Thursday, New York Times Bureau Chief Jennifer Steinhauer, wrote a good round up of the emotional/cultural/legal winds that still swirl around the murder of Jamiel Shaw.

(Your faithful blogger is one of those quoted.)

Here’s how it opens:

Jamiel Shaw Sr. never gave much thought to the immigration status of gang members in his South Los Angeles neighborhood. With his military wife deployed to Iraq and two sons to raise, there were football practices to manage, shoes to buy, college applications to consider.

But in the two months since his older son, Jamiel Jr., was gunned down by a man the police say is a gang member who was here illegally from Mexico, Mr. Shaw has been able to think of little else.

“I don’t care about illegal people who are working here and taking care of themselves,” Mr. Shaw said. “I just feel I am obligated to target illegal aliens in gangs.”

A preliminary hearing in the killing of Jamiel Shaw Jr. is set to begin here on Thursday. Jamiel Jr. — who was black and, according to the police, not known to be affiliated with gangs — and a simmering unease about illegal immigration have unleashed a swell of opposition to the city’s hands-off policy toward immigration enforcement.

The Los Angeles Police Department was one of the first in the nation — nearly three decades ago — to institute a procedure that prohibits officers from initiating contact with people for the sole purpose of learning their immigration status. The procedure, known as Special Order 40, was designed in part to reassure illegal immigrants who historically had shied from reporting crimes and assisting police investigations.

But in the context of contemporary immigration politics, the procedure is now perceived in black neighborhoods and beyond as a roadblock to using immigration laws as a tool against Latino gang violence. A push to reverse the procedure, led by Mr. Shaw and viewed by many as a symbol of deeper racial conflicts in South Los Angeles, has inflamed tensions between many blacks and Hispanic immigrants, groups long resentful of each other as shifting demographics and a smattering of racially motivated killings have racked South Los Angeles.

“I think you can assume the resentments are pretty widespread,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights activist and lawyer. “There has been a huge turnover in a 20-year period, and so the tensions get expressed in a lot of other ways. The African-American community is feeling under siege, and it is always easier to strike out at the ‘other.’ “

[snip]

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If my schedule will cooperate, I’m going to try to sort through the various views of Special Order 40 and where LA ought to go with it from here. This includes the points of view of LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, City Councilman Dennis Zine and his proposal to amend SO40, the proposal contained in Jamiel’s Law (which is just a little different than what Zine is suggesting), the view taken by the Police Protective League, which in general supports Zine’s proposal.

In the meantime, take a look at this opinion piece in Sunday’s LA Times in which researcher Monica Varsanyi tells what 450 police chiefs across the country said when asked how they feel about cops doing immigration enforcement.

And be sure to read the compilation in this morning’s LA Times Opinion in which 40 “prominent Angelenos”—chosen from one end of the political spectrum to the other—sound off on Special Order 40.

UPDATE: I missed linking to Rick Orlov’s column on the issue, which is at least fun to read, while advancing the dialog

Here’s pieces of his Bratton quote:

(ABOUT ZINE & HIS MOTION)

“He has not had a conversation with anyone, including my leadership team. He talks so much about being a reserve officer, he should go to his commanding officer for clarification.”

(ABOUT SO 40 IN GENERAL)

“I don’t understand what’s so difficult. We don’t ask people their immigration status if they are not breaking the law. Once they are arrested, we check to make sure they are in the country legally.”

“Our priority is going after gangbangers,” Bratton said. “Once they are arrested, we check their immigration status and if they are in the country illegally, turn it over to ICE.”

I love when Bratton gets on his high horse. (I’m not being ironic here. I actually do.)

And here’s Councilman Dennis Zine:

“This chief doesn’t think anything needs to be changed,” Zine said. “Ask any 10 officers on the street and they will tell you they don’t know what to do with Special Order 40. They feel they can’t do anything.”

