HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES AT 25

“If you want to change the world, change the metaphor,” said Father Greg Boyle, quoting Bertrand Russell, when he delivered the final speech of the evening at Homeboy Industries’ 25th birthday celebration on Saturday night.

Twenty-five years ago, Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries— before it was Homeboy Industries—changed the metaphor. Rather than demonizing young gang members, Boyle practiced compassion and what he calls kinship. He said that gangs and gang violence were symptoms of “a lethal absence of hope. So you want to infuse young people with hope, when it seems that hope is foreign.”

So Fr. Greg did—and does. And he built an organization to reflect that same sense of compassion and the belief that “we belong to each other.” Lives were changed—and not just those of the homeboys and the homegirls, but of others in the city, many of whom came to celebrate on Saturday night.

Mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel was there at the party (shown below with former homegirl, my pal, Frances Aguilar), as was Hilda Solis, Sheriff Lee Baca and other elected officials and policy makers. Eric Garcetti did not attend, but he sent his dad Gil did in his stead.

Happy 25th Birthday Homeboy!

JAILS SUPERVISORS HAD BRIEFING MONDAY ON “RETALIATION”

Newly promoted custody commander Marvin Washington called a meeting on Monday of jail supervisors, including those from OSJ, to talk about the issue of retaliation.

(OSJ is the unit in which deputies Mike Rathbun and James Sexton have been working.)

Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore confirmed the meeting, saying that Sheriff Baca has long been committed to a firm no retaliation policy, “And the message is finally getting through loud and clear; that you can’t do that!”

About the Sexton/Rathbun lawsuit, Whitmore said that the department is “cooperating fully with the federal investigation,” but also reiterated what he’d earlier told the LA Times, that Sexton and Rathburn “were not retaliated against.”

DO WE STILL HAVE THE RIGHT TO A SPEEDY TRIAL? NOT SO’S YOU’D NOTICE. (DEAR SCOTUS, YOU’RE NOT HELPING.)

Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic has a column on the topic of not-terribly-speedy trials, which are now the norm. His doorway into the topic is the matter of a case involving a 7-year wait for trial in Louisiana, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear, and then, this week, decided….um….maybe not.

Here’s a clip from the story:

There has been for decades now an ideological split at the United States Supreme Court over the Sixth Amendment’s right to a speedy trial — one of the most basic of due process rights. Court conservatives have successfully limited the scope of the right by justifying and forgiving unconscionable delays in bringing criminal defendants to trial. And the Court’s progressives, outnumbered now for a generation, have complained not just about the unjust results of those cases but about the indigent defense systems which have fostered trial delays in the first place.

And so it is again. On Monday, in a case styled Boyer v. Louisiana, none of the Court’s five conservative justices were willing to come to the aid of a man who had to wait seven years between his arrest and his trial because of a “funding crisis” within Louisiana’s indigent defense program. In fact, those five justices refused even to render a ruling on the merits of the matter, instead deciding after oral argument and all the briefing in the case that their earlier decision to accept the matter for review was “improvident.”

It was left to Justice Samuel Alito to defend the Court’s inaction. The long delay in bringing Jonathan Edward Boyer to trial on murder charges was not just the fault of Louisiana and its infamously underfunded and understaffed indigent defense program, Justice Alito concluded. “['T]he record shows that the single largest share of the delay in this case was the direct result of defense requests for continuances, that other defense motions caused substantial additional delay, and that much of the rest of the delay was caused by events beyond anyone’s control,” he wrote. That was enough to deny Boyer’s claims.

Read the rest.

THE FEDS TOUR MCJ AND TWIN TOWERS

Officials from the U.S. Attorney’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI are conducting a tour of Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers on Tuesday. According to the notification passed around to custody personnel, the tour is expected to last for approximately 8 hours, and the feds will be interviewing random inmates and videoing certain areas of the jails.

The tour is reportedly a part of preparations for an upcoming Civil* Grand Jury Inquiry.

LASD spokesman, Steve Whitmore, admitted he was not aware of the tour, but said that the department “welcomed” such inquiries and saw them as beneficial.

*NOTE: We took the designation “civil” grand jury from the LASD internal memo we obtained but, upon reflection, we now suspect that the word was simply incorrect verbiage that we unwittingly repeated, and that the department supervisor who wrote the memo meant the latest federal grand jury to be convened in the ongoing and ever-expanding FBI investigations. If we get further clarification, we’ll let you know.

AFTER DORNER, 40 OTHER COPS WANT THEIR CASES REVIEWED

I’m presuming you’ve seen this story, by the LA Times Joel Rubin, but just in case anyone missed it, about the 40 former LAPD officers who believe their respective cases out to be reviewed.

The news for those officers dismissed who believe their cases are wroth of review is both good and bad.

Here’s a clip that explains the situation:

In the wake of Christopher Dorner’s claim that his firing from the Los Angeles Police Department was a result of corruption and bias, more than three dozen other fired LAPD cops want department officials to review their cases.

The 40 requests, which were tallied by the union that represents rank-and-file officers, have come in the two months since Dorner sought revenge for his 2009 firing by targeting police officers and their families in a killing rampage that left four dead and others injured.

