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Clusterbuck2 04/13/2011 11:58:00 PM
reality is this. LATINOS in this city comprise the largest percentage of murderers, pedophiles and violent felons. DEAL with that... VilarSCUMraigosa racist will not let you know that...he keeps the statistics well hidden. LA's numero Uno Racist Tony will paint what ever pretty picture he feels to make you think that the people from his homeland who barged in here and bred like 3rd world animals, are just 'good hardworking salt of the earth types" ...the reality is. Latinos ARE the Crime in Los Angeles...at least the very large majority of it. And if it weren't for Tonys SANCTUARY CITY (come on in, break the law, I'll hide you and feed and house you) STATUS our murder rates WOULD be at 1956 levels. It is Always Latinos on LAPDs most wanted top 10....and in our prisons...and failing and dropping out of our schools and breeding. The chief will ignore all of that so as not to 'offend' his political ally. Disgusting, racist and the beginning of the end of an OVERPOPULATED BY 3RD WORLD TRASH LOS ANGELES
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susan 05/23/2009 2:01:00 AM
See today's witnessla.com where veteran reporter and USC journalism prof Celeste Freemon takes apart this way TOO long for its content article (and subsequent ones in the month since) as *hit pieces on Bratton because this paper is biased against Antonio and anyone associated with him.
That's true of it's slamming him for endorsing Weiss, but spinning Cooley not just endorsing Trutanich but getting him to run in the first place and twisting arms to get him money and endorsements, as a mark of courage. Try as she might, Jill Stewart can't hide the obvious bias of this paper.
The Weekly isn't alone, though, as people are realizing. Joe Mailander in his street-hassle.blogspot.com notes how both the Times and Daily News also effectively campaigned for Trutanich while writing hit pieces on Weiss. (He thinks maybe to belatedly get at the mayor, who they didn't feel they went after hard enough before 3/3. Possibly.)
He notes that Trutanich the "chest thumping death penalty advocate" etc. started off confrontationally and ungraciously already, and since he "looks more like a Vegas pit bull boss" is apparently acting like it. Like his BFF's Zine and Cooley. Opines his undermining Antonio at every step will make Bradley-Gates look like the good old days. Wonder if he'll do the same to Bratton, or try to put a wedge between him and Antonio?
All 3 of our major papers are shills Trutanich and other candidates who oppose Antonio. Appalling.
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Madame Butterfly 05/14/2009 4:42:00 AM
What a load of cow manure! I was born and raised on the Westside and graduated HS in the FIFTIES! I know what it was like in the good old days....there were NO Mexican gangbangers, no drive-bys, no car jackings, break-ins...NOPTHING! We had an occasional sensational murders every blue moon, but NOTHING on a regular day-to-day basis!
The city was predominantly WHITE, and Blacks were pretty much segregated in the fifties.
Everyone left their doors unlocked and walked the streets freely! No one was 'afraid' of being mugged, raped, or murdered. It was the California Dreamin' surfer generation! It was the Beach Boys and the Beatles.
Bratton and Villar are liars! Problem is...this city is mostly populated with foreigners and illegal aliens...what do THEY know? Bratton is a NY transplant and Villar is a Mexican transplant! They do NOT speak for all of us native Angelenos!
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Chaz 05/12/2009 6:52:00 AM
This is great news!
Thank you Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton on a job well done.
I support the LAPD 100%.
After reading this article I think Chief Bratton was being a little P-C.
Every White knows why there's a major decline in crime in this city.
The continual decline of the black population no ifs ands or buts about it.
The LAPD has done a great job of ethnic cleansing us of those people.
It's so obvious that there are fewer blacks in L.A. County than 10 or 20 years ago.
Cities with low black population have less crime than city with large black population.
This isn't racist it's just a fact.
I'm not single out just blacks but you've got to start somewhere.
Mexicans should be next getting them back south of the border will be a real challenge.
Obama isn't up to that challenge.
Don't forget back in 1956 when L.A. was a safe city it also was a Whiter city too.
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Danny 05/07/2009 3:03:00 AM
I don't disagree with most of what I've read so far, but I'm not sure I agree with your insinuation that homelessness is a crime or the homeless are criminal.
[Epstein, in fact, didn�t lock his car door in 1956. You just didn�t need to. And he never saw the homeless strolling the Walk of Fame � a common sight today. �They were nonexistent in the �50s,� he says.]
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Rob 05/06/2009 10:57:00 PM
As long as we're on the subject of law enforcement officials fudging facts, a 16 year old boy was picked up recently under the Patriot Act by the FBI. Unfortunately for that agency, this kid, a white American citizen, is innocent, but he is still being held incommunicado in another state. That the FBI couldn't spot IP spoofing is really ominous for national security: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFVQ0HZz2mc&feature=player_embedded
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Chris 05/06/2009 10:38:00 AM
Joe, Bratton has a good reason to be dishonest about this. His professional and political future depends on perception of him more than it does on how well the LAPD will be funded 5 years from now. He wouldn't have become chief here if he'd had a bad reputation from his time in Boston and New York. And Villaraigosa also wants "good" numbers for HIS own career. They both benefit from it.
