Councilman Bill Rosendahl and the LAPD held a press conference today to discuss the murder of 31 year old Adam Pacheco last Sunday outside of TheOtherRoom and another unrelated murder of Braylon Williams September 23rd in the 4800 block of Marionwood Drive in Mar Vista at the Mar Vista Gardens Housing Project.

The police would like your help trying to find the suspects. The shooter in TheOtherRoom incident is described as a male hispanic 17-18 years of age that escaped in a white vehicle, possibly a Durango. The shooter walked up to Adam Pacheco and shot him multiple times. The shooter also shot a passing female motorist in the face. The motorist apparently was not a part of anything except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The attack may be gang related. The shooter in the Braylon Williams murder is described as an 18 to 20 year old Hispanic male with medium height and build. The motive appears to be gang related. Those behind the podium said that there were erroneous emails and false reporting circulating about the events of Sunday evening. They said that out of 100 or so people that were possible witnesses they were only talking to two of them. If you saw what happened, you should call them up. All parties were adamant that Sunday nights shooting was unrelated to The Abbot Kinney Festival. Next year they may plan to have the festival shut down at an earlier hour, however. We will put up video of the entire conference later.

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Shut down an hour earlier?

That'll fix everything!

It's great when our government sees a problem, steps in to help, and gets everything back on track.  I for one will rest easy tonight…

…just as soon as I get back from the neighborhood watch meeting, CPR training, and self-defence class.

i really don't think it's right to refer to this incident as 'the otheroom shooting.'  i once owned a coffee shop in whittier where there was a stabbing out front during the now defunct uptown whittier street festival.  the incident, just as this one, had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the establishment in which it occured in front of, yet the paper insisted on continuing to single out one unfortunate business.  a simple address or street location/intersection would suffice.

hopefully this does not cause the street festival to close.

Ok…Here are some thoughts I had while watching the video:

Around the 7:50 mark, the Detective is asked if the suspect is hispanic or lighter skin, possibly white.  He replies that 1 witness said hispanic and the other witness said maybe hispanic or white.  ”As detectives, we are looking for a hispanic.”   I don't think they played eeny-meeny-miny-moe, do you?

The word on the street is “cute, but nothing else,” says the detective in response to rumors that the shooter had blue eyes.  And then he complains that only two witnesses of a hundred came forward to help the police.  So 98 witnesses are talking about what they saw to everyone but the police, which is “cute but nothing else.”

At around the 10:18 mark, the detective is asked about a shooting that took place on 6th and Broadway (last tuesday?  it wasn't on the crime map at all in September) and he dismissed it by saying “that was black on black.”  So…does that mean it doesn't count?  WTF is that response?

Someone needs to teach this guy about how to phrase sentences at a press conference.

Other thought - at 10:45 mark, the officer was asked if gang crime is up or down.  After talking in circles for a bit, he says the rate is “running about the same as last year, it was down significantly.”  So is it the same or is it down?  Does that mean it was down before last year and maybe went up, but stayed the same after?  I checked the gang crime statistics on the LAPD website.  Here's what I found out about this year, compared to last year:

In January 08:  City-wide gang crime was down 20.1% from Jan. 2007; Pacific division was down 37.5% - sounds good right?  Read on…

Feb. 08: City was down 11.7% from Feb 07, Pacific was UP 26.7%

March 08: City was down 11.5% from March 07; Pacific had no change.

April: City down 12.7%; Pacific up 15.4%

May: City down 14.2%; Pacific up 65.8%

June: City down 14.3%; Pacific up 51.1%

July: City down 14.8%; Pacific up 50%

August: City down 11%; Pacific up 39.4%

I think this answers the question, don't you?

Yes that is true about how many crimes it takes to affect the statistics - but my point is that there is a trend of increased gang crime here.  It may not be to the numbers of some other areas, but the police shouldn't imply that it's gone down or stayed the same when it clearly has not.  

Pacific Division certainly has a significantly lower number of gang-related crimes than any other division in Los Angeles - but we have had 100 gang-related crimes this year (70 last year at this time).   And the list of gang-related crimes are pretty violent scary crimes.  Homicide, Aggravated Assault, Attacks on Police Officers, Rape, Robbery, Carjacking, Kidnapping, Shots inhabited Dwelling, Arson, Criminal Threats, Extortion.