Dorner’s allegations of a department plagued by racism and special interests left Chief Charlie Beck scrambling to stem a growing chorus of others who condemned Dorner’s violence but said his complaints about the department were accurate. To assuage concerns, Beck vowed to re-examine the cases of other former officers who believed they had been wrongly expelled from the force.

Now, details of how the department plans to make good on Beck’s offer are becoming clear. And, for at least some of the disgruntled ex-officers, they will be disappointing.

In letters to those wishing to have their case reviewed, department officials explain that the city’s charter, which spells out the authority granted to various public officials, prevents the police chief from opening new disciplinary proceedings for an officer fired more than three years ago.

“Therefore the Department does not have the power to reinstate officers whose terminations occurred more than three years ago,” wrote Gerald Chaleff, the LAPD’s special assistant for constitutional policing. “You are being informed of this to forestall any misconceptions about the power of the department.”

Yep, that last would be the the bad news.

In the past three and a half years that I’ve reported on the Alex Sanchez federal murder conspiracy case, I have repeatedly linked to the ongoing write-ups on the case by Tom Diaz.

I did this because—as I’ve mentioned in every post pertaining to the case— Alex Sanchez is friend and, even though I have done my best to give an honest, rigorously factual account of the events of the case as they have unfolded, my reporting cannot help but be affected by the fact that I have always believed Alex to be innocent of the charges arrayed against him.

Tom Diaz, however, has pretty much held the opposite view to mine from the get go. So I linked to him as a countervailing voice, figuring that since I leaned so resolutely in the direction of the defense, he would present the prosecution’s POV—and do so from an informed perspective, due to his background in the law and his extensive contacts in the law enforcement community, both federal and local.

In case you’re not familiar with his name, Tom Diaz is an attorney, author, journalist (a former assistant managing editor at the conservative Washington Times), He is also the former lead Congressional counsel on counterterrorism and firearms, has written extensively on transnational gangs, Mara Salvatrucha—or MS13—among them, and on firearms (He is a former competitive shooter.) and he is now the Senior Policy Analyst for the Violence Prevention Center. AND he’s a occasional talking head on news shows whenever somebody with his expertise is required.

Diaz and I have discussed the case on several occasions, most often agreeing to disagree on some of the more salient points.

However, after the most recent news broke about the Feds dropping charges against Sanchez (all the while assuring everyone they intended to refile) Diaz read through any and all of the available legal material on all the matter (at least anything that wasn’t under some kind of seal), at the end of which time he evidently had a change of heart and mind.

As a consequence, over the weekend, Diaz issued a very public apology to Alex Sanchez.

Here are some clips from his post.

It will be four years in June since the United States government shocked the world and threw a legal fragmentation grenade into the home of Alex Sanchez. On June 24, 2009 Sanchez was arrested and charged under the federal racketeering law popularly known as RICO.

The essence of the federal charge was that Sanchez—an anti-gang activist whose prominence at the time cannot be exaggerated—was secretly continuing his membership in the huge and violent Latino gang, MS-13, a transnational racketeering organization. In plain words, Sanchez was accused in the indictment of plotting, as a boss or “shot caller,” to kill another gang member.

The government recently dropped the charges against Sanchez.

But the great, gray, anonymous and tight-lipped agglomerations of suits that is “the government” collectively muttered under its breath that it is going to “review” the evidence and likely will indict Sanchez again. They’ll be back. The prosecution asked the judge to let it take its embarrassingly shredded case back to a grand jury.

[BIG SNIP]

With the conspiracy to murder charge toasted like last week’s Cinnabon, perhaps the genius bar at the U.S. Attorney’s office can assign half of the federal agents in Southern California to follow Sanchez around and nail his ass on a charge of felonious crossing against a “don’t walk” sign.

Sanchez is due more than one apology, and I’ll start with mine.

I’ve followed this story for three years with a series of caustic and skeptical posts. The trouble is, I was skeptical about the wrong party. Although I have always been careful to note Alex Sanchez’s claim of innocence, looking back over past posts, it is clear that I had a grain, nay a fist-sized rock, of salt stuck in my throat.

My blind spot was that I simply could not believe that the government would indict a man as well known and, frankly, beloved as Alex Sanchez unless the government case was locked up tight. As I have written many times, you better be damned sure you’re right if you indict Mother Teresa. I also knew that the government has a barracks full of informants and “flipped” gangsters, so they must have had solid evidence against Sanchez.

My bad.

I am sorry. I apologize to Alex Sanchez and to those who had faith in him. Because it now appears that the U.S. government, with all the power and resources available to it, screwed up in such a way that assistant U.S. Attorneys and some law enforcement agents ought to be fired, or at best reassigned to wear out their shoe leather on student loan collection work.

[SNIP]

How could the federal government—with its awesome access to technology and expertise—get the single most important piece of evidence in the only meaningful charge against Sanchez wrong? Namely, the phone calls in which the operative facts were all about who was Talking to whom about killing whom?

You tell me. But they did. And now they grudgingly admit it.

