On Wednesday morning, The ACLU of Southern California filed a federal class action suit against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department with the idea of getting a sharp-toothed federal injunction that will force the department, at legal gunpoint, if necessary, to make the changes necessary clean up its desperately troubled jails.

The suit makes it clear that it’s not looking merely for symptomatic tinkering, that it views the problems as systemic, and that they start at the top.

With this in mind, in addition to suing the LASD in general, the suit charges that Sheriff Lee Baca, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo, and former Chief of Custody Operations Dennis Burns all knew about “a longstanding, widespread pattern of violence by deputies against inmates in the county jails” —but when confronted with the abuse by concerned supervisors (as we reported here and here and here in Matt Fleischer’s Dangerous Jails series), Baca, Tanaka and company basically told the supervisors to buzz off—and the abuse was allowed to continue.

The 77-page complaint details an avalanche of horrific alleged incidents of inmates being slugged, tased, kicked, head-bashed, slammed and, in one case, scalp-carved by deputies—with several of the reported incidents occurring in front of witnesses, or while the inmate was handcuffed, or both. Many of the beatings reportedly resulted in multi-day hospital stays and permanent injuries.

At a press conference Wednesday morning, So Cal ACLU legal director, Peter Eliasberg, and Margaret Winter, the associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, both said they expect the lawsuit to result in a federal injunction—likely in the form of a consent decree—- that will force the LASD into “real accountability.”

When I asked Winter whether or not she thought the ACLU had a good chance of getting the desired injunction, Winter answered strongly in the affirmative.

“I have really seldom felt more confident that litigation is going to result in a consent decree.” she said. “I mean, we have massive evidence even before discovery. And during the discovery phase of all this, we’re going to get everything. Everything. ”

(Just in case you’ve forgotten, discovery is the period of formal investigation — governed by court rules — that is conducted before trial. At that time one party may force the other to produce requested documents or other physical evidence, even if the second party really would rather not.)

Until very recently, said Winter, the department refused even to fork over its guidelines for use of force inside the jails. “We tried for years to get that.”

(For the record, I know from personal experience that one can easily get this kind of information from the LAPD, while the Sheriff’s Department is bothersomely withholding about trivial things.)

“Now [through the discovery process] we’re going to open the book and go into all the dark corners of the jails and shine a light on the fantastic secrecy that’s been the rule in the past.”

In reading over the just-filed 77 pages of the “Complaint for Injunctive Relief”—known formally as Rosas v. Baca— it does appear that the ACLU already has a lot of potent ammunition to get the court’s attention.

Some random examples of the allegations include:

In July 2011, two deputies beat a handcuffed inmate about the head and neck, the beating so severe that he required hospitalization outside the jail, and has permanent hearing loss in one ear.

In March 16, 2011, three deputies beat an African American inmate until he was unconscious then carved the letters M – Y into his scalp, the first two letters of “MYATE,” (or more commonly “MAYATE,”) a racial street slur meaning “black.”

In March 2011, deputies slammed a handcuffed inmate’s head into a cement wall, leaving him with a concussion and a gash that took 35 stitches to close, then beat him around the head and face when he came to, resulting in 2 days of hospitalization and four additional days in the jail’s medical unit. The ACLU reports that were several witnesses to this incident.

In February 2011, deputies severely beat a mentally ill inmate who was in jail on two warrants: for failure to pay his subway fare, and driving without a license. The beating resulted in a collapsed lung, two broken ribs, a nasal fracture and four broken teeth.

The list goes on from there, including the alleged 2008 rape by a deputy of Frank Mendoza, who was in LA County jail on a charge of public drunkenness. (That’s Mendoza in the video above.)

These are, of course, only allegations. But there are a lot of them. And included in the filing are accounts from a list of civilian witnesses, including two jails chaplains, and a former FBI agent.

LASD Commander James Hellmold was present at the press conference and answered reporters’ questions afterward. (Interestingly, Hellmold admitted he’d not been invited by the ACLU to the Press Conference, but saw a PR release announcing its existence, and simply decided he’d show up, like the rest of us, to find out what was being said. We, in the press, of course, were delighted that he chose to do so.)

In response to inquiries about the alleged beatings, Hellmold said that he “hoped deputies would be given the same courtesy given the inmates, of being considered innocent until proven guilty.”

(Winter said later, than if any deputies weren’t given due process, she guaranteed she’d be the first in line to bring suit to defend their constitutional rights.)

About the reported “culture of violence” inside the jail system, Helmold said that there was “a culture of violence,” inside the jails, but that it was “among the inmates,” more than half of whom he said, “are in jail on violent charges.”

When pressed on the topic by a TV reporter who asked what he thought about the sign-throwing, tattoo-sporting deputy gangs inside the jail, groups like the now-infamous 3000 Boys inside the jails, he said, “I have no comment.”

Hellmold is one of the three recently promoted commanders who are heading up the Sheriff’s special task force that was formed last fall to look into the accusations of inmate abuse by deputies. (As we have reported in the past, Hellmold is also part of Undersheriff Paul Tanaka’s inner circle, and a longtime donor to Tanaka’s political campaign outside the department. We also reported that Paul Tanaka was the one who was repeatedly obstructive when concerned department supervisors tried to institute reforms to curb the deputy on inmate violence.)

Oh, and Hellmold was one of those who told the LA Times back in October that reports on jail violence never reached the Sheriff.

Bring on the lawsuit—and the discovery.

PS: Matt Fleischer and I were happy to note that loads of material from our Dangerous Jails series was woven all through the ACLU’s 77-page lawsuit. (Just thought you’d like to know.)

To be exact, Supervisor Gloria Molina tossed two G-words in Sheriff Baca’s direction during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting when she was questioning the sheriff about the Sheriff’s Department’s progress—or lack thereof—-in implementing the recommendations made last October by Special Counsel Merrick Bobb and the Office of Independent Review relating violence in Baca’s troubled jails.

Among other things, Molina and Supervisor Mike Antonovitch wanted to know whether the sheriff was able to institute a plan in which deputies would be stuck for fewer years working in the jails before they are rotated to street patrol. (The existing multi-year tenure working the jails after young deputies first graduate from the Sheriff’s academy has long been flagged by Bobb and other experts as problematic.) Molina also asked about whether deputies had stopped using their heavy flashlights as batons to whack inmates, and if the camera’s were properly installed at Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers facilities, and, if so, had they been successful in capturing videos of any of the use of force incidents at CJ that have occurred since the installation.

