If you live in the foothills above Monrovia, you get used to critters wandering into your neighborhood.

Over Memorial Day, Valerie and Rachel Gasparini were looking out their kitchen window, when they saw a very large visitor making himself/herself at home in their back yard.

Bears are relatively common in Monrovia, especially this time of year.  In some hillside neighborhoods, they are a regular sight early in the morning on trash pick-up day.

Last week, this Mama and her cub showed up not far away from where the bear was seen in the swimming pool.

And while we were covering the bear story, we saw an adorable family of deer.

Beverly Hills doesn't want Metro to put a subway tunnel under its high school, and so the school PTA posted this:

But the other side, the one that supports Metro's plan, has also taken its fight to YouTube:

Who has the more compelling video?

As only Stephen Colbert can do.   I saw it when it aired.  Thanks to Kevin Roderick @LAObserved for finding it on the Comedy Central site.

It's not often a Mama Bear and two cubs invade your neighborhood.

This is the week for everyone to look back to what happened on April 29, 1992.

On that day, I was a relatively new reporter at KTLA, having been hired the prior year.

I covered the entire Rodney King trial in Simi Valley. It lasted for six weeks.

On verdict day, like so many people, I was surprised that the jury acquitted the four officers involved in the taped beating.

Before I could make it back to Hollywood, the rioting had already started at the corner of Florence and Normandie.  Reginald Denny had been victimized there. 

It only got worse from that point on.

Over the next three days, I was assigned to the KTLA helicopter, then called Skycam 5.

On the first day of the violence, as we flew for hours over the looting and fires, our assignment desk asked us to check out a report of a group of shop owners on a rooftop with shotguns.

I decided it wouldn't be a good idea.

Later, after we landed the chopper, we noticed a bullet hole in our helicopter.  It had just missed the engine. 

Someone had taken a few potshots at us.

On the third day of the riots, the National Guard tanks rolled in.  And then we saw from the air the most hopeful sign we'd seen in days.

It was actor Edward James Olmos and a group of people who were walking north on Western Avenue.   They had brooms in their hands.  They wanted to clean up the mess that had been left behind.

It was gratifying to see.

Strangest revelations in Rodney King's new memoir, The Riot Within:

1)  On the first night of the riots, he dressed up in Bob Marley-style dreadlocks and drove down to Florence and Normandie to see the mayhem first-hand.

2)  One of the cops accused of brutalizing King on the video, Lawrence Powell, once agreed to a boxing match with King.  King says he trained for it, but Powell backed out at the last minute.

Here are excerpts from our interview:

The L.A. Police Protective League has taken its opposition to the LAPD's new vehicle impound policy to court.

The union has filed a lawsuit against the city in L.A. Superior Court seeking "declaratory and injunctive relief".

Chief Charlie Beck's new rules will let unlicensed drivers, including undocumented immigrants, skirt a mandatory 30-day impound rule following a traffic stop.

According to the police union, that "may subject LAPD officers to potential civil liability if they impound an unlicensed driver’s car under the new one-day policy, and that driver, within those next 30 days, goes on to cause a collision resulting in injury or death."

A group of civil rights lawyers have also filed suit in effort to block the policy.

You can read the LAPPL's lawsuit here:

Download LAPPL suit

L.A.'s streets are in a sorry state, and the recent storms have only made things worse.

Potholes are everywhere.  Mayor Villaraigosa does an annual photo op with a street paving crew, where he talks about the number of potholes his administration has fixed.

But KTLA viewer Cathryn Feely says she can't get the city to fix the potholes she's found.

In January, she wrote:

I have called 311 on several occasions  regarding specific streets that are heavily traveled and were in GREAT NEED OF REPAIRS MONTHS AGO.  They took the information over the phone but nothing was done and not one repair has been made.

I asked her to take some pictures, and she sent me some examples.

Cathryn works for an insurance brokerage.  She thinks the city is opening itself up to lawsuits by ignoring complaints:

These streets have now deteriorated further and will either have very large sinkholes, or will cause further damage and more injuries than they already have. The City of Los Angeles will be legally obligated to pay for these repairs since they have been put on prior notice. This could be avoided if they would just make these repairs.

Cathryn says some of the biggest potholes she's found are on Westbound Pico Blvd. between La Cienega and Beverly Drive, the 1100 block of South Holt Avenue, Eastbound Whitworth at Holt.

She's says the holes are so large, people sometimes trip over them and fall down.

I've got a call into the Bureau of Steet Services to get their resposne, and I'll let you know what they have to say.

I work with various photographers every day, and sometimes I forget how enormously talented they are.

Then something comes along to remind me.

This time, it's a video from KTLA Photographer Carlos Cortes documenting his trip to Kenya, and it's outstanding.