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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies.

There were about two thousand of people at Los Angeles City Hall on Saturday. 328 spent the night. The numbers weren’t as large on Sunday with about 150 people sleeping on the sidewalks surrounding Los Angeles City Hall.

Occupy LA was sparked by Occupy Wall Street. Angelenos know that the murky financial happenings on Wall Street brought down the local economy, but few of us know that the City Treasurer’s Investment and Cash Management Report shows how $6 billion dollars of our tax money is invested in corporations like Nike, Coka-Cola, and McDonald’s through financial instruments created and traded on Wall Street. With those sorts of policies being brought up – the connections between Occupy LA and Los Angeles City government is deeper than just the physical location of City Hall.

In light of the financial ties between Los Angeles City and Wall Street its no surprise that no elected officials showed up over the weekend. However, City Councilman Richard Alarcon (who represents the 7th district, which includes Pacoima and the North East Valley) scored some points with activists by reportedly telling an Occupy LA activist that if the Los Angeles Police Department (LADP) was going to arrest people, “they would have to arrest me first” – that’s a great sound bite, but Councilmember Alarcon didn’t end up showing up. Regardless he deserves some credit for the hands-off approach that the LAPD has taken up to now. His office sent a memo to City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, Chief of Police Charlie Beck, and General Manager of General Services Department Tony Royster calling on them to “provide a reasonable accommodation to ‘Occupy Los Angeles’… and allow this group to peacefully exercise its First Amendment rights… [and] be allowed to sleep near City Hall.”

Meanwhile, the rest of Los Angeles government has been noticeably silent. No press releases or even comments have been issued by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the City Council, or the County Board of Supervisors.

Without concerning themselves too much with elected officials, the General Assembly of Occupy LA has been meeting every night at 7pm at City Hall. The concept of the General Assembly is to provide a public forum for every voice in a public space, but when hundreds of people are participating, decision making processes become difficult, which was made apparent on the first night, when the decision of where to pitch camp needed to be made.

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) made it clear to the protestors that anyone sleeping on the grassy areas around city hall would be arrested. It was also agreed that the LAPD would allow demonstrators to set up tents on the sidewalks around City Hall. After some heated back and forth, it was decided that Occupy LA would occupy the sidewalks around Los Angeles City Hall.

The media’s demand for demands has been stifled, but ktla, fox news, cbs, the los angeles times, and other media have taken notice — how they choose to present the entirety of the situation, is up to them.

It might be time to bring a tent to city hall because when these clowns play telephone, the 99% are left uninformed.

For Uprising, Ankur Patel with Civic Circus