WitnessLA has obtained county documents indicating that a deputy probation officer (DPO) working for the Los Angeles County Department of probation has been twice arrested on complaints of child molestation, based on accusations by three of his adopted children—and that’s before you get to the DCFS reports.

Although the arrests did not lead to convictions, in five other instances the officer was the object of complaints of child abuse and child sexual abuse made to the San Bernardino DCFS (Department of Family and Children Services.)

In three of those instances of abuse complaints, the charges were “substantiated” by DCFS.

County documents also show that, for several years, the same officer had a live in “nanny” for the children who also happened to be a convicted sex offender. (When the “nanny” was 19 years old, he was convicted of having anal sex with a minor under the age of 18.)

Yes, you read right. The officer had a live in friend/nanny who is also a convicted sex offender.

Yet, as of May of this year, the officer was still working for LA County probation—and is reportedly working still (although the department’s human resource section won’t confirm, one way or the other).

Most recently, the officer has been supervising adult probationers, not juveniles. The department won’t say if he supervised juveniles earlier in his employment for the LA County or not.

THE NIT-PICKY DETAILS

Okay here, in excruciating detail, is what the county paperwork shows:

In 2002 this officer adopted four children—three boys and one girl—some or all of whom it is believed were in his care as foster children prior to the adoption.

Five times between May of 2001 and December of 2006, allegations of child abuse, sexual abuse and/or general neglect were filed against the officer, and thus required investigation by the Department of Family and Children Services in San Bernardino .

In three out of the five cases, the charges were “substantiated.” In other words, they were investigated and found to be true, according to county documents.

Here’s the list:

On May 24 2001, the charge of physical abuse was substantiated against the officer

On December 4, 2003, another charge of physical abuse was substantiated against the officer—this time along with his housemate.

Three years later, on December 21, 2006, allegations of sexual abuse, plus general neglect and the absence of a caretaker were lodged against the officer. Those allegations were again substantiated.

(Earlier that same year, two other allegations of sexual abuse were made against the officer, and in one case his housemate as well, however they were not substantiated.)

(Okay, I know this is tedious, but stick with me here.)

On the same day that the sexual abuse allegations were substantiated, the San Bernardino Police stopped by the officer’s house to find out why his housemate, the nanny, had failed to register as a sex offender.

According to an article in the San Bernardino Sun. and also according to LA County documents, when the police officers came to the house, three of the officer’s children—one presumes the three boys— alleged that their father had “molested them repeatedly.”

Both the officer and the housemate were arrested on suspicion of child molestation. In the end, however, criminal charges were not filed.

According to a separate LA County document, The officer was rearrested for molestation a week or two later. Again there were no charges.

SO, DOES PROBATION KNOW ABOUT THE MOLESTATION CHARGES, ET AL?

Did LA County Probation higher ups know that one of their officers had been repeatedly slammed with child abuse allegations—with at least three of those charges found to be righteous?

Yep, they did.

And what did they do about it?

Just about nothing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday, the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to create a multi-agency task force in order to investigate the health and safety issues surrounding raves—in particular raves that are held in public venues.

The measure was proposed by Zev Yaroslavsky and Don Knabe. Mark Ridley-Thomas suggested that some kind of young person or persons should be added to the task force that would be made up of law enforcement agencies, medical and health professionals, music business types and so on.

(Heck, it’s nice to see the Sups get along over an issue for a change. Last week, they voted unanimously to send a sternly-worded collective letter to the loathsome Sam Zell about the LA Times’ faux front page, so maybe they’re on a roll)

The vote came in response to the death of 15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez who evidently drank from a water bottle laced with Ecstasy—a drug that had dropped in popularity around a decade ago but now has spiked again.

The LA Times covered the story here, KPPC covered it here.

Then, for Neon Tommy, Annenberg journalism student, Paresh Dave, has done an excellent job of giving a comprehensive overview of the many complex issues swirling around Rodriguez’s death and the subsequent temporary ban on raves at the Coliseum and now the Board of Sups new task force.

Read it.

What do you think LA County should do about raves?

