WEST LA BOY SCOUT CHAPTER PUSHES ORGANIZATION TO WELCOME GAY YOUTH AND ADULTS

The W. LA County branch of the Boy Scouts of America is calling for the organization to both execute an offered proposal to lift the ban on gay scouts and also allow gay adults to be troop leaders.

Reuter’s Alex Dobuzinskis has the story. Here’s how it opens:

The council, which represents more than 14,000 scouts and ranks as the nation’s 14th-largest scouting chapter, called for the Texas-based youth organization to go further by welcoming gays into the ranks of its adult volunteers as well.

In issuing its declaration on Tuesday urging a “true and authentic inclusion policy,” the Los Angeles group joined at least two branches in New York state that have pushed for allowing gays to work as troop leaders or staff members.

The Boy Scouts of America holds its annual national meeting on May 23 in Texas, where a resolution will be voted on that would end the century-old group’s policy denying membership to youths on the basis of sexual orientation.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT…

On Tuesday, Delaware’s state Senate voted to make DE the eleventh state to legalize gay marriage. (Way to go, Delaware!)

Here’s a clip from the Associated Press:

Less than an hour after the Senate’s 12-9 vote, Democratic Gov. Jack Markell signed the measure into law.

“I do not intend to make any of you wait one moment longer,” a smiling Markell told about 200 jubilant supporters who erupted in cheers and applause following the Senate vote.

NEW BILL WOULD FURTHER EQUALITY FOR TRANSGENDER YOUTH IN CA SCHOOLS

AB 1266, a bill in California Legislature introduced by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, would allow transgender kids to participate in sex-segregated school sports and activities regardless of the sex listed on the student’s records. Passage of AB 1266 would be a huge step in the direction toward equal opportunities for trans youth who already face plenty of hardships and discrimination in school, as it is.

NY Times’ Ian Lovett has the story. Here’s a clip:

Over the last decade, the International Olympic Committee and the National Collegiate Athletic Association have adopted regulations for athletes who were born male but now consider themselves females and want to play on women’s teams.

And now, high schools are beginning to take on the issue as well, as a small but growing number students who identify themselves as transgender have begun demanding access to the same school activities, like interscholastic sports, that other students enjoy.

More than half a dozen states, from Washington to Massachusetts, have adopted rules to allow transgender students to compete on teams that correspond with their gender identities rather than the sex listed on their school records. Half a dozen more states are considering similar regulations. And a bill in the Legislature would make California the first to specifically guarantee by law that transgender students like Tony are allowed to play school sports.

“Transgender students deserve equal access to everything in public education, including sports,” said Tom Ammiano, the state assemblyman sponsoring the bill. “You can’t discriminate just because you’re uncomfortable with a young man transitioning to become a young woman.”

MAJORITY OF AMERICANS WRONGLY ASSUME GUN VIOLENCE IS ON THE RISE

Firearm-related crimes have seen a significant decrease over the last two decades, but most Americans are under the impression that gun crimes have increased since 1993 with only 12% of those surveyed aware of the decrease, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Another Tuesday report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics says that the number of gun-related homicides dropped 39% from 1993 to 2011.

LA Times’ Emily Alpert has the story. Here’s a clip:

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

“It’s hard to know what’s going on there,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center. Women, people of color and the elderly were more likely to believe that gun crime was up than men, younger adults or white people. The center plans to examine crime issues more closely later this year.

Photo by Douglas Muth through Wikimedia Commons.

WHAT DOES CALIFORNIA PRISON “SHU” REALLY LOOK AND FEEL LIKE?

Monday, California state legislators began discussing the issue of isolation policy in the state’s prisons. The U.S. Congress has begun examining the same growing controversy about the use of Special Housing Units—or SHUs—in the nation’s federal lock-ups.

KQED’s Michael Montgomery had a conversation with—and video taped—an inmate named Jeremy Beasley, while he was in Pelican Bay State Prison’s SHU. Beasley is, by his own admission, not the most angelic of guys, but does that mean it is moral or wise or constitutional to house him in the kind of isolation that more and more people, including some prominent conservatives, regard as torture.

Below you’ll find clip from Montgomery’s story. But be sure to watch at least the first 2 or 3 minutes of the full half hour video with Beasley, which you can find here.

(NOTE: Montgomery is arguably more expert on the issue than any other reporter in California. So his dispatches are always worth your time.)

Here’s the clip:

“I haven’t seen the moon since 1998.”

That’s inmate Jeremy Beasley, talking to me while sitting–shackled–in an interview room at Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s highest security lockup.

Beasley, a convicted murderer, was clearly surprised by my presence—-he told me he hadn’t met with a visitor since 1994, when he was incarcerated.

It’s not just the moon Beasley hadn’t seen in 15 years. During that time, in fact, Beasley rarely glimpsed the outside world. Before being transferred to another prison, he was held in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit, a windowless, bunker-like facility that houses more than 1,000 California inmates.

For 22-and-a-half hours a day, each inmate here is locked, usually alone, in an 8-by-10 feet cell. For 90 minutes the inmate is allowed to exercise in an adjacent room with 25-30 feet high walls. And that’s their entire day — every day.

“I’ve seen guys lose their minds back here,” Beasley tells me.

LAPD LIEUTENANT SUES DEPARTMENT FOR ALLEGED RETALIATION AFTER HE REPORTED ILLEGAL GUN SALES BY METRO OFFICERS

According to the Courthouse News Service, Lt. Armando Perez, a 25-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department is suing the LAPD for retaliation after Perez allegedly discovered that officers from the department’s Metro division were buying special SWAT–labeled guns through the armory that Perez oversaw, and then selling the guns for profit to other LAPD officers, civilians and gun dealers.

Here’s a clip from the story by Elizabeth Warmerdam:

Los Angeles police officers bought and sold guns from the police armory for profit, and told the lieutenant in charge of the armory to “watch his back” after he reported it, the 25-year LAPD veteran claims in court.

Armando Perez sued the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department in Superior Court.

Perez, who joined the LAPD in 1987, claims he was retaliated against, suspended and threatened after he discovered, through his job as “Officer in Charge of the Armory,” that officers in the Metropolitan Division were buying and reselling guns to other officers, civilians and gun dealers….

Perez also alleges that, when the department investigated the matter, no one ever bothered to interview him, but later, he himself was investigated in relationship to his reports on tthe gun sales, and on the subsequent harassment, and was suspended for five days.

Last August, the LA Times ran a story bout the possible gun dealing. Perez alleges that after the publication of the Times story, the retaliation against him got worse.

Read the rest here.

