After a videotaped episode of localism at Lunada Bay went viral last month, the chief of the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department said his force will take a more active approach to policing the famed winter surf spot when waves begin breaking there again later this year.
“We’re going to be stepping things up to monitor Lunada Bay,” Police Chief Jeff Kepley said. “We’ll put efforts into the issue and we’ll place an emphasis on it.”
In doing so, Kepley, who joined the Palos Verdes Estate Police Department last year from La Habra, is hoping to rein in a decades-old tradition of localism at the bay, where surfing gangs have verbally harassed, threatened, thrown rocks and vandalized the property of interlopers for many years.
It’s a well-known reality that some surf spots on the Peninsula, including Lunada Bay, are strictly forbidden to outsiders — in defiance of the California law that all sand below the mean high tide line is open to the public.
“While I understand the perspective of those who grew up here, the truth is that this is a public beach,” Kepley said.
Lunada Bay — or “The Hill” to locals — is surfable roughly two dozen days on a good year, mostly in the winter, when northwest swells bring highly-coveted right-hand waves to the bay. The “Bay Boys” have a well-documented history of harassing outsiders who attempt to take any of those waves for themselves. It is a relatively close-knit surfing community compared to freeway-accessible places in the South Bay and acceptance into the group is earned over years, not days. Outsiders are easily spotted.
“With no parking lots, the only parking is right dab in the middle of our community,” a Lunada Bay local told Easy Reader last year. “How would you like it if your street was lined up with complete strangers, changing in towels in front of your kids, hanging out while making your wife feel uncomfortable while she’s alone at home?”
That mentality was challenged last year when a group of activists, organized through social media, tried to create an open-to-all surfing day at the bay, along with a new name for the spot, “Aloha Point,” to reflect greater inclusivity. Those efforts appear to have failed to make a lasting impression.
Last month, British news organization The Guardian posted a video of an otherwise pleasant Sunday during a swell, taken a few months ago, in which locals berate the newspaper’s West Coast correspondent, Rory Carroll, and another journalist who accompanied him, Noah Smith, who filmed the incident surreptitiously.
Carroll went to the bay for a surf lesson under the tutelage of Smith, while also scouting for a possible story on localism — a part of the sport that can surprise those who perceive surfing as a wholly peaceful pastime.
“This issue of localism is old news to people in California who pay attention to surfing,” Carroll said. “But to non-surfers this is news. They had no idea that this culture existed. To them it’s fascinating and remains largely unknown.”
When the duo descended the steep dirt path leading down to the rocky beach, they were greeted by a handful of locals, who told them to “just leave,” saying if they were to get in the water, they’d get “a lot of shit.” One of the locals told them, “People will just f…ing duke it out, f…ing work your car and get in fights.”
Carroll and Smith stayed on the beach for about two hours, debating whether to enter the surf. Locals notwithstanding, the bay is still a treacherous place for a surf lesson, with its slippery rocks at the water’s edge and sharp reef that awaits a novice surfer who inevitably will fall from his or her board.
The reporters offered to stay “hundreds of meters” away from the handful of surfers in the water, but the locals did not budge, Carroll said.
Eventually, the two reporters went back the way they came, finding upon return to the car that “Kooks” was scrawled on the rear windshield with surf wax. They also met a French surfer sitting in his car, who said a police officer told him not to surf at the bay, “cause they’ll beat you up,” Carroll said.
After leaving the bay, the reporters went to the local police station, where they were greeted by nonplussed officers.
“They are infamous around here,” an unidentified officer said of the Lunada locals, in video footage that ran on The Guardian website. “They are pretty much grown men [with a] little man’s mindset … They don’t want you playing on their swing set. But it is what it is. If you feel uncomfortable, you know, then don’t do it.”
Kepley, the police chief, said that response wasn’t fully in line with his views.
“The message I want put out there is that the police department will take these complaints seriously,” Kepley said.
Kepley hopes the city’s new Parkland Ranger volunteer program can help the problem. In the program, four to eight polo shirt-clad volunteers will patrol public parks and open spaces in Palos Verdes, and “put eyes and ears on the coastline,” Kepley said. He said volunteers are currently being solicited, and will be trained in the late summer.
“Those volunteers will be a tremendous asset,” he said.
Kepley said victims of harassment need to report incidents to the police for them to be investigated. He said there have only been a few incidents reported in recent years.
For the time being, Carroll’s account of events has only reinforced Lunada Bay’s reputation, and brought new, international attention to the spot as locals anticipate the first northwest swell after summer is over.
“Noah and I were both really surprised – we weren’t expecting [the intimidation] to be so brazen and so swift … It opened my eyes to a negative, or should I say an unpleasant, undercurrent to the sport,” Carroll said.