Photo by Winnie Jaing

Last Tuesday, the LA County Board of Supervisors approved the county’s long-awaited gang violence reduction plan: The Regional Gang Violence Reduction Initiative. (The LA Times reported on the plan Monday. And here’s a link to the Which Way LA? podcast where Connie Rice and I discussed the matter.

It is, in a word, pathetic.

The so-called initiative is pathetic as a strategy, pathetic in its allocation of a mere $1.1 million dollars to address gang intervention and prevention in all of LA County, pathetic in the number of kids it intends to serve (a nice round 100 out of a county population of 10 million).

It is also pathetic in that, instead of maximizing its mini-reach by cooperating with existing programs and community based groups, or even with LA City, for no appreciably functional reason the county has elected to reinvent its own sad little wobbly wheel.

It is even more discouraging when one realizes it has taken three full years to get us to this woeful pass. Back in March of 2008, when I wrote these two posts, we’d already waited a year for the damn plan, and even that seemed like slow-dragging.

NO TRAIN AND NO TRACKS

It was understood back in 2008—and more so now, what with the state’s budget meltdown—that the kind of multifaceted approach needed to begin to address the many elements in a community that allow gangs to flourish, was simply not in the cards. There is neither the money nor the political will launch such an initiative.

But the idea was that while we couldn’t afford the fully-functional locomotive to take us where we needed to go in terms of gang prevention and intervention, we could at least start to lay some tracks.

With that in mind, the committee (headed by the County’s Chief Executive Office, Bill Fujioka) tasked with coming up with said “tracks” has over the past three years presented the County Sups with a bunch of different iterations of the plan okayed on Tuesday. Discouragingly, each one of those pre-plan-plans have been deemed not ready for prime time.

Finally, however—whether because the plan was thought to be slightly better, or more likely because everyone was worn down—yet one more plan was presented, a vote was taken, and a strategy was approved—albeit with two crucial changes, (but I’ll get to that last in a minute).

So what is this much labored over plan? You can read the a version of the last iteration here. But let me summarize it for you.

First a few metaphors:

After the plan was approved, Connie Rice snapped unhappily —and correctly— that the county had labored to produce an elephant and had instead managed only to push out a mouse.

Or to use the locomotive versus tracks image, under this plan we have no train, no tracks, but four bus benches.

Put yet another way, after three years of dithering, we’ve got a strategy that could have been drawn up in 15 minutes on a cocktail napkin.

Here’s the heart of LA County’s one and only Regional Gang Violence Reduction Initiative:

In four “demonstration sites” the county will will find and focus on 25 kids per site.

Yep, you added right. The new initiative will serve a grand total of 100 kids out of an LA County population of 10 million— 850,000 of whom are kids living in high violence zones. All of the 100 kids chose for the program will be adolescents who are being released from one of the county’s juvenile probation camps. The idea is to help them transition back into community life and not to land back in the juvenile justice system.

As I mentioned up top, the budget for this massive 100 kid battle plan is $1.1 million—meaning we will spending about $11,000 per kid.

FEW BUCKS, LESS BANG

And what will each probationer kid get for our money to help him or her turn a life around? For those bucks the county will:

1. Make sure that every kid has a probation officer.
2. Refer them to the County Department of Mental Health, if they need mental health care.
3. Refer their parents to parenting classes, if that is needed.
4. Work with school officials to make sure kids get back in school and/or get tutors or whatever.
5. Make sure that all the County’s “appropriate services have been made available to probationer and family members.”

Call me crazy, but I thought that LA County was already supposed to be providing most of those five services for its kids coming out of camp, even without the new “initiative.”

Oh, yeah, I think there are some committees and “workgroups” planned too. (I love committees and workgroups, don’t you?)

Like I said. Something far better could have been mapped out on a cocktail napkin.

To make matters worse, the 18-month plan was originally budgeted at nearly $2 million until Supervisors Mike Antonovitch and Don Knabe proposed at the last minute that the whole kit and caboodle could be run by LA County probation, which would allow the Sups to subtract another $891,000 from the budget bringing it down to its present $1.1 mil.

