Thursday, October 2, 2025
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Excessive Force by the LBPD: An Unfair Perception or a Real Problem?

Back in 1989, when a TV camera crew filmed Long Beach police officers smashing a compliant suspect—allegedly guilty of no more than a traffic infraction—into a plate-glass window, the Long Beach Police Department had a reputation in some circles for excessive force.

Several events in recent years have reopened a raging debate about whether there is excessive force department-wide. In April, for example, a jury awarded $6.5 million to the family of Doug Zerby, who in 2010 was gunned down by police while sitting on a stoop holding only a water nozzle. Over the last few years LBPD officers have frequently employed battering rams and wielded assault rifles while conducting raids of medpot dispensaries. During one such raid an LBPD officer was caught on camera stepping on the neck of a compliant, face-down suspect—video that surfaced despite officers’ smashing security cameras and attempting to confiscate the dispensary’s recording devices.

Lori Ann Farrell Appointed to Board of Harbor Commissioners

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LONG BEACH — On Nov. 25, Mayor Bob foster announced Lori Ann Farrell as his pick for the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners.

Farrell is the city’s former finance director. Her appointment is for a six-year term.

She will be replacing Nick Sramek, who resigned Nov. 21.

Board President Thomas Fields, who was fired by a Long Beach City Council vote of 6-3 Nov. 19, has not been filled.

The Long Beach Personnel and Civil Service Committee will meet Dec. 3 to consider the appointment. The city council must confirm the appointment.

Farrell was a city controller in 2006. In 2007 she was appointed to be the finance director. In 2010, she move on to become the finance director for Huntington Beach. She concurrently is the secretary and treasurer of the Long Beach Transit Board since 2011.

Must Have Music for Your Christmas List

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By B. Noel Barr, Music Writer Dude

KELP! Andy Hill, Renee Safier

Andy Hill and Renee Safier, along with co-conspirator producer Marty Rifken released a new album, KELP! this year. The cover art is a send up to the Beatles iconic album, HELP!

The title song, “KELP,” starts with Marty Rifken’s bodacious slide on pedal guitar, followed by some beautiful boogie that has you up and jumping. Musically, this song is absolutely wicked. When the lyrics kick in, I’m on the floor rolling with laughter when Hill sings:

I wouldn’t say you’re a bad lover at all. I wouldn’t say you used me as a means to an end. I just want to know why when you made love to me. You were calling the names of my friends….You left me wiggling like a big green glob of Kelp on the beach…

Navigating Los Angeles

Trucks, traffic and developing the Waterfront

By James Preston Allen, Publisher

We received a letter to the editor from one of our readers last week about the dangers crossing San Pedro’s Gaffey Street to pedestrians (see letters to editor next page),which prompted me to go on a mission to discover just how much traffic there was on this main artery of transit in this part of the city. I thought it would be a simple quest.

That I thought this simple question would have a simple answer shows my own lack of understanding of just how complex the City of Los Angeles truly is. From my years sitting on the Community Advisory Committee of the now defunct Community Redevelopment Agency, I recall some city employed technocrat saying that traffic volumes on Gaffey Street were in the range of 65,000 car trips per day.

So I go sleuthing through the city’s Department of Transportation website and was directed to NavigateLA.lacity.org. I thought the new and improved digital face of Los Angeles was going to make this quick, but of course the link to what I’m looking for doesn’t work, forcing me to call LADOT directly. After five frustrating calls and several hours later, I finally talk to one technocrat who is actually in charge of traffic counts, only to find that the simple answer to my question is lost in a series of fairly old reports and a list of data reports that you need to have a traffic engineer explain just to make sense out of it.

What I did discovered during this quest was that in the entire city, there are only eight employees that count traffic–three who count it “manually,” and five who count it automatically via those boxes with a black hose strung across the street. The manual counts are done the old fashion way with some kind of clicker. I’m relieved that they weren’t using their fingers.

So it comes as no surprise that with this few workers there is a backlog of calls for service of 3,200 and that the most recent traffic count is dated from 2008. They can hardly keep up with the demand.

This all begs the question of why didn’t the previous administration figure out how to count traffic remotely when it installed the citywide ATCS (Adaptive Traffic Control System), the automated traffic light system? It would just be too 21st century to have a real time count of traffic flows anywhere in the city.

Yes, I know I’m dreaming. Much of Los Angeles’ bureaucracy seems to stuck in a retro Raymond Chandler novel. Or as Tom Hayden once pronounced, “The problem of fighting City Hall in Los Angeles is finding city hall.” There are so many parts of the city bureaucracy squirreled away near and far that finding the right person with the right knowledge becomes a game of, “Where’s Waldo?”

Add to this the complication of proposing anything new like the remake of the San Pedro waterfront. The real challenge facing Mayor Eric Garcetti is how to get the entire city mechanism running in the same direction, sharing information and addressing the real-time problem. I’m thinking at this point of the current and forecasted traffic volumes leading into Ports O’Call where the L.A. Waterfront Alliance revealed their proposed development last week. If one can trust the Port of Los Angeles’ numbers, there currently are some 840,000 visitors per year coming to Ports O’ Call.

Well let’s just say that the new Ports O’Call development is going to be half way more successful as it is currently, adding another 420,000 visitors a year. The total traffic would be fifty percent more congested, mostly on weekends, as that’s when everybody from out-of-town visits. Add to that the congestion of having a few cruise ships in on the same days and perhaps a special event occurring simultaneously and there’s a traffic jam all the way up the 110 freeway to Pacific Coast Highway or beyond. So much for living on a peninsula folks.