WHAT CONGRESS LEARNED ABOUT GUN VIOLENCE BEFORE THE NRA PRESSURED CONGRESS TO KILL ALL RESEARCH FUNDING

Reasonable people might argue over what kind of gun regulation is helpful and appropriate. But it is difficult for any but the most partisan to defend the intense lobbying by the NRA that, in 1996, persuaded a fearful congress to strangle research into gun violence by the Center for Disease Control, and by the National Institute of Health—both of which, rightly, viewed the nation’s approximately 30,000 gun deaths per year as a public health issue.

The NRA, however, evidently viewed fact-based information as a threat.

Reporters at ProPublica wondered what exactly the CDC had found out with its research before the door to science got slammed. With this in mind, Joaquin Sapien interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency’s gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

You can find the interview here.

CALIFORNIA SUPREMES SAY PARENTS OF WOMAN KILLED BY JEALOUS LAPD DETECTIVE LOST RIGHT TO SUE DEPARTMENT OVER MISHANDLING THE CASE DUE TO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS

The California Supreme Court declined to take the case of Nels and Loretta Rasmussen, whose daughter, Sherri Rassmusen was murdered in the Van Nuys townhouse she shared with her husband, by former LAPD Detective Stephanie Lazarus. Although Sherri Rassmusen was murdered in 1986, police concluded that she was killed in a home robbery gone bad—despite the fact that, according to the Rasmussens, they provided investigators with information that pointed to Lazarus and, at the very least merited investigation. Instead, the allege, they were rebuffed and deliberately intimidated. It was only in 2009, when DNA left at the scene was matched to Lazarus, that the detective was arrested. Lazarus was convicted of murder in 2012.

Lots of people have the story (like the Daily News) , but the legal-leaning Metropolitan News-Enterprise has a good explanation from a legal perspective.

Here’s a clip:

Sherri Rasmussen, was murdered in 1986. Lazarus was charged following a DNA match to a bite mark on the body, and was convicted in March of last year.

The Rasmussens sued in July 2010, while Lazarus was awaiting trial. They alleged that they had told the LAPD the day after the murder that they suspected their son-in-law’s ex-girlfriend was the killer, although they did not know her name at the time.

The dead woman’s husband, John Ruetten, identified Lazarus as his ex-girlfriend and told the investigators that she was an LAPD officer. The LAPD, the Rasmussens alleged, ignored evidence that Lazarus had stalked and confronted Sherri Rasmussen, focusing instead on an untenable theory that the killers were two unknown Hispanic men who had committed burglaries in the area.

That theory, they said, was discredited in 2005 when DNA obtained from the bite mark was tested and determined to have been left by a woman, although it took another four years before Lazarus was linked to the bite mark.

The Rasmussens sued the LAPD for civil rights conspiracy and sued Lazarus for wrongful death.

There’s more, so read on.

PHOTO CREDIT: The above photo is a screen capture taken from Michael Montgomery and KQED’s video accompanying the story about the Special Housing Units (SHUs) in California’s prisons.

As more and more civil rights organizations and some lawmakers, push for a reexamination of prison policies that keep certain inmates in solitary confinement for years, even decades, in October the California Department of Corrections (CDCR) revised its own policies regarding what can land an inmate in the SHU—or Special Housing Unit—which is solitary confinement. Since then it has been slowly letting some SHU inmates back into the general population.

Critics say the the revised policy doesn’t got nearly far enough.

Yet it’s a start.

The LA Times Paige St. John has more on this story.

Here’s a clip:

Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton this week said the agency has so far reviewed 144 inmates who were placed in the SHU because they allegedly associated with prison gangs, an activity that now no longer merits segregation. Of those reviewed, she said, 78 have been released into the general population and 52 have entered the “step down” program. An additional seven inmates have been retained in segregation, Thornton said, “for their safety,” and the remaining 10 have agreed to debrief, the term the corrections department uses for providing prison investigators information on gang activity.

Thornton said the department intends to eventually review all SHU inmates for possible release, though there are about 1,200 in segregation at Pelican Bay State Prison alone, some held there more than 20 years.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a federal lawsuit against the state contesting the indefinite stays, and Amnesty International last year released a report contending SHU conditions are inhumane.

GEORGE WILL WRITES ABOUT SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE

Conservative columnist George Will writes a strongly worded column about why solitary confinement qualifies as torture.

Here’s how it opens:

“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Noting that half of all prison suicides are committed by prisoners held in isolation, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has prompted an independent assessment of solitary confinement in federal prisons. State prisons are equally vulnerable to Eighth Amendment challenges concerning whether inmates are subjected to “substantial risk of serious harm.”

America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.

Federal law on torture prohibits conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” And “severe” physical pain is not limited to “excruciating or agonizing” pain, or pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” The severe mental suffering from prolonged solitary confinement puts the confined at risk of brain impairment.

Supermax prisons isolate inmates from social contact. Often prisoners are in their cells, sometimes smaller than 8 by 12 feet, 23 hours a day, released only for a shower or exercise in a small fenced-in outdoor space. Isolation changes the way the brain works, often making individuals more impulsive, less able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds.

I was happy to note that Will references “Hellhole,” the excellent 2009 article New Yorker article by surgeon/writer Atul Gwande that explores whether or not solitary confinement is torture. (If you’ve not read it, I strongly, strongly recommend it.)

DENVER SCHOOLS LEAD NATION WITH SMART DISCIPLINE POLICIES

This article by Julianne Hing in Colorlines Magazine has the story. Here’s how it opens:

Already home to one of the most progressive school discipline policies in the country, Denver has set out to best even its own record. On Tuesday, Denver Public Schools and local and county police departments inked a five-year agreement specifically designed to limit student interaction with the juvenile justice system. The agreement offers a rare example of a school system that is bucking the national trend toward criminalizing student misbehavior.

Just two months after the gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., and in a state that has had its share of mass shootings, the Denver pact comes at a pivotal point in the national debate on firearms and school security.

The school system had already articulated a commitment to minimizing police contact with its students. But because of a lingering zero-tolerance framework that required harsh and automatic penalties for student misbehavior, the 15 officers assigned to the city’s schools were functioning as disciplinarians, meting out suspensions, expulsions and tickets for minor infractions like chewing gum, fighting in the schoolyard and exposing their tattoos.

The new agreement—the result of a collaboration between law enforcement, school officials and a Denver-based community organization called Padres y Jovenes Unidos—turns the concept of minimal police contact into an official, districtwide policy.

“This is a historic collaboration between a school district, a police department and an organization [that] represents parents and young people of color who are most impacted by these policies,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a national civil rights group that partnered with Denver-based Padres y Jovenes Unidos to secure the agreement.

