The Brief

Los Angeles police arrested and cited a street safety activist on Sunday as he painted DIY crosswalks in Westwood with community members.

“I was like, ‘Hey, look, we don't have a permit. We're protesting for safer streets and a more effective government,’” Jonathan Hale said about his interaction with officers. “They were not down with that.”

Hale made headlines earlier this year when he led efforts to paint crosswalks around Stoner Park and at a Koreatown intersection where an RV driver hit and killed 9-year-old Nadir Gavarrete in July.

Hale and volunteers with a group he founded called People’s Vision Zero initially planned to work at the intersection of Wilkins and Midvale avenues. State data show a car hit and injured a 35-year-old man at that intersection in November 2020. There were too many potholes, Hale said, making painting there “unfeasible.” Instead, the group focused on the corner immediately adjacent at Wilkins and Kelton avenues.

According to a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson, “a vandalism radio call was generated” around 11 a.m. that described “approximately 7 suspects were painting what appeared to be a fake crosswalk pretending to be city workers.”

Hale said the group had painted two of four total crosswalks and were working on the third when officers approached, asked him for a permit and eventually cited him for misdemeanor vandalism.

Hale said he made it clear to the officer questioning him, as well as in flyers and posters he distributed locally earlier in the week, that People’s Vision Zero is an “unofficial group painting an unpermitted crosswalk.”

“ I make it very clear I’m not a city employee,” Hale said.

People's Vision Zero painted two of four crosswalks at the corner before police showed up.

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Jonathan Hale

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A video from People’s Vision Zero shows an officer speaking to Hale and people watching him get arrested.

“You’re vandalizing city property without a permit,” the officer says in the video. “So I’m gonna ask y’all nicely — y’all can record all you want — but back up or I will take everyone to jail.”

Hale said he is due in court on Jan. 5.

In addition to the local outreach before painting the crosswalk, Hale submitted a 311 ticket on Oct. 7 requesting the city install a marked crosswalk at the Midvale intersection and emailed the mayor’s office about People’s Vision Zero’s planned action on Dec. 1.

Local councilmember responds

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky represents the Westwood area.

In a statement, her spokesperson, Leo Daube, pointed to how DIY crosswalks present liability concerns for the city and need to be reviewed for "ADA access, visibility, and safety."

Daube added that Yaroslavsky recognizes the need for expedited delivery of safety improvements to L.A. streets and could see "volunteers supporting this work in a safe and legal way in the future."

While not involved with the incident, Daube said the office would "prefer enforcement focused on dangerous driving and speeding, which put residents at risk every day.”

Hale has been transparent with the mayor’s office

Hale met with the mayor’s office in September and said they discussed policy proposals that would address the city’s slow pace toward making streets in L.A. safer, the central frustration behind community-led campaigns like People’s Vision Zero.

According to correspondence shared with LAist, the mayor’s office has only responded once to Hale’s emails since the September meeting.

“While we share your goals, all roadway markings, including crosswalks, must comply with local, state, and federal standards to ensure consistency and minimize risk,” an Oct. 10 email from the mayor’s office states. “Though we can’t approve of or endorse unsanctioned roadway alterations, we welcome collaboration to advance safety initiatives.”

Nothing has materialized so far, Hale said, so his group has continued to paint crosswalks at certain intersections where pedestrians have been hit by vehicles. Hale emails the mayor’s office before each “paint party,” the term People’s Vision Zero uses to describe DIY crosswalk painting events, according to messages reviewed by LAist.

In the Dec. 1 email he sent about the Westwood crosswalk, Hale said People’s Vision Zero would stop painting crosswalks if the mayor’s office either “publicly and unequivocally condemns our actions” or “demonstrates urgency in ending traffic violence by taking tangible steps to make our streets safer.”

In a statement to LAist about Hale’s arrest, the mayor’s office said that “despite communication about City, State, and Federal laws and parameters, Jonathan has chosen to continue to pursue his own course of action.”

Where is the city’s Vision Zero program?

In the spring, an audit covering the first seven years of L.A.’s Vision Zero program found that a lack of political will and poor coordination hampered the city’s failed goal of reaching zero traffic deaths by 2025.

Since then, local leaders have been considering a suite of recommendations to revamp the program.

Last week, members of L.A. City Council’s budget committee largely approved the recommendations, but also criticized the city’s slow pace of implementing programs, such as speed safety cameras, that have proven to be effective in addressing traffic violence.

“I'm just sort of speaking for myself, but like almost every week someone's hit by a car and killed, it feels like, in our district,” Yaroslavsky said at the Dec. 2 meeting.

In a presentation to the committee, staff from the City Administrative Office and L.A.’s Department of Transportation said pedestrian fatalities in the city have increased nearly 36% since 2021, but that there’s been a decrease in vehicle-and-vehicle crashes.

“It is essentially getting safer to drive in L.A., and similar story across the country, but it is getting less safe to be a pedestrian,” Chris Rider, a city transportation engineer, said during the meeting.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is blaming Boeing and his own agency for botching a test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, designed to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

A 311-page report details the issues that led to the failure of Starliner's first crewed test flight, which in June 2024 launched NASA astronauts Butch Willmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida.

The duo's launch was initially a success — but as their Starliner spacecraft approached the station, multiple thrusters failed, hampering the crew's ability to steer toward the station and dock.

After months of deliberation, NASA and Boeing made the decision to send Starliner back to Earth without Wilmore and Williams on board. Instead, the astronauts remained on the space station and returned home nine months later — in SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule.

In a news conference Thursday, Isaacman said the report classified the failure as a Type A Mishap — the highest classification for a mission failure. The Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents, along with the Apollo 1 fire, were also classified as a Type A Mishap. While those accidents resulted in the deaths of crewmembers, the Starliner mission was "ultimately successful in preserving crew safety," according to the report.

The report identifies the thrusters as a key technical issue leading to the failure, although an investigation is still ongoing and a root cause has not yet been found.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected," said Isaacman. "But the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight."

He said those organizational and leadership problems were seen at both Boeing and NASA, Isaacman's own agency.

The report identified an erosion of trust between the two organizations and leadership that was "overly risk-tolerant."

Isaacman said that the more than 30 launch attempts for this mission led to "cumulative schedule pressure and decision fatigue." When discussing whether to return Wilmore and Williams in Starliner, Isaacman said the "disagreements over crew return options deteriorated into unprofessional conduct while the crew remained on orbit."

Isaacman said there would be "leadership accountability," but didn't offer any details.

"These are very complex programs, and complex programs like this fail in complex ways," said Don Platt, department head of aerospace engineering, physics and space science at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. "Those organizational issues are oftentimes, maybe even more important than the technical problems that they're facing."

Such a public scolding of NASA and one of its contractors by its own leader is uncommon, says Platt, who worked on the construction of the space station.

"I think it's really setting the stage for sort of the new way that NASA plans to do business here in his administration," says Platt.

He says that could mean greater transparency and oversight over NASA's contractors

Despite NASA's plans to decommission the space station by the end of the decade, Isaacman says he is still committed to flying Starliner. That would leave NASA with two options, Boeing and SpaceX, to fly astronauts to the station — something SpaceX already does with regularity.

The report offered 61 formal recommendations ahead of the next crewed Starliner mission.

"We're grateful to NASA for its thorough investigation and the opportunity to contribute to it," Boeing said in an emailed statement. "We're working closely with NASA to ensure readiness for future Starliner missions and remain committed to NASA's vision for two commercial crew providers."

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The Long Beach Unified Board of Trustees on Wednesday authorized the school district to end the employment of close to 600 employees, a move the LBUSD says is necessary to stabilize its ballooning deficit.

Board members approved two separate resolutions, the first of which does not renew the contracts of 515 certificated employees, who are on temporary contracts that must be re-upped annually. Though it is common for the district to choose not to renew some temporary contracts, the non-renewal of hundreds of TK-12 teachers, early childhood education teachers and social workers represents a massive change for the next school year from the current workforce of 10,000 total employees. While schools across the district will feel the cuts, Poly and Jordan high schools may be especially hard hit; 14 and 12 teachers at each site are listed on the district’s document of non-renewals.

The second resolution authorized the district to formally lay off 54 classified district positions: non-teaching staff members ranging from office support staff to instructional and recreation aides to library media assistants to parent liaisons.

The board votes come after months of warnings from the district that costs and spending have outpaced the district’s funding, saddling LBUSD with a $70 million deficit. The district is now attempting to shrink that deficit through a fiscal stabilization plan that “has prioritized preserving core instructional, wellness, and student support services,” the district wrote in an agenda item related to the cuts.

Prior to the vote, Superintendent Jill Baker framed the proposed cuts with the historical context of significant enrollment declines, the expiration of funds following the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic that had allowed the district to develop a healthy reserve, uncertain federal and state dollars and low attendance numbers, for which the district is penalized — “a really grave situation, fiscally,” she said, one that many districts across California are grappling with.

Baker walked board members through the significant efforts the district has made to manage costs, saving more than $47 million, including through significant central office reductions. Despite these efforts, it’s still not enough, Baker said.

“The release of temporary certificated contracts is one way of reducing the number of employees without impacting permanent certificated employees,” the district wrote in the agenda item.

For those 515 certificated employees who will be notified that their contracts will end, it’s a way that “the district can get away with letting teachers go without calling it a layoff,” said Peder Larsen, vice president of the Teachers Association of Long Beach, which represents certificated employees in LBUSD.

Some of them could be rehired, especially if their positions are in high demand, like science, math and special education teachers, Larsen said. Yet, it throws hundreds into a tailspin of uncertainty and fear, unsure if their jobs have definitively ended and how long they will have health coverage, he added.

While he said the district has not officially announced that no permanent certificated employees will be cut (they have until March 15 to do so), he said he is “reading the tea leaves” and predicting those permanent positions will be safe this year.

In his comment to the board during public testimony, Larsen advocated for examining the money spent annually on consultants and contracts and urged the board and district to re-examine their priorities and “choose to protect the people who serve students every single day.”

On both votes, School Board Member Maria Isabel López was the lone vote against the resolutions, voicing her opinion that some of these positions could have been saved if fiscal priorities had been different and major contracts had not been approved.

Other board members acknowledged that the votes will change lives. “There’s not one of us in this room that takes this lightly,” said Board President Diana Craighead before voting in favor of the cuts. Board Member Doug Otto said he was voting to adopt the resolutions “sadly, reluctantly and necessarily.”