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

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

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

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

Here’s pieces of his Bratton quote:

(ABOUT ZINE & HIS MOTION)

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

(ABOUT SO 40 IN GENERAL)

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

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

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

And here’s Councilman Dennis Zine:

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

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

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

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

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All day Tuesday some of the main players in the realm of LA criminal justice got together at the Davidson Center at USC and talked with each other and the audience about what a successful 21st Century criminal justice system ought to look like. Among those present were LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, LA civil rights attorney Connie Rice, gang intervention specialist, Bo Taylor, Urban League president Blair Taylor, author and former California state senator Tom Hayden, LA gang czar Jeff Carr…and lots more.
The discussions were moderated by journalist/author Joe Domanick and bounced around between such subjects as gangs and gang violence, California prisons, the LA County jail and the broken parole system.


I’ll blog about the high points later. But the conversations were remarkable for their lack of defensiveness or grandstanding. Everyone seemed to have showed up with the willingness to genuinely talk about solutions—and how the ideas discussed this week could get beyond talk to actual implementation.

Here’s some of what Victor Merina, Senior Fellow at the the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, wrote about the conference:

For Connie Rice, an attorney and architect of Los Angeles City’s landmark anti-gang report, reforming the criminal justice system is critical in dealing with an “endemic epidemic” of violence on community streets.

For Sheriff Lee Baca, who oversees the country’s largest jail system, a criminal justice system overtaxed by mental health issues among those incarcerated has worsened a staggering problem.

For Darren “Bo” Taylor, a former gang member who now works with at-risk youth as founder of Unity One, the everyday violence in communities of color is simply “a crisis. It’s an emergency.”

And Blair H. Taylor, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League, puts it even more dramatically, calling the need to curb community violence today’s paramount issue. “It’s a problem, I believe, bigger than any problem in the 21st Century,” said Taylor, “bigger than global warming, bigger than terrorism.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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All day today I’ll be at the Criminal Justice Conference sponsored and organized by the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, where I’m a senior fellow. (They’re the folks who sponsor this blog.)

The prime mover behind the conference, which is open to anyone, is my pal Joe Domanick, and the three-day schedule will feature LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, Connie Rice, and loads of others. (You can find the full schedule here
Here’s a snippet from Joe’s introduction to the reasons he think the conference is important:

The purpose of the Justice and Journalism conference….is for L.A.’s criminal justice professionals and experts to discuss what they see taking place on the other side of the Los Angeles criminal justice conveyor belt – a belt that never stops. Over 30% of those moving into the state’s overstuffed prison system come from L.A. County. After doing their time, tens of thousands return each year to Los Angeles – the majority having received little or no educational help, mental health care, treatment for drug or alcohol abuse, or other services while in prison. When they arrive here and hit the streets, there is no serious, sustained and coordinated reentry strategy to assist them. It’s no wonder that 70% are placed back on the conveyor belt and returned to prison within three years following their release….

Come on down if you can manage it. The event is free and it will be very, very interesting, I guarantee it.

(Naturally, I’ll be blogging it.)

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Pedro Guzman, the 29-year-old developmentally disabled man—and U.S. citizen— who was wrongly deported from the LA County jail to Mexico in May of this year, turned up this past Sunday when he tried to cross back into the U.S. at Calexico.

In case you’ve forgotten, here are the basics of the story: In April of this year, Guzman was sentenced to 120 days in jail for trespassing and vandalism. It seems that, in a bizarre serious of actions, Guzman walked out on the runway at the Fox Field Airport in Lancaster, and tried repeatedly to get on a private plane as it prepared for takeoff. Then when he couldn’t get on, he found a stranger’s truck, and sat inside the cab until he was arrested.

Although sentenced to 120 days, Guzman was only scheduled to spend 40 days in LA’s overcrowded jail system, yet he was instead released after 20 days and deported to Tijuana. As nearly as anyone seems to know, the mistake was based on a confused conversation in which Guzman indicated to sheriff’s deputies that he was born in Mexico—nevermind the fact that he was born in Los Angeles.

