The Brief

The winds of change blew swiftly and relentlessly into this oceanside city in northern Orange County.

Not long after winning election last November, the new conservative majority of the Huntington Beach city council adopted an ordinance that prevents the rainbow LGBTQ+ flag from flying at city hall during Pride Month.

Then this summer, the council dissolved a human relations committee formed after two notorious hate crimes by white supremacists in the mid-1990s; rewrote a declaration on human dignity to eliminate any reference to hate crimes but recognize “from birth the genetic differences between male and female”; and took away the ability to select who gives the invocation before its meetings from an interfaith council also founded in the wake of those 1990s hate incidents.

Last month, council members passed a ban on government mask and vaccine mandates in a city that has none, then placed measures on the March ballot that would add the flag policy to the city charter and require voter identification at the polls.

Hardly a few weeks pass anymore without another contentious vote pushing the community to the right — and right into some of the country’s fiercest cultural battles. Claiming a mandate from voters, Huntington Beach’s conservative council majority has set out to erase any vestige of progressive governance or “wokeism.”

They’ve been cheered on by constituents including Cari Swan, a local activist who helped organize an unsuccessful recall attempt against five members of the previous city council for passing liberal policies that she considered out of step with Huntington Beach’s values.

“The left kind of brought it on themselves,” Swan said. “They were poking the bear and the bear fought back.”

But now an opposition, growing fearful of just how far and how fast the conservative council may go to reshape their community, has galvanized around their latest move to create a citizen review panel to monitor library books for sexual content.

At a tense meeting last month, public comment dragged on for five hours as hundreds of residents filled the council chambers, frequently shouting at the conservative majority for promoting a book ban. Opponents have since launched a campaign against the March ballot measures, effectively turning the election into a referendum on the council members and their vision for Huntington Beach.

“They have just come in and taken a wrecking ball to the city with all of these things they have passed,” said Carol Daus, a library volunteer who has lived in Huntington Beach for more than three decades. “Now the community is divided. There is no place for the middle.”

How did the political center fall out, even in this swing region of California where the close partisan divide might have once invited moderation instead of conflict?

Welcome to the era of backlash politics.

Lacking power at the state level — where Democrats are so dominant that they can dismiss these cultural concerns without so much as a debate — conservatives are leaning into local governance as a form of protest against liberal California.

Their efforts can also be seen in Shasta County, where far-right activists took control of the government for not doing enough to fight coronavirus pandemic mandates and then got rid of voting machines at the center of election fraud conspiracies, and in school boards across the state, which have been roiled by fights over the rights of LGBTQ+ students.

It tracks with a growing repolarization among California voters. After decades of steady gains in independent registration, the trend has undergone a sharp reversal over the past five years as more voters embrace the Democratic and Republican parties again. Surveys find an increasing number have a favorable view of their own party and an unfavorable view of the opposition.

“It almost feels like you have to overcompensate for some of the damage being done,” said Gracey Van Der Mark, the Huntington Beach council member who proposed the library book review committee. “The more radical they got to the left, the more I felt myself pulling to the right.”

Gracey Van Der Mark, one of the conservative majority on the Huntington Beach City Council, in her City Hall office on Nov. 11, 2023.

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Lauren Justice

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CalMatters

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Many residents and former officials in Huntington Beach have watched with shock and horror as the city of nearly 200,000 emerged as a leader in this movement. They emphasize that the community historically leaned conservative, but not overly partisan, and had long been on the same page about maintaining its suburban beach town vibe.

The 2020 presidential election split fairly evenly, with Donald Trump beating Joe Biden by fewer than 4,000 votes. Several Democrats were elected to the nonpartisan city council, which began taking steps that might have once seemed unthinkable, such as flying the rainbow flag for Pride Month for the first time.

The Trump era and the pandemic deeply unsettled the community, however. Huntington Beach was the site of regular protests — in support of Trump and against pandemic restrictions, occasionally violent and sometimes led by white supremacist groups, recalling its history as a magnet for skinheads in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The unsuccessful recall effort two years ago tapped into a sense among many conservative residents that they were losing their community. Local activist Russell Neal said the then-council’s decision to fly the Pride flag exemplified how progressives encourage moral weakness to bring people under control of the government.

