A 45-year-old homeless man that started acting irrationally after being asked to leave the food court area on the Santa Monica Pier was arrested on Aug. 11.
At 11:45 a.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department received a radio call telling them that a man was trespassing and being combative on the pier.
Apparently this man had been sitting on the ground in front of the food court begging for food, so the local security staff had asked him to leave.
At that point he had begun to act in an irrational fashion, and had followed that up by attempting to enter a local business.
He was stopped from entering the business by a security officer, but had pushed this security officer away, almost causing him to fall over.
This man had then climbed a tree and wrapped his legs around the tree.
The security men then pulled him out of the tree and he had then laid flat on the ground and started to challenge anyone who would listen to a fight.
The first responding police officers had put this man in handcuffs, but when he was asked to arise he refused and begun to shout the words, “police brutality, police brutality,” over and over (again, presumably to anyone who would listen).
Eventually the officers managed to get him off the ground and place him in a cage fitted into the back of a police vehicle.
A pair of representatives of a local business signed a private person’s arrest form, and this man in a cage was taken to jail.
This man was charged with battery on a person, obstructing an investigation and disturbing the peace. Bail was set at $20,000.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