Which suggests that Bill Bratton’s right; it’s not a legal issue, it’s a training issue. The problem isn’t with Special Order 40, it’s with the rank and file’s knowledge of it—-meaning the training and oversight on the matter is faulty.

But….although I’ve taken a POV on the issue before, I’m willing to concede that its a complex matter with various valid perspectives to consider. So I’ll continue to gather puzzle pieces for further discussion.

PS: I’ve put in a call to the LAPPL for clarification of their stand. Back with more on that tomorrow or the next day.

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After watching a shockingly hideous Democratic debate last night (What is wrong< with Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous????)…..let’s turn to the local:

Wednesday night I was on Warren Olney’sWhich Way LA? with Councilwoman Janice Hahn (plus LA Gang Czar Jeff Carr, and activist Charlotte Austin-Jordan, a woman who’s lost 2 kids to gang violence), and, in the course of the show, Hahn made an important promise.

The show had to do with the mayor’s gang plan introduced on Monday at the State of the City speech, which came on the heels of last week’s decision by the city council-–after endless turf battles—to move all of LA’s gang intervention and prevention money and programs to the mayor’s office, as had been strongly recommended by City Controller Laura Chick.

Hahn was on the show in particularly to discuss her support of a November ballot measure that would ask LA residents to pay three dollars a person per month toward gang violence prevention and intervention programs, a tax that could generate an additional $30 million a year. (On Monday, Hahn and Councilwomen Jan Perry and Wendy Greuel announced that they’d joined together to form what they are calling Mothers Against Gang Violence in order to push the three-buck a person ballot proposal.)

Certainly, with the city facing a $400 million deficit this year, an additional $30 million more for the desperately needed programs is a great idea- –especially now that we’ve got the beginnings of a coherent gang plan that will be administered under one roof. But, Hahn’s fundraising gambit begged a question: would politics as usual still call the shots should the measure be passed?

In other words: now that the City Council has been boxed into handing over control of the city’s gang money, would Janice Hahn try to yank that new $30 mil into the council’s pocket? Or would she put turf wars aside and hand it all over to the mayor?

Earlier in the week, I’d discussed the issue with one of Hahn’s aides, and he told me that he honestly didn’t know.

So toward the end of the Wednesday night’s show, I brought up the issue and said I hoped that the Councilwoman would do the latter. At that juncture, Warren Olney jumped it and asked her directly.

There was a pause, and then Janice Hahn, to her credit, showed leadership and made the right commitment.

“Absolutely,” she said.

So there you have it. After two years of turf wars over gangs….actual progress.

NOTE: LA City Beat has an interesting interview with Laura Chick about gangs and city hall turf wars.

ALSO, you can listen to the show here.

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PS: What kind of person asks a presidential candidate questions like: “Does Jeremiah Wright love America as much as you?”

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NOTE: I’LL BE DISCUSSING ALL THIS along with Gang Czar Jeff Carr and some others on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA tonight at 7 pm, KCRW, 89.9.) Just heard it’s been preempted by a special. May air tomorrow. Will let you know. (UPDATE: was just interviewed by KNX News, which will likely be on tomorrow morning.)

Maybe there was Kool-aid in my coffee yesterday, but for me this was the State of the City speech where Antonio Villaraigosa got a lot of it right—at least when it came to the gang policy part of the address, which was, as expected, the speech’s centerpiece.

The set-up was corny. Villaraigosa walked to the podium at 5 pm yesterday at the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters to the strains of Stevie Wonder’s Living for the City. He exited to Marvin Gaye’s Aint No Mountain High Enough. In between, he talked about traffic, the environment, education, law enforcement, summer jobs for youth, hate crimes, potholes, and how to solve the city’s record-breaking budget woes. (The LA Times has a rundown here.)

But gangs and public safety was the main event, and the primary broadstrokes were the following:

1. The city will focus on twelve gang reduction zones And, while we don’t have the money to really blanket those hot spot neighborhoods with programs and services, the mayor has freed up some bucks in the hope of doing some smart and focused prevention and intervention work.