“The whole transformation of culture goes together as a cohesive package,” Neal said. “The fundamental form of slavery is slavery to sin and when they’re slaves to sin, presto, they’ll find themselves slaves externally.”

It’s a message that can be heard at meetings of Republican groups around town and at Calvary Chapel of the Harbour, an influential evangelical church overlooking a marina on the northern edge of Huntington Beach. The conservative council candidates campaigned from the stage there last year, with Pastor Joe Pedick telling congregants he was voting for the foursome. One of the intern pastors is running for city council next year.

“We look for those types of leaders” who will “stand up for righteousness,” Pedick said after this past Sunday’s service, where a guest speaker preached to hundreds that Planned Parenthood is the source of all wickedness in modern American culture and that Democrats are demons.

Running as a slate last year, however, the conservatives focused their platform not on cultural issues but on fighting high-density development in the city, including a state requirement to plan for more than 13,000 new units in the next eight years, as well as on reducing homelessness and crime. They swept the four open seats last November, receiving at least 12,000 votes more than their closest competition, and celebrated the results as a mandate, though with lower turnout, each won the support of less than a fifth of Huntington Beach residents.

“Our voters have no more appetite for progressive governance or the wokeism,” said City Attorney Michael Gates, a staunch conservative elected to a third term last November after campaigning with the council candidates.

So opponents are flummoxed by how much the city council focused this year on issues that never came up in the campaign. They have come to see the housing and homelessness message as a bait-and-switch — though to what end, they’re not sure. To simply undo the work of the previous council? To boost future runs for higher office? To create a laboratory of conservative policymaking that could become a playbook for other communities?

“It’s a banana republic down here,” said Dan Kalmick, one of three Democrats on the city council who regularly oppose the conservative majority. “This isn’t Republicanism. This is nihilism.”

The political divisions have consumed city government — sometimes quite literally. The conservative majority chose adjoining offices on the same hallway in city hall, booting the Democrats to the other side of the building.

Council meetings are filled with open hostility and executive staff have fled for neighboring communities. While a potential budget deficit looms, the council majority recently approved a secret $7 million settlement with a political ally who sued the city after the final day of his popular air show was canceled in 2021 due to a massive oil spill.

“That whole philosophy, you would think it would be small government and fiscal prudence because they are Republicans. But they are ones who are Republicans in name only,” said Democratic Councilmember Rhonda Bolton, who slammed the conservative majority for advancing policies such as voter ID and the library book review committee without considering how much they might cost to administer or defend in court. “What I’m seeing is Trump ideology, MAGA ideology, and in that respect, no original ideas.”

The conservative council members say they are responding to concerns raised by constituents during more than 100 town halls they held on the campaign trail.

One of their first major steps, about two months after taking office, was adopting a policy that allows only flags for the United States, California, Orange County, Huntington Beach and the military to fly on city property. Councilmember Pat Burns, who introduced the ordinance, said it was a move to unify the community behind symbols that represent everyone equally. He said he has nothing against LGBTQ+ people, but believes the rainbow flag — the only flag previously approved for display in front of city hall that was not included in the new policy — promotes divisive identity politics that are actually counterproductive to LGBTQ+ acceptance.

“They’re such a small population and why would we recognize anybody special?” Burns said, adding that it would be like him asking for an NRA, white or Christian flag in front of city hall. “We’re all marginalized in some way or victimized in some way, but we don’t get months or parades or whatever.”

Known as the Fab Four to their fans, the council majority, along with Gates, have become rock stars to local Republicans, who hooted and hollered for them at a Veterans Day ceremony on the beach.

Supporters spun off groups like HB Lady Patriots, which aims to bring a patriotic education back into Huntington Beach schools and was active in promoting the library book review proposal. Gates said he hears from officials in other communities who want to replicate their policies, including Fresno County, which recently voted to create a panel to screen children’s books in the libraries.

“We’re willing to be the tip of the spear on this,” Van Der Mark said, attributing everything the council is doing to a philosophy of fighting government overreach. “We want to make Huntington Beach the city that protects your individual liberties and freedoms.”