The answers that the sheriff gave in response to many of the questions seemed mostly to amount to some version of “we’re working on it.”

For example, in terms of the cameras, of the 674 needed in Men’s Central Jail, according to the Sheriff’s report, more than half still have to yet to be installed or need to be replaced. At Twin Towers, according to the report, none of the 677 have been installed as yet.

As for the flashlights, the only progress made in nearly 2 1/2 months had been to schedule a meeting withe ALADS and the PPOA, the two deputies unions, to talk about the issue.

All this did not please Molina, so she marched out the first of her G-words: garbage.

“You know, Sheriff, you’re providing these reports and it’s all in the same tone. It’s like I’m going to give you all this garbage, and you can just take this garbage and shove it around however you want. I don’t think you’re taking us very seriously. I’m very disappointed.

“To the contrary,’ retorted the Sheriff. “I don’t think you’re taking what I’m saying seriously.”

But Molina didn’t back off and, instead, pulled out the second and largest G-word: Gobbledygook.

“I am [taking you seriously], and I’ve been listening and reading your reports. And I’ve asked questions about them. And that’s why we’re asking questions now. …Don’t give me Gobbledygook that you can’t get……

“I object to you referring..….” interrupted Baca…

And so it went.

(You can read a copy of the Sheriff’s report to the board on the various recommendations and actions here.)

Here’s KPCC Frank Stoltz’s rundown on the Molina/Baca verbal kerfuffle.

SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT REPORT SHOWS THAT USES OF FORCE IN JAILS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE USED AGAINST MENTALLY ILL INMATES.

At the same Board of Supervisors meeting, Sheriff Baca reported to the Supes that his own jails task force, formed last fall, had determined that deputies were more liable to use force on mentally ill inmates. He asked for additional $1.3 million dollars to hire specialized deputies and social workers to better address the problem.

Here’s a clip from the LA Times story on the issue:

Roughly a third of the 582 deputy use-of-force cases in the jail system last year involved inmates with mental health histories, according to an analysis released Tuesday. About 15% of the jail’s 15,000 inmates are classified as mentally ill.

The numbers provide a more detailed picture of the confrontations between deputies and inmates, an issue that has sparked intense scrutiny over the last few months and prompted a heated debate Tuesday between Sheriff Lee Baca and some L.A. County supervisors.

FOUR SHERIFF DEPUTY TRAINEES FILE LAWSUIT TUESDAY AND ACCUSE THEIR LASD SUPERVISORS OF TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE AND OTHER MISCONDUCT

Also on Tuesday, Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell announced the filing four lawsuits against the Sheriff’s department alleging criminal conduct and discrimination.

KPCC’s Corey Moore reports:

Terrell says the plaintiffs testified at recent depositions they saw training officers at two L.A. County stations commit crimes that include falsifying and destroying evidence and filing false police reports.

The plaintiffs claim that after speaking up about the wrongdoing, officers retaliated by, among other things, forcing them to work up to 20 hours without overtime pay.

ABC’s Rudabeh Shahbazi also has a report on the serious accusations.

(NOTE: We will have more on this issue as we get further details.)

AND IN NON-LASD NEWS—PUBLIC COUNSEL, THE ACLU AND OTHERS SCORE A VICTORY ON THE ISSUE OF STUDENT CURFEW TICKETS.

This is very good news. Here are some clips from the ACLU’s press release on the matter:

Students with tickets for being late to school faced hundreds of dollars in fines and were forced to miss more school time to appear in court.

Now Los Angeles’ top judge for juvenile courts [Judge Michael Nash] has released new guidelines to eliminate fines and unnecessary court time for students who were late to school and for other minor offenses. The court will also direct students who miss school to school- and community-based resources that are shown to improve academic achievement and get struggling students back on track.

It’s the latest step forward to reforming Los Angeles daytime curfew rules and truancy ticketing.

….Data collected by Public Counsel, the ACLU of Southern California, and the Community Rights Campaign shows that truancy and tardy ticketing unfairly and disproportionately targets African American and Latino students and their families, and results in more student time out of school and significant financial burdens on low-income families.

City Councilman Tony Cardenas has also been working for the last two years to reform the city’s student truancy policies.

Earlier this year, the LAPD and LA’s School Police Department dialed back the number of tickets written to students on their way to school.

Photo by Corey Moore/KPCC

Last week, Sheriff Lee Baca did a massive mea culpa when he met with the Times Editorial Board and told them he didn’t know, but should have known, about the pattern of abuse of inmates by Sheriff’s deputies in his massive jail system.

Okay, at first bounce the sheriff’s Captain Louis Renault stance was not terribly believable. But let’s say the sheriff is telling the truth-–or a version of the truth. More likely, what he means is that he was told that the ACLU was exaggerating with all those reports over the years, and the occasional bad apple who did use too much force had been investigated and either disciplined appropriately or, when necessary, fired. So not to worry.

We know from our own sources that there are those within the Sheriff’s Department who were concerned about what they were seeing in the jails, and attempted to alert people at the top of LASD command staff, but were roundly ignored—or in the case of Captain John Clark who tried to institute reform at Men’s Central Jail, was shut down, then moved out of the custody section of the Sheriff’s Department altogether. Somebody—or several somebodies— did that ignoring, and that sidelining.

Plus there were the issues like the multiple boxes worth of video cameras-–67 cameras in all— that were supposed to be installed in Men’s Central Jail more than a year ago, but weren’t and instead sat in a captain’s office, according to Baca.

So what about all that? What about that captain who ignored the order to get the cameras installed? What about the command staff who blocked reform and ignored the reports by concerned supervisors and lessor command staff that Bad Things Were Happening in the jails?

Shouldn’t some heads be rolling by this time?

When I happened, by chance, to speak about the jails issue this past weekend with former LA Mayor Richard Riordan, his most emphatic point on the matter was that it shouldn’t be merely the deputies who actually engaged in the abuse who were punished. “The supervisors should be held responsible, and the command staff above them. We should follow the responsibility as high as it goes.”

I don’t believe Riordan actually used the term heads should roll, but he said so in so many words.

