Bikeside LA

Celine Mahdavi stands before the court for Felony Hit & Run and Felony DUI. I’m outside the Beverly Hills Municipal Courthouse awaiting the arrival of Louis “Birdman” Deliz. The air is crisp and full of the murmur of morning gridlock along Burton Way. Louis shows up, I give him a handshake and we wait for [...]

Brandon Chau was recently the victim of a hit and run while riding in Beverly Hills.  When he couldn’t identify the drivers face – because you always get a good look at the drivers face when they hit you with their car – Beverly Hills Police Department, the highest paid department in California, dropped the [...]

Stephen Box has a whirlwind of a post up in City Watch, permanently hosted at SoapBoxLA.  It lays out the mistakes that were made by LAPD rank and file in handling a recent hit and run.  Ed Magos, a member of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council, was hit and left for dead by Porsche driver [...]

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 – Today, I watched a low level LAPD officer throw two bars and one star under a bus.  Specifically, Officer Cho’s prejudiced police work at the scene of the Hummer Hit N Run left Captain Allen (two bars) and freshly minted Commander Mike Williams (one star) flapping in the breeze in [...]

Sparked by the now infamous Hummer incident, cyclists from all over the city will be swarming City Council on Friday, to make their dissatisfaction with LAPD known.  Friday, May 1st, at 10am at Van Nuys City Hall we will submit public comments regarding the anti-cyclist bias of LAPD.  Van Nuys City Hall is located at [...]

Friday I wrote about an incident downtown where a Hummer driver hit a cyclist, and the police let him drive away after pulling him over with a bicycle lodged beneath his car.  Since then additional details have come forward in a witness statement by one of the cyclists: I urged the police officer that this [...]

(update: more details on the incident) Friday morning at approximately 2am in downtown LA:  A black Hummer, bearing no license plates, hits a cyclist, knocking him to the ground.  The Hummer then flees the scene dragging a bike it ran over underneath it, only to be pulled over one block over by LAPD.  After taking [...]