Gracey Van Der Mark, a Huntington Beach City Councilmember, with a book she says should be banned from children’s sections of the library in Huntington Beach Nov. 11, 2023.

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Lauren Justice

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CalMatters

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Van Der Mark’s sunny fourth-floor office at city hall is stacked with books that she finds obscene. Many of them are sex education manuals, borrowed from the Huntington Beach public library and filled with sticky notes to mark offending passages — discussions of masturbation, explanations of fetishes, images of erect penises and gay sex.

She’s particularly perturbed by a picture book called “Grandad’s Pride,” currently on order for the library, which features a drawing of a Pride parade where two men in leather are kissing in the crowd; she equates it with promoting bondage to kids. Van Der Mark also returns again and again to a page in a sex education book that describes how to use lubricant to insert a tampon if it does not fit.

“The lines are so blurred that we don’t even know where to stop and where to start,” she said. “I don’t need to learn how to stick a finger up my vagina with K-Y jelly. We survived without that kind of graphic information. And if you want it, then you go talk to your mom.”

It’s the type of sexual content that her library book review committee, which the city is in the process of establishing, could move to the adult section or prevent the library from acquiring in the first place. Though a challenge process for library books already existed — there were five in the previous five years, including one by Van Der Mark herself — she said more robust steps are necessary to protect young readers from damaging material, even if it appears within the context of an educational or creative work.

“This one page is going to stick in their brain,” she said. “We should have one area that is completely safe for all children.”

Her crusade has mobilized library supporters — the central branch, a concrete marvel with a spiraling atrium, is beloved far beyond Huntington Beach — and First Amendment groups, who sent a letter to the council in October warning that the plan would infringe on free speech. Daus, the library volunteer, worries that the vague language of the ordinance could allow the committee to impose its own morality on the entire community, especially with LGBTQ+ books.

“It’s feeling like a China or a Russia or a Hungary,” Daus said as she toured the children’s room, which has a reading area designed as a pirate ship. The sex education section had only three books on the shelf.

Among the conservative council majority, Van Der Mark seems to especially rankle the opposition. She was a divisive activist even before her election, which she winkingly acknowledges in her office with a framed wall hanging of her entry in the OC Weekly’s Scariest People of 2018 list.

That was the year Van Der Mark got kicked off two school district committees after troubling comments she had made online resurfaced. In 2017, Van Der Mark joined alt-right protestors, including some with ties to white nationalist groups, to crash a racial justice workshop in Santa Monica. Beneath a video of the incident posted by Van Der Mark, she referred to Black attendees at the meeting as “colored people” who were doing the bidding of “elderly Jewish people” there. Her YouTube account also had a playlist of Holocaust denial videos titled “Holocaust hoax?”

The comments have continued to follow Van Der Mark through her rise in local politics. This summer, as the council majority voted to eliminate the human rights committee, Democratic Councilmember Natalie Moser publicly questioned whether Van Der Mark was a Holocaust denier, leading the conservatives to censure Moser.

“She was masking a face of radical extremism and she did it to infiltrate a government institution so she could become legitimized,” said Gina Clayton-Tarvin, a liberal school board trustee who initially appointed Van Der Mark and who finished fifth in last year’s city council election. “It’s a total threat to democracy, because they are acting in ways that are quasi-fascist.”

Van Der Mark said she has never doubted the Holocaust happened; she was unfamiliar with the conspiracy theory, she said, until she spoke with one of the Jewish organizers at the racial justice workshop she crashed, whom she said sent her the hoax videos as an example.

A 49-year-old grandmother and daughter of immigrants from Ecuador and Mexico, Van Der Mark said she was largely apolitical until around 2016, when she was pulled into advocacy against the local sex education curriculum. She acknowledged that, in the early stages of her political awakening, she attended all types of rallies “to find the truth,” not necessarily aware of who she was affiliating with, but she denied harboring any racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic sentiments.

“If I would have known they were there, I might not have gone,” she said. “But I can’t regret going, because had I not gone out in search of the truth, I would not be where I am today.”