Last year there were eight Gang Reduction Zones (or GRZs as they call ‘em for short). This year there will be twelve. The difference is that, last year, the GRZs were primarily places for law enforcement and related agencies to focus their attention. This year, the city is to allot $1.5 million dollars in prevention and intervention money for each of those zones. That’s not a lot of funding. But if those $1.5 mil chunks are allocated intelligently, not politically, they can make a difference.

Nobody who’s really studied the issue doubts that the target zone approach is a big piece of the prevention/intervention puzzle—even if all the resources aren’t yet there to do it correctly. Every gang reduction report in the last two years—from Connie Rice’s, to Laura Chick’s to the sheriff’s report, to the recommendations prepared for the LA Board of Sups—have emphasized the need for blanketing certain neighborhoods with resources in order to begin to change the “ecology” of the city’s poorest and most violent communities. If one bothered to read it, that’s what Connie Rice’s report said in it’s 100 plus (slightly mind-numbing) pages.

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Well it’s settled, signed sealed and delivered, written in stone…and thoroughly peed on by all who felt the need to make their mark on the thing:

Just before 1 pm today, the Los Angeles City Council voted to officially take all the city’s gang prevention and intervention programs and move the whole kit and kaboodle to the mayor’s office for oversight.

In act of transparent face-saving, Councilman Tony Cardenas made the needed motion using glowing terms that suggested that the idea of shifting control of the programs from the City Council to Villaraigosa’s office was his all along—never mind the fact that he’s been fighting the idea tooth, nail and press release ever since Controller Laura Chick made the transfer recommendation in her February report.

It was Controller Laura’s contention (and Connie Rice’s before her) that having the programs strewn among various city agencies made adequate oversight impossible (hence things like the No Guns scandal). Chick further pointed out that, if the city’s budget-challenged gang funds were to be used effectively, they needed to be consolidated under a single roof, and the most logical roof was that of the mayor’s office.

Cardenas, who has positioned himself as the Council’s gang guy (and despite his annoying behavior seems to genuinely care about the issue), is the chair of the Ad-Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development, a body that has managed in 2 years to do little more than spawn a gang intervention subcommittee, which itself spent nearly a full 11 months settling on a definition of gang intervention—and not a very good one at that. (I say this with all kindness and affection since some of the gang intervention players I most like and respect are on this $#$&^%$#* subcommittee, but too many cooks…..yadda, yadda, yadda.)

Yet, despite the fact that his own committee was displaying increasing signs of terminal dysfunction, Cardenas refused to cede power (and accompanying budget) to the mayor.

A City Hall source told me today that City Council Prez Eric Garcetti was the main person who managed to sit Cardenas down and slap some sense into him about abandoning his increasingly indefensible turf battle.

There was also another teensy, weensy event on the horizon that prodded Cardenas to cease his non-stop roadblocking. And that was the inconvenient fact that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reportedly intends to make gang violence reduction the center piece of his State of the City message to be delivered on Monday. And once the mayor put forth his own gang plan, Cardenas territorial foot-dragging would look more foolish than ever.

Faced with the aforementioned realities, yesterday Cardenas said the equivalent of “maybe. I’ll think about it,” as David Zahniser at the LA Times reported here.

But, what David Z did not spell out is that Cardenas demanded a 18-22 month “sunset clause,” which would have meant that at the end of 18 months or two years, even if the programs were working just swimmingly under the mayor, they would automatically revert back to council control.

In response to this so-called compromise Chick rightly said, .Oh, he-e-ell, no (or words to that effect)

So today Cardenas finally read the political graffiti on the wall, got religion, and embraced he relevant motion that authorized a transfer of power (with a review but not a Sunset clause), as if it was his baby all along.