Keep in mind that the former mayor, while fair-minded, is not a bleeding heart. Yet his tone was emphatic: Awful things were going on in the county’s jails and those who knew about it, and could have put a stop to it, needed to be held to answer.

I agree.

If change is to occur, the individuals who turned a blind eye to years of scathing ACLU reports, individual complaints, and high ticket lawsuits, cannot all stay in the same positions they occupy now. Actions—or lack thereof—have to have consequences.

Can you imagine former LAPD Chief Bill Bratton leaving in place a high level officer who failed him and the department in the manner that Baca is suggesting?
Nope. Never.

By the same token, Baca needs to have someone (or several someones) at a very high level in his command staff who has both the desire and the stomach for the aggressive reform that the sheriff claims now to want. Based on his past actions, it would seem that Undersheriff Paul Tanaka is not that person.

Baca is meeting with the ACLU next Tuesday. Both sides appear to be approaching the get together with sincerity. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that talk.

In the meantime, for true reform to take place surely there needs to be some kind of shakeup at the upper levels of the Sheriff’s Department.

LA WEEKLY STORY ABOUT JAILS VISITOR BEING BEATEN IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED

The LA Times has a story on that story, and it’s a must read.

Here’s the original story by Chris Vogel. in the Weekly about the alleged beating incident.

The ACLU of So Cal filed a racial profiling lawsuit against Glendale Unified School District, the Glendale Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and LA County Probation on Thursday having to do with a 2010 incident in which 56 Hoover High Hchool students were rounded up and questioned for an hour.

The suit names individual officers from the GPD, the LAPD, probation, plus administrators at Hoover HS for “racial profiling and unlawful search and seizure.”

The lawsuit is based on an incident that occurred on September 24, 2010, when, according to the ACLU, school administrators, working with police and school-based probation officers, rounded up 56 Latino students during their lunch period, herded them into classrooms, interrogated them—and in a bizarre touch—”orced them to pose for mock mug shots.”

Attorneys say that the students were targeted although there was no evidence that they were violating any laws or breaking school rules.

Here’s more from the ACLU statement:

“I was shocked and scared when I saw the police, especially because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,” said sixteen-year-old Ashley Flores, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “It was the first encounter I’ve had with police. I’ve never been in trouble and have nothing to do with gangs.”

The students, all Latino, were eating lunch when school administrators ordered them into two classrooms, where armed GPD and LAPD officers were waiting for them. Police told the students that they could not leave until they provided information. When some protested that they had done nothing wrong, officers ordered them to “sit down and shut up,” and threatened to go to their homes at 6 a.m. to collect the information if they did not cooperate. The officers told students that their personal information would be kept in a file to identify them if they ever got in trouble. The students were detained between 30 and 90 minutes, causing some to miss their fifth-period classes.

“The police officers, school officials, and probation officers involved in this roundup targeted these students solely because they are Latino,” said David Sapp, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. “They acted as though being a Latino teenager is all the justification they needed to detain and threaten these students, which is a textbook case of racial profiling.”

One student who was eating lunch with the others, who is not Latino, was not detained in the classrooms.

Additionally, after the incident, Defendant Michael Rock, a captain in GPD who authorized the roundup, acknowledged that the students’ ethnicity was central in determining which students were detained, adding that GPD had planned to conduct a similar operation targeting Armenian students. [Italics mine.]

Nice.

The lawsuit sounds righteous, and there’s no excuse for racially profiling and terrorizing kids, yet it might help to have this bit of context:

According to the school website, Hoover High’s student population is around 42 percent Armenian American, and around one quarter Latino. In recent years, elements within the two ethnic groups have sometimes been violently at odds. The most tragic such event occurred in May of 2000 when 17-year-old Raul Aguirre was beaten with a crowbar then stabbed to death in front of the school just after classes ended for the day. Raul Aguirre, it seemed, was a non-troublemaker kid who had tried to intervene in a fight between the two ethnic factions, and was murdered for his trouble.

In any case, one assumes that there’s more to the story. Again, not that anything excuses the actions of the adults. However, additional information might at least, in part, explain the thinking of the cops and the Hoover High administrators.

AND IN OTHER NEWS:

CDCR SAYS CALIFORNIA’S PRISON HUNGER STRIKE HAS ENDED

The CDCR reported on Thursday that the mass hunger strike in the state’s prisons has ended. This is from their statement:

CDCR officials in Sacramento were contacted by inmates by letter on October 11. It was the first such contact by inmates or their representatives during the inmate-led action.

Officials agreed to meet with inmate representatives to discuss its ongoing review of and revisions to its Security Housing Unit (SHU) policies that began in May 2011. Similar to its discussions with inmates during a July hunger strike, all agreed the changes to policies would take several months to finalize. The department agreed to continue on its same course.

Inmates initiated a second hunger strike on September 26, and after three days, 4,252 inmates in eight state prisons had missed nine consecutive meals – the point at which CDCR considers an inmate to be on a hunger strike….

Last Friday, Ian Lovett reported for the NY Times that, unlike with the first strike in the summer, this time the hunger strikers were dug in and prepared to last as long as it took to get some of their demands met, so the change was unexpected.

Here’s a clip from last week’s story:

….since inmates resumed the strike last week in continued protest against conditions of prolonged isolation, things have gone differently: the corrections department has cracked down, trying to isolate the strike leaders, some of whom say they no longer trust the department and are hoping to push the governor to enact reforms.

“I’m ready to take this all the way,” J. Angel Martinez, one of the strike leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison, said in a message conveyed through a lawyer this week. “We are sick and tired of living like this and willing to die if that’s what it takes.”

This time, though, both sides have shown less inclination to compromise, and no negotiations between the strike leaders and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken place since the strike resumed.

An internal memo from George J. Giurbino, director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the department, outlined new, more aggressive processes for dealing with mass hunger strikes….

However, on Thursday, Lovett reported on how and why the strikers had agreed to begin eating again. Here’s a clip:

…after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.

Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news release from the department.

The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing inmates in security housing units.

But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior while in prison.

“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to end the hunger strike.”

In his most recent report on the jails, Michael Gennaco, head of LA County’s Office of Independent Review (OIR), details 12 incidents, in relation to which, a total of more than 30 jail employees have been fired or suspended for either abusing inmates or helping to cover up abuse they witnessed. (The report, which WitnessLA has obtained, is to be released publicly at noon on Thursday.)