As Van Der Mark prepares to take over as mayor next month, critics worry that she will unleash even more extreme policies. Van Der Mark said she has tried to explain herself to opponents but they remain hostile, perhaps because she betrays their idea of what a Latina politician should be.

“I want to be able to offer this little safe haven that I found for my family, for other people,” she said. “The other side is trying to push conservative values out. We’re saying, ‘no, no, no, this is our city.’ We want to keep it. Why do you want to change it? If this is not a good fit for you, there are other cities that may be a good fit.”

Carol Daus outside of the library in Huntington Beach on Nov. 11, 2023.

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Lauren Justice

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Feeling like strangers in a strange land, some liberals in Huntington Beach are considering leaving.

Daus and her husband have started to explore a move to nearby Long Beach or Pasadena, where a daughter lives. An incident in June when a neighbor had their rainbow flag ripped down and torn to shreds unsettled Daus.

“These are the things that just make you go, you know, do you want to live around this? Or would you rather be in a more welcoming, inclusive neighborhood?” she said. “If I wanted to live in Florida, I’d live in Florida.”

The library fight diverted her attention, though, and the housing market is tough, so now she may wait to see what happens with the March election. The campaign to defeat the proposed charter amendments has provided some comfort and motivation. While she’s not ready yet to put a sign in her yard, she is getting bolder. At a kickoff event last Saturday afternoon, where hundreds gathered at the park outside the central library, Daus ran a table soliciting people to write op-eds in the local media.

Attendees picked up lawn signs and postcards from other booths. The three Democrats on the city council spoke, as did former elected officials. Under a canopy, Shirley Dettloff, who helped write the city’s human dignity statement when she served on the council in the 1990s, signed up volunteers.

“We wanted the city to be known as a city that protected people,” Detloff said. “I was just surprised that anyone would take that on as an issue.”

At the end of the event, dozens gathered around a 33-foot-by-24-foot rainbow flag lying in the grass and chanted, “Vote no! Vote no! Vote no!” The homemade flag is a project of Pride at the Pier, an LGBTQ+ community group that formed this spring after Huntington Beach passed its flag ban. In May, demonstrators unfurled the enormous flag over the side of the city’s famed pier in protest.

Attendees pose for a portrait with a giant Pride flag after a Protect Huntington Beach event in Central Park on Nov. 11, 2023. The group formed in opposition to the new conservative majority on the Huntington Beach City Council.

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Lauren Justice

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CalMatters

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Kane Durham, one of the group’s founders, said this year has raised difficult questions for LGBTQ+ residents about whether they will continue to be welcome in Huntington Beach. He fears the council might next use the updated human dignity declaration, which states that “sex carries advantages and disadvantages that warrant separation during certain activities (i.e. sports),” to prevent trans athletes from participating in the city’s youth sports programs.

Though he does not live in Huntington Beach, Durham has become a vocal activist on behalf of other transgender and nonbinary people whom he said do not feel safe putting themselves out there publicly. For his efforts, he said he’s been doxxed and subject to online rumors calling him a pedophile.

“Too many Californians are in this blue fantasy bubble. We think that it won’t happen here, even while it is happening here,” Durham said. “There are so many people there who are frogs in a boiling pot of water.”

Months of angry council meetings have hardly swayed the Fab Four off their path. They dismiss their opponents as a vocal minority searching for relevance and reject the notion that their actions have divided the community like they accuse their predecessors of doing.

“If just who shows up to city hall’s a reflection of the city, none of us four would have been elected,” said Tony Strickland, who is finishing up his year in the rotating mayorship. “The voters have the final say.”

That will again be the case in March, the first real test for the council majority of how sustainable backlash politics can be in transforming a community.

Even some allies already seem to have grown weary of what’s happening in Huntington Beach.

Pano Frousiakis, a young Republican activist, ended his own campaign for city council last year and worked to elect his conservative rivals so they could regain control of a community that he had always considered “our little oasis in California.”

Though he’s happy with the overall direction of the council, Frousiakis concedes that “the past few months have been getting a little bit off-track.” He established a political organization this year, the HB Patriots, and is running again for city council in 2024 with a message about getting back to local quality-of-life issues.