The government’s expert witness, it turns out, completely misidentified a participant in the supposed plot to kill phone calls. And when the real participant surfaced, he blew up the government expert’s theory of the case.

After Sanchez’s new lawyer filed a motion to throw the case out, the U.S. Attorney’s office got some new lawyers on the case to reply and fess up…sort of….

[SNIP]

All the basic documents in this courtly exchange are sealed. But one juicy little piece of sizzling meat somehow escaped the Czar’s censor. This is an extract from Alex Sanchez’s defense reply to the government’s request for a do-over:

The government has not filed an opposition to the Motion to Dismiss and has avoided addressing the factual arguments therein: that the government presented false evidence to the grand jury issuing the indictment; that a government prosecutor lied to the grand jury in subsequent proceedings; that the government failed, for more than three (3) years, to take any action to formally acknowledge or attempt to correct an indictment based on false evidence; and that government prosecutors withheld from Mr. Sanchez favorable and exculpatory evidence.

(There’s a lot I’m leaving out, so read the whole thing.)

When I spoke to Tom on the phone Sunday afternoon, he reiterated that he found the case very disturbing. He was bothered for example that, after the central elements of their case had blown up, the feds continued to “hide behind a forest of sealed files.”

“You want to think that prosecutors are seeking justice with a case, not career advancement,” Diaz said.

With Sanchez’ case he said he was no longer at all sure, and was beginning suspect instead “a massive miscarriage of justice.”

More to come after Sanchez’s hearing later this month.

An interesting story just popped up in the Daily Breeze regarding Paul Tanka, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s second in command, who has evidently pulled the plug on running for a third term as mayor for the city of Gardena. According to the Breeze’s Sandy Mazza, Tanaka filed papers to run last month, then yanked them in the last few days.

Here’s a clip from the story:

Gardena Mayor Paul Tanaka announced this week that he is dropping his bid for a third term and will support his main challenger in the March election.

Though Tanaka’s name will still appear on the ballot, he plans to cede the office to three-term Councilwoman Rachel Johnson.

If elected mayor, Johnson would be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the post.

Tanaka, who is facing some major controversies in his professional career as second-in-command of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, had previously said he would not seek re-election because of his demanding work schedule.

But he filed papers to run last month when it appeared no one else on the City Council would seek the office. Resident Philip J. Dent-Ferrell is also vying for the seat.

Tanaka said he had encouraged Johnson to run but she declined. In a letter addressed to her this week, he said he was surprised to learn she filed nomination papers.

The position of Gardena mayor is a four year term. Tanaka was elected for a second term in 2009.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT….

ACCORDING TO FBI FILES, THE FEDS WERE AFRAID THAT OCCUPY LA WOULD JOIN UP WITH “VIOLENT” CITIZENS UPSET BY LA JAIL ABUSES

Over the holiday weekend, LAIST’s Emma Gallegos decided to cruise through some just released FBI docs relating to the monitoring of the Occupy movement, and turned up this curious concern that was evidently keeping the feds up at night.

(File under #WorryingAbouttheWrongThing)

Here’s a clip:

The nonprofit Partnership For Civil Justice Fund obtained redacted documents through a FOIA request. The group’s executive director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard said in a statement, “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.”
We took a look at some of the documents that dealt with local groups affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The FBI took note of the disturbing reports that sheriff’s deputies were beating inmates at the county (p 72). In this report, however, the FBI’s concern wasn’t about the inmates, but how news reports of these beatings could be riling up citizens who were riding public transit.

Anyway, there’s more, so read on.

Okay, I’m now going back to my undisclosed location.

A Federal Grand Jury is now investigating whether certain members of the LA County Sheriff’s Department moved FBI informant, Anthony Brown, from place to place inside the county jail system, giving him phony names and fake inmate numbers, all done specifically to keep him away from his Fed handlers. A convicted bank robber, Brown was reportedly gathering information for the Feds about possible deputy misconduct inside the jails.

The LA Times’ Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard report that Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Whitmore explains the whole thing, saying they were only doing this for the inmate’s own good, and in response to his request:

Here’s the relevant clip:

Sheriff’s officials insist that they were not hiding the informant, Anthony Brown, from the FBI but protecting him from other deputies.

Department spokesman, Steve Whitmore said Brown wrote a letter after his identity was discovered, complaining that he feared for his life and felt abandoned by the FBI.

“He was frightened not of inmates but of deputies because he was snitching on deputies,” Whitmore said. “We were moving him around to protect him from any kind of retaliation.”

Yes, well….our sources say otherwise. In fact one of our sources told us he has direct knowledge of what went on because he was part of the team of deputies ordered to participate in the hiding of Anthony Brown. He said unequivocally that there was no ambiguity whatsoever about what he and his fellow team members had been instructed to do:

“Our job was to keep this inmate away from the FBI,” he said.

Moreoever, according to our source, the supervisor who ordered the deputies to hide Brown was Lt. Greg Thompson, the former head of Custody Investigative Services Unit (CISU)—AKA the intelligence-gathering and investigative unit inside the jail system.

