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

In Tuesday’s LA County Board of Supervisor’s meeting, the Sups will very likely approve another $7.9 million to help improve matters at the county’s troubled probation department.

The money is slated to go toward satisfying the agreement the board made with the Department of Justice in 2008 to improve conditions in probation’s various juvenile detention facilities, which were deemed to be violating the civil rights of the kids they served.

The $7.9 million is being requested in addition to an earlier allocation of $79 million earmarked for the same DOJ-related purpose. Unfortunately, as you might remember, the previous probation chief and his administration….misplaced that other chunk of funds—which amounted to more than one tenth of probation’s budget.

The agreement stemmed from a 2006 DOJ investigation into whether youth were “adequately protected from harm” at the Los Angeles County Probation camps.

The Department of Justice concluded that the kids in probation’s camps were not in fact being “adequately protected.”

Four years and much money later, the DOJ is still not one bit happy with what probation has accomplished, according to Monday’s memo to the Sups from Bill Fujioka, LA County’s Chief Executive Officer:

“On July 30, 2010, the County received a letter from DOJ expressing its dissatisfaction with the County’s progress in implementing the MOA [Memorandum of Agreement] for Probation Camps,” wrote Fujioka.

In should be noted that the Urban League and the National NAACP have both passed resolutions–in part at the urging of Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas—each calling for a more rigorous form of federal intervention, likely in the form of a federal consent decree.

Rumor has it that, thus far, Eric Holder’s DOJ has been reluctant to take that step.

But behind the scenes, the pressure is not letting up from any quarter. And, from what I have seen, the disclosures about the ills of probation are far from over.

Tuesday, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to create a multi-agency task force in order to investigate the health and safety issues surrounding raves—in particular raves that are held in public venues.

The measure was proposed by Zev Yaroslavsky and Don Knabe. Mark Ridley-Thomas suggested that some kind of young person or persons should be added to the task force that would be made up of law enforcement agencies, medical and health professionals, music business types and so on.

(Heck, it’s nice to see the Sups get along over an issue for a change. Last week, they voted unanimously to send a sternly-worded collective letter to the loathsome Sam Zell about the LA Times’ faux front page, so maybe they’re on a roll)

The vote came in response to the death of 15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez who evidently drank from a water bottle laced with Ecstasy—a drug that had dropped in popularity around a decade ago but now has spiked again.

The LA Times covered the story here, KPPC covered it here.

Then, for Neon Tommy, Annenberg journalism student, Paresh Dave, has done an excellent job of giving a comprehensive overview of the many complex issues swirling around Rodriguez’s death and the subsequent temporary ban on raves at the Coliseum and now the Board of Sups new task force.

Read it.

What do you think LA County should do about raves?

Photo by Winnie Jaing

While the flow of revelations about the ghastly state of LA County’s juvenile probation system appears to have slowed for the moment, LA County’s five supervisors can’t seem to agree about how to fix the colossally broken department.

Last week, there was an attempt to pass three reform-minded motions, which stalled due to the abstention of Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. [Back story here.] Accusations flew that Ridley-Thomas was standing in the way of reform because of pressure from the probation officer’s union.

The next day, however, that notion seemed disabused when Ridley-Thomas pushed for a far heftier brand of reform by calling publicly for federal intervention. Thus far, this is an approach that other supervisors do not favor. And neither, I understand, does the new Chief of Probation, Donald Blevins.

Everyone agrees that something needs to be done. The problem is agreeing on what exactly that something ought to be.

Knowing that the Board of Supervisors will meet again Tuesday to wrestle again with these matters, I talked at length with Ridley-Thomas about various sides of the probation problem, why he thinks the feds are necessary, and the kerfuffle with his colleagues over how to reform a dysfunctional department.

You’ll find the results below:

NOTE: Tuesday, the LA Times has an editorial on the topic describing its own perspective of how probation ought to be fixed.

WitnessLA: Mr. Supervisor, last week you called for federal oversight for the LA County Probation Department in the form of a federal consent decree—much like the federal consent decree that the LAPD had to agree to in order to avoid a Department of Justice lawsuit after the Rampart scandal.

However, none of your fellow supervisors seem to favor such federal involvement. Why is there such a schism between the supervisors?

Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas: At least one supervisor has articulated the point of view that we have a new chief probation officer, and so we should permit him a chance to succeed rather than declaring him a failure. I think that’s a mischaracterization of the call for broadened, deepened and quickened reform.

These problems are not of [Chief Blevins’] making. We’re not declaring him a failure.

But if we want to get this right, I think it has to be understood that it’s not about the new probation chief at all. This is about the mission of that department. The focus of the probation department is supposed to be rehabilitation of the children we serve. But there is so much dysfunction in the Department of Probation that rehabilitation is hard to realize.

WLA: Most of those I speak to who work inside the department say that rehabilitation is pretty much nonexistent.

MRT: And I don’t think you get there without serious top to bottom reform. For that, I think we need a set of tools and resources that are only available to the federal government.

