I’ve got a crazy day, but here are a few short takes to chew on:

*The ACLU just released this video on the Crack/Powder sentencing issue:

*The Nebraska supreme court is hearing a case this week about whether a State Trooper should be allowed to keep his job despite membership in the Klu Klux Klan. Here’s the Omaha Herald story.

*You think good teachers should be paid a six figure salary? This proposed Washington Heights charter school plans to do just that. (Chapeau tip to Eduwonk.)

*And, according to the Washington Post, this Boston area charter high school guru has a radical idea about how to cure the drop out rate—with a sort of drop out savings account. (Just read it.)

AND LAST….AND PROBABLY BEST:

*A new, worthwhile-sounding documentary: Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars Here’s some of the info:

Their mothers may be convicted thieves, murderers and drug dealers, but the girls of Troop 1500 want to be doctors, social workers and marine biologists. With meetings once a month at Hilltop Prison in Gatesville, Texas, this innovative Girl Scout program brings daughters together with their inmate mothers, offering them a chance to rebuild their broken relationships….

An estimated 1.5 million children have incarcerated parents and 90 percent of female inmates are single parents. Their daughters are six times more likely to land in the juvenile justice system. TROOP 1500 poignantly reveals how an inspired yet controversial effort by the more than 90-year old Girl Scouts organization is working to help these at-risk young girls deal with their unique circumstances and break the cycle of crime within families.

Troop 1500 is part of a group of films about women, criminal justice and prison—all of which can be purchased by those looking for a night at the movies that features more in the way of content than say, Jumper.

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LAPD’s head terrorism guy, Deputy Chief Mike Downing, is a smart and decent fellow. And most of his testimony before the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security’s and Governmental Affairs last month about the department’s strategy for outreach into Muslim communities was very nuanced and intelligent.

But it went off the rails when he got to the now-much publicized—and much criticized—part of the report that talked about mapping Muslim neighborhoods to asses for terrorist potential.

It is our hope to identify communities, within the larger Muslim community, which may be susceptible to violent ideologically-based extremism and then use a full-spectrum approach guided by antintelligence-led strategy. Community mapping is the start of a conversation, not just data sets: It is law enforcement identifying with its community and the community identifying with its families, neighborhoods, city, state, country and police.

So what exactly does that mean? That the cops were going to find corners of the Muslim community where people were…..what? Talking angrily?

And here’s how the LA Times reports it:

In a document reviewed by The Times last week, the LAPD’s counter-terrorism bureau proposed using U.S. Census data and other demographic information to pinpoint various Muslim communities and then reach out to them through social service agencies.

Racial profiling, no matter how well intentioned, is still racial profiling. It’s not the LAPD’s job to look for perceived pockets of homegrown terrorist potential. (Is it law enforcement’s job to look for crimes being planned or committed? Yes. But should they also look for people who might one day, if the right circumstances develop, start thinking about committing crimes…? That would be a no, folks.) Nor is it the cops’ job to become some kind of badge-wearing sociologist/social workers in order to keep that perceived potential from developing.

Yesterday when Downing was on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA show , he wisely announced that the department was dumping the mapping plan because of the understandable upset it was causing in the Muslim community.

Chief Downing is meeting with members of the Muslim community about the issue today.

Kudos to the cops for having the willingness to admit their misfire, and then to work with the various Muslim communities to find a solution that makes a bit more practical and cultural sense.

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….Legally speaking, that is.

More specifically, on Monday, the ACLU filed an amicus brief in behalf of Senator Larry Craig saying that Craig’s footsie-playing, hand-waggling arrest was likely unconstitutional.

What is more, those pesky, liberal ACLU-ers have an excellent point.

McClatchy reports

“It is not a crime to solicit sex that would occur in private,” [ACLU exec director] Romero said. “It is a crime to solicit sex that would occur in a public place. What the state failed to show was that Senator Craig clearly expected to have sex in public.”

The ACLU brief also argues that there are plenty of less-invasive ways for law enforcement to stop nuisance behavior, such as posting signs warning people that sex is banned in the restroom and sending in uniformed officers to patrol.

CNN reports:

“Sen. Craig has not always been a great friend of civil liberties, but you shouldn’t have to endorse the civil liberties of others to keep your own,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, alluding to Craig’s history of voting against gay rights.

Right you are, Mr. Romero.