“Unfortunately, I feel that our residents get sidelined as a result of that. I feel sidelined as a resident,” he said. “The other issues that are being talked about, that’s why I vote for president.”

All you have to do is grab a drink with a friend, eavesdrop at a coffee shop, or open your eyes to see that entertainment professionals in L.A. are hurting these days. Last year there was a 16% decline in filming in the region, according to Film LA, and between 2022 and 2024, L.A. County is estimated to have lost more than 42,000 motion picture-related jobs.

I know this pain, personally. I was a TV writer for years, but my last writer’s room job was in 2021. Luckily, I was able to pivot to copywriting as I continue to work on my own projects, but I do wonder what the rest of my colleagues are up to. Where have the thousands of highly skilled entertainment professionals gone?

Turns out, school.

Specifically, to become therapists.

I first noticed this trend over a decade ago in 2013. I had just moved back to L.A. from New York and I started seeing a new therapist. Over the course of our sessions, she revealed to me that she used to be an actor — and quite a successful one. She was a co-star on a hit sitcom for nine seasons.

But despite the consistent work, she wasn’t fulfilled. She said acting was mostly sitting around in a trailer waiting and she craved more intellectual stimulation. So she went back to school and became a therapist, the irony being that she never fully escaped Hollywood. Today, as an L.A. based therapist, she spends most of her days listening to frustrated actors and writers complain about the biz. Ahh, the circle of life!

Not only was my therapist a former actor, I started to notice more and more of my peers and friends making the switch. I met Alan, 40, who prefers to be anonymous because he doesn’t want his patients knowing about his private life, at a co-working space. We both belonged to a charming apartment-turned-writer’s haven in Silver Lake.

At the time, Alan was a busy film producer, plugging away at his own feature script on the side. But despite having a shiny career working with hip actors and directors, he wasn’t happy.

He remembers going to schmoozy parties where everyone would name drop and brag about what they were working on.

“I had all those fancy things to drop, too, but it meant nothing, it didn’t make me feel any better about myself,” he said. “If I can’t even talk about what I’m up to without feeling sad, that’s kind of a problem.”

Alan started to realize maybe producing wasn’t his destiny. He was going through the motions. Things started to fall into place when he started therapy.

“Therapy made me feel more like myself. I just felt a little bit more enlivened… the rest of the week kind of deadened me,” he said.

He loved how real and deep the conversations were and became intrigued by the idea of becoming a therapist himself. He started taking a few psychology classes and was instantly hooked. Now, he has a thriving private practice and hasn’t looked back.

Primal emotions

Julie Mond is a therapist and an actor. Unlike Alan, Mond still loves acting, it’s not something she grew out of. She just needed a more stable career as she continued to pursue her passion. Becoming a therapist has actually liberated her to focus on the kind of acting she actually wants to do. Because she’s financially stable she can now pick and choose the kinds of projects that feel worth her time.

When I ask Mond why so many entertainment professionals become therapists she reflects on a couple of things. She said performers and directors crave “connecting authentically, being present moment-to-moment, being real and honest. We’re digging for these primal emotions.” All things you have to do as a therapist.

She also has another theory: “A lot of artists go to therapy. Many of us who become therapists have been in therapy and it's changed our lives. I think people in L.A. have been on a healing journey and want to give back.”

Charley Lang, who teaches at Antioch University.

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Jaymes Mihaliak

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Courtesy Charley Lang

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Even though I'm personally meeting more people who are becoming therapists, I wondered if it was an actual trend or just a coincidence.

So I talked with psychology professor Charley Lang at Antioch University to get his take. Lang, who's been teaching psychology for 30 years, said that in his graduate classes, at least 50% of the students come from entertainment careers.

When I asked why they make the switch, he’s blunt: stability.

That’s why Lang himself became a therapist decades ago.

Lang was an actor on Broadway, but eventually hit a wall.

“I had a nice career as an actor, I essentially got to do everything I wanted to do," he said. "But then I was in my late 30s and I was like, ‘Do I always want to be praying for another guest spot on a sitcom in order to feel secure and OK?’”

