Hermosa Beach Crime Reports Weblog
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Hermosa Beach Downtown Crime Concerns - From The Easy Reader by Robb Fulcher - February 6, 2003
Citing "crazy" incidents last month in Hermosa Beach's party-hearty downtown area, a city councilman wants to review public safety policies to determine whether any changes should be made for greater downtown security
"This was a crazy January and if we don't do something now we're going to have a completely crazy July," Councilman J.R. Reviczky said
Last month three people were arrested, including a man who allegedly threw a 70 pound table at an officer during a brawl that, police said, engulfed the inside of Dano's, a downtown establishment before it was dispersed by about 40 officers from Hermosa and surrounding cities. The proprietors of Dano's said the incident was blown out of proportion.
In a separate incident about 2am New Year's Day, police arrested a man who refused to surrender an alcoholic drink he was allegedly holding in the middle of the Pier Plaza, and arrested three others who allegedly tried to free the man from the officers by force.
About 2am Dec. 30 officers arrested three people after a contentious traffic stop that involved physical force, pepper spray and a electric-charged Taser.
Before reccommending possible changes in public safety policies, Reviczky was awaiting a report from police officials on the matter.
Man attacked, and then thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the head. From The Daily Breeze - Police Log - Feb. 5, 2003
At 1:22am on January 25, 2003 on the 1300 block of Manhattan Ave. A man was attacked and thrown to the ground, outside a restaurant. Once on the ground, the victim was then repeatedly kicked in the head. A 30-year old man, with blood on his hands and shoes was arrested.
Thu Jan, 30 2003
Crime Reports of Violent Assaults in Hermosa Beach from The Beach Reporter reported by Whitney Youngs and the Easy Reader reported by Robb Fulcher.
The back issues of The Easy Reader are available at www.hermosawave.net The back issues of The Beach Reporter are available at their main office.
These crime reports are focused on violent crime, where people are assaulted, battered, raped, attacked with and without weapons.
More...
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From the Easy Reader – February 15, 2001 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Man attacked
A Venice man suffered a broken right hand, a concussion and “broken upper and lower teeth”.
The victim experienced blurred vision and hearing loss in a nighttime attack along Hermosa Avenue, police said.
The man was standing next to another person who was attacked with pepper spray about 2 a.m. Jan. 27, and the Venice man was hit by the “over-spray,” a police report stated.
The Venice man threw a punch to defend himself, then was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly, the report stated.
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From the Easy Reader – January 18, 2001 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Student assaulted
A student from Rancho Palos Verdes was hospitalized following a blow to the head on Dec. 29 that caused bleeding to the brain, police said.
The man was sitting with friends…when another man struck him in the back of the head with a clenched fist, police said.
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From the Easy Reader – November 9, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Fight! Fight!
Three “young adults” were fighting in a municipal parking lot near the city’s skate track.
About 6:30 p.m. Halloween eve when one of the men threw himself against a parked car, leaving a dent in the left front fender, the car’s owner stated in a report to police.
The car’s owner watched the man get into his auto to leave, and wrote down the license plate number, the report stated.
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From the Easy Reader – November 2, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat - Man stabbed
One man was arrested and another hospitalized in good condition following a stabbing in the men’s room of a Pacific Coast Highway bar about 10:30 p.m. Monday, police said.
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The Easy Reader – October 12, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat - Man attacked
A 20-year-old Torrance man was accosted by several people.
One of the attackers was identified as his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend.
The assault happened shortly before 7 p.m. Monday in the area of Noble Park, police said.
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The Easy Reader – September 7, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Woman accosted
A 20th Street woman awoke about 5 a.m. Thursday to see a man walking around on the landing outside of her third floor apartment in a security building.
Stopping from time to time to look in through her partially open drapes.
The woman pretended to be asleep until the man left. Then she called police. Officers found fingerprints on the window indicating that the man might have tried to slide the window open.
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The Easy Reader – September 28, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Fighter
A man hauled another man over the patio railing at a Pier Plaza establishment and began a fistfight with him about 9:30 p.m. last Saturday, police said.
The attacker forced the other man to defend himself until bar employees pulled the attacker away.
The aggressive man had tried to start a fight with the other man earlier in the evening, police said, but a friend pulled him away and took him from the bar.
The man who was attacked said he did not know his assailant, who apparently had become angered over something that was said, according to a police report.