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Jim Townes 05/06/2009 5:50:00 AM
This article is way too opinionated!
Without having access to exact murder rate info - I would bet that per capita the murder rate is comparable to that of the late 60's and way lower than late 80's.
So taking them to task for comparing them to 1950's is cool but when you load it up with a lot of quotes about people saying that it felt safer then, thats not really factual. In fact you could interview a lot of 25 year olds and say way it safer in 1985 and they would say of course! When in fact murder, robbery rates are lower.
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Alex 05/03/2009 10:54:00 AM
I don't know what happened to LA Weekly for a time but the recent series of articles about the cesspool at City Hall show that the LA Weekly is back. If you really want investigative reporting, you won't find it at the Los Angeles Times (except the one series of articles each year that the Times targets as its "entry" in the Pulitzer Prize "contest"). Please keep MacDonald paid well so that he stays at LA Weekly to do THIS kind of reporting. If he goes to the LA Times, he will be seriously watered down.
This article reminds me of the watershed New Yorker Magazine article that took the shine off of Antonio Villaraigosa's star. Bratton's pants are down around his ankles and the BIG LIE is on the table for all to see.
Where was the Los Angeles Times? Sucking contentedly on the LAPD's website "nipple." We used to have a media in this town that investigated. Now all we have is the LA Weekly.
Please. Keep digging. There are more stories like this at City Hall.
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Jill Stewart 05/02/2009 2:45:00 AM
Thank you, commenter Greg Meyer. The typo, which was my doing, has been fixed to correctly show the chief as William J. Bratton. (Joseph, for anyone who wonders.) - Jill Stewart, LA Weekly News Editor
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Alan 05/01/2009 6:03:00 PM
After reading your article I was happy to see my thoughts written out and investigated in plain english, why we have all these hikes in police recruitment and drops in school budgets drives me and many Los Angeles community members to hate the the local government for lying to us. I aprreciated the conclusion where Karmen stated that the more money spend on criminal justice would take away from programs to prevent crimes thus forcing the goverment to hire more enforcement, however, I wish that topic would be discussed more. why the desperate measures in order to hire more LAPD and why not the despirate hikes in trash and phones to invest in our children and prevention Thanks again for your article it means the world to readers like me who are frusterated with this BS that the Mayor and his puppets are acting in greed rather than serving the people
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Teralloy 05/01/2009 12:40:00 PM
Remember, in the '50s, the LA demimonde was controlled by out-of-town Mafia families, who kept things quiet and profitable while conducting their vendettas elsewhere. That was nice, but that was when LA, in lots of ways, was a colony of the "real" cities.
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Greg Meyer 05/01/2009 11:40:00 AM
Random ex-cop thoughts:
I remember in the early 70's when Chief Edward Davis said he needed 10,000 officers to police Los Angeles effectively. About 35 years later, we're about to reach that number, probably about half what it should be given the population increase. New York has nearly four times as many officers as Los Angeles.
I remember that 1980 was the first year that more than 1,000 murders were committed in the City of Los Angeles, and murders exceeded 1,000 in quite a few years in the 80's and 90's. So now that murders are in the 300's, is that not cause for some respect, instead denigrating the crime-reduction efforts? The author mentions early in the article, then totally glosses over, that murders are as low now as 38 years ago.
And the author doesn't even get the name of Chief William J. Bratton correct. What else did he not get correct?
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Anon 05/01/2009 8:03:00 AM
That is one beautiful lady on the cover. Next week, can we have a followup showing her "tramp stamp"?
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MRP 05/01/2009 3:54:00 AM
I agree with Joe's comment. It's in the interests of a law enforcement agency to show higher numbers for crime as this gets more government money for the agency. I.e. rent-seeking. However the article was correct when it said that comparing numbers for murder and robbery will probably give a better analysis of long term crime trends than Part I crimes as a whole. Murder is the hardest crime to cover up or remain unreported and the incidence of murders is a good indicator of violent crime trends as a whole. Based on that, Bratton has done a good job but by no means is L.A. violent crime back to 1950s/60s levels. I disagree with the article's comment that the number of police don't mean anything ; more cops act as a deterrent. However, it would take about 20K officers, not 10K, to lower L.A. crime back to the levels of 40 years ago.
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MRP 05/01/2009 3:48:00 AM
The comparisons to the '50s are blatantly ridiculous. Now if Bratton had claimed that LA was safer than it's been since 1986, rather than 1956, he would be more on the money. L.A. is by no means as safe as it was 40 or 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago, but safer than it was 20 years ago.
One cause of decreased crime not mentioned in the article is that so many people in crime prone groups have left L.A. in large numbers in the last decade or so. Not coincidentally, the main destination cities for L.A.'s poor, Las Vegas and Phoenix, have had astronomical rises in crime.