“The Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development has been meeting regularly for over two years carefully reviewing all gang intervention, prevention, re-entry and youth development programs [and so on and so on and so on]….” began the motion.

“We have come to the conclusion that it is necessary for the Los Angeles City Council to move toward the immediate restructuring and consolidation of gang intervention……. [blah, blah, blah]….”authorize the Mayor to begin the consolidation of…”

You get the picture.

In other words, Tony Cardenas did the right thing for the wrong reasons. But that’s okay. With gang members still daily blowing horrific holes in the lives of LA families and communities and throwing away their own futures in the process, we’ll take this much needed move any way we can get it.

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PS: The shape of new agency at the mayor’s office has yet to be outlined. Will LA Gang Czar Jeff Carr run the thing? While smart, sincere, honorable and knowledgeable, Carr has yet to distinguish himself as the savvy political player needed to lead such an endeavor, so some feel that having a strong administrator to support Carr’s field and inter-agency liaison work might be a good combo.

Likely we’ll know more on Monday. So stay tuned.

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On Wednesday, the LA City Council passed a resolution that asks Federal law enforcement to mind its own damn business when it comes to medical marijuana.

More accurately, the resolution supports the state in its push to get the Feds to back off. Last August, the Council tried on its own when it passed the an ordinance to regulate and oversee the medical marijuana trade in LA, and politely asked the DEA to stop launching 100-agent raids on lawful clinics. But the DEA blithely ignored the request and kept on raiding the marijuana clinics anyway. “We’re just enforcing the law,” DEA spokeswoman Sara Pullen told me when I reported on the issue last summer for both WLA and the LA Weekly.. (I believe I mentioned to Pullen that I could personally point out a couple of meth-dealer locations, the raiding of which might be a better use of her agency’s time, but she declined to take me up on the offer.)

With Wednesday’s resolution, sponsored by Dennis Zine, Janice Hahn, and Bill Rosendahl, (the lone No vote from Greig Smith) the Council is trying a new strategy by calling for support of California State Senate Joint Resolution 20. The state resolution asks the President and Congress to enact legislation to require the DEA and all Federal agencies and departments to “respect the compassionate use laws of states”. SJR 20 also requests Federal law enforcement to enforce Federal medical marijuana laws in a manner consistent with the laws of the State of California.

California Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was passed 12 years ago, yet still the DEA continues to raid clinics, and arrest patients, although the charges rarely stick.

As recently as last month, I talked to a med marijuana patient who, in the course of a routine traffic stop, was asked by two LA sheriff’s deputies if he had any drugs or alcohol in his car. The man had just come from purchasing his month’s supply and answered honestly. Yes, he said, he did have a small amount of marijuana, but he had a prescription for the stuff and handed the officers both his just-purchased weed and his official state card. (Yeah, the guy was a real patient with a real medical condition, not a scammer just wanting to smoke out) The cops confiscated the weed and wrote up a misdemeanor citation meaning the guy had to take off work and show up in court. The judge promptly dropped the case as soon as the proper paperwork was produced. “Oh, yeah we get these all the time,” the bailiff told the man, explaining that the judge usually dropped the charges forthwith if the prescription was legit.

Meanwhile we have overcrowded courtrooms and a state, county and city budget crisis. So does this seem like a good use of your tax dollars?
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I don’t want to seem like a killjoy, but I don’t think asking politely is quite the comprehensive gang violence-reduction strategy we’ve been calling for.

Yesterday the Los Angeles City Council asked residents to stop killing each other for a minute or two and instead to promote peace and talk about the causes of violence — for at least 40 hours.

The “period to promote peace, justice and non-violence” will begin at exactly 6:01 p.m. on Friday and end at 10:01 a.m. on Sunday—dates that coincide with the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Okay, nothing wrong with that, per se, but some of us were looking for something…meatier.

Evidently the talk-don’t kill thingy was originally proposed by activists Earl Ofari Hutchinson and Eddie Jones to be a straight up ban on murder. As blogger Zuma Dogg rightly put it “I thought murder was already banned in Los Angeles.”

