|
|
|
Topic Archive: Police beat
Evidence is mostly anecdotal, but the Times leads the paper with the story anyway.
Posted December 28, 2009 11:21 AM
Thirty-two Los Angeles intersections now have cameras installed to generate traffic tickets and, thus, revenue for the city and the company that runs the cameras. Contrary to the original intent,...
Posted December 24, 2009 12:05 PM
The White House just announced that Andre Birotte Jr, the inspector general of the Los Angeles Police Department, has been nominated by President Barack Obama to be the U.S. Attorney...
Posted December 24, 2009 10:15 AM
That's City Councilmember Janice Hahn and former mayor James Hahn in the front row, flanking their parents at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, site of the county's free holiday concerts. This...
Posted December 20, 2009 11:39 PM
The body of 21-year-old James Wernke was found this morning near a creek bed in Fullerton. There was no immediate indication how he died. Wernke had been missing since taking...
Posted December 15, 2009 1:06 PM
The city of Burbank wants Debra Wong Yang, the Los Angeles police commissioner and former U.S. Attorney here, to help clean up whatever ails the Burbank Police Department. KPCC...
Posted December 10, 2009 4:11 PM
A federal judge dismissed the guilty plea by Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli on charges that he lied to investigators in a stock options backdating probe. AP...
Posted December 9, 2009 5:07 PM
Lawyer and former state assemblyman Walter Karabian won't be charged by the DA over Saturday's incident in which a parking attendant was allegedly struck by Karabian's car at the USC...
Posted December 9, 2009 12:05 PM
Jeffrey Tidus, an attorney with Baute & Tidus in downtown Los Angeles, died this morning of his wounds. He was found shot on the lawn in front of his home...
Posted December 8, 2009 1:58 PM
The interviewer on Los Angeles Kings telecasts on Fox Sports West was stopped early Monday morning, allegedly for driving too slow on the 105 freeway. She was booked on suspicion...
Posted December 8, 2009 1:51 PM
Former state assemblyman Walter Karabian was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly running over a parking attendant at the Coliseum before today's USC game. He...
Posted December 5, 2009 8:52 PM
Today's segment, airing shortly at 4:44 p.m., talks about Phil Spector's visit to the dentist in Toluca Lake. I tie in Roman Polanski moving over to the mountain chalet in...
Posted December 4, 2009 4:29 PM
Officer Aragon was off-duty when his motorcycle crashed around 2:15 a.m. at Fletcher Drive and Larga Avenue, according to the L.A. Times and CBS 2. He was pronounced dead at...
Posted December 3, 2009 3:42 PM
Redondo Beach Police officer Ken Greenleaf had to make the tough call yesterday and put down his dog. Valor, a 5-year-old black-and-gray German shepherd, had been in the hospital with...
Posted December 3, 2009 12:29 PM
KFI's news Twitter feed says that convicted killer Phil Spector is at a dentist's office in Toluca Lake right now, escorted by prison correctional officers. Update: Yes, Spector was allowed...
Posted December 2, 2009 4:35 PM
I guess the media liked the Jerusalem Post story we posted this morning — on a LAPD deputy chief saying the two rabbis shot here in October were "kneecapped" in...
Posted December 2, 2009 3:05 PM
Israeli organized crime activity in Los Angeles has gotten "a little bit worse" recently, LAPD terrorism chief Michael P. Downing told the Jerusalem Post this week on a visit in...
Posted December 2, 2009 10:28 AM
New LAPD chief Charlie Beck sent officers in the field his latest round of promotions and reassignments tonight. Captains Blake Chow, Bob Green and Mike Moriarty make commander, Sharon Papa...
Posted November 30, 2009 8:56 PM
New LAPD chief Charlie Beck has made his first substantial personnel moves. "The new organization includes six Direct Reports and the renaming of two Offices. I have made several selections...
Posted November 23, 2009 5:39 PM
Click to view larger. See more by Steve Greenberg in the LA Sketchbook archive....
Posted November 18, 2009 10:14 PM
New LAPD chief Charlie Beck lives in Walnut, the city that had resisted plans for an NFL stadium in nearby Industry. Walnut has made its peace with the stadium plan...
Posted November 17, 2009 5:21 PM
The City Council this morning unanimously confirmed Charlie Beck as chief of the LAPD. He was then sworn in by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and received the badge from Council...
Posted November 17, 2009 12:57 PM
I have no idea what is really going on at the Burbank police department, only that things seem pretty messed up. This afternoon, Chief Tim Stehr announced he would retire,...
Posted November 9, 2009 5:43 PM
Sacramento's withholding tax increase, a new hit on Nikki Finke and fare hikes at Metrolink, plus much more after the jump. From the weekend: Mark Lacter on the Toyota scandal...
Posted November 9, 2009 9:07 AM
I'm told the political chatter at Saturday night's big True Blue dinner at the new Police Administration Building — to raise about $2 million for the Police Foundation and honor...
Posted November 8, 2009 11:50 PM
My take on the Charlie Beck selection — I hope he's the guy to finish off the old, unprofessional LAPD culture once and for all — airs at 4:44 p.m....
Posted November 6, 2009 4:25 PM
More analysis of Charlie Beck, plus the state's big water deal, blacks and pot in Pasadena, Andrew Breitbart and more after the jump. Also see Mark Lacter's morning headlines at...
Posted November 5, 2009 9:11 AM
In the in-box, sent via the mayor's office email from "Chief Charlie Beck" with the subject line: I'm your new Chief and I want to hear from you. It's straight...
Posted November 4, 2009 1:31 PM
Barbara Walters maybe? Larry King? At least Jon Stewart? No, ex-LAPD chief William Bratton is Thursday's guest with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report....
Posted November 4, 2009 9:13 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa and police chief-nominee Charlie Beck came out of Getty House at 11:06 a.m. The police commission and other invited guests are gathered in front of the residence on...
Posted November 3, 2009 11:10 AM
All three live news shows on local TV — on chanels 2, 4 and 7 — are at the scene of an officer-involved shooting and LAPD standoff in South Los...
Posted November 3, 2009 11:01 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa at 10:16 sent out a Twitter post saying "Meet Charlie Beck, my choice to lead the LAPD," with a link to this bio. The Rev. Carr connection: Villaraigosa's...
Posted November 3, 2009 10:25 AM
KPCC News, KNBC and ABC7 have joined the L.A. Times in reporting they confirmed that Mayor Villaraigosa will name deputy chief Charlie Beck to run the LAPD. Beck was rumored...
Posted November 3, 2009 9:44 AM
Dr. Christopher Thompson was just convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, mayhem and other charges for stopping abruptly and causing injuries to bicyclists he had just passed on Mandeville...
Posted November 2, 2009 4:23 PM
Channel 5's Lynette Romero had a report at the top of the hour from Wilson High School in Long Beach, where the distraught parents of 16-year-old Melody Ross spoke to...
Posted November 2, 2009 1:29 PM
Clearing the decks for the new week: USC president Steven Sample announced that he would step down in August, after 19 years. Honors student Melody Ross, 16, was shot and...
Posted November 1, 2009 11:55 PM
District Attorney Steve Cooley's office announced today there was insufficient evidence of illegal actions by cops and commanders — merely "questionable tactics" — in the 2007 rampage by police in...
Posted October 30, 2009 2:35 PM
Former City Councilman Jack Weiss is the latest blogger finding a home on the Jewish Journal website. (There are 25 others.) His first (I think) post recalls when Gene Bartow...
Posted October 29, 2009 9:35 PM
The Los Angeles Police Department has issued an alert to all Jewish day schools and synagogues in the wake of this morning's attack in North Hollywood. The Jewish Journal has...
Posted October 29, 2009 10:16 AM
Police are investigating this morning's shooting at Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic synagogue on Sylvan Street in North Hollywood as a hate crime. Two Jewish men were shot inside the synagogue...
Posted October 29, 2009 8:36 AM
Pretty shocking numbers in the nationwide crackdown on child prostitution, Hollywood restaurateur booked in death of fetus, new political endorsements and Anderson Cooper's ratings in the tank — plus much...
Posted October 27, 2009 9:12 AM
Sunil Dutta has been promoted to LAPD lieutenant since we last heard about his writing and opposition to capital punishment. He has an opinion piece this weekend in the Ventura...
Posted October 25, 2009 11:17 PM
Sunday's L.A. Times carries a story by staffer Joe Mozingo going back over the evidence that Roman Polanski drugged and raped 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in 1977. The most detailed description...
Posted October 25, 2009 10:13 PM
Mitrice Richardson is the South L.A. substitute teacher who has been listed as missing since leaving the sheriff's station on the Valley side of Malibu Canyon on Sept. 17, following...
Posted October 25, 2009 6:30 PM
In today's radio commentary I argue we should all care about embarrassed cops obtaining the phone records of TMZ's Harvey Levin. The segment airs — as every Friday — at...
Posted October 23, 2009 4:20 PM
Jailed private eye Anthony Pellicano and his sidekick, Alexander Proctor, pleaded no contest today in that 2002 threat on reporter Anita Busch, who they thought was working on a story...
Posted October 23, 2009 3:32 PM
Following his toss-down of the gauntlet last night (reported first at LAO, I feel like saying), TMZ boss Harvey Levin guests tonight on "Which Way, L.A.?" to talk about the...
Posted October 20, 2009 4:54 PM
Blogger offers three finalists for LAPD chief, Polanski staying put and more. After the jump....
Posted October 20, 2009 8:58 AM
Venting in depth for the first time about official prying into his personal phone records, TMZ editor Harvey Levin tonight called it an illegal abuse of power — "a brutal...
Posted October 19, 2009 9:05 PM
Rick Caruso, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission when William Bratton was hired to run the LAPD, argues in a Visiting Blogger post at LA Observed that now is...
Posted October 18, 2009 9:46 PM
Times op-ed columnist Tim Rutten wants LAPD chief William Bratton to stop offering his departing wisdom about the way Los Angeles works. From today's column: The flaw in Bratton's reform...
Posted October 17, 2009 12:18 PM
The real reason David Hockney relocated from Los Angeles to Yorkshire is that the U.S. wouldn't allow his partner back into the country, Tyler Green says in chiding the...
Posted October 16, 2009 5:08 PM
Looks like the Police Protective League is going to meter out these pictures a little at a time.* Still, their point is valid: should LAPD confidential records really be stored...
Posted October 15, 2009 4:44 PM
Laurence Rittenband was the Superior Court judge who handled the original Roman Polanski case, and if the recent documentary is correct, was going to undo a plea deal with Polanski....
Posted October 15, 2009 11:18 AM
Police commissioner Robert Saltzman says the board is under pressure to let the Boy Scouts continue to run the LAPD's Explorer program, despite the group's violation of the city's policy...
Posted October 15, 2009 12:16 AM
The departing police chief rates at least one thing about Los Angeles higher than New York. After the jump....
Posted October 14, 2009 7:35 PM
The Los Angeles Police Protective League says these boxes stacked near the employee entrance of the LAPD's Northeast Station are confidential personnel complaints against officers, "including names, serial numbers and...
Posted October 13, 2009 8:43 PM
Sounds like a compromise to me: City council president Eric Garecetti says there are eight votes to keep hiring enough recruits to match attrition from the LAPD, and Mayor Villaraigosa...
Posted October 12, 2009 11:09 PM
Andrew Adelman, the former general manager of the city's Department of Building and Safety who was accused of raping a woman he met in a bar, won't be prosecuted, DA...
Posted October 9, 2009 9:57 PM
Did the Los Angeles County sheriff's department break the law by obtaining and poring over the phone records of TMZ editor Harvey Levin, looking for evidence that a deputy leaked...
Posted October 9, 2009 9:40 AM
Los Angeles magazine hosted one of its periodic breakfast gatherings with newsmakers this morning at The Foundry on Melrose, with LAPD chief William Bratton invited to give an exit interview...
Posted October 7, 2009 3:32 PM
Officers Richard Amio, Evan Samuel and Manuel Ortiz were accused by the DA's office of lying about evidence that led to the arrest of a drug suspect in Hollywood in...