And so it was that the county’s one and only gang plan was handed over with minimal discussion to the same scandal-ridden LA County probation that was recently slapped with one big bad civil rights lawsuits for its failure to educate kids its probation camps, and that last month admitted to the LA Times that it had not managed to discipline scores of employees whom it was determined had abused juvenile probationers, and had allowed hundreds more complaints to go uninvestigated altogether.

And probation is just about to get a new chief, Donald Blevins, who has not been consulted on the gang initiative his agency is about to run—namely because he hasn’t taken his position yet.

NOW ABOUT THAT OTHER $142 MILLION

Oh and it gets even better: What few people know, and what the county fails to mention in its press advisories, is that there is already $142 million being spent on miscellaneous programs scattered across LA county that have one thing or another to do with gangs or gang violence reduction, (most of them subject to no public evaluation to see if they, you know, work).

Yet do these programs coordinate with each other? Or will this new 100-kid program coordinate with the existing programs in order to maximize resources? Or will the new gang initiative pair up with LA City’s gang program for the same economies of scale purpose, or with successful community based programs like Homeboy Industries or Toberman House (among others) that are already helping kids transition of out the probation camps?

The answers to those questions would be no, no, no and no.

PS: The county did make a frail attempt to get UCLA to agree to evaluate the outcomes of its soon-to-be-launched 100 kid, four-site pilot program. Last I heard, UCLA had to regretfully decline—because for said evaluation the county had budgeted exactly: $00.00.

This is no way to run a railroad. (Or even bus benches.)

PS: The surly-looking fellow in the center of the above photo (taken in Boyle Heights in 1992) is now working as one of the head bakers at Homeboy Industries.

I don’t remember the curly haired guy on the right, but the sneering guy on the left is doing a 14-year federal sentence for drug dealing. I hadn’t seen him in years but just recently he has started writing me letters to tell me that he intends to use his time inside well, educating himself as much as he possibly can, so that when he gets out he can start over and make something of his life. I do what I can to encourage him to keep with his plan.

Martin Berg at the LA Daily Journal wrote a very good column about the unconscionable idiocy that is going on at the LA County Department of Probation. Since the Daily Journal is hidden behind a firewall, I’ve reprinted the whole thing below.

But first, a little back story.

Until this past February 13—three weeks ago—the LA’s Department of Probation was charging families of lawbreaking kids for their children and/or teenager’s stays in juvenile hall or probation camp—as much as $23.63 dollars for each day in juvie ($750 each month), and $11.94 for each day they spent in camp.

Cool, the hard core among you might be saying. Let’s hold parents responsible for the misdeeds of their offspring.

Yes, well. The one teensy problem about this swell notion is that the majoriy of the parents charged were poor or working class with nothing to spare, so for many, the fees were either deeply burdonsome, or not affordable at all.

Supposedly the parents who couldn’t afford what usually amounted to thousands of dollars in bills could appeal the charges. But for some reason the appeals rarely seemed to work.

As a result, working single mothers were having their wages garnished, families were losing homes or on the verge of doing so, a homeless mother got billed while in a shelter, grandparents on fixed incomes who had taken in children out of love and kindness, were being hounded for high payments.

Moreover probation was spending an astonishing amount of money hiring people to chase after slow-paying parents (and grandparents, and foster parents).

Around a year ago, the Youth Justice Coalition began hearing the fees-for-kid-lock-up horror stories and looked into the matter. What they found was worse than they had imagined. So, together with some other nonprofits like Human Rights Watch, YJC’s Kim McGill went to see Probation Chief Robert Taylor to find out if he would set things right.

Gosh! Bummer! Nothing I can do, said Taylor. ( Or words to that effect.)

(A SIDE NOTE: Since Probation Officer Mary Ridgway’s death I’ve happened to talk to a lot of POs who’ve told me they uniformly hate this parent dunning policy. Just so you know, the rank-and-file should in no way be held responsible for management’s utter stupidity.)

After failing with Taylor, YJC and company next contacted a very, very talented reporter at the LA Times named Molly Hennessy-Fiske, who started looking into the issue. A series of excellent articles resulted, which may be found here and here and here.