Does he have any regrets or miss acting? On the contrary, he tells a story:

“I had become a therapist and stopped acting and a friend of mine was directing a play at the Ahmanson and he was like, ‘Please do this play.’ And I was able to figure it out and I was just dipping my toe back in to see what it was like and it was a six-week run of the play. And at the end of the first week I remember standing in the wings waiting to make my entrance and thinking, ‘Oh my god haven’t we already told this freaking story?’ It was like Groundhog Day. It was the same story over and over.”

As a therapist, he said he loves that every day is different.

The point isn’t that working in entertainment is bad and therapy is perfect. To me, the takeaway is that it’s never too late to make a change. That just because something used to work for you doesn’t mean you’re committed to doing it forever.

Or in Mond's case, maybe there is a way to continue doing what you love, but more sustainably.

In today’s fragile and volatile job market, it’s nice to know that you can always begin again. Just because a job or career ends, doesn’t mean your life is over.

If, in the future, I’m too fried, burnt out, or tired of the rollercoaster of being a writer, maybe I’ll embark on a second career.

But until then, I’m still riding the dragon.

Folks, we’ve reached peak art-weird. There’s a group show opening Sunday in an abandoned Sizzler. I am not making this up. Get your fill at the art fairs around town — Frieze, The Other Art Fair, Butter and Felix, for starters — or explore some of the neighborhoods with galleries, like Melrose Hill, West Hollywood and the Arts District. You’re sure to see a lot. It’s almost like we live in a city where you could just wander around and randomly come across things.

If music is more your thing, Licorice Pizza has your go-tos. On Friday, German singer-songwriter and producer Monolink’s "The Beauty Of It All Tour" stops at The Wiltern, Brandi Carlile is with The Head And The Heart at the Forum and the Fiery Furnaces are at the Masonic Lodge. At the Peacock Theater, there’s an epic “Legends Of Hip Hop” bill with Big Daddy Kane, Kurtis Blow, Kool Moe Dee, Melle Mel & Scorpio from The Furious Five, Doug E. Fresh, KRS‐One and more. Saturday, experimental hip-hop group Clipping is at the Fonda, and the artist formerly known as June Marieezy — (((O))) — is at a cool new Chinatown venue called Pacific Electric. Or you can spend the whole weekend at Ace Mission Studios in Boyle Heights, immersed in Factory 93’s two-day underground techno festival, Skyline L.A.

Elsewhere on LAist, you can visit the community hub East L.A. Film Shop, dance like it’s the 70s at the immersive theater experience Brassroots District: L.A. ’74 and head to the new Studio Ghibli exhibit at the Academy Museum with superfan Makenna Sievertson.

Events

Amadeus

Through Sunday, March 15
Pasadena Playhouse
39 S. El Molino, Pasadena
COST: FROM $48; MORE INFO

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Jeff Lorch

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Pasadena Playhouse

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Our friends at the L.A. Times called the new production of Amadeus at Pasadena Playhouse a “marvel to behold,” and I don’t think you can get a bigger rave than that. Tony winner Jefferson Mays plays Salieri in director Darko Tresnjak’s (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) take on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play about the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart in 19th-century Vienna.

Spooky Stories After Dark

Saturday, February 28, 7 p.m.
The Wolves
519 S. Spring St., Downtown L.A. 
COST: FREE, TWO DRINK MINIMUM; MORE INFO

One of my favorite L.A. Instagram follows is Spooky Foodie, aka Ansley Layne, who goes to restaurants in L.A. and tells all about the ghosts haunting your favorite haunts. She’s bringing her ghost stories and encouraging you to tell your own at Spooky Stories After Dark, a Moth-inspired storytelling competition night at The Wolves downtown. After each story, the speaker will be interviewed by Spooky Foodie and co-host Your Cousin Trev. You can also expect some surprise celebrity guests.

Sleep, a film by Andy Warhol featuring John Giorno

Friday, February 27, 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Marciano Art Foundation
4357 Wilshire Blvd., Mid-Wilshire
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

Film stills of John Giorno in Andy Warhol's Sleep. New York, NY, United States, 1963. Photo credit: Andy Warhol. 8 x 10 inches, b/w, photographic print.

