The Brief

The Los Angeles City Controller’s Office made several findings about police responses to mental health crisis calls, including that patrol officers often are first to respond to calls for service instead of the department’s mental health teams.

That should change, according to an assessment released this week.

L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a statement that the LAPD should revise its policy to allow the department’s SMART units — short for Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Teams — “to lead responses in mental health-related calls that don't involve weapons.”

LAist has reached out to the police department for comment.

The assessment makes several recommendations about police responses to mental health crises and comes several years after former police Chief Michel Moore said the department would deploy SMART units with patrol officers to mental health-related calls.

The teams are made up of armed officers and clinicians from the L.A. County Department of Mental Health who have the goal of de-escalating situations and preventing violence.

But Dinah Manning, senior advisor at the Controller’s Office who led the assessment, said patrol officers still are the primary decision-makers on scene, citing the LAPD’s own policy and data on calls they reviewed.

“When it comes to LAPD mental health crisis response, LAPD requires an armed-first, police-first, patrol-first response to mental health crisis incidents,” said Manning, who also is the controller’s chief of strategic initiatives.

Background

According to the Controller’s Office, the former police chief said in 2021 that allowing SMART units to respond to crisis incidents with patrol officers helps to de-escalate incidents and reduce the trauma a subject may suffer.

But the assessment found LAPD policy and practice created a barrier between the SMART units and the person in crisis because patrol officers, instead of authorities with specialized teams, were in charge.

“SMART’s role as the secondary unit severely limits the mental health professional's ability to intervene and improve outcomes for the person in need or in crisis,” the assessment said.

An LAist investigation published last year found that between 2017 and 2023, 31% of shootings by L.A. police involved a person perceived by officers to be living with mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis.

In an emailed statement, Mejia said the assessment was launched partly in response to a 48-hour span in January 2023 when LAPD “killed three men who had a history of mental health conditions or appeared to be in mental crisis.”

One of those incidents involved Takar Smith, 45, who police said was armed with a kitchen knife inside an apartment before officers fired a Taser at him and later shot him.

In audio of a 911 call released by the department, a caller can be heard telling dispatchers that Smith lives with schizophrenia and had not been taking his medication. Several officers arrive, and after entering the apartment, they attempt to talk Smith down.

After officers shoot Smith with the Taser, he grabs a kitchen knife. Officers open fire.

During a news conference after the three killings, Moore said several points of the Smith incident gave him “pause.”

“I’m being very clear about my dissatisfaction with what I believe were points of information regarding [Smith’s] mental health ... that ... resources were not called upon,” he said.

Recommendations

Among other findings, the Controller’s Office said police officers working with SMART units in 2022 and 2023 were not required to receive additional mental health training beyond the department’s 36-hour mental health intervention training.

“What we found is SMART officers during the scope period ... are not required to have any other specialized training aside from what a rookie patrol officer would be getting,” Manning said.

The controller also recommended the city and police department:

• Develop a system to track the impact SMART units have on mental health-related incidents where they are dispatched. 
• Require additional training for SMART officers to ensure that they “are updated on evolving standards and best practices.” 
• Continue to support and fund the Unarmed Model of Crisis Response pilot, an L.A. city effort that sends out unarmed clinicians to nonviolent mental health crisis calls.

Running a small business is tough under normal circumstances. Running one in a wildfire burn scar can feel nearly impossible.

That's the reality many Altadena business owners are still navigating nearly a year and a half after the Eaton Fire destroyed the community and the local economy. Businesses are grappling with how do you stay open when so many of your customers are gone?

At Wet Paws, a pet grooming business along Lake Avenue, that question recently came to a head.

The shop reopened in January but business remained slow. Wet Paws co-owner Stephanie Trujillo estimates the fire had displaced up to 90% of their customers.

Marley, a Cane Corso from Pasadena, went for her first grooming session at Wet Paws in more than a year.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

Then came a conversation with their landlord that forced a decision.

"He reached out and said, 'Are you going to re-sign your lease?'" Trujillo recalled.

The answer wasn't obvious.

"I said, unfortunately, we're not even making it. We're paying out of our own pocket," she said. "So he said, 'I'll give you until June 1.'"

The deadline meant Trujillo and her mother, Linda Alashti, who have owned the business together since 2023, had only a few months to figure out whether Wet Paws had a future in Altadena.