(Thompson, if you’ll remember, was the lieutenant accused earlier this year of interfering with a criminal investigation that implicated a deputy working in the jails of wrongdoing. In that instance, Thompson allegedly took the report on the deputy’s actions and, instead of turning it over to the department’s Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau (ICIB) where it belonged, instead gave the unredacted report to the deputy being investigated—among others—thus blowing the investigation entirely.)

According to our source, Thompson announced to the team tasked with hiding the FBI informant, that he, Thompson, “was ordered to do so by Paul Tanaka.”

“He said, ‘It’s our job to keep the FBI our of our jail,’ or, [if they come in] to make it as unpleasant as possible for them.’”

Since our informant admitted he participated in hiding Brown, in talking to us he was acting against self-interest.

However, like so many Sheriff’s Department members who have talked to WitnessLA (or to the LA Times) at risk to themselves, this informant said he contacted us because he was sick of the corruption.

More in this vein after we come back in January.

In the meantime, read the story in the Times for additional details.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Although we keep trying to be on break, we’ll have one more story tomorrow on an unrelated topic that, again, we couldn’t ignore. (After that, we’re fervently hoping for a series of nice boring news cycles.)

Over the weekend, another chapter surfaced in one of the many perplexing sagas that continue to unspool at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

The latest installment pertains to Captain Bernice Abram, the head of the department’s Carson station who has been on administrative leave since mid-April 2011, after she was reportedly caught on tape warning Dion Grim, the alleged head of a drug-trafficking ring, of some impending police surveillance. The “surveillance” was in fact part of a sting operation—-which had been specifically designed to catch Abram in the act of passing police info to the 36-year-old Grim.

Abram also reportedly used her position to get Grim and his sister out of various low-rent legal scrapes, tickets and more, by leaning on various subordinates—in one case reportedly to the point of attempting to discredit a department deputy who was investigating Grim and his friends.

Now, 19 months later, according to a report in the LA Times, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has declined to charge Abram with anything. In the case of the ticket fixing, et al, the statute of limitations on the various incidents had simply run out.

As for the more serious potential crimes of warning an alleged drug dealer of law enforcement activity that might adversely affect him, the DA’s office said they couldn’t prove that Abrams knew that Grim was engaged in illegal activities. Nevermind that in August 2011, four months after Abram was relieved of duty, Grim and fourteen of his alleged associates were arrested after a 2-year-long multi-agency investigation into two inter-state drug trafficking rings, one allegedly headed by Dion.

Here are the basics of this maddening tale as outlined in an excellent story by the LA Times’ Robert Faturechi.

The trap was set. All that was left for Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators to do was wait and see if the unthinkable was true.

Suspicions had grown that one of their colleagues — a respected captain with more than 150 deputies under her command — was funneling secret information to an alleged Compton drug trafficker. So investigators sent out a phony plan as bait, according to records and interviews, detailing their intention to do surveillance on a house near the suspected trafficker’s home.

A few minutes after receiving the fake plans, Capt. Bernice Abram was heard on a phone tap placing a call to Dion Grim, the suspected drug dealer.

Authorities listened in as she tipped him off about the location of the planned surveillance. Stay away, she warned.

That day, in April 2011, sheriff’s officials placed Abram on leave, and for more than a year afterward her ties to Grim were investigated. Prosecutors recently declined to file charges against Abram, saying they couldn’t prove the captain knew that Grim, a documented gang member, was involved in illegal activities.

But a district attorney’s memo explaining that decision provides the most detailed description yet of how the Sheriff’s Department came to believe one of its up-and-coming leaders was betraying the agency and shows the efforts officials pursued to prove it. The memo also documents several occasions when Abram appeared to use her authority to help Grim avoid law enforcement scrutiny.

An FBI investigation into Abram is ongoing, a spokeswoman said.

The Sheriff’s Department placed Abram on leave along with her niece, a custody assistant who prosecutors said improperly accessed a law enforcement database for Grim. They remain on leave and together have collected more than an estimated $300,000 in salary as the sheriff’s internal probe continues, based on posted county salaries….

A department source tells us that, now that the DA’s office has declined to prosecute, the LASD’s Internal Affairs investigation will likely begin—although the FBI’s continuing probe could further delay an IA investigation.

He also said that Abram’s actions as reported by the Times contained multiple firing offenses.

Another source familiar with the workings of the Carson station that Abram oversaw, and with the reputation of Grim and his friends, said that the notion that Abram was unaware of Grim’s extralegal activities was simply not credible.

Several LASD sources expressed concern that, even if Abram’s actions are found to be cause for her termination, she could be allowed to retire ahead of any findings, thereby retaining all pension and benefits that she has accrued at that point.

Back in April of 2011, Sheriff Baca told KABC’s John North that he expected the investigation into Abram’s possible wrong-doings to be wrapped up in approximately 30 days.

KABC also noted that Bernice Abram and Undersheriff Paul Tanaka have been friends since junior high school but said that the undersheriff assured press that there was no conflict of interest.

POST SCRIPT: The fact that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office filed on nothing and allowed the statute of limitations to run out on the lesser matters, is hard for those of us observing to understand. To be frank: absent some more rigorous justification than we have yet heard, it suggests a dispiriting double standard.