Yet, despite his disability (not to mention the fact that he’d been locked up to begin with for irrational behavior), nobody bothered to check his records. Instead he was transferred from the LA County facility to an immigration detention center in Santa Ana, where the disoriented Guzman signed a voluntary deportation order—after which time he was transported to the border and dropped off, with little in his pockets, inside Mexico. He tried to call his family once after his deportation, but the conversation was cut off. And no one ever heard from Guzman again.

(WLA first reported on the issue here but, for the full tale, do yourself a favor and read Daniel Hernandez’ wonderful LA Weekly story on Guzman and his mother, Maria Carbajal.)

His mother took weeks away from her job working nights at Jack in the Box to search for her son, with no luck. She got zero help from the feds who, when she pleaded for their assistance, basically said, “Not our problem.”

(We understand that people make mistakes. But the responsible among us try then to rectify them.)

In any case, he’s found now—after being missing for three months— and was reunited with his family this afternoon.

Here are some clips from the ACLU press release that came out a little while ago:

….He told his family today that he attempted to cross the border several times but was turned away. He said he walked fromTijuana to Mexicali, a distance of more than 100 miles, and ate out of trash cans as he
looked for a way back into the U.S. His family says he was nearly unrecognizable…

Border agents detained Mr. Guzman as he attempted to cross into the U.S. near Calexico early Sunday morning. County officials had issued a warrant for his failure to appear at probation hearings, (!!!!!) despite attempts by the family and ACLU/SC to explain to probationofficials that he had been wrongfully deported.

(Good grief. And we wonder why our prisons are filled with people who have committed no new crimes but are simply arrested for technical violations of their probation or parole.)

The government had promised to immediately notify the family and their attorneys if it found Mr. Guzman. Instead, it took 36 hours for the family to be notified.

Mr. Guzman spent two days in jail (WHY EXACTLY?) before Superior Court Judge Carlos Chung ordered him released Tuesday morning. Late Monday night, ACLU/SC staff had met with Mr. Guzman at Men’s Central Jail and confirmed his identity. This afternoon, Sheriff’s Department officials transported him from downtown Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley Courthouse,where he was reunited with his mother, Maria Carbajal.

The family’s last contact with Mr. Guzman was May 11, when he called his sister-in-law from a borrowed cell phone to say he had been deported to Tijuana. The call cut off, and Carbajal rushed to Tijuana but was unable to locate him.

And so ends a harrowing three-month search. Thankfully Guzman’s okay. At least physically, anyway. And a mother gets her son back.

It’s a story that could have had a very different ending. It didn’t. But it could have.
************************************************************************
UPDATE: According the lawsuit filed by the family, Guzman, who could neither read nor write, and has trouble processing information, was first asked about his immigration status in jail. And he told deputies—not that he was born in Mexico—but that he was born in California but had Mexican parents.

“Sometime after that,” writes the AP, “the Sheriff’s Department identified him as a non-citizen, obtained his signature for voluntary removal from the United States and turned him over to Customs and Immigration Enforcement, a division of the Homeland Security Department, for deportation.”

Also, instead of being in jail the 40 days that was expected, he was in jail around 20 days, thus the family was unaware of his release date until it was too late. (As you’ll see, I’ve corrected it above.)

The AP’s Peter Prengaman also writes that Guzman’s mother described her son as being very deteriorated, psychologically.

Guzman was shaking, stuttering and appeared traumatized,his family said at a news conference. The family said it planned to seek medical attention for Guzman, who was not at the news conference.

“They took him whole, but only returned half of him to me,” his mother, Maria Carbajal, said in Spanish while crying….