(photo from AP photo/file)

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Pedro Guzman, the 29-year-old developmentally disabled man—and U.S. citizen— who was wrongly deported from the LA County jail to Mexico in May of this year, turned up this past Sunday when he tried to cross back into the U.S. at Calexico.

In case you’ve forgotten, here are the basics of the story: In April of this year, Guzman was sentenced to 120 days in jail for trespassing and vandalism. It seems that, in a bizarre serious of actions, Guzman walked out on the runway at the Fox Field Airport in Lancaster, and tried repeatedly to get on a private plane as it prepared for takeoff. Then when he couldn’t get on, he found a stranger’s truck, and sat inside the cab until he was arrested.

Although sentenced to 120 days, Guzman was only scheduled to spend 40 days in LA’s overcrowded jail system, yet he was instead released after 20 days and deported to Tijuana. As nearly as anyone seems to know, the mistake was based on a confused conversation in which Guzman indicated to sheriff’s deputies that he was born in Mexico—nevermind the fact that he was born in Los Angeles.

Yet, despite his disability (not to mention the fact that he’d been locked up to begin with for irrational behavior), nobody bothered to check his records. Instead he was transferred from the LA County facility to an immigration detention center in Santa Ana, where the disoriented Guzman signed a voluntary deportation order—after which time he was transported to the border and dropped off, with little in his pockets, inside Mexico. He tried to call his family once after his deportation, but the conversation was cut off. And no one ever heard from Guzman again.

(WLA first reported on the issue here but, for the full tale, do yourself a favor and read Daniel Hernandez’ wonderful LA Weekly story on Guzman and his mother, Maria Carbajal.)

His mother took weeks away from her job working nights at Jack in the Box to search for her son, with no luck. She got zero help from the feds who, when she pleaded for their assistance, basically said, “Not our problem.”

(We understand that people make mistakes. But the responsible among us try then to rectify them.)

In any case, he’s found now—after being missing for three months— and was reunited with his family this afternoon.

Here are some clips from the ACLU press release that came out a little while ago:

….He told his family today that he attempted to cross the border several times but was turned away. He said he walked fromTijuana to Mexicali, a distance of more than 100 miles, and ate out of trash cans as he
looked for a way back into the U.S. His family says he was nearly unrecognizable…

Border agents detained Mr. Guzman as he attempted to cross into the U.S. near Calexico early Sunday morning. County officials had issued a warrant for his failure to appear at probation hearings, (!!!!!) despite attempts by the family and ACLU/SC to explain to probationofficials that he had been wrongfully deported.

(Good grief. And we wonder why our prisons are filled with people who have committed no new crimes but are simply arrested for technical violations of their probation or parole.)

The government had promised to immediately notify the family and their attorneys if it found Mr. Guzman. Instead, it took 36 hours for the family to be notified.

Mr. Guzman spent two days in jail (WHY EXACTLY?) before Superior Court Judge Carlos Chung ordered him released Tuesday morning. Late Monday night, ACLU/SC staff had met with Mr. Guzman at Men’s Central Jail and confirmed his identity. This afternoon, Sheriff’s Department officials transported him from downtown Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley Courthouse,where he was reunited with his mother, Maria Carbajal.

The family’s last contact with Mr. Guzman was May 11, when he called his sister-in-law from a borrowed cell phone to say he had been deported to Tijuana. The call cut off, and Carbajal rushed to Tijuana but was unable to locate him.

And so ends a harrowing three-month search. Thankfully Guzman’s okay. At least physically, anyway. And a mother gets her son back.

It’s a story that could have had a very different ending. It didn’t. But it could have.
************************************************************************
UPDATE: According the lawsuit filed by the family, Guzman, who could neither read nor write, and has trouble processing information, was first asked about his immigration status in jail. And he told deputies—not that he was born in Mexico—but that he was born in California but had Mexican parents.

“Sometime after that,” writes the AP, “the Sheriff’s Department identified him as a non-citizen, obtained his signature for voluntary removal from the United States and turned him over to Customs and Immigration Enforcement, a division of the Homeland Security Department, for deportation.”

Also, instead of being in jail the 40 days that was expected, he was in jail around 20 days, thus the family was unaware of his release date until it was too late. (As you’ll see, I’ve corrected it above.)

The AP’s Peter Prengaman also writes that Guzman’s mother described her son as being very deteriorated, psychologically.

Guzman was shaking, stuttering and appeared traumatized,his family said at a news conference. The family said it planned to seek medical attention for Guzman, who was not at the news conference.

