The Brief

It’s been a beloved Los Angeles tradition for well over a decade. On New Year’s Eve, a crowd of people gather around on Santa Monica Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in West L.A. to celebrate at midnight.

The crowd isn’t waiting for a ball to drop, or for a bell to toll — not in L.A. Instead, the crowd is waiting for the exact moment that an anti-smoking billboard resets. Its message warns of the dangers of lighting up by showing the number of people who’ve died that year due to smoking.

For one beautiful moment, the billboard shows that not a single American has died from lung cancer or other smoking-related illnesses in the new year. (Of course, there’s no way to know this for sure — the counter is based on previous estimates and statistical averages.)

The billboard brouhaha has grown from a neighborhood gathering, as the L.A. Times reported in 2012, to a packed viral celebration in the 2020s. Some Reddit users even loosely planned this year’s meetup, and it’s now cemented as a mainstay of how this beautiful, occasionally smoky city rings in the new year.

What’s the origin story?

The billboard dates back to 1987. William E. Bloomfield Sr., an ex-smoker, anti-smoking advocate and Redondo Beach resident, put it up to make the effects of smoking feel more real, according to the L.A. Times.

“I want to do what I can to get even a few people to quit, or at least think about it,” Bloomfield told the Times back then.

Drumroll: What do the sponsors have to say? 

LAist reached out to the billboard’s sponsors to get their take, and long story short: They’re fans of the tradition.

“Seeing the social media response of Angelenos counting down the New Year alongside this billboard is a powerful example of how impactful public awareness can be,” said Jen Maduko, the American Cancer Society’s senior executive director in Los Angeles, in a statement provided to LAist. “Lung cancer continues to claim more lives than any other cancer, and smoking remains the leading preventable cause.”

The ACS also said that they hope that the billboard’s viral status will encourage smokers to quit, or at least make current and former smokers consider getting screened for lung cancer. You can find more info on that from the ACS here.

“Although we appreciate how it brings renewed attention to the effects of smoking, we hope that it encourages action throughout the year,” Maduko added.

So there you have it. The sponsors behind the smoking deaths billboard have given Angelenos the blessing to ring in the new year on the side of the road in West L.A.

Who knows, one day this billboard might become even more iconic than the more traditional celebrations at places like Grand Park in downtown L.A. and the Queen Mary in Long Beach — or even make it to a national telecast.

Two masked men dragged a landscape worker into a vehicle and drove off.

Another masked pair in green fatigues detained a man walking out of a grocery store. 

Four masked people in a black SUV circled a block. 

These were all calls LAPD received in January from people alarmed by what they were witnessing and unsure about who they could trust as immigration agents carried out operations across the city.

They were also among the first details that the department has released of how its officers have responded to calls for help from neighborhoods targeted by the federal government’s immigration crackdown.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued a directive last month requiring the department to produce monthly reports, aiming to increase transparency about policing amid immigration sweeps. The report follows weeks of mixed messaging from the department, as LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell refused to enforce new laws requiring federal agents to remove masks and identify themselves.

Bass’ order prompted McDonnell to change course last week — a reversal he continued in Tuesday’s meeting. He sent a note to the department establishing a new policy requiring officers and supervisors to identify federal agents, document encounters with them and refer cases for possible criminal charges if misconduct is suspected.

Deputy Chief German Hurtado told the Police Commission Tuesday the department received eight calls in January from the public about immigration operations and none in February. The LA Local has reached out to ask why this is the case and will update if more information is available. 

Three of the January calls were in the department’s Northeast Division and two in Rampart Division. Harbor, Southeast and Olympic divisions had one call each.

Officers submitted two crime reports of actions by federal agents, but Hurtado provided no further details. 

In several cases, the people who called the police and the alleged federal agents weren’t actually there when officers arrived. And in most cases, the department took no further action after confirming the individuals worked for federal immigration agencies.

In one instance, Hurtado said police received information that two taco vendors had been kidnapped. “No report was taken,” Hurtado said, because video of the confrontation appeared to show the masked men were federal agents. The two were detained, he said, not kidnapped.

A man in the department’s Southeast Division reported being assaulted by immigration agents. Hurtado said officers found he had been knocked over while agents were chasing someone else: “They cleared the scene once they realized that it was a federal enforcement action,” Hurtado added.

The department had not received any reports of federal agents refusing to identify themselves to police officers, he told the commissioners. And he emphasized that the department’s longstanding policy is not to assist or impede immigration enforcement.

“The officers are not going to interrupt the actions of another law enforcement agency,” Hurtado said. “They’re there to keep the peace.”

Commission President Teresa Sanchez-Gordon pressed Hurtado to provide more details on how the department is clarifying its role for the city’s residents who are also immigrants. 

“They’re still fearful that they can’t call LAPD for help,” Sanchez-Gordon said.

Hurtado responded that the department’s new immigrant affairs liaison, along with at least two officers at each station, were redoubling efforts to communicate that the LAPD does not contribute to immigration enforcement.