(photo of Pedro Guzman taken August 7, after reuniting with his family—courtesy of the ACLU of Southern California)

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photo by Joseph Rodriguez

Yesterday the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Justice Policy Institute issued a 100-plus page report that is getting a lot of attention. The report, called Gang Wars, analyzes which strategies work to combat gang violence, which strategies really don’t work, and which approaches only make the problem far, far worse.

The good news, according to the research, is that there are strategies that have been proven to be effective. The bad news is that Los Angeles, long the gang capital of the world, is the model for how NOT to solve the gang problem. The report points out that, rather than put money and effort into gang prevention and intervention programs, LA county has spent the past several decades trying to arrest and incarcerate its way out of the problem—and has failed spectacularly.

“Anti-gang legislation and police crackdowns are failing so badly that they are strengthening the criminal organizations and making U.S. cities more dangerous…..” writes the AP about the report’s findings. “Mass arrests, stiff prison sentences often served with other gang members and other strategies that focus on law enforcement rather than intervention actually strengthen gang ties and further marginalize angry young men…”

And over at the NY Times’ editorial pages they write:

It shows that police dragnets that criminalize whole communities and land large numbers of nonviolent children in jail don’t reduce gang involvement or gang violence. Law enforcement tools need to be used in a targeted way — and directed at the 10 percent or so of gang members who commit violent crimes. The main emphasis needs to be on proven prevention programs that change children’s behavior by getting them involved in community and school-based programs that essentially keep them out of gangs.

Most of us who’ve been paying attention, have been saying as much for a long, long time, but lawmakers have insisted on pursuing the crack-down/lock-’em-up policy almost exclusively.

“A 25-year anti-gang effort has cost taxpayers billions of dollars but has resulted in six times as many gangs and twice the number of gang members, because Los Angeles has not adequately funded social programs…” says the Washington Post of LA’s history of ill considered gang policy.

Statistics show that youth crime in the United States is at its lowest levels in 30 years and that gangs are responsible for a relatively small share of crime. In addition, according to a national Justice Department survey of police departments, gang membership declined from 850,000 in 1996 to 760,000 in 2004.

But occasional outbursts of violence prompt the media and politicians to seek immediate answers, said the report’s authors, Pranis and Judith Greene.

“And it’s more about politics than it is about serious efforts to do something,” Greene said yesterday. “It’s frustrating to see officials come forward with money for mass arrests, when the money is so sorely needed in programs that are tried and true and can really work.”

Interestingly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the AP and various other news publications all have longer news stories on the report than LA’s hometown paper saw fit to run.

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Okay, I’ve been threatening to be more critical of Sheriff Lee Baca for his running of the problematic LA County jails, but he’s just now made a very good move that is emblematic of Baca’s best leadership qualities. So it’s essential to give credit where credit is due.

(I promise I’ll post a nice snappy To Do list for him next week, now that I’m out from under my pesky deadline.)

While our California governor and state lawmakers do little more than posture on the issue of prison and jail overcrowding—and do exactly ZERO on the issue of sentencing reform—(with the exception, on both counts, of state senator Gloria Romero), Baca is jumping in with both feet to push for the authority to put 2000 of the low-level offenders, who are routinely remanded to his jails, on home detention. They’ll have to serve out their full sentences wearing those electronic ankle bracelet thingies. But, they won’t be in county lock-up.

This is exactly the right move.

(One of my UCI students did a great story last quarter on a California company that distributes the SCRAM monitoring device, and they are unquestionably the wave of the future.)

Yesterday’s LA Times has the details on the sheriff’s idea, and this morning’s LA Times editorial appropriately urges support for Baca’s proposal.

If the state legislature doesn’t hop enthusiastically on Baca’s plan, we need to hammer them until they do.

PS: Already the law-and-order types are marching out the usual tired and wearingly predictable criticism…..while the California prisons are possibly a week or two away from having their populations capped by a federal judge who has had it with the over-politicized behavior—on both sides of the aisle—that has left the state’s prisons, and the corrections health care system, in a dangerous state of overcrowded shambles.

Ya estuvo!

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