It should be noted, however, that whatever the reasons behind all this non-filing-–whether righteous or deeply questionable—-it was the decision of the DA’s office under Steve Cooley’s tenure.

District Attorney-elect Jackie Lacey will be sworn in next Monday, December 3. Let us hope that she will choose a more agressive route in such matters in the future.

As we near the end of 2012, we at WitnessLA believe there is quite a bit to be thankful for within the social justice sphere–breakthroughs, big wins (and smaller wins), opened doors, and steps in the right direction. Here are fifteen items on our list, in no particular order:

1. We’re thankful to Senator Leland Yee for drafting SB 9, the Fair Sentencing for Youth Act, and to Gov. Brown for having the good sense to sign the bill that gives certain juvies serving life-without-parole the possibility of a second chance.

2. We’re thankful that Californians passed Prop 36, the three-strikes reform legislation.

3. We’re thankful that California’s education system will not have to find out what would have happened if Prop 30 had not passed.

4. We’re thankful for the rigor with which the members and staff of the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence approached their task, which led to a strong set of findings, and a thorough list of recommendations.

5. We’re also thankful for the many LASD people—present and former— who have courageously come forward: to us, to the LA Times, to the commission and to those guys and girls on Wilshire Blvd.

6. We’re thankful to Judge Michael Nash for shining light on Child Dependency Court proceedings by allowing media access, and to the 2nd District of the California Court of Appeals for denying petitions against Judge Nash’s decision.

7. We’re thankful for the passage of marijuana laws in Washington and Colorado as steps toward rectifying the harm done by a failed drug war.

8. We’re thankful for SCOTUS’ ban of mandatory juvenile life-without-parole sentencing. (It’s one step in the direction of banning juvie LWOP altogether.)

9. We’re also thankful to SCOTUS for ruling preposterously long sentences for youth unconstitutional.

10. We’re thankful for the wise and important findings of the California State Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color created by Assembly speaker John Perez, and chaired by Assemblyman Sandré Swanson.

11. We’re thankful that, slowly but surely, the US is making progress toward equal rights for the LGBT community (shout out to Washington, Maryland, Maine, and Minnesota).

12. We’re also thankful to Gov. Brown for making CA the first state to ban gay conversion therapy for youth.

13. We’re thankful for all those who are pushing for zero-tolerance reform in LAUSD schools and across the nation.

14. We’re thankful to SCOTUS for striking down most of the harsh AZ immigration law, SB 1070.

15. We’re thankful that, a year after the program commenced on Oct. 1, 2011, people are finally starting to talk sense about California’s prison realignment process—rather than painting it counter-factually as a plot to endanger public safety by releasing prisoners early. (We are particularly grateful to the LA Times Rob Greene for snapping some of the worst fact-offenders out of their stupor.) We’re also thankful for the programs that are starting to spring up in various counties that see realignment as an opportunity, rather than a burden.

At last Friday’s hearing for the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence—the final time the commission will meet before it issues its report at the end of this month**—the statements about the sheriff and the undersheriff, and others on the LASD command staff, pulled no punches, and left little room for spinning.

Here is a representative sample of some of the points made:

*Sheriff Baca failed to monitor and proactively control the use of force in the jails.

*Leaders had a lax attitude toward deputy aggression and discouraged deputy discipline.

*Management has known about and failed to address problems with deputy cliques.

*The undersheriff failed to up hold the department’s goals and values.

*There is substantial evidence that Tanaka urged deputies to be aggressive and ‘work in the gray area’ and “function right on the edge of the line,” made comments that undermine the credibility of IAB, discouraged supervisors from investigating deputy misconduct.

*There was a breakdown in the chain of command at MCJ that Undersheriff Tanaka encouraged and permitted.

These preliminary “findings” were presented to the commissioners by the teams of lawyers who have served as the commission’s investigators. The teams—-made up of high-powered attorneys lent by such firms as Gibson Dunn, O’Melveny & Meyers, Munger, Tolles & Olson, and others of that ilk, to work for the commission pro bono—have cummulatively interviewed approximately 150 people and have reviewed around 15,000 30,000 pages of documents.

Later this month, WitnessLA will have a more comprehensive story about the last stages of the commission’s work, including additional details and thoughts on these investigative reports and what they suggest for the final report.

In the meantime, here are a few representative bullet points from Friday’s presentations:

A CULTURE OF FORCE AND SILENCE

The teams found the following:

And it goes on from there.

NO SUGAR COATING

Several of the Board of Supervisors’ staffers who drifted down to watch the proceedings their 8th floor offices, said they were impressed with the teams’ willingness to call things as the facts they found suggested.

“Frankly, we expected a whitewash,” said one high level staffer. “But that’s definitely not what this is.

Or as Commissioner Jim McDonnell put it: “There was no sugarcoating as some may have thought there would be for political reasons.”

That much was clear on Friday. There is no white wash. No sugar coating. Just well-researched facts—and carefully drawn conclusions. What they add up to is troubling but not surprising.

The final report is still to come, of course.

