Well, I’m glad someone has written about it.

Tim Rutten calls it government by tantrum —which try as I might not to endlessly criticize the actions of our city attorney, Carmen Trutanich—is about right when it comes to describing his latest escapade with the city’s legal system.

For those playing catch up, Trutanich is on a crusade to bring into line the scofflaw building defacers who ignore the city’s permitting process and wrap giganzoid “supergraphic” posters around multi-story structures that they personally own, in return for a handsome fees.

Good for Trutanich for holding the expensively-suited lawbreakers to answer.

To make it clear that he meant business (also a good idea; don’t put a gun on the table unless you are willing to fire it, so to speak), the city attorney chose to send a message to all the supergraphics law-ignorers by making an example of Pacific Palisades businessman Kayvan Setareh, who had evidently blithely ignored a bunch of warnings from Trutanich’s office, and wrapped an 8-story poster around a building of his located at Hollywood and Highland.

Since Setareh reportedly has other buildings and other supergraphics, this was moral equivalent of waggling his tongue at Trutanich and saying, “Naah-naah-naah-naah-naah-naah! MAKE ME, MO-FO!”

So Carmen Trutanich decided he would, indeed, make Setareh comply. All well and good. If you and I have to obey city regulations or risk icky consequences, so does the Pali-living, multiple-building-owning Setareh. Nuch, we’re behind you all the way in your quest to make the guys in pricey suits obey the law! Go get ‘em!

But here’s where the tantrum came in. Trutanich had Setareh arrested. (Fine.) And slapped him with a million dollars in bail. (Not fine.)

Rutten explains the unfineness of Nuch’s bail action perfectly. (I said something similar, although not as well articulated or in as much detail, in an email to a student who is also planning to write about the issue. It will be interesting to see what he finds out.)

The problem is that even scofflaws are entitled to due process. Trutanich found a feeble-willed judge who was willing to set the landlord’s initial bail at $1 million. By having him arrested on a Friday, the city attorney essentially gave Setareh a choice: Pay the nonrecoverable $100,000 a bail bondsman would have charged to write the bond, or spend the weekend in jail, because it takes three to four days to secure release by putting up your own real property as surety. (The bail was subsequently reduced to $100,000.)

Putting aside the question of whether there’s any ethical proportionality in demanding $1 million bail for three misdemeanor charges, are we really supposed to believe that Setareh — with all his holdings in Los Angeles — is a flight risk? Bail is not a punishment; it simply is a way of enforcing a defendant’s promise to appear in court. In this case, though, Trutanich essentially imposed a choice between jail time or a $100,000 fine on a defendant who’d never had a minute — let alone a day — in court and is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Trutanich has explained why the guy with the misdemeanors got a higher bail than most child molesters and attempted murderers by muttering something about public safety and how when there are lots of people on Hollywood Blvd. at night, why that nasty graphic could blow off fall on people and, oh, the horror! doncha know!

Or something like that.

This was even less effective as an excuse than the weak tea offered by that other recent government bully, whom Rutten also writes about, namely Washington, Sen. Jim Bunning and his appalling use of the one-man fillbuster to, until Tuesday night, prevent passage of an extension of aid to the nation’s recently jobless.

OKAY SO HERE’S A FRIENDLY NOTE to City Attorney Trutanich, Senator Bunning and all the others who have signed on to this new “Because I can!” way of holding office:

We elected you to be our representatives, to do a job in the name of the people, not to be our hired thugs.

Got it? Thank you. I’m glad we had this little talk.

Novelist, poet, memoirist, teacher, advocate Luis Rodriguez writes about City Attorney Carmen Trutanich’s ill-considered tagger injunction idea in Friday’s LA Times.

Luis is the author of the classic Always Running and something of an icon in many circles. Although he’s a friend, I can honestly say that most anything he writes is worth reading, but this piece is particularly on point for the public discussion of the moment.

Here’s the opening:

Forty years ago, I was a gang member and a tagger, an aerosol graffiti artist. No doubt this was vandalism — my canvases were the walls of businesses, homes, schools, any public place.

I was just the sort of kid City Atty. Carmen Trutanich is targeting with his proposed civil injunction against taggers, a court order that would allow taggers to be arrested for merely hanging out together, an act that for most of us would be legal.

Now I am a homeowner, co-founder of a thriving cultural center and bookstore, a writer/poet with 14 published books and a gang intervention expert. I am a father, grandfather and law-abiding citizen. I invite you to listen to my story and judge whether the city attorney’s injunction is right for Los Angeles.