Posted October 6, 2009 5:59 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa's most non-negotiable agenda has been his push to hire 1,000 more LAPD officers, even as crime rates fall. The City Council has been pushing back, a little, and...
Posted October 6, 2009 9:37 AM
Marina Zenovich, who made the documentary about fugitive director Roman Polanski, says she's pretty surprised to hear former assistant DA David Wells claim now that he lied in the film....
Posted October 1, 2009 12:32 PM
When USC freshman Adrianna Bachan was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver at 3 a.m. last spring, the 18-year-old had a high level of alcohol in her system, according...
Posted September 30, 2009 5:46 PM
This could change some of the legal maneuvering in the Roman Polanski case. Retired prosecutor David Wells says now that he lied when he talks in the 2008 documentary, "Roman...
Posted September 30, 2009 5:25 PM
This is kind of amusing. Yahoo's pick-up from Associated Press on the Roman Polanski arrest in Switzerland seemed for awhile this morning to include some not-for-public-consumption, reporter-editor go-between. "no surprise,...
Posted September 27, 2009 1:00 PM
Director Roman Polanski was arrested on Saturday as he arrived at the Zurich airport to receive an award at the Zurich Film Festival. Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley's office...
Posted September 27, 2009 9:05 AM
Atkins, 61, becomes the first of the Charles Manson followers on life sentences to die while in California prisons. She died Thursday night as the longest-serving female inmate in the...
Posted September 25, 2009 7:24 AM
Joe Francis, the legally challenged "Girls Gone Wild" impresario, accepted a plea offer from the feds today to avoid more jail time over back taxes. From his statement, via flack:...
Posted September 23, 2009 4:42 PM
Gary Leonard read about the approaching truck on LA Observed and headed out to take pictures of the arrival for the Downtown News. The truck from Kansas City rolled through...
Posted September 22, 2009 1:45 PM
Motor officers plan to meet the truck from Kansas City when it reaches Rosemead Boulevard on I-10 at 10:30 on Tuesday. The bikes will escort the truck to a mounting...
Posted September 21, 2009 5:35 PM
Prosecutors still insist that Bruce Lisker probably killed his mother, but the DA's office says a new trial is problematic given the passage of time. Lisker's conviction was overturned by...
Posted September 21, 2009 3:26 PM
On Friday in Kansas City, a memorial to fallen Los Angeles police officers was loaded onto a trailer for the trip west. Kansas City Police officers escorted the truck to...
Posted September 21, 2009 9:02 AM
Pang is the Newport Beach financier accused by federal regulators of a massive fraud in which millions of dollars were re-directed for his personal use. He had been taken from...
Posted September 12, 2009 5:09 PM
Two LAPD officers have been placed on paid leave as investigators figure out how a photo showing the singer's battered face wound up on TMZ. Both cops have been “assigned...
Posted September 11, 2009 10:17 AM
OK I'm biased, but I thought we had a fun 30 minutes with authors Richard Rayner and John Buntin talking about Los Angeles' dark and storied past. Here's the audio...
Posted September 8, 2009 9:37 PM
A media group was escorted Thursday through the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters across Spring Street from the L.A. Times building. The new HQ, as yet unnamed, opens in...
Posted September 4, 2009 8:55 AM
At the morning shift change at the Hansen Dam command post, more than 1,000 firefighters paused to remember Capt. Tedmund Hall and Arnaldo Quinones, the County Fire veterans who died...
Posted September 4, 2009 8:42 AM
Register reporter Greg Hardesty got through to the aunt of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and gets a bunch of exclusive details about the family reunion after 18 years....
Posted September 3, 2009 1:39 PM
The former Charles Manson follower who murdered actress Sharon Tate in Benedict Canyon 40 years ago is reportedly dying of brain cancer and 85% paralyzed. Supporters want her to be...
Posted September 2, 2009 8:24 AM
That is the question explored by journalist John Buntin in a new piece for Governing magazine. Buntin comes at the subject with extensive background: he's the author of a new...
Posted September 1, 2009 10:09 AM
Dave Laut, the athletic director at Hueneme High School, was found shot to death last night in the yard of his Oxnard home. He was 52. Laut, a UCLA graduate,...
Posted August 28, 2009 3:04 PM
The murder victim's missing Mercedes was recovered in the parking lot of the Trader Joe's on Santa Monica, according to law enforcement sources cited by the L.A. Times....
Posted August 26, 2009 4:10 PM
Michael Berkow, the former head of LAPD's internal affairs unit, has resigned as chief of police in Savannah, GA to join a division of the company that recently hired LAPD...
Posted August 25, 2009 11:56 PM
TMZ has the blow-by-blow, so to speak, of Rihanna's awful night in Hancock Park. If you didn't think Chris Brown had a violence problem before, you will after reading it....
Posted August 25, 2009 5:58 PM
TMZ says the manager of the motel in Canada where suspected killer Ryan Jenkins hanged himself identified Jenkins' former fiancee as the woman who dropped him off and paid for...
Posted August 24, 2009 12:36 PM
The coroner found a potentially lethal amount of the anesthetic propofol in Michael Jackson's body, according to a search warrant affidavit unsealed today in Houston. The L.A. Times has a...
Posted August 24, 2009 12:30 PM
The suspected killer of model Jasmine Fiore, Jenkins' ex-wife, apparently hanged himself in a motel room in Hope, British Columbia. CNN, LAT...
Posted August 23, 2009 7:38 PM
While crackdowns on counterfeit clothes and DVDs get more attention, Ed Fuentes reports at Blogdowntown that "the Fashion District's illegal animal trade continues unabated." The photo is by Fuentes. According...
Posted August 21, 2009 10:52 PM
Channel 4's new website is a real piece of work. The lead story up now is about model Jasmine Fiore being killed and left in a dumpster. Look how they...
Posted August 19, 2009 11:55 AM
For want of a permit that officially is easy to get but that nobody seems to know how to issue, Veronique de Turenne has three parking tickets — and a...
Posted August 18, 2009 11:56 AM
Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme is the woman who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento in 1975. Before that, she was the Charles Manson follower who served as the...
Posted August 14, 2009 8:58 AM
Photojournalist Jonathan Alcorn captured the conclusive moment when the suspect was shot with a Taser (or Taser-like) charge, bringing to a close today's lengthy standoff outside the Westwood federal building....
Posted August 13, 2009 10:00 PM
KFI's Eric Leonard is reporting online that Andrew Adelman, the general manager of the city's Department of Building and Safety, is being investigated by the LAPD as "the prime suspect"...
Posted August 11, 2009 4:53 PM
LA Observed contributor Nancy Rommelmann, at her blog up in Portland, steps back and considers the murder of 17-year-old Lily Burk, the way she and others have written about it,...
Posted August 10, 2009 8:57 PM
Twenty five years after he was arrested as a 17-year-old for killing his mother in Sherman Oaks, Lisker must be retried or set free. The judge based her findings on...
Posted August 7, 2009 2:26 PM
In an interview with the New York Daily News, LAPD chief William Bratton said he would not run for elective office, but left open the possibility that he would return...
Posted August 7, 2009 8:54 AM
Steve Greenberg had a nice meeting with LAPD chief William Bratton in June about the LA Sketchbook cartoon on the naming controversy over the new police headquarters. I guess Steve...
Posted August 5, 2009 3:56 PM
More than three dozen journalists, nearly 20 cameras and city officials packed in the mayor's conference room for LAPD chief William Bratton's announcement that he's leaving for New York and...
Posted August 5, 2009 2:29 PM
Police chief William Bratton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have a 12:15 p.m. media availability in the mayor's office. The Los Angeles Times' Joel Rubin reports "Bratton is expected to announce...
Posted August 5, 2009 9:43 AM
The story in tomorrow's Los Angeles Daily Journal, by reporters Ciaran McEvoy and Greg Katz, says the investigation involves payments by Voter Improvement Program Inc. Federal authorities are investigating Los...
Posted August 4, 2009 9:20 PM
A judge today threw out a lawsuit against the city by the mother of Suzie Peña, the 19-month-old toddler killed by an LAPD bullet during a 2005 SWAT action prompted...
Posted August 3, 2009 4:23 PM
The news magazine's Aug. 17 print issue gives the LA Weekly and reporter Christine Pelisek big props for diligent reporting on the serial murders in Los Angeles blamed on a...
Posted August 3, 2009 12:27 PM
My commentary today talks about the murder of 17-year-old Lily Burk and the strong reaction it has evoked in the city. The piece airs at 4:44 p.m., can be heard...
Posted July 31, 2009 4:38 PM
It's an unanswerable question probably, but the LA Weekly's Christine Pelisek says police are puzzled by an aspect of the Lily Burk murder. Surveillance video shows the 17-year-old walking with...
Posted July 30, 2009 10:46 AM
Another lawsuit has been filed against the city of Burbank by officers (or former officers) in the city's police department. This is the second suit alone by former detective Christopher...
Posted July 29, 2009 5:15 PM
This evening's Which Way, L.A.? on KCRW sets up the discussion this way: "The murder of 17-year-old Lily Burk has received saturation coverage. Does a brutal crime contain any lessons...
Posted July 29, 2009 5:08 PM
Police said today that they took transient Charlie Samuel into custody by 5:30 p.m. Friday on drug charges in Downtown. They now have a pretty horrific chronology of the events...
Posted July 27, 2009 1:20 PM
Police announced that a 50-year-old man named Charlie Samuel has been booked on suspicion of murder in Friday's killing of 17-year-old Lily Burk. A press conference is scheduled for 11...
Posted July 27, 2009 9:04 AM
The daughter of Los Angeles journalist Greg Burk and Southwestern Law adjunct professor Deborah Drooz was found slain this morning in her car near Alameda and Fourth Street downtown. A...
Posted July 25, 2009 11:50 PM
An unidentified man was shot dead in his black Lexus about 11 a.m. today in the parking lot of Allstate Insurance in Glendale. Police were searching for a man who...
Posted July 22, 2009 2:50 PM
That South Bay real estate broker whose body was found inside a home for sale in Westchester has the kind of checkered past that will certainly perk up the ears...
Posted July 21, 2009 12:01 PM
News item: LAPD consent decree lifted See more in the LA Sketchbook by editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg....
Posted July 20, 2009 3:34 PM
U.S. District Court Judge Gary A. Feess freed the Los Angeles Police Department from most of the federal oversight that has been in place since the Rampart corruption scandals of...
Posted July 17, 2009 10:22 PM
Robert Korda's body was located by LAPD detectives Sunday in the county morgue. His death is under investigation. Korda disappeared on Wednesday and his son Noah had been seeking help...
Posted July 13, 2009 8:39 AM
Los Angeles and New York both make great settings for police dramas on TV. But why, over the last decade or more, are most of the better ones located in...
Posted July 13, 2009 8:27 AM
Korda, 69 and a veteran of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has not been seen since Wednesday, the day before he was supposed to drive from home in Van Nuys to...
Posted July 12, 2009 11:39 PM
Channel 7 reported tonight that Michael Jackson's casket was removed from Staples Center after Tuesday's memorial while hidden in a SWAT van. Chief Bratton would neither confirm nor deny, saying...
Posted July 9, 2009 11:15 PM
Hmm, selling in a down market. Let the speculation begin. The Times' Hot Property column says that LAPD Chief William Bratton and his wife Rikki Klieman are asking 1.875 million...
Posted July 9, 2009 2:58 PM
The L.A. Times says its comparison of LAPD crime stats to the department's online maps that are supposed to show what's going on in neighborhoods found that 40% of serious...
Posted July 9, 2009 12:50 AM
The Times is reporting that the unidentified detective shot herself last night after walking into the Santa Clarita sheriff's station and speaking to a deputy. She placed a box of...
Posted July 7, 2009 8:34 AM
Dov Charney's L.A. firm today was "fingered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for employing some 1,600 workers at its Los Angeles factories whose eligibility documentation is 'suspect and not...