With the new agreement, police officers are now being directed to know and observe the difference between disciplinary issues and criminal acts. Law enforcement officials have agreed that they will only respond to serious offenses. The district will use restorative justice practices to address routine student misbehavior.

“It’s not, ‘You did something wrong, go home for five days and watch television,’ ” Denver Superintendent Tom Boasberg told the Washington Post. “It’s, ‘What did you do wrong? Who did you harm? How are you going to make them whole, and what are you learning from this?’ ”

SOCIAL TRENDS DRIVING GUN AND GANG VIOLENCE

The Atlantic’s Ta-nehisi Coates has a very interesting discussion about trends in gun violence with the Chicago Crime Lab’s Harold Pollack.

Here’s a clip:

Like everyone, we at The Atlantic have spent the weeks since Newtown thinking about the role of guns in America. In our ongoing effort to broaden the conversation, I spent some time talking to Professor Harold Pollack, who co-directs the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. Pollack is one of the foremost voices on gun violence from a public health perspective. Pollack and his colleagues at the Crime Lab have done yeoman’s work in helping us understand how guns end up on the streets of cities like Chicago, and how precisely they tend to be used.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Hi, Harold. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us over here at The Atlantic. We’ve had several off-line conversations which have been illuminating to me. I greatly appreciate your willingness to take some time to do this for the Horde, as we say on the blog.

Harold Pollack: It’s great to correspond with you, Ta-Nehisi, regarding what can actually be done to reduce gun violence. I’m a big fan of your work. I should mention by way of self-introduction that I am a public health researcher at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Here in Chicago, we have become the focus of much national attention because we had our 500th homicide [of the year in 2012]. We’re sometimes called the nation’s murder capital — though this mainly reflects the fact that we are a big city. We’re more dangerous than L.A. or New York, but we’re actually in the middle of the pack when it comes to homicide rates. Still, we’re dangerous enough. The declining homicide rates in many prosperous and middle-class neighborhoods casts a harsh light on the high rates facing African-American (and to a lesser-extent) Latino young men on the city’s south and west sides. Lots to talk about. I am looking forward to talking. So let’s get to it.

I don’t know if I’ve told you how I come to this issue, but I should say for everyone reading this that I am from Baltimore — the West Side, as we used to call it. I came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s, a period in which violence spiked in our cities. I don’t know if Chicago today is as bad as it was in, say, 1988, but this was a period of deep fear for everyone in the black communities of Baltimore. And the fear was everywhere.

It changed how we addressed our parents. It changed how we addressed each other. It changed our music. The violence put rules in place that often look strange to the rest of the country. For instance, the mask of hyper-machismo and invulnerability — the ice-grill, as we used to say — looks strange, until you’ve lived in a place where that mask is the only power you have to effect a modicum of safety.

I’m in my late 40s. I was a typical suburban kid graduating high school outside New York. It wasn’t as tough for me as it was on the west side of Baltimore, but crime certainly touched my life. On one occasion, I was in Washington Heights on my way to an AP class at Columbia University. A group of middle-school or early-high-school kids jumped me in the subway station, and they attempted to wrest away my watch. My high school sweetheart had just given it to me; I didn’t want to give it up. So a kid grabbed me by the hair and smashed my head against the concrete floor until I finally relented. As you know, my cousin was beaten to death by two teenage house burglars a few years later.

So I remember very well both the fear and the anger that accompanies one’s sense of physical vulnerability. Of course this anger often comes with a race/ethnic/class tinge that poisons so much of what we are trying to do in revitalizing urban America.

Read on.

EDITOR’S NOTE: WitnessLA is taking Monday off. We’ll be back to our regular reporting tomorrow.

In the meantime, we want to strongly recommend to you a completely extraordinary 2-part story produced by the public radio show, This American Life.

This 2-part series takes a look at the violence affecting Harper High School in Chicago where, during the last school year, 29 current and recent Harper students were shot. Twenty-one of those kids were wounded. Eight of them eight died.

“Watching this,” said the program’s host, Ira Glass, “it’s hard not to think that if you grafted these facts on to another high school, in a wealthier place, maybe a suburb…In other places that would be national news, right? We would all know the name of that school.”

But most of us have never heard of Harper.. Nor do we hear much about a similar kind of everyday violence that goes on in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles. When we do hear about a shooting, it’s often labeled “gang-related,” the unstated implication being that the victim must have somehow deserved it, that what goes around comes around—unless, of course, the victim is specifically designated “innocent.”

This story of Harper High School drills down past those careless assumptions.

“For everything we’ve all heard about children and gun violence,” says Glass, “there are basic things we don’t hear so much about. Like what it’s like to live in neighborhoods that have to cope with so much bloodshed. This is a school that knows this problem in a way that most of us around the country don’t.”

The administrators at Harper (who seem, by the way, like unusually caring and level-headed educators) gave TAL’s three reporters remarkable access for a full semester, five months. When violence struck—as it does with some regularity—the reporters recorded the staff as they jumped into action. They recorded private and painfully difficult meetings with families and students.

The result is one of the most affecting and accurate pieces of journalism I’ve run across in a very long time.

I’ll have more to say after Part 2. But for now, just listen.

Back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming.

DORMER, THE LAPD AND A PSYCHOLOGICAL “CEMETERY FULL OF GHOSTS”

“We’ve got a cemetery of ghosts from LAPD’s past raised by this tragic—beyond tragic— catastrophe,” said civil rights attorney Connie Rice, when she and LAPD expert, Joe Domanick, associate director of the Center on Media Crime and Justice, and author of the definitive history of the LAPD, “To Protect and to Serve,” were interviewed by Madeleine Brand on KCET’s So Cal Connected about what the Dorner nightmare means for the LAPD going forward.

Both Rice and Domanick have looked into the LAPD deeply over the years, and thus have much to add to the developing conversation. Here’s the link.

LA WEEKLY REPORTS THAT SHERIFF LEE BACA SEEMS TO PLAY FAVORITES WHEN HE GIVES OUT CONCEALED CARRY PERMITS

Gene Maddeus at the LA Weekly reports, based on documents obtained by the Weekly through the public records act, that Sheriff Lee Baca approves very few concealed weapons permits but those he does approve are likely to be for his friends and/or his donors.

Here’s a clip from the story:

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department is known in gun-rights circles for being stingy with concealed-weapons permits. Sheriff Lee Baca has total discretion over who is allowed to get a permit, and he hasn’t given out many.

