Public Urination, Hermosa Beach, City Attorney Diversion

At about 10:50 p.m. on a warm May evening, our client and several friends arrived in Hermosa Beach to enjoy the Pier Plaza bars.  Our client drove into the large new cement parking structure to the north of Pier Plaza and parked his car.

His two friends got out of the car and started walking toward one of the entrances to the stairs to descend down to the ground level.

Our client told his friends he needed to urinate and that he would catch up to his friends in a few seconds.  Our client, age 28, then walked around to the cement wall that his car faced in the parking stall.  He then unbuttoned his pants and began to urinate.

Just as he did so, a Hermosa Beach police cruiser drove by him and slammed on its brakes.  An officer from the cruiser jumped out and yelled to our client to “come here.”  Our client had urinated, he estimated, one ounce of urine to the concrete below.

Our client buttoned up his pants and walked toward the officer.  The officer asked our client if he had just been urinating.  Our client stated no, as he had not really started.  This was a half-truth, which some may also call a lie.

The officer then asked for our client’s driver’s license and issued our client a ticket for violation of Penal Code § 372 (“public nuisance”).  Our client told the police officer two more times that he had not been urinating, although he allowed that he was planning to do so before being stopped.

The officer never walked back to the area where our client had urinated perhaps just one ounce.  He never moved from a location two feet from his police cruiser, which he left still running.  He just issued the ticket and handed it to our client, asking him to sign a promise to appear in court, which our client signed.

The client asked the officer to walk back to the rear of the car to see that the pavement was dry and there was no urine on the ground.  The officer refused, got in his cruiser and drove away.

The client called Greg Hill & Associates the following day, describing what had happened to him the prior evening.  The client wanted to know if the case could be challenged.

Greg said the answer was generally yes, but that he would want to see the body-cam video and / or dash-cam (MVARS (mobile video audio recording system)) of the officer’s encounter with our client to see how the client looked.  Greg also cautioned that police officers often write a police report that contains extreme descriptions of what they observed, so Greg would want to read the police report as well.

The arraignment date came for the client’s case and Greg appeared on the client’s behalf in the Torrance Courthouse.  Our client remained at work, at the Los Angeles International Airport, where he worked for a large, well-known company whose identity will not be specified in this summary.

Greg then read the police report, wherein the police officer wrote he was driving his police cruiser in the parking structure and looked over to see our client standing behind his car in a stance that he recognized as a male urinating.  He described our client as having his hands facing away and having his hands near his waist.

He then wrote that he could hear the sound of a stream of urine hitting the “floor” and that he could smell the odor of urine and see a long stream of dark yellow urine leading from our client’s position.  

All of these observations were utter lies.  There was absolutely no way the officer could hear the sound of one ounce of urine hitting the pavement, let alone smell such an odor or see a stream of urine leading from the client because he urinated only one ounce.

Greg explained this to the Redondo Beach City Prosecutor who was in court and she politely listened, not really arguing or having any way to respond.  There was no notation in the police report if the officer wore a body camera or if the officer’s cruiser was equipped with a dash cam video recorder.

The People’s offer to resolve the case was dismissal after our client made a $350 “donation” to the Hermosa Beach Nuisance Abatement Fund and performed 30 hours of community service.

Greg then conveyed the offer and sent the police report to the client by email after the hearing.

The client called Greg immediately and the two discussed the offer and how the police report was so obviously wrong.  The officer never walked to a place where he could have seen the urine and certainly could not have smelled the urine from fifteen feet away.

The client was outraged, but decided to accept the People’s offer, understanding that he had in fact urinated after all, although not the normal larger amount of urine as may be common.

We present this summary to exemplify how police reports can be quite inaccurate and that once one receives a citation or is arrested, however, as our client understood, the issue was whether our client actually did what the law prohibited and not whether the police report was a lie.

In this case, since the case was not exactly a murder where our client faced life in prison, he decided not to fight the case at trial and instead accept the plea bargain with a dismissal, rather than spend far more time and energy than required in the plea bargain to expose the officer’s blatant lack of credibility in trial.  

Our client decided to save his energy defending himself in a bigger fight where more was at stake, a future fight he hoped he would never be forced to have.