Posted July 1, 2009 1:25 PM
"Minutes after our 10pm liveshot, FOX News Channel Correspondent Craig Boswell was the victim of a hit & run," Fox 11's Hal Eisner reported on Twitter about half an hour...
Posted June 29, 2009 11:25 PM
U.S. District Judge Gary Feess today extended the consent decree under which he oversees the Los Angeles Police Department until July 15, saying he needs more time to review filings...
Posted June 29, 2009 7:49 PM
Well, let's call it partly politics and partly law enforcement, with some union advocacy for seasoning. It's the new blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which posts today...
Posted June 26, 2009 3:13 PM
A three-year federal investigation into the Mara Salvatrucha gang's activities near Lafayette Park produced a bunch of indictments unsealed today, including that of Alex Sanchez, executive director of Homies Unidos....
Posted June 24, 2009 12:25 PM
Convicted killer Phil Spector was moved Monday to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran, in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno. It's the state's largest...
Posted June 23, 2009 10:51 PM
After Steve Greenberg's LA Sketchbook cartoon suggested a Parker Center naming compromise last month, he heard from the LAPD headquarters that chief William Bratton would enjoy a copy. One thing...
Posted June 23, 2009 7:29 PM
Singer Chris Brown will have to do community labor and five years probation, stay away from Rihanna, give up a DNA sample and other steps in exchange for deal that...
Posted June 22, 2009 2:07 PM
Steve Greenberg was inspired by today's Los Angeles Times Poll story showing higher approval ratings for the LAPD. See more by Greenberg in LA Sketchbook....
Posted June 22, 2009 10:57 AM
A three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeal agreed with a lower court’s decision to throw out a lawsuit that argued the LAPD policy violated federal and state laws....
Posted June 17, 2009 5:16 PM
Attorneys for the city of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Justice jointly asked U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess today to drop the requirement that the LAPD submit...
Posted June 15, 2009 2:36 PM
LAPD chief William Bratton, speaking just now on Fox 11, said officers are trying to clear out the last groups still hanging around Downtown. He says there have been five...
Posted June 14, 2009 10:42 PM
News reports of a Crips gang party in Studio City on Wednesday night made me smile, if only because of the location. The stories gave the club's name as Platinum...
Posted June 12, 2009 11:49 PM
Former music producer Phil Spector's new home is North Kern State Prison in Delano — known in prison system jargon as NKSP. His stay may be temporary, as NKSP...
Posted June 10, 2009 3:10 PM
When I played in a roller hockey league in the Valley, there was a team of deputy sheriffs that always started fights and played out of control — worst in...
Posted June 10, 2009 9:35 AM
The father of Sherri Rae Rasmussen, the victim of the 1986 murder that the LAPD now says was committed by one of its officers, says he told detectives repeatedly about...
Posted June 8, 2009 11:48 PM
Stephanie Ilene Lazarus, 49, was arrested this morning at Parker Center. Cold case investigation into the 1986 beating death of the wife of her ex-boyfriend led to Lazarus, and her...
Posted June 5, 2009 12:20 PM
Coming up on 40 years since the Sharon Tate murders in Benedict Canyon, any mention of the Charles Manson family still generates a predictable surge of traffic on this website...
Posted June 5, 2009 8:59 AM
Rachelle Spector, the wife of jailed killer Phil Spector, broke her media silence about the case over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel with L.A. Times celebrity justice reporter Harriet...
Posted June 5, 2009 8:46 AM
This time, the Queen of England is preparing to honor Los Angeles Police Department chief William Bratton with the title of "commander of the most excellent order of the British...
Posted June 4, 2009 2:57 PM
The only wall of sound Phil Spector will be hearing is the night howls of a state penitentiary. He got 15 years to life for his second degree murder conviction,...
Posted May 29, 2009 11:37 AM
Natasha Vargas-Cooper, who is watching the murder trial of Jesse James Hollywood up in Santa Barbara for The Awl, grew up with killing victim Nick Markowitz in West Hills. The...
Posted May 27, 2009 3:55 PM
Anthony Pacheco unexpectedly announced his resignation as of July 1, saying in a letter to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that he needs to return full-time to his law firm job. Pacheco...
Posted May 26, 2009 1:53 PM
Federal court oversight of the LAPD that was agreed to in a consent decree nine years ago "has been a resounding success, and it should at last be allowed to...
Posted May 25, 2009 11:09 AM
That's what the U.S. Attorney's office here is calling this morning's raids on Latino gang members allegedly responsible for violence against law enforcement and racially motivated attacks against blacks. There...
Posted May 21, 2009 9:57 AM
Officer James Veenstra, who was wounded in the Feb. 2008 SWAT raid in the Valley in which officer Randal Simmons died, was honored at the White House Tuesday along with...
Posted May 12, 2009 11:58 PM
Sahl, who lives in Claremont, was reported missing by his wife on Friday, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune blogged this morning. An afternoon update says that Sahl, who turns 82...
Posted May 9, 2009 2:26 PM
Steve Greenberg is the editorial cartoonist for LA Observed. View his bio and cartoon archive. Click the cartoon to see it bigger....
Posted May 6, 2009 9:10 AM
Two California men were indicted today on federal charges that they illegally smuggled Asian songbirds into the country. One man was stopped at LAX upon return from Vietnam and found...
Posted May 5, 2009 4:08 PM
After OC money manager Danny Pang was released from federal custody in Santa Ana Wednesday and sent to home confinement on $1 million bail, he took exception to photographer Jonathan...
Posted April 30, 2009 10:26 PM
It was on April 29, 1992 that riots broke out at Florence and Normandie, and in the Civic Center downtown, after four white LAPD cops were acquitted in Simi Valley...
Posted April 29, 2009 10:36 PM
Times staffers Jessica Garrison and Kim Christensen went big on Sunday's page one with an expose on oft-accused L.A. slumlord Frank McHugh. Money grafs: For more than 50 years, McHugh,...
Posted April 27, 2009 12:38 AM
Wave Newspapers contributing editor Betty Pleasant got hold of a letter that ex-LAPD chief Daryl Gates wrote ripping L.A. Times reporter Joel Rubin's coverage of the William Parker naming controversy....
Posted April 21, 2009 10:43 PM
The Numero Uno supermarket founder and president was convicted today on federal charges that include racketeering and solicitation of murder. Somewhat of a surprise to court watchers, apparently. Steven Mikulan...
Posted April 20, 2009 4:08 PM
Josue Luna, husband of the woman charged in the hit and run death of USC student Adrianna Bachan, was arrested Friday afternoon while entering the U.S. from Mexico at the...
Posted April 18, 2009 4:27 PM
While director John McTiernan awaits a new indictment over his use of wiretapper Anthony Pellicano in a divorce case, he's pushing a new documentary that alleges the Pellicano prosecution was...
Posted April 15, 2009 5:05 PM
In tomorrow's Daily Journal, staff writer Don DeBenedictis writes that Orange County DA Tony Rackauckas has been dismissing felony drug charges if defendants submit their DNA samples. Upset judges and...
Posted April 14, 2009 8:43 PM
The jury came back today, after nearly 30 hours of deliberation, with a second-degree murder conviction for Phil Spector. He was taken into custody pending sentencing on May 29. The...
Posted April 13, 2009 6:10 PM
L.A. Times writer Thomas Curwen's and photographer Allen J. Schaben's series on Ana Rodarte, 3½ years in the making, has award contender all over it: "Ana Rodarte had given...
Posted April 5, 2009 11:28 PM
I wonder if the $235,000 reward helped? More details to come at afternoon news conference. Student Adrianna Bachan, 18, was killed in the weekend incident and Marcus Garfinkle 19, was...
Posted April 3, 2009 10:37 AM
The Hollenbeck station veteran who said he was shot in the shoulder by two men outside his home in East Los Angeles in January has left the LAPD after being...
Posted March 31, 2009 12:10 PM
Briggs was known around Los Angeles police headquarters at Parker Center as Dr. Dave, Minister of Leather. He shined shoes in the lobby for 21 years and on Monday he...
Posted March 20, 2009 11:20 PM
Kiran Alvi and Stuart McClave, student reporters at USC's NeonTommy, have a good story up — when sheriff's detectives claimed they didn't know how to reach a Compton shooting victim,...
Posted March 13, 2009 4:20 PM
Mark Lacter at LA Biz Observed has been following today's jailing of Bernard Madoff in New York, the New York Times story on Rep. Maxine Waters' questionable involvement with OneUnited...
Posted March 12, 2009 5:21 PM
Former LAPD Sgt. Mark Arneson was handcuffed and led out of court today to begin a 10-year federal prison sentence for his conviction as an accomplice of private investigator Anthony...
Posted March 3, 2009 10:40 PM
A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal slipped by largely unnoticed on Saturday — who reads the Saturday Journal again? — but the yarn by Tamara Audi is a...
Posted March 2, 2009 2:28 PM
Nothing posted yet at the Los Angeles Police Department newsroom or blog, but the officers' union has issued a statement mourning the death at home this morning of South bureau...
Posted March 1, 2009 1:05 PM
Celeste Fremon writes at Witness LA that Ridgway, a supervising deputy probation officer for Los Angeles County, "changed—and in many cases, saved—more lives than anyone can adequately count." Ridgway died...
Posted February 27, 2009 8:38 PM
Officers from the LAPD met mayoral candidate David "Zuma Dogg" Saltsburg at tonight's campaign forum, took him to the Wilshire station and questioned him about an accusation that he directed...
Posted February 26, 2009 10:26 PM
TMZ posted last night a photo it says shows Rihanna with bruises from the alleged attack by singer Chris Brown the night before the Grammys. It appears to be an...
Posted February 20, 2009 8:51 AM
Court houses in Los Angeles County have metal detectors that screen for weapons. You know that, I know that, but apparently many people who come to court don't realize it...
Posted February 19, 2009 5:56 PM
CityBeat this week brings out-of-work classical music critic Alan Rich back into print, at the expense of freelance critic Donna Perlmutter, who wrote for CityBeat for five years (and was...
Posted February 19, 2009 8:35 AM
In a statement this afternoon through crisis managers Sitrick & Co., performer Chris Brown doesn't mention Rihanna but does mention God: Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened...
Posted February 15, 2009 1:45 PM
The Huffington Post says the L.A. Times was the first major media outlet to identify Rihanna as the victim of Sunday's early morning domestic violence, "despite the LAPD's refusal to...
Posted February 9, 2009 11:00 PM
TMZ reports that law enforcement sources tell the site Rihanna was found in Hancock Park with two "huge contusions" on her forehead, and a bloody lip and nose, from the...
Posted February 9, 2009 4:15 PM
Both performers were supposed to appear this afternoon at the Grammy festivities at Staples Center, but instead Brown was being booked at the LAPD's Wilshire station and Rihanna's people were...
Posted February 8, 2009 10:20 PM
Marc Haefele's comparison of Thursday's Drew Street demolition to something out of the Middle Ages struck a nerve in the City Attorney's office, which sent over a response: The February...
Posted February 7, 2009 5:56 PM
The Los Angeles artist best known now for his Obama poster was taken into custody on his way to Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art for the opening of his first...
Posted February 7, 2009 11:53 AM
Residents of Culver City got robocalls on their home phones informing them that the city would be patrolled today by Santa Monica police, while Culver City police attended services for...
Posted February 6, 2009 3:54 PM
Anthony Razo, 49, was attacked as he left his home in City Terrace to play golf about 5 a.m. He is listed in serious condition with a gunshot wound to...
Posted January 31, 2009 12:32 PM
The Culver City Police Department is mourning the death of Sgt. Curt Massey in this morning's wrong-way crash on the Santa Monica Freeway. He was a 17-year veteran and recipient...
Posted January 28, 2009 5:33 PM
The Times and reporters Scott Glover and Jack Leonard say, based on "two law enforcement sources familiar with the case," that Cardinal Roger Mahony is under federal grand jury investigation...
Posted January 28, 2009 4:55 PM
Anonymous LAPD cop "Jack Dunphy" says that officers were told not to wear helmets while working the line at last Saturday's pro-Palestinian rally in Westwood — Dunphy says commanders thought...
Posted January 15, 2009 11:42 PM
Samantha Geimer, who was 13 when director Roman Polanski had his way with her in Jack Nicholson's hot tub back in 1977, filed a formal request today that the legal...
Posted January 12, 2009 6:58 PM
Last year at this time, Brent Hopkins was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News and the guild shop steward/blogger called upon to keep the staff informed through waves...
Posted January 8, 2009 3:29 PM
Henry Casas, deputy chief of staff for Councilman Jose Huizar, has been arrested on suspicion of felony domestic violence. Casas, 40, was booked in Van Nuys on New Year's Eve...
Posted January 5, 2009 5:33 PM
Roman Polanski's lawyers argue that the director's bid to have that pesky sex with a minor case from the 1970s dismissed should be moved because the entire Los Angeles Superior...
Posted January 5, 2009 4:13 PM
Andrew Blankstein reports at the Times: Over the weekend, the LAPD opened its emergency operations center in the wake of Hamas rocket attacks against Israel and the Jewish state's bombing...
Posted January 5, 2009 4:04 PM
Randal Simmons, LAPD SWAT "It wasn't until I saw the 10 o'clock news that I fully appreciated how many people lined Vermont and Slauson to greet the procession escorting...
Posted December 30, 2008 5:52 PM
Still no positive IDs released since the bodies were badly burned, but officials think that Bruce Pardo's ex-wife Sylvia and her parents perished in the house. Pardo had not worked...
Posted December 26, 2008 11:51 AM
The victims of Bruce Pardo found in the Covina home he set afire include his ex-wife and her parents, who owned the home. At least two children who were shot...
Posted December 25, 2008 10:18 PM
Bruce Pardo, 45, showed up dressed as Santa Claus at a Christmas Eve party of his estranged wife's family, opened fire with a handgun and set the house on fire....
Posted December 25, 2008 3:05 PM
He's in Pakistan, of course. Baca was reported to have met with officials in Karachi yesterday on a five-day visit in the country. From The News: Sheriff Baca heads the...
Posted December 18, 2008 9:02 AM
California Editor David Lauter rebutted former reporter Anita Busch's comments yesterday in court tying the L.A. Times to convicted private eye Anthony Pellicano. Lauter, who emailed the response to Patterico,...
Posted December 16, 2008 9:39 PM
The Jewish Journal, breaking new stuff on the local side of the Bernard Madoff story, is blogging developments at Swindler's List....
Posted December 16, 2008 4:29 PM
At today's sentencing of Anthony Pellicano, former Los Angeles Times Hollywood reporter Anita Busch — she's also the ex-editor of The Hollywood Reporter — accuses the Times of collaborating with...
Posted December 15, 2008 9:15 PM
Officer Sanders was killed this morning on the eastbound 60 Freeway in Hacienda Heights when struck by a car while he was tending to a traffic accident. Sanders leaves a...
Posted December 15, 2008 3:25 PM
That 15-year-old San Pedro High School girl who reported two men tried to drag her into a truck [see Morning Buzz] has admitted making up the story. "She said she...
Posted December 11, 2008 4:40 PM
Hollywood financier Ryan Kavanaugh's arraignment on fresh DUI and probation violation charges has been put over to Jan. 22. By then, Sheriff Lee Baca's charity hopes that Kavanaugh makes good...
Posted December 10, 2008 5:18 PM
When Danish fugitive Stein Bagger walked into the LAPD's Central Area station on Saturday to turn himself in, the cops were skeptical. Officer Jack Richter, in the LAT: "We've had...
Posted December 7, 2008 6:31 PM
The Hollywood financier was arrested again for drunk driving, speeding and driving on a suspended license — back in October, while still on probation for an earlier conviction, the New...
Posted December 5, 2008 2:33 PM
I think the actual range is 9 to 15 years, but it's kind of fun scanning the first page of Google News headlines: Simpson gets 18 years in prison for...
Posted December 5, 2008 10:33 AM
Esteban Armando Nuñez, the 19-year-old son of the former Assembly Speaker, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the stabbing death of a 22-year-old college student at a party in San...
Posted December 3, 2008 1:45 AM
SEIU President Andy Stern announced today that Tyrone Freeman, the politically connected head of the union's United Long-Term Care Workers local, would be banned for life and asked to repay...
Posted November 26, 2008 2:15 PM
It's not often you see Hollywood lawyers the prominence of Terry Christensen go to federal prison. He was sentenced today to three years, plus a $250,000 fine, for conspiring with...
Posted November 24, 2008 3:30 PM
Police say a security guard at the Scientology Celebrity Centre International in Hollywood shot and killed a man who brandished a sword in the parking lot about noon today. LAPD...
Posted November 23, 2008 2:58 PM
Sergeant Paul M. Weber takes over as president of the LAPD officers' union. He has been a VP and replaces Tim Sands, who will retire from the department next month...
Posted November 21, 2008 12:46 PM
Tomorrow's Daily Journal will report that the City Council did not approve the proposed settlement of legal claims for victims of the LAPD's misbehavior in MacArthur Park last year. The...
Posted November 19, 2008 7:44 PM
Actually, $10 million is just the reported amount of the settlement between victims and the city of Los Angeles that is being brought today to the City Council, says the...
Posted November 19, 2008 12:28 PM
The depleted Los Angeles Times has suspended publication of the Homicide Report, which at this time last year was one of the breakout hits among the paper's blogs. Its success...
Posted November 18, 2008 11:52 PM
First more than a thousand anti-Prop 8 protesters gathered at the Mormon temple in Westwood. Now, after employees reported receiving an envelope filled with white powder, the temple has been...
Posted November 13, 2008 5:17 PM
Anand Jon, the Indian-born fashion designer who has dressed celebutante Paris Hilton and singer Janet Jackson (big photo gallery on his still-live web site) faced a jury on multiple charges...
Posted November 13, 2008 1:20 PM
The two anti-Proposition 8 demonstrators arrested in Westwood yesterday are employees of Buzznet.com. One of them, Mark Oshiro, blogs about his experience while in LAPD custody and his befuddlement at...
Posted November 7, 2008 3:35 PM
I enjoy Los Angeles history as much as the next guy, and probably more than the guy beside him. Yet I haven't felt motivated to read the L.A. Times' seven-part...
Posted October 31, 2008 1:58 AM
LAPD chief William Bratton has given another interview across the pond — to ITV's London Tonight program (pardon me, programme) — and his remarks about British justice caught the eye...
Posted October 28, 2008 3:52 PM
LAPD chief William Bratton's phone message for Barack Obama "challenged Republican John McCain's 'record on policing issues and extolled Obama's,'" he told the L.A. Times. Bratton said he got involved...
Posted October 23, 2008 10:45 PM
A slide show">slide show at the LA Weekly website displays the weapons, bikes and gang colors seized from the Mongols motorcycle gang after a multi-year investigation by several agencies. This...
Posted October 23, 2008 9:27 AM
LAPD chief William Bratton co-authored an Op-Ed piece in the New York Daily News that posits Osama Bin Laden wants to influence the Nov. 4 election: "If history is any...
Posted October 22, 2008 4:18 PM
Controller Laura Chick calls her audit finding a backlog of 7,000 unprocessed rape evidence kits "one of the most startling and important audits " since she was elected seven years...
Posted October 20, 2008 4:30 PM
In April of 2007, a release arrived from the Hermosa Beach Police Department announcing that longtime spokesman Paul Wolcott was leaving his post. He didn't, until now. Wolcott has an...
Posted October 17, 2008 8:23 PM
Russell Mecano, 40 and an eight-year-veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, was taken into custody at the West L.A. station. From the LAT's Richard Winton: Two law enforcement sources...
Posted October 17, 2008 8:04 PM
The former City Hall power broker and commissioner was sentenced today to state prison in connection with the pay-to-play scandal during the Jim Hahn years. In particular, Wong carried water...
Posted October 10, 2008 4:31 PM
The City Council today approved $50,000 rewards for information on sexual assaults against two women near USC in September. And UCLA police announced the arrest of three suspects in a...
Posted October 8, 2008 3:44 PM
The Sun newspaper in the U.K. continues to call LAPD chief William Bratton "a leading contender to replace ousted Sir Ian Blair as London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner." In a story...
Posted October 7, 2008 11:24 PM
LAPD chief William Bratton attended the London tabloid The Sun's "Broken Britain summit" on crime last week (in conjunction with the Conservative Party), got some attention from the papers, and...
Posted October 5, 2008 10:44 PM
O.J. Simpson was convicted tonight in Las Vegas of all charges — kidnapping, robbery, assault, 12 charges in all. Simpson was handcuffed and taken immediately into custody. Life in prison...
Posted October 3, 2008 11:10 PM
After being told that his wife was leaving him for a younger man, Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy Robert McClain sexually tortured her and her lover for hours and left...
Posted October 1, 2008 2:59 PM
Tibby Rothman's Venice Paper picks up street talk that the murder of a young man Sunday night after the Abbot Kinney Festival was a targeted gang hit. Just talk at...
Posted September 30, 2008 12:25 PM
The city council of Bell Gardens has hired itself a new city manager — and it's Steve Simonian, the former chief of investigations for District Attorney Steve Cooley. What's intriguing...
Posted September 29, 2008 9:07 PM
Fox 11 crime reporter Chris Blatchford is out with "The Black Hand," which Dominick Dunne calls in a blurb, "A gripping, powerful, chilling inside look at a criminal organization that...
Posted September 27, 2008 1:46 AM
Why yes, I believe they did. Terry Christensen's law firm sent out a press release today (via Sitrick & Co.) that says he'll be "withdrawing" from the practice of law...
Posted September 18, 2008 10:33 PM
Signs have begun going up in Downtown advising commuters. A funeral procession for Officer Spree Desha will begin at Parker Center at 8:45 am Thursday and move to the Cathedral...
Posted September 16, 2008 1:32 PM
The LAPD has apparently decided to convene Board of Rights hearings for some of the officers who abused media and protesters in MacArthur Park on May 1, 2007. I know...
Posted September 16, 2008 12:57 PM
The Los Angeles Police Department officer who died in the Chatsworth train collision was identified by the LAPD as Spree Desha, a seven-year veteran who worked in the Office of...
Posted September 12, 2008 11:24 PM
Channel 7 says an unidentified Los Angeles Police Department officer has been confirmed dead in the Chatsworth Metrolink crash. Updates from media monitoring: * Rescue workers have been pulled out...
Posted September 12, 2008 8:56 PM
Poor Linda Deutsch. AP's legendary Los Angeles-based trial reporter is back on the O.J. Simpson beat. She is in Las Vegas for the start of Simpson's latest criminal trial —...
Posted September 10, 2008 12:24 AM
A couple of weeks back I was on a blogging panel with LAist editor Zach Behrens and came to appreciate that he makes more phone calls than most bloggers, often...
Posted September 4, 2008 6:37 PM
It's a long way from Beverly Hills High for disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. LAT story. Previously: Backhanded compliment...
Posted September 4, 2008 5:15 PM
As Mark picked up earlier at LA Biz Observed, prominent lawyer Terry Christensen and former private eye Anthony Pellicano were convicted today of conspiring to illegally wiretap the ex-wife of...
Posted August 29, 2008 5:33 PM
The L.A. Times says it omitted race from the descriptions of three Melrose-area serial robbers by mistake. From the Reader's Representative blog: At least a dozen readers sent a question...
Posted August 28, 2008 9:30 AM
For the eighth time in two weeks, a robber has hit the stretch of Melrose Avenue between Fairfax and La Brea. The latest, at 5:30 pm on Wednesday, occurred just...
Posted August 22, 2008 2:49 PM
Juan Alvarez is sentenced to eleven life terms in the Atwater Village Metrolink crash that killed eleven in 2005. LAT...