As of May 2012, only 341 people had been granted them, according to sheriff’s records. Compare that with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which had 1,754 permit holders in 2011, despite a population of just 2 million people to L.A.’s 10 million. The Kern County Sheriff granted even more, with 3,564 permit holders in a population of 800,000 people.

In L.A. County, records show, most of the permits go to judges and reserve deputies. But there is another group that seems to have better luck than most in obtaining permits: friends of Lee Baca. Those who’ve given the sheriff gifts or donated to his campaign are disproportionately represented on the roster of permit holders.

Chuck Michel, a gun-rights attorney who has pushed for greater access to concealed-weapons permits, says practices in many “anti-gun” jurisdictions are “corrupted by favoritism and cronyism.”

Michel had not looked in depth at L.A. County’s practices, but the Weekly did. Last year, the Weekly filed a public records request for all 341 active concealed-weapons permits granted by the Sheriff’s Department — as well as a list of the 123 people who applied for concealed weapons over an 18-month period but were denied….

And here’s where you can find the list of permit holders that the Weekly acquired.

MORE ON THE DORNER SEIGE AND THE USE OF “BURNERS”

The LA Times Joel Rubin and Andrew Blankstein have the best story I’ve read thus far on the ongoing question of whether the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department SWAT team deliberately set fire to the cabin where Dorner was barricaded.

The department has said no, then declined to comment on the matter further. But based on the Times’ and other reporting this seems a bit disingenuous. Whether or not it was the stated intent, it was the all but guaranteed outcome after sending in seven highly incendiary tear gas devices into a mountain cabin.

Rubin and Blankstein find expert opinions on both sides of the question of whether the move was justified. In the end, however, one is left with the picture of an extremely difficult and deadly situation with no perfect choices after Dorner did not respond, except with gunfire, to repeated calls to surrender.

CONFIDENTIAL COUNTY REPORT SHOWS AN INCOMPETENT AND OVER BUREAUCRATIZED FOSTER CARE SYSTEM THAT RESULTED IN 13 RECENT KIDS’ DEATHS WHEN DCFS WORKERS’ MADE INCOMPREHENSIBLY BAD DECISIONS

Jason Song and Garrett Therolf report for the LA Times. Here’s a clip:

A stifling bureaucracy and inept workforce have crippled Los Angeles County’s child protective agency, resulting in a system that allowed children to remain in unsafe homes, sometimes to die at the hands of their caretakers, according to a confidential county report.

The investigation, conducted by an independent counsel for the Board of Supervisors, looked at 15 recent child deaths and a torture case. In all but two instances, investigators found that casework errors began with the agency’s first contact with the children and contributed to their deaths.

The report is the harshest assessment of the Department of Children and Family Services in recent memory, echoing complaints from child advocates that the county has rejected for years.

Investigators largely blamed the department’s problems on its decision to place its least experienced social workers in its most crucial job: assessing dangers to children. Many of those workers — facing a total of 160,000 child abuse hot line calls each year — are “just ‘doing their time,’” according to the report.

Supervisors are poorly qualified and often disregard policy, creating a situation akin to “the blind leading the blind,” with workers rarely held accountable for “egregious” errors, the report said.

The result has been deaths that might have been prevented had social workers taken basic steps to assess the risks.

Here’s a link to the report that the LA Times obtained.

In short, this is an agency in need of an overhaul. We very much hope that Philip Browning, the newest DCFS chief who came on just as the report was being completed, is up to the task of making the “wholesale changes” the report recommends. Browning was picked because he’s known as a solid nuts and bolts guy capable of turning things around.

He cautions that this will not be a quick fix.

No kidding.

GUN ADVOCATES & DEATH THREATS: SENATOR LELAND YEE GETS A THREAT “LIKE NO OTHER.”

On Thursday, State Senator Leeland Yee, held a press conference to announce an extremely chilling threat against his life. Rather than paraphrase, let me quote from his statement on the matter:

Four weeks ago, I received an email to my Senate account detailing a very explicit threat on my life. The author of the email specifically stated that if I did not cease our legislative efforts to stop gun violence that he would assassinate me in or around the Capitol. He stated that he was a trained sniper and his email detailed certain weapons he possessed.

This threat was unlike any other I had ever received. It was not a racist rant on my ethnicity or culture, but instead it was very deliberate and specific. As a psychologist, I was deeply concerned by the calculating nature of this email.

My Chief of Staff immediately forwarded the email to the Senate Sergeant at Arms and the CHP to investigate.

As you know, law enforcement made an arrest on Tuesday and executed a search warrant of the suspect’s home in which they found illegal weapons and bomb-making materials. I have no other details regarding this case and all such questions should be directed to the CHP.

With that said, I want to make it crystal clear – these threats and any others will not deter me and my colleagues from addressing the critical issues surrounding gun violence. This case is very troubling and only further demonstrates the need to address this epidemic.

The San Francisco Chron has more on the story.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because of the nature of what I’ve reported on over the years, I’ve gotten more than my share of angry letters and the occasional not-so-veiled threat. But nothing approached the flood of hatred and genuinely scary threats I got back the spring of 2000 for an essay I wrote for MSNBC (where I was, at the time, a regular columnist) about my experience bringing my then-fourteen year old son to the so-called Million Mom March for gun control.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC, NEW REPORT SAYS LA RESIDENTS APPLY TO BUY 200 GUNS A DAY

Yikes.

Rick Orlov of the Daily News has the story. Here’s a clip:

Los Angeles residents apply to buy 200 guns a day, an alarming number making it difficult to get weapons off the street, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich said in a preliminary report on gun purchases in Los Angeles.

“With Angelenos buying an average of nearly 200 firearms every day, thousands every month and tens of thousands every year, I will do everything in my power to keep guns out of the hands of people interested only in destroying the lives of children, families and police officers,” Trutanich, who is in a close re-election race, said in a written statement.

The results are based on letters his office began sending out in December during the 10-day waiting period for people buying guns. The letters reminds gun owners to keep the weapons safe and report when weapons are lost or stolen.

“If we can stop just one person from buying a gun who is prohibited from possessing a weapon, or stop someone from buying guns for felons or the mentally ill, then perhaps we have also stopped another senseless tragedy,” the letter said.

The letters were sent out as a follow-up to a study by the RAND Corp. that said 50 percent of people will voluntarily comply with local laws if they are informed of the requirements.

“Our intent was to make them aware of the laws and what they have to do under the law,” Trutanich said in an interview. “Our purpose was to get more compliance.”

A new poll indicates that California voters strongly believe that more mental health services and better emergency response training for school staff are the best strategies for preventing violence in schools. This is according to a survey of 1,200 voters released Thursday by The California Endowment. When asked whether hiring a school counselor or a police officer would be more effective at preventing violence, voters chose counselors by a margin of more than two to one (67% to 26%).

