TRUTANICH’S GRAND JURY

Tuesday the City Council is tentatively scheduled to discuss SB 1168, the bill that would allow City Attorney Carmen Trutanich to have his own grand jury. The bill has passed the state senate and with a trip to the state assembly still ahead.

The City Council will decide whether or not it is in favor of the bill. Councilmembers Jan Perry and Bernard Parks are strongly opposed, and would like the idea to be put to a vote of the residents of Los Angeles.

COUNTY SUPERVISORS EXPECTED TO VOTE $400,000TO SETTLE JUVENILE HALL MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE/WRONGFUL DEATH LAWSUIT

Also on Tuesday, the LA County Supervisors are scheduled to vote to settle a lawsuit brought by the parents of Tremayne Cole.

The bare bones of the case, which is expected to be settled for $400,000, are as follows:

According to the county’s own report, on February 5, 2008, a short, skinny, 14-year-old boy named Tremayne Cole was placed in one of LA County’s juvenile halls, Los Padrinos. Four days later, on February 9, Tremayne complained of a bad headache, a tooth ache, and he was running a fever. Although he was given medication, he was reportedly not seen by either a doctor or a dentist until around February 17 when he had grown so sick that he was transferred to LA County-USC hospital. Tremayne died of complications of meningitis on March 4, 2008.

Tremayne’s parents allege that the adults in charge dropped the ball on their son pretty much at every step.

Really, all we’re asking for is a little of the much promised transparency and accountability.

It’s a season of ongoing budgetary nightmares. LA’s libraries are losing one-third of their staff. Even the city’s firefighters are taking budget hits. However one of the few programs or agencies in all of Los Angeles that has not seen its funding slashed is the city’s $26 million plus Gang Reduction and Youth Development program—or GRYD.

This is not to suggest that the city doesn’t need every penny of that GRYD money. Even after LA’s drop in crime, Los Angeles is still the gang capital the nation. Gang violence takes lives, wrecks futures, fills prisons and causes staggering levels of measurable PTSD in school-age kids who live in gang-intense neighborhoods.

In truth, $26 million is not all that much considering the gravity and complexity of the problem.

Yet the very scarcity of funds is a big part of the reason why the community at large deserves to know exactly what we’re getting for our prevention/intervention millions now that we are two years into the mayor’s GRYD strategies—which is precisely why WitnessLA and Spot.Us have hired Matt Fleischer to find out under the banner of the LA Justice Report.

Matt’s been digging up a lot very intriguing information already. (The fruits of his labors will appear later this summer.)

But, as he digs and explores, it has been a bit vexing to find that the least cooperative people have been those in the mayor’s GRYD office.

Take for example the issue of the evaluation:

As part of its mandate, GRYD has contracted with the Urban Institute to conduct an evaluation of the various GRYD programs’ for performance and efficacy—for a fee of $900,000. The gang programs were officially moved to the mayor’s office in July of ‘08 and here we are in late June of 2010. Yet, thus far we can find no one outside of GRYD who has seen any part of any kind of an evaluation.

And GRYD ain’t sharing.

In fact, every time Matt asked for any information whatsoever regarding the UI evaluation city officials switched on their vague-afiers.

It was in draft form, they said, so they couldn’t give him that.

Now, granted, the evaluation is a 3-5 year project, which means that every interim report is, by definition, a “draft” until 2013 or 14 or whatever, when there will be a final report. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reports at the one year mark. Surely GRYD wants to know—and would want us to know—that they are on the right track with their $26 million worth of gang violence prevention and intervention strategies. Matt said that a draft of the evaluation would fine. Anything would be better than nothing. At this, the GRYD people remembered urgent business elsewhere and stopped replying to his requests altogether.

Just out of curiosity, I called a contact who is an insider at the LA City Council. I reasoned that since the council is responsible for approving all GRYD’s city funds, surely a well-placed person in the council offices could get some kind of interim evaluation at this point. Nope, they’d asked for it, he said. And so far, nada.

“The council gets quarterly reports,” he said, “but they don’t say much.

