Originally posted Jun 01, 2018
On May 29th, 2018, America drew a line. ABC canceled Roseanne within hours of Roseanne Barr tweeting a racist slur about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett — comparing a Black woman to an ape. The network torched its highest-rated show. Wanda Sykes quit on the spot. Barr’s talent agency dropped her before lunch. The message was clear: racism has consequences.
That same day, in Venice, California, about 20 people stood outside Hotel Erwin for the third time, protesting the hotel’s own racist incident — and its absolute refusal to acknowledge it, let alone address it. No consequences. No statement. No policy change. No accountability. Just silence, private security, and the BID goons.
The apathy regarding racism remains a persistent issue within the Venice community. A stark contrast was visible on a single day: while a comedian faced immediate termination for a racist tweet, a local hotel faced no pressure to apologize after having its own non-white paying guests arrested at midnight.
What Happened at Hotel Erwin
In early February 2018, a group of non-white paying guests at Hotel Erwin came downstairs from their rooms around midnight looking for a place to eat. Hotel staff called LAPD — not to help them find a restaurant, but to report them for trespassing. In their own hotel. Some of those guests were arrested and spent the night in jail. Testimony from that incident is documented here: vog.news/erwintest.
Read that again. Paying guests. In the hotel they paid to sleep in. Arrested. Because they were Black and Brown and had the audacity to walk through a lobby after dark.
The Third Protest
The May 29th protest was organized by Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), Black Lives Matter L.A., and White People 4 Black Lives. That’s not a casual lineup. Those are abolitionist organizations rooted in Skid Row, South L.A., and the frontlines of anti-surveillance and anti-carceral organizing. The fact that this coalition showed up in Venice — three separate times — tells you this incident resonated far beyond the boardwalk. It was recognized for what it was: a case study in how policing functions as property protection for white-owned businesses.
The protest ran from noon to about 1:30 PM. Protesters carried signs reading “Erwin = Jim Crow Hotel” and “Hotel Erwin Racist Arrest of Paying Guests.” The chant that cut the deepest: “White Silence Equals Violence.” A blunt and necessary reminder that the silence of white folks in the face of racism isn’t neutrality — it’s a co-sign to violent systems.
And then there was this gem. One of the protesters quipped that “Hotel Erwin is Roseanne Barr’s favorite hotel.”
Here’s what makes that lfunnier: Roseanne Barr posted her racist tweet that same morning — roughly 2 AM Pacific time on May 29th. By noon, when protesters were chanting outside Hotel Erwin, ABC had already announced the show’s cancellation. The protester wasn’t reaching for a random pop culture reference. They were drawing a parallel in real time: America was holding Roseanne Barr accountable for racism that very day. Venice — specifically, the Sokol family and Hotel Erwin — still hadn’t even acknowledged theirs from four months earlier.
Enter Mark Sokol’s Venice BID Goons
In addition to the Black and Brown security staff Hotel Erwin management positioned out front — a deliberate deployment that uses people of color as a racial buffer so the white ownership doesn’t have to face protesters directly — they called in the Venice Beach BID’s “Safe Team.”
The BID officers rolled in on bikes shortly after 1 PM, inserting themselves into the center of the protest scene in distinct LAPD fashion. They came off like rookies, however their body language and positioning were clearly intended to intimidate people exercising their First Amendment rights. For the previous two protests, it was LAPD itself playing hotel security. If you’re still confused about exactly who LAPD serves, watch this clip from the first protest: vog.news/erwinprotest1.
When protesters called them out as the hotel’s paid security, the BID officers kept insisting they weren’t private security.
But in fact — they are.
Mark Sokol, co-owner of Hotel Erwin, was also the President of the Venice Beach BID. The same BID whose “Safe Team,” staffed by Allied Universal, had just launched its operations on May 14th — exactly two weeks before this protest. So the BID’s private security apparatus, which Sokol helped create and presided over, showed up to protect Sokol’s private business from a civil rights protest. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s the feature working as designed.
The BID: A Tool of Gentrification
The Venice Beach BID was formed in 2016 over significant community opposition. The majority of individual property owners actually voted against it. It only passed because City-owned property — which made up roughly 25% of the assessed value in the district — automatically voted yes per a standing 1996 City Council directive. The BID was, from its inception, an entity that the community did not ask for and largely did not want.