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The Easy Reader – September 7, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Bar attack
A affianced couple was attacked in a Pier Plaza bar Saturday night, and officers arrested two suspects, police said.
The couple was approached by two people shortly before midnight.
The woman was struck in her jaw several times, and her fiancée was struck with a beer bottle, police said. Police arrested two suspects nearby.
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The Easy Reader – September 7, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat – Woman attacked
A woman went out to hose down the porch of her 27th Street home about 4 p.m.
On Tuesday before last, and found a man asleep on her property beside an empty bottle of vodka, police said.
The man got wet in the consequent patio washing, became verbally abusive, and the got “soaked” with the hose, a police report stated.
The man then attacked the woman, causing her to hit her head on a patio table, leaving her with a bruise above her right eye, police said.
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From the Easy Reader – July 20, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - HB bar manager sued in rape case
One of four women allegedly attacked by convicted rapist Nicholas Temkey has filed a lawsuit against Temkey and the Pier Plaza bar where he worked as a manger.
Temkey, 32, former manager of the Beach Club, pleaded no contest in May to charges that he raped one woman he met at the bar and attempting to sodomize another.
As part of a plea agreement he was sentenced to four and-a-half years in state prison, and is likely to be paroled after serving about half his full sentence.
The woman alleges that Temkey gave her free drinks on July 17, 1999 and lured her into his upstairs office where he sexually assaulted her.
Temkey closed and locked the door and “thereby imprisoned” the woman in the office.
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The Easy Reader – July 13, 2000 by Robb Fulcher - Hermosa Beach - Police Beat - Samaritan battered
A man was attacked by three people and kicked in the head after he used his body to cover another battery victim.
The first victim had fallen to the pavement outside a Pier Plaza bar about 11 p.m. Wednesday, June 28, police said.
Officers arrested three suspects shortly after the incident.
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From the Easy Reader May 2, 2002 by Robb Fulcher - Police step up downtown foot patrols
Authorities will expand heavy weekend foot patrols in the busy downtown area to cover Thursday and Sunday evenings as well, Hermosa Beach Police Chief Mike Lavin reported to the city council.
The small downtown area with its thriving nightlife accounted for 40 percent of the assaults in Hermosa Beach last year, according to Lavin’s report.
A total of 53 verified assaults were reported in the downtown area in 2001, Lavin wrote in the report, which expanded upon the well-worn subject of downtown crime at the request of the city council.
Twenty-eight of the downtown assaults were classified as aggravated assaults, in which weapons were used or significant injuries were inflicted. Seventeen were simple assaults, involving no serious injuries, four were assaults on police officers, and four were classified as domestic violence.
In the other parts of town, domestic violence accounted for nearly half of the assaults.
Police believe that the presence of foot patrols over the last few years has “reduced the number of assaults and other related crimes in the downtown area that would have occurred if the patrols had not been deployed,” Lavin wrote.
Rest of town
Citywide, a total of 132 verified assaults occurred. The regular year-end report from the police department listed 141 total assaults, but since then nine of those incidents were reclassified following detectives’ investigations.
Of the citywide total, 48 were aggravated assaults, 37 were simple assaults, four were aggravated assaults on police officers and one was a simple assault on a police officer.
Breaking out domestic violence as a subgroup, 42 total assaults occurred, 17 of them aggravated assaults and 25 simple assaults.
Other incidents
The downtown area—bordered by the Strand on the west, 10th Street on the south, Palm Drive on the east and 16th Street to the north--generated 1,166 calls to police last year, less than 4 percent of the calls citywide. But the small downtown area accounted for a disproportionate number of assaults and some other reported crimes as well.
More than one quarter of the reported rapes and nearly one-third of the disturbance calls occurred downtown.
Calls regarding fights or alleged rapes “did not necessarily mean that an assault or rape took place, or that a report was ever taken,” Lavin wrote. “Some of these calls were probably officer-initiated, for example when officers come upon a fight in progress.”
Almost 30 percent of the city’s drunk and disorderly calls, and about one-third of the calls regarding fights and assaults, occurred downtown.
Disturbance calls also were often generated by police on patrol, Lavin wrote.
As a side note, only 12 of the city’s 154 family disturbance calls came from downtown, and only 26 of the 633 complaints of loud house parties came from the area.