WLA: One of the main objections I’m hearing from the offices of your colleagues is that: 1. Once the Feds step in their agenda tends to bigfoot any internal reform that is taking place for good and for ill, and 2. Even when the feds are genuinely helpful, as they were with the LAPD, they’re very often like the bad houseguests who overstay their welcome, to a degree that can be problematic.

How would you answer those objections?

MRT: I recognize those concerns. But there is no wholly elegant solution to a crisis as deep as the Probation Department’s. It’s in situations like these that the Justice Department needs to come in— when it’s clear an invasive treatment is required for the patient to survive. If DOJ decides to expand its role, it will be because they have concluded there are civil rights matters serious enough to compel them to do so.

And keep in mind this is no longer George Bush’s Department of Justice. What’s emerging is a new justice department with more robust civil rights prowess that would take this kind of issue on in a serous way—which is what we want.

Frankly, part of the problem I think we’re seeing from those who resist federal help, is a certain level of denial about the depth of the problem. And some want to control rather than correct it.

WLA: When you say “control rather than correct”, are you speaking about juvenile justice advocates—some of whom are also worried about the feds coming in—or those in county government?

MRT: I’m talking about decision makers. And more than some would like to admit or acknowledge, the department is already out of control. And it calls for intervention to rectify these problems.

Also, you should know, I’m quite sure that more in the way of problems will be revealed, none of which is particularly pleasant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Activists take lead roles to reopen Burke’s failed monument

I long ago gave up any hope that Yvonne Burke would be indicted for her failure to stop the dying and maiming that eventually forced King-Drew Medical Center to close in 2007. Every sitting member of the county board of supervisors, who ignored the management problems festering for a decade or more, deserve punishment, too.

To heal their souls, Burke and her accomplices should mark a calendar with the birthdays of those who needlessly died under their bungled leadership. One birthday is coming up. On Feb. 1, Edith Isabel Rodriguez may have turned 45 had the hospital staff heeded her pleas and those of her boyfriend. She writhed in pain on the floor of the ER waiting room for 45 minutes before dying of a ruptured bowel. Let the dozens of birthdays marked on the supervisors’ calendars inspire them to quickly act to reopen the hospital.

One woman already up for the fight to reopen the South L.A. hospital is Sylvia Drew Ivie, the daughter of Charles Drew, the physician for whom the hospital was named. A graduate of Howard University School of Law, Drew Ivie is the chief of staff for County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who replaced the disgraced Burke.

A profile of Drew Ivie, written by a former colleague of mine, Evan George, appears in today’s Daily Journal, a legal newspaper in Los Angeles. (Evan covers healthcare and law better than anyone in town. And yes, his is the first piece written about Drew Ivie by any major media in Los Angeles.)

Drew Ivie worked in the Carter Administration’s U.S. Office for Civil Rights and served briefly as a deputy L.A. city attorney in the 1970s and was most recently the executive director To Help Everyone Clinic in South L.A. She cut back on her time there to lead the community’s losing struggle to keep the hospital open.

Here are a few excerpts from Evan’s story. (Sorry, no link. The paper’s online and print editions are paid-subscription only.)

Her work with the clinic tapered off by 2005, when the largest cloud hanging over South Los Angeles became its once celebrated hospital and the Charles Drew University Medical Center that trained its doctors. As losing federal funding over safety concerns grew likely, Drew Ivie served as project director of the Steering Committee on the Future of the King/Drew Medical Center. The group advised supervisors on how to clean up the hospital’s act.
When the supervisors pulled the plug on the hospital, Drew Ivie said, she was stunned. “We really didn’t think that would be permitted to happen by all of the people who understood how important it was to the community,” she said. She said she blamed failed governance and poor communication between the medical staff and county leaders.
Now, her boss is the one county official most bent on reopening the decrepit facility within two years.
Many in county government have interpreted Drew Ivie’s appointment as a shake-up to try to overcome crippling bureaucratic failures. Last week, Ridley-Thomas also announced his pick of attorney Yolanda Vera as his health deputy. Vera, a longtime health care advocate who helped sue the county over hospital bed cuts years ago, said she has worked closely with Drew Ivie in the past.

Earlier in the story, Evan describes the depth of her motivations:

She also comes to the fight saddled with heavy emotional ties to the issue.
A daughter of the physician for whom the teaching hospital was partially named, she made saving the sinking institution a personal battle and a family obligation. That the hospital finally shuttered within weeks of her losing her own husband to a brain tumor made the tragedy that much more crippling. Friends say the loss brought Drew Ivie to a low point in her life that left her treading water. They also said they had no doubt she eventually would charge back into the fray.
“Sylvia is somebody, unlike some politicians, who actually understands her mistakes and learns from them,” said Stan Price, a former director of the National Health Law Program who has worked with her for decades. “She knows what went wrong and why she wasn’t successful.”

Let’s hope all of the county supervisors are listening to Sylvia Drew Ivie and Yolanda Vera as they reflect on the many darkened days on their birthday calendars.