Posted August 20, 2008 2:30 PM
The perp is caught on tape at Metblogs....
Posted August 20, 2008 2:27 PM
The South L.A. activist pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe a witness in a criminal case involving his daughter, Jasmin Eskew. Ali's sentence was enhanced because of a 1992 robbery...
Posted August 18, 2008 9:46 PM
A hockey fan who posts at LetsGoKings.com as riseandfall9 describes being shot outside a club in Hollywood and having to call 911 himself even though a half-dozen other people looked...
Posted August 14, 2008 11:56 PM
The funeral for murdered Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Juan Escalante will be held at 9 am downtown at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Burial follows at...
Posted August 8, 2008 8:17 AM
Teams from the FBI, LAPD and other agencies are up on the residence hill at UCLA this morning for a large-scale training drill set in Rieber Hall, an empty dorm....
Posted August 5, 2008 9:14 AM
Back in 2005 we told you about Gene Hughes, creator of the bible of police scanner frequencies. He also volunteered at the desk at the LAPD's Wilshire division. His real...
Posted August 4, 2008 12:23 PM
Juan Abel Escalante, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy assigned to the Men's Central Jail, was shot and killed outside his Cypress Park home as he left for work about...
Posted August 2, 2008 11:26 PM
The former City Hall power player was convicted on 14 counts of bribery, perjury and other charges stemming from influence peddling while he was a commissioner in the Jim Hahn...
Posted July 24, 2008 5:18 PM
Jill Leovy is turning her year as the Los Angeles Times' homicide blogger into a book for Spiegel & Grau. "The Homicide Report: Black Men, Murder and America’s Unseen Catastrophe"...
Posted July 15, 2008 11:06 PM
District Attorney Steve Cooley sent a letter to the chairman of the state Board of Parole Hearings strongly opposing the compassionate release from prison of Manson family killer Susan Atkins....
Posted July 14, 2008 11:10 AM
Christopher Thomas Thompson, who turns 59 today, has been charged with two felony counts each of reckless driving causing injury, battery with serious bodily injury and the special allegation of...
Posted July 11, 2008 2:23 PM
Former deputy mayor (to Hahn) Troy Edwards testified under immunity yesterday at the Leland Wong trial and detailed the gift of sexual favors linked to Wong at a Bonaventure Hotel...
Posted July 11, 2008 8:55 AM
Seventeen officers and two sergeants face department charges resulting from the mishandling of the May Day protest in MacArthur Park in 2007. No details were given, except that Cmdr. Rick...
Posted July 8, 2008 6:07 PM
The LAPD says that in a study it ran in the Valley, DNA samples collected at the scene of residential and commercial burglaries helped identify a suspect in 45 percent...
Posted July 2, 2008 9:55 AM
City Controller Laura Chick wants to audit the City Attorney’s Workers’ Compensation Program. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo declined her request to turn over records, so she is using the subpoena...
Posted June 26, 2008 5:36 PM
Roosevelt Dorn is expected to be charged in connection with a low-income housing loan he reportedly received from the city of Inglewood, according to the Los Angeles Wave and contributing...
Posted June 25, 2008 10:14 PM
Anaheim Ducks co-owner Henry Samueli was suspended indefinitely by the National Hockey League after the co-founder of Broadcom pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the U.S. Securities and...
Posted June 24, 2008 11:20 PM
Today is the 50th anniversary of a story hitting the Los Angeles papers that would become iconic in local literature. On June 22, 1958, 10-year-old James Ellroy came home in...
Posted June 23, 2008 7:23 PM
Susan Atkins, center, did the stabbing of actress Sharon Tate during the August 1969 murders in Benedict Canyon that are popularly blamed on Charles Manson. Atkins was the killer who...
Posted June 12, 2008 11:41 PM
The toll is corrected upward after late killings in Los Angeles, Inglewood and Long Beach. Most are believed to be gang related. LAT Previously: 11-murder weekend in Los Angeles County...
Posted June 9, 2008 2:29 PM
At least eleven, says the Times roundup — nine of them in the city of Los Angeles, and four of those in the Valley. Ruben Vives gives some details on...
Posted June 8, 2008 9:58 PM
Did Henry T. Nicholas III, the co-founder of Broadcom, really spike the drinks of other tech executives with ecstasy? The feds say he did that, and a bunch of other...
Posted June 5, 2008 11:51 AM
Mandalit del Barco of National Public Radio wraps up a four-part series on Los Angeles street gangs with a seven-minute piece on All Things Considered about the feds' decade-long fight...
Posted June 3, 2008 5:42 PM
In an interview with Patterico blogger Patrick Frey, the victim of the dead-fish incident that helped spur the Anthony Pellicano prosecution voices concerns about ties between the convicted private eye...
Posted May 16, 2008 8:35 AM
Verdicts are still being read, but former Hollywood private eye and muscle Anthony Pellicano has been convicted of all but one count of racketeering and conspiracy. (So much for being...
Posted May 15, 2008 12:31 PM
NYT bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer talks to the father of slain teenager Jamiel Shaw Jr. about the hole in his life and his crusade to amend Special Order 40: “I...
Posted May 15, 2008 12:14 AM
Vandals even got the tires on the local tow trucks, forcing delays in the Auto Club's response the next morning. Residents in several neighborhoods discovered they had all been victimized...
Posted May 13, 2008 10:25 AM
Jamiel Shaw, the high school athlete whose murder has provided a new rallying cry for the right in the immigration wars, may have been killed because of his association with...
Posted May 11, 2008 3:12 PM
Councilwoman Hahn responds on her blog to the Fox 11 report that sided with two cops suing the city and tied Hahn to the mother of a Grape Street gang...
Posted May 9, 2008 5:25 PM
Regarding yesterday's item from the Daily Mail about LAPD Chief William Bratton advising the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, Bratton says there has been no contact between them: I have...
Posted May 9, 2008 1:37 AM
Looks like LAPD chief William Bratton could be traveling out of the city more than ever. The mayor of London just announced that he has signed Bratton to help advise...
Posted May 8, 2008 9:18 AM
Film financier Ryan Kavanaugh's company, Relativity Media, backed Columbia Pictures’ “Catch and Release.” Today's NYT uses that connection to lead into a story about Kavanaugh's lawyer trying to use connections...
Posted May 5, 2008 8:59 AM
St. Bernardine of Siena Parish in Woodland Hills has donated nearly $1.5 million of its savings to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to help fund last year's multimillion-dollar...
Posted April 30, 2008 11:27 AM
The Huffington Post's Allison Hope Weiner means it sarcastically: Jettisoning the whole John Adams "fact is a stubborn thing" quote used by Mr. Saunders yesterday, Mr. Pellicano went with his...
Posted April 30, 2008 11:16 AM
Counts of all major crimes are improved compared to last year — except homicide, which at 132 so far is still up 10%. From the LAPD stats: Homicide 132 119...
Posted April 30, 2008 9:09 AM
Lt. Rick Banks introduces himself to readers as the officer in charge who manages the blog "by approving the postings and reading all of your comments and evaluating which ones...
Posted April 24, 2008 12:05 AM
Ex-private eye to the stars Anthony Pellicano told the judge at his trial that he won't be testifying after all. And the accused got a little testy when the judge...
Posted April 23, 2008 5:40 PM
Sheriff's deputies used tear gas to put down a riot that broke out Tuesday afternoon and involved 400 or so detainees at the Mira Loma immigration detention center in Lancaster,...
Posted April 23, 2008 7:53 AM
Looks like Hollywood fix-it lawyer Bert Fields won't be testifying in the Pellicano trial after all. Huffington Post...
Posted April 17, 2008 4:29 PM
Fox 11 reporter John Schwada has posted quotes from a video where Sheriff Lee Baca tells a mostly black audience in Compton that some Latino youths are indeed killing African...
Posted April 15, 2008 2:29 PM
Veteran Fox 11 reporter Christina Gonzalez filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and the police department, saying she suffered "shock and injuries to her nervous system" and "severe...
Posted April 14, 2008 10:06 PM
Nope, the image is not a scene from a movie. It's something better: real life. It's one in a great collection of 960,000 old LAPD crime scene shots that the...
Posted April 14, 2008 12:35 AM
Former New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub, who had teamed with Anita Busch at one point, also took the stand today in the Anthony Pellicano trial. Allison Hope Weiner's...
Posted April 9, 2008 6:19 PM
The reporter who started it all — by being threatend via Pellicano and associates to lay off a story about Steven Seagal — took the stand this afternoon. She recounted...
Posted April 9, 2008 2:50 PM
Allison Hope Weiner has more exclusive audio clips from the Anthony Pellicano case, of Michael Ovitz on the phone asking for a meeting with the felonious private investigator and Hollywood...
Posted April 9, 2008 11:18 AM
How many private cars, trucks and other vehicles would you guess are registered confidentially in California, able to escape parking tickets, toll road fees and those red light cameras? Would...
Posted April 9, 2008 12:27 AM
Times City Hall reporter David Zahniser cracks Column One for the first time with a first-person story about his 1989 Toyota Camry being stolen and recovered three times in six...
Posted March 31, 2008 12:21 AM
The Washington state 19-year-old who cracked the phone system and got Orange County dispatchers to sent a SWAT team to a home in Lake Forest was sentenced to three years...
Posted March 27, 2008 2:35 PM
Betty Pleasant, the Wave's Soulvine columnist, has been hammering away that there is a racial aspect to the gang murders sweeping South Los Angeles and the Eastside. LAPD chief Bill...
Posted March 27, 2008 9:25 AM
The firefighter who suffered fatal injuries today in Westchester was identified this evening as Brent A. Lovrien. He was a 10-year veteran assigned to the 'A' Platoon at Fire Station...
Posted March 26, 2008 10:37 PM
The Smoking Gun claims that the L.A. Times relied on FBI documents fabricated by con man James Sabatino for the paper's report last week that the 1994 shooting of Tupac...
Posted March 26, 2008 9:12 AM
A couple visiting from Colorado had their bikes stolen — and their vacation spoiled — by a "mid 30’s well-dressed white couple" in Santa Monica on St. Patrick's Day. They...
Posted March 25, 2008 11:26 PM
Talk about corrections. Months after finalizing Sara Jane Olson's prison release date, five days after letting her out — but two days after police groups started squawking — the California...
Posted March 23, 2008 11:23 PM
The former Kathleen Soliah was released this week from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla after serving six years. Nabbed after two decades in hiding, she pleaded guilty in...
Posted March 20, 2008 11:58 PM
The body of Alexander Merman, 35, was found shot to death in his Montana Avenue apartment last night. Over the weekend, aspiring actress Juliana Maureen Redding, 21, was found in...
Posted March 20, 2008 1:23 PM
Chief Bratton gave his side of the SWAT report controversy, and talked about having women in the unit, this afternoon on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC. (Audio.) Mayor Villaraigosa was also...
Posted March 18, 2008 5:30 PM
The headline above is the first line of Dr. Mauricio Heilbron Jr.'s Op-Ed piece in today's Long Beach Press-Telegram. The boy is the 11-year-old who was cut down Sunday night...
Posted March 18, 2008 4:20 PM
Oscar Medrano Jr., 47, was picked up by sheriff's deputies at his Gardena jewelry store on suspicion of molesting a 14-year-old girl. No charges filed as yet. Worth noting, I...
Posted March 13, 2008 3:56 PM
Journalists turned out at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a press conference where the Girls Gone Wild founder again ranted about being in jail for most of a year. "We...
Posted March 13, 2008 3:44 PM
That audio of O.J. Simpson hollering at sports memorabilia collectors in a Las Vegas hotel last year was worth $165,000 to TMZ.com, reports The Smoking Gun today. TMZ reportedly bought...
Posted March 10, 2008 5:13 PM
The former California insurance commissioner, who resigned in 2000 amid corruption allegations, is now a deputy sheriff in Florida. And he just shot somebody: a domestic violence suspect with a...
Posted February 29, 2008 3:05 PM
* Rewritten at 2:40 pm with better info Brent Hopkins, the Daily News reporter who has been keeping everybody informed about pending cuts via his blog, took the buyout and...