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From the Easy Reader May 2, 2002 by Robb Fulcher - Task force looks for quiet downtown
With city officials asking for quiet, the Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce along with owners of downtown nightspots have formed a task force to fight excessive noise from the bars and from patrons walking through residential neighborhoods at the end of the night.
Part of the campaign is aimed at a self-policing of city permits forbidding amplified music speakers placed outside some Pier Plaza nightspots, said Carla Merriman, executive director of the chamber of commerce.
“We’re calling it ‘Project Ssshhh,’” she said. “…We want our businesses to be successful, and they don’t want to cause any trouble.”
A task force will keep an eye on the Plaza during busy nights and report amplified music violations to the chamber, which will try to mediate any disputes over the noise, Merriman said.
“What happens is one bar does it and another bar across the way feels like they have to do it too,” Merriman said. “The bars on the Pier Plaza are all competing for the same audience.”
The task force grew out of a meeting of city council members, police officials, chamber representatives, and owners and managers of the nightspots. In some cases, Merriman said, bar managers did not know details of the establishments’ permits, and resolved to look them over and follow their instructions, Merriman said.
Quieting patrons
The chamber also plans to combat noise from the Plaza’s patrons, whose partying often ends with a walk through residential neighborhoods to their cars or their homes.
The chamber plans to provide signs for the front and back doors of the establishments, reminding patrons to “respect our neighbors” as they leave. Merriman also wants A-frame signs placed at each end of the Pier Plaza.
She also planned to ask representatives of Anheuser Bush, the brewers of Budweiser beer, to make up some plastic cups with a “respect the neighbors” message, similar to the “party responsibly” advice she has seen on cups.
“They do a lot of special promotions,” she said.
‘Police problem’
She said, however, that enforcing quiet in the residential neighborhoods poses a problem for the bars.
“They can’t completely help it if people make noise on Manhattan Avenue or 10th Street,” she said.
Merriman suggested that police foot patrols, already set to increase in the Plaza area, should be further expanded to include surrounding residential streets.
“That’s really a police problem,” she said.
Police Chief Mike Lavin said he doesn’t have extra officers for that duty. At one meeting, he said, he suggested the nightspots post a small number of employees around those areas during certain hours to urge people to be quiet. The owners did not appear eager to do that, Lavin said.
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From the Easy Reader April 25, 2002 by Robb Fulcher - Second downtown suggested in Hermosa economy study
Advisors have suggested something of a second downtown--centered at Aviation Boulevard and Prospect Avenue and perhaps linked by trolley to the existing downtown--following a study of other attractive beach cities to chart Hermosa’s economic future.
The volunteer advisors—Hermosans with a wide variety of business and political backgrounds, presented what they called general strategic proposals to the city council on Tuesday.
The group, led by commercial development expert Joe Mark, suggested expanded marketing to bring a mix of stores, other businesses and homes to keep the city growing and attractive.
The 45-member group wants city officials to concentrate on a resident-friendly Hermosa before worrying about attracting visitors, a direction that dovetails with the philosophy of the current city council.
“Hermosa Beach is a community first and a guest destination second,” the group’s report stated.
The group wants to encourage more pedestrian traffic around town by slowing auto traffic, widening sidewalks, promoting resident-friendly businesses, and adding more landscaping and bicycle lanes of travel.
The group wants more parking, and Mark began offering the council several broad, possible suggestions such as encouraging “shared parking” for employees of businesses with different hours of operation.
The group also wants city officials to pay more attention to “specific design criteria,” possibly designating parts of town where only certain architectural designs would be allowed.
Council members praised the group, officially called the Hermosa Beach Economic Development Review Committee. Councilman Sam Edgerton added that he hopes for “more specificity” as the council embarks on a series of special meetings to chew over the group’s sweeping report.
“This report was very, very good. This was kind of like how RUDAT started,” Edgerton said, referring to a lengthy study that eventually led to construction of the popular Pier Plaza promenade.
“Hermosa Beach must have a complete, comprehensive and up-to-date master plan for the entire city,” the report stated. “A plan in which parking, the Plaza, public access, building development, redevelopment, public services and all other areas of concern to a city are integrated and evaluated each to the other, with its citizens in mind.”
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From the Easy Reader May 16, 2002 by Robb Fulcher - City to try a new weapon on Fourth of July parties
In an attempt to curb out-of-control house parties on the typically rowdy Fourth of July, the city has taken steps to outlaw private parties with music and widely advertised public admission.