Now, it doesn’t take a traffic engineer to predict this future calamity and it shouldn’t have to take seven years to study it either. What this does call for, what the council office should be asking for is a comprehensive traffic-transportation study to tell us how all of this is going to work without choking all of the streets in the Harbor Area. This presumably, and one shouldn’t assume, includes a traffic study and plan that includes the flow of truck traffic in and out of the port.

To respond to Mr. Bartels original complaint about traffic being dangerous to pedestrians on Gaffey Street, I’d have to agree. The best number I can come up with for the corner of 4th and Gaffey is 68,845 car trips per day.

My suggestion is don’t try to cross the street during rush hour. This number ranks Gaffey street 45th on the list of most congested streets in all of Los Angeles. And it’s only going to get worse as businesses become more successful in attracting visitors and more residents have to commute to jobs out of town. The temporary partial fix is that Councilman Joe Buscaino got the LADOT and its engineers to fast track two new signals on11th and 8th streets. What one learns about doing business in Los Angeles is that when you are the chair of the Public Works Committee, you get to put your priorities at the top of the list without having someone stand there and count cars by hand.

The Magic Flute

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By John Farrell, Curtain Call Writer

When the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is full, it’s a dynamic place to be.

When it is empty, it is very different. The hall is echoingly empty, as a recent tech rehearsal, the first ever open to the press (or so it was said) proved.

When the audience is in the hall, the air is warm with human temperature and expectations of music to come. Even a single phrase can be heard from the back row.

Otmaro Ruiz’s Lado B, Monsters at The Blue Whale

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By Melina Paris, Music Columnist

The Blue Whale in Chinatown never ceases to host great musicians and great music while providing a perfect listening room for fans of multiple varieties of jazz.

October brought the extraordinary jazz pianist, arranger and educator,Otmaro Ruiz, with his band Lado B. Ruiz is known as a master of many different styles of jazz piano and synthesizer and is one of the most sought after keyboardists for recording. A force in jazz circles, he has been touring with Los Angeles-based groups and leading his own projects.

Playing brilliantly, this sextet wholly captured the room’s attention with their interpretations of beautiful Brazilian standards.With Otmaro on piano, Catina DeLuna on vocals, Jeff Koonse on guitar, Eldon Livingston on bass, Aaron Serfaty on drums and Clarice Cast on percussion. Lado B accomplished no less than a work of art on stage. Lado B is a quintessential jazz band. With their refined musical talent they perform impeccably. Combining that with the honest pure emotion that Brazilian music so often evokes results in an awesome mixture of heartfelt music that appeals to and stimulates the intellect.

LB City Council Gives Fields the Boot

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Long Beach — On Nov. 19, the Long Beach City Council voted 6-3, council members Al Austin, Steve Neil and Gerrie Schipske opposed, to remove Long Beach Harbor Commission President Thomas Fields from office — despite tremendous supporter showing at the meeting.

Fields, an advertising entrepreneur, had served on several city commissions before serving as a Harbor Commissioner.

Foster, who appointed Fields to the 6-year term in 2009, placed the removal of Fields on the meeting agenda Nov. 11, while Fields was out of the country, on a two-week trip around Asia with port executive staff. Foster questioned Fields’ port travel. Fields reportedly traveled spent more than $77,000,000 on eight overseas trips between Oct. 29, 2011 and June 1, 2013 — without considering that he also traveled more often on port-related matters.

Three Arrests Made in Murder-For-Hire Plot

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Long Beach — On Nov. 18, Long Beach Police Department officers announced the arrest of three suspects in a premeditated murder plot, which almost killed a 62-year-old woman.

At about 9:20 p.m. Oct. 11, LBPD responded to a report of a screaming person near 69th Place and Ocean Boulevard. When officers arrived, they found the woman severely beaten in her home. She was taken to a local hospital in critical condition. The initial prognosis was that she may not survive.

Initially, it appeared the incident may have been a home invasion robbery. However, detectives discovered evidence that the incident was murder-for-hire plot that targeted the woman and that the plotters were her family members. Through the course of the investigation, detectives learned that the victim’s daughter, 40-year-old Holly Ramos, had been arrested in Monterey County, California on child endangerment and narcotics related charges. As a result, Ramos’ two children, ages 2 and 4, were taken from her and her husband, 40-year-old Frank Haverly, also from Monterey County, and placed into foster care.

At that time, the victim began the process with the Department of Children and Family Services to become a foster parent to her grandchildren.

Website With Relaxed Parking Enforcement Information Announced

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LOS ANGELES— On Nov. 20, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the city will begin posting online information about relaxed parking enforcement on streets that won’t be cleaned as scheduled.

On occasion, some streets are not cleaned during the time posted on “no parking” signs. When that happens, the Bureau of Street Services will post on its website,bss.lacity.org, the routes not being swept that day and the Department of Transportation will not issue street sweeping citations on those routes.

Garcetti Announces Nuclear Detection Halo Grant

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LOS ANGELES — On Nov. 19 Mayor Eric Garcetti, the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Los Angeles/Long Beach Urban Areas Security Initiative Approval Authority members announced $11.4 million in federal funds for a regional nuclear and radiological detection system.

Known as the “Securing the Cities” program, the grant will be used to purchase equipment to create a nuclear and radiological detection ring around the Los Angeles area. The grant will also create the Southern California Radiological Intake Center which will collect and analyze data and coordinate a regional response. The center will be located in the Los AngelesEmergencyOperationsCenter. The LA/Long Beach region may be awarded up to $30 million for the program within the next five years.