Posted February 29, 2008 12:35 PM
Kazuyoshi Miura never should have posted on his blog that he would be visiting the Pacific island of Saipan. That's where U.S. immigation officers grabbed him. They were tipped by...
Posted February 28, 2008 4:06 PM
OK, more loot than treasure. But when cops followed the map scrawled by burglar Roberto Caveda and dug where the X was marked near White Oak Avenue and the Reagan...
Posted February 27, 2008 12:02 PM
The L.A. Police Protective League took umbrage at Times columnist Tim Rutten's chiding of Mayor Villaraigosa for injecting a bit of politics into his TV time at the funeral of...
Posted February 23, 2008 9:53 AM
At the end of his monthly visit with Patt Morrison on KPCC today, LAPD chief William Bratton pooh-poohed the need for the paparazzi law proposed by Councilman Dennis Zine. He...
Posted February 20, 2008 9:15 PM
Crystal Dillard, a Los Angeles County probation officer, and her boyfriend — a reputed Crips leader &mdash were among 23 people indicted in a Pomona-based drug ring, authorities announced today....
Posted February 18, 2008 4:56 PM
It could be a prank, pulled by a teenager in another state. They call 911 with a report of hostages and guns, hiding their real phone number ID. The cops...
Posted February 18, 2008 10:20 AM
It wasn't until I saw the 10 o'clock news that I fully appreciated how many people lined Vermont and Slauson to greet the procession escorting the remains of Randal Simmons...
Posted February 15, 2008 10:44 PM
Motorcycle officers working the route of the Randy Simmons funeral procession have marked their helmets with the radio designation of his SWAT unit: 41-D. Holy Geography, Batman: Furnell Chatman, holding...
Posted February 15, 2008 10:30 AM
These didn't occur on Valentine's Day, but they hit the Homicide Report en masse. Got my attention. Athens: Antwan Cole, a 19-year-old young black man, was shot multiple times at...
Posted February 15, 2008 12:47 AM
Enough members of the City Council are attending this morning's services for slain LAPD officer Randal Simmons that the regular Friday session was cancelled. TV stations have agreed on pool...
Posted February 15, 2008 12:06 AM
The paralyzed former LAPD officer and her husband, officer Tim Pearce, welcomed Lucas Braedon Pearce into the world yesterday. All are doing well. Ripatti was shot in South L.A. in...
Posted February 14, 2008 9:19 AM
In his last piece left in the can for the LA Weekly before taking his keyboard to Mexico, Daniel Hernandez uses Elizabeth Palacios's troubles with the law to tell the...
Posted February 12, 2008 11:18 PM
The LAT's Al Seib captures the memorable image of a sad day for the LAPD. It's posted on the Times website, along with a profile of slain officer Randal Simmons...
Posted February 7, 2008 6:06 PM
Robert Parry, a contributor to the Daily News' Friendly Fire blog, attended the SWAT team's annual social dinner at the LAPD academy ten days ago. He was struck that night...
Posted February 7, 2008 1:35 PM
SWAT team veteran Randal Simmons, left, was killed this morning during a shootout with a suspect in the Valley community of Winnetka. He is the first member of the Special...
Posted February 7, 2008 8:30 AM
Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton both called in to El Cucuy de la Mañana's radio show this morning. A suspicious device ignited a fire at a home owned...
Posted February 5, 2008 3:32 PM
Police were stumped trying to solve a string of nine residential heists pulled off inside Downtown's Orsini complex, a previously impenetrable place dubbed the Tuscan Rock by Curbed LA. Then...
Posted February 4, 2008 10:58 PM
In the midst of a spree of retaliatory shootings that has left two three dead and two other victims injured, the gang situation in the San Gabriel Valley community of...
Posted January 30, 2008 3:15 PM
Celeste Fremon asks if the LAPD went too far in breaking up a USC block party over the weekend. There were thrown bottles, a tactical alert and Tasering: Did the...
Posted January 29, 2008 9:15 AM
U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer denied today's latest moves to delay the trial for celebrity private investigator Anthony Pellicano and his co-defendants. It looks more than ever like the trial...
Posted January 28, 2008 3:33 PM
Search warrants were served on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego...
Posted January 24, 2008 1:11 PM
Already in jail for having communication with a witness, O.J. Simpson had his bail doubled to $250,000 by an angry Las Vegas judge. Simpson is expected to post the bond....
Posted January 16, 2008 11:06 AM
The February issue of Playboy, on sale starting today, has a long feature by Joe Domanick on LAPD chief William Bratton, or Supercop as the headline calls him. The piece,...
Posted January 15, 2008 1:16 AM
Dianne Ogden, a longtime music talent coordinator, was one of four women who testified in Phil Spector's murder trial (which ended in a mistrial) that he had threatened her with...
Posted January 7, 2008 10:57 PM
Curtis Bernard Harris had pleaded no contest to possessing a firearm after kidnapping his estranged wife, but was freed without bail on Dec. 21 pending his formal sentencing to 16...
Posted January 7, 2008 1:51 PM
Arthur magazine's columnist Dave Reeves is serving time in Men's Central Jail over a bike accident, and his friends aren't happy about it. "A series of bizarro events and idiocies...
Posted January 6, 2008 10:00 PM
A serial robbery suspect was killed in an early-morning gun battle on Sawtelle Avenue in West Los Angeles. The LAPD officer involved was not hurt. * Not much of a...
Posted January 4, 2008 10:52 AM
Unhappy with the LAPD's new financial disclosure rules for drug and gang cops, the L.A. Police Protective League has bought radio time on KFWB and KABC for an ad that...
Posted January 3, 2008 8:17 PM
Colin Brown headed to lunch at Clifton's Cafeteria today and encountered the remains of a robbery at the Bank of America on Broadway. That's red dye from the exploding pack...
Posted January 2, 2008 8:10 PM
Jill Leovy hinted in this month's profile of her in Los Angeles that she would stop writing the Times' homicide blog in the new year. It's one of the most-read...
Posted January 2, 2008 12:37 AM
Question: Where will Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton drag the media to announce the 2007 crime stats? AKA, a "historic reduction in homicides and violent crime." Presser is Wednesday at...
Posted January 1, 2008 2:59 PM
John Stodder, the former Fleishman-Hillard executive whose wire fraud and conspiracy conviction is on appeal, blogs about the pressure of facing Christmas with a prison sentence hanging over your head,...
Posted December 31, 2007 6:02 PM
The mother of four who took a politically motivated shot at President Gerald Ford in San Francisco in 1975 got out of the low-security Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin this...
Posted December 31, 2007 4:16 PM
Five men aged 18 to 27 have been arrested in connection with the Thanksgiving weekend fire that burned 53 homes in Malibu. Authorities said the fire started as an illegal...
Posted December 13, 2007 7:52 PM
Remember the murder last year in Long Beach of off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Maria Cecilia Rosa? She was apparently surprised by two guys on a morning crime spree...
Posted December 11, 2007 11:40 PM
The District's Rebecca Schoenkopf got to know Sheriff Mike Carona in her OC Weekly days — he once sent her a bottle of wine and chocolate for her son —...
Posted November 1, 2007 11:25 PM
The Times reports, apparently alone, that Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona has been indicted on federal corruption charges. Former Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo already has pleaded guilty and is cooperating,...
Posted October 30, 2007 12:16 AM
Times reporter Peter Hong sat through the whole first act of The People vs. Phil Spector, but he found a way to leave at intermission. He's transferring to the LAT's...
Posted October 16, 2007 1:39 PM
Based on the coverage, the department's long-awaited report blames bad command decisions, gaps in officer training and a small splinter group of trouble-making demonstrators for the May Day melee in...
Posted October 10, 2007 8:45 AM
Just for fun I checked Google News to see how many news websites used "the Juice is loose" in their reports on O.J. Simpson making bail. Surprisingly few: just Access...
Posted September 19, 2007 9:49 PM
Split is 7-5 (but we don't know which way) and the foreman tells the judge he doesn't think they can reach a verdict on Phil Spector's guilt or innocence. Judge...
Posted September 18, 2007 2:10 PM
Pedophile Jack McClellan is staying behind bars, charged with violating a court order to keep away from children. He pleaded not guilty and was ordered held on $150,000 bail. He's...
Posted August 14, 2007 5:31 PM
Reporter Chip Yost simply asked if the self-professed pedophile Jack McClellan wanted to talk after his release from UCLA custody last night — and he did, says Channel 5 executive...
Posted August 14, 2007 11:35 AM
Admitted pedophile Jack McClellan was arrested this afternoon lurking with a camera outside the Megan E. Daly Infant Development Program at UCLA. He is to be released by the UCLA...
Posted August 13, 2007 5:32 PM
The Times has added a whole bunch of filters and details to the new interactive map that goes with Jill Leovy's homicide blog. If you want to just see the...
Posted August 9, 2007 10:28 PM
Man-Ling Williams, 27, was arrested late last night on suspicion of murdering her husband and two young sons in the family home. Neal Williams, 27, had been found yesterday morning...
Posted August 9, 2007 11:18 AM
The jury weighing Phil Spector's guilt or innocence will head out to Alhambra tomorrow to view the foyer where Lana Clarkson died. Special correspondent Linda Deutsch of the Associated Press...
Posted August 8, 2007 5:48 PM
How often do TV stations get to send their nightside crime-and-mayhem crews to a community meeting of angry, frightened citizens at the Hotel Bel-Air? Never! On Thursday night, the rich...
Posted August 6, 2007 10:25 PM
This has been a bad day for the Los Angeles Police Department. Detective George "Mike" Selleh of the Mission station was killed about 3:30 am while riding his motorcycle to...
Posted July 29, 2007 10:26 PM
George Miller, who is 69, was the subject of a legal tussle over access to files kept by the Los Angeles Archdiocese. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Cardinal Roger Mahony's...
Posted July 24, 2007 3:08 PM
I'm guessing she won't get any rehab endorsement deals any time soon....
Posted July 24, 2007 11:14 AM
Lindsay Lohan, fresh off a second stint in rehab, was booked in Santa Monica this morning on suspicion of drunken driving and felony possession of cocaine. She also got nabbed...
Posted July 24, 2007 8:10 AM
Two or three men dressed in black and ski masks have targeted Bel-Air, Holmby Hills and Encino in the evenings and on weekends. Their take in the past year includes...
Posted July 19, 2007 1:47 PM
Hector Villalta, a rookie officer in the West L.A. station, was arrested Saturday on suspicion of sexual assault. A female companion complained the assault occurred after they came home from...
Posted July 10, 2007 4:22 PM
In response to the London bomb discovery, Mayor Villaraigosa wishes to reassure us all that Los Angeles is safe. His statement: Scotland Yard's immediate action to discover and dismantle a...
Posted June 29, 2007 11:17 AM
Now that the L.A. Times has given up on the idea of a readable and substantive Sunday magazine, Angelenos have to look elsewhere for deeper, well-written feature pieces out of...
Posted June 27, 2007 11:53 PM
Civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman was just convicted of tax evasion, money laundering and bankruptcy fraud. The possible tab for nineteen counts: 80 months in federal prison. I'll just assume...
Posted June 22, 2007 4:18 PM
LAPD Chief William Bratton was on the panel as KPCC reporter Patricia Nazario brought many in the audience to tears describing her encounter with a Metro Division officer (and his...
Posted June 21, 2007 8:49 AM
Word out of the Santa Monica courthouse is that Michelle Delgadillo came in this morning, pleaded no contest and received twelve months probation on top of paying fines. Stories forthcoming....
Posted June 20, 2007 2:38 PM
The Police Commission vote on a second term is unanimous. LAT, CBS2, DN...
Posted June 19, 2007 3:35 PM
A federal jury acquitted former LAPD sergeant and Fox News reporter Roderick Bernsen of inappropriate sexual contact in a cruise ship sauna. End of the case, though Bernsen said: "My...