“They took him whole, but only returned half of him to me,” his mother, Maria Carbajal, said in Spanish while crying….

(photo of Pedro Guzman taken August 7, after reuniting with his family—courtesy of the ACLU of Southern California)

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Okay, this is a wild one: The So Cal ACLU says that the LA Sheriff’s Department together with ICE officers have deported a US citizen to Mexico. At today’s 10 am press conference, the ACLU folks promise to fill in the details.

What they have said up until this point is that the man who was deported is developmentally disabled and that he has been missing in Mexico since May 12.

“There are no circumstances under which the government may deport a U.S. citizen,” say the ACLU folks about the case. Family members of the missing man say that federal officials have refused to requests (by the family and by a private lawyer) to assist in the search.

MORE SHORTLY

UPDATE: Alright, here’s the deal. Pedro Guzman, 29, was arrested for some kind of low-level trespassing at a Lancaster airplane junkyard. A misdemeanor. Mr. Guzman is a person described as developmentally disabled. More specifically, he is someone who has genuine mental disabilities, and cannot stray too far from his home without getting disoriented and lost.

When on April 3 he was arrested, Guzman told the booking deputy that he was born in California-–which is true, and which the book deputy has confirmed. Guzman was born at County USC and is an American citizen. On April 19 he was sentenced to 120 days in jail (for the above-mentioned misdemeanor trespassing), with his time already served subtracted. (Thus, by the way, giving lie to the contention that Paris Hilton and her 45 days reduced to 24 was an excessive sentence and a grave miscarriage of justice.)

On May 10 or 11, with no apparent attempts to verify his legal status, Mr. Guzman was deported and released in Tijuana. He managed to make one phone call but has not been heard from since.

Mr. Guzman’s mental ability is such that he does not remember family phone numbers and so keeps a copy of his brother’s telephone number on him at all times. It is unclear if the necessary slip of paper with the brother’s number was returned to him when he was deported.

“We see due process violations all the time,” said an ACLU spokesman, speaking about the mismanaged deportation order.

Attempts by Mr. Guzman’s family to locate him have, thus far, been unsuccessful. When asked for help finding the missing man, local ICE officials declined, saying only that they’d be happy to correct their order once it could be proved that Mr. Guzman was indeed a citizen. (Um….a birth certificate isn’t enough?)

AND ON A TANGENTIALLY RELATED SUBJECT…..In a report just published, the Urban Institute says that about one quarter (26%) of all service sector jobs in LA County are held by “unauthorized immigrants.” Make of that what you will.

UPDATE #2: The LA Times has a good follow-up storyhere .

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Okay, I’m in the middle of another project, but I simply couldn’t let this AP story pass. It has to do with five Illinois high school students who were denied their diplomas by Galesburg High School officials because family members cheered too enthusiastically for them during the graduation ceremony.

Evidently an increase in rowdiness at graduation ceremonies has become a genuine problem for a lot of high schools with large student populations. It seems that, in addition to cheering, friends and family bring air horns, silly string and the like, and other parents can’t hear their own child’s name called, admittedly not an ideal situation.

Some schools have hired sheriff’s deputies to police the ceremonies in an effort to keep over-the-top behavior to a minimum. Many simply ask audience members to hold their applause and cheers until after all diplomas have been handed out, then make peace with the fact that the noise may be lessened, but not eliminated. Other schools break up the ceremony into groups of graduates, allowing families to get their ya-yas out by cheering, at least, for the group.

But few have resorted to the kind of strong-arm tactics that the AP story describes.

Caisha Gayles graduated with honors last month, but she is still waiting for her diploma. The reason: the whoops of joy from the audience as she crossed the stage.

Gayles was one of five students denied diplomas from the lone public high school in Galesburg after enthusiastic friends or family members cheered for them during commencement.

“It was like one of the worst days of my life,” said Gayles, who had a 3.4 grade-point average and officially graduated, but does not have the keepsake diploma to hang on her wall. “You walk across the stage and then you can’t get your diploma because of other people cheering for you. It was devastating, actually.”

(The fact that cutting these monster schools into smaller, more personal schools would solve the problem in a heartbeat is an issue that we won’t get into right now.)

School officials in Galesburg, a working-class town of 34,000 that is still reeling from the 2004 shutdown of a 1,600-employee refrigerator factory, said the get-tough policy followed a 2005 commencement where hoots, hollers and even air horns drowned out much of the ceremony and nearly touched off fights in the audience when the unruly were asked to quiet down.