“When police do not help with immigration arrests, it’s not about protecting criminals,” Hurtado said. “It’s about protecting communities. It’s about making sure that everyone feels safe enough to seek help for a crime and participate in everyday civic life. Public safety works best when fear is replaced with trust and in Los Angeles that trust has saved lives.”

McDonnell, who was present for the presentation, also issued a new policy on Tuesday clarifying how city policing intersects with federal immigration enforcement. Here are some of the requirements:

• When officers are dispatched to calls about apparent immigration sweeps, they are expected to turn on body cameras before exiting their patrol cars.
• They’ll record interactions with the apparent agents, verifying their identities and the agencies they work for. 
• If it’s a confirmed federal immigration enforcement action, the officer is expected to maintain public safety and help deescalate any tense confrontations.
• Officers will write reports about these encounters and label all body camera footage for review.

The chief’s policy update brings the department into compliance with Mayor Karen Bass’ executive order from February requiring the changes. 

Apart from the new policy, Sanchez-Gordon said more must be done to ensure the community understands what LAPD officers are and aren’t responsible for during what have often been tense confrontations. She said she wants to work with McDonnell to host meetings with immigrant advocacy groups to better understand community concerns.

“I think we all have our work cut out for us,” she said. “It’s a new era for the city of LA.”

The post Here’s what happened when people called LAPD to report potential ICE activity appeared first on LA Local.

The short documentary All The Empty Rooms follows CBS news correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp on their years-long journey memorializing the empty rooms of victims of school shootings.

The film features four families from Santa Clarita, California; Uvalde, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee.

Director Joshua Seftel said he received a call from Hartman three years ago asking if the photography project could be turned into a documentary film. Hartman showed Seftel a photo of an opened toothpaste tube from the bathroom of a school shooting victim.

“You could see the story,” Seftel said. “You could imagine the kid rushing to school in the morning, not taking the time to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube, thinking 'I'll put that on when I get home.' And then the child never came home from school and I immediately just thought this approach — talking about school shootings through these photographs of the empty bedrooms — was just really novel and powerful.”

All the Empty Rooms is now nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 2026 Academy Awards and is available to watch on Netflix.

LAist All Things Considered host Julia Paskin talked with Seftel and Mia Tretta — a school shooting survivor and friend of one of the victims featured in the film.

A sensitive filmmaking process

During the filmmaking process, Seftel said he wanted to be as respectful of the families as possible by entering the rooms with small crews and using minimal equipment. He said many of the rooms were “frozen in time” and left untouched by parents since the day their children died.

Julia Paskin:  Did you learn anything about how to go about documenting stories in a way that is respectful to your subjects?

Joshua Seftel: I would say that a lot of the coverage on school shootings and mass shootings in general, especially early on, focused on the shooter and talked about them a lot. And the victims often were in the background and often faded away from the news coverage.

So you end up with the victims being forgotten, and these families that we visited in All The Empty Rooms all feel that way. They feel like however long it had been since their child had been killed in a school shooting, they felt like the world had moved on and left them behind.

And for them to be able to get to tell the story of their child is everything… In the process of making this film, we've wanted to shine a light on the people who are gone, the kids who are gone. And in the process of telling the story, we made a film that never mentions the word "gun."

That was by choice because we wanted to make a film that was about the children who were gone, and we wanted to make a film that never gave the viewer a reason to turn it off.

And sadly, in the world we live in, even just saying the word "gun" is polarizing and could possibly get people to turn off. And we want to make sure people watch to the end and know the stories of these children because we think the stories of these children in these empty rooms have the potential to make people feel something again.

On the importance of silence in the film

Julia Paskin:  You insisted on Steve Hartman being a character. Folks that are familiar with him on CBS know he does a lot of "feel good" stories. And this is a departure because this story, as he points out, deserves that treatment. Why was that important to include in the storytelling?

Joshua Seftel: For those people who watch Steve Hartman on CBS and see him on CBS Sunday morning almost every week, he's there to sort of say the perfect thing.

And in this film, when we followed Steve into these bedrooms and into these homes, oftentimes there's not much to say. It's about the silence of these places. It's about the absence of the child.

These rooms are empty. And what we found is that Steve didn't have the perfect thing to say because in some cases there's really nothing to say. What's happening in our country with gun violence and with school shootings where there are now more than 100 a year is completely unacceptable. And we all know that deep down.

And by showing these bedrooms and showing the empty spaces and the children who are gone, there's not much more you need to say than to just see these rooms. And that's what we wanted to capture in the film.

‘Losing my best friend’

Tretta was best friends with Dominic Blackwell, one of the victims in the 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, where she was also shot. Tretta also experienced another school shooting last December.

“ I lost my best friend and I went across the country to go to college. And six years later I found myself in lockdown for over 10 hours at the Brown University shooting,” she said.

Tretta met Blackwell on the first day of 8th grade after having transferred to a new school.

Tretta: I walked into my math class … and he was sitting in the back of the class with his feet on the desk and a bright SpongeBob shirt and introduced himself as Dominic Michael Jordan Blackwell. And from that day on, we became best friends.

Pretty much from that first day of eighth grade, we were inseparable… until one random day in November. A boy we didn't know pulled a .45 caliber ghost gun out of his backpack. And because of gun violence, Dominic is gone. And it was in that same shooting that I was shot in the stomach.