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matt dukes jordan 04/30/2009 8:26:00 PM
Great story on the grand simulacra of media... For a moment I thought, Wow, let's party like it's 1956 ! Get out the bongos! Let's read HOWL by Ginsberg (only it was just published by City Lights and declared obscene and there was a trial! So it might be hard to get a copy.) We can chant, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...." (Hmmm, maybe things weren't so fun in the 50s...) Well, there's Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis...their film HOLLYWOOD OR BUST just came out! Bukowski was an unknown poet who was working in menial jobs and writing a novel, A PLACE TO SLEEP THE NIGHT..... (unfinished)... The artist Robert Williams told me when I interviewed him for my book WEIRDO DELUXE that guys driving hot rods were regularly pulled over by the police and roughed up -- as unsavory characters! Yes, it was a time of law and order, and non-conformist bohemian types were being put in nut houses ------like Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's pal, who, in the spirit of Dadaism, tossed some potato salad at a prof lecturing on Dadaism! Back then we had the commie witch hunts of the McCarthy era (late 40s to late 50s), fear and conformity and the rise of the corporate man in the gray flannel suit... but global warming, acidification of the oceans, clear-cutting rain forests, massive species extinction, and bees not pollinating fruit trees anymore --- all these were a ways off...... so was the visit to the moon and the declaration by a president that we were going to Mars ! Gawd, the future ain't what it used to be... so said Yogi Berra. Nor was the past...... The French writer Baudrillard contemplated and wrote about the idea of the end of the idea of history... in our age of high-speed electronic communication we've lost metanarratives, grand over-reaching ideas of society becomeing a utopia at some point in the future, etc... linearity collapses in our age of simultaneous narratives overlapping on TV, the internet, etc... the linear idea of history is over, says Baudrillard... Perhaps Bratton is on to something....
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Walter Moore 04/30/2009 7:37:00 PM
M. White -- That's a good point about crime being down everywhere. And get this: i) crime has dropped much more in cities SURROUNDING the City of L.A. than in the city itself (something like 4% in L.A. vs. 6% in surrounding cities, which is a 50% difference); ii) the crime rate itself is much higher in the City of L.A. than in those surrounding cities.
Let me put this in actual numbers rather than percentages. In the first 114 days of 2009, guess how many people were victims of violent crime? The answer is 7,813 -- 69 per day. During that same period, 28,876 people were victims of property crimes (e.g., burglary, grand theft auto), which works out to 253 people per day. Shooting victims: 409, which is four per day. Eighty-nine people were murdered, which is more than two people every three days.
According to the LAPD's own estimates, moreover, there are over 40,000 gang members in the city.
Now, do we REALLY believe Villaraigosa has reduced crime? Or are we seeing the three-strikes law, changing demographics, slow response times, and witness intimidation produce voodoo statistics?
Put another way, if this is 1956, then Wally and the Beaver were in a gang.
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M White 04/30/2009 6:27:00 PM
Um, anyone noticed that crime is dramatically down like this in cities all over the US for the first part of this year?
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Joe 04/30/2009 5:44:00 PM
This is a really flawed article: a dramatic story lacking a motive.
Everyone in law-enforcement (and the courts, where I work) knows, that the way that law enforcement increases its funding is by claiming it needs more money to stop the increasing rate of crime. Scare the people, get more money -- it is as simple as that, and always has been.
The Chief is saying that crime is down (i.e., stop freaking out people). The only thing that can follow from this is that his own budget will flatten out or decline.
So what is the motive to lie about this?
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Jerome Cleary 04/30/2009 3:15:00 PM
Excellent article! When I have looked at weekly crime blotters for LA and Hollywood in the local papers it shows the growing constant crimes that could never be compared to any other era let alone the 1950's. The worst part is the residents and voters of LA bought the PR campaign hook, line and sinker.
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Notyetoutofla 04/30/2009 10:50:00 AM
You cannot believe anything the Chief says. The Mayor tells him what to say and what to think. If the Mayor farts, the Chief may get a broken nose.
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Walter Moore 04/30/2009 10:30:00 AM
Oops!
Correction: First, we should NOT have to take Bratton's word for it...
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Walter Moore 04/30/2009 10:28:00 AM
Where, exactly, can we find the statistics on which Bratton bases his claims?
I ask for three reasons.
First, we should have to take his word for it.
Second, I have looked, but not found statistics from the 1950s from the FBI, the State of California, or the City of L.A. I'm pretty good at finding things on the web, but I have found L.A. crime statistics from the 1950s.
Third, and most troubling, for a long time the LAPD website "diluted" the crime statistics by inflating the city's population to about 4.2 million people. That's 200,000 more than the highest estimates I've seen anywhere else (e.g., census). The effect of inflating the city's population is to reduce the crime RATE. Five crimes per 100 people is worse than five crimes for 100,000 people.