Posted June 11, 2007 3:37 PM
Paris Hilton was dragged out the courtroom — weeping and screaming for her mother — and remanded back to the county jail in Lynwood. Unclear to me in all the...
Posted June 8, 2007 1:24 PM
Paris Hilton can phone in this morning's court appearance after all. Superior Court spokesman Allan Parachini, who has been speaking for Judge Michael Sauer, gave no reason for the change....
Posted June 8, 2007 8:26 AM
You definitely get the feeling the Paris Hilton backlash is a lot bigger than Sheriff Baca gambled on — and the storm is just beginning. Judge Michael Sauer wants Hilton...
Posted June 7, 2007 5:31 PM
Cynthia Littleton reports on her Variety blog that the LAPD has closed off Wilshire Boulevard outside the Screen Actors Guild, meaning it's also right outside Variety, E!, KNX-KFWB and the...
Posted June 7, 2007 2:42 PM
Paris Hilton was fitted with an ankle bracelet and released to house arrest after serving the four-plus days in county that are more typical for her kind of offense. The...
Posted June 7, 2007 8:08 AM
Paris Hilton turned herself in at the Men's Central Jail downtown on Sunday night — after attending the MTV Movie Awards — and was driven to her temporary new digs...
Posted June 4, 2007 8:02 AM
The former city comissioner, already waiting trial on bribery and other charges, will be arraigned tomorrow on a new conflict of interest felony that stems from his time on the...
Posted May 31, 2007 4:21 PM
Veronique de Turenne at Here in Malibu says signs are posted everywhere about the year-old German shepherd taken by a 50-ish overweight woman with bleached blond hair who drove a...
Posted May 30, 2007 6:55 PM
The L.A. Police Protective League acknowledges "missteps" by the LAPD during the May 1 melee at MacArthur Park and yesterday proposed more and better training for offices and commanders —...
Posted May 29, 2007 1:11 AM
The LA Weekly's Steven Mikulan has been covering the Phil Spector trial like a theater performance, observing the development of characters and scenes. Hey, you may as well. I just...
Posted May 24, 2007 9:17 AM
Four Daily News reporters — Jason Kandel, Brent Hopkins, Rick Coca and Rachel Uranga — are contributing items to It's a Crime, with a Valley bias to the mix. Roll...
Posted May 23, 2007 8:40 AM
A suspicious item in checked baggage has closed part of the airport for the second time in less than 24 hours. The LAPD says its bomb squad is en route....
Posted May 17, 2007 12:45 PM
The L.A. County Sheriff's department now says Paris Hilton won't be treated any differently than other low-risk inmates when she turns herself in next month to begin a 45-day term....
Posted May 10, 2007 3:34 PM
It's Sergio Diaz, Assistant Commanding Officer of the Special Operations Bureau, says LA Weekly contributor Celeste Fremon at WitnessLA. She gives Diaz a strong personal endorsement: "One of the smartest,...
Posted May 8, 2007 4:33 PM
Today's Daily Journal has a front page story by Sandra Hernandez reporting on the forcible drugging and botched deportation of two men by agents for the Department of Homeland Security....
Posted May 8, 2007 8:56 AM
Mayor Villaraigosa, Chief William Bratton and police commission president John Mack have called a 3:30 news conference that the mayor's office bills as "to discuss changes in LAPD command staff"...
Posted May 7, 2007 1:11 PM
Paris Hilton will get no work release, furloughs, cushy suburban jail or electronic monitoring and instead must spend a month and a half locked up at the Century Regional Detention...
Posted May 4, 2007 5:23 PM
With the LAPD yet again giving the city a black eye, Mayor Villaraigosa cut short his trip to Latin America and will return to Los Angeles Friday morning. He broke...
Posted May 3, 2007 10:42 PM
It was just a few months ago that LAPD chief William Bratton argued that the department had learned its lesson and no longer should operate under a consent decree or...
Posted May 3, 2007 1:03 AM
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's statement on the violence against the police, and by the police, during the May 1 rally in the park. Yesterday, across the country, we witnessed a day...
Posted May 3, 2007 12:19 AM
From the Los Angeles Press Club and SPJ after the jump, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at the link, in response to yesterdays injuries by journalists at the...
Posted May 2, 2007 11:50 PM
Those are reporter Christina Gonzalez's words on Fox 11 after she was shoved and laughed at by LAPD riot cops while coming to the defense of the station's camera operator,...
Posted May 2, 2007 11:22 AM
Yesterday's number of marchers was small compared to last year, perhaps 25,000 strong, and peaceful. But the day ended with police moving in to MacArthur Park after reporting that bottles...
Posted May 2, 2007 7:41 AM
Raul Gama, a 20-year veteran Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy on surveillance duty in North Hollywod, died this morning when a van smashed into his unmarked parked car. The...
Posted May 1, 2007 4:12 PM
The father with two kids who tried to stiff the Northridge Claim Jumper last Thursday night sure picked the wrong night at the wrong place to walk out on his...
Posted April 30, 2007 8:25 AM
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has charged Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis with one count of misdemeanor sexual battery for allegedly touching an 18-year-old woman on the breast, buttocks and...
Posted April 25, 2007 10:47 AM
The Los Angeles Korean community has been closely following the news out of Virginia Tech, and Radio Korea here is reporting rumors that the father and mother of Cho Seung...
Posted April 18, 2007 10:38 AM
LAPD chief William Bratton did the deed today and requested a second term. "It's been an honor and a privilege to serve as Los Angeles' chief of police," he said...
Posted April 2, 2007 6:17 PM
Good piece in the Sunday LAT that began as a post on Jill Leovy's Homicide Report blog: LAPD officers frequently assign the wrong name to Latino crime victims and arrestees....
Posted April 1, 2007 3:09 PM
KFI News' Eric Leonard reports on his blog that at least two California Highway Patrol officers assigned to the Newhall station were placed off-duty during an internal investigation of allegations...
Posted March 13, 2007 10:58 PM
Jill Leovy asks the question in her Homicide Report blog at LATimes.com: "Are Black-vs.-Brown Racial Tensions Driving Homicide in L.A.?" Her answer is no. Take the four most violent Los...
Posted March 1, 2007 11:41 PM
It's not quite O.J. Simpson-in-a-white Bronco, but it's still a premium-grade L.A. police chase tale. During yesterday's press conference to remember the 1997 North Hollywood police shootout, the cameras —...
Posted March 1, 2007 9:58 AM
Watching this YouTube video of new Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department hires reporting for training last July — assuming it's the real thing — made me wonder about claims that...
Posted February 22, 2007 6:30 PM
Former Orange County Superior Court judge Ronald C. Kline — who pleaded guilty to possessing child porn — heard that he was headed to federal prison for 27 months and...
Posted February 20, 2007 2:09 PM
Nemesis of Evil posted tonight at 9:01 pm that the bomb squad was outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Weyburn and Gayley in Westwood Village. Then came the...
Posted February 19, 2007 10:05 PM
Jill Leovy's LAT homicide blog now takes note of 99 killings across Los Angeles county so far this year, about three a day. That's lower than last year's daily average,...
Posted February 13, 2007 12:29 PM
First there was "Jack Dunphy" opining anonymously at the National Review Online. Now there is Sgt. Sunil Dutta writing in the latest issue of The Nation, under his real name,...
Posted February 12, 2007 1:38 AM
Police in riot gear arrived in force tonight at the Ramona Gardens housing project where tensions are running high over the death in custody of Mauricio Cornejo, a 31-year-old parolee...
Posted February 6, 2007 11:18 PM
The now-18-year-old girl got probation and community service like the others, but did not receive sixty days of house arrest. She told the judge she was "truly saddened" by the...
Posted February 6, 2007 12:48 PM
Covering murder and mayhem in Los Angeles for the Times, Jill Leovy has been driven crazy knowing that for every homicide that captures the media eye there are others that...
Posted February 5, 2007 8:11 PM
Judge Gibson Lee gave four more girls convicted in the Halloween attack the same sentence as those juveniles he sent home last week: probation, 60 days house arrest, 250 hours...
Posted February 5, 2007 1:09 PM
The New York Times received a partial transcript of O.J. Simpson's never-televised Fox interview with Judith Regan describing how the 1994 murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman might have...
Posted February 4, 2007 12:22 PM
Former USC gene therapy scientist William French Anderson, one of the world's most acclaimed scientists, received 14 years in prison today for sexually abusing the young daughter of his number...
Posted February 2, 2007 1:07 PM
Ahmed Rashed, a third-year resident at King/Drew Medical Center, pleaded guilty to stealing a hand from a cadaver at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark. That's not the...
Posted February 2, 2007 10:34 AM
Allegations of felony assault against nine juveniles are found to be true, not true for the youngest accused. The hate crime allegations are also found true against eight of the...
Posted January 26, 2007 1:58 PM
Sheriff's deputies are "relatively sure" they have the guy who spilled mercury in the Pershing Square Metro station last month. Armando Bustamante Miranda, 27, was being held on an...
Posted January 23, 2007 4:43 PM
The suspect killed this morning by police was handcuffed at the time he was shot, but had managed to reach a gun in his pants and open fire on officer...
Posted January 22, 2007 9:20 PM
Authorities now are actively looking for the man shown in surveillance video pouring or spilling liquid mercury onto the platform of the Pershing Square Metro station the night of Dec....
Posted January 18, 2007 2:25 PM
Steven Garcia, the LAPD officer who shot and killed 13-year-old suspect Devin Brown, today released the finding of the confidential Board of Rights proceeding that cleared him of wrongdoing. The...
Posted January 12, 2007 1:43 PM
How times have changed. The FBI filled a room at the Westwood federal building yesterday with screenwriters invited in for a seminar on how to realistically portray anti-terrorist efforts. Special...
Posted January 11, 2007 1:42 AM
The suspect was reaching for his waistband as he exited a disturbance at a South Los Angeles Masonic lodge early this morning, the sergeant who shot him told investigators. After...
Posted January 10, 2007 12:48 PM
Times columnist Steve Lopez isn't the only one keeping a literal eye on construction of the new LAPD headquarters on the downtown block where a civic park should be instead....
Posted January 10, 2007 12:21 PM
They got their man. Jorge Arroyo-Garcia, better known as Armando “Chato” Garcia, was extradited from Mexico and turned over to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators before dawn at the...
Posted January 9, 2007 4:22 PM
One of the traffic engineers being arraigned today for shutting down four intersections on the day that EAA went out on strike was featured last January in a Downtown News...
Posted January 8, 2007 10:24 AM
What a story. Two high-ranking city traffic engineers, Gabriel Murillo and Kartik Patel, were charged Friday with breaking into the city's automated traffic system and disabling the lights at four...
Posted January 6, 2007 9:32 AM
Noted, since it hasn't been included in the mentions here of Jim Lampley's arrest: "I am innocent of the charge of domestic abuse that has been leveled against me and...
Posted January 5, 2007 12:09 PM
Today's Wall Street Journal front page says that in breaking up an international car theft ring recently, the LAPD interrupted the flow of profits to terrorists in the Republic of...
Posted December 29, 2006 11:28 AM
Five more LAPD officers will hold a press conference Friday to allege misconduct by ex-deputy chief Michael Berkow, Eric Leonard reports at KFI.com. Berkow is the former head of internal...
Posted December 28, 2006 11:53 PM
James Mee, the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who arrested Mel Gibson in Malibu, claims through his lawyer that he's being harassed by supervisors. Mee's arrest report, you might remember,...
Posted December 27, 2006 7:09 PM
Yeah, the former head of LAPD internal affairs cops to the affair with a sergeant under his command — but only for three years! Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally apologized (sort...
Posted December 19, 2006 5:55 PM
Harvey Levin, who covered the O.J. Simpson legal circus for CBS 2, has some observations over at TMZ.com on Brian (Kato) Kaelin, who lived in a guest house on Simpson's...
Posted December 15, 2006 12:42 AM
Chief William Bratton says in the LAT that the department is investigating the former deputy chief in charge of internal affairs over allegations that he exchanged preferential treatment and promotions...