As we remain glued to the dual drama of the bailout and the election (and the debate-or-no-debate cliffhanger that is John McCain’s latest Hail Mary ball toss), let’s take a break to look at an elections-related drama closer to home.

***********************************************************************************************************

This week some are questioning whether or not Councilman Bernard Parks used his office to play politics with the city’s rental policy.

Here’s the deal: SCOPE, a well-regarded South LA-located nonprofit, has been renting the same building for nearly ten years. Like another 100 or more nonprofits in the city (107, to be exact), SCOPE has something of a sweetheart rental deal. They are allowed to occupy a building— a former firehouse located at Florence Avenue near Western—and they pay only $1-a-year in rent. SCOPE originally made the rental deal back in 1998 with then-city council member Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Now that same council seat is occupied by Bernard Parks who is facing a close runoff race for the County Supervisor position being vacated by Yvonne Burke. His opponent in the runoff is, of course, Mark Ridley-Thomas.

(As the story continues keep that last point in mind.)

Anway….after years of happy renting, SCOPE president and founder Anthony Thigpenn and Executive Director Erika Smith were surprised and alarmed when, on September 3, they received an eviction notice stating that SCOPE must vacate the building in 60 days. No warning. No explanation. No hint of what had triggered the eviction. The notice was sent by the city’s Department of General Services.

The SCOPE folks called General Services right away to find out what was up. And were told that Councilman Bernard Parks had requested the eviction because he thought the property could be put to better use for the city and was going to be sold. “We were also told he didn’t know what SCOPE does,” said Thigpenn.

This last seemed somewhat hard to believe. As far as South LA nonprofits go, SCOPE is very well known. They have run several job training programs in the district that Parks oversees, each with budgets in excess of a million dollars.. The programs have been funded by groups as diverse as the L.A. Work Force Investment Board and Dreamworks. Most recently SCOPE has been heading up a newly hot multi-agency project called the Los Angeles Apollo Alliance that is creating green jobs for residents in low income LA neighborhoods.

In other words, SCOPE is not exactly low profile.

So if Parks really was unfamiliar with SCOPE, he was strangely remiss. If he did know SCOPE, why was he feigning ignorance?

Barbara Osborn is another who thought Parks’ Who-Are-These-People? stance a bit odd.

Osborn is the Communications Director for the Liberty Hill Foundation, one of the organizations that has repeatedly given SCOPE grants. She is also the person who first brought the SCOPE/Parks situation to my attention.

“SCOPE is one of the most effective community organizing entities in Los Angeles,” Barbara told me “They have been an extraordinarily effective in their get out the vote effort in South LA. So how could Bernard Parks not know who they were? ”

Whatever the case, SCOPE set about rectifying the situation. On November 4, the day after they got the notice from General Services, they sent their own letter to Parks’ council office inquiring about the eviction, and dutifully followed up with three phone calls in the days to follow.

No one ever got back to them. No return letter. No calls. No emails. Nada.

Curious, Thigpenn and Smith also checked to find out if they could find any evidence that their building was up for sale, was to be placed up for sale, or if anyone had expressed interest in buying the building.

They found nothing. “And we’ve never been approached to see if we wanted to buy the building,” said Thigpenn. As nearly as they could tell, he said, the sales ploy was “a complete fabrication.”

So with still no reply from Parks’ office, SCOPE did what community organizers do. They began organizing. They called friends and allies to see if they could turn things around or, at the least, work out some kind of compromise. They also put in place an organization plan in case the front door approach didn’t work.

Word of the situation got around, and various well-placed friends of the councilman reportedly contacted Parks to warn that this whole eviction thing was wrong-headed.

SCOPE also hand delivered a comprehensive package to Parks’ office explaining the details of all of SCOPE’s programs.

The result?

SCOPE got a new eviction notice saying that now they had to be out in 30 days, not 60. Again there was no explanation.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s so nice to see Mayhill Fowler score two of the biggest stories of the campaign season, and so predictable to hear the complaints from the mainstream press and others out to protect their turf and rules and mirage of power. But I have a more practical issue: Shouldn’t Mayhill be getting paid? Look at how she’s raised the profile of The Huffington Post. She and Arianna have been good for each other, and now it’s time to draw up a generous contract to reflect the good times.

And Mayhill needs a new title. The term “citizen journalist” is offensive at a time when we should be in the streets fighting for the rights of all immigrants. Besides, aren’t most journalists “citizens?” And don’t we want more “non-citizen voices” writing about their communities? Until Mayhill gets her contract, George Orwell and I would like to suggest a more descriptive term: Mayhill Fowler is an “unpaid journalist.”

But I want to change that, Mayhill. I’ll be your agent and will open negotiations with Arianna as soon as you call or email me.

OK, OK, OK, it’s fine if you don’t need the money. Even better, actually. We’ll put your well-deserved salary toward setting up an online news site to report local news in Los Angeles. We’ll hire top student talent from USC, UCLA and other local colleges and cover City Hall and the county Hall of Administration like it was done in the very recent past when this was a three-newspaper town.

A proposed name: The Fowler Post.