Certainly the school didn’t break any laws and even the ACLU agrees that, legally, the high school administrators are probably within their rights. But is it really a sensible, productive strategy to start yanking kids’ diplomas because of somebody else’s over-sized whoops?

“You’re kidding?” said Father Greg Boyle on the phone when I told him about the news story. “I just spoke at three graduations last week where they had this same issue. Everybody lives with it. I can’t believe they took those kids’ diplomas. It’s ridiculous.”

Over the years, I too have attended my share of gigantic graduations for LA’s biggest inner city high schools, some of which have student populations larger than certain Midwestern towns. And, although in many cases administrators ask everybody to hold applause and keep the mayhem down to a dull roar, it works only up to a point and nobody sweats it. Some people really want to cheer for their kid—especially, as is true in many families, when a successful high school graduation is a hard-won victory worth cheering.

I suspect this same is true for many families in economically-distressed Galesburg.

And while we’re on the subject, would the Galesburg officials have also flipped out over the wild cheering that erupted for this Utah dad who flew home from Afghanistan to hand his son a diploma?..
Or perhaps the cheering for the kid in this Maryland story who got whoops and shouts from both his happy grandmas as the first in his very large family to ever graduate?

Which of those diplomas do the no-cheering adults suggest we eliminate?

I’m just curious.

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As we head into a few days of (hopefully) no dramatic LAPD news, here are a few wrap ups on this week’s remaining department issues:

BRATTON NAMES CROWD WRANGLER

At yesterday’s City Council meeting, Bill Bratton said that he is making Deputy Chief Michael Hillman the head of a newly-created Critical Management Bureau—which will now be the entity called out to do future crowd control instead of those Metro guys. Hillman who, despite his vaguely militaristic vibe and his penchant for gee-whiz gadgets (the man loves helicopters), is earnest, likable and very well-regarded by the troops. Plus he’s something of a national expert in crowd management.

Whatever functional difference the Hillman appointment does or doesn’t make, it’s another signal that Bratton takes the various intricacies of the May Day problem seriously.

POT MEET KETTLE

The LA Times reports that, at that same meeting, former Chief and present day City Council member, Bernard Parks brought his own show-and-tell set up to play after Bratton and Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell repeated the May Day Power Point that they’d give the day before to the Police Commission:

Some council members suggested that a long-term problem with Los Angeles Police Department culture was involved. Councilman Bernard C. Parks showed a video from community members suggesting that the melee was the latest in a series of excessive-force incidents during Bratton’s nearly five-year tenure.

Now we all know that Bernard Parks is genuinely powerless in the face of his Katrina-sized hatred of Bill Bratton. (Keep coming back, Bernie. It works, if you work it.) Still, how Parks managed to say this stuff with a straight face is, in itself, an accomplishment—since, to counter the accusations, all Bratton had to do is turn around to the video-wielding Councilman and utter a single word: RAMPART

Note to Bernie: Try following the lead of Rudy Giuliani, who famously loathed Bill Bratton too, yet in a KFWB interview this week, Rudy couldn’t have sounded more kissy-kissy. Disingenuous? Probably. But also practical. And far less tedious for the rest of us.

IT’S THE MATH, STUPID

One last thing: Yes, the LAPD needs to take a hard look at some of the subtle—and not so subtle— mindsets still favored by too many of its officers that, when given free rein, lead to incidents like May Day melees…..BUT..

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On Friday, Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled a “sweeping new” $48 million dollar gang plan. (I love sweeping new plans, don’t you?) The plan comes complete with lots of “cracking down” (Yawn, been there….over and over and over again), some gee-whiz gadgetry in the form of satellite electronic tracking devices to be strapped on the ankles of truly bad gang members, and….the new must-have accessory for all 2007 gang crack downs: A GANG CZAR.

It’s not that I don’t think a gang czar is a good idea, it’s that the chances of getting someone who has the breadth of knowledge and experience to genuinely problem solve in the arena of gang violence are….well, I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it. Plus, in order for them to have a prayer of being even slightly effective, said Czar would need some real control and authority. This is likely to happen….let’s see, what’s the term I’m looking for? Oh, yeah. Never. Given what Arnold is suggesting now, it appears to be one step above a vanity position—in other words, another committee head.

