I predict a buyer will purchase the land, raze all of the structures, and build something much nicer in their place. What other reasonable alternative could there be for a place with so many code compliance and health issues?

Thanks for the virtual tour, Greggory!

its too bad someone decided to try this case in the media.

we should wait till all the facts are in before rushing to judgement.

After I had send the invitations out to my guest and everyone had RSV with their menu for the event she call and said that we had lost the room to a larger group that would give her more money.

She said that business comes first and that we could pickup the the deposit.

If you go there know what type of people you are dealing with.

since we bulldozed the liquor store…

This statement in this GLB article troubles me, however:

“The video shows that Asanstacio Rojas Hernandez, a Mexican citizen living illegally in the San Diego area, was handcuffed and hogtied while he was tazed and beaten by Border Patrol agents in 2010.”

A slightly different version in the Downey Beat article is equally troubling:

“But videos found recently by PBS’ ‘Need to Know’ news program — along with police reports — show that Rojas Hernandez was handcuffed and hog tied while he was tazed and beaten.”

I watched the entire PBS episode that Downey Beat linked in its article. I watched each of the videos that PBS uncovered. I saw nothing in any of the videos of the incident that “shows” what either GLB or Downey Beat claim.

Tonight he’s in La Jolla. After that, Conolly has no shows until Saturday in downtown Long Beach, where he and San Pedro-born comedian Brian Zuinich have reserved Club Cohiba to open what they hope to develop into a monthly series called the Long Beach Port of Comedy.

Dave,
I can copyedit future pieces so errors like these don’t go unnoticed! =)

Had a great time at the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe Festival years ago. Always wished there was something similar in the states. Is it liability laws?

If Bryan has a handle on this, I’d love to hear her thoughts.

This explains VIP’s giant sign, which originally depicted a man whistling.

But what happened to Whistler Liquor? When it left the VIP Records building (now a beauty salon, I believe), did it simply relocate to the northwest corner of PCH and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue?

Just wondering if that was the same Whistler Liquor all those years.

“In the early 1960s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Special Activities Division began to recruit, train and lead the indigenous Hmong people in Laos to fight against North Vietnamese Army intruders into Laos during the Vietnam War. It became a Special Guerrilla Unit led by General Vang Pao. About 60% of the Hmong men in Laos were assisted by the CIA to join fighting for the “Secret War” in Laos.[37][38] The CIA used the Special Guerrilla Unit as the counter attack unit to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main military supply route from the north to the south.
Hmong soldiers served against the NVA and the Pathet Lao, helping block the Hanoi’s Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos and rescuing downed American pilots. As inhabitants of the more mountainous regions of Laos, the Hmong people earned a special place in the hearts of American combat soldiers because of their strong support for the United States in its fight against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao communist forces. Though their role was generally kept secret in the early stages of the conflict, they made monumental sacrifices to help the U.S., with 18,000 of their soldiers killed in battle before 1969 alone, and more than 100,000 Hmong losing their lives by the time the U.S. made the decision to pull out of Vietnam.”

glad to see them doing well in america.

Dean has now stepped, make that rolled, away from looting and ruining local newspapers. He has an advancing case of MS and can no longer perform as a standup liar.

Sixth and Pine is a monument to his greed.

Thank you very much.

I’ll be viewing the video in the next few days, using your explanations to help me better understand the interaction.

“We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.” — Douglas Coupland

“…it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” — Joseph Conrad

“Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform.” — Kate DiCamillo

“Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward — that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.” — Kevin Brockmeier

“You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.” — Goldie Hawn

“I was in the biggest breakdown of my life when I stopped crying long enough to let the words of my epiphany really sink in. That whore, karma had finally made her way around and had just bitch-slapped me right across the face. The realization only made me cry harder.” — Jennifer Salaiz

“There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be…” — John Lennon

(Source: goodreads.com)

I’m just pointing out the astronomically high costs of preserving, restoring, and converting these big old boats, whether it be an outdated luxury liner or some galant, decommissioned obsolete warship; high costs that neither a non-profit conservancy or municipality can well-afford, especially in this deficit-addled age.

As for converting these old boats to self-sustaining commercial enterprises, it’s a highly risky proposal which very few, if any, well-heeled private business investors will get involved. That’s especially true considering all the exacting restrictions and expectations that would likely be placed on them by a historical conservancy.

If all that is too harsh a reality for you and all the other Mary Queens to face-up to when attempting to rescue these high-cost, high-maintenance, decaying old ships, that’s your problem, not mine.

Make no mistake, when a cop believes he or she is fighting for his or her life, virtually any tactic can be deemed reasonable so long as the officer can demonstrate the exigency. I cannot, however, believe that either Ramos or Cicinelli legitimately believed they were fighting for their lives.

Based upon the obviously obstructed view in the video, it is difficult to see much of anything of substance or clearly, once Ramos has Thomas on the ground. We can infer quite a bit from the sounds, and from the forensic evidence, but all of that, along with all of the other direct evidence, must now rightly be evaluated by a jury.

I’ll repeat: I think the charges brought against both Ramos and Cicinelli are appropriate. If they are convicted I hope the pay the heaviest penalty allowed by law.

Cops in larger cities (like Long Beach) deal with these folks routinely. The more experience the officer gains with them, the more effective the officer tends to become at handling such contacts in ways that do not require violence.

It’s important to remember, though, that many 5150′s can be entirely unpredictable in their behavior….passive and compliant nine times out 10 but extremely violent on that one occasion. There is just no way to reliably determine whether the 5150 one is dealing with is on his or her first nine days, or on his or her 10th.

Regardless, and bringing this back to my perceptions concerning Thomas, there is no reason to threaten a 5150 with violence, as Ramos did. In my view, all that was, was a blatant abuse of authority and I think it very well may have escalated an encounter toward violence that may very well have gone another way.

I have personally seen many, MANY, encounters with 5150′s wherein the suspect starts out belligerent, sometimes even violent, but can be calmed and re-directed toward compliance with little more than a quieter volume and a respectful, if stern, tone. I have never seen a situation where threatening a 5150 with violence had any positive result. This does not mean that it hasn’t happened, only that it is beyond my personal experience.

As a former cop, I can literally see on the video Ramos getting amped up and initially for no better reason than Thomas wouldn’t sit in just the way Ramos was telling him to. As I have said, there can be very good reasons for placing the suspect at that sort of physical disadvantage but I mainly only used it to make it more difficult for the suspect to jump up and run away. To me, Thomas didn’t seem interested in running.

Thomas’ not sitting with his feet out and his hands on his knees *could* have been a red flag, for Ramos, signalling a refusal to cooperate or it could have just meant that Thomas was having real difficulty both understanding what Ramos wanted and then doing it. Some people physically cannot sit in the fashion at all, let alone for very long. Perhaps Thomas, in his mental condition, couldn’t sit that way, but didn’t know how to verbalize that to Ramos.

All Ramos seems to have seen is a guy who *wouldn’t* do what he was told. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that, perhaps, he simply *couldn’t* do it. Whenever I came across folks who were having great difficulty sitting that way, I would try to modify it a bit so as to achieve the same result but make it a bit easier, physically, on the suspect. That usually solved the issue. If it didn’t, and the person just didn’t want to or couldn’t cooperate, I didn’t waste any more time trying to control them in that way, I simply got them up, patted them down, handcuffed them, and sat them in the back of the closest patrol car that had a cage.

In that way they were properly contained and a bit more comfortable, and I could go about my investigation without further distraction or concern on that score.

I see a lot of good police work on the video, even from Ramos, right up until he chose to threaten Thomas. Other officers who assisted were really doing just that….helping to immobilize Thomas so that he could be properly handcuffed and, perhaps, have leg restraints applied if he had been kicking.

More later.

1) is there any element of the video showing good police work? any indication in their actions that they might be encountering an EDP? (And thanks for the term, John, it tells me the officers should have had a category for thinking about this encounter–Thomas as basic street schizophrenic–other than just checking out some middle-aged, non-mentally-ill car burglar with a supposed attitude.)

2) if so, is there any illustration of when the good policework turned into criminal police work?

Knowing that turning point, and trying to understand why that turning point occurred, would go a long way toward aiding public understanding of this incident. You seem to be indicating that this is the proper interpretation (‘the things it shows and the things it doesn’t show.”).

It’s hard to understand what was legal policework about this incident and what was not, whether or not the officers could be seen clearly in the video through an unbloodied lens.

Looking for clarity and not getting much yet.

John, if you’d like to be our guide through this, spelling out clearly where the officers crossed the line, it would be a valuable public service and I would gladly assign you to be my guide.

Lacking that, however, I’m not sure watching blood splattering a lens, or hearing the cries of a delusional schizophrenic call pathetically for his Dad as he senses his life leaving his body is going to help.

No one should have the luxury of refusing to see the sort of work cops are sometimes expected to do as well as how well and how poorly they sometimes do that work.

For the glory of Britannia, please take back our aged and declining RMS Queen Mum Mary. I’m too ill-equipped and financially stressed to properly care for her during her declining years much longer. Please!

– your dear and loving sister city, Long Beach, CA, USA.

Why does the city continue to increase the fees when it clearly lacks control of taxpayer’s money? And where are our City Council policy makers? Why isn’t City Council publicly questioning our city manager about his poor sheparding of taxpayer’s money rather than continuing to devise ways to cut city services?