Another of the talented LA Weekly writers who’ve migrated elsewhere in the past year is Jeffrey Anderson. Jeff is an emblematic example of that much too rare breed, the crusading reporter. He has great street instincts, lives to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted and rarely meets a wrong he doesn’t long to right. (While at the Weekly, he wrote about, among other topics, political corruption in Bell Gardens and Cudahy.)

Now Jeff lives in Baltimore and works for the town’s LA Weekly equivalent, the City Paper.

Earlier this year, I posted links to Jeff’s three-part series that connected dots in the LA-Baltimore drug connection,

Now, Jeff and his colleagues have been working on an investigative series that feels like it’s pulled straight from The Wire. This look at Baltimore’s shadow world involves the nexus of drug trafficking, respectable business and local politics.

Jeff sent me a link to the latest in the series yesterday. It’s an intriguing tale that makes for great reading and likely has many more chapters yet to come. But it’s scary stuff for any reporter to dig into, especially when one is working for the alternative weekly, not the town’s Tribune-owned, lawyer-heavy paper of record.

Here are the links to the pieces of the story thus far so you can follow along, and cheer Jeff on as he continues to dig.

1. Flight Connections

2. One Angry Man

And from yesterday...

3. Grave Accusations.…. in which a now dead prosecutor calls a local business man a “violent drug dealer.” (This last one’s by Jeff’s colleague, Van Smith.)

Photo above of murdered Baltimore-based Federal Prosecutor Jonathan Luna

Bookmark to:

(NOTE: USC grad j student and IJJ research associate, Amanda Becker took excellent notes on this session, which are what I’m working from in this post.)

Thursday was the last day of the IJJ Criminal Justice seminar and featured the moment where the rubber met the road—or at least talked about meeting the road.

(Could I possibly torture that metaphor any more?)

For two and a half days, nearly all the main players in LA’s criminal justice system, and many of their top critics, got together on panels, at lunch, and sometimes in the audience, to talk about the fact that LA is still the gang capital of the world and that, after nearly three decades of using imprisonment and punishment as its primary public safety strategy, California’s “incarceration addiction” is threatening to break the state.

The final panel was called: Moving from Vision to Action, What are LA’s Leaders Willing to do Jointly to Reform the System?

The panel consisted of LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, LA District Attorney Steve Cooley, LA Public Defender Michael Judge, LAPD Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger (one of those likely to be short listed to replace Bratton when the time comes), California State Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, Chief LA County Probation Officer Robert Taylor, and Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, Marvin Southard.

Joe Domanick, the moderator and prime mover behind the conference, asked everyone to say what they were willing to commit to doing in order to reform LA’s—and California’s—- justice system.

The best of the answers are below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

As I was sitting at my desk, trying to make sense of the story I’ve been working on this week, my thoughts drifted back to Tuesday night’s dinner, and the words of the women who wrestle with all the pesky, run-of-the-mill, day-to-day elements of journalism that the rest of us face: tracking down good sources, organizing the facts you’ve gathered so that they have some kind of meaning, and laying it all down in prose that you hope will will engage reader’s attention for at least a nanosecond.

Yet in addition to those routine tasks, these women who were honored–and journalists like them in countries around the world—- have to worry about whether they’ll make it through the day alive, or will ever see their kids again.

“If we go to jail, or are tortured, or eventually killed for being good journalists,” said Mexico’s Lydia Cacho at the end of her acceptance speech, “because of this award, we have witnesses. And, after tonight, you share the responsibility of knowing.”

I hereby pass that shared responsibility to you, dear WLA readers. Sometimes the fact of increased public scrutiny can protect a journalist who is at risk.

Sometimes, of course, it does not.

For me, the ever-present ghost of Monday’s dinner was the woman who was given the Courage in Journalism award in 2002, Anna Politkovskaya . I met Anna that same year when PEN USA gave her our International Freedom to Write Award for her risky reporting on the war in Chechnya, specifically the effect of the war on ordinary people. I’m on PEN’s board of directors so got to spend a little time with her. I remember thinking that she was one of the bravest people I’d ever met. She had been receiving death threats for a while back then. She didn’t disregard them, but nor did they slow her down. It was impossible not to worry about her.

One day—it was a year ago this October 6—the worst of the worries came to pass; Anna did not make it home. She was shot to death, execution style, in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. It is taken for granted that she was murdered specifically because of her work. In fact, the day of her death she had planned to file a major story on the torture practices of Chechen security forces.

Yet, while those who killed her could take away Anna’s life, her future work, and her abitlity to be a mother to her now-grown children, they could not take away her power as a witness, a power that, because of her writing, she passed along to the rest of us.

On the first anniversary of her death, 2000 Russians braved a cold Moscow day to make it clear that they heard, they knew, and they weren’t going away.

Bookmark to: