Who’s Watching The Neighborhood Watch? 

by Peggy Lee Kennedy

The latest dirt on the Venice Neighborhood Watch is that the newest watch s/hero and queen anti-homeless blogger must have got into it with another neighborhood watch person – triggering a background check that revealed a felony conviction, among other things. Even as a felon, she is just another tool for a snitch police state culture.

The true intention of Community Policing, which is the umbrella organization for Neighborhood Watch, is to create civilian groups that directly communicate the needs of the community to the police. The end result should be that the police are more receptive to the community. It is a basically a good idea – if it were not controlled by such negativity toward poor people. The problem is that Neighborhood Watch leaders are not always picked from a diverse cross section of the community. Even if moderate people do join the local Neighborhood Watch, they may be pulled into a police snitch culture that does not foster diverse points of view.

Some of our most public Venice Neighborhood Watch figures are Boston Dawna, Alex Thompson, Rick Feibusch, and Councilman Bill Rosendahl as the big top Neighborhood Watch promoter.

Boston Dawna, aka Donna Chaet and mentor to Alex Thompson, is a woman that has crude behavior who drove or walked around Venice at all hours taking the law into her own hands apparently under the premise that some people do not have civil rights - until she moved back to Boston.

Alex Thompson, aka Alexandria Thompson (alias Amie Thompson, Amie M Thompson, Alexandreia Thompson, Alexanderia Thompson), who is evidently a convicted felon with a police radio. Thompson is well known for stirring up community hate for homeless people or those who help the homeless people. She posts anti-homeless fairy stories or foul verbiage on blogs, which has included going after our Venice Justice Committee that helps poor people being unjustly treated and cited with infractions or misdemeanors. She goes out on the street to be the cheering section when homeless disabled people loose their RV, doggies, or get arrested. Now Thompson has created a snitch web site mimicking the City’s 311 number, Venice311, as a new place to spread fear, hate, and dis-information. She is a busy little ex-con.

Rick Feibusch, aka Venice Watchdawg, also tells fairy stories on the blogs to stir things up, like repeatedly stating how scary all the homeless people are and how they are criminals.. Feibusch ran with the propaganda against our Justice Committee (blogged by Thompson) to encourage people to contact our landlords, the Venice United Methodist Church, to complain against us. All based on a hate movement founded on dis-information.

 

Rather than empowering leaders that encourage fear and the need to increase law enforcement as a non-solution to homelessness - the city should be encouraging an increase in affordable or supportive housing and services.
The real crime is how our city is dealing with homelessness.

The majority of the homeless people I have been in contact with are not criminals. However they are criminalized by an anti-poor, fear based, pro-gentrification, quality of life, law enforcement campaign that costs tons of money and provides no real solutions. And these homeless people are not convicted felons either.

The main thing that these popular Venice Neighborhood Watch leaders have in common is that they appear to care less about basic human rights or constitutional rights when it comes to the poor, the odd, or the homeless.

Another interesting fact is that Alex Thompson and Boston Dawna were the two main witnesses (neither credible in my opinion) to that infamous RV Dumping incident August 17, 2010 – which was ground zero for a wide scale movement to tow, arrest, ticket, and harass vehicle live-aboards in Venice. All championed by Councilman Rosendahl with multiple task forces and a town hall meeting packed full of hate for the vehicle housed people and the main-stream media.

The result being an untold amount of city funds spent on hurting disabled people and yet another civil rights lawsuit

 Then there is that $750,000 Venice monies given to a non-Venice Non-Profit to run a well-promoted Venice RV parking program with no city ordinance in sight to support the program, no Venice parking lot allocated to the program, and a Non-Profit that is feeding into the NIMBY agenda. Maybe they will house a few of the RV people that survived the onslaught of police activity. Any financially sane taxpaying person should feel pretty ripped off by this stuff.

Our city council person puts on a caring front pretending while riding pretty high on the tsunami wave of gentrification crashing down on Venice. Caring is not violating human and civil rights of disabled poor people.

 

And building community does not mean co-opting people into a snitch police state culture, which is exactly what the Venice Neighborhood Council (VNC) is doing at its up-coming Town Hall, June 9 at Mark Twain Middle School 7-9pm.

“NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH Safer Communities Block by Block” is the theme of the VNC Town Hall, but doing this means forming MORE Neighborhood Watch groups without changing the negative, fear based, homeless hate culture.

My final questions are: 

• Who is watching these fear promoting Neighborhood Watch people that the police and the city are      empowering?
  

• And will there ever be an objective and independent community advisory to the LAPD? (Or the City for that matter.)   
  

Because even though civil rights lawsuits can be successful and the city pays out or tweaks some law – the lawmakers, the police, and the city attorneys seem to have no apparent repercussions – and the tax-payer bears the financial burden.