With the entrance of the Times on the scene, all of a sudden Chief Taylor found— Mon Dieu! Quelle surprise!—-he could do something after all—especially after the YJC also went to the County Board of Supervisors, who forced Probation’s hand.

Thus on February 13, Chief Taylor declared a moratorium on the payments until things could be sorted out.

Only one problem: a lot of people didn’t know about the moratorium because Probation didn’t bother to tell them. They just kept asking for the back money.

Which brings us to our story. Take it away, Marty.

EARTH TO L.A. COUNTY: GET A CLUE

Leave it to Los Angeles County bureaucrats to turn a well-intentioned state law holding parents financially accountable for their kids’ bad deeds into a vicious attack on beleaguered foster parents.

Vicious, and really stupid.

Vicious because county lawyers have gone after people they should have known didn’t have the ability to pay, sometimes putting liens on their homes when parents couldn’t come up with the money.

Stupid because the county lawyers throw good money after bad, in one case paying an outside law firm $13,000 to try to collect $1,000 from a grandmother who became guardian of her daughter’s four children – even after the county Board of Supervisors had declared a moratorium on the collections.

Read the rest of this entry »

Activists take lead roles to reopen Burke’s failed monument

I long ago gave up any hope that Yvonne Burke would be indicted for her failure to stop the dying and maiming that eventually forced King-Drew Medical Center to close in 2007. Every sitting member of the county board of supervisors, who ignored the management problems festering for a decade or more, deserve punishment, too.

To heal their souls, Burke and her accomplices should mark a calendar with the birthdays of those who needlessly died under their bungled leadership. One birthday is coming up. On Feb. 1, Edith Isabel Rodriguez may have turned 45 had the hospital staff heeded her pleas and those of her boyfriend. She writhed in pain on the floor of the ER waiting room for 45 minutes before dying of a ruptured bowel. Let the dozens of birthdays marked on the supervisors’ calendars inspire them to quickly act to reopen the hospital.

One woman already up for the fight to reopen the South L.A. hospital is Sylvia Drew Ivie, the daughter of Charles Drew, the physician for whom the hospital was named. A graduate of Howard University School of Law, Drew Ivie is the chief of staff for County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who replaced the disgraced Burke.

A profile of Drew Ivie, written by a former colleague of mine, Evan George, appears in today’s Daily Journal, a legal newspaper in Los Angeles. (Evan covers healthcare and law better than anyone in town. And yes, his is the first piece written about Drew Ivie by any major media in Los Angeles.)

Drew Ivie worked in the Carter Administration’s U.S. Office for Civil Rights and served briefly as a deputy L.A. city attorney in the 1970s and was most recently the executive director To Help Everyone Clinic in South L.A. She cut back on her time there to lead the community’s losing struggle to keep the hospital open.

Here are a few excerpts from Evan’s story. (Sorry, no link. The paper’s online and print editions are paid-subscription only.)

Her work with the clinic tapered off by 2005, when the largest cloud hanging over South Los Angeles became its once celebrated hospital and the Charles Drew University Medical Center that trained its doctors. As losing federal funding over safety concerns grew likely, Drew Ivie served as project director of the Steering Committee on the Future of the King/Drew Medical Center. The group advised supervisors on how to clean up the hospital’s act.
When the supervisors pulled the plug on the hospital, Drew Ivie said, she was stunned. “We really didn’t think that would be permitted to happen by all of the people who understood how important it was to the community,” she said. She said she blamed failed governance and poor communication between the medical staff and county leaders.
Now, her boss is the one county official most bent on reopening the decrepit facility within two years.
Many in county government have interpreted Drew Ivie’s appointment as a shake-up to try to overcome crippling bureaucratic failures. Last week, Ridley-Thomas also announced his pick of attorney Yolanda Vera as his health deputy. Vera, a longtime health care advocate who helped sue the county over hospital bed cuts years ago, said she has worked closely with Drew Ivie in the past.