He reminded me that one of the selling points for moving LA’s gang dollars away from the city council and putting the money all under the single roof of the mayor’s office was to insure that the program would be more accountable and transparent than the city’s previous gang violence reduction programs had been. (cough) LA Bridges (cough, cough).

“Well, the mayor is two years into having all the money, and we’ve not seen a lot of either transparency and accountability,” he said grumpily. “They aren’t very good at collaborating either. As a result, if you as a taxpayer ask me what you’re really getting for your money, I can’t really tell you.”

Okay, we aim to change that. That’s what Matt’s reporting for WLA and Spot.Us is all about.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You can do another round of free “donations” to Matt’s investigation for WLA the LA Justice Report by doing the following:

* going to Spot.Us
*Login/Register on Spot.Us (upper left hand side.)
* hit the EARN CREDITS button
*answer three anonymous questions about how reporters and techs might better collaborate.
*scroll down and choose the LA Justice Report when you’re prompted to select how to use your credits.
*hit the APPLY CREDITS
*Then confirm it at the prompt.

That’s it. You pay nothing, and our reporting fund gets ten bucks!

The Los Angeles City Council approved much of mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposed budget on Monday afternoon.

Library hours were cut, day care eliminated, 761 city positions were slashed-–with a possible road back on some of the jobs if unions will approve a five percent pay cut to their employees. For the moment, however, the LAPD is guaranteed a sworn force of 9,963 officers.

Rick Orlov reports for the Daily News:

Villaraigosa also sent a somber message to the council, praising them for their efforts, but saying more needs to be done. “We can do better than the budget I originally proposed, but we cannot do it without significant structural cost-saving measures from our labor partners,” Villaraigosa said, adding he wanted to also move ahead with pension reform. Union leaders said they were not prepared to make any further reductions in their pay, saying their workers had passed on pay raises last year and for this coming year.

City officials, however, said without concessions workers will face layoffs or 16 to 26 furlough days. Rough projections show that if all city workers, including police and fire, take a 5 percent cut, the city could save $123 million. If only civilian workers take a 5 percent reduction, it would mean $63 million in savings.

Council member Tony Cardenas and Richard Alarcon managed to find away to put back into the budget money to keep Northeast Valley Animal Shelter and to replace the $1.3 million in cuts from the city’s gang intervention and prevention funding that had been marked for slashing.

However, both Antonio Villaraigosa and some of the council members attempted to delay the vote to allow time for further union talks. Yet the majority prevailed.

The LA Times reports about the ploys to avoid taking the vote:

Opponents of the cuts tried to circumvent the vote by adjourning the meeting ahead of schedule. That proposal failed on a 9-6 vote. Alarcon, Huizar, Hahn, Wesson and council members Paul Koretz and Paul Krekorian voted in favor of adjournment.

David Zahniser and Phil Willon have more.

REVISITING THAT MILLION $ BAIL FOR THE SUPERGRAPHIC OUTLAW

If you’ll remember, last month, I objected mightily to the one million in bail that City Attorney Carmen Trutanich requested and got for supergraphic super-scofflaw, Kayvan Setareh, but then I began to wonder if the matter wasn’t a bit more complicated than I’d hastily portrayed.

Neon Tommy reporter Chris Pisar looked more deeply into the issue and came up with a well-balanced report that informs you—then allows you to make up your own mind.

Here’s a clip from the heart of the story:

…That leads us to the real question at hand: does the $1 million dollar bail set by Judge Escobedo fit the crime and circumstances or is it excessive?

When asked if the bail fir the crime, Laurie Levenson, law professor at Loyola Law School, had this to say:

“Of course no, that bail is high even for murder,” said Levenson. “That was off the charts.”

But how exactly does a judge determine what the bail amount should be?

The state starts with a bail schedule that outlines what the bail amount should be for a particular crime, said Patricia Kelly of Los Angeles County Superior Court Media Relations. There is also a committee that makes a recommendation to the district attorney or whoever the prosecutor is.

The key is that it’s only a recommendation, not a cut-and-dried figure.