At age 16, in 1970, I was a high school dropout and drug user. I had met a youth worker at the community center that served my East L.A.-area neighborhood. He saw something in me I couldn’t see: an artist, a leader, a contributing member of the community. He offered me a deal — if I returned to school, he’d help me get training and work as a muralist.

Who knows why I finally agreed – for two years, I had told this guy to drop dead. But he never gave up on me. I learned mural painting at the old Goez Art Gallery on 1st Street. I had a mentor in Alicia Venegas. The youth worker persuaded the principal of the high school to let me come back, even though I had been kicked out for fighting when I was 15. I graduated. Then, from 1972 to 1973, I painted murals at the youth center, a local library branch and several businesses, the latter with 13 other gang members…

It gets even better….so read the rest here.

PS: Mr. City Attorney, I hope you’re reading this. Luis is the real deal. I promise.

PPS: Okay, just in case, here are a few more clips from Luis’ essay-–for those of you who aren’t going to click through.

We have so many ways to send young people to prison, and very few to keep them out. And we still have a terrible gang problem.

Like most Angelenos, I don’t want any more vandalism, violence or drug wars. But I know this: In hard times, we need more imagination, more healing, more innovation, more grace. Another injunction is simply the wrong way to go.

….AND…

All the research tells us that getting troubled kids involved in the arts is far less expensive and has longer-lasting positive results than punishing the art out of them. “Tough on crime” doesn’t impress me — I know it’s tougher to care. Even LAPD Police Chief William Bratton has said we can’t arrest our way out of this crisis.

We have so many ways to send our young people to prison, and few to keep them out……..”Tough on crime” doesn’t impress me—I know it’s tougher to care.

I want those words on bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets…or maybe tattooed on our collective wrists, as reminders. Better yet, written in indelible ink on our on our hearts.

Monday, the LA Times’ Scott Gold reported that, in an interview with new LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, Trutanich said that, through the use of a civil injunction similar to a gang injunction, he planned to give police the power to arrest and jail taggers just for hanging out together. Not for tagging. Or for planning to tag. But just for talking to each other. About whatever. School. The Dodgers. The merits of this spray paint over that one.

Now, just to be clear, with this new notion, Trutanich is not talking about gang members who tag, which is a whole different deal, and a provocative and dangerous business. The city attorney says he intends to aim his legal guns at graffiti crews: Guys (or young women) who spray paint their nicknames on walls, light posts, and freeway overpasses as a form of risk-courting, illegal sport.

He wants to slap those kids and young adults with the equivalent of a gang injunction, which means they can be arrested, in essence, just for being a tagger. Or, more specifically, for being a tagger who is standing with someone else who has been labeled a tagger, whether he or she is—in fact— a tagger or not..

(Functionally, a gang injunction works like a restraining order. But, instead of barring contact with an individual, it bans certain activities by purported members of a particular group named in the order.)

I am not, by the way, defending tagging. I hate that the proprietors of small, family-owned stores have to repaint their walls over and over, and that some of LA’s most beautiful murals have been repeatedly defaced by graffiti. I have often wished I could exchange more than a few terse words with the idiots who kept tagging up Frank Romero’s gorgeous “Going to the Olympics” mural that used to reside along the Hollywood Freeway. (Of course, it was CalTrans that actually managed to destroy the artwork. But that’s another topic altogether.)

I even pretty much buy the whole “broken windows” theory. (This is the theory of crime prevention popularized by criminologists, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The idea is that if one controls the small, quality-of-life crimes in any given neighborhood—the metaphorical broken windows—community members feel less helpless and more able to “reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself.” When community members began exerting their own control, goes the theory, the big crimes will lessen as well. In many of LA’s communities, graffiti is the most obvious form of broken window to address.)

However we already have laws about spray-painting messages on property not your own. In fact, ever since that dream statute for the law-and-order obsessed, Proposition 21, passed in 2000—lowering the ceiling for felony vandalism from its former $50,000 threshold to $400—comparatively minor outings by the young and the foolish toting spray cans may be prosecuted as felonies with up to three years in prison.

One would think that would be enough.

But apparently one would be wrong.

“I’m going to put together an end-of-days scenario for these guys,” Trutanich said. “If you want to tag, be prepared to go to jail. And I don’t have to catch you tagging. I can just catch you . . . with your homeboys.”

Great.