And then there’s the question of what it will all mean. Will the Commission’s final report help to precipitate real change in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department? Or will it be one more stack of papers that get a day or two of attention from the public and the Board of Supervbefore being roundly ignored by the sheriff?

Stay tuned.

**DELIVERY NOTE

The Commission has pushed their timeline up and their final report will likely now be released on September 28, not early Oct. (October is their safety net date.)

ARE THE FEDS EXAMINING ONE OF THE UNDERSHERIFF’S INMFAMOUS “WORK THE GRAY” SPEECHES?

WitnessLA has obtained the following email that went out to all LASD lieutenants this past Wednesday morning:

From: Federal Grand Jury Inquiry
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 7:36 AM
To: All Lieutenants
Subject: Federal Criminal Grand Jury Subpoena #1788

Good morning,
The Department has received a subpoena from the Federal Criminal Grand Jury which commands, in part, the following documents:

“4. Any and all correspondence between members or associates of the CCJV [Citizen's Committee on Jail Violence] and any member of the LASD at the level of Lieutenant or above.”
YOU MUST RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL. If you possess documents that are responsive to this subpoena, please indicate so in a reply email. If you do not have documents that are responsive, indicate such in a reply email.

It is of the utmost importance that we comply fully with this subpoena.
Your prompt attention to this matter is necessary and your cooperation is appreciated.

In that the memo was notably fuzzy about what this subpoena/grand jury business was about, there has much department speculation about what exactly the Feds are looking for.

Robert Faturechi from the LA Times wrote about the subpoena on Saturday. (You can read his article here.) In his story, he reported that the memo provoked concern that the subpoena could inadvertently “force department members to out themselves” if they have given testimony privately and in confidence to the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence.

However, a department source has told us that the subpoena may pertain to a story that WitnessLA first reported last month about an incident that occurred in mid-2005, after the murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Luis Gerardo Ortiz by a Hawaiian Gardens gang member.

According to our source, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka was ushered in to speak to a room full of 80 to 100 deputies, federal agents and other members of law enforcement, who were all part of a multi-agency task force being briefed before the service of a series of search warrants in connection with the killing of Deputy Ortiz. According to the story, before he began, Tanaka told anyone who was video taping the proceedings, to turn off all recording devices. Then he reportedly gave to those assembled a version of his “work the gray,” speech, and some of those listening were concerned by the skate-the-edge ethic they believed the speech tacitly encouraged.

Subsequent to our reporting, the CCJV [Citizen's Committee on Jail Violence] brought the incident into public testimony, and questioned Mr. Tanaka himself on what had occurred. (He denied telling anyone to turn off recording devices or saying anything that implied working on or over the legal line.)

We have been told that pursuant to the commission meeting, the feds became interested and that 11 federal officers have already been interviewed by the FBI on this matter.

Of course, due to what appears to be the general nature of the subpoena request, the “work the gray” incident, may be only one of the things that the feds are looking at.

One thing we do know is that the FBI investigation that began by looking into incidents of violence and corruption in Men’s Central Jail continues to widen.

As we learn more about the issue of the subpoena and the grand jury we will let you know.

LAPD’S DEPUTY CHIEF PAT GANNON IS RETIRING…AND NEARLY EVERYBODY HE KNOWS WANTS TO TALK HIM OUT OF IT

The South Bureau of the LAPD polices some of the most challenging real estate in in all of California. Yet in the last few years it has been led by a series of commanding officers who have managed to create good relationships with communities whose residents had, for decades, felt themselves to be at war with LA’s law enforcement.

The person commanding South Bureau right now is a guy named Pat Gannon, who is extraordinarily well liked by community members, activists, city government types, and the officers under him. Smart, strategic, warm and innovative, it is difficult to find anyone who doesn’t like the man.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Gannon is retiring on August 31.

Now that the dreaded time has nearly arrived, writer Diana Chapman has written a nice profile of Gannon for City Watch explaining why she and those in the communities LAPD’s South Bureau polices don’t want to see Pat Gannon go. Not at all.

Here’s a clip:

He returned phone calls.

He set up water polo and basketball games between his officers and community kids. Sometimes he even played in them. As the captain of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Division, he closed down an entire street Halloween night so parents and children could trick-or-treat safely in the neighborhood saturated with crime. His officers policed the event.

Most of all, LAPD Deputy Chief Pat Gannon, who retires from the department Aug. 31, listened to people like you and me.
“He was a saint,” said Neal Kleiner, who met Gannon when he was principal at one of the toughest middle schools — John Muir — in the 77th Division. Having called Gannon’s predecessor and never getting a response, Kleiner was astonished when Gannon, then the new captain, called him without provocation.

“He initiated a call to me and visited Muir,” Kleiner said still with amazement. “He let me know that his men were there to service the community and if I needed help to call. He was a frequent visitor to the school and met with the staff and parents and he demonstrated a genuine concern for my school and the community.”

Said Mike Lansing, the Harbor Area Boys and Girls Club executive director: “Pat always supported the Boys and Club and the work we do. He advocated for kids through his police work and had officers interact with our members — including playing basketball. Sometimes, Pat even played himself. He is one of the great leaders who actually wanted to know what we did — he took the time to listen and engage our members.”

