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Life & Times Transcript
07/28/05 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- It takes more than a sharp pair of eyes to be a good cop, but should we let a car do police work? Sgt. Dan Gomez>> A good officer in a ten-hour shift could maybe do a hundred twenty licenses. With this car, the automated system can easily run about eight thousand plates in that same amount of time. Val>> And then, what do we have cued up for FilmWeek? A school for super heroes, a joke for all comics and a required fondness for canines. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val>> It could make a huge dent in the number of stolen cars that are actually recovered. It's a new technology: cameras that can scan hundreds of license plate numbers in the time it takes an officer to scan just a few. But there are some concerns. Hena Cuevas went on a ride-along to see how this anti-car theft technology works. Hena Cuevas>> In Los Angeles, one in five crimes is a car theft. Compared to the national average, there are fifty percent more vehicles stolen here. But now police officers, Christine Labriola and Ryan Nguyen, have a new weapon in their fight against car thieves. It's a high-tech vehicle that gives them an extra set of eyes for the road. Christine Labriola>> Well, it frees up our hands and that gives actually two sets of eyes instead of one set of eyes to look at our surroundings and see what's going on. Hena Cuevas>> It's called the Smart Car, a one-of-a-kind vehicle that's being tested out in Los Angeles's high crime Rampart Division of the LAPD. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> The Smart Car is unique because what it does is it incorporates a lot of technologies into one vehicle. Hena Cuevas>> Sergeant Dan Gomez specializes in providing officers with high-tech gizmos. This is the latest one. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> As far as we know, this particular vehicle is the only vehicle like that in the United States where it combines all this technology into one vehicle used in this manner. Hena Cuevas>> Its official name is the License Plate Recognition Vehicle. This is how it works. Multiple cameras on top of the car -- in this case, two -- record and scan information as the car drives along. The camera can read the plates of cars even as they're moving by, similar to a bar code scanner at a grocery story. Christine Labriola>> As we go by, it's making this little dinging. That's telling me it's reading plates. Hena Cuevas>> The system then compares the plates it reads with the license numbers of vehicles that have been reported stolen. If it finds a match -- Christine Labriola>> It's going to go to big screen and it's going to alert you with a signal letting you know if that car may possibly be stolen. And it makes it nice because it has that audible sound, so I don't have to be focused on the screen. I can just drive around and, once I hear that, I look at the picture. If it's on the right side of the screen, it's going to let me know that the vehicle is going to be to the right of me. If it's on the left side of the screen, it's going to be to the left of me. Hena Cuevas>> On the screen, the officers can see not only the plate number, but also a picture of the vehicle. Christine Labriola>> So it makes it much easier when I've got to make a u-turn and I've got to go chase that car down. Instead of just looking for a license plate, I have a picture of the vehicle like this vehicle here. Now I'll be able to find it much quicker. Hena Cuevas>> Normally, officers have to manually input the license plates of vehicles they suspect are stolen and run it through the database, something Gomez says could be a thing of the past since the Smart Car has increased scanning capacity enormously. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> A good officer in a ten-hour shift could maybe do a hundred twenty licenses. With this car, the automated system can easily run about eight thousand plates in that same amount of time. Christine Labriola>> Usually in a year, my partner and I would maybe be able to get ten stolen cars that were out rolling. This year so far, we've had over twenty-five ourselves in just a few months of doing it. Hena Cuevas>> It can also work the other way. Officers can input a wanted license plate number and the Smart Car will keep an eye out for it. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> Amber alerts, warrants, any of those databases can be put because the computer simply looks at the numbers and then compares to whatever databases in the vehicle. Hena Cuevas>> The system can scan the license plates of vehicles not only parked alongside a street, but also traveling at high speeds on the freeways. But with this new technology and all of this information, there are concerns about privacy and its possible illegal use. Ricardo Garcia>> Today we're talking about taking the pictures of a license plate. Tomorrow it might be a different technology. These things together combined change how we function as a society. Hena Cuevas>> Ricardo Garcia is an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. Even though he doesn't have a problem with the license plate technology itself, he wonders what the collective effect of these monitoring systems popping everywhere will be. Ricardo Garcia>> If you look at individual ones, you know, they're packaged in a very neat, sexy way to resolve a particular issue. But when you stop and look at all of them together, which is really how they function, they're part of a greater surveillance technology to monitor what goes on in the streets of Los Angeles or other cities. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> We understand peoples' concerns about their privacy and we're being very strict in terms of our guidelines and how we deploy it. We deploy it in only public spaces where people have no expectation of privacy and we're very careful with that and we will continue to be in the future. Hena Cuevas>> But could someone get into the system and tamper with the license plate numbers? Gomez says no because the databases come directly from the Justice Department. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> At the end, when we pull the information out, again, it can't be tampered by the officer. It's simply wireless taken out of the vehicle and put into a secure server where it's encrypted and can't be changed. Hena Cuevas>> About half an hour into this ride, the system spots a stolen vehicle. An image fills the entire monitor. Ryan Nguyen>> So the first thing we do is look at the monitor, verify where the vehicle is and if it's rolling or not. Obviously, this looks like it's parked. Hena Cuevas>> Since the machine may have misread the number, every alert is always verified over the radio. [Film Clip] Christine Labriola>> "Yeah, it looks like they pretty much stripped it." Hena Cuevas>> Their first stolen vehicle in less than an hour. Christine Labriola>> "The whole ignition is missing from the inside." Hena Cuevas>> According to Gomez, it also helps reduce bias and racism by making the process more objective. Remember how officers have to manually input suspicious plates? Many times they're influenced by who's driving the car, what it looks like and where they are, but the Smart Car -- Sgt. Dan Gomez>> Isn't looking for gender or race. All it's looking for is numbers. Hena Cuevas>> But like every new technology, the system has its glitches and that's why this test period is so important. Christine Labriola>> My partner and I are street cops, so we're telling them, you know what, this doesn't work, we don't want this, we want this, and they're more than happy to accommodate us. Sgt. Dan Gomez>> The technology is no good if it's too complicated. We want simple technology to add to our officers. Hena Cuevas>> Toward the end of our ride, an SUV speeds by and the machine beeps once again. The chase continues as it's verified over the radio, but it turns out to be a misread. The officers check the list of numbers and see that the problem is that the machine read a "3" as a "B". Christine Labriola>> Sometimes when the numbers or letters are similar, it may give us a false read and that's what it did there. Once again, we always do a double-check and voice it over the radio. Hena Cuevas>> The cars cost an estimated twenty to forty thousand dollars. If this trial works out, they hope to have half a dozen of them on the streets. But ACLU's Garcia hopes they don't make officers lazy. Ricardo Garcia>> The technology, if it's a substitute for good police work, that's a concern. That is something that would be a problem. Hena Cuevas>> But Labriola says this technology, together with their street smarts, holds great promise and could make a major dent in the thirty-three thousand vehicles that are stolen every year. Christine Labriola>> You know, technology is huge and what we're finding is, if the knuckleheads get smarter out there, we need to get smarter. Hena Cuevas>> I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times. Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times". Val>> Los Angeles is the nation's second largest city and yet, when it comes to major corporations, Los Angeles has very few headquartered here. New York, for example, has forty-three. We have only four. Even Troy, Michigan has more major corporations than Los Angeles. Kate Berry with the L.A. Business Journal talked with Sam Louie about the dirth of major companies in Los Angeles. Sam Louie>> Kate, thanks very much for joining us on Life and Times. You wrote a recent article titled "Why L.A. Companies are Getting Smaller and Smaller and Smaller and Smaller". First off, how do you define small and what exactly is small? Kate Berry>> Well, small is having a market cap of below fifty million really and we have a lot of companies in Los Angeles with very small market caps. Only a few with market caps of a billion or more, maybe ten, so Los Angeles really is a very small company town. Sam Louie>> You talked about market capitalization. What exactly is that? Kate Berry>> The market capitalization is the number of shareholders at a company multiplied by the price of the stock. So with the companies that are very large, their market caps are over a billion, but companies that are fairly small, their stock price might not be as high or the number of shareholders they have is lower. Also, the value of the company. It really represents the value of the company which is smaller. So you'll have a company like Walt Disney, Amgen which is a pharmaceutical company, DirecTV which is in El Segundo. They are an entertainment company. These companies have very large operations and are much larger obviously than most companies in Los Angeles. Sam Louie>> When I think of large, I think of Fortune 500 companies. How many Fortune 500 companies does Los Angeles have? Kate Berry>> Los Angeles only has four Fortune 500 companies, which is amazing, but that is really only the city of Los Angeles. When you include the county and surrounding areas, we have sixteen large Fortune 500 companies. The difference, though, is that a lot of Fortune 500 companies have left Los Angeles in the past decade and many are still leaving. In fact, Unocal which is a company that is about to be bought will be one of the last remaining Fortune 500 companies in Los Angeles. Sam Louie>> What are their reasons for leaving? Kate Berry>> Well, what usually is that companies get bought by other bigger companies. Los Angeles tends to be a place that is very expensive for companies to operate, we have a high workers' comp. All of the things in California that make it tough for a company to make money means that a lot of companies really don't want to base their operations here. Sam Louie>> So with these Fortune 500 companies leaving Los Angeles, does that mean a recession will soon hit the area? Kate Berry>> Well, it really isn't dependent on Fortune 500 companies leaving, but that might be a small factor. But economists believe that a recession is likely to hit -- or at least a slow-down -- will hit the United States economy next year. One of the issues about Los Angeles is, because we have so many small companies in diverse industries, you know, people think Los Angeles is only entertainment or movie studios. In fact, we have a broad range of companies here in oil and gas, way beyond entertainment. So because we have a lot of small companies, it means that we're not as likely to be hit by a recession because different industries respond to a downturn in the economy differently. Sam Louie>> I understand Los Angeles leads the country in terms of startups? Kate Berry>> Absolutely. In fact, ninety-five percent of the companies in Los Angeles have fifty or fewer employees and that's an amazing statistic because it means the majority of companies are small. So job growth, which is what fuels the economy, really hasn't been going on that much in the last maybe two years. Sam Louie>> Does this mean fewer companies are deciding to move into Los Angeles because of some of the factors that you have mentioned earlier? Kate Berry>> Absolutely. In fact, very few if any large companies plan on moving to Los Angeles and opening their headquarters here. More likely, you'll have a small company that grows and gets bigger and bigger and started operations here as a startup and then becomes a Fortune 500 company down the road, like an Amgen which is a bio-pharmaceutical startup. That's probably more likely what will happen. Or even, say, DreamWorks which is publicly traded and does have a fairly high market cap and they're in the entertainment industry obviously, DreamWorks Animation. They grew to become much larger. So the more likely scenario is a small company will grow to become larger as opposed to large companies moving their operations to Los Angeles. Sam Louie>> And with all these new companies that are starting up, does that help -- you had mentioned -- balance the economy a little more? Kate Berry>> Absolutely, because a diverse economy means that one industry won't get hit when another one does. When we had the recession in the 1990's, Los Angeles got hit dramatically because of the aerospace industry and a lot of layoffs in aerospace, then the downturn in housing. That's not actually the case anymore. Now we have a lot of new startup businesses, a lot in technology, internet-related companies, some in manufacturing, again, distribution, a lot of it that has gone to China. But it's an area like Silicon Valley that has bred a lot of entrepreneurs. Sam Louie>> Currently, what are the biggest industries in the Los Angeles area? The hot markets? Kate Berry>> Financial services is very hot. We have a lot of new bank startups. Any financial services, obviously mortgage lending is huge, so we have a very large company, Countrywide Financial, one of the largest mortgage lenders in the country based in Calabasas. Everybody knows that construction, real estate is a huge hot industry. Retail is obviously a very big industry in Los Angeles. We have a lot of apparel manufactures, though some of that is going overseas. The ports bring in a huge amount of business. Most of it is distribution systems with distributors that are based in Los Angeles. Some of it is manufacturing, though the manufacturing base has eroded in Los Angeles in the past decade. Sam Louie>> So with all these small companies starting up here in Los Angeles, what does this mean for the future of the city? Kate Berry>> I think the future is pretty bright for Los Angeles. I think in the past decade, Los Angeles has really transformed itself, so now it's a diverse economy. It would probably be more likely to withstand a recession if it comes next year. Obviously, Los Angeles consumers and homeowners are doing very well because of the increase in housing prices. So overall, Los Angeles is looking pretty good. Sam Louie>> Great. Thank you for your insight, Kate. Kate Berry>> Thanks so much. Sam Louie>> And thank you for joining us on Life and Times. Kate Berry>> Thanks, Sam. To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is the romantic comedy, "Must Love Dogs", starring Diane Lane and John Cusack in a movie directed by Gary David Goldberg. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Peter Rainer, former president of the National Society of Film Critics, and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. Well, Lael, fill us in on "Must Love Dogs". Lael Loewenstein>> Well, Larry, "Must Love Dogs" is pretty much what you want in a romantic comedy with tremendously appealing leads who just play their parts to the hilt and have such a great sense of rhythm for dialog and how to arch an eyebrow appropriately. It's just a terrific story of how a couple of middle-aged divorcees navigate the world of internet dating. Diane Lane's sister, played by Elizabeth Perkins, sets her up for internet dating with the proviso that her future suitor must love dogs and that's the hook in the film. Of course, she doesn't actually have a dog, but she likes them anyway. Along the way, there are some bumps in the road. She and Cusack sort of get together and then don't and then almost get together. There's a very funny bit in the film where they're actually about to have sex one night, but they don't have a condom, so they go out frantically looking for one and every store is closing down, so they can't find one, so their romance is sort of constantly aborted. What the film does well is actually keep the rhythm of their relationship going to