Wayne Spindler, a 49-year-old Los Angeles attorney known for frequently disrupting city council meetings, appeared at the Personnel and Animal Welfare Committee evening meeting on March 6 at City Hall. During the public comment period, he took the podium in the small conference room with a cow puppet on his right hand.
Using an exaggeratedly high-pitched voice, Spindler brought the puppet's mouth to the microphone and accused the council of failing to properly address animal welfare.
Uncomfortable laughter swept the audience.
Committee chair Paul Koretz quickly instructed Spindler to comment only on items on the agenda, saying he would "put [Spindler] in the back" if he strayed off-topic. Spindler pulled out his copy of the agenda packet as if to comply with that instruction and said, "Okay, okay. Item number one — fuck number one!"
"That's more like it," Koretz responded.
Spindler, whose behavior is known to council members, imitated the sounds of pained animals as he ran down the agenda, calling each item "a waste of time" and asserting that the committee was "really in the dumpster."
For their part, the council members remained unfazed. When Spindler's time ran out, Koretz thanked him and continued the meeting, which finished in less than 30 minutes with little further controversy.
Each agenda item was approved without objection – the Zoo Department received permission to recruit a new chief veterinarian, and the Animal Services Department was approved to offer free cat sterilizations. But at the end of the meeting, Spindler was granted one more minute of public comment.
He and his puppet returned to the microphone and, without commenting on any of the meeting's events, called the committee members "FBI fraud money-laundering thieves," and alleged that Councilman Greg Smith "wants to take a bulldozer to the whole fucking city."
He ended his comment by saying "Fuck the FBI, and fuck this meeting. Thank you so much."
"You have six more seconds, if you want it," Koretz said.
The councilman's composure speaks to the regularity with which he and other members confront harassment and inflammatory speech. The State of California requires all public to commence their meetings with public comment periods, according to the Freedom Forum Institute.
Spindler wielded a puppet at the March 6 meeting, but he also has a documented history of threatening council members with violence.
According to a 2016 report by ABC7, Spindler has been removed from LA City Hall for disruption and threatening behavior on multiple occasions – behavior that included wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood with a swastika to meetings.
He was also arrested after submitting a public comment card to Herb Wesson – the first black City Council President – that called him a racial slur and included a drawing of a lynching, according to the LA Times.
The charge was dropped, but Wesson filed a restraining order against Spindler in 2016. That order required Spindler to relinquish three handguns and an unregistered assault rifle.
But the restraining order did not bar Spindler from continuing to attend city council meetings, including those at which Wesson was present.
"You can't ban people from City Hall," Los Angeles attorney Keith Scheuer said in a phone interview. "You have a right to say what you want to say in public meetings, as long as it doesn't incite violence. But the trap is, because there's so much gray area and because California is so pro-free speech, it's extremely difficult to draw lines."
A well-known City Hall agitator, Spindler often pushes the boundaries between public commentary and disruptive speech.
"He's a disruptor, but he's smart," Scheuer said of Spindler. "If he follows the rules, he can pretty much say what he wants to say. And it drives everyone nuts."
Scheuer says public input is essential to the functioning of democracy, which raises the question if behavior similar to Spindler's simply comes with the job or if public officials should be provided protection.
"It would be wonderful if there were some kind of way to protect public officials from hateful speech, but I don't think there's any way to do that," Scheuer said. "The framers of the constitution wanted the public to have a way to speak truth to power. And our system says you get to do that."
This, however, causes an issue when members of the public who want to express their concerns are put in the same category as those whose participation could be considered a nuisance.
“Spindler’s end game is to disrupt these meetings. So, people with real concerns have problems getting their voices heard,” Scheuer said. “But if governments want to have public comment at all, they cannot pick and choose who to speak.”