Uh, yeah.

Opposing activist Joe Hicks also gave the whole idea a large raspberry: “It’s just an incredibly silly notion that you can do some kind of symbolic maneuver for 40 hours that the street terrorists that are killing people are going to notice that and say, `Well, I can hold off for a few hours here. Forty-five hours in, I can get busy again,”’ Hicks told KTLA.

According to David Z. over at the LA Times, the LA County Board of Sups passed its own resolution, declaring a moratorium on violence during the same 40-hour period.

Call me boringly literal-minded, but frankly, I’d have really preferred that the Council instead acted on Laura Chick’s gang violence report, which would put into place actual, you know, programs. (It’s been a month and a half and counting on Laura’s, a year on Connie’s.) But yesterday, it seemed, it was politics as usual meaning only purely symbolic actions were on the agenda.

I think the Daily News has it right. The LA public has to start screaming “NO” to politics and keep screaming until the Council gets it, grows a backbone, and says NO to Tony Cardenas’ political stalling.

Write letters. Make phone calls. Send emails.

Dear fellow Angelenos, as we say in pre-school: use your words. Loudly.

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Yesterday a press release went out announcing that the new “Countywide Gang and Violence Reduction Strategy” plan, which was supposed to have been delivered to the LA County Board of Supervisors today, is being sent back to the drawing board for another month. According to one of the Sups who’s seen the damned thing, the plan is “too vague”—hence the delay.

Too vague? Right. And what fabulously specific strategy do the Supervisors imagine this new report will outline that has not already been covered by:

1. Connie Rice’s half-million dollar, LA-City-Council-ordered Advancement Project Gang Activity Reduction Strategy report?

2. Mayor Villaraigosa’s Gang Reduction Strategy report?
3. Laura Chick’s half-million dollar “Blueprint for a Comprehensive Citywide Anti-Gang
Strategy” report?

But like it or not, it appears we’ll have said plan in another month (which likely means it’ll be more expensive. Those report-making folks don’t come cheap).

In case you’re curious, the stated purpose of the forthcoming LA County report is to suggest a “holistic method of combating gang violence, bringing together a host of county departments to suppress violence while simultaneously attacking its causes.”

Alrighty then.

The report in its draft form says little about the specifics of this “holistic method,” however we do know that it intends to ask for $500,000 to pay “consultants” who will provide “technical assistance” during a proposed six-month “planning phase.”

Report. Consult. Plan. Rinse. Repeat.

In fairness, Chief Bratton, Sheriff Baca, City Gang Czar Jeff Carr, LAUSD Superintendent David Brewer and others have signed on for the ride with this report in some kind of desperate attempt to get something going that addresses the gang problem from a community-wide public health perspective, as opposed to leaving everything to law enforcement, and a scattered group of prevention/intervention programs that have no coherent form of uber coordination.

But just to make sure we’re all on the same happy page here, let’s review what has thus far been put into motion with the other three plans, all of which have similar agendas:

Nothing.

Zip.

Zero.

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In an era of dire city and state budget slashing, LA City Controller Laura Chick released a report today that shows how the LAPD could get at least 500 more officers out from behind desks and on to the street by filling those same positions with civilian employees—who, as it turns out, cost an average of $29,000 a year less than sworn officers. Some of the positions include public information officers, front desk and security staff, court liaisons and the like.

This is one of those cases where no one’s been thinking clearly, it seems. Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton have been, quite rightly, trying to hold on to the money needed to hire additional police officers for our drastically underpoliced city. But they are doing so in the face of budget amputations that will be draconian for other city agencies.

(For instance, unless something changes, it has been reported that with $2 million cut from the city library system, LA’s libraries will be unable to buy any new books. None. At all.)