And I feel like even though the pain of getting shot is terrible physically and mentally and something that I'm still having to deal with on an almost daily basis, nothing compares to the pain that I felt losing Dominic and losing my best friend and having to cope with that at the same time as everything else.

So I think the movie does a really beautiful job of not only showing the fact that gun violence stole such a beautiful person from everyone's lives, but also portraying him as the type of person he was.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is officially on the hook for providing high-dosage tutoring to students after a judge approved a settlement reached last fall.

After being accused of denying students their right to equitable education during pandemic shutdowns, the district must now provide 100,000 students — more than a quarter of the district’s TK-12 students — with three years of high-dosage tutoring under a court-approved settlement, amounting to more than 10 million hours. District staff and outside vendors will provide students with a mix of virtual and in-person sessions.

“The District is conducting a program evaluation of the tutoring program, which will explore variation in the implementation, take-up, and impact on student outcomes across a range of tutoring models and vendors,” LAUSD said in a statement to EdSource.

The tutoring mandate stems from a court-approved settlement reached in October and finalized last month in Shaw et al. v. LAUSD et al., a lawsuit filed during the Covid-19 pandemic that alleged that only 60% of the district’s students participated in virtual instruction during the spring 2020 semester, denying them “basic educational equality guaranteed to them by the California Constitution.”

LAUSD would continue to use its already existing high-dose tutoring eligibility criteria to determine which students receive the support. The district did not specify how it would measure the program’s success.

The settlement 

The high-dosage tutoring that Los Angeles Unified maintains it has been providing relies on money from the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP). The lawsuit, which includes other supports outlined in the settlement, gained final approval on Feb. 18 and is intended to help close learning gaps and improve academic performance.

The method specifically caters to students’ individual needs and provides either small group or one-on-one support that complements what they learn in the classroom, according to the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University.

“Evidence does suggest that that kind of effort would boost student outcomes,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor of education.

“But I think it’s not likely to fully solve the problem, both because it’s missing a portion of the student population — a pretty sizable one — and also because I don’t know if that’s enough hours to solve the problem,” he said, referring to the fact that only a quarter of the student population will receive these services.

Ned Hillenbrand, a partner with Kirkland & Ellis LLP and one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, emphasized the importance of accountability moving forward.

“Our families understood that these issues affected students across the district. They admirably pursued remedial programs for those students as well as their own children,” Hillenbrand said in the statement.

“Now that the court has approved the settlement, our goal is to hold LAUSD accountable and to maximize the benefits students receive during the three-year enforcement period.”

Challenges with access  

After the pandemic hit, Judith Larson, a plaintiff in the case, said she waited six months for a school computer to arrive, navigated connectivity challenges and even paid out of pocket for tutoring for her daughter. And one of the mentors struggled to help because she learned math in an entirely different way.

Aida Vega found it difficult to access LAUSD’s tutoring services for her daughter, who struggled academically during the pandemic but eventually graduated. But Vega had to take on an extra job to pay for the support.

“I did have the opportunity as a mom to be able to help my student that year because it was just her at that moment. I paid for her,” she said in Spanish. “But other parents had three, four children in schools and didn’t have that opportunity to pay. And now those students aren’t studying.”

LAUSD’s tutoring webpage says schools will contact families whose students qualify, and that parents can contact their local school sites for more information.

But Walt Gersón Rodríguez, the vice president of Innovate Public Schools, which supported parents in the suit, emphasized the importance of improving access, so parents and students don’t have to embark on a “scavenger hunt” to find them.

“My concern would be that this information doesn’t reach the parents; their children don’t get the service and support,” Rodríguez said. “And then, we have another generation of students that either graduate or don’t graduate and don’t go on to college and get a job or career in a competitive economy that we have today.”

Despite LAUSD’s gains in standardized test scores, which showed students are performing better than they did prepandemic, Polikoff noted that students are still “behind where they would have been had Covid not happened.”

Rodríguez added that some graduates have struggled to meet A-G requirements, courses necessary for students to be eligible to attend University of California or California State University campuses, and are having a hard time getting into college or entering the workforce.

If it weren’t for the setbacks, Larson said her daughter would have loved to attend UCLA. But she still considers herself one of the fortunate ones.

“Many moms and dads that I know, that one [dream] we share is we need to do better and change for our children,” Larson said. “But here we are taking steps, one at a time.”

L.A., you have a big choice to make this year. Mayor Karen Bass is running for a second term in office, and there's a long list of others — including City Councilmember Nithya Raman, former reality star Spencer Pratt, community organizer Rae Huang and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller — lined up to run against her.

The election is June 2. If any one candidate for mayor gets more than 50% of the vote, they'll win the election outright. If nobody meets that threshold, the top two vote-getters will compete in a runoff Nov. 3.

LAist and The LA Local are preparing to ask the candidates questions that will shape our voter guides closer to the June election. We want to make sure we're asking the right ones.

So tell us: What are the issues and questions you want the mayoral candidates to address?

Share your thoughts in the survey below.