keep them apart just long enough to make it interesting but also sustain the interest of the audience. Larry Mantle>> One thing with Cusack and Lane, neither one of them are actors who like to play cute. I would think that would help in a romantic comedy. Lael Loewenstein>> Absolutely. That's a good point. I mean, this isn't a cutesy sort of Meg Ryan kind of romantic comedy. It is predictable and it is contrived. What I really liked about it was that these are actors who are about in their late thirties or early forties who have been around the block who we've known and loved for a long time and they act well together. What I didn't like is that the film makes the Los Angeles of the world that it takes place in look like a bucolic New England village and it's a little bit annoying. It's a little too perfect. Larry Mantle>> Next up this week is a Disney action family-oriented film starring Kelly Preston, Kurt Russell and Michael Angarano. Its title is "Sky High". [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Peter, what did you think of "Sky High"? Peter Rainer>> Well, this is the kind of movie that was made for the summertime. It's a kind of pre-teen confection that's meant to be a family entertainment action-oriented movie that has its charms. It's rather ploddingly directed by Mike Mitchell, but it does have a very interesting central idea which is that there's this high school in the clouds, literally called Sky High, and Will Stronghold, Michael Angarano's character, who is the freshman in the high school, his parents, Kelly Preston and Kurt Russell, who are the two leading superstars in this universe with super powers, but he initially doesn't have any powers at all for some odd reason. He's with this bunch of kids who mostly have a lot of weird powers. Some have six hands, one can start fires and hold up trucks that fall down on him and so forth. It's a metaphor for puberty. You know, where you think when you're a kid, you don't have anything going for you and all of a sudden things start happening to your body and you kind of go haywire. So that central conceit, I think, is a lot of fun and the special effects are fun. It's unimaginatively made, but enjoyable. Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Lael? Lael Loewenstein>> I pretty much agreed with Peter. I think this was a pleasant, coming of age comedy. I think kids from, say, nine to thirteen might enjoy it. It is a clever premise. I felt like there was a dash of kind of "The Incredibles" thrown in there for inspiration that had sort of given them the idea. It's perfectly fun and there is some good action sequences, some good fight sequences. It's refreshing to see the way all the typical teen angst issues are played out in a somewhat unusual context, so I enjoyed it. Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, we have the standup documentary "The Aristocrats" in what is billed as the world's dirtiest joke as told by a hundred different comedians. The film was directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Well, Lael, was this a funny documentary? Lael Loewenstein>> As much as a documentary about the world's worst joke can ever be funny. This was, in its way, kind of amusing. You know, it's probably the worst dirty joke ever told. It involves descriptions of bestiality, incest, things that are absolutely unrepeatable and certainly unprincipled. What's interesting about the film is that it goes through all these different comedians and they all riff on this very lame material. So as an exercise in watching comedians at their art, it's quite fascinating when you see people from George Carlin to Whoopi Goldberg to Robin Williams to David Brenner, you know, all sort of taking their own twist on it. There's a bit where the same joke is performed by a ventriloquist and then by a mime and then by a car dealer. It is, in a way, kind of disgusting when you hear the actual content of the joke, but you become sort of inured to it after a short time because you hear it over and over and over. It's kind of like watching jazz. You watch these guys just go off in their own directions and that's kind of fun. Larry Mantle>> Peter, what did you think? Peter Rainer>> Yeah, it's basically a comic riff and what's fascinating about it is that, once you get past the true disgustingness of the material itself, it's a fascinating depiction of standup comic mania and how these comics are just so totally into their own neuroses and playing it out for all to see. It's really almost more of a psychological study than it is a study of a particular joke of a whole class of comedians and their way of trying to top each other because they're so intensely competitive. So it's a fascinating document. Larry Mantle>> What about the joke itself? Were all the participants aware of it before the documentary was made? Is this something that every comedian has heard? Peter Rainer>> Apparently. I had never heard this joke myself, but apparently it's a real standard that comics use just to show just how far out they are. Larry Mantle>> Well, thanks so much for joining us for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Lael Loewenstein of Variety and Peter Rainer, the past president of the National Society of Film Critics. Please join us again next week at this same time for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times. Val>> And there's a full hour of FilmWeek on KPCC radio Friday mornings at 11:00. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow. Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val>> Join me on a trip from Ventura to Cambria. We'll uncover history, enjoy the scenery and meet the people of the Central Coast. [Film Clip] Val>> We're Central Coast Bound tonight at 8:00 p.m. on KCET. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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