In Sacramento, our legislators are battling desperately to find some way to cut California’s eat-everything corrections budget by incarcerating fewer people in this prison benighted state. And now our new city attorney wants criminalize and lock up taggers who hang out with each other—as part of some half-hatched scare-em-straight plot?

This is really, really not an encouraging omen.

When Gold questioned Trutanich about why he was “proposing to adopt the same tactics police use on the city’s toughest criminals against people who are typically viewed as more of an annoyance,” the city attorney had a ready answer.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “they are no less of a gang.”

To support that contention, he pointed to several incidents in which people have been shot and killed after confronting graffiti vandals in residential areas — a Valinda man in 2006, for instance, and a Pico Rivera woman a year later.

Yeah. Well. About that “no less than a gang” thing, Mr. City Attorney: At the end of the day, as you put it, with all due respect, that just isn’t the case.

Here’s the deal: When tagging crews start packing firearms and shooting at innocent people—or at each other— we no longer call them taggers. That’s banging, dude. One is no longer in outlaw graffiti artist territory; one has moved, by definition, into gangsterland.

Gold talked to the ACLU’s Peter Bibring who doesn’t think Trutanich can pull off this idea of a tagger injunction, that it will be found unconstitutional. I think Bibring is right. There is much about even the run-of-the mill gang injunction that skates perilously close to the edge of constitutionality. I suspect this tagger injunction plan will topple easily right off the edge. (See the article for more on that.) If all this goes forward, we will find out, I guess.

Right this minute, LA has 43—count em—43 injunctions against gangs.. When Trutanich was elected in many of us had hoped that he would start dialing back some of the injunctions as no longer needed, while keeping the most relevant ones and making sure that those were sharply targeted at the right people and gangs. This tagger idea is philosophically a huge step in the exact opposite direction. So what exactly is going on?

Mr. City Attorney…. um.. Nuch….. I met you a few months ago. Remember?

We had a nice chat. You seemed intelligent and sensible. (Not all power mad, or anything.)

Thus, I’m going to hope that you merely lost your head a little with this crazy tagger injunction idea.

Okay, fine. It can happen. You may have a Do-Over. No problem.

But just one.
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PS: The Daily News has a short editorial on the issue.
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PPS: I have no idea how the comments got closed for a time on this post. (Ghosts, I tell you.) But as you can see, they’re open now. A thank you to Woody for flagging the problem.

When newly elected City Attorney Carmen Trutanich was sworn in on Wednesday, one of the more interesting things he announced was his plan to hire 200 investigators that would allow his office to have what amounts to its own small police force. Trutanich hinted that such a group might, among other duties, provide a kind of check and balance watch dog function for the LAPD.

Here is what the LA Times reported about Trutanich’s speech:

“We’re going to build this unit, we’re going to fund it, we’re going to get them automobiles, we’re going to have a regular police force,” the city attorney said. That force…..might even be responsible for keeping an eye on the LAPD, he said.

“I don’t want to see a need for another consent decree,” Trutanich said, referring to the federal restraints imposed on the LAPD after the Rampart Division corruption scandal. “If there’s something that we need to do to supervise LAPD to make sure that they comply, let the independent police department — the bureau of investigation — do that supervision. Why do we have to make millionaires out of private lawyers?”

This is a rather interesting idea. Although some police watchers would like to see the Federal Consent Decree stay in place, others like myself, think it has long outlived its usefulness and is no longer an “engine of reform” for the department. Instead of stimulating further correction or improvement in the department, U.S. District Judge Gary Feess has come to resemble a vaguely abusive foster parent who demands adherence to pointless and demeaning rules—like the financial disclosure requirement for gang and narcotics officers.

On the other hand, for the LAPD to police itself has not proved to be a good solution either. The arrangement has satisfied the union—the LAPPL—but despite the best efforts of Bill Bratton and his capable command staff, there are changes that remain to be made in the LAPD’s ” culture,” and more trust that still needs to be built with the city’s other stakeholders.

Thus having another law enforcement entity providing a check and balance could be a concept worth exploring.

It is unclear what such a structure would look like. And certainly there are potential pitfalls. It would not do to have bad blood between two of the city’s law enforcement agencies. Plus, since there’s a hiring freeze in city government, Trutanich will have to do some creative cost cutting elsewhere in his budget to find the funds to hire his proposed swarm of detectives.

Yet I hope Trutanich does pursue the notion. It is one among a number of intriguing ideas being floated by the City Attorney’s office in the past few weeks that are worth watching as they are developed.

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photo by Francine Orr for the Los Angeles Times