In one case Gennaco describes, blows to an unconscious inmate resulted in “significant injuries requiring surgery, including brain swelling.”

In another, three deputies “assaulted the inmate resulting in a fractured cheekbone and injuries to his ribs.” The deputies then “left the inmate in a cell without medical attention.”

In a third, a deputy and a custody assistant beat a mentally ill inmate with flashlights. Although the injured inmate’s head bled profusely and needed sutures, none of the four employees who participated in or witnessed the assault took him for medical care. Instead, the custody assistant simply told a second inmate, a “trustee,” to clean up the mentally ill man’s bloody cell.

In addition to the recounting of the individual instances of abuse, Gennaco’s report includes observations regarding larger, systemic issues regarding the jails that merit concern.

Here are a few excerpts from the report’s notable points:

INSTANCES OF DEPUTIES ABUSING INMATES AND NOT GETTING CAUGHT ON THE RISE?

“One troubling aspect of our initial review of the recent ACLU report is that the times in which deputies “get away” with using excessive force may be on the rise.”

SLACK HIRING STANDARDS MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO EXCESSIVE FORCE CASES

“Over two years ago, OIR took the Department to task for not following LASD’s own hiring standards the last time there was an uptick in hiring. Some of these hires are responsible for the excessive force cases that have occurred in the jails.”

PREVIOUS JAILS REFORMS THWARTED

“Over the years, there have been proposals to address jail violence issues systemically that did not take root. For example, a proposal to rotate employee jail assignments was initially approved but scotched by Department executives when deputies complained about it. A related plan to place first line supervisors inside the modules was also halted despite initial positive signs of a reduction in force in the areas in which it was implemented.”

[Editor's Note: The above belies the Sheriff's contention on Tuesday night's Which Way LA? broadcast that Undersheriff Paul Tanaka acted appropriately when Tanaka blocked 2006 reform efforts that would have helped to break up the problematic deputy gang-like cliques inside Men's Central Jail.]

JAIL SUPERVISORS MAY HAVE KNOWN ABOUT “GANGLIKE” DEPUTIES’ BEHAVIOR AND DONE NOTHING

“Perhaps most concerning [About last year's Christmas party incident] is the evidence that jail supervisors apparently knew about the use of “gang-like” signs and other troubling behavior well before the eruption of violence at the Christmas party. OIR believed that while the assault was clearly propelled by alcohol, some LASD executives were too swift to conclude that intoxication was the sole cause of the incident.”

The initial full 26-page report may be accessed HERE— with an updated version HERE.

FRUSTRATION OVER CASES THAT CAN’T BE PROVED

When I spoke to Gennaco on Wednesday night about his findings, he expressed frustration about a number of matters the report contained.

“I see this report as a bad news/good news/bad news story,” he said. “It’s not good that deputies are using excessive force. But when it does happen, when it can be proven, obviously that’s a good thing.

“In too many cases we can’t prove it,” he said.

That’s why, Gennaco said, he is ardently in favor of a comprehensive system of video cameras being installed in the jails. He then cited a case of an inmate beating involving nine deputies in the county’s East Facility jail located in Castaic, near Magic Mountain. “We were able to prove it, and discipline nine people, because we had a video. Otherwise it would have been a case of he said/he said. A video is an evidentiary tie-breaker.”

Although there are some cameras in a few of the jails, inside Men’s Central Jail (CJ), the facility where most of the recently reported alleged abuse has taken place, there’s almost nothing.

Recently, Sheriff Lee Baca told The LA Times that he planned to install 69 video cameras inside CJ by the end of the year.

However, according to WitnessLA’s Dangerous Jails report by Matt Fleisher, back in 2006, a $12 million plan was drawn up for a closed-circuit surveillance system that would have caused 1,200 cameras to be installed inside CJ. But the plan that was subsequently abandoned.

“It’s taken way too long for these cameras to get in,” said Gennaco. “We also need them in Twin Towers, which is where we have most of the mentally ill inmates.” Too often when there’s a report of excessive use of force at Twin Towers, he said, the mentally ill inmate isn’t capable of explaining to Gennaco’s investigators what has happened. “That’s why cameras are so important.”

“LOW LEVEL FORCE”

Gennaco was also bothered by the difficulty of proving occurrences of what he described as “low level force.”

“These are incidents that don’t trigger injuries—or major injuries. Maybe it’s a case where a deputy just shoves an inmate hard. But those incidents are important. You want to catch that one shove.”

He explained that the one shove, if not caught, may lead an otherwise good deputy into a pattern of escalating behavior. “And it doesn’t just affect the person who did the shoving. It also affects those who saw it and didn’t report it.” Nipping those incidents in the bud is critical to reform, said Gennaco.

On the topic of reform, I asked him what he thought about the FBI probe and the other recent revelations of abuse.

“Sometimes it takes a fulcrum of events to cause real change.”

So, did he think we had reached the necessary fulcrum now?

At first Gennaco didn’t answer directly. “I’m glad that everything is getting out on the table,” he said.

I pressed.

“Well, I haven’t seen this much attention paid to a public agency and not had reform result.”

“Look,” Gennaco said just before we rang off, “nobody likes to think about the jails and the prisons. But we have to think about them: A society is only as good as the way we treat our most vulnerable individuals.”

Like inmates.

“Like inmates.”

NOTE: At Thursday’s LA County Board of Supervisors meeting, Gennaco and the Office of Independent Review (OIR) is expected to have an initial analysis of the allegations in the ACLU’s most recent report. (I got this date wrong. The meeting is not Thursday.)

Gennaco also reportedly intends to ask the FBI and the US Attorney to help create a system by which the Feds “independently review the Sheriff Department’s internal investigations of excessive force and other misconduct.”

Frank Stolze of KPCC has a good interview with Gennaco this morning.

On Tuesday morning, both the LA Times editorial board and WitnessLA called for the LA County Supervisors to appoint an independent civilian commission—a la the Christopher Commission (which looked into LAPD practices post Rodney King)—to investigate the civil rights mess that is occurring in the County’s jails facilities.

On Which Way LA? Tuesday night, after I brought the matter up, Sheriff Baca said he would welcome civilians investigating—or words to that effect. He even mentioned some people he’d like to see on such a team. Loyola Law School prof, Laurie Levenson, was among those whom he named.

But will the Board of Supervisors step up and create the commission?

Some Board insiders I polled said that that is unlikely that an independent commission would happen, that budgetary concerns would stand in the way.

“There just isn’t the money for it,” said one source.

No money? Um, what about the $1.4 billion plan the Sheriff just pitched on Tuesday to demolish and rebuild Men’s Central Jail downtown, plus a second new jail for women inmates at Pitchess Detention Center. (Fox news has more on the jails pitch.)

The Supervisors are in a position to take a much needed leadership role by appointing an independent commission —-which is really not a terribly expensive proposition. (Heck, just shave a single million off that $1.3 billion jail construction pricetag.)

Unfortunately, thus far the Board has been missing in action on the topic of the jails scandal in general.

Of course, a civilian commission alone can’t force reform in the culture and practices of LA County’s Jails . It is also important that the existing FBI probe into deputy abuse be expanded substantially. Then, once the Feds have finished their investigation, with any luck the Department of Justice will impose a Federal Consent Decree—which is essentially a legally binding plea bargain that imposes a list of strict conditions, plus a timetable under which they must be met.

(The Federal Consent Decree imposed on the LAPD, was much of what made it possible for LA’s once-ailing police culture to reform itself.)

No one can guarantee what the FBI and the Department of Justice will do. Yet, it is fully within the power of the LA County Board of Supervisors to appoint that much-needed independent commission.

Inmates rights are being violated on the Board’s watch. Doing something proactive about the jails abuse scandal is a part of their job.

PS: Someone like John Van de Kamp might be a good person to lead such an endeavor.

Or how about Bill Lann Lee, the civil rights attorney who was the Assistant Attorney General for the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under Bill Clinton?

The possibilities are many.

AND ON OTHER TOPICS…

LAUSD AGREES TO MAKE CHANGES IN HOW IT TEACHERS ENGLISH LEARNERS AND BLACKS

The LA Times’ Howard Blume has the story.

Wednesday’s LA Times has an Op Ed about realignment that is so smart and dead on that it made me a little dizzy.

It’s written by former federal prosecutor (and present USC adjunct law professor), Jonathan Shapiro. Here’s a clip:

Rather than complain, L.A. leaders ought to lead. If done right, realignment could revolutionize and repair the incarceration-only policies that have led to both the nation’s highest costs per inmate and the nation’s highest state recidivism rate.

Public safety means more than simply jailing offenders. It requires problem-solving courts, the creative use of electronic monitoring and more intensive oversight when offenders have done their time. It means evidence-based, cost-effective strategies such as day-reporting centers, where former offenders must participate in programs during the day but return home at night, and “flash” incarceration, an immediate but short return to jail following a probation violation. It also means drug and mental health treatment for offenders and ex-offenders, as well as education and job training.

To be sure, this is a tough time for Los Angeles County. Its Probation Department is in a period of transition, its Sheriff’s Department is being investigated for excessive force against the offenders it already houses, and budgets are being cut. But however difficult the times and however challenging change is, L.A. County and the rest of California no longer have the luxury of pandering to “tough on crime” policies that have proved ineffective and too expensive to sustain.

Realignment has arrived. Former offenders are already trickling back to L.A. and into county hands. New offenders are being charged. The Los Angeles law enforcement community and the county Board of Supervisors should embrace their new role as a historic opportunity. Public safety is in their hands now more than ever.

In a blogpost that appeared on the LA Times website in the late morning this past Friday, columnist Steve Lopez called for Sheriff Lee Baca to resign.

A lot of frantic chatter about whether the Sheriff should, could or would resign followed the appearance of the column. (The ACLU also called for Baca’s resignation at their September 28 press conference, but it was Lopez’s column that tipped the law enforcement watchers into chattering.)

“How bad does it have to get at L.A. County’s jails before Sheriff Lee Baca is either pushed into stepping aside, at least temporarily, or has the integrity to volunteer for a leave of absence?” Lopez wrote.

Then farther down in the post: “…..If Baca’s got any self-respect, he’s got to walk. Given his record, Baca can’t be trusted to handle even more inmates who flood into his jails because of the realignment that will shift responsibilities from the state to the counties.

“Do the right thing, Sheriff Baca. I know you were elected to the job, but I don’t think many people would object if you decided on early retirement.”

Actually, there are a couple of very large reasons why some of us who have been closely tracking the ballooning LA County jails scandal would object very loudly to Baca getting shoved out.

REASON #1 WHY BACA SHOULDN’T STEP DOWN: DO YOU KNOW WHO WOULD LIKELY REPLACE HIM, STEVE? WELL, DO YOU??

The Sheriff is an elected official—and an extremely popular one at that, despite his various blind spots and peccadilloes. This means that, unlike with the soon-to-exit Chief of LA County Probation, Donald Blevins, the Board of Supervisors cannot simply find and hire some other swell gal or fellow to take his place.

Until an election could be held, one of the members of his command staff would be tapped to replace him. The most likely candidate is his second in command, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, who is reported to want to run for Sheriff in the future.

THE PAUL TANAKA FACTOR

As regular readers are aware, WitnessLA has been writing about the horrorshow that is the LA County jails system since the Spring of 2009. (You’ll find representative posts here and here and here and here. .

In March we went so far as to say that the jails needed its own Christopher Commission.

Then in September, we posted the first part of our DANGEROUS JAILS investigative series by Matthew Fleischer, in which Matt documented a particularly horrific case of inmate abuse in which deputies allegedly beat an unresisting inmate so badly that they broke a bone in his eye socket, marched him naked up and down a cell block, and then tossed him in a cell with a bunch of gang members who raped the already injured inmate throughout the night, while patrolling deputies “failed” to notice.

In that same story, with the help of an LASD whistleblower, Matt revealed that higher ups on the Sheriff’s Department command staff—people like Paul Tanaka— were aware of the abuse of inmates by deputies and yet did little to stop it.

Of course, the buck stops with the Sheriff, thus he deserves the blame doing nothing about what has become a culture of violence that flourishes unchecked in many areas of the jail system.

