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.

EVEN DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, CALIFORNIA KEPT ITS PARKS OPEN, BUT ALL THAT CHANGES IN SEPTEMBER

Speaking personally, I am still having a hard time believing that the state’s scheduled parks closure will truly occur, but Timothy Egan’s NY Times Op-ed brings home the mind-numbing reality that California may really shutter some of its most irreplaceable and historic sites.

For a few months, still, you can see the sunlit room where the author of “Call of the Wild” wrote his daily thousand words before noon, and walk under redwoods and wild oaks on his 1,400-acre Beauty Ranch, where he pioneered “sustainability” before anyone was pushing $20 plates of arugula with a such a claim.

It belongs to you and me — the ranch, the cottage, the pond, the stone scraps of an old winery — an inheritance that is now being dismantled. California created the state park idea with Yosemite in 1864, before it was a federal reserve; it is destroying it in 2011 with a plan to permanently close one-fourth of its parks.

Along with 69 other sites, Jack London State Historic Park will be shuttered, gates locked, and left to meth labs, garbage outlaws and assorted feral predators. Nearly 50 percent of all of California’s historic parks are on the closure list. This is not a scare tactic from the state. Parks go dark starting in September.

Even during the Great Depression, when this state had 30 million fewer people, California somehow found a way to keep its parks and heritage sites open.

The nuclear option is being executed to reach a budget cut of $22 million mandated by a failed state that is forcing lethal whacks for all, even with an improved budget forecast. That’s right, $22 million — one-fifth the price of a recent sale of a single private mansion in Los Altos….

(Meanwhile, though, the feds say that closing some of our parks may be illegal. May it be so.)

THE PSYCHOPATH TEST, REDUX

Last month we learned that there was such a thing as a Psychopath test, and that it was being administered in American prisons (California prisons included) to help determine if an inmate should ever be granted parole—a use that has horrified the test’s inventor.

With all this in mind, naturally, Ira Glass and his This American Life team figured they all oughta take the test. In this week’s show, they have the results—plus a lot more on this whole testing-for-psychopathy issue.

Listen to the show here.

GOVERNOR JERRY ASKS THREE-JUDGE PANEL FOR MORE TIME THAN THE MANDATED 2 YEARS TO LOWER THE STATE’S PRISON POPULATION

As long as Jerry has a concrete plan and a solid timetable—which he seems to—he will likely get the extension.

The LA Times has the rest of the story.

PS: On the topic of the Brown v. Plata Supreme Court decision, the NY times’ Linda Greenhouse has an interesting take on the ruling and where it fist into an historical context.

DEAR OC D.A TONY RACKAUKAS, THE US CONSTITUTION IS YOUR FRIEND (AT LEAST IT BETTER BE IN THE FUTURE)

Last month a federal judge slapped some stringent limitations on Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas’s use of gang injunctions—an issue that is generally hard for average person to understand or care about.

But with an editorial this past weekend, the LA Times skillfully outlined the issue, and why it should matter to the rest of us. I understand that the LAT’s Sandra Hernandez was the primary author of the unsigned editorial. Brava, Sandra!

Here’s a clip:

Earlier this month, a federal judge put the brakes on Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas’ reckless attempt to enforce an anti-gang injunction against dozens of men and women who never had the opportunity to challenge his designation of them as gang members.

Injunctions are a unique kind of restraining order that bar gang members from engaging in certain activities, such as congregating, wearing particular clothes or going out after 10 p.m. Their goal is to reduce a gang’s ability to control the streets by putting limits on its members’ behavior — generally activities that would be legal if done by anyone else. In some cases, injunctions can be a highly effective tool in loosening a gang’s grip on a neighborhood. But because they impose harsh limits on an individual’s freedom, such restrictions must be subject to court review.

[SNIP]

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sued on behalf of the alleged gang members and won. U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank put it bluntly: “In sum, their constitutional rights were violated.”

At the very least, Rackauckas’ office failed to follow the law. If prosecutors believe suspected members of a gang pose a danger to the community, they have an obligation to present evidence of that to the court before limiting people’s lawful activities. Instead, prosecutors made a unilateral determination of guilt.

DON’T SHOOT THE NEIGHBOR’S CAT UNLESS YOU’RE PREPARED TO PAY THE VET BILL SAYS STATE APPEALS COURT

The SF Chron has the story:

The market value of a stray cat with a crippling pellet wound is zero, or close to it. But for his devoted owner in Brentwood, a male tabby named Pumkin was well worth the tens of thousands of dollars it took to save his life and restore some of his mobility.

Now a state appeals court has issued a first-of-its-kind decision in California, ruling that whoever shot Pumkin can be required to pay his medical expenses.

(MY NOTE: One would think so! You mean prior to this ruling, if someone deliberately shot my cat—or very nice wolf-dog— I couldn’t sue???)

“The people that perpetrate these crimes against domesticated animals are going to have to pay,” said Kevin Kimes, whose lawsuit against his backyard neighbors was revived by the ruling. “Maybe, over time, people will start to think twice.”

Colin Hatcher, a lawyer for the neighbors, said Kimes has no evidence that they shot his cat and they’re prepared to go to trial.

Read the rest here.

This week’s LA Weekly’ cover story about LA County’s Men’s Central Jail paints a discouragingly familiar picture of brutal behavior on the part of a cadre of sheriff’s deputies—use of force which seems always to be officially portrayed by the sheriff’s department as a justified response to a violent inmate.

However, in this case, it wasn’t an inmate. The guy beat up—Gabriel Carrillo— was not residing inside jail, but was a civilian just visiting his brother, his girlfriend along with him.

However as in cases of inmates who have ended up beat up and inured, without video tapes, neutral witnesses, or someone inside the LASD willing to break ranks, it is inevitably the word of the beat up jailbird against multiple sworn officers of the law.

Even when there was a neutral witness earlier this year in the person of the ACLU’s Esther Lim, LASD spokesman Steve Whitmore suggested that Lim probably didn’t see what she said she saw in a sworn affidavit.

I mean, who are you gonna believe? Her lying eyes? Or the guys with the badges? [See here and here for Lim backstory.]

The LA Weekly cover package by Chris Vogel is full of excellent reporting.

By the way, it is also in many ways, a preview of the series on the LA County Jails bu Matt Fleischer that is coming this summer from WitnessLA in partnership with Spot.Us.

Here’s a long opening clip from Vogel’s terrific story.

But there’s much, much more. Read the whole thing, or you’ll miss out.

And there is far more still coming right here at WLA very, very soon.

Shackled in handcuffs, Gabriel Carrillo was being detained in a small break room near the visitors’ lobby in Men’s Central Jail when, he says, a Sheriff’s deputy knocked him to the floor with an uppercut.

Carrillo, 5 feet 6 and 160 pounds, doubled over in pain. Three deputies began kicking and punching the baby-faced 23-year-old in his head and thigh, tearing his white T-shirt while blood splattered on his blue jeans and Air Jordans.

With each blow, Carrillo felt his body jerk as his head bounced up and down on the cold, county building floor. He briefly lost consciousness, only to wake to the sting of punches to his head and face.

Through eyes purple with bruises and nearly swollen shut, Carrillo could see blood pouring out of his head onto the floor.

“I’m not fucking resisting,” he cried out.

Suddenly, Carrillo felt a blast of chemical spray. He was blinded and gasping for air as more punches pummeled his increasingly numb legs and torso. It was like being caught in a violent ocean wave, Carrillo recalls. Every time he tried to come up for air, another blow drove him back under.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Carrillo wheezed.

“Shut the fuck up,” Carrillo claims a deputy said. “If you can talk, you can breathe.”

Finally, Carrillo lay motionless, watching officers wipe his blood off the floor with clean towels, thinking to himself, “How did this happen? All I was trying to do was visit my brother in jail.”

Carrillo arrived at Men’s Central Jail, a dungeonlike fortress near downtown Los Angeles, around noon on Feb. 26 with his girlfriend, Grace Torres, to visit his younger brother, who was locked up on charges of carrying a concealed weapon.

It was a Saturday, and Torres was on call for her job at an employment agency. She says she was afraid of being fired if she missed a call, so she tucked her cellphone into her boot and sneaked it into the visitors’ lobby, despite the signs prohibiting it. Carrillo, a general laborer who helped build a stage for an Academy Awards after-party next to the El Capitan Theater, says he forgot he had a phone in his pocket.

While they waited, Torres moved to scratch her foot and her phone fell onto the floor. Within minutes, she claims, deputies had confiscated the phones, handcuffed Carrillo and taken the two of them into the break room, where a deputy pushed Carrillo into the side of a refrigerator.

Carrillo admits that he mouthed off, telling the officer, “If I weren’t in these handcuffs, it’d be a different situation and I wouldn’t let myself get thrown around like this.” He says he was trying to compensate for being scared.

The deputy, however, called for backup....

MEN’S CENTRAL JAIL IS OVERCROWDED, LA COUNTY’S NORTH FACILITY JAIL, NOT SO MUCH

Actually there are two inmates at the North Facility. Two. One, two.

Robert Faturechi has the story—and the county’s rationale for this preposterous situation.

Admittedly, the two jails have separate functions. But surely there’s a better system.

In any case, read it!

CAN A TEST DIAGNOSE A PSYCHOPATH?

The California Department of Corrections is using a test that theoretically can screen for psychopathy when determining if a man or woman will ever be eligible for parole. But is it accurate?

NPR’s All Thing Considered reports that even the test’s creator, Robert Hare, is having his doubts.

“I’m very concerned about the inappropriate use of this instrument for purposes that have serious implications for individuals and for society,” Hare says. “It shouldn’t work that way.”

In fact, Hare says, he is so disturbed by some of what he has seen as he has traveled through America training psychologists in use of the PCL-R, that he sometimes has trouble focusing on the way his test could be affecting people’s lives.

“I think about this periodically, and I probably try to suppress it,” Hare says. “I do disassociate myself from it. I mean, if I thought about every potential use or misuse of the instrument, I probably wouldn’t sleep at all.”

Be sure to read or listen to this fascinating and troubling story.

After reading a slew of news stories last week marking the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King incident, out of curiosity I began hauled out the Christopher Commission report and began leafing through its 297 pages.

I’d forgotten how blunt and clear-headed the report was. Reading it, reminded me that I’d attended some of the hearings the commission held in the Spring of ‘91 in order to gather information for the report, and knew several of the east side community members who testified. What was striking then, and still is striking now all these years later, is the seriousness and gravity with which Christopher and his committee members regarded the opinions and experiences of the ordinary people who testified.

All this, in turn, got me to thinking about how much things have changed at the Los Angeles Police Department in the past two decades. There are still problems, sure. But, under the last two chiefs in particular—Bratton and now Beck— the cultural transformation thus far has been, in so many ways, remarkable.

The report also reminded me that there are things in certain pockets of Los Angeles law enforcement that have yet to make some of the most fundamental changes that are needed.

I’m thinking specifically of the LA County jail system. In reading the report, now, its conclusions sound eerily like what the ACLU and other say about Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers facility—with little effect.

I’ll explain more about that in a minute, but first let’s revisit the context in which the Christopher Commission was formed.

RODNEY KING AND THE AFTERMATH

On March 3, 1991, twenty years ago last Thursday, drunken motorist Rodney King led LAPD officers on a high speed chase before finally being apprehended. During the course of the arrest, four officers struck King more than 50 times with their batons and shocked him with an electric stun gun. When the officers finished and King was taken into custody—and then to the hospital—three surgeons operated for five hours to begin to repair the damage done by the officers’ blows.

