[ilbegone]

What I find fishy about all this is that that the Bell City Clerk didn't find the alleged incident threatening enough to contact the police herself, it was an unnamed council member who filed the report. Was the council member a witness to the alleged incident, or did he act on convenient hearsay?

Unspecified City of Bell officials had previously obtained a restraining order against Snell, which apparently lapsed or didn't apply under the circumstances - he's definitely an unwelcome outsider.

This smells like the dispensation of a "lesson". The city council obviously has some clout with the police department, perhaps an "appropriate" police report was forwarded to the DA's office.

Even if they don't have anything to convict him on, his bail is set high enough that he's not going anywhere, and it might be a month or so before they get around to providing him with a public defender to present a bullshit plea bargain - all the while in LA county general population - a pretty ugly place to be. If he rejects a plea bargain and the prosecutor has nothing to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt he stays in jail until the day of or day before the trial, forcing the defense attorney to prepare for trial, then drop the charges and release Snell - thus effectively punishing Snell by imprisonment without violating his "rights" plus "fining" Snell by costing him a lot of cash if he hired an attorney rather than using the public defender.

A further note. It's my subjective belief that it's not in a public defender's professional interest to piss off the court by effectively defending his "client", and it might be the same for a local attorney who "works" the same courts. I believe they all keep each other in business, and a naive jury can be a crap shoot for a defendant.