We Are Not Criminals

Your author

Just so there's no doubt about who is speaking, the author of this site is Rich Perelman.

I am a 51-year-old life-long resident of Los Angeles and am the owner of Perelman, Pioneer & Company, headquartered in the Wilshire Center District of the city. Our firm specialized in event management and publishing, including two Web sites.

>> In the event management area, I was privileged to be a Vice President of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, responsible for the preparations of Press Operations for the 1984 Olympic Games. Since then, our team has worked on dozens of diverse events, including, but not limited to:

• Centennial Celebration of the Statue of Liberty (New York, 1986);
• National Columbus Quincentennial Celebration (New York, 1992);
• Olympic Games in Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996) and Winter Games in Calgary (1988) and Salt Lake City (2002);
• Major multi-sport competitions including the Goodwill Games (Seattle, 1990), Pan American Games (Indianapolis, 1987) and World University Games (Buffalo, 1993).
• Major single-sport competitions including the XV FIFA World Cup (1994), the III FIFA Women's World Cup (1999), the World Baseball Classic (2006), the 1993 NFL Super Bowl, USA Track & Field Senior and Junior National Championships (2005) and many others.
• The wild and wooly Reform Party National Convention held in Long Beach, California in 2000.
• Los Angeles' Olympic bids for the 2012 and 2016 designations as the United States Applicant City.

>> On the publishing side, we are involved in sports and cigars:

• Our CigarCyclopedia.com site is one of the largest information-only sites on cigars in the world, with 1.6 million visits and 5.0 million page views in 2007 alone. We were the first site to post daily coverage of the world of cigars, beginning in 2004 and still continuing.
• Our Perelman's Pocket Cyclopedia of Cigars is in its 14th annual edition in 2008 with more than 175,000 sold to date. Our Perelman's Pocket Cyclopedia of Havana Cigars is now in its third edition.
• Our sports commentary site, TheSportsExaminer.com, offers commentary, intelligence and observations twice weekly, both on-line and by electronic mail to our opt-in subscriber list of nearly 40,000 nationwide.
• I write a thrice-weekly column about Olympic sports called "Inside the Rings" at UniversalSports.com (click Olympics, then click "Columns" at the right side of the page).

I live in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA as a member of the Honors program in 1978, then from Loyola Law School in 1981. I have been a member of the California State Bar since 1981.

Now you know.

Welcome to "We Are Not Criminals"

Welcome to the "We Are Not Criminals" blog, an effort to stop a terrible change in the laws of the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. Here are the basics:

>> On Friday, August 12, 2008, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks introduced two items:

(1) A proposed Resolution that asks the County of Los Angeles to "limit public exposure to secondhand smoke in all public areas and common areas where people congregate including, but not limited to indoor and outdoor businesses, hotels, parks, apartment common areas, restaurants and bars, and beaches." The proposed Resolution was referred to the Rules & Government Committee, made up of Council members Eric Garcetti, Jack Weiss and Dennis Zine.

(2) A Motion that asks the "City Attorney to be requested to prepare and present an ordinance to enact a second-hand smoking law effective throughout the City which would limit public exposure to secondhand smoke in all public areas and common areas where people congregate, including, but not limited to indoor and outdoor businesses, hotels, parks, apartment common areas, restaurants and bars, and beaches." This motion was referred to the Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee, made up of Council members tom LaBonge, Jan Perry (who seconded the Motion) and Janice Hahn.

>> The goal of the legislation is to essentially ban smoking in the City of Los Angeles and possibly in the County of Los Angeles, if agreed to by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. It would make criminals out of an estimated 384,000 smokers in the City and 989,000 adults who smoke in the County of Los Angeles.

>> Make no mistake: enforcement of this law, as requested by Parks, requires the involvement of the Los Angeles Police Department and the City Attorney's Office in the City and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the District Attorney's Office in the County. All four are already overloaded, but any time that a person is smoking at a street corner, in front of a building or even on a crowded sidewalk, that person can be arrested on a misdemeanor charge or cited for an infraction.

>> In an editorial that appeared on Tuesday, August 12 on the CityWatchLA.com, Parks wrote that "This is not a request that will drain law enforcement resources but primarily would be a code enforcement activity via either an infraction or misdemeanor." At best, he must be kidding, since Parks knows - as a 36-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and chief from 1997-2002 - the police are the only enforcement mechanism the City has!

This site is therefore dedicated to trying to prevent this change in the law in Los Angeles. You can help be registering your protest with the applicable City and County officials, listed in a subsequent post.