Wet Paws is hardly alone. As businesses struggle, Los Angeles County recently launched a program offering free marketing assistance and storefront improvements to fire-affected businesses. The deadline to apply is June 8.

A flag banner and sandwich board on the sidewalk outside Wet Paws advertises its services.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

The county also operates a gift card program to encourage residents to spend money at fire-impacted businesses.

But relief has not arrived quickly enough for many businesses.

One particularly slow April Sunday at Wet Paws drove home how dire the situation had become, when they had only one customer.

As she drove home to Fontana, Trujillo began composing a social media post.

"So this isn't easy for us to share," the post began, "but I wanted to reach out with an open heart and hope."

In the message, Trujillo asked the community to book appointments and spread the word if they wanted to see the business survive.

Before posting it, Trujillo showed it to her mother.

Wet Paws groomer Elizabeth Ranes takes care of a basset hound client.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

"We're very prideful, and it's very hard to ask people for help," she said. "I felt embarrassed that we had to ask the community for help."

Her mother's advice was simple. "Just post it," she told her. "The worst that's going to happen is nobody sees it or nobody cares."

Instead, the opposite happened. By the next day, the post had been viewed and shared hundreds of times across Instagram and Facebook.

The phone started ringing, said Wet Paws groomer Elizabeth Ranes.

"I got well over 50 calls," Ranes said. "We booked out for the last three weeks of the month when we made that post.”

Customers told Alashti that they “didn't know you were back, because they don't come this way anymore.”

Decor inside Wet Paws embraces a playful canine motif.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

Among those who returned was Penny Dahlstrom, a Pasadena resident whose 113-pound Cane Corso Marley had been a Wet Paws customer before the fire.

Dahlstrom had tried taking Marley to a large pet store chain while Wet Paws was closed.

"My husband went in to pick her up, and he hears crying, and it was her," Dahlstrom said. "That's not just her nature."

The social media appeal didn't just bring back former customers. It also introduced the business to new ones, Trujillo said.

But recovery remains uneven.

Some days are still slow. And the shop continues to deal with lingering fire-related electrical damage in the back of the building.

Wet Paws is operating on a temporary electrical system, limiting how much power it can use at any given time.

"If we run our AC, and the neighbors run their AC, we lose power," Trujillo said.

As the June 1 lease deadline approached, Trujillo and her mother weighed their options. They could walk away and cut their losses. Or they could commit to rebuilding alongside a community that was still finding its footing.

Ultimately, they thought about the response to their post and the customers who had shown up when the business needed them most. And they had faith that Altadena would rebuild to its full strength.

They chose to renew the lease for another three years.

"I can't imagine what the community is going through, losing their homes and losing everything that they had," Trujillo said. "Yet they're still coming back."

And as long as they do, she said Wet Paws will be there for them and their fur babies.

On a recent Monday, students at Breed Street Elementary in Boyle Heights started their day like no other — with a tour of the murals hand-painted over the weekend across the playground.

It’s the latest of seven elementary schools in and around L.A. to get the treatment. Over 70 murals in the last 13 years, brought by a collective of artists to students in under-resourced neighborhoods with little access to art education.

“The kids were so excited,” said Stefanie Barbee, a math teacher at Breed. “Just pure joy.”

The students snaked through the paintings on handball courts and school walls: cartoon animals, bright orange flowers, a circle of meticulously painted lines. The works span genres and sensibilities.

Mural by artist hi-dutch.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

“It's grassroots. We're not getting money from anyone,” said Erik Caruso, the 5th-grade teacher in Paramount who's the group glue. To them, they are just an assembly of likeminded friends — and friends of friends — who spend one weekend out of the year to hang out and paint murals for school kids.

But the collective is anything but typical. It includes artists like the late Rich Jacobs, who died from leukemia this year, and Tim Kerr, pro-skater Jay Barbee, and Japanese artists Yusuke Hanai and hi-dutch. The vibe's always low key, and somehow they've managed to stay under the radar.

Mural by artist Yusuke Hanai.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

Mural by artist Yusuke Hanai.

