Tag: LosAngeles

LA’s Rape Cases.

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The NY Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes disturbingly about how rape and prosecuting rapists is still constrained by the slowness of evidence gathering and testing:

“A 43-year-old legal secretary was raped repeatedly in her home in Los Angeles as her son slept in another room. The attacker forced the woman to clean herself in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

Tim Marcia, the detective on the case, thought this meant that the perpetrator was a habitual offender who would strike again. Mr. Marcia rushed the rape kit to the crime lab but was told to expect a delay of more than one year.

So Mr. Marcia personally drove the kit 350 miles to deliver it to the state lab in Sacramento. Even there, the backlog resulted in a four-month delay — but then it produced a “cold hit,” a match in a database of the DNA of previous offenders.

Yet in the months while the rape kit sat on a shelf, the suspect had allegedly struck twice more. Police said he broke into the homes of a pregnant woman and a 17-year-old girl, sexually assaulting each of them.

“The criminal justice system is still ill equipped to deal with rape and not that good at moving rape cases forward,” notes Sarah Tofte, who just wrote a devastating report for Human Rights Watch about the rape-kit backlog. The report found that in Los Angeles County, there were at last count 12,669 rape kits sitting in police storage facilities. More than 450 of these kits had sat around for more than 10 years, and in many cases, the statute of limitations had expired. ”

’64 Coupe DeVille

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’64 Coupe DeVille, originally uploaded by here in van nuys.

Crude Times.

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crudenessOnce upon a time, there were public words that were not generally uttered in public. Comedian George Carlin was famous for reciting the seven dirty words that you could not say on television in 1972.

Gradually, we know that swearing and public vulgarity are now out in the open, for anyone to see.

Barnes and Noble, a respected national retailer of books, has a big sign in their window at The Grove advertising a woman who calls herself “E’s Answer Bitch”.

I don’t know who Leslie Gornstein is, nor do I really care, since her affiliation with “E!” is enough to make me not want to watch her or buy her books.

But I wonder about the word “bitch”, a term that many people find to be just as demeaning to woman as “slut” or “c–t”. Why is it funny? And why is it proper and fitting for a chain store to advertise this ugly word in big letters on their front windows when thousands of children pass by here daily? Does a woman calling herself “bitch” make it right?

What if I were to go into this Barnes and Noble and walk up to a female worker and say to her, “Hey, Bitch can you find me a book?” What would her possible reaction be? Would a waiter working in a restaurant in The Grove walk up to a table of old ladies and ask, “Hey you old bitches, are you ready to order?” Of course not. But someone at Barnes and Noble has spent thousands promoting the “E!’s Answer Bitch” and printing posters to hang in the window.

Maybe it is something small or unimportant to get offended about. But I offer this poster as an exhibit to just how crude the times we live in are.

Los Angeles Traffic: 1947

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1947: Traffic in Los Angeles/ Olive and 6th/ Credit: Life Magazine
1947: Traffic in Los Angeles/ Olive and 6th/ Credit: Life Magazine

In 1947, Life Magazine published a photograph of Los Angeles trafffic, near Olive and 6th, downtown.

Where the Workers Are.

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On blissfully sunny drive around the San Fernando Valley today, I went on a couple of errands. As usual, there were stopovers at places that make me feel like I am connecting to the larger world, that bigger universe of ideas and thought: Borders and Starbucks.

At Borders, there are just so many magazines. It is hard to look at these glossy promotions of a better life, especially when you know the truth is so much less than those covers promise. There are dozens of publications telling you how to make money; many others show impossibly lovely homes and landscaping; others have gourmet eating, sophisticated international travel, weight loss, weight gain, muscle gain, celebrity child rearing tips. There is not an average looking person on any cover, unless they are working for the Obama Administration.

Books, like magazines, are just as eager to sell titles promoting any point of view that might sell. One book that I recently bought, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink, postulates the idea that all those “experts” and people like engineers, doctors and financiers, will lose out to generalists of the imagination, like Andy Hurvitz. I will treasure this book as I collect my unemployment check and fondly remember earning my BA in English from Boston University.

At Starbucks, in Toluca Lake, one can plug their laptop into an outlet and conduct online activities. This will be done while the accompanying Hollywood schmoozers pour in and out the door with fantastic tales of meetings they just had over at NBC, Warner Brothers and Disney. Somehow, their great projects and plans always end up in a coffee store at 2:30 on a weekday afternoon.

The whole world, of course, is not unemployed. There are still many productive people who work within those padded cubicles, and collect paychecks every week. They spend hours on Facebook and Yelp, but unlike those of us at Starbucks who do the same, these employed people have a fabulous sense of purpose and accomplishment, a feeling that they are working and earning something tangible.

Excuse me while I go and order a tall latte.

Is Traffic in LA Easing Up?

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Perhaps I am hallucinating, but there seems to be less traffic in Los Angeles in the last couple of months.

Last night, there was a crazy two-hour car chase that was televised on all the local news stations. A woman in Palmdale had stolen a U-Haul and drove it all the way from the high desert into downtown Los Angeles. She was clocked at speeds over 80 m.p.h. and managed to evade the police as she sped through such dense areas as Echo Park, Mid-City, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Malibu. She commanded the road, lightly traveled roads, along the 10, the 5, Pacific Coast Highway. This was during the rush hour, between 4-6pm. Finally, she ran out of gas near Oxnard, jumped out of the truck and was tackled and handcuffed by the police.

What amazed me, even more than her driving skills, which included evading a tire flattening strip on PCH, were the open freeways which she rocketed down. Where was the normal traffic that one encounters on these densely traveled highways?

Unemployment in LA is now around 10%. Many people are not going to jobs, and perhaps fewer people are shopping and eating out. Can a 10% reduction really make that big a difference? I think so.

We have all seen how much less traffic there is on Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana. Jews make up no more than 15% ( or less) of the population of LA, yet a High Holiday will often result in much less traffic.

I drove from the barely attended Beverly Center this evening and noticed that there were fewer cars along LaCienega. Beverly Glen was not that crowded coming back into the Valley.

Maybe this is luck, or perhaps just a subjective impression, but I am beginning to wonder if the Great Recession is making a difference in how many cars are on the roads of our city.