Since, the state is facing a $3 billion budget shortfall, it’s unclear where the $48 million is actually going to will come from anyway. Plus the democrats, quite rightly said that the plan has virtually nothing planned for prevention and intervention, that it’s mostly a strategy to beef up law enforcement.

And in a sop to the CCPOA-–the prison guards’ union—Arnold wants to add 70 new corrections officers to try to do something about the prison gangs that all but run certain of the state’s correctional institutions. (And they will do what exactly, to accomplish this?) Unfortunately, this seems emblematic of the governor’s approach to most criminal justice issues in the state: build more prisons; hire more guards.

The state, like the city of Los Angeles, has very real gang problems that call for the will and the willingness to craft the kind of comprehensive and creative approach that we have yet to see come out of either city or state leadership. Connie Rice’s Advancement Project report pointed the way to the kind of thinking necessary to get started. Yet it has all but been ignored.

Instead we get new “sweeping plans” that look a lot like old sweeping plans—or, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. Politics as usual.

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Cop watching author, Heather McDonald, has an Op Ed in Sunday’s LA Times about the warrior mentality that exists in the LAPD’s Metro division and it’s effect on the events of May Day. McDonald has a lot of smart things to say—and she’s also got a lot wrong. But it’s certainly the thing that folks inside the department—and outside LAPD watchers—were talking about yesterday.

Here are a few excerpts:

If the Parker-era centurion mentality has an afterlife, it would be in the elite Metropolitan Division, whose officers pride themselves on their history and exacting admissions standards. Created in 1933, Metro serves as a specialized force for such crisis situations as the 1997 North Hollywood bank robbery. While it also backs up street-crime fighters, it has little continuing contact with the public. A top LAPD commander explained the park incident to me this way: The problem began when a “handful of one-dimensional Metro cops put on their Darth Vader masks and helmets and became a system serving a system, not people serving people. They could not transition between being soldier-warriors and being public servants.” Once one or two officers violated policy, their managers should have intervened immediately so that their conduct didn’t become contagious. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

Okay, right. So far so good….

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Imporant newly proposed immigration legislation….another MacArthur Park march and rally….a strongly worded new ACLU legal filing regarding the LAPD….

Yesterday was a full day.

I’m finishing up a deadline so I’ll be back with a new posting late this afternoon.

In the meantime, here’s a post from the always interesting ProfsBlog about how bad California’s prison system really is. It’s titled “Golden State Guantanamo.” Here’s the main ‘graph:

One of the least covered and most important areas of California’s socio-legal landscape is its bloated and inhumane prison system that now holds approximately 80,000 prisoners more than the 100,000 its 30+ prisons were designed to house. While Guantanamo has rightly been a subject of constant attention in the main stream media and the legal blogosphere, California’s prison crisis constitutes a human rights abuse of equal if not greater significance. Three separate federal courts now have jurisdiction over different aspects of the crises created by the endless growth of this system. The overcrowding has transformed the state’s already warehouse like prisons, which lacked educational or treatment facilities, into something that deserves the term “camp”, with gyms and hallways packed with bunk beds. Such conditions, and a chronic shortage of guards, has a more hellish twist when you consider that most of these prisoners are considered players in a racialized gang order that involves more than a dozen different factions (many divided within ethnicity). But suffering can be more mundane as well. In a new report prepared for one of the federal courts (described in today’s SF Chronicle), that of Hon. Thelton Henderson (N.Dist CA), the special master appointed by Judge Henderson criticized the system for being as many as 2,700 guards short and noted that plans to add thousands of new beds would only increase the numbers of people exposed to the system’s broken health and dental systems (the subject of the case before Judge Henderson). I’m not an expert in the metrics of pain, but how many unset broken bones or uncared for dental abscess equals a case of water boarding?

Now before anybody labels this an over-the-top rant by some no-nothing bleeding heart, you should know it was written by Jonathan Simon, the Associate Dean for Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School. Simon’s own blog, Governing Through Crime, is full of other interesting takes on California’s crime and prison policies.

In fact, here’s something he wrote on my fabulously smart friend, Joan Petersilia, the state’s top expert (and one of the nation’s top experts) in prison reentry and parole policy.

Okay, back soon. In the mean time, please inform, argue, opine, take issue and discuss this— or any of the other pressing topics of the last 24 hours.

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UPDATE: Blogfather Marc Cooper has a good take on the immigration package, as I knew he would.

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