Beverly Hills High School students took 10 of the 11 Beverly Hills City Council candidates to task on May 11, when they asked pointed questions about the city’s biggest issues during a forum in the Jon Cherney Lecture Hall.

Members of the high school’s Interact Club and Teen BHEF, which is essentially a student organization that serves as a liaison to the Beverly Hills Education Foundation, moderated the event and determined what questions to ask the candidates.

“I think it’s very important that students get involved in politics, even if they can’t vote in the elections,” Interact Club president Melina Rosen said. “They can talk to their parents about it, who in turn can vote for the candidate of their choosing, but I think it’s very important for all the kids to know what’s really going on. It’s just a great way to raise awareness of their surroundings, and I think it’s a really great thing for younger students to partake in.”

Several parents, teachers and students attended the forum. Although the Interact Club and Teen BHEF host candidate forums every year, this year’s event was the first that Rosen, a senior, organized as an eligible voter.

“It was great to be an emcee for this forum, because then I really paid attention,” she said. “I really made sure that I knew what I was doing. It’s great to have that insider information, basically, for the election.”

After the candidates introduced themselves, the students questioned them on city issues. Students came up with the questions without any adult assistance – one of which asked about the city’s 2,000 security cameras and privacy concerns associated with them.

Attorney Darian Bojeaux said she is favor of the security camera system and would like to see more cameras installed.

“Most of us don’t do anything that … we need to be afraid of having it on camera,” she said.

Beverly Hills Planning Commission chair Andy Licht said he would like to see the system upgraded.

“I think we also need to focus on preventing crime,” he added.

Councilman Robert Wunderlich said the city is increasingly being more proactive in monitoring the camera system, and that the city is looking to further use artificial technology to do so.

“For example, if a car circles a block three times at three in the morning, that has nothing to do with the individual driving the car,” he said. “That’s a pattern of suspicious behavior, and increasingly, we will have to do things like [using artificial intelligence] in order to be able to prevent crimes before they happen.”

Councilman Lester Friedman said he does not believe the cameras are a privacy concern.

“They are not focused on anybody’s private home at all,” he said. “They are on the public streets. We are talking about putting cameras in the alleyways, which are also not focused on anybody’s homes. We’ve always said that what we want is to deter crime.”

Small business owner Akshat “A.B.” Bhatia said he is also in favor of the camera system.

“In fact, I would look [to install] more cameras, but I feel that they don’t immediately [prevent the crime from occurring],” he said. “For that, we need more police patrolling.”

Just in Case BH founder Vera Markowitz said the cameras are not a deterrent to crime at all, and that they only help after a crime has been committed.

“We have to realize cameras are not the answer to everything, but it’s only a step and it’s a step afterwards, not before,” she added.

Beverly Hills Public Works Commissioner Sharona Nazarian said the city should do anything it can to utilize technology in an effort to make its services better.

“It’s shocking to me that we had all of these cameras in place, yet nobody was monitoring them until we started to talk about it,” she said.

Business senior manager Robin Rowe said he has asked what would happen if the camera system was abused by operators.

“The answer I received was that the city had already talked to the city attorney, and there’s no way that anyone can sue us,” he said. “There you go.”

Councilman John Mirisch also voted to increase funding for the camera system. He said they are more than a forensic tool, as they also monitor the police.

“The cameras are a useful tool, and I support them,” Mirisch added.

Small business owner Shiva Bagheri referenced an incident in which an individual’s bike was stolen in front of a camera, and it apparently was not working.

“Watch ‘1984,’ George Orwell, because we’re literally headed to Big Brother,” she said.

The students also asked the candidates how they would address the homelessness crisis.

“With our resources, we should be going to each one of these homeless people and educate them on the programs we already have, because we have a lot of programs,” Bagheri said. “I don’t think a lot of these homeless people know about them, and we should [never] allow anybody to be just sitting in front of [a] business, because this is very, very hard for businesses. People don’t want to come into a business that has a homeless person sitting in front of it, and I see that happen all the time.”

Bojeaux said she believes the city is handling the homelessness crisis quite well, as other cities seem to be struggling.

“We could always do better in anything, but I think we’re doing quite well,” she said.

Licht said homelessness is a regional problem, and that Beverly Hills should work with nearby communities to address it.

“It’s obviously not just Beverly Hills, not just Santa Monica,” he said. “It’s everywhere around. We need to work with the surrounding cities and work together.”

Wunderlich praised the city’s efforts in dealing with homelessness. He said the city has ambassadors and social workers who make contact with individuals living on the streets.

“They’re our first line in reaching out to the unhoused in the city, letting them know about the resources we have available,” Wunderlich added.

Friedman agreed.

“We will go up to person who is homeless, and if they need assistance and are willing to take it, we have a place for them to go in the evening,” he said. “We have places every evening; we’ve reserved spots at a shelter so that a person can go into that shelter. But we can do better. We always can do better.”

Like the previous candidates, Bhatia noted that the homelessness problem is a mental health issue.

“We need to figure out a way [to] help them if they need help,” he said. “But [the remaining] bad apples, we need to [manage them] somehow.”

Markowitz referenced the book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” and suggested that the audience read it.

“We have to be much more proactive here, because us not treating the homeless cost us way more than actually being much more proactive,” she added.

Nazarian said that, oftentimes, “people just push them into another city and move them all around.”

“We need to find beds and, I think, programs. It’s important to help them find programs, whether it’s through our nurse practitioner program or teaching our ambassadors to do a better job to really be able to foster relationships with them so that we can help them get off the streets,” she said.

Rowe said 60% of the unhoused were put in their current situation due to bankruptcy or health care costs. He said approximately 20% are veterans and should be “totally cared for” by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

“It’s more [complicated than explaining] in 60 seconds, but confronting them with ambassadors is not the way to deal with the unhoused,” Rowe added.

Mirisch disagreed, saying that the city’s ambassador program has been honored by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“Sometimes, it requires multiple contacts with a homeless person in order to convince them that they will we be safe to get the help they need,” he said. “It is indeed a regional issue, but we do devote substantial resources to it, and we will continue to do so.”

Students also asked the candidates questions about traffic congestion and environmentalism. In addition, they gave the candidates an opportunity to rebut some of the other candidates’ claims.

Interact Club sponsor Joanie Garratt said the students did a great job moderating the forum and posing questions, which were formulated with little assistance from adults.

“It’s vitally important for them to be involved, because their involvement gets other students involved,” she said. “We want our students to be critical thinkers and active participants in the political process. We want them to be informed citizens, so we consider that very, very important.”

To view the forum, visit the KBEV channel on YouTube.