Earlier in the story, Evan describes the depth of her motivations:

She also comes to the fight saddled with heavy emotional ties to the issue.
A daughter of the physician for whom the teaching hospital was partially named, she made saving the sinking institution a personal battle and a family obligation. That the hospital finally shuttered within weeks of her losing her own husband to a brain tumor made the tragedy that much more crippling. Friends say the loss brought Drew Ivie to a low point in her life that left her treading water. They also said they had no doubt she eventually would charge back into the fray.
“Sylvia is somebody, unlike some politicians, who actually understands her mistakes and learns from them,” said Stan Price, a former director of the National Health Law Program who has worked with her for decades. “She knows what went wrong and why she wasn’t successful.”

Let’s hope all of the county supervisors are listening to Sylvia Drew Ivie and Yolanda Vera as they reflect on the many darkened days on their birthday calendars.

There was a time when it seemed that So Cal’s best bet for a forward thinking and comprehensive gang program would be LA County, which planned to completely revamp its existing $105 million gang program—while the City Council and the mayor’s office seemed to do little more than shoot at each other rather than coming up with a coherent strategy to calm the violence in the streets.

But now the city seems to be moving (at least vaguely), even if slowly, in a single direction. Yet the county has done……Zero. Zip. Nada.

Bill Fujioka, the county’s chief executive, and a smart guy whom we generally like, is more than a year late in unveiling even a presentation of a plan—so that the Board of Supervisors might begin to haggle over it.

More on this in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, the LA Times’ Molly Hennessy-Fisk has a fairly thorough listing of some of the vexing issues at play here. (By the way, Hennessy-Fisk was only given the LA County beat this past September, and she has already produced some very nicely reported articles, this one included.)

Hard to say for sure. But it’s beginning to look more and more like the latter.

CHILDREN NOW, a national nonprofit that monitors the wellbeing of American children, has just issued its yearly scorecard for California, with measurements that are separated by county.

So how does LA County score in relationship to the rest of the state?

We are home to 2.8 children under the age of 18. And when the scores are converted to grades, overall LA County gets a C -.

Among a number of decidedly uncheering scores, one of the most disheartening numbers was the percentage of high school students who had not been victimized and who felt physically safe at their school’s school: a mere 23 percent.

In other words, less than one fourth of LA County’s adolescents feel that school is a safe place.

Among the other scores, there is the fact that only 62 percent of LA’s kids “feel connected “to some adult or other. The same percentage, 62 percent, report very good to excellent health. (Meaning a more than a third of LA County kids do not report good health.)

There’s more at both a state and local level. So take a look.

ALL THS SCORING of the existing health and well-being of the state’s kids cannot help but bring to mind the suggested budget cuts that will affect the future health and educational scores of California’s children and young adults.

For instance, there is the following:

At present there are more than 900,000 California kids enrolled the state’s Healthy Families program. These are kids who would not have health insurance otherwise. But, because of the state’s budget woes, at a time when parents are losing their jobs and health benefits, the state, for the first time ever, is considering freezing enrollment and starting a waiting list.

That’s, of course, along with such other fun cuts like the planned amputations for K-12 education totaling $2.5 billion, and those that are causing the Cal State Universities to announce a likely enrollment cut-back of 10,000 students for next year, and the cuts that are making it necessary for the UC’s to raise their tuition (another) ten percent (triggering protests yesterday), and the positively draconian $332 million budget slashing that has been proposed for the lowest rung of the state’s higher education ladder, California’s community colleges.

One wonders what those cuts will do to the physical and educational health of California’s young.

From now through Monday, I’ll be running informational posts —written by me and others—on most of the various propositions.

(For instance, some of my very smart USC students have written some nice and pithy analyses, which I’ll be putting online, and there will be more voices)

Then on Monday, I’ll post a list of endorsements.

(Since the LA Weekly has stopped doing endorsements, some readers have suggested that another voice or three would be helpful. And I agreed.)

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FIRST…..PROPOSITION A:

KPPC’s Frank Stolz did an excellent short and informative, rundown on Prop. A.

In case you don’t remember, Proposition A is the City of LA parcel tax to fund gang-prevention programs. It will raise $30 million every year through a $3 per month parcel tax dedicated solely to gang prevention, intervention and after-school programs, plus vocational, job training and apprenticeship programs. Supporting it are LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, the police union, Steve Cooley, Connie Rice, Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor, Dick Riordan, the teachers’ union, the LA firefighters….and on and on.