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Studio Rondinone/Courtesy of the John Giorno Collection, John Giorno Archives. Studio Rondinone, New York, NY.

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Andy Warhol

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It’s not every day you can screen Sleep, the 1964 groundbreaking avant-garde film by Andy Warhol, so take advantage and grab a ticket for this evening at the Marciano Art Foundation. Coinciding with their John Giorno: No Nostalgia show, the film is five hours and 21 minutes of artist and poet (and Warhol’s then-lover) John Giorno sleeping, so needless to say, you probably don’t need to be there the whole time. The galleries will be open throughout the entire screening, so it’s also a fun chance to see some late-night art!

Black History Greens Festival

Saturday, February 28, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. 
Virginia Ave. Park 
2200 Virginia Ave., Santa Monica
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

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Courtesy City of Santa Monica

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Check out three greens-cooking demonstrations with local chefs at the Black History Greens Festival in Santa Monica. The day also features family activities, including book readings and giveaways, plus performances. KJLH radio’s Arron “BOBO” Arnell returns for a second year as the master of ceremonies, and DJ Dense will be spinning throughout the event.

48th L.A. Chinatown Firecracker-Lunar New Year Celebration

Saturday, February 28 to Sunday, March 1
943 Broadway (starting line), Chinatown 
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy Firecracker 10K

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Usher in the Year of the Fire Horse with the annual run/walk in Chinatown, plus a celebration with lion dances, music, a dog contest and more. Saturday features the long 20-mile run and century bike ride, while Sunday is a festival atmosphere with the 5K and 10K races, fun runs, kids' activities and more.

Opera Noir at L.A. Opera’s Akhnaten 

Saturday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A. 
COST: Opening night from $134, other performances from $44; MORE INFO

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Craig T. Mathew

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L.A. Opera

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L.A. Opera welcomes back Philip Glass’ opera about ancient Egypt, Akhnaten, featuring John Holiday as the title king and mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as his queen, Nefertiti. The opera is on at the Dorothy Chandler through March 22, but opening night is also Opera Noir, an event with the San Fernando Valley Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, which brings Black artistry and community together with opera. No matter which night you go, get there early for a pre-performance talk with Dr. Tiffany Kuo in Stern Grand Hall one hour before every performance.

Art Fairs

You have your pick of art fairs and related art events all weekend long. From the big Frieze Art Fair, which has been the jewel of L.A. Art Week since its launch here in 2019; to Felix, which makes a very cool use of space at the Hollywood Roosevelt; to The Other Art Fair in a new Culver City location (with art you might actually be able to afford for your wall); to the Black-artist focus of Butter in Inglewood, there’s really no shortage of places to see the newest artists’ work as well as old favorites.

Frieze L.A.

Through Sunday, March 1
Barker Hangar
3021 Airport Ave., Santa Monica
COST: FROM $79; MORE INFO 

Butter

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Courtesy Butter

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Through Sunday, March 1
Hollywood Park
1011 Stadium Drive, Inglewood 
COST: $60; MORE INFO

Felix Art Fair

Through Sunday, March 1
Hollywood Roosevelt 
7000 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
COST: $75; MORE INFO

The Other Art Fair

Through Sunday, March 1
3Labs
8461 Warner Drive, Culver City
FROM $30; MORE INFO

Post-Fair

Through Saturday, February 28 
128 Fifth St., Santa Monica
COST: $12; MORE INFO

We're in for another warm and sunny day in SoCal.

Daytime highs for the beaches will reach the mid-70s and up to the low 80s more inland. Downtown L.A. will see temperatures up to 83 degrees.

Temperatures for the valley communities and the Inland Empire will reach the mid-80s. The western San Fernando Valley will see temps in the upper 80s, up to 89 degrees for Woodland Hills.

In Coachella Valley, expect another day with highs in the 90s, up to 96 degrees.

Friday is expected to be the warmest day of the week.

Newly released data from the city show that Los Angeles police officers use minor traffic stops as a way to investigate Black and Latino people on suspicion of committing a more serious crime at a higher rate than their share of the citywide population.