But, during all this push for cop hiring, there has been a freeze on civilian hiring in the department, meaning that more and more cops are behind more and more desks, which is just dumb, said Chick in press conference today (although I don’t believe she used quite those words.) Chick pointed out that step one needs to be an unfreeze on civilian hires, so that the uniformed men and women can be moved out from behind counters and desks and on to the street—which is where most of them would prefer to be anyway.

“We do not need hundreds of police officers, at a cost of $30,000 a year more than a properly trained civilian, performing administrative functions that do not require carrying a firearm. While Chief Bratton has made major progress in deploying our officers more effectively, this report challenges us to fully engage in smarter 21st Century policing,” said Chick.

UPDATE: The LA Times’ Joel Rubin has taken the time to wade through the finer details of the 200 plus-page report and has a very good rundown here.

Bratton is reportedly down for it. And anyone with any sense should be too. The union has not weighed in yet. But we trust that they will see this correctly. ( Right guys?)

UPDATE: Okay, Tim Sands did release a message that states (I think) that he mostly agrees: with Chick, but it is so cautious and pretzeled that it’s difficult to tell.

This is the second smart report in a row from Chick. (Her gang report, on which there has STILL been no action, was very good and sensible as well.)

GO LAURA!

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Kevin Roderick at LA Observed posted a link to this Op Ed that ran in the Long Beach Press Telegram on Tuesday. I don’t want to let it go away without notice. It’s written by Dr. Mauricio Heilbron Jr. who is chief of surgery at Little Company of Mary Hospital in San Pedro and a trauma surgeon at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach. Around 10 PM this past Sunday night on a Long Beach residential street, a 20-year-old man and an 11-year–old boy were on their way to get some donuts when two gangsters ran up on them and sprayed them with bullets. The 20-year-old made it. The 11-year-old, a sixth grader named Jose Luis Garcia Bailey, did not.

Dr. Heilbron operated on the kid in a desperate attempt to save him. When he couldn’t, he came home, kissed his own five-year old son…and wrote an opinion piece, which he sent off to the paper. The Press-Telegram wisely ran it immediately. I’ve posted some excerpts below.

As you read, it would be nice to know that our city leaders have mended their quarrels and were moving ahead to resolve the year-long stalemate on a gang plan for our City of Angels.
But they haven’t.

It would also be nice to know that the federal government has moved to restore the $20 million dollars it used to allocate to Los Angeles and other urban centers to fund jobs for at risk youth and tutoring programs for kids who were in danger of not graduating from high school. But it hasn’t. That money has been yanked since 2001, and never replaced as the Bush administration developed priorities it deemed more pressing.

(Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has a 14 billion dollar monthly burn rate. And, no, I’m not going to stop repeating these Iraq cost figures. )

Here’s how the Op Ed opens.. You can read the whole heartbreaking thing here. Please do.

I just finished sewing up a dead boy.

I pronounced him dead at 10:34 p.m. Sunday. It’s now 11:27 p.m. I know I won’t be able to get to sleep for a long time. I feel like I shouldn’t.

I’m a trauma surgeon at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach. I was sulking in my call room on Palm Sunday because I missed yet another important moment in my 5-year-old son’s life. A tarantula crawled all over him at his best friend’s birthday party, and my wife had e-mailed me a glorious photo of this big, hairy arachnid on my son’s face. The phone rings, and I am summoned to the ER for a “gunshot wound to the chest.” That’s bad, but around these parts, sadly not a surprise. Then the ER secretary adds, “… in a 12-year-old.” That changes things a bit. As I hurry down to the Emergency Department, I play out several horrific scenarios in my head - a mental exercise in preparation for what certainly was to be a difficult situation…..

“This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that ….those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids…” – Barack Obama, March 18, 2008.

Dr. Mauricio Heilbron, got just that, felt just that. It would be nice if public policy—local and national— admitted it too.

UPDATE: Here’s a follow-up in the Long Beach PT, with a video.

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