In the eyes of some, the incident was not an unusual one, but mirrored the kind of use of force that residents of LA’s lower income minority communities had been complaining about in increasing numbers for years prior to Rodney King. But the complaints fell on unreceptive ears inside the Los Angeles Police Department, whose command staff simply denied such things were happening.

For example, in January of 1991, in the Pico Aliso Housing Projects of Boyle Heights, where I was then reporting, a group of more than 100 community mothers demanded and finally got a public meeting with the captain of Hollenbeck division of the LAPD, where they told the captain and his upper division officers about the brutality their community was experiencing from certain patrol officers, pleading with him to institute a more lawful policy. The Captain, whose name was Medina, listened with a stony expression. But nothing changed.

Then three months, the Rodney King incident occurred, albeit with a difference.

A local man named George Holliday was jolted from sleep by the commotion followed by the sounds of police sirens outside his apartment in the Lake View Terrace section of Los Angeles. Holliday grabbed his Sony Handycam, stepped out on his balcony, saw the officers and the man on the ground, focused his camera the best he could—and started rolling.

In the week that followed, from the 12-minute grainy video ran repeatedly on every news station in the nation.

And everything changed.

“See, that’s what we were talking about,” members of minority communities all over Los Angeles said to anyone who would listen.

In April of 1991, Mayor Tom Bradley—who had been hearing the community complaints for years but got no traction on the matter with then LAPD chief, Darryl Gates—appointed the Christopher Commission, headed by Warren Christopher (who would later be come Bill Clinton’s Secretary of state), to investigate police department practices and then to make recommendations.

The Christopher Commission report—formally known as Report by the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department—was published in July of 1991.

Here’s a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavor of the thing:

This is a blunt report. We have received impressive cooperation from the LAPD as well as other agencies in the Los Angeles and national law enforcement communities. We seek to respond to this cooperation by being
plainspoken.

The Commission found that there is a significant number of officers in the
LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public and persistently ignore the written guidelines of the Department regarding force. This finding is documented and confirmed, from several perspectives, by the detailed analyses of documents and statistics performed by the Commission. Our computerized study of the complaints filed in recent years shows a strong
concentration of allegations against a problem group of officers. A comparable study of the use of force reports reveals a similar concentration. Graphic confirmation of improper attitudes and practices is provided by the brazen and extensive references to beatings and other excessive uses of force in the MDTs.

The Commission also found that the problem of excessive force is aggravated by racism and bias, again strikingly revealed in the MDTs.

The failure to control these officers is a management issue that is at the heart of the problem. The documents and data that we have analyzed have all been available to the Department; indeed, most of this information came from that source. The LAPD’s failure to analyze and act upon these revealing data evidences a significant breakdown in the management and leadership of the Department. The Police Commission, lacking investigators or other resources, failed in its duty to monitor the Department in this sensitive use of force area. The Department not only failed to deal with the problem group of officers but it often rewarded them with positive evaluations and promotion….

WHAT ABOUT THE JAILS?

In reading those words and more in the report, I see—as we all do—how much the Los Angeles Police Department has changed.

But do those same words—once true of our police department—now apply to our county’s jails? In May of 2010 the Southern California ACLU released a 64-page report charging that Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail was fostering what they described as a “culture of violence and fear,” in which certain guards routinely beat and otherwise physically abused prisoners— sometimes to the point of severe injury. If inmates tried to report the mistreatment, said the ACLU report, those same deputies threatened them with physical harm.

Plus there are years and years of anecdotal reports by prisoners and their families.

But there are no videos. No independent witnesses.

At least until now, when ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim witnessed an (alleged) beating.

In an ideal world, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department would call for a Christopher-like commission to look at what is going on inside Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers—and the whole system, really—and then to make recommendations.

Of course the real change at the LAPD didn’t occur until the Rampart scandal blew up, followed by the institution of the federal consent decree.

But Warren Christopher and his commission got the ball rolling.

Now it’s the LA County jails that need some comparable changes.

The ACLU has filed dozens of complaints over the years alleging that sheriff’s deputies inside LA County jail have beaten or otherwise mistreated inmates. As recently as May of last year, they released a 64-page report on the LA County jail system charging that it fostered a “culture of fear and violence.” However, according to Peter Eliasberg, the managing attorney for the Southern California branch of the ACLU, in most cases, the only witnesses to incidents of alleged mistreatment by deputies are the deputies themselves who say the beatings et al never happened, and prisoners whose accounts are chronically disbelieved. Thus the complaints almost never go anywhere.

Part 2 below covers Brown’s account of what happened:

Christopher Brown was in one of the cubicles at the Twin Tower jail facility that is reserved for attorneys who need to meet with their clients. He was talking to ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim who was sitting in the twin of his cubicle, right across from him, separated by a glass window. All at once, Brown said, he heard loud “cussing” outside the attorneys’ room. Someone said the word, “motherfucker.” Then Brown heard what he later described as scuffling noises, boots squeaking and various thumps and thuds. A fight, he thought.

Brown stood up and strode to the locked door that separates the attorneys’ room from the “staging area,” a large space that contains the jail module’s recreation area. The door featured two windows—one in the top half of the door, the second in the lower half— that allowed Brown to peer out at the staging area to see what it was that was causing all the scuffling noises.

“I saw an inmate who looked African-American, who I later learned was Parker,” Brown stated in his signed declaration about the events of that day. “He had big braids that were sticking out from his head and [he] was standing next to the water fountain in the staging area with his hands covering his face, with two deputies punching him.”

At that point, Brown said, he could only see the deputies backs, but he could see their punching motions clearly. He glanced at Lim, who by that time, was also standing at the windows on her side of the attorney’s room. “See, it’s happening now,” he said.

Brown then said he looked back out the windows in time to see Parker stumbling forward, then falling to the ground between the two deputies, his hands out in front of him. However, according to Brown, when Parker hit the ground, he stopped moving. “He looked like he was knocked out,” said Brown. “He appeared limp.” The fall brought Parker right up to the door nearest to where Brown was standing.

It was at that point that Brown got an angle on the deputies, whom he identified as Hirsch and Ochoa, both officers who had worked on the module. To his surprise, both deputies began punching the prone and unmoving Parker, according to Brown. Then one of the deputies, whose name Brown happened to know, Hirsch, began “kneeing” Parker. Finally, the other deputy—Deputy Ochoa— got out a taser gun and, according to Brown, tased Parker first in the leg several times, then in his back.

Brown saw Parker’s body convulse each time he was tased, he said, but otherwise the man with the deputies appeared to be out cold.

Like Lim, Brown said that Deputy Hirsch kept yelling “Stop fighting! Stop resisting!” even though Parker was in no condition to resist anything, according to Brown.

At this point, said Brown, Deputy Ochoa pointed a finger at him and yelled, “Lay down on your stomach and face the fucking wall.”

Brown scurried back to the cubicle and did what he was told to do. He laid down on the floor—which is where Esther Lim found him when she went back to the cubicle before leaving the building.

After Lim was gone, more deputies came into the attorneys’ room and into the staging area. Someone took pictures. A jail trustee arrived with a mop to swab down the floor where Parker had been lying and, according to Brown, had bled some on to the ground.

A sergeant asked Brown what had happened. Brown said he told him what he had witnessed. But while he talked, Deputy Ochoa appeared nearby and give him a hard look, said Brown what he took to be a threat, The sergeant escorted Ochoa away then left to get a video camera, at which point Brown spoke to Deputy Ryan Hirsch, the second of the deputies who had allegedly beat James Parker, who complained that he had injured his hand.

Brown said he told Hirsch that “a lady from the ACLU was here and saw what happened.”

“My advice is to stay out of it,” Hirsch said, according to Brown. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Brown did, however, give a statement on video about the incident. That much was verified by Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Steve Whitmore.

Brown also detailed the sequence of events in a signed declaration for the ACLU, in which Brown said he was interviewed on video by a second sergeant named Ramos who, he said, told him several times that he didn’t have to give a statement if he feared for his safety—or words to that affect.

“I felt very intimidated by this comment,” said Brown, “like he was trying to discourage me from saying anything.”

According to Brown, the same sergeant told him that he looked uncomfortable. “It looks like you don’t want to say anything.” Again, he said, he felt intimidated and thought that Sergeant Ramos was suggesting that perhaps he should not talk about what he had seen.

Brown said he gave the statement anyway. “I thought, if someone had seem me being beat up by deputies like the way it happened to Parker, I’d want that person to stand up for me and tell what happened.”

Brown also told Sergeant Ramos about Esther Lim having witnessed the eventl. According to Brown Ramos said that he knew who Lim was and where she was from and that it would “not change” his report.

BACK AT THE ACLU OFFICE, Peter Eliasberg said he assumed that someone would also want to interview Esther Lim—the sole outside witness to the Twin Towers incident. But, according to Eliasberg, no one from the sheriff’s department attempted to contact Lim.

Lim, however, checked on Parker and learned that he had stitches in his face and bruising in his facial area and his ribs.

By the end of the week, criminal charges had been filed —against James Parker. He was charged with with a felony assault on an officer and obstructing an officer in his line of duty.

When asked why no one from LASD had interviewed Lim before filing charges against Paker, Steve Whitmore said that they had attempted to reach Lim. “And she could have called us. I mean if she was so concerned about Mr. Parker’s safety, why didn’t she immediately report what had happened to the Sheriff’s department.”

As for Brown’s account in the declaration?

“It’s a fabrication,” Whitmore said. Both Brown and Parker were interviewed on video. “And they both said nothing happened.”

When Eliasberg and Lim hear what Whitmore has said about the sheriffs trying unsuccessfully to contact Lim, they are emphatic. “That just isn’t true. No one has called us,” said Eliasberg.

As to why Lim didn’t reported the alleged beating to the sheriffs, she said it was simple.

“I was scared,” she said. “If you see two police officers beating up a man on the street, would you go flag down the nearest police car?”

I’ve read reports of this kind of thing,” said Lim. “But I’ve never seen deputies viciously beating up an inmate. Nothing compares to the brutality of seeing it in person. It was scary.”

ON FEBRUARY 3, JAMES PARKER WAS SET TO BE ARRAIGNED IN IN DEPT. 30 OF THE DOWNTOWN CRIMINAL COURT, but he didn’t show up. According to court records, he wouldn’t come out of his cell. The unofficial word is that he was too spooked. The court records show that the same thing happened on Feb 4.

On Monday February 7, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times about the alleged beating and the fact that Lim had witnessed it. That same day, the ACLU filed an official complaint about the incident.

On Tuesday February 8, following the appearance of the Times’ story, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department launched an internal criminal investigation into the alleged beating.

In the meantime, Parker is on what is called “keep-away” status, said Steve Whitmore, meaning he is separated from all other inmates and accompanied at all times by a sheriff’s department sergeant.

On Feb. 9, James Parker was again set to be arraigned. Again he refused to come out of his cell.

When he was once more not present in court on Feb. 10, Superior Court Judge Upinder S. Kalra got fed up and ordered the sheriff’s department to “extract” Parker from his cell and get him to court, “by all means necessary.”

On February 14, Valentines Day, he was a no show.

On February 15, extraction was presumably successful and James Parker was finally arraigned.

He pleaded not guilty to both felony counts

His preliminary hearing is set for February 28.

Photo by 888bailbond.

In January, WitnessLA and Spot.us launched our second investigative series under the banner of The LA Justice Report. Our first investigation looked at how LA spends its gang intervention money.

This new investigation will examine the “culture of violence and fear” that allegedly exists inside the LA County jail system.

The following story is an illustration of why we think such an investigation is important.

*NOTE: This account is based on declarations given under penalty of perjury both by Esther Lim and by Christopher Brown, as well as interviews with Ms. Lim and with Peter Eliasberg.

We will hear from the spokesman for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and others in Part 2 of the story.

THE WITNESS

On Monday, January 24, 2011, ACLU Jails monitor Esther Lim was seated in one of the seven cubicles reserved for attorneys in module 142 in the Twin Towers facility of the Los Angeles County jail system. She was there in cubicle number five (of the seven) in order to meet with an inmate named Christopher Brown, who was now seated in the matching cubicle directly opposite her. Lim and Brown were separated by a 2 by 3 foot window and spoke to each other via the telephones mounted on the right side of each cubicle.

It is a set-up akin to that depicted in nearly every prison visiting scene you’ve ever seen in the movies or on TV. Except that in Twin Towers, the public visiting area is located on the 1st floor near to the exit, whereas the attorney visiting rooms are inside the various modules in the jail’s interior.

[Click twice for full sized diagram.]

Lim is the latest in a string of So Cal ACLU jails monitors. The monitors were originally put in place after the ACLU sued the County of Los Angeles in federal court in the mid-1970s over what it believed to be unconstitutional conditions at LA’s Men’s Central Jail. The ACLU won the lawsuit—known as Rutherford v. Block, now just called Rutherford, for short—and, as part of the subsequent ruling that mandated improvements in jail conditions, the court appointed the Southern California branch of the ACLU as monitor, to make sure that the ordered changes were being made. Nearly four decades later, some changes have been accomplished, while others are depressingly slow in coming. More recently, however, the sheriff’s department installed special hot lines that allow inmates to call the ACLU to report complaints that they would like to see addressed.

Lim, who is in her late 20s, has been the monitor since last October and visits one of the LA County jail facilities every day of the work week except for Thursday. Much of her time on site is spent talking to inmates who have requested a meeting to tell her about some problem or other. The most common problems reported are things like lack of access to adequate medical care, too little out-of-cell time and not enough recreation.

Sometimes, however, the complaints are more dramatic and involve accusations of excessive use of force and other forms of brutality by the deputies toward the prisoners. Yet such tales are difficult to verify. An inmate who claims he was beat up by sheriff’s deputies usually has no witnesses other than the deputies he has accused of wrongdoing.

However on Monday January 24th, when a beating was alleged to have occurred between an inmate and two deputies, this time an outside witness present.

According to Lim, the incident in question began after she had been talking to Brown for about 30 minutes. She heard what she thought sounded like some kind of scuffle coming from the “staging area” outside two windows that were located on the far right wall of the attorneys room. She later described the noises in a sworn deposition as the “sounds of fists hitting a body.” Lim said she also heard thuds against the attorney room wall underneath the windows, and “other noises that sounded like a fight.” Hearing the commotion, Brown left his cubicle and moved toward the windows and the noises. Lim paused for a moment, then did the same.

What Lim saw at first confused her. An African American prisoner, whom she later learned was a 35-year-old named James Parker, was lying face down on the floor unmoving while, according to Lim, two sheriff’s deputies were punching and “kneeing” the prone man while simultaneously yelling “Stop fighting!” and alternately, “Stop resisting!”

For the first few seconds, Lim could not make sense of the scene. She could see, she said, that Parker was neither fighting back nor was he resisting. He wasn’t even flinching, despite the force of the blows. Instead, he was lying motionless on the floor as if unconscious.

With a nod toward the scene outside the windows, Brown turned briefly to Lim and shrugged. “See. It’s happening now,” he said.

After a bunch of punches, said Lim, one of the deputies tased Parker —first three or four times in his leg, then three or four more times in his back. All the while he kept shouting the same bizarre monotonic chant: “Stop fighting! Stop resisting!”

Parker’s body convulsed at each tasing, then went limp again. Lim thought irrationally that it looked as if the deputies were using a mannequin in inmate garb as a punching bag.

