Clamor Over Venice 311

Last the world heard from Dawna Chaet, known around Venice as Boston Dawna, she was being crowned the "Batman of Venice Beach" by a charmed Associated Press writer from out of town. The burly, middle-aged brunette was packing up the sex-shop handcuffs and purple bike she used to carry out 40 years of citizen's arrests, and moving back to Boston.

PHOTO BY SHANNON COTTRELL

Alex Thompson, Venice's lightning rod

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More About

• Venice (California)
• Amie Thompson
• Alex Thompson
• 311 (Band)
• Coast Boston Dawna

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The AP article dropped in September 2010. It depicted Dawna basking in a goodbye party purportedly thrown by Los Angeles Police Department officers (or "my cops") and ceremoniously passing her neighborhood watch duties on to a group of Venice women who fancied themselves "the Dawnettes."

Among the torchbearers: A hot 43-year-old with Urkel glasses and a nose for good business whom locals knew as Alex Thompson. (The AP misspells her name as Thomasson.)

"Like just about everyone in this neighborhood, Thomasson [sic] is Dawna's friend," reads the AP profile. "Thomasson laughs when she recalls her initial reaction to Dawna: 'I thought she was off her rocker.' "

Today, the Dawnettes have disbanded, if they ever existed at all. And Alex Thompson has taken neighborhood watch viral.

Her website, Venice 311.org, launched in February, won this year's L.A. Weekly Web award for Best Police Blog. The tech-savvy Thompson made a splash online in 1999 for founding an interactive TV company, Mixed Signals, and was named one of the 100 Young Innovators in the nation by MIT's Technology Review magazine.

Now she's focused on hyperlocalism, and her Venice 311 Twitter account has nearly 3,100 followers.

But Thompson's rise as Venice's citizen crime fighter has widened a gap in the liberal coastal community that cleaves along political and social lines that some describe as the gentry versus the funky.

It's fueled from the East Coast by Boston Dawna, who is leading a vicious campaign against her ex-protégé with help from Thompson's estranged former business partner, New Hampshire musician Justin Spencer. Spencer and Thompson are tangled in a messy court case arising after Thompson accused him a few years ago of stealing her money and identity.

In recent months, Dawna and Spencer have alleged that Thompson is an ex-felon from Texas named Amie Thompson. By spamming Venice residents, police officers and media with copies of court files and background checks, they have gained traction with the Venice coffee-shop set.

Three weeks ago,Thompson invited the Weekly into the small, dark beachside apartment that serves as Venice 311 headquarters.

A police scanner set to LAPD Pacific Division's radio is its center of gravity, perched on an instructional "makeup makeovers" coffee-table book. A neon-colored golf cart is parked just within darting distance, ready to deploy on another graffiti-destroying mission or Good Samaritan trash pickup.

Here, in her element, Thompson reveals what happened once the AP reporter went on his way.

She says, "Just after he left, [Dawna's], like, cranking through a pack of cigarettes," spewing insults, barking orders at her successors and proclaiming they could never be a legend like her.

Another of the so-called Dawnettes agrees, saying, "Dawna said to me right after that interview, 'You're too soft for this.' "

Dawna has a different version. First, she insists, it wasn't LAPD who paid for her farewell party but Sally Leboeuf, a Westside real-estate tycoon and one of Thompson's closest friends. "By paying for my party, [Leboeuf and Thompson] got to go to LAPD all the time and bat their little baby blues," says Dawna over the phone from Boston, riled up and bitter, her parrot squawking up a racket worthy of the Venice Beach Boardwalk.

Thompson has since become the LAPD beach patrol's right-hand girl. When she isn't furiously tweeting out cop-speak from her Mac (always thick on snark), she can be spotted scurrying up and down Ocean Front Walk, snapping photos of crime scenes and arrests or calling the cops about criminals or problems that may have slipped under their radar.

"What she does, it's hard-core shit," says Tony Vera, a longtime L.A. paparazzo who has since joined forces with Venice 311 to video-chronicle the Pacific Division's daily struggle.

"It's good to have the cops on your side, because we can work with them," Vera says. "We need to save Venice, man. We need more people like Alex."

LAPD Capt. Jon Peters, who heads the Pacific Division, denies any intimacy between Thompson and beach police brass claimed by Dawna. "She doesn't work for me. I'm not employing her," he says. "She's a community member on a private venture. I have no control or authority over her."

The department has no place investigating Thompson's past, Peters says, no matter how Dawna continues to heckle.

Critics of Thompson's war on grime and crime see a conspiracy between her and the LAPD to sanitize Venice of its homeless characters and urban grit. Almost all of them refuse to criticize her publicly, citing fear of repercussions within the cramped community.

But Peters insists there is "no type of relationship where [Thompson] calls me and gets special information." As for officers down the chain of command, "I can't attest to those relationships," he says. "But there are no official relationships."

Her few thousand followers on Twitter — most of whom fall somewhere on the outskirts of the town's hotheaded, overdramatic core — often tweet back their gratitude for Venice 311's timely explanations of every last siren and midnight helicopter racket.