However, in the case of Paul Tanaka, it isn’t merely that he did nothing to check the abuse after it was brought to his attention by other LASD officers who tried to raise the alarm. Worse, according to several sources, Tanaka actively stifled an attempt at reform:

As Matt Fleischer reported, in 2006 the commanding officer at Men’s Central Jail (CJ), a Captain Clark, became so concerned about by abusive cliques of deputies at CJ—like the now infamous 3000 Boys— that Clark attempted to institute a shift rotation system that would split up these deputy “gangs” who were causing most of the problem.

Unfortunately, that attempt at reform was aggressively shut down by then-Assistant Sheriff, now Undersheriff Tanaka—i.e the guy who would be most likely to replace Baca.

(That would be the same Paul Tanaka who was once a tattoo-sporting member of another infamous deputy clique The Vikings, as the LA Times reported here and here.)

Sheriff Baca’s egregious mistake has been handing authority to some of the hard chargers in his department, like Tanaka and others, who cultivate the respect of certain swaths of the rank and file, but who have demonstrated a less than ardent concern for pesky little issues like inmates’ civil rights.

So now we want Baca to step aside so we can hand over the entire department to one of those guys? Uh, no. I don’t think so.

REASON #2 WHY BACA SHOULDN’T STEP DOWN: RIGHT NOW, THE BEST REPLACEMENT FOR LEE BACA IS A NEW AND IMPROVED LEE BACA

Lee Baca is a complicated man. Whatever his failings, Baca very much wants to be a reformer. Despite the sometimes gross inconsistency of his actions (as in the horrific case of the jails), this is not a pose. He genuinely believes in rehabilitation and reentry programs. He doesn’t think we can arrest our way out of every problem. He sees inmates and prisoners as human beings who should be treated as such.

All this is precisely why it has long been so confounding that Baca looked the other way as his jails became an ever fouler swamp of violence, abuse and malignant neglect—as solid report after report from the ACLU painstakingly documented, to little avail.

When the ACLU’s newest report came out featuring sworn affidavits by two jail chaplains and a film producer who volunteers at the jail, plus a former FBI agent, it was discouraging to hear Baca again dismiss the allegations.

It was even more perplexing when, after the Times’ Robert Faturichi reported that the FBI was investigating some of the allegations of deputy misconduct, the Sheriff got angry—not at his allegedly abusive gangs of deputies—but at the FBI for their investigative tactics.

But, for once, the pressure was kept up: A letter signed by prominent California figures—some of them personal friends of the Sheriff—-called for a full on Federal investigation into “pattern and practice” violations in the jails. The LA Times’ Faturechi dug up more tales of abuse.

Late on Friday, two of the five Supervisors, specifically Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina, talked to Times about their distress at the Sheriff’s handling of the jails.

Finally, over the weekend an interesting thing happened: Baca snapped out of his defensive fog and began to respond differently to the rising clamor. First he did an about face on the matter of the FBI poking around in the jails and said he welcomed the Feds and, heck, he would even welcome a wider federal investigation.

Then on Sunday Baca sent a letter to Supervisor Mike Antonovich that Faturechi and Jack Leonard of the Times acquired. In it, among other things, the Sheriff pledged to create a 35-person task force of “seasoned investigators” and “force subject matter experts” to examine the growing pile of allegations of deputy misconduct in the jails.

In short, in the last 72 hours or so, the Sheriff has made some heartening gestures. There is, of course, still a long way to go.

And, yes, we still need a full pattern and practice investigation by the Feds, likely including a Federal Consent Decree.

Nothing less will really do.

“I’m hoping that the feds won’t do a drive-by investigation,” civil rights attorney Connie Rice told he Times. “There needs to be a carefully planned, systematic excavation of the sheriff’s culture.”

….Rice said such a jail probe should involve interviews with deputies, inmates and people outside the department who understand the jail’s problems, such as civil rights attorneys who have sued the county and advocates for the welfare of inmates.

Affirmative to all of that.

But NO to a Baca resignation.

NOTE: A PERSONAL STATEMENT FROM SHERIFF BACA

Shortly after I pressed PUBLISH for this post, a personal statement by Sheriff Baca appeared at the Chatsworth Patch site.

(See REASON #2 above.)

Here is the statement in its entirety:

By Leroy D. Baca, Sheriff

I believe in the principle of dignity for all, including those who are incarcerated. The deputies and staff of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are entrusted and obligated to serve the constitutionally-bound civil rights of all, and to protect and enhance everyone’s human potential.

A number of allegations of misconduct including excessive force by Sheriff’s Department jail staff have been brought to my attention by way of a report from the American Civil Liberties Union.

I take these allegations very seriously.

While safety and security for staff and inmates are paramount, we have to treat the inmates as our community, and we want it to be the best community it can be. This can in part be gained through Education-Based Incarceration.

Stress, anxiety, depression and the threat of violence interfere with the educational process and personal growth. All of this has a significant effect on inmates as well as employees.

In order to address concerns about the jails and to ensure that we are doing the best we possibly can, I have implemented two separate task forces as outlined below. These task forces have already begun their purpose of providing leadership and investigative efforts devoted to the jails.

Read the rest of this entry »

THE LETTER

On Thursday afternoon, the ACLU released a letter signed by 26 criminal justice, civil rights and religious leaders that calls for a broader Federal investigation of the alleged abuse of inmates and misconduct by sheriff’s deputies inside the LA County Jails.

The letter is addressed to US Attorney General Eric Holder, US Attorney Andre Birotte, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Thomas Perez, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and Steven M. Martinez, the Assistant Director in Charge of LA’s FBI Office.

In other words, nobody with any power in the matter got left out.

The message conveyed is sober-minded and respectful but leaves no room for doubt about the seriousness of the request:

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the federal government pursue a thorough criminal and pattern or practice civil rights investigation into the allegations filed by the ACLU yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Rutherford v. Baca, with documentation of a persistent pattern of deputy-on-inmate assaults, deputy-instigated inmate-on-inmate assaults, and use of excessive force in the Los Angeles County jails.

We understand that the FBI is currently investigating the beating of James Parker in Twin Towers Correctional Facility on January 24, 2011 based in part on the eye-witness statement of a civilian, ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim, and that the investigation has widened to include other such incidents in the Los Angeles County Jails. We are pleased that federal law enforcement officials have undertaken this investigation.