(

Sandy Yang / James Hamblin

)

“The kids have no idea that they show in huge galleries or have pieces hanging in museums,” said writer Martin Wong, co-founder the pioneering Asian pop culture magazine Giant Robot. "Or they're famous in the skateboarding scene or surf or music."

Their reward is the Monday morning after, seeing the happiness on the kids’ faces.

“The artists are waiting all weekend – it’s that moment,” Caruso said.

Mural by artists Sandy Yang and James Hamblin.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

James Hamblin was at Breed for the meet-and-greet earlier this month. He painted a mural designed by his partner Sandy Yang on one of the handball walls.

“Sandy's design is pretty abstract, so it was interesting because the kids were [asking], you know, ‘ What is it?’” Hamblin said. “It was great because I could tell them I had no idea and like, ‘What do you guys think it is?’"

Bring the art museum to the school

Erik Caruso.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

The idea came to Caruso in 2011, after he took about two dozen students from his Paramount school to MOCA and discovered that only four had ever been to an art museum.

“I wonder if there's a way we can bring the art museum to the school,” he said.

Caruso, a 24-year veteran, was no stranger to bringing art — and artists — directly to his students. In 2009, he launched a monthly art project for fifth graders that culminated in a year-end show where they meet and share work with living contemporary artists.

Caruso's 5th grade art project, featuring works by artist Tim Kerr.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

The murals were next.

They painted their first ones at his school in 2012. Soon, the project expanded to the rest of Los Angeles.

Crew at work

Mural by artist Chris Johanson.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

Mural by artist Chris Johanson.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

The painting takes place between Friday and Sunday, but planning takes months.

At Breed, the connection was made through math teacher Barbee — wife of Jay — who is on a two-year stint at the Boyle Heights school to help students catch up on the subject.

“I had sort of planted that seed that at some point I would love for a school I was working at to be the recipient of the beautiful work,” she said.

Breed Street Elementary in Boyle Heights.

(

Sandy Yang / James Hamblin

)

She brought Caruso out for a site visit last September.

“He has a really amazing kind of vision about where to place the artists … based on just their artwork and where it is in relation to the street view,” Barbee said.

Next came an introduction to the principal and the approval process.

“One of the biggest challenges with what we are doing is, you know, they want flipping dolphins and stuff like that,” Caruso said. “But we want to cross over into fine art pieces.”

Mural by artists Lookout & Wonderland

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

Mural by artists Lookout & Wonderland

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

Paying it forward

Caruso estimated that as many as 40 artists and musicians have joined the effort.

The core group now, he said, is about 11 people and friends and families often tag along to help out, given they have just 16 hours over three days to finish the job.

Mural by artist Oitama.

(

Sandy Yang / James Hamblin

)

Mural by artist Lori Damiano.

(

Operation Creative Freedom

/

Operation Creative Freedom

)

Among the regulars: Wong and his wife Wendy Lau, who once organized DIY punk shows to fund music education at their daughter's Chinatown school. In Caruso, they saw a kindred spirit.

Caruso later brought the collective to paint at that school and eventually invited their daughter, Linda Lindas bassist Eloise Wong, to join his 5th grade art and music project.

“All of these kids on the blacktop were all just screaming their hearts out,” Eloise said. “It's cool how Erik — Mr. Caruso to them — shows them, like, raw ways to express themselves through cool art.”

Reggae star Ziggy Marley has spent decades carrying one of music’s most celebrated legacies. But until now, he had never written a song directly about his father, Bob Marley.

That’s changed with “Many Mourn for Bob,” a track on Marley’s ninth solo album Brightside, his first release recorded in his new studio in North Hollywood.

Marley was just 12 when his father died of cancer in 1981. Now 57, Marley says the song instinctually emerged after years of life experience and producing the biopic One Love, which revisited his father’s struggles like an assassination attempt amid political violence in Jamaica.

“He went through some things that was really tough on a human being – and just understanding him in that light is to have a little bit more emotional, deeper connection to his experience,” Marley said in an interview at his studio.

Searching for the bright side

The deeply personal track is part of a splashy return for Marley, who's touring behind Brightside and will perform at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21.

The new album blends political themes, optimism and musical experimentation.

Its lead single, “Racism Is a Killa,” featuring Big Boi, pairs the heavy topic with an upbeat groove that he hopes will make the song more accessible to young people.

“We just wanna come out straightforward, like I never want to come out tiptoeing,” Marley said. “I want to say something that can catch your ears or catch your thoughts.”

That tension between darkness and hope runs throughout Brightside. Marley described the album as a reflection on enduring difficult periods – from the pandemic to the Los Angeles wildfires – without losing sight of optimism.

“Sometimes we get lost in that so much that we don't realize that there is always a bright side,” Marley said.

The 432 Hz experiment

The album also experiments sonically: Marley recorded Brightside using 432 hertz tuning instead of the standard 440 hertz in most mainstream music. Advocates of 432 hertz believe it produces a warmer, more meditative sound better synced to the natural world. (You can hear the difference for yourself here.)

“It's a lower musical frequency, but it's a higher frequency in a next sense of your spirituality and emotion,” he said. “So even though the numbers go down, the frequency actually go up.”

Marley sees the move as part of a larger search for new creative approaches.

“I'm very open-minded and always trying to evolve and just experiment with life and music,” Marley said.

The Grammy winner, who joins James Blake and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead as the most high-profile artists to record at the lower frequency, floated the idea of a larger movement among artists.

“Let's just have a revolution in the music industry,” he said. “Let's change the frequency.”

Building a dream

Marley works out of his Rebel Lion Studio in North Hollywood, its name a nod to his 2018 album Rebellion Rises while also a play on the word “rebellion.”

He described the studio as an extension of the independent spirit his father built with Tuff Gong Studio in Jamaica.

Musicians set up for rehearsal ahead of the next leg of Ziggy Marley's tour.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

“My father had a dream, and I had a dream too,” Marley said.

Like with Tuff Gong, Marley also plans to expand the studio operation to include vinyl pressing as records continue their resurgence in the streaming era.

“There’s always gonna be a vinyl present going on,” Marley said. “A thousand years from now, people that we're still gonna need vinyl records to listen to music.”

Ziggy Marley in the hallway of his new studio in North Hollywood.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

For years, Marley said, he worked out of smaller home setups and rented facilities before deciding to build a larger permanent space in L.A.

Marley said the city has become central to his own creative evolution over the last two decades of living and working here.

Drawn initially by music, friends and the city's small but tight-knit Jamaican community, he says being surrounded by creatives from different backgrounds helped push his artistry in new directions.

“I left my safety and my community, my tribe, and come out by myself to L.A.,” he said. “But it's a great experience. It really helped my growth as a human being being here.”

What’s next

Fresh off the release of Brightside, Marley says he’s already working on another album – a notably quicker turnaround since his last album, the family-music release More Family Time in 2020,

“We're doing back to back,” he said.

Ziggy Marley will be performing at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21 as part of a tour supporting his new album Brightside.

(

Astrida Valigorsky

/

Getty Images

)

He’s also busy writing a children’s book based on his feel-good hit anthem “True to Myself” and eyeing opportunities in front – or behind the camera – inspired by his time working on One Love and making the video for “Racism Is A Killa.”

“Same philosophy, same message, but within visuals, you know?” Marley said excitedly. “I want to create some stories and try out. I feel it coming. I can feel it.”

A new free record shop for survivors of last year’s Eaton and Palisades fires is celebrating with a grand opening party Saturday night.

After losing his home in the Eaton Fire, Brandon Jay founded Altadena Musicians to get instruments back into the hands of musicians who lost their gear in fires.

Now he’s doing that with vinyl records, too.

“We want to be here to help replace those items and support music in people’s lives that can’t necessarily afford it right now because they’re saving all their pennies just to live and also just to rebuild their homes,” Jay told LAist.

Jay says they’ve seen roughly 3,000 records donated so far. Now they have a dedicated space on Lincoln Avenue where fire survivors can sign up for time slots and shop for up to 10 records a month.

“It’s a really lovely distraction but it kind of keeps me going as well just to know that we’re trying to build something great for the community and keep us all moving forward,” Jay said.

The store will carry copies of the benefit album, Gimme Shelter: Songs for LA Fire Relief. The compilation features cover art by Shepard Fairey and L.A. specific tracks from artists like Elliott Smith ("Angeles" of course), Norah Jones, The Flaming Lips, as well as a cover of "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads performed by Jay and about 50 other fire-impacted musicians.