An ordinance tentatively approved by the city council on Tuesday would ban parties with live or recorded music that are open to the general public and widely advertised by brochures, posters, handbills or via the internet.
The ordinance also would ban parties that are open to the general public and money is charged for admission or refreshments.
The ordinance would not apply to parties thrown for charitable, religious or political purposes.
The ordinance was tentatively approved by a 4-1 vote, with Councilman Art Yoon dissenting. Yoon said he feared the ordinance could outlaw non-rowdy parties for which a host or hostess simply sends out numerous invitations.
The ordinance will be brought back to the council as soon as possible for final approval, city officials said.
In other Independence Day matters, Police Chief Mike Lavin told the council he will deploy his entire 38-member force of sworn officers to patrol the Strand area and target notorious “party houses” for citations for noise and alcohol-related offenses.
Officers also will contact owners or occupants of some specific Strand-area houses before the Fourth, to let them know the enforcement is coming, Lavin said.
Hermosa police will once again call upon officers from other agencies to help on the Fourth patrol, Lavin said.
Last year police handled 433 calls for service over a 24-hour Fourth of July period, and arrested 12 people, 11 for allegedly being drunk in public, an offense generally targeted at people who have become unable to care for themselves.
Police issued 116 citations, 81 of which were for possessing and consuming alcohol in a public place, Lavin said.
The three council members who were in their positions during last Fourth of July praised Lavin for last year’s enforcement efforts, saying the Strand was somewhat less crowded and rowdy than the year before.
Last year’s big seaside celebration began close to midday when more than 170 people took part in the 27th annual “Ironman” event, running on the beach, paddling in the ocean and dashing back to chug beer and throw up in front of a Strand home.
In other matters, the council voted 3-2 to place an “Autistic Child” sign at Valley Park Avenue and 20th Street after hearing the concerns of a resident who fears for the safety of her son as motorists pass by.
The dissenting votes were cast by Mayor Kathy Dunbabin and Councilman JR Reviczky, who said they feared potential lawsuits in connection with the non-standard road sign.
City Attorney Michael Jenkins told the council that such non-standard road signs are illegal. Similar “Children at Play” signs are no longer approved by the state or federal governments because they lend a “false sense of security” and can mislead children into thinking the street is a safe place to play.
The mother of the autistic child actually opposed the sign as well, saying she recommended it only as an alternate measure when city officials rejected her request for a stop sign at the three-way intersection.
“The only way to slow motorists down and keep my child safe is a stop sign,” she said.
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From the Easy Reader October 10, 2002 by Robb Fulcher.- Police seek man in night attacks on young women
Police were looking for a man who allegedly attacked two women on separate occasions after they left the Pier Plaza area, grabbing their breasts and punching one of them in the face.
The first attack occurred shortly after 1 a.m. Friday, Sept. 27 when a 21-year-old woman was walking to her car. She was approached around Beach Drive and 11th Street by a man she did not know.
“Suddenly and without provocation the man punched the woman in the face, knocking her to the ground,” Hermosa Beach Police Sgt. Paul Wolcott said. “He then grabbed her by the neck, ripped off her blouse and aggressively fondled her breasts. He made derogatory statements to her then fled the area.”
The second attack occurred about 11 p.m. Monday, Sept. 30 on the Strand near 17th Street. The victim was a 21-year-old woman who recognized her attacker as having been in the Pier Plaza area earlier in the evening, Wolcott said.
“During this attack the suspect grabbed the victim’s breasts and pulled her towards him,” Wolcott said. “This victim began screaming and fled the attacker.”
Detectives have been watching the area and no further attacks have been reported, Wolcott said.
The suspect was described by both women as a clean-shaven, white man with dark hair and a deep voice, about 25 to 29 years old and standing between 5-feet-6 and 6 feet tall. Police are asking anyone who has witnessed either of the attacks, or victims of any unreported attacks, to call Detective Raul Saldana at 318-0332.
HBPD Crime Report:
HBPD Crime Report:
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Fri Feb, 07 2003
The Daily Breeze - Police Log - Jan. 25, 2003 - Man attacked, and then thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the head.
From the Police Log in The Daily Breeze. At 1:22am on January 25, 2003 on the 1300 block of Manhattan Ave. A man was attacked and thrown to the ground, outside a restaurant. Once on the ground, the victim was then repeatedly kicked in the head. A 30-year old man, with blood on his hands and shoes was arrested.
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