikes will be paid for with Proposition A funds.

Director of Public Works, Craig Beck, and Councilmember Rex Richardson (CD-9), had a brief kerfuffle over when the public bikes would make their way to North Long Beach. Richardson managed to get a “yes” from Beck, who stated that some of the next batch of 100 bikes would be installed in the Ninth District within six months.

In March, the city said 22,000 bikeshare program members had taken 106,800 bike trips, accumulating 277,600 miles over the past two years.

We ran Social Bicycles and Uber, its parent organization, through our 2017-2018 Long Beach political campaign contribution database and did not find any contributions associated with the companies.

   Street Vacation   

Council voted to relinquish the public’s right to use Pasadena Avenue starting at 33rd Street and ending at a cul-de-sac just before Interstate 405. SA Properties Company, who own two plots of land abutting that portion of the street, requested the street vacation.

The company wants to combine their two properties and use that length of street as a parking lot for an eventual one-story Harbor Freight Tools store.

SA Properties Company paid a $20,000 processing fee into the General Fund for the street vacation.

We ran SA Properties through our 2017-2018 Long Beach political campaign contribution database and did not find any contributions associated with the company.

Follow @LBCMtgNotes on Twitter for live updates during every City Council meeting.

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition