The special Jail Violence Commission ordered by the LA County Board of Supervisors has added its final two members—one of whom, in particular, is a very heartening choice.

One of the two, Robert Bonner, is a former federal judge, a former prosecutor, and even a former DEA administrator. This brings the total number of former jurists on the 7-person panel, to four. Added to that there is Cecil “Chip” Murray, the well-liked former pastor of the First AME Church, and Long Beach Chief of Police, Jim McDonnell, the former Assistant Chief of the LAPD and someone who was short-listed for the chief’s job after Bill Bratton left.

Thank heaven for McDonnell.

The former judges—Lourdes Bairde, Carlos Moreno, and Dickran Tevrizian–while impressively august and no doubt extremely bright and discerning, have exactly zero experience between the four of them in the ins and outs of dealing with custody facilities, or the running of a law enforcement agency.

McDonnell, fortunately, while he’s not worked in the LA county jails, has spent his life in law enforcement.

The other piece of good news is commission member number seven, Alex Busansky, who is right now the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. But most significantly, in the recent past he worked for the Vera institute where he was the Executive Director of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. So he knows Jails and prisons, their functions and policies—and what they look like when they’re running well—and he knows a lot about the LA County Jail.

(And he is a former prosecutor.)

The original five commissioners chose the last two. So bravo to them for the selection of Busansky.

It’s a good omen.

But, see here’s the thing: This commission has no legal power, meaning its only power to affect change will simply be the force, accuracy and clarity of its investigation, analysis and recommendations, which can in turn affect public opinion. The pressure of public opinion, together with the the existing federal investigation—which may (or may not) result in a federal consent decree—is the one combination of elements that has the possibility of producing the desperately needed reform in the jails, and in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department as a whole.

So, will these seven have the will and insight necessary to take on such an aggressive investigation? Or will they simply tinker around the edges?—making more suggestions of the ilk of forbidding deputies to wear steel-toed boots when working custody, and asking for more timely completions of force reports in the jails—all suggestions that, while worthy, only address the symptoms.

The selection of Busansky offers at least the hope that the seven might—-just might—be planning to take a swing at making a real difference.

Fingers crossed.

GOOD NEWS, OBAMA ISSUES FIRST COMMUTATION OF HIS PRESIDENCY. BAD NEWS: WHAT TOOK HIM SO LONG? AND WHY JUST ONE?

Late Monday, the President pardoned five people and issued one commutation.

This is all very nice, of course. But many of us who follow such things wonder why he has only pardoned a grand total of 22 people (plus that single commutation) while by the same time in his presidency, Jack Kennedy had pardoned or commuted the sentences of 600 Americans. Why, people ask, has Obama has has left such an important presidential power lying nearly fallow?

Julie Stewart, the President, Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) is one of those who thinks Obama could have done a lot more by now. She writes for the Huffington Post. Here’s how her column begins:

This week, President Barack Obama won’t just be pardoning turkeys. He decided to throw some human beings in the mix, too. He pardoned five people, restoring their civil rights, and even issued his first presidential commutation to Eugenia Jennings, reducing her sentence so that she can return home to Missouri to recover from cancer and watch her daughter graduate high school.

Her commutation is long overdue.

In 2001, Jennings was a survivor of domestic abuse and had a long-standing struggle with drug addiction. She began selling small quantities of crack cocaine to support herself and her three children. When she sold a mere 13.9 grams of crack cocaine to a police informant, Jennings received a 22-year sentence. No guns were involved; no one was hurt.

Jennings spent her decade in federal prison conquering her addiction, educating herself, and speaking publicly to students, warning them of the consequences of drug use. Earlier this year, Jennings was diagnosed with cancer. She has received chemotherapy treatments in prison and shows positive signs of an eventual recovery.

Jennings’s commutation is no fluke — her pro bono legal team from the Washington, D.C. firm of Crowell & Moring built a wide network of supporters and advocates, including Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.). Sen. Durbin first learned about Eugenia’s outrageous sentence when her brother, Cedric Parker, testified before Congress. Sen. Durbin and Jennings’s lawyers fought tirelessly for her release for three years.

Unfortunately, the use of the pardon power has become seen as such political anathema that this kind of herculean effort — and lengthy wait — is what it takes to get justice. It wasn’t always this way. President Obama has now been in office as long as President John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy granted over 600 pardons and commutations during that time. President Obama has granted 22 pardons and one single commutation…..

