“The journalists on the scene decline[d] to put their First Amendment instincts to the test of civil disobedience,” Francke says. “Their employers have no more stomach now for backing them in such a confrontation than they ever have.”
Roger Jon Diamond, a top First Amendment attorney nationally, bluntly says the Sheriff’s Department “lied when they said it was a ‘crime scene.’ … This was a classic confrontation between civil protesters and government. The media’s First Amendment rights were clearly infringed. This is something right out of Gadhafi’s playbook.”
But sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore says that’s untrue and unfair. “We may have restricted the media from getting as close as they would have liked, but it was a safety issue and we take that seriously,” Whitmore says. He explains that heavy equipment crews demolishing the trees told deputies it would be unsafe for reporters to be in the area.
Whitmore says Sheriff’s Department brass at the Temple City station told him the deputies did not declare the area a crime scene. Click here for video of a deputy clearly informing reporters that the crime scene extended to the grove and deep into an adjoining public street.
The media covered the story “extensively,” Whitmore says, “whether or not they got the access they wanted. And quite frankly, we encourage the debate.”
For Cameron Stone, a local on the steering committee of the UrbanWild Network, the destruction of the Arcadia woodlands was like watching the death of an old and trusted friend.
“I have been walking in those woods since I was a kid,” he says. “They were dear to me, and to so many others.”
Stone says that as public concern for the preservation of wildland has grown over the past 30-plus years, the county’s DPW has shifted to more clandestine tactics to achieve what he describes as the sterile handiwork of engineering apparatchiks.
“They basically stopped routine maintenance of their grounds,” Stone says, “instead waiting for an advantageous emergency to arise where they could cry ‘public safety!’ And they also discovered that, once they declared public emergencies, the treasury doors also opened.”
Not so, says DPW spokesman Bob Spencer, who offers a heated retort to the suggestion that the agency mishandled the elimination of the oak grove or engaged in bureaucratic subterfuge. “Absolutely not! This was the result of a multiyear process. Three years in the making that exhausted all of the alternatives, it was an exhaustive environmental process.”
Spencer notes that for the 11 acres of woodland demolished, the department is returning 30 acres to wildland status, including eight revegetated acres at the removed grove. “And we’re not talking just planting a few saplings when we’re done, either,” Spencer says.
But, in fact, it will be many decades before the DPW’s replanting will produce a canopy of mature trees.
Whatever the fate of the “Arcadia Four,” the battle to save what little remains of open, old-growth wildland across Greater Los Angeles is not over.
“The outcome of this case will have far-reaching consequences for community leaders working to save other endangered wildlands in the county, such as Whittier Narrows and Montebello Hills,” Flynn says. “These community members have the dual task of protecting our endangered wildlands and also exposing government corruption and mismanagement of publicly owned lands.”
Reach the writer at Mrcromer@aol.com.
It's absurd that no one could figure out a viable alternative to bulldozing those wonderful trees. The environmentalists should be regarded with the utmost respect for trying to save the woodlands. The County needs to go after the real criminals in this case - the County of Los Angeles and the City of Arcadia.
It is no wonder that the LASD deputy in the video (via the link above) acted as he did. Here are some interesting videos of typical LASD deputy behavior:http://www.thebusbench.com/200...
http://www.thebusbench.com/201...
http://www.thebusbench.com/200...
http://www.thebusbench.com/201...
http://www.thebusbench.com/200...
http://www.thebusbench.com/201...
To top off that thick cake, here is a video of how the sheriff, Leroy Baca, handles a relatively medium speed straight shot pitched from amid a large group of Metro-vetted "journalists": http://www.thebusbench.com/201...
The only crime is spending millions of tax dollars preparing a defensible environmental document for the removal of the oak trees only to have few individuals to use the media for venting instead of mounting a legal challenge to the document. I hope these four criminals use their own money for legal defense on these charges instead of asking for a public defender.
There have been some startling revelations since the County Department of Public Works' unnecessary obliteration of the Arcadia Oak Woodland at the northern end of the Santa Anita Wash Trail. It was revealed at a recent DPW sediment task force meeting that the California Dept. of Fish & Game had not approved the County's inadequate mitigation for destruction of the oak woodland and, as such, removal of the trees should not have commenced when it did. Some neighbors overlooking the woodland were never notified of the project. There was incredible opposition to the destruction of the ancient oaks, mature sycamores, bay laurel trees and all the wildlife dependent upon that habitat. The EIR and CEQA processes for the project were deeply flawed by misassumptions, misdirection and factual inaccuracies. We now know there was sufficient room for Santa Anita Dam sediment on the existing Arcadia dump site without "removal" of the woodland.
It has also become known that Vulcan Materials Co. has made its quarry pits available to receive County sediment; however, the Vulcan manager at the task force meeting stated that no sediment has yet been dumped in their empty pits and he could not say why.
In the face of all this, it becomes increasingly vindictive and unjustified for the County to prosecute the brave individuals who put their own bodies between 4 ancient oaks and the excavating machines. Sitting in the oaks, they were first hand observers of the carnage. The "before" and "after" images are hard to look at; nevertheless, take a close look. The tree sitters were there when it happened, hearing the trees break and go down, being surrounded by panicked birds and bats fleeing roosts as their trees were toppled in the night. By that terrible experience alone, the tree sitters have been "punished." The County should set these people free without further harassment, penalty or criminal record. The trees they defended are dead and the County has its dirt dump. Leave it at that.
Peaceful civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in this country when gov't oversteps its authority and misuses its power.
As facts surrounding the County's destruction of the Arcadia Oak Woodland are revealed, the 4 tree sitters have been proven right... Their oaks should never have come down as they did, during the night. Nor should our tax dollars have been used to pay overtime for the heavy equipment and operators or the Sheriffs and private security forces that attempted to prevent the news media from filming what was being done. The County's DPW is not always "right," nor are the Supervisors always correct in their assessments. The tree sitters are not worth wasting limited resources to prosecute. We, the public, have lost a beautiful parkland that you and your children will never be able to walk and enjoy. It will now be a blighted dirt dump for which there were several viable alternatives.
The oak sitters acted on behalf of the living forest that is now a blighted wasteland. They were peaceful in their actions and attempted to harm no one. Though they failed in their efforts, their actions spoke for the outrage we all felt when the oaks, sycamores, bay laurels and all the wildlife that lived among them was torn from the Earth and crushed. Prosecutions cost money. Pursuing these 4 persons for "trespassing" and interfering with efforts to take down the trees is inappropriate and financially irresponsible. Let's not waste more taxpayers' dollars, court costs and the DA's time on this. The DA's office has many more important cases to try involving public safety and serious crime.
Read the EIR and you will see that CDFG was consulted and that they did not object to the proposed mitigation measures. File a legal challenge if they believe the EIR is so fundamentally inadequate and flaw as you stated so a judge can issue an injuction to te County.
Did the LA Sheriff's Dept. allow the county Department of Public Works to bulldoze a crime scene? Isn't the justification for excluding media from crime scenes to prevent them from disturbing the evidence?
Sometimes being "green" means actually sacrificing a donor or development project to preserve something that our grand kids might actually value. I don't know, like, let's say old growth trees in old growth-poor Los Angeles. Supervisor Antonovich obviously cared more for the easily replaceable public works project than the legacy oaks that are now mulch.
It's pathetic, really. Who elected this supervisor? Oh yeah, we did. His communications deputy that is running the google search on his/her bosses name can now add #fail and #arcadiafour to the search indexes.
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