Your editorial comments about the 8/25 Los Angeles Times story on Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan’s visit to Broad Beach were spot on. You were right to signal out the sheriff’s department reportedly confused response to the scene of the “crime,” i.e., Wan setting up her beach chair on public sand at Broad Beach. The Times report did indeed make the sheriffs look rather silly by quoting a reserve deputy saying, “What do I know – I’m just a dumb deputy?”
That’s a typical response from a reserve deputy, and it’s unfortunate that the Times was not able to identify the quoted deputy as a reserve. I worked at the old Malibu Sheriff’s Station as a civilian records employee in the 1990s, and reserve deputies were notorious for getting things wrong. That’s why they’re reserve deputies, not full-timers. But back in the early 1990s, the Sheriff’s Dept. response to requests by private security guards to arrest visitors to Broad Beach was anything but dumb.
Back then, they refused to support the questionable antics of the Broad Beach security guards who would intimidate Broad Beach visitors by threatening to have the visitors arrested for trespassing on alleged private property. In the state of California, law enforcement can’t arrest someone on suspicion of a misdemeanor, which is what the Broad Beach security guards accuse beachgoers of committing. Knowing the pitfalls of trying to define trespassing vis-a-vis the mean high tide rules of California, that’s what a deputy would be doing: arresting someone on suspicion. Instead, the deputies would offer the private security guards the option of personally putting the beachgoer under citizen’s arrest.
Bottom line: in the years I worked at the Malibu station, not one Broad Beach visitor who got into a sand dispute was ever cited for trespassing.
One more thing: the Times story quoted Broad Beach homeowner and lawyer Marshall Grossman blasting the actions of Coastal Commissioner Wan. What the Times story left out is that Grossman, the longtime pitbull litigator for Broad Beach homeowner Steven Spielberg, was himself a Coastal commissioner from 1981 to 1985. According to information on www.agsk.com the Web site of Grossman’s law firm, one of the defining moments of Grossman’s law career was when he “broke the yoke of discrimination” by forcing the Jonathan Club to admit minorities in exchange for the Coastal Commission granting the club permission to expand its Santa Monica beachfront property.
It’s a good thing these minorities got into the Jonathan Club. Something tells me if they wanted to take a stroll now on the sand, they wouldn’t be very welcome on Grossman’s Broad Beach.
Ross Johnson