The LAPD adopted a policy about so-called pretextual stops and began tracking the practice in 2022.

In a report released at the end of January, the city’s chief legislative analyst found that Black people were involved in nearly 31% of pretextual stops conducted by LAPD officers between spring 2022 and fall 2025. According to 2023 Census estimates, Black people make up 8% of the city’s population.

According to the report, "Hispanic/Latino" people, who make up just less than half the city’s population, were the subjects of 56% of pretextual stops.

That analysis, along with a separate report by LAPD, found that of the more than 760,000 people involved in traffic stops between spring of 2022 and fall of 2025, 9% to 10% of them were stopped pretextually.

Chauncee Smith, an associate director of the racial justice-focused nonprofit Catalyst California, said LAPD’s data is “under inclusive” since it relies on officers subjectively deciding when a stop is pretextual.

He said an analysis of data from Catalyst California, published in February, demonstrates that pretextual stops don’t result in evidence discovery enough to make up for the negative impacts of the practice.

“It's affecting the lives of many Black and Latinx Angelenos on an everyday basis,” Smith said, adding that pretextual stops often result in harassment, dehumanization and excessive ticketing or fining of communities of color.

Pretextual stops 

Police sometimes use violations of the vehicle code to stop drivers and investigate them for a more serious crime unrelated to the traffic stop, such as possessing drugs or firearms, according to Deepak Premkumar, a research fellow for the Public Policy Institute of California.

 ”Law enforcement officers see tons of violations, and we give them a lot of discretion to determine who they should stop and when,” Premkumar told LAist.

A plausible example of what a pretextual stop could look like is if police see a car matching the description of one that was involved in a crime in the area, then pull that car over for a broken taillight, Premkumar said.

The policy the LAPD adopted in 2022 outlines that officers:

• Can only conduct pretextual stops as long as they are “acting upon articulable information” that the person is close to a serious crime that’s worth investigating. 
• Should minimize stops for minor equipment violations, such as broken taillights, unless the violation “interferes with public safety.”
• State the reason for the stop, whether pretextual or not, while their body-worn cameras are filming.

Despite the adoption of the policy, Catalyst California’s analysis found that the proportion of all officer-initiated stops that are for minor traffic violations has “remained relatively constant since 2019.”

Racial disparities

The analysis from the city’s chief legislative analyst included a comparison of pretextual stop rates for different ethnic and racial groups in L.A. compared to their share of the citywide population.

The analysis found that "Hispanic/Latino" and Black people were overrepresented in data on pretextual stops compared to their share of the population.

L.A. Police Capt. Shannon White drafted the department’s report of the same data, which did not include an ethnic or racial breakdown of those involved in pretextual stops.

At a Los Angeles Police Commission Meeting in February, when she presented the department’s analysis, White said Census estimates for the city don’t necessarily align with “the actual breakdown of our suspects of crime,” who, theoretically, are the subjects of pretextual stops.

“When you look at the actual breakdown of our suspects of crime…what you will find is that they skew towards communities of color for various societal reasons,” White said.

According to the LAPD’s analysis, people in Central and South L.A. were subjects of pretextual at higher rates than in the Valley and West L.A.

Some commissioners at the meeting questioned that disparity.

“Something just doesn't add up,” Commission President Teresa Sánchez-Gordon said. “Is it racial profiling? Is that bias? Implicit, explicit bias that's in the report?”

Discovery rates

The police’s analysis found that searches during pretextual stops yielded contraband, such as firearms and other weapons or drugs, in about every 3 in 10 cases. “Narco-related” evidence is what’s most commonly found in the searches.

Catalyst California’s report looked more specifically at different kinds of searches and how likely they are to lead to evidence discovery.

The nonprofit found that since 2022, when officers used consent-only searches during stops for minor traffic violations, they discovered evidence 3% to 10% of the time. The rate was similarly low when the person stopped was on parole or probation.

According to Catalyst California’s analysis, the type of search most likely to lead to discovery of evidence is when there’s an existing search or arrest warrant for the person stopped.

“This was likely because they occurred in situations when there was a higher likelihood of a significant violation, beyond mere pretext,” the nonprofit's researchers wrote.