We note that Sheriff Baca, through a spokesman, responded to the report of this investigation in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, by categorically denying the need for a federal investigation and insisting that the Sheriff’s Department has already investigated inmate accounts of deputy beatings and found most of them to be unfounded. Based on evidence presented by the ACLU, however, including sworn statements not only from some seventy inmates and former inmates but also from prison chaplains and civilian eyewitnesses to deputy-on-inmate assaults, we are concerned that despite the Sheriff’s protestations there appears to be a pattern of violations by deputies against inmates in the Los Angeles County jails that should be independently investigated.

We therefore respectfully urge you to proceed with a broad inquiry.

Former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp tops the list of those who signed. He is followed by 2 former US Attorneys, 3 former assistant US Attorneys, Los Angeles County Public Defender, Ron Brown, the former head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, plus 2 high profile law school deans, some well-known civil rights lawyers and religious leaders.

THE SHERIFF

It is interesting to note that, several of those who signed on to the plea for the Feds to step in consider themselves to be personal friends with Sheriff Baca, people like Connie Rice and Father Greg Boyle— among others.

Indeed Lee Baca is a very likeable man who has for many years expressed a deep commitment to criminal justice reform. For those who know him, this progressive and humanistic vision of LA’s popular Sheriff has always been hard to square with the hard fact that the jail system he oversees is a shameful quagmire of ongoing civil rights violations.

THE PAST

After the release of our recent jails story by Matt Fleisher, and in the run-up to the this week’s release of the harsh ACLU report on abuse at the jails, a lot of us who write (or litigate) about this topic wondered if any of the new round of stories and witness accounts would make any difference.

Now, with the appearance of this letter, I think maybe…..maybe we have reached a tipping point. The moment feels weirdly like period after the Rampart scandal broke about the LAPD. For a long time after the scandal, disbelief still governed public perception. It couldn’t be that bad, people said; even editors I worked with, said it; people experienced enough to know better said it.

But it was that bad. Most LAPD officers were excellent people. Yet there was a toxic culture inside the department that was doing terrible damage to the fabric of our communities and to the people within them—and to all the good cops who were doing their damnedest every day to protect and serve..

And so it is with the Los Angeles County Jails.

So maybe that’s the good news. In the case of the LAPD, eventually enough people acknowledged that the LAPDs problems were greater than the existence of a few bad apples that it led to a widespread push for reform.

THE FUTURE

As a consequence, the Los Angeles Police Department is now fundamentally different than it was in the bad old, pre-Rampart days.

So perhaps there is reason to hope the same will ultimately prove to be true for LA County’s jails system.

Of course, several elements went into the LAPD’s transformation. Good leadership at the top was essential. Bill Bratton and Charlie Beck, and their command staffs made a world of difference.

But equally important was the existence of a very sharp-toothed Federal Consent Decree.

Which brings us back to the letter at hand.

What those who signed it have requested is crucial.

Let us hope that those with the power to trigger a comprehensive investigation understand that.

****

What happens inside jails and prisons does not stay inside jails and prisons. It comes home with prisoners after they are released and with corrections officers at the end of each day’s shift. When people live and work in facilities that are unsafe, unhealthy, unproductive, or inhumane, they carry the effects home with them. We must create safe and productive conditions of confinement not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it influences the safety, health, and prosperity of us all.

—2006 report by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, Vera Institute of Justice

AND IN RELATED NEWS….WHICH WAY LA? DOES THE JAILS

Warren Olney’s Which Way LA had a segment on the jails on Tuesday and another segment with Sheriff Baca on Thursday.

Plus there was a segment on realignment—the transfer of a large segment of parolees from state custody to the various California counties—which begins this weekend.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF REALIGNMENT…

NPR Carrie Kahn did an excellent show on LA County’s role in realignment with some mention of the jails issue.

AND ONE MORE WRINKLE IN THE JAILS STORY

An inmate allegedly beat up by deputies in front of ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim and another witness was tried for assaulting those same deputies although Lim says he did not. Not even close. The trial ended in a hung jury that was reportedly leaning toward acquittal.

The LA Times Robert Faturechi has the story.

Photo by Damian Dovarganes/AP

“I have never seen anything that approaches the patterns of violence, misfeasance and malfeasance that particularly infects the Los Angeles County jail system.”

Tom Parker, Former Assistant Special Agent in Charge of FBI LA Field Office

The witnesses include two jail chaplains, film producer Scott Budnick of “Hangover” fame who volunteers at Men’s Central Jail,, Esther Lim, the ACLU’s jails monitor, 72 inmates and former inmates, and a former FBI agent, Tom Parker, who has investigated problems in corrections facilities in the U.S. and around the globe.

In sworn testimony, all of these people detailed incidents of abuse of inmates by Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputies in the LA County jails. They did so as part of the ACLU’s lengthy and scathing jails report released Wednesday morning.

In addition to the ACLU’s new report, in the past six months, KTLA News, the LA Weekly and WitnessLA , have each done extensive stories on the entrenched patterns of violence and abuse by deputies at the jails.

In the case of WitnessLA’s story, Dangerous Jails, by Matt Fleischer, for every account of mistreatment that appeared in the article there were another five that we did not use.

Then, on top of the media accounts, on Sunday the LA Times reported that there was a widening FBI investigation into beatings and other deputy misconduct inside the Jails.

In short, a pile of evidence from various sources suggested that something was terribly wrong in the county’s jail system.

So how did LA’s popular Sheriff, Lee Baca, respond to all these stories of deputies brutalizing inmates? One might have reasonably hoped that he would assure us—the concerned public— that he takes such reports of brutality inside his jails very seriously and that each incident would be carefully investigated until he was sure he’d gotten to the bottom of the matter.

But that’s not what Baca did.

Instead, the Sheriff—who has a long had a reputation as a progressive lawman— began blasting away at the messengers.

He told the AP that the ACLU’s statements in its report were “hyperbole” designed to win a quick headline.

About the charges that gang-like groups of deputies had been allowed to operate in the jails—made by the ACLU, plus KTLA and WitnessLA— Baca said:

“That is a very false allegation. There are no gangs in the Sheriff’s Department working custody.”

Right. Never mind that the ACLU has multiple witnesses, we have a whistleblower from high up in the department who told us otherwise in detail, and KTLA has a deputy on camera doing the same.