After about a minute of disbelieving observation Lim banged hard on the window with the palm of her right hand, hoping to get the deputies’ attention. The LASD deputies—whom she would later learn were named Ochoa and Hirsch—did not look up. Eventually Deputy Ochoa did look up and, according to Lim, looked at her hard and motioned her emphatically away from the window.

Spooked, Lim dutifully moved away. By that time a frightened Brown had also retreated from the window back to his side of the attorney client cubicle—except that he was no longer sitting in a chair, but lying on the ground as if trying to become invisible. After exchanging a few words with Brown, Lim gathered her purse and other belongings, left the attorney room and walked quickly to the elevator, which she took the first floor, then headed outside to the parking lot. She passed three or four deputies on her way out, but said nothing to them. “I was scared,” she said later. After watching the beating, she was no longer sure whom she could trust.

Instead of telling deputies, Lim called her boss, Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU/SC’s managing attorney. The ACLU immediately filed a complaint.

The next morning, Lim was back at the office reviewing the jail logs and reports that she gets from the sheriff’s department every day via email. She noted that there was a “Significant Use of Force” log entry for Twin Towers for Monday, the 24th.

The entry describing an altercation between two unnamed deputies and an inmate named James Parker who, according to the log, attacked the deputies and continued attacking even while being tased in the leg and the back.

Stunned at the alternate version in the log, Lim went to Twin Towers in the afternoon and where she talked with Brown briefly and arranged for a longer meeting in the attorney’s room the next day, Wednesday.

On Wednesday Lim brought one of the ACLU’s attorneys with her and the two met with Brown, who told the attorney and the monitor what had happened after Lim left the jail.

TO BE CONTINUED

On Thursday, the ACLU called on the US Attorney’s Office to launch an independent criminal investigation into the beating of an LA County jail inmate, allegedly by two LA County Sheriff’s deputies. The incident was witnessed by the ACLU of Southern California’s jails monitor, Esther Lim.

This is from the ACLU’s Thursday press release.

The ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC) and the American Civil Liberties Union today called on the United States Attorney’s Office to launch an independent criminal investigation into last month’s brutal beating by two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) deputies of an inmate at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, part of the Los Angeles County Jail system.

The savage attack Jan. 24 on James Parker, detained on a non-violent marijuana charge, was witnessed by ACLU/SC’s Jails Project Coordinator Esther Lim, who is assigned to monitor all county jails, and another inmate. Both observed the two deputies beating and repeatedly tasering Parker for about two minutes while he was lying on the ground limp, motionless and not resisting the deputies in any way.

“It is crucial that the federal government launch an independent investigation immediately,” said Peter Eliasberg, ACLU/SC managing attorney. “A criminal investigation from an impartial outside agency will not only help the inmates but will also help all those deputies who work hard to do their job properly and who should not be painted with the same brush as those who may have violated the law by beating a non-resisting inmate.”

Sheriff’s department employees have made public statements challenging the motivation and integrity of Lim, calling into question the impartiality of the LASD. Lim would necessarily be a key witness in any criminal case filed against the deputies and so the statements by sheriff’s department employees could significantly harm any prosecution by the county district attorney that relies on an investigation by the LASD.

“It is odd, and indeed troubling, when a law enforcement spokesperson publicly disparages the credibility of a potential prosecution witness,” said Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Law and former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Such comments can undermine the appearance of impartiality critical to maintaining public trust in the criminal justice system. Moreover, if a prosecutor ends up bringing charges, the defense may try to use the comments to undermine the credibility of that witness, a problem that no prosecutor wants to deal with.”

James Parker, the inmate who was reportedly beaten by deputies, has been charged with the crime of battery with injury on a peace officer and resisting an officer in the performance of his duty. Although the sheriff’s department has launched a criminal investigation into the incident, the charges against Parker still stand.

Next week, I’ll post the detailed story of the Parker incident-–and its aftermath to date. I think you will find it to be a troubling and perplexing tale.