According to the Endowment:

“California voters understand that counseling and mental health services can help prevent senseless tragedies on campus—and frankly, that focus on prevention has been the missing ingredient from school safety efforts in recent years,” said Barbara Raymond, Director of Schools Policy for The California Endowment.

“Addressing gun policy and smart policing strategies are important pieces of the puzzle, but we can’t make schools safe without also improving mental health services. Counselors, nurses, and other support services are part of a range of strategies that will help make Health Happen in Schools, because we know the physical and emotional well-being of students is essential to their academic success,” Raymond said.

Among the findings are the following:

· 96% of California voters support training school staff in emergency response (including 78% “strongly support”);
· 96% support requiring every school to have a comprehensive safety plan (79% strongly—California law currently requires schools to maintain safety plans and update them annually by March 1);
· 91% support training teachers in conflict resolution techniques (64% strongly);
· 91% support expanding mental health services in communities (69% strongly);
· 91% support providing mental “first aid” training to school staff, so they can recognize the signs of mental illness in young people (64% strongly);
· 84% support increasing the number of trained counselors in schools (55% strongly);
· 50% support putting armed police officers in every school (23% strongly); and
· Only 31% support allowing teachers trained in firearms to carry guns on school grounds (16% strongly).

When asked to compare policy options directly, voters surveyed backed improving mental health services over installing more security cameras and metal detectors by a margin of 66% to 27%. By a similar margin, they preferred counselors over police (67% to 26%).

According to the Endowment:

Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents (65%) agreed that too many guards and gates on campus risks creating a tense, fortress-like environment that can be detrimental to a school’s educational mission. Regardless of their position on placing police in schools, 88% of voters agreed that officers assigned to schools should get special training in youth development, so they better understand teens and can work more effectively with students and teachers

The opinions of California gun owners are similar to those expressed by all voters. By a margin of 58% to 36%, gun owners agreed that placing school counselors in every school was a more effective strategy than placing armed police officers in every school. Gun owners also backed increasing mental health service in communities (93%) and providing mental health “first aid” training to school staff (87%). California gun owners were evenly split on allowing teachers to carry firearms on school grounds (49% support; 48% oppose).

For the rest of the survey graphics go here.

POST SANDYHOOK, LIZ RYAN ABOUT WHAT WORKS TO PROTECT KIDS FROM VIOLENCE

Liz Ryan, president and CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice (among other accomplishments), has this thoughtful and informative essay at The Crime Report on the initiatives that, in combination—–according to some of the nation’s best youth advocates—are the most likely to reduce gun violence against children and teenagers, in addition to reducing violence in our communities.

Yet, one of the advantages of this essay is that, while Ryan is very knowledgeable, she does more here than opine. She provides lots of good links to recent and relevant studies and reports, thereby giving you the resources with which to make up your own mind about the issues.

Here’s a clip from Liz’s essay:

….the nation’s educational leaders, including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have stated emphatically that, “Guns have no place in our schools.”

Others have suggested more police presence.

But research has shown that increased police presence has not made schools safer. In fact, it has resulted in the criminalization of young people in the justice system.

University of Delaware Professor Aaron Kupchik, author of “Homeroom Security” says that while armed guards are already in many schools, “their presence has effects that help transform the school from an environment of academia to a site of criminal law enforcement.

Instead of more guns and more police presence, education experts such as Barbara Raymond of The California Endowment point to the importance of counselors, social workers, psychologists and evidence-based programs. One example is the school-wide positive behavior support program to improve learning environments in schools and help children resolve conflict.
The Sandy Hook killings also underscore the need to improve access to quality, community-based behavioral mental health services for children and young people.

An interdisciplinary group of more than 200 violence prevention researchers, practitioners and professional associations recommends that, “these efforts should promote wellness, as well as address mental health needs of all community members while simultaneously responding to potential threats to community safety.

“This initiative should include a large scale public education and awareness campaign, along with newly created channels of communication to help get services to those in need.”
Additionally, a comprehensive approach must address the root causes of violence, and focus resources on proven violence prevention and juvenile delinquency prevention programs such as the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence’s “Blueprints for Violence Prevention” programs.

Easy access to guns that kill 7 young people a day and injure 43 more is a challenge addressed by the bipartisan national coalition of 750 mayors led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston. The coalition has created comprehensive recommendations to severely reduce the easy access to guns and assault weapons in the U.S.
Finally, there must be a focus on healing….

There’s more. Ryan points to the huge report that was just released by the Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence, that looks at the affect that deleterious effects that exposure to violence has on kids, and what we can do about it. Anyway, take a look.

US ATTORNEY SAYS PROSECUTION OF AARON SWARTZ WAS “APPROPRIATE”

Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz evidently spoke to reporters after an unrelated news conference, saying she was terribly upset about Aaron Swartz’s suicide, but that the federal prosecutors acted appropriately.

David Kravets at WIRED has the story about the MA U.S. Attorney’s . Here’s a clip:

Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, said Thursday the government’s “conduct was appropriate” in its handling of the Aaron Swartz prosecution.

The President Barack Obama appointee’s first public comments on the matter come nearly a week after the internet sensation, who was under federal indictment in Massachusetts on hacking and other charges, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.

Swartz’s family, in part, blamed the suicide of the executive director of Demand Progress on what they said was an overzealous prosecution. Prosecutors in Ortiz’s office had offered the 26-year-old a six-month prison sentence in exchange for his guilty plea to more than a dozen counts of computer hacking and wire fraud over the illicit downloading of millions of academic articles from a subscription database at MIT. It was a plea agreement Swartz rejected.

“As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life,” Ortiz said. “I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably.”

The Boston Globe (among others) also has a report that, for those slightly obsessed with this story, is worth a read.

Also, while—whether one agrees with her legal POV or not (I don’t happen to at all), Ortiz at least handled the press interaction with dignity and respect.

Not so, it seems her husband, Tom Dolan, who early on took his feelings about criticism of his wife to Twitter. (His account has since been deleted.)

FireDogLake (among many others) has that story.

Dolan evidently forgot that in such unbearable circumstances the grieving family gets to say whatever they want, especially about a public figure, like a U.S. Attorney. The public figure’s spouse does not have such license, and certainly does not get to start shooting back through social media at the people who lost their son/brother/friend.

One more thing, just to be clear, yes, Aaron Swartz was offered a plea deal (as we mentioned in an earlier story), but when the defense and the prosecution couldn’t agree upon a deal, the 35 year sentence comes back into play.