9TH CIRCUIT RULES THAT YELLOWSTONE GRIZ MUST STAY ON THREATENED LIST FOR NOW

In 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lifted Endangered Species Act protections from the grizzlies scattered through Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.—contending that they were a recovery success story. However, US District Judge Donald Malloy granted summary judgment that vacated the feds’ delisting plans at least for the 500 or so bears in the Greater Yellowstone area. A three judge panel ruling for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, concurring with advocates who said that the Fish and Wildlife folks had not adequately guarded against changes in circumstances that could once again reduce the bears’ numbers.

Reuters has more.

The LA Times also has a good story on the griz issue.

PS: Since I spend some time in West Glacier, MT, every summer, an area that like greater Yellowstone is grizzly central, I’ve observed bear management up close for nearly 30 years. It’s a delicate matter. I’ve also been able to observe my share of grizzlies of various sizes, ages and genders, over those same years. It’s a privilege I treasure. Thus I’m personally deeply grateful to the three judges of the 9th Circuit panel, and also to Judge Malloy before them, for erring on the side of caution when it comes to protecting the great bear.

BILL BRATTON ET AL HIRED TO INVESTIGATE UC DAVIS PEPPER SPRAYING DEBACLE

Does the UC System really need former LAPD Chief Bill Bratton and his New York-based Kroll security consulting firm in order to aggressively investigate the insanely shocking pepper spraying at UC Davis? Uh, no, it’s a bit of overspray.…uh overkill.

On the other hand, one could also argue that it’s a great PR move designed to communicate that UC President Mark G. Yudof is taking this really, really, really seriously.

Which is good.

As long as the price Bill and group charge isn’t too high.

Larry Gordon of the LA Times has more.

NO $1.4 BILLION TO BUILD AND RENOVATE JAILS UNTIL SHERIFF BACA GETS HIS EXISTING HOUSE IN ORDER, SAYS THE LA TIMES

Good call, Times editorial board! (This is, by the way, the second good jails-related editorial from the Times in the last few days. There was also this on Tuesday.)

Here’re a couple of clips from Wednesday’s editorial on the matter:

In the coming weeks, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is expected to decide whether to approve a $1.4-billion jail construction project that would help ease overcrowding at Men’s Central Jail and prevent the early release of some inmates. The county’s chief executive and Sheriff Lee Baca argue that the plan, which calls for rebuilding one facility and expanding a second, would make the nation’s largest jail system safer and cheaper to operate.

It’s hard to argue with the need or the logic. The Men’s Central building is so dilapidated and so overcrowded that in 2006, U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson described conditions as “not consistent with human values.” Renovations would make it safer for deputies as well as for inmates. What is questionable, however, is whether Baca should be given new or refurbished jails when he’s so clearly struggling to run the ones he has.

[BIG SNIP]

Yes, the county’s jails need help, and Men’s Central needs to be replaced. But the Sheriff’s Department should demonstrate that it can properly operate the jails already under its control before it asks taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion.

Don Knabe has broken with the prevailing trend and, instead of nominating an august and respected former judge as his pick for the LA County Supe’s Jail Violence Commission—-Knabe picked a guy with his own badge and a gun.

Here’s how it happened: it seems that Knabe turned to Long Beach Chief of Police Jim McDonnell to help him vet candidates that he might consider nominating as his pick for the newly forming Commission.

McDonnell who, before his Long Beach gig, was the Assistant Chief of Police right under Bill Bratton (and was on the short list to become LAPD Chief when Bratton left) is highly respected by law enforcement types around So Cal. Plus he was awarded the Medal of Valor in his LAPD days, is the immediate past president of the California Peace Office Association, and knows everybody. In addition, he’s smart: He used to teach a class at UCLA’s school of public policy, and lectures about law enforcement issues all around the world.

So, yeah, you might say he knows the relevant territory.

Alright, so, anyway, there’s the Supervisor talking to McDonnell when all at once Knabe has a DUH! moment.

“Why not nominate the guy in front of me whom I trust so much?” Knabe reportedly asked himself.

And so he did. Knabe asked McDonnell if he’d be willing, the Chief said he’d be honored, and that was that.

I know from my own conversations with Jim McDonnell over the years that he’s someone with zero patience for cops/deputies or anybody else who is sworn to uphold the law, who instead uses his or her badge to abuse others.

Good choice, Supervisor Knabe.

It’s not officially official yet, but deals have been made, hands have been shaken, last minute contractual stumbling blocks have been shoved off the road ahead. Barring any force majeure, Jerry Powers, the Probation Chief for Stanislaus County will take over LA County’s very troubled and very large Department of Probation.

The official approval by the Board of Supervisors of Powers’ appointment plus his salary and extras is slated to take place next Tuesday, Oct 25. But offers have been unofficially made and accepted.

County CEO William Fujioka has recommended that the board approve a salary for Powers of $255,000 per year, with $25 grand to help with the relocation of his family.

Powers is expected to start work on December 5.

The Board members seem pleased. Powers is thought of as a very solid guy.

The rest of us look forward to welcoming the nearly-appointed new Probation Chief, and wish him all possible luck. Given the challenges the beleaguered agency still faces, he will likely need it.

(Link to CEO’s memo here.)

UPDATE:

Garett Therolf of the LA Times reports that the $255,000 per year salary for Jerry Powers that the board is expected to approve on Tuesday is $28,000 higher than what Donald Blevins was making.

Photo by BRIAN RAMSAY, Modesto Bee

The proposed 5-person Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence will be voted on by the LA County Supervisors today, Tuesday, and it looks as if the motion—proposed by Zev Yaroslavsky and Mark Ridley-Thomas—will likely gather the necessary three votes to pass.

Other than Yaroslavsky and Ridley-Thomas, none of the other Supes has officially committed to a YES vote. But when I spoke to Zev over the weekend he said that he believed the necessary vote had been there on Friday, but that the other Supervisors could have drifted away by Tuesday.

Only Supervisor Gloria Molina has been public about her opposition to the Commission. Molina had her own motion for jails reform that will also be considered on Tuesday.

On Monday, however, Mike Antonovich put out a press release saying that if a commission was indeed created he already knew whom he would appoint. (The way the motion is constructed now, each Supervisor is allowed to appoint one of the five commissioners.)

Michael D. Antonovich will appoint retired Federal Judge Dickran Tevrizian to the “Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence” when the Board of Supervisors considers establishing the commission at tomorrow’s Board meeting. The proposed commission will review the allegations involving the use of force by deputies in the jails and recommend corrective action.

The LA Times took Antonovich’s press release as a strong indication that he would indeed be voting YES (a logical conclusion), but an Antonovich spokesperson insisted that the Supervisor was still making up his mind.

I’m with the Times reporters. I think it’s a done deal.

But we’ll see.

[Very light blogging this morning, more later today.]

Two important things having to do with the LA County Jails abuse scandal and with Sheriff Lee Baca happened over the weekend.

THE WIDENING OF THE FEDERAL INVESTIGATION:

It is now clear that the FBI’s probe of the abuse of jail inmates by Sheriff’s deputies is much wider than simply an investigation into several alleged incidents of abuse, as it appeared to be in the beginning.

According to an LA Times story by Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard, the Feds have subpoenaed use of force records of all deputies who have worked in the jail since 2009.

“I was caught completely flabbergasted,” Sheriff Lee Baca said of the growing federal scrutiny of his jail system, the nation’s largest. “It’s like your best friend digs up your favorite rose bed.”

[Okay, weird image, but whatever.]

This means that the Feds are no longer engaged in a “few bad apples” kind of probe. Instead, it is all but certain that the FBI is looking at the whole landscape—going back years—to determine if there is a widespread culture of abuse at the jails—as the ACLU, WitnessLA and others are claiming.

This is a big, big step forward.

SHERIFF BACA MEETS WITH TIMES’ EDITORIAL BOARD AND SAYS HE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT JAILS ABUSE

Sheriff Lee Baca made a rather astonishing set of statements when he met with the LA Times to talk about the ever widening abuse scandal in the LA County Jails.

For the most part his answers to questions about the growing list of reports of deputies abusing jail inmates appeared to boil down to the contention that he really, really didn’t have any idea this sort of thing was going on, that his command staff hid it from him.

Here’s a clip from the Times’ story:

In a searing self-critique, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca acknowledged that he was out of touch about problems in his jails and had failed to implement important reforms that could have minimized deputy brutality against inmates.

Faced with an FBI investigation into the jail system and mounting criticism over his handling of the crisis, Baca said in a long interview with The Times that his command staff has at times left him in the dark about the jails’ woes.

“I wasn’t ignoring the jails. I just didn’t know,” Baca said. “People can say, ‘What the hell kind of leader is that?’ The truth is I should’ve known. So now I do know.”

It is good, I suppose, that the Sheriff is no longer fighting the idea the idea that there is an abuse problem, as he did as recently as the end of last month.

But this claim that he knew nothing and then blaming his subordinates is….a little hard to take.

I’ll have additional news on these and other aspects of jail abuse scandal as the week wears on.

MEANWHILE IN OTHER NEWS…

NY TIMES CALLS ON CONGRESS TO RENEW FUNDING FOR SECOND CHANCE ACT

California can save $233 million in the first year alone if we cut our prison recidivism by 10 percent reports the NY Times in their editorial on why the Second Chance Act must be funded. Here’s the opening:

With state prison costs driven mainly by recidivism, the federal government must do all it can to support programs like the Second Chance Act, which guides newly released prisoners to drug treatment, mental health care, housing and jobs to keep them from going right back to jail. The House, which supports continued funding, must hold fast against a Senate appropriations bill that would zero out this important program.

Of about 700,000 people released from prisons this year, more than two-thirds will be re-arrested and more than half returned to prison within three years. Even modest reductions in recidivism could yield huge savings. For example, a study released earlier this year by the Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that Texas could save $33.6 million, New York $42 million and California $233 million in the first year alone if they cut recidivism by even 10 percent. The Second Chance Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008, supports re-entry services for newly released prisoners, who typically land on the street without money, skills or a place to live. The program was initially authorized at $165 million. But Congress funded it at only $25 million for fiscal 2009, $100 million for 2010 and $83 million this year.

CALIFORNIA MEDICAL ASSOCIATION SAYS IT’S TIME TO LEGALIZE POT

Slate has the story. Here’s a clip:

The California Medical Association says it’s time to legalize it.

The state’s largest doctor group questioned the medical value of marijuana but says it’s time for it to be legal and regulated like alcohol and tobacco, reports the Los Angeles Times. The group’s spokeswoman claims it is the first major medical association in the country to call for the drug’s legalization.

“CMA may be the first organization of its kind to take this position, but we won’t be the last. This was a carefully considered, deliberative decision made exclusively on medical and scientific grounds,” said Dr. James T. Hay, CMA President-Elect in a news release. “As physicians, we need to have a better understanding about the benefits and risks of medicinal cannabis so that we can provide the best care possible to our patients.”

In a well-reported story in Sunday’s LA Times Robert Faturechi writes that the FBI is investigating beatings of inmates and misconduct by deputies in the LA County Jail system—indicating a far wider probe by the Feds into abuse inside the jails than had previously been disclosed.

This is good news.

It had already been reported that the FBI was looking into the alleged beating witnessed by ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim earlier this year. But Faturechi’s story indicates that the probe goes much further than the Lim case. (We have heard rumors that it is even wider still.)

One of the most intriguing tidbits from Sunday’s story is the little matter of the cell phone: It seems that FBI agents managed to sneak a cellphone to an inmate in the hope that they would get unfiltered reports from inside the jail.

Here’s a clip:

The inquiries include allegations that deputies broke an inmate’s jaw and other facial bones and beat another man for two minutes while he was unconscious.

Their investigation created a flap recently when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department brass discovered that an inmate inside Men’s Central Jail was an FBI informant equipped with a cellphone he was believed to be using to communicate with agents on the outside.

Sheriff Lee Baca, who had not been notified by the feds of the plant inside his jail, is expected to meet with U.S. Atty. André Birotte Jr. soon to discuss the phone incident and the growing tensions between the two law enforcement agencies.

The problems of abuse and mistreatment inside LA County’s huge jail system are longstanding (See Part 1 of WitnessLA’s DANGEROUS JAILS series by Matt Fleischer). Yet, despite years of civil rights lawsuits, reports by the ACLU, and a plethora of anecdotal reports by laypeople who work or volunteer inside the jail , there has been little outcry from the public and/or pressure from policy makers for genuine reform.

The news that the FBI is investigating the abuse and that the investigation appears to be widening in scope and seriousness…is a very good sign.

Wednesday, Larry Mantle’s AirTalk on KPCC focused on a new strategy that the LAPD plans to take for a test drive as a experimental program. The strategy is called predictive policing and it is already being tried out by the Santa Cruz PD, reportedly with some success. Now Los Angeles wants to give it a try—at least in the form of a pilot program.

Here are some clips from the show:

Police departments have been providing years of historic crime data to mathematicians, who’ve created algorithms to analyze and determine crime patterns. The results are predictions of where and when similar crimes are likely to occur.