In order to better understand the open interpretation of bail amounts, we first need to take a look at California Penal Code 1275(a), which outlines four main criteria for setting, reducing, or denying bail: the protection of the public, the seriousness of the offense charged, the previous criminal record of the defendant, and the probability of his or her appearing at trial or hearing of the case, with public safety being the top concern.

Seeing as how Setareh was booked on three misdemeanor counts all but rules out the probability of his bail being set so high due to the “seriousness of the crime.”

The same goes for Setareh’s potential as a flight risk. As a prominent businessman facing only a few misdemeanor charges, the risk does not outweigh the reward.

So what about Setareh’s criminal history?

Setareh has been arrested four different times in the last 15 years, including his most recent arrest on February 26, but has only been convicted of one count, according to Los Angeles Superior Court documents.

That was a misdemeanor conviction back in July of 2002, in which Setareh was arrested for failure to comply with city regulation on graphic ads. He was charged with two similar counts in December of last year but the charges were dismissed.

While he does have a criminal history, it is hardly enough to warrant such a lofty bail.

That leaves us with the issue of public safety….

And public safety is a crucial point. Read on.

JUSTICE 4 JUSTICE

I’ll have a follow-up to this story next week, but in the meantime, Neon Tommy’s Kevin Grant has this very good report on the anger, confusion and upset that was felt by students at the under-enrolled Green Dot charter, Animo Justice, after they learned that their school was being shut down.

(LAT Howard Bloom’s back story on the issue is here.)

Here’s a clip from Kevin’s story:

Read the rest of this entry »

After a meeting that lasted seveTuesday, the LA City Council decided to act sensibly by voting to allow retail dispensaries to continue selling medical marijuana. According to John Hoeffel of the LA Times, the Los Angeles City Council is also strongly considering a draft ordinance that may cap the number of shops in the city between 70 and 200.

The CC did not not shy away from going head to head with LA’s city attorney, Carmen Trutanich, over the regulations and the interpretation of the law.

Here’s more from Hoeffel.

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley had pressed the council to explicitly ban the sale of marijuana, saying that the state’s medical marijuana laws do not allow it and citing several recent court decisions to back up their argument.

The contentious issue snarled the council’s efforts to develop an ordinance, with members caught for months between their desire to provide access to marijuana for patients who need it and their reluctance to reject the advice of their own attorney.

But the council stripped out language that would bar sales and replaced it with a provision that would allow “cash contributions, reimbursements and compensations” for actual expenses, as long as they comply with state law. The law has been interpreted differently by medical marijuana advocates and law enforcement officials….

There’s more.

Sanity prevails.

PS: It is interesting to see where City Council member Dennis Zine was on the issue in this interview two and a half years ago, when the city was planning to settle on regulations immanently.

The process of selecting a new Los Angeles Chief of Police has just entered phase two. The candidates for chief who will advance to the next stage of the selection process all were notified on Thursday.

In phase one, 24 candidates—13 from within the department, elevenfrom outside—filled out an application that included a bunch of term paper-ish essay questions, in which candidates were asked to describe their ideas about and experience with around a half dozen issues that are part of a chief’s job—matters such as dealing with unions, new technology and so on.

The applications were reviewed by LA City Personnel Department General Manager Margaret Whelan and her team.

And out of the pile of applications, Maggie Whelan (a surprisingly powerful person about whom we know nothing) was to choose between six and twelve candidates.

The next step was for that list of 6-12 to be passed along to the LA Police commission, who will interview the candidates.

That long list is whittled down to the short list of three candidates who are then passed to the mayor with a recommendation.

None of the candidates were told how many were on that pre-short list.

I’ve spoken to two of the candidates who are moving to the next round.

My guess is that(in alphabetical order) Charlie Beck, Sergio Diaz, Jim McDonnell, Mike Moore, Sharon Papa, Earl Paysinger are on the list. Yet there will likely be some surprises.

I’ll let you know when I know for sure who’s on.

I do know that the interviews will be on October 21 and 22.

Good luck to all concerned, and good luck to us.

(David Crane/Los Angeles Daily News)

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.

I’ll be on Deadline LA today, KPFK’s half-hour weekly show on the Media, hosted by Barbara Osborn and Howard Blume.