So to those who contended that a 35 year was not in fact a threat, it was, actually. The big bad possible sentence is the gun that prosecutors hold to a defendant’s head, to get him or her to plead out. That’s the game. And it’s an ugly one.

A TALE OF A MISSISSIPPI COLD CASE AND A DECADES OLD MISSISSIPPI SCANDAL THAT MAY HAVE COMPROMISED A FRIGHTENING NUMBER OF CASES OVER DECADES

Huffington Post’s talented criminal justice writer/reporter, Radley Balko has this fascinating two-parter about the solving of the 15-year-old murder of Kathy Mabry by the unlikely team of two Innocence Project attorneys, in the course of which, a brewing subrosa scandal involving a pair of shoddy forensic analysts has been brought irrevocably into the light, finally (hopefully) making it impossible for Mississippi officials to ignore.

Here’s a clip:

The [Mabry] case went unsolved for 15 years, until December, after a casual courtroom conversation led lawyers from the Mississippi Innocence Project to investigate it. That two attorneys for an organization better known for getting the wrongly convicted out of prison would take it upon themselves to solve a cold case is remarkable enough. Their search covered the state, from Columbus in the northeast, to Oxford in the northwest, to the crime lab in Jackson, to a dusty attic in the Humphreys County courthouse, deep in the belly of the Delta.

The reason they felt compelled to act is part of a larger scandal currently unfolding in Mississippi. The original police investigation into Mabry’s murder hinged on the forensic analysis of Steven Hayne, a longtime Mississippi medical examiner, and Michael West, a dentist and self-proclaimed bite-mark expert. Hayne was a doctor in private practice who at the time performed nearly all of the state’s autopsies. West was one of his frequent collaborators. The two men have been at the heart of the Mississippi death investigation system for two decades. West has testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in thousands, including a number of death penalty cases.

Media investigations over the years, however, including my own for The Huffington Post and Reason magazine, have revealed that both Hayne and West have contributed critical evidence that led to the convictions of people who were later exonerated, and routinely and flagrantly flouted the ethical and professional standards of their respective fields. West, for example, once claimed he could match the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich found at a murder scene to the teeth of the prime suspect. In a more recent case, Hayne claimed the bullet wounds in a murder victim showed that two people held the gun when it was fired, not one. In the Mabry case, West used bite-mark analysis to nab an innocent man for Mabry’s murder. That man spent nearly a year in jail. But the Mabry story also shows that the victims in this scandal include not just the wrongly accused, but the families of the victims, the future victims of the actual perpetrators, public officials like Roseman, and even entire towns.

Mississippi officials have thus far resisted calls for a thorough review of Hayne and West’s work. In particular, the Mississippi Supreme Court has shown little concern over the possibility that Hayne and West may have put an untold number of innocents behind the razor wire at Parchman penitentiary. Neither has Attorney General Jim Hood, whose office continues to defend convictions won primarily on the testimony one or both of the men have given on the witness stand. To concede there’s a problem would implicate many state officials who used the two men during tenures as prosecutors. It would also open hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases to review.

Tucker Carrington, the director of the Mississippi Innocence Project, says he and his colleague Will McIntosh decided to pursue Mabry’s killer themselves after they attempted to bring the case to the attention of the prosecutor in Humphreys County, and then to Hood’s office, and received no response from either.

“When you take on a case and it reveals a glaring injustice like this — something that could easily be taken care of if someone would just give it some attention — you can’t just turn a blind eye to that,” Carrington says. “In the end, I guess we saw this through because no one else would.”

Photo from Library of Congress collection, 1930-1940, (Creative Commons)

WWJD—WHAT WILL JACKIE DO? PATT MORRISON INTERVIEWS NEW D.A. JACKIE LACEY

Patt’s interview offers some brief but interesting glimpses into Jackie the D.A. and Jackie the person.

Regarding Jackie the person, there’s an affecting moment where Lacey talks about how her father died in 2008, and when she visits his grave, she keeps thinking how much she wishes he’d seen her take office.

In terms of Jackie the D.A., it is encouraging to hear that her views on realignment sound reasonably balanced. (How that translates into action is something we’ll be keeping an eye on in the future.)

Here are both those clips:

PATT M: Is your dad here to see what you’ve achieved?

JACKIE L. He died in 2008. When I’m at the grave site, the question that pops into my head is, God, couldn’t he have been here for this? While it’s important for my mother, this particular accomplishment would have been extraordinary for my father. He loved following politics. He had pictures in our dining room of Tom Bradley and Julian Bond and Kenny Hahn, Martin Luther King of course, Robert F. Kennedy, John Kennedy. So for him not to be here — I don’t want to say I’m angry; I just don’t understand it. But I feel my father’s presence.

AND…

PATT M: How is state prison realignment — pushing state prisoners to the local level — going?

JACKIE L: It happened so fast and local law enforcement just wasn’t ready for this shift. We have a limited amount of space and money to incarcerate people. We’ve run out of room at the state prisons. We have run out of room at the county jail. My office’s role is to figure out alternatives for some people, such as mental health programs or drug facilities. Let’s peel the lower-risk people off and save room for people who are very dangerous.

Right now, we have policies that mandate 10 days in jail, 15 days, 30 days. They’re not going to be in that amount of time. And for some of these people, some of these alternatives are cheaper to do, and the recidivism rate is something like 10% to 30%. We’ve got to not be fearful about having these discussions.

L.A.R.B INTERVIEW WITH PAUL M. BARRETT, AUTHOR OF GLOCK: THE RISE OF AMERICA’S GUN

An interesting interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books with Paul M. Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s gun, who, by the way, isn’t particularly enthusiastic about assault weapons bans, simply because he doesn’t think they’ll do all that much good. Here’s what he says about his preferred approach:

PB: We already have a system in place right now for which there is broad support, restricting not particular kinds of guns, but who’s allowed to buy and possess them. That should be our focus when it comes to new legislation: not on guns, but on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally unstable people. We already have laws on the books that do that, but they are not as effective as they could be, because they too have loopholes. I would be in favor of closing those loopholes.

Specifically, I’m in favor of there being a requirement for a federal background check on all sales of all firearms at all times, not just the sales by federally licensed firearms dealers. That would capture many, many thousands and thousands of transactions that today happen basically off the books.

SR: Is this the so-called “gun show loophole”?

PB: Just as some people are obsessed with — to their own detriment — assault weapons, people are obsessed with gun shows. Gun shows are not the problem. It’s not gun shows, it’s private sales of firearms. Forget about gun shows.

At gun shows you have both federally licensed dealers who do background checks, and you have so-called private collectors who don’t do the background checks. The problem is not the federally licensed firearm dealers, who are actually at most gun shows selling the majority of guns, it’s those other guys.