HERE’S what Frank Stolze says:

Southern California remains the gang capital of the world. Law enforcement officials estimate more than 100,000 mostly young adults claim membership in hundreds of gangs. Police have had some success in reducing gang violence. But they say they can’t keep up with the constant flow of kids joining gangs. In the city of Los Angeles next week, voters will consider a new tax to pay for more gang prevention and intervention programs. KPCC’s Frank Stoltze reports.

Frank Stoltze: Being asked to join a gang is almost a rite of passage in many Southern California neighborhoods. James Vasquez recalls hanging out with friends after school one day when he was 12.

James Vasquez: A big group of guys just came out of nowhere and said, “where are you from?” And we said, “we’re not from anywhere.” And they’re like, “you want to join our gang,” and I said “no thank you.” My other friend said “sure, why not.” I know, it’s weird how one friend said yeah, and I said no.

Stoltze: Not long after that, Vasquez’ teachers helped enroll him in a gang prevention program called “Bridges.” Outside a Tommy’s Burger in his Hollywood neighborhood, Vasquez says his parents weren’t really around at the time.

Vasquez: If I wasn’t in this program, I would have been doing drugs. I would have been gang banging with my friends, you know.

Stoltze: Why do you say that? Why do you think you would have ended up there?

Vasquez: ‘Cause I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.

There’s much more after the jump (and there’s an audio version if you’d prefer):

Read the rest of this entry »

Two good LA stories were produced for USC’s TV station ATVN by two of my smart Annenberg students–one present, the other former. Since I only teach print journalism and these are broadcast stories, I can’t claim even the tiniest bt of influence on either. But, I thought you might enjoy seeing what some smart kids at Annenberg TV News are producing.

One story is about Tuesday’s controversial decision to allow a bunch of new oil drilling in a neigborhood in Baldwin Hills, but also to apply additional evironmental regulations

Here’s a clip from the LA Times version of the story.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to regulate controversial new drilling at an oil field in southwest Los Angeles, a decision that came after a contentious three-hour public hearing and despite the protests of nearby residents.

The unanimous vote effectively clears the way for Plains Exploration & Production Co., or PXP, to drill 24 wells this year, starting in a month. The plan allows for 600 new wells over the next 30 years in the Baldwin Hills area.

Now here’s what USC’s Mat Mendez had to say:

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The second story is about a hunger strike called “Fast for Our Future” taking place at La Placita in downtown Los Angeles. It will last until the presidential election, it’s purpose is to draw attention to immigrants rights, but also as part of a GOTV push for LA’s Latinos.

Here’s what USC’s Marin Austin did on the story.

UPDATE: CBS KCAL News has reported that the engineer was likely texting a teenager, but Metrolink would not confirm and the National Transportation and Safety Board said they were reluctant (understandably) to deal in rumors.

However, I have additional material that suggests he KCAL story may very well be accurate.

Yesterday, a source with family who works inside Metrolink also gave me this same information independently, saying that Metrolink has the information about the engineer’s text messaging having occurred just before the crash, but that they are not releasing it.

Here’s what Fox News had on the story:

Nick Williams, a teenage train enthusiast, told CBS2 in Los Angeles he exchanged three text messages with engineer Robert Sanchez Friday afternoon. Williams, who considered Sanchez a “mentor,” received the last text at 4:22 p.m., one minute before the train wreck, according to the ocregister.com report. Williams’ claims have not been confirmed.

UPDATE 2 – 1:15 pm Sunday: It is now my understanding from my source that Metrolink does indeed have the phone records confirming that the engineer was texting right before he blew the light, yet I have not been able to further confirm this.

Just a few minutes ago, I talked to Metrolink spokesman, Terry Williams, and he declined to comment on the text message story. I asked him if Metrolink had indeed recovered the engineer’s phone, he said he honestly didn’t know.

The NTSFB has yet to return my calls.

UPDATE 3: Monday, NTSFB says that no phone has been recovered as yet, so my tip sounds wrong.

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SATURDAY MORNING: Twenty-five dead…and counting. Obviously, I’m not bringing you news. Just posting to acknowledge that we know….