Gannon, 56, retires not because he wants to, but because he signed on to an economically savvy retirement package the LAPD offered years ago which he now regrets.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: It's called the DROP program and it can seem like a good idea at the time, and then becomes something that LAPD officers wish they could reverse as retirement time approaches. That's the situation with Gannon. I know because I've asked him about the issue mournfully several times.]

“I could have stayed forever,” said Gannon, who plans to look for other police work. “I’m going to continue working. It was interesting to me. I worked cases. I solved them and I enjoyed that.”

ENDING THE OVERUSE OF SOLITARY

The wide use of solitary confinement as a punitive measure in U.S. prisons continues to be controversial. On Sunday, the online only version of the New York Times featured a new op ed challenging the cost/benefit wisdom (or lack thereof) of the practice, written by Vanderbilt University associate professor, Lisa Guenther, who is the author of the forthcoming book “Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement.”

Here’s how it opens:

There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged. They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this cluster of symptoms SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units of many supermax prisons. Prisoners have more direct ways of naming their experience. They call it “living death,” the “gray box,” or “living in a black hole.”

In June the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, headed by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, held the first Congressional hearing on solitary confinement. Advocates and experts in the field were invited to submit testimony on the psychological, ethical, social and economic issues raised by punitive isolation. Among the many contributors was Anthony Graves, who spent over 18 years on death row in Texas, most of them in solitary confinement, for a crime he did not commit. Graves describes his isolation as a form of “emotional torture.” Two years after his exoneration and release, he still feels trapped in isolation: “I am living amongst millions of people in the world today, but most of the time I feel alone. I cry at night because of this feeling. I just want to stop feeling this way, but I haven’t been able to.”

We tend to assume that solitary confinement is reserved for “the worst of the worst”: violent inmates who have proved themselves unwilling or unable to live in the general population. But the truth is that an inmate can be sent to the hole for failing to return a meal tray, or for possession of contraband (which can include anything from weapons to spicy tortilla chips). According to the Bureau of Justice, there were 81,622 prisoners in some form of “restricted housing” (code for solitary confinement) in 2005. If anything, these numbers have increased as isolation units continue to be built in prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers across the country. Given that 95 percent of all inmates are eventually released into the public, and that many of these will be released without any form of transition or therapy, solitary confinement is a problem that potentially affects every one of us.

RINGLING BROS. CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN, BUT NOT WITHOUT MUCH PROTEST FROM ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

With more than 35 municipalities in the US restricting use of animals in circuses, the Ringling Bros. residency at the Staples Center this week is not without controversy. Hundreds of activists rallied Wednesday (opening night) to protest the “Cruelest Show on Earth” PETA’s undercover investigation of Ringling’s elephant conditions produced some pretty shocking footage of treatment of the animals (some in the above video narrated by Alec Baldwin).

KPCC’s blogdowntown’s Omar Shamout has the story. Here’s a clip:

Hundreds of animal rights activists gathered outside Staples Center Wednesday at a PETA-organized rally against Ringling Bros. Circus – an organization protestors say abuses the wild animals in its traveling show.

Clad in tiger suits, paper-mache elephant heads and faux-ringleader outfits, the contingent lined both sides of Figueroa Boulevard to greet patrons with posters showing what they say is photographic evidence of the inhumane treatment of circus elephants by Ringling Bros. trainers. Most of the circus’ endangered Asian elephants are raised from captivity at the company’s Center for Elephant Conservation in Central Florida.

PETA spokesman Matt Bruce called on Angelenos to boycott [Ringling Bros.] and argued there is no such thing as a humane circus that uses animal performers. Bruce said the baby elephants on display inside Staples Center were “torn from their families, forced to perform under the threat of extreme punishment, gouged with bull hooks, and even tied to the concrete floor of a barn for up to 23 hours a day to break their spirit.”

KPCC’s Larry Mantle had Feld Entertainment’s Stephen Payne on AirTalk, along with animal rights activist Catherine Doyle. Here’s a clip from the show:

“In essence circuses are inherently cruel for wild animals, whether it’s Ringling or any other circus,” Catherine Doyle, spokesperson for In Defense of Animals, said. “These animals are separated from their families, brutally trained to perform unnatural tricks, they’re chained, confined to small cages and pens, and transported around the country in cramped train cars and trucks for months at a time.”

Doyle is opposed to any form of circus, saying that the humane treatment of animals cannot be done in those conditions.

“If you cannot meet the animals needs. If you cannot meet their physical, social and psychological needs, you should not hold those animals,” she added.

[SNIP]

“We are very, very proud of our animal care and to have the ability to showcase these animals to families around the country who really can’t see them in any other forum except ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’,” said Stephen Payne, vice president of corporate communications for Feld Entertainment, which owns Ringling Bros. Circus.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus raises most of its animals from captivity in their Central Florida compound, according to Payne.

“Unfortunately, this idealized wild that everyone speaks of really no longer exists. Asian elephants are highly endangered, there’s only about 35,000 left in the world. And really the animals at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey are ambassadors for their species,” Payne said.