Zach Friend, a crime analyst for the Santa Cruz Police Department, says the crime-fighting system is modeled on methods for predicting earthquake aftershocks. The tool comes from Santa Clara University Professor George Mohler who believes crimes follow similar patterns. Friend, who helped to launch the program in Santa Cruz, says the system works because crimes tend to occur in time and place-based patterns. Santa Cruz officials became interested in the program after the success of a similar pilot by the LAPD.

“You have a crime and there will be after-crimes that occur after that,” said Friend. The technology, he says, has helped Santa Cruz prevent crimes before they happen. Thus far his department has focused on burglaries and vehicle theft.

“The arrests are not the goal here,” says Friend, of how the program is working in Santa Cruz. Preventing crime is the goal.

In L.A., LAPD Captain Sean Malinowski says he’d like to push the envelope further; and next year use the technology to predict violent crimes. Each morning officers using the program enter crime reports into the system, which is already packed with eight years worth of data. The program then predicts 10 potential crime hot spots.

Malinowski says the technology represents a vast improvement to what the department currently uses.

“The instruments we are using seem blunt now, in terms of the kind of specificity we can get with data analysis,” he says. Malinowski says he believes the computer model helps to remove biases.

Marjorie Cohn, Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of law, worried that the program would lead to additional profiling and would provide an excuse for harassment.

My pal George Tita, criminologist from UC Irvine countered Professor Cohn’s concerns with down to earth information.

And, yes, Cohn’s fears could come to pass, but it would be up to LAPD management to keep an eye out for any such Minority Report-like problems.

In truth, on first bounce, the model sounds very promising.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Listen and see what you think.

DEAR SUPERVISORS: YOU’RE WORRYING ABOUT THE WRONG THING

The LA Times’ Rong-Gong Lin II has a story about the LA County Supervisors opining that crime will go up if, as Governor Brown intends, short-timer offenders (people given months-long sentences) serve out their time at the various county jails, rather than being sent to state prison for, say, 3 or 6 months, which is grossly inefficient and needlessly expensive.

The Sups also say that crime will go up if the lower-level offenders who are paroled from prison report, not to a state parole officer, but to a county probation officer (as it was decided would happen last month).

This last, especially, is ridiculous.

Currently, when inmates are released from state prison and transferred to the state parole system, they are given $200 so they can buy themselves a bus ticket home with instructions to contact a state parole officer within two business days.

But county authorities say that system [requiring them to instead contact a probation officer] could allow just-released prisoners to flee without making contact with a county probation officer.

Huh???

Lin notes that the supervisors also expressed some concern that the state won’t fork over enough money to pay for the County’s added responsibility with the short time prisoners and the parolees.

That, my dears, is the one legit worry out of this whole The Sky is Falling and Criminals are Coming to Get Us! routine.. Heck, if the state fails to pay up, we should all march on Sacramento, then plant ourselves outside the governor’s office and refuse to leave until he gets out his metaphorical wallet.

But until and unless we find out that Jerry plans to welsh on his promise to pay the cost incurred by the 58 counties when they shoulder the burden of some of the state’s prisoners and parolees, how about we dial back the crime wave scare tactics.

THE SISTER OF A MURDER VICTIM WORKS FOR JUVENILE JUSTICE REFORM

Rebecca Weiker’s essay on the Juvenile Justice Exchange speaks eloquently for itself. Here’s how it opens:

A few months ago I spent the day meeting with a group of family members who have had their lives changed forever by acts of violence. Nobody there would have chosen to be a member of this group — all of us had either lost a loved one to murder, or had lost a loved one in an entirely different way. Many brothers, sisters, sons and daughters were sentenced to die in prison for a crime committed in their youth.

My sister Wendy was a therapist who was passionate about supporting young people with mental health problems. Almost 20 years ago she was murdered by one of her patients. All these years later, I only now am at a place where I can consider this crime from a position of empathy. I understand that I can choose what meaning to make of this experience.

I will never “get over” her death nor do I expect to shed the feeling of loss and deep sadness that comes from not having her in the world. She was truly a bright light in the world. She was my big sister and I looked up to her. I admired her commitment to justice, her warmth, her seemingly endless energy.

But, I believe it dishonors my sister’s memory every time a young person is sentenced to die in prison. In California prisons, nearly 300 youth have been sentenced to life in prison without parole. How can we decide that a young person’s life is entirely without worth when they are still unformed and immature?

Our broken system is far from offering real justice to either victims or offenders…

Note: Weiker is strongly in favor of passing Senate Bill 9, a California law that would give young people sentenced to life without parole the possibility of a hearing to determine if they deserve to be re-sentenced to a minimum sentence of 25-years-to-life.

Photo by Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times prognosticate

Tuesday’s Board Of Supervisor’s meeting involved much drama, lots of side players, gobs of backroom gossip, weeks of lobbying and finally two presentations—one by Sheriff Lee Baca, the other by Probation Chief Don Blevins— both aimed at gaining LA County’s new state parolee contract. The meeting also featured the revelation that the Sheriff’s plan costs quite a bit more money than that of Probation.

Now, however, everything has changed.

Thursday afternoon the word floated around that the Sheriff had backed off on his proposal and said he was willing to share the contract with Probation. It isn’t clear whether the LASD mainly means they want to share the money that accompanies the contract. In any case, they are willing to step aside and let Probation do what it is clearly better equipped to do than law enforcement, meanly to oversee and aide parolees as they attempt to reenter law-abiding life.

I’m up in the wilds of West Glacier cadging WiFi from a cafe, so I’ll turn the rest of the story over to Robert Faturechi of the LA Times:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has backed down in his bid for the department to take on sole supervision of state parolees, an official confirmed Thursday evening, opting instead for a hybrid plan that would leave his deputies out of rehabilitation.

Baca’s initial proposal was an unprecedented attempt to handle the thousands of parolees being passed from the state to the local level instead of the county’s probation officers, who already do that sort of work.

No law enforcement agency in the nation, officials say, handles parole or probation supervision, a task decidedly more oriented toward social work.

Critics blasted Baca’s plan, saying that it presented potential conflicts of interest because the same deputies who were arresting and jailing criminals would have also been serving as caseworkers after the inmates were released.

Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo said Baca decided to allow the county’s Probation Department to handle reentry and case management, while sheriff’s deputies and possibly LAPD officers do traditional suppression work and compliance checks.

“I don’t know that it was a back-down,” Rhambo said. “At the executive meeting today, listening to all the nuts and bolts as to what it takes to manage this, as people were throwing out the labor-intensity of it all, [Baca] thought what might work better is a hybrid version…..”

On Tuesday the LA County Board of Supervisors will vote on its state legislative agenda for the coming year. The package includes agenda items that range from topics relating to watershed management and flood control, to a push to steer kids away from sugared beverages.

Nestled within the 26-page single-spaced list of legislative priorities is a proposal that could easily fly under the radar. Yet it is an idea that has very large implications for the problems plaguing LA’s troubled foster care system, the Department of Children and Family Services.

The proposal—put forth by the County’s CEO with the blessing of DCFS, and long championed by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas** in concert with statewide foster care advocates such as the Children’s Advocacy Institute—is a simple one: make dependency court public.

As it stands now, the hearings in which it is decided which kids will be taken from their parents care, and for how long, are closed to almost anyone but family members required to be present, plus attorneys and those who work in the foster care system.

Theoretically, this arrangement is to protect the privacy of the children involved, but it has also created an unhealthy lack of adequate scrutiny—one that often works against the best interest of the kids and families affected by the court’s actions.

I have managed to weasel my way in to several of these hearings in the past few years and, in each case, it was a sobering and eye-opening experience. Suffice it to say that the light of day would do these proceedings great good.

In a statement he will read on Tuesday morning, Ridley-Thomas explains more of the reasoning behind the proposal.

Here is an excerpt:

“Opening dependency courts may yield the biggest bang-for-the-buck of any child protection measure. Any solution to our current child safety crisis lies in expanding, not curtailing civil rights.

“Dependency court proceedings are closed to protect children and their families from potential public humiliation and embarrassment.

“But doing so can also shield a failing system from public scrutiny. As a result, parents may be treated poorly behind closed doors – which many families in my district have said is the case.

“Making dependency court hearings public (with specific privacy protections remaining in place) will make the system accountable. Open proceedings also, however, enable child welfare officials to protect themselves from false accusations.

“In other words, those worthy of scrutiny could no longer hide behind confidentiality; and those who suffer false accusations silently could defend themselves with the public record.

“The news media, with full access to hearings, can be a powerful advocate for currently voiceless parents and children, and can keep an even more vigilant watch on the government…..”

This is an absolutely essential move that we should all support.

Other states such as New York, Illinois, Florida and Pennsylvania have public dependency courts.

It’s time that California open the doors of its courts as well-–sooner rather than later.

**CORRECTION: I originally wrote that Ridley-Thomas proposed the dependency court item, More correctly, the CEO put the item on the agenda at the request of DCFS, while Ridley-Thomas had been working along a parallel track with advocacy groups.

Photo of Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court