We’ll be talking about:

1. How well or poorly LA is spending its gang intervention $$…

2. What LA County is doing—and not doing— with its gang violence reduction dollars.

3. Those faulty numbers behind the claims of a crime spree by those who oppose the state’s early budget-driven release of prisoners.

Tune in!

Yesterday I complained that the city has not given funds to Homeboy Industries despite the fact that the Homeboy programs are in trouble financially, and are regularly serving more people than all the other city gang-violence-reduction programs combined. (More on those numbers next week.)

(And for a brand new development on the Homeboy/mayor’s office issue, please watch for Tim Rutten’s Saturday column.)

So, if the city hasn’t given funds to Homeboy, how is it spending its gang reduction dollars?

On Tuesday, the city’s gang czar, Reverend Jeff Carr (more properly known as the director of Gang Reduction and Youth Development—AKA GRYD, love those acronyms), gave his progress report to the LA City Council detailing how the city’s $24 plus million in gang funds have been spent in the period from January 1 to June 1, 2009, and what we as taxpayers and residents are getting for our money.

During that same meeting, Councilwoman Janet Hahn* said that, given the progress report, now is the time to take another run at a bond measure to fund additional gang programs. A new Measure A, so to speak.

With all respect to Janet, having now read the 67-page report, I think we need to slow down and think this one through a little.

(The LA Times Rob Greene did an opinion piece/blog post on the matter of the proposed bond that is very much worth reading—both for its own sake, and for some additional background.)

Okay, well what about that report?

What exactly has city done thus far in the first six months of 2009? What have we gotten for our gang $$$?

Simple question, but even having marched my way through Jeff Carr’s acronym-infested report twice, I find it tough to answer.

Two things the city has done are easy to list.

1. In May, the mayor’s office along with the LAPD, Ralphs Markets and some other partners, sponsored a citywide gun buy back program that collected 1700 firearms…. This is a nice thing, and symbolically reassuring. As for whether homeboys from this or that gang actually turned in their Tech 9’s in order to get a supermarket gift card. Well, when these programs have been done in the past, in LA and other cities, there has not been any measurable result in terms of gun violence. In other words, the buyback is not a violence reduction strategy as much as it is something of a public perception stunt. But, okay, better to do it than not. Getting guns off the street, even if many of them are old, broken guns, can’t hurt.

2. Number two accomplishment is the fact that the GRYD office, along with Parks and Rec and the LAPD et al, has launched its second Summer Night Lights program, a program of which I am an ardent fan. It consists of forking over the funds necessary to have sixteen parks in some of the city’s most violence prone areas extend their hours until midnight four nights a week (Wednesday — Saturday) during the two month period between July 8 and September 5.

Sure SNL is a small bucket out of the very big ocean known as LA gang violence, but it’s a simple and straightforward program. Each park sponsors additional activities during those later hours, and each hires ten kids from the community to work in the park. That’s 140 more kids who have summer jobs, assuredly a good thing.

When you give kids something fun to do with their time they are less likely to get bored and then get into trouble. Period. Nothing complicated about that.

I DO have a slight problem with SNL being painted as the main reason for a drop in crime in those target areas during those months since I suspect that has more to do with the fact that the 14 areas are flooded with cops during the SNL hours. But okay, why quibble? It’s a small program, but a good one. GO SUMMER NIGHT LIGHTS!

But these are small side programs. As for how the city has spent the main part of our intervention and prevention dollars…..I’ve batted the topic around with quite a few people in the days since Jeff presented his report and am still left with more troubling questions than answers.

…..TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

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When you get a minute, skim through the report yourself.

In the meantime, I’m heading out to shop for lots of barbecue supplies— now that I’ve reclaimed my backyard patio furniture and the Weber from the black widows. (The spiders were tough, but I was tougher.)

Happy Friday afternoon!

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* NOTE: Earlier I wrote “Jan Perry” when I really and truly meant to write Janice Hahn. Apologies to both Jan and Janet. A brain freeze in the hot weather is the best explanation I can offer.

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