And even more to the point, it’s the guys who don’t even go to gun shows, because those guys publically set up their product, essentially saying, “Here I am selling guns out in public, where the police can see me, and the ATF can see me,” and so forth. It’s the guys who do that from their kitchen table or the trunk of their car who are selling, all too often, to criminals or to other people who shouldn’t be getting guns.

I would make all sales that are sneaky, where no one knows who is actually buying the gun, illegal. That would keep guns out of the hands of some number of people who right now are very purposefully avoiding the background checks. Those are people we should be very suspicious about.

Read the rest of this intriguing interview (conducted by critic and essayist, Shaun Randol) here.

(Go, LARB!)

PROSECUTORIAL ABUSE & AARON SWARTZ, THE SEQUEL

While Aaron Swartz was an extraordinary young man, the story of relentless prosecutorial zeal aimed at Swartz for more than two years before he killed himself is depressingly ordinary.

And usually it is directed people who do not have the support and resources that Swartz had.

I am particularly aware of this as I prepare, this Wednesday morning, to attend the latest hearing in Federal Court pertaining to the case of Alex Sanchez, a RICO case in which the Feds reportedly lied to the grand jury, misidentified witnesses, all to bolster a murder conspiracy charge, which appears to have had nothing in the way of real evidence to justify it.

Writing for the Atlantic, Wendy Kaminer (who is one of many writing on the topic) points out the depressing ordinariness that Swartz’s case represents. Here’s a clip:

Federal prosecutors wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz and they succeeded. Their wildly disproportionate treatment of his victimless trespasses exemplified the Justice Department’s disregard for fairness, decency, and the fundamental rights of the citizens it’s supposed to serve. Swartz’s prosecution was notable not because of its cruel over-zealousness, which is horribly routine, but because it involved a gifted, idealistic, emotionally vulnerable defendant, with a sophisticated and relatively powerful constituency that has the means to make itself heard.

He was not the first person to hang himself in the wake of abusive, even sadistic federal prosecution, and he may not be the last. (You can read about the case of the “posthumously vindicated” Dr. Peter Gleason here.) But Swartz’s suicide may be the first to generate widespread sorrow and outrage over common prosecutorial tactics that put ordinary as well as extraordinary citizens at risk.

MARILAND GOVERNOR O’MALLY SAYS TUESDAY HE WILL PUT EVERYTHING BEHIND A NEW BILL TO REPEAL CAPITOL PUNISHMENT

Andy Brownfield of the Washington Examiner has the story. Here’s a clip:

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is giving a repeal of his state’s death penalty another shot, announcing on Tuesday that he will file a bill to do away with the ultimate punishment.

“The death penalty is expensive and it does not work,” O’Malley said during a news conference. “And for that reason alone, I believe we should stop doing it.”

The governor said the state should instead focus on measures that have proven to reduce crime rates, such as deploying police forces strategically, collection and use of DNA evidence, and using modern policing technology.

He also tied the abolition of capital punishment to a moral imperative, pointing out that the U.S. was among the seven countries that oversaw the most state executions: Iran, China, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United States.

“In whose company do we choose to walk forward?” he asked. “Will we be a society guided by the notion that two wrongs somehow make a right? Or will we be a society that’s guided by the fundamental civil and human rights that we understand are bestowed on humankind by God?”

O’Malley was flanked by members of the legislative black caucus, county executives and NAACP officials.

The NAACP has made it a priority to scrap capital punishment in Maryland this year, with the ultimate goal of abolishing it nationwide.

As the discussion continues about how best to prevent other tragedies like the terrible shooting in Newtown, CT, experts in youth issues are concerned that, in the desire to DO SOMETHING we are in danger of imposing new policies without adequately examining possible collateral effects that those policies could produce.

Youth advocates have reason to be wary. After the school shooting at Columbine High School, a flood of zero tolerance polices were adopted by school districts all across the country, with the unintended result that thousands of students were unnecessarily “pushed out” of school with suspensions or referrals to law enforcement for minor infractions.

With these worries in mind, a new report sponsored by Advancement Project, the Alliance for Educational Justice, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and more, argues that more police in schools are not the answer.

Whether you agree or not with the report’s conclusions about police in schools, it is important to recognize that the report raises questions that must be part of the discussion.

Here’s a clip from the report’s introduction:

The Newtown shooting also evokes a rational focus on school safety. Ultimately, keeping our children safe is the highest priority. And, in fact, all data show that our schools remain the safest place for children. Unfortunately, some of the early reactions, rooted in the well-intentioned desire to do something swiftly to protect young people, revolved around placing more security and more guns in schools. The first of these calls came from the National Rifle Association which believes the answer is an armed officer at every school. Other proposals include increasing law enforcement in schools
deploying the National Guard,3 and arming every teacher.4 These proposals satisfy our desire to appear secure. They are based on the theory that the only way to keep us safe from guns is to have more guns.

[SNIP]

These proposals satisfy our desire to appear secure. They are based on the theory that the only way to keep us safe from guns is to have more guns. The Newtown tragedy was a shooting at a school by an outsider, making it more akin to the incidents in Aurora and Tucson than past shootings at schools by students; but still, the responses to Newtown are aimed at doing more to “police” our schools. However, when we take a step back and review what we know about safe schools, we realize that these proposals go more towards creating the appearance of safety rather than towards actually creating truly safe schools.

[SNIP]

Based on a significant body of research and decades of lived experience, we know that these strategies will fail. They will do nothing to create school environments that reduce violence in our communities, catch early indicators of mental health needs, identify root causes underlying violence, or utilize the skills and resources of law enforcement in an effective way. They also fail to consider the host of unintended consequences – measured in educational, emotional, and economic costs – of placing more police in schools.

Our organizations have worked together to raise awareness about the devastating trend known as the School-To-Prison Pipeline. Specifically, too many schools are employing policies and practices of extreme discipline that push young people out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice system. The influx of police in schools has been one of the main contributors to the growing number of children funneled into this pipeline…

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT,,,,,EDUCATORS ARGUE OVER WHETHER TO LOCK CLASSROOM DOORS, OR NOT, POST NEWTOWN

The LA Times Stephen Ceasar and Howard Blume have the story:

Here’s a clip:

Behind a locked classroom door, a Los Angeles third-grade teacher purportedly committed lewd acts against students. The charges spurred demands for classrooms to remain open during the school day.

But after the shooting deaths of 20 first-graders in Connecticut last month, calls were made to keep classrooms locked.