In perhaps the most bizarre moment of denial and misplaced priorities, Baca even slammed the FBI for setting up a sting in which they gave a jails deputy a 1500 buck bribe to get a cell phone to one of their inmate informers. Instead of wondering why it was so easy to find a crooked deputy willing to bring in contraband phones, Baca complained to US Attorney Andre Birotte about those mean, mean Federal agents.

In an editorial in Thursday’s paper, the LA Times advised the Sheriff to get a grip:

If Baca is truly interested in demonstrating the integrity of his department and protecting the reputation of his deputies, he should welcome the FBI probe, not obstruct it.

No kidding.

Both Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU of So Cal’s Legal Director, and former FBI agent Tom Parker have gone a step further by calling for a more comprehensive Federal investigation—most likely by the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department.

Let us hope that Justice heeds the call—and sooner rather than later.

“ The voluminous evidence I have reviewed cries out for an independent, far-reaching, and in-depth investigation by the Federal Government.

The problem can no longer be ignored.”

- Thomas Parker, former Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.

NOTE: Frustrated with the inattention to the jails abuse issue on the part of public and policymakers, the ACLU deviated from its traditional lawyerly approach to its reports and, as an adjunct to its many pages of written material, produced the above dramatic video that seems more Dateline NBC than traditional ACLU fare.

The gambit appears to be working. Rachel Maddow ran a clip from the thing on her show Wednesday night in a segment covering reports of abuse at the LA County Jails.

Tuesday morning, the Southern California ACLU released a new and deeply disturbing report detailing, yet again, the systemic pattern of abuse by deputies taking place in the LA County Jail System. This time the report contains the accounts of witnesses along with those from the inmates describing abuse.

Both the LA Times and the New York Times have stories about the report.

The LA Times story by Robert Faturechi, opens this way:

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies brutalized inmates on multiple occasions and their supervisors failed to take complaints of the abuse seriously, according to sworn declarations from two chaplains and a Hollywood producer who volunteered in the jails.

Two of the volunteers said they heard deputies yell “stop fighting” as deputies pummeled inmates who appeared to be doing nothing to fight back.

The allegations come on the heels of Los Angeles Times stories detailing FBI probes into deputy misconduct in the jails. The declarations are expected to be filed in court Wednesday as part of a report compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is a court-appointed monitor of jailhouse conditions.

It’s not uncommon for inmates to make allegations of abuse, but these sworn statements are noteworthy because all three are from independent civilians in the jails who say they came forward because they were troubled by what they saw. Two have included their names. The third, a chaplain whose identity was learned by The Times, opted to have his declaration filed anonymously at the last minute for fear of reprisal.

The New York Times story, whose reporter Jennifer Medina, went so far as to interview some of those whose accounts were in the ACLU report, opens like this:

One inmate said he was forced to walk down a hallway naked after sheriff’s deputies accused him of stealing a piece of mail. They taunted him in Spanish, calling him a derogatory name for homosexuals.

Another former inmate said that after he protested that guards were harassing a mentally ill prisoner, the same deputies took him into another room, slammed his head into a wall and repeatedly punched him in the chest.

And a chaplain said he saw deputies punching an inmate until he collapsed to the ground. They then began kicking the apparently unconscious man’s head and body.

The examples are just a fraction of dozens of detailed allegations of abuse in Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers, according to a report that the American Civil Liberties Union is expected to file in Federal District Court here on Wednesday. The Los Angeles County jail system, the nation’s largest, is also the nation’s most troubled, according to lawyers, advocates and former law enforcement officials.

“This situation, the length of time it has been going on, the volume of complaints and the egregious nature are much, much worse than anything I’ve ever seen,” said Tom Parker, a retired F.B.I. official who led the agency’s Los Angeles office for years and oversaw investigations into the Rodney King beating and charges of corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department. “They are abusing inmates with impunity, and the worst part is that they think they can get away with it.”

The system has a long history of accusations of abuse and poor conditions. The A.C.L.U. filed a federal lawsuit 35 years ago, and an agreement eventually allowed the organization to place monitors inside the jails. But those monitors say that they receive six or seven complaints a week now, primarily from the two large jails in downtown Los Angeles that house thousands of men. The F.B.I. has also begun to investigate several episodes in the jails.

Sheriff Lee Baca has repeatedly dismissed any suggestion of a systemic problem in the jails, saying that all allegations of abuse are investigated and that most are unfounded.

This week, The Los Angeles Times reported that F.B.I. agents sneaked a cellphone to a prisoner as part of an investigation. Sheriff Baca reacted to the investigation angrily, saying that the agency did not know what it was doing and was putting prisoners and guards in danger.

Sheriff Baca discussed the matter with a Justice Department official in a meeting on Tuesday. Nicole Nishida, the sheriff’s spokeswoman, said that the department thoroughly investigated all complaints of abuse that it received and that most were unsubstantiated.

With California under an order from the United States Supreme Court to shed thousands of inmates from the state prisons, county jails are expected to receive many more inmates in the next year, which could aggravate overcrowding and other problems. Officials from the Sheriff’s Department have said that they will not place inmates from the state in the Men’s Central Jail, which they concede is an antiquated building.

But lawyers from the A.C.L.U. say that the Los Angeles County system is, in many ways, even worse than the state prisons that have been found unconstitutional. They say that many complaints are never properly investigated, and that often the very guards accused of abuse are in the room when an inmate is interviewed about the complaint….

And there’s more. Plus the NY Times posted affidavits from the various inmates and witnesses.

I’ll be posting additional material from and about the report in the next few days.

But, for now, suffice it to say that although Sheriff’s department officials and the Sheriff himself continue to deny the seriousness of the abuse in the county’s jails, those of us who have, over the years, interviewed man after man who credibly describes having been abused by deputies in the LA County jails, and have talked to a long list of volunteers and other civilians who have witnessed abuse of inmates by deputies, have gradually concluded that this issue can no longer be considered merely a He said, She said matter. The charges are too many, too detailed, and too serious.

Despite official statements to the contrary, the weight of evidence is too great.

For an in-depth look at abuse of inmates by deputies in the jails, and the entrenched culture that is producing it, read WLA’s special report by Matt Fleischer: DANGEROUS JAILS – Part 1.