FBI REVIEWS FORENSIC EVIDENCE IN THOUSANDS OF POST-CONVICTION CASES

The FBI announced that it will be conducting the largest ever review of forensic evidence in post-conviction cases–possibly reaching back past 1985–to determine if there were any wrongful convictions due to flawed evidence data.

The Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu has the story. Here’s how it opens:

The Justice Department and the FBI have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence, officials said Tuesday.

The undertaking is the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI. It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery.

The review comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

OH-SO MANY BEAR SIGHTINGS

Bears have been spotted in and around LA County quite a bit this summer–looking for food, swimming in pools, and getting trapped in garages.

LA Weekly’s Dennis Romero has the story on some of the recent bear sightings in the area. Here’s a clip (and a video!):

Fish and Game officials announced they’ve captured one of the black bears suspected of going domestic in Duarte Monday.

It was a little one:

City News Service reports the 150 pounder was tranquilized in Duarte late yesterday by Fish and Game officials. It was captured in the 900 block of Swiss Trail Road about 3:30 p.m., according to CNS.

Fish and Game officials were triumphant, tweeting, “Bear captured!” yesterday.

It was believed to have been the juvenile, who was travelling with his mom and a sibling, that got into a garage in the 200 block of Greenbank Avenue in Duarte Monday. The same day a bear sighting was reported outside a home near Mount Olive Drive and Mount Olive Lane in neighboring Bradbury. Yet another sighting was reported near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena Tuesday.

Here’s a very cool video clip of a mama bear rescuing a cub from a South Lake Tahoe garage (no known relation to the Duarte bear):

By the way, the Department of Fish and Game has some helpful pointers for avoiding (and, if necessary handling) bear encounters.

For a pile of years, my pal, the award-winning Brit investigative journalist, Andrew Gumbel, has been digging deep into the plot behind the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and all that went wrong with the FBI investigation of that ghastly day. His co-author, Roger G. Charles, has been researching the issue—and the untold story— for even longer. So the two wisely joined talents and forces to produce an exhaustively researched, wonderfully written, and genuinely riveting book on what we weren’t told about the issue and why we should care: Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed–and Why It Still Matters

The jiggly iPhone video above was taken at a book launch party for Andrew on Sunday late afternoon in Santa Monica. When the video begins, he was just launching into the explanation that, in the 1990′s, the extreme right fringe began forming into leaderless cells. Then he outlined for us the tale of how the FBI investigation into the bombing—before and after the bombing occurred— went so dreadfully awry.

In the video below, Actor Todd Waring reads an excerpt from the book.

(NOTE: that unfortunate ringing phone is not mine.)

Here’s a clip from what Michael Isikoff had to say about the new book in the Daily Beast.

The story of the Murrah building bombing receives its most comprehensive accounting yet in Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed-and Why it Still Matters—a new book by journalists Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles. It is a cautionary and at times startling tale, filled with bizarre characters from the outer fringes of American political life, with continuing relevance today. The feds certainly had legitimate reason to be worried about Islamic extremists in the mid-1990′s. But there was an equally menacing threat that was being largely ignored by federal law enforcement, a resurgent movement of loosely connected extremist hate groups, Christian Identity fanatics, and gun-toting militia members, all convinced that American liberty was in grave peril.

As Gumbel and Charles amply document, U.S. law enforcement had plenty of warning signals that these groups were planning violent attacks—and even that the Murrah Building itself might well be one of the targets. One of the movement’s most charismatic leaders, a white supremacist Arkansas death-row inmate named Richard Wayne Snell, had plotted to blow up the Murrah building years earlier. Snell, a convicted double murderer fond of quoting Rudolf Hess, had warned prison guards there would be “hell to pay” on April 19, his execution date. One of Snell’s most devoted acolytes, Louis Beam, also talked about “something big” that would take place that day—which was also the anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. This law-enforcement debacle had become a rallying cry for the far right, but for reasons ranging from bureaucratic rivalries to political timidity, few in Washington were paying any attention.

Now go and it!

NOTE: JAIL COMMISSION STORY COMING TOMORROW I’ll be running it in three parts. Part 1 will be published Tuesday morning.

AND IN OTHER NEWS….MORE THAN 2000 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WRONGLY CONVICTED SINCE 1989, ACCORDING TO NEW DATABASE

David Savage of the LA Times has the story. Here’s a clip:

More than 2,000 people have been freed from prison since 1989 after they were found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes, according to a new National Registry of Exonerations compiled by University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University.

Its sponsors say it is by far the largest database of such cases, and they hope it will help reveal why the criminal justice system sometimes misfires, prosecuting and convicting the innocent.

“The more we learn about false convictions, the better we’ll be at preventing them,” said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor.

The registry covers the period since DNA came into common use and revealed, to the surprise of many prosecutors and judges, that a significant number of convicted rapists and murderers were innocent. The Innocence Project in New York says DNA alone has freed 289 prisoners since 1989.

Criminal law experts have been studying the growing number of exonerations. Some cases have involved police corruption or witnesses who recanted. Experts have also pointed to faulty eyewitness testimony and lying witnesses as common problems.