The intent of both efforts is to keep students safe. But as school districts nationwide examine their security measures following the Newtown, Conn., massacre, the question of locked versus unlocked classroom doors is in debate. Should teachers and administrators use their secured doors as a shield from an outside danger? Or does a locked door conceal a potential danger inside?

The answers differ. Some schools, such as the 14 operated by local charter group PUC Schools, are required to keep doors open. Others, including the campuses in the Martinez Unified School District in Contra Costa County, require classrooms to be secured at all times. The Los Angeles Unified School District, like many others, leaves it up to administrators and instructors to decide, and the decision can vary from teacher to teacher….

THREE SUSPECTS FROM NORDSTROM RACK HOSTAGE STANDOFF CRISIS CAPTURED IN AZ MOTEL

We don’t usually report on straight up crime stories but, as one of those who was following the standoff via phone and twitter until the wee hours, I’m glad to see the situation appears to be moving toward resolution.

Andrew Blankstein of the LA times has the story.

Here’s a clip:

The incident began around 11 p.m. Thursday at the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center, near the 405 Freeway. The LAPD called a tactical alert and closed off the area around the shopping center.

When the Police Department’s SWAT officers arrived, they surrounded the store. At one point, one suspect exited, saw the police and ran back inside.

A second suspect walked out with an unidentified woman, saw police and also headed back inside. The suspects apparently fled in a while SUV, which police said they lost sight of. The officers entered the store at 3:30 a.m. and freed the captives.

At least three of the employees were wounded, including one woman who was sexually assaulted. Another woman was stabbed in the neck and sustained non-life-threatening wounds, and a third employee was pistol-whipped, police said.

It was unclear whether the robbers hid in the store or gained entrance after it closed. It was also not clear precisely how long they remained in the store before fleeing, and police would not say how much cash was stolen.

NOVELIST JERVEY TERVALON TALKS ABOUT WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GROW UP WITH GUNS ALL TOO FREQUENTLY POINTED YOUR DIRECTION

This Op Ed by novelist Jervey Tervalon appeared over the weekend in the LA Times and is assuredly worth your time. Here’s a clip.

…The time after that my high school girlfriend’s drunken stepfather aimed a double-barreled shotgun at me at close range after seeing me hug his stepdaughter while she made French fries for the family. She grabbed the gun from him. Only later did she tell me they had already taken the precaution of hiding the shells.

I accepted these and other encounters with guns as what happened in my neighborhood, even to kids like me who stayed on the right side of the line, the ones who didn’t drink, didn’t get high and were college-bound.

At UC Santa Barbara, where I went to college, the only time I saw a gun was when the Isla Vista police approached me, and that gun was at least holstered. But then I returned to Los Angeles to teach at Locke High, and I was back in the world of guns. I took over a class for a teacher who had threatened his students with a 9mm pistol. During my time at Locke, one student was shot in the face and left to die at a phone booth, and another was shot for a leather jacket she wouldn’t give up….

THE OAKLAND SCHOOL SYSTEM HOPES TO COMBAT RISING SUSPENSIONS WITH A FIVE YEAR RESTORATIVE JUSTICE PLAN

Ana Tintocalis has this excellent story for KQED’s California Report about an Oakland model for cutting down on school suspensions that, if it works, could set the standard for the state.

Here’s a summary:

A number of new education laws in California tackle a particularly alarming issue: the state’s schools now issue more suspensions to students than diplomas, especially to African-American students. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Oakland Unified School District. But now, district officials are pinning their hopes on a new approach to student discipline, called “Restorative Justice.”

But listen here.

NY TIMES SLAMS OBAMA’S PATHETIC CLEMENCY POLICY

This editorial, which appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, speaks for itself.

Here’s a big clip:

Mr. Obama has pardoned only 22 people, fewer than any president since the modern era of pardons began in 1900. [EDITOR'S NOTE: !!!!!] He has granted a pardon for 1 out of every 50 applicants, compared with 1 out of 33 for George W. Bush, 1 of 8 for Bill Clinton and 1 of 3 for Ronald Reagan.

In part, this has been a reaction to Presidents Clinton and Bush, both of whom compromised the pardon power with cronyism. But the basic problem may be that Mr. Obama allowed himself to be crippled by the pardon process itself. That process is managed by the Justice Department, which receives applications for clemency and makes recommendations to the White House.

Presumably, the president is willing to use acts of clemency to right the wrongs of the sentencing and judicial systems. Yet the same cannot be said of the Justice Department, which has a prosecutorial mind-set. It has undermined the process with huge backlogs and delays, and sometimes views pardons as an affront to federal efforts to fight crime.

Over the years, too, the process appears to have been tainted by racial bias. As ProPublica documented in an analysis of Bush administration pardons, whites benefited from pardons four times as often as members of minority groups, even though blacks alone made up 38 percent of the federal prison population. That report prompted a continuing Justice Department review by its Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In addition, the department’s pardon office is run by a Bush-appointed lawyer, Ronald L. Rodgers, whose professional conduct has been excoriated by the Justice Department’s own inspector general and referred to the deputy attorney general for possible administrative action. In 2008, in transmitting a proposed pardon to the White House, Mr. Rodgers misrepresented the views of both the United States attorney who made the recommendation and the judge who seconded it. The prisoner was denied a pardon.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE MAY HELP WITH SCHOOL SUSPENSIONS, AND LOWER LEVEL CRIMES, BUT WHAT ABOUT MURDER

Also in the NY Times, this story by Paul Tullis in the Sunday Magazine asks if forgiveness in the form of—restorative justice—-can help parents of a murder victim/

The answer seems to be yes, in this particular case.

But it’s complicated.

Clipping doesn’t really do this story justice. Just read it.

KIDS PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO FALSE CONFESSIONS, EXONERATION EVIDENCE FINDS

This story by Joyce Lee for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange looks at the tendency of underage suspects to make false confessions.

Here’s a clip:

Carl Williams was 17 years old when Cook County police arrested him in January of 1994. Williams was charged with two counts of murder and one count of sexual assault. He confessed to the crime after a police interrogation and along with four co-defendants, Williams was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in 1996.

Now, 18 years later, Williams, who claims he is innocent, has been granted an evidentiary hearing and a re-sentencing by the 1st District Appellate Court of Illinois. “The case of the wrong Carl” is a prime example of change in the way Illinois judges view confessions, said Steven Drizin, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions – and co-founder of the Center on Wrong Convictions of Youth – at the Northwestern University School of Law.

The Cook County justice system interrogates its juveniles as they do its adults. And the center is quite certain that of the 100-plus juveniles currently serving life without parole sentences in the state, many of their convictions were based on false confessions.