Posted December 14, 2006 3:34 PM
Jill Leovy covers homicide and the police for the L.A. Times, often in South Los Angeles. She writes today at Salon.com that the recent uptick in murder stats and spreading...
Posted December 14, 2006 11:31 AM
Michael Buchanan, the security guard who stabbed an intruder at the Beverly Hills home of celebrity trainer Gunnar Peterson, is an ex-Rampart Area officer who was fired from the LAPD...
Posted December 12, 2006 4:13 PM
Records containing the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of students, faculty, employees and some applicants since the early 1990s may have been accessed. The online intrusion went on...
Posted December 12, 2006 12:23 AM
One day after ABC featured LAPD officer Kristina Ripatti on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Chief William Bratton sent out an update on all the officers who are living with serious...
Posted December 11, 2006 11:21 AM
If you saw the SUV barreling the wrong way in the carpool lane on the 134 early this morning, first, congratulations for not getting killed. Second, the SUV driver who's...
Posted December 11, 2006 11:08 AM
Sean Joseph Meade, 41, was taken from home on order of Chief Bill Bratton after a videotape allegedly showed him choking a handcuffed sixteen-year-old suspect at the Central station. Meade...
Posted December 7, 2006 1:33 PM
Suspected gang members backed into and nearly totaled the car of a black woman who has been testifying for several days in the racially inflamed trial over assaults on white...
Posted December 6, 2006 2:11 AM
Warren Price had been on the run for almost nine years since the 1997 murders of a man and pregnant woman in Kansas City who were innocents in a bungled...
Posted November 30, 2006 4:52 PM
District Attorney Steve Cooley says no charges are warranted in the shooting death of toddler Suzie Peña since the SWAT officers who fired were defending themselves against her father. One...
Posted November 28, 2006 12:20 PM
Two more items today on the LAPD blog take issue with stories in the Daily News. First, a watch commander in the Valley continues the department's high-level bristling at Mariel...
Posted November 27, 2006 11:55 PM
Elderly driver George Weller was given five years probation, fined $20,000 and ordered to pay $24,000 in penalties plus restitution to the families of some of his victims for killing...
Posted November 20, 2006 11:13 AM
A Halloween night attack on three white women by 20 to 40 blacks (according to the Press-Telegram) is causing a lot of community upset in Long Beach. One woman suffered...
Posted November 17, 2006 12:31 AM
Columnist Mariel Garza's recent column about the LAPD prompted Chief William Bratton to reply on the department news and PR blog. Her column described the trouble Garza's Cal State Northridge...
Posted November 16, 2006 6:39 PM
A shouting student inside Powell Library at UCLA was shot with a stun gun at least twice last night, once after resisting police orders to "stop fighting us" when they...
Posted November 15, 2006 10:18 PM
This time it's not Vernon, B.C. but our own city of Vernon. Mayor Leonis Malburg, who has ruled the industrial city for fifty years — that's five-oh — was charged...
Posted November 15, 2006 4:05 PM
Former LAPD sergeant and Fox 11 reporter Rod Bernsen was arraigned today in federal court and said he will fight the charges that he touched two boys inappropriately on a...
Posted November 13, 2006 11:06 AM
Those sex charges against former FOX 11 reporter, KFI host and LAPD spokesman Rod Bernsen aren't going away. He was indicted Thursday on two federal felony counts of "abusive sexual...
Posted November 10, 2006 1:41 AM
The feds have an opened an investigation into the latest videotaped incident involving what looks to be excessive force by LAPD officers. The suspect, gang member William Cardenas, had run...
Posted November 9, 2006 6:38 PM
The last minutes aboard the yacht Well Deserved before Thomas and Jackie Hawks were tied to the anchor and tossed overboard alive makes for a chilling read. The testimony, from...
Posted November 9, 2006 11:26 AM
Jurors in the grand theft trial of Swedish bad boy Bo Stefan Eriksson could not reach a verdict and the judge just declared a mistrial. Prosecutors said they will try...
Posted November 3, 2006 1:26 PM
When the FBI and Santa Monica police served search warrants at the home of Animal Liberation Front supporters Jerry Vlasak and Pamelyn Ferdin this week, they gained entry through a...
Posted November 3, 2006 12:27 AM
That car allegedly stolen by Joel Campos of San Pedro? It belonged to Ramona Hahn, mother of the former mayor and the current city councilwoman. That LoJack system? It worked....
Posted November 2, 2006 9:16 AM
Chief William Bratton opens his latest newsletter with praise for the Glocks and Tasers that LAPD officers are starting to carry, and lists some of the more high-tech tools that...
Posted November 1, 2006 9:36 AM
A powdery substance found this evening sent everyone down to the lobby. A Los Angeles Police Department Hazardous Materials team is on the scene along with the health department. *...
Posted October 24, 2006 10:36 PM
The three-year veteran was killed Sunday morning during a routine traffic accident investigation at Riverside Drive and Hyperion Avenue. He was in the street when struck by a car traveling...
Posted October 23, 2006 1:47 AM
Remember the amazing news that newlywed James Woodson died from a bullet that came out of the air and struck him in the back while he gardened in Sherman Oaks?...
Posted October 20, 2006 1:56 AM
Agents from the FBI's foreign counterintelligence unit have searched the Valley Village home of Abraham Lesnik, a senior scientist on anti-missile systems, looking for evidence that high-security information in his...
Posted October 19, 2006 9:46 AM
ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" demolished the Redondo Beach home of paralyzed LAPD officer Kristina Ripatti last week — and now needs construction workers to finish the rebuild before she...
Posted October 16, 2006 7:51 PM
James Mee, the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy in Malibu who booked Mel Gibson in July, had his home computer confiscated and other records seized last month, TMZ reported this...
Posted October 12, 2006 5:13 PM
Former Fox 11 reporter and KFI talk host Rod Bernsen appeared in federal court today and was ordered released on $850,000 bail. He has a November 13 court date for...
Posted October 10, 2006 5:59 PM
Former Fox 11 reporter and KFI fill-in host (as well as retired LAPD sergeant) Rod Bernsen will be charged in federal court Tuesday in connection with "an investigation into alleged...
Posted October 9, 2006 8:56 PM
Author and former Los Angeles cop Joseph Wambaugh, writing on the Times op-ed page, calls Rossmore Avenue his favorite L.A. street and only partly because James Ellroy lives on it....
Posted October 9, 2006 2:45 AM
LA Observed regulars may remember last year when Will Beall, a homicide investigator for the LAPD in 77th Street Division, sold a novel called L.A. Rex to Riverhead and the...
Posted October 4, 2006 2:37 AM
Eighteen members of the big and notorious 18th Street Gang were indicted on federal charges of "selling" streets in Koreatown and the MacArthur Park district to drug dealers. The ring...
Posted September 12, 2006 3:05 PM
Authorities spent much of the night searching Pier 300 in the Port of Los Angeles after an anonymous bomb threat was called in. A man, reportedly with a Middle Eastern...
Posted September 11, 2006 9:09 AM
On Tuesday, News and Chatter noted that James Ellroy's copies of the Steve Hodel book, Black Dahlia Avenger, appear to be for sale on eBay. In today's CityBeat, Ellroy elaborates...
Posted September 7, 2006 2:22 PM
I haven't checked back to compare his past talk, but it feels like LAPD Chief William Bratton has been cranking up the rhetoric. In his latest monthly missive on the...
Posted September 6, 2006 11:42 AM
The headline is LAPD-ese for "he's in trouble." According to the department news blog, Officer Chris Walker of Pacific Division was at home around midnight when he heard his wife...
Posted August 29, 2006 3:51 PM
Ca Del Sol in Toluca Lake was robbed at gunpoint about 10 pm last night. Two gunmen came in wearing masks and emptied the cash register. Sound familiar?...
Posted August 21, 2006 9:38 AM
TMZ reports that Mel Gibson's lawyer dropped in on Malibu's courthouse today and revealed a deal with prosecutors. He pleads no contest to misdemeanor drunk driving, but counts of driving...
Posted August 17, 2006 12:25 PM
LAPD officer Edward Beltran Zamora has been charged with filing a false police report and making false arrests. He surrendered at Parker Center then was released on $20,000 bail. The...
Posted August 11, 2006 11:24 AM
LAPDBlog.org gets about 2,000 visits a day. Chief William Bratton sees it as mainly a tool for the department to put out its version of events without media interference, as...
Posted August 9, 2006 11:22 AM
John Hatfield contends that Chief William Bratton unduly influenced the LAPD Board of Rights that fired him. Hatfield is the officer who applied a flashlight to the head of auto...
Posted August 7, 2006 1:11 PM
Former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Gabriel Gonzalez assaulted women he stopped while on patrol in the Compton area. He was convicted in federal court earlier this year....
Posted August 3, 2006 5:34 PM
The Valley Inn, just off the 405 freeway in Sherman Oaks, is about the 200th restaurant in the Valley to be hit during a spree that has been especially hard...
Posted August 3, 2006 12:31 PM
Until Mel Gibson's real arrest report leaked out, Steve Whitmore was not the most visible of law enforcement media handlers. Cindy Beavers with the San Bernardino County sheriff's and that...
Posted August 2, 2006 11:11 PM
So much for Mel Gibson wrapping himself in God. When he was arrested Friday on suspicion of DUI in Malibu, a very un-pious Gibson resisted the deputy and threatened repeatedly...
Posted July 29, 2006 6:37 PM
TMZ.com says that Mel Gibson was arrested this morning on suspicion of DUI by the Malibu sheriff's. He made the mistake of speeding in the dark on Pacific Coast Highway....
Posted July 28, 2006 2:25 PM
Sheriff's homicide detectives plan to ask for the public's help in locating 54 women (!) whose pictures were found in the home of multiple murderer William Bradford, who used to...
Posted July 25, 2006 11:47 AM
At gunpoint, no less. Channel 2 News says the actor's Thunderbird jumped the curb, sped into the parking lot of Nina's Kitchen Bath and Hardware at Wilshire and Saltair in...
Posted July 19, 2006 6:10 PM
We bloggers are not supposed to mention the ads that Google AdSense places on our sites, for fear that the mention will trigger click fraud. So I'm not suggesting you...
Posted July 19, 2006 5:29 PM
Back in June when the LA Weekly proclaimed that a serial killer had preyed on ten Los Angeles-area prostitutes, the paper fingered its favored suspect sitting in a Fresno jail....
Posted July 17, 2006 2:47 PM
News and observations from around town, mostly off the police beat today: Chief Bratton told KPCC's Patt Morrison that an internal investigation is looking into reports of overfly forceful LAPD...
Posted July 11, 2006 5:18 PM
KCRW music host Chris Douridas will NOT be charged with kidnapping or a sex crime in connection with his arrest on suspicion of drugging a 14-year-old girl at Santa Monica's...
Posted June 26, 2006 3:35 PM
Civil rights attorney—and long-time thorn in the side of local law enforcement officials—Stephen Yagman has been indicted on nineteen counts of income tax evasion. The indictment dated June 1 was...
Posted June 23, 2006 12:25 PM
Alvaro Luna-Jara, a member of the Dogtown street gang, is suspected of shooting and killing 12-year-old Steven Morales on Avenue 58 in 1998. Luna-Jara fled to Mexico and was nabbed...
Posted June 22, 2006 4:16 PM
An LAPD officer on his way to work at 2:30 am had stopped to help at a wreck near Disneyland when his motorcycle was rammed by an SUV. He's in...
Posted June 16, 2006 10:09 AM
© 2003-2015 • About LA Observed • Email the editor
| The funeral for Mark Lacter will be held Sunday, Nov. 24 at 12 noon at Hillside Memorial Park, 6001 W. Centinela Avenue, Los Angeles 90045. Reception to follow.
Before I lived in Echo Park, there was a tiny 1920s bungalow-cottage-standalone house on N. Occidental in Silver Lake. I...
I don't know why it's taking me so long to choose the new platform for this blog. Well, that's not...
Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.
