Task Force Will Deploy Plain-Clothes Surf Observers, Produce a Quarterly Kook Threat Assessment Report, and Recommend Corrective Foam Board Handling Protocols Countywide

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

VENICE BEACH, CALIFORNIA — The Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors announced Wednesday the formation of the Kook Identification Task Force, a specialised unit of the county lifeguard service charged with identifying, documenting, and where possible gently redirecting surfers who pose what officials described as “an elevated and statistically significant hazard to themselves, the public, and the general vibe of the Venice Beach surf zone.” The Task Force, which will operate year-round with a budget of $220,000, was established in response to what Lt. Brayden Saltwater of the LACSD Beach Division called “the Helicopter Incident of March 14th,” details of which the department declined to elaborate upon except to confirm it involved a foam board, a drone, a wedding party, and no lasting physical injury to any of the thirty-seven people present.

Defining the Kook: An Official Government Classification

The Task Force has developed a seventeen-point Kook Assessment Matrix that evaluates surfers across criteria including board-to-skill ratio, wetsuit fit relative to actual water temperature, and what the matrix describes as “paddling confidence versus paddling competence discrepancy index.” A surfer who rates high across all seventeen criteria earns the formal designation of Level Five Kook, which triggers an automatic intervention by a plain-clothes Task Force observer posing as a fellow beginner. The plain-clothes observer will then suggest, conversationally and without citing official authority, that the surfer might enjoy bodyboarding or paddleboarding, activities the county considers statistically safer and considerably less aerially unpredictable. The observer is trained to make this suggestion feel like casual advice from a well-meaning stranger rather than a government-mandated redirect, a skill the Task Force’s training manual describes as “crucial” and which trainers say takes approximately six weeks to master convincingly.

Lt. Saltwater emphasised that the Task Force was not intended to be exclusionary. “Every surfer started somewhere,” he said, standing beside a whiteboard covered in diagrams of what appeared to be various stages of an involuntary aerial manoeuvre. “We are not trying to gatekeep surfing. We are trying to ensure that the person who has been surfing for three days and rented a nine-foot foam board from a shop in Santa Monica does not, through enthusiasm alone, send that board into the head of a competent surfer at six in the morning. That is not gatekeeping. That is physics.” When a reporter asked whether the Task Force itself constituted a form of gatekeeping, Lt. Saltwater said that was “a very philosophical question” and moved on to the next slide.

The Kook Threat Assessment Report: Quarterly Data From the Front Line

The Task Force will produce a quarterly Kook Threat Assessment Report covering Venice Beach, Santa Monica, and Malibu’s Surfrider Beach. The inaugural report, covering January through March, identified a 34 percent increase in what it termed “uncontrolled board projectiles,” a 22 percent rise in “leash deployment failures,” and an unprecedented spike in incidents the report classified as “entry-level surfer overestimates own readiness, wave disagrees strongly, spectators indirectly involved.” The report recommended mandatory leash awareness training for all foam board rentals, a suggested minimum distance of twenty metres between beginner surfers during peak hours, and the installation of informational signage at beach entrances reading “The Ocean Does Not Care How Confident You Feel.” The signage budget was approved unanimously. The leash training budget was sent back for revision. The twenty-metre spacing requirement was described by the parks department as “logistically ambitious.”

According to data from the United States Lifesaving Association, surfing-related incidents involving beginner surfers and rented equipment have increased significantly in coastal communities that experienced pandemic-era surges in first-time participants. The USLA noted in its national report that soft-top foam boards, while reducing injury from the board itself, had simultaneously increased the confidence of surfers whose skill level had not yet caught up with their enthusiasm, producing what the report described, in admirably direct language, as “a lot of people in the water who should not yet be in the water, some of whom are excellent people in every other respect.”

Venice Beach Responds: Mixed Feelings in the Lineup

Reception among established Venice Beach surfers has been, by surf community standards, cautiously positive, which in practice means fewer than usual have told reporters to go away. Longtime Venice local Marcus Devereaux, 43, who has surfed the same stretch of break since the Clinton administration and considers himself an informal cultural ambassador of the spot, said he welcomed “anything that makes mornings safer” while acknowledging he had mixed feelings about government involvement in surf culture. “The ocean is supposed to be free,” Devereaux said. “But also that foam board nearly took out my friend Kevin last Tuesday and Kevin did not deserve that. Kevin is a good surfer. Kevin has been surfing twenty years. Kevin was just sitting in the lineup minding his business on a Tuesday morning. Nobody deserves a foam board to the collarbone on a Tuesday.”

Kevin, reached by telephone, confirmed the incident and said his collarbone was fine and that he bore no ill will toward the individual responsible, who he described as “well-meaning, very apologetic, and a person who I genuinely think will be a decent surfer in about three years if he keeps at it.”

California State Parks confirmed it supports the Task Force initiative and noted that Venice Beach receives approximately eight million visitors annually, a figure it described as “a lot of people, some of whom surf, and some of whom would like to surf but have not yet reached the minimum recommended competence threshold.”

Read more California coastal chaos at The London Prat’s satirical news desk and enjoy the absurdist dispatches at Bohiney Magazine.

Also worth reading: Private Eye, currently investigating whether kook identification constitutes a civil rights matter under California tort law.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/la-county-kook-identification-task-force/