By May 2018, the BID had been collecting nearly $1.8 million in annual assessments for over a year but had delivered essentially zero services. The City Clerk was issuing refunds to property owners because the BID had failed to provide the cleanup and safety programs it promised. Community activists and property owners alike were furious. A group of homeowners filed a lawsuit alleging the BID had gerrymandered its boundaries to include residential properties with no connection to the boardwalk business community.
And yet — with all that dysfunction, all those broken promises — the BID managed to deploy its brand-new security team to a protest at the board president’s hotel within two weeks of launching operations. They couldn’t sweep a sidewalk for a year and a half, but they could show up to intimidate civil rights protesters on a Tuesday afternoon. Priorities.
This moment also reaffirmed what many in Venice have long understood: the Venice Beach BID functions as a proxy for LAPD. A quasi-policing apparatus funded by commercial property owners, operating in public space, with the aesthetic and posture of law enforcement but none of the oversight. The BID’s “Safe Team” carried handcuffs and pepper spray. They patrolled on bikes — ironically, in violation of the very boardwalk bike rules they were supposedly there to enforce.
Mark Sokol: The Man Behind the Curtain
Mark Sokol isn’t just a hotel owner who had a racist incident at his property. He’s a central figure in the infrastructure of Venice’s gentrification machinery.
Sokol co-owns Hotel Erwin, which has been in the Sokol family for over 50 years. He served as President of the Venice Beach BID, the entity he co-founded alongside Steve Heumann of the Venice Boardwalk Association. The BID’s formation effort was bankrolled by real estate investor Brian Dror and shepherded by BID consultant Tara Devine — the same Devine who was later sued for refusing to comply with the California Public Records Act for over a year. Sokol personally lobbied the L.A. City Council’s economic development committee, telling them Venice needed “additional security” and “cleanup crews” to supplement city services. The language of “clean and safe” — which in BID-speak has always been code for displacing unhoused people and sanitizing public space for tourism and real estate interests.
Mind you, public records obtained through CPRA litigation revealed that as far back as 2013, Sokol was arranging hotel rooms at the Erwin for LAPD Senior Lead Officer Peggy Thusing. The nature of that arrangement remains unexplained. But the pattern is consistent: a property owner cultivating cozy relationships with the very police force his hotel would later call to arrest paying guests of color.
And then there’s the matter of his nephew’s racist tirade, documented here: vog.news/sokolnephew. Multiple racist incidents connected to one property, one family — and total silence from ownership.
Westside Current, of course, has published multiple glowing profiles of the Sokol family — framing Erwin Sokol as a visionary who “breathed life into Venice” and his son Mark as a custodian of boardwalk culture. Not a single mention of the racist arrest. Not a single mention of the protests. Not a mention of the nephew. That’s not journalism — that’s reputation laundering. And it’s exactly the kind of narrative management that lets racism slide in this community while the rest of the country at least pretends to care.
The Pattern Venice Needs to Reckon With
On the same day America canceled its highest-rated sitcom over a racist tweet, a Venice Beach hotel that had its Black and Brown guests arrested couldn’t even muster a public statement. No apology. No policy review. No cultural competency training for staff. No acknowledgment that calling the police on your own paying guests because of their skin color is a violent act — one that resulted in people spending a night in jail for the crime of looking for a late-night meal.
Hotel Erwin never responded to the protests. Never issued a public statement. Never implemented any visible changes. The Sokol family simply waited it out — and the local media ecosystem, led by outlets like Westside Current, helped them do it by burying the story under fluff profiles about artisanal pizza and rooftop lounges.
This is how racism operates in Venice. Not through burning crosses or tiki torches — through silence, through selective enforcement, through BID security that shows up faster for a protest than a promised sidewalk sweeping, through media that launders reputations instead of holding power accountable. Through the quiet understanding that if you own enough property on the boardwalk, you own the narrative too.
Hotel Erwin markets itself with the tagline “Never Normal. Always Venice.” But there’s nothing uniquely Venice about calling the cops on Black and Brown people. That’s the most normal thing in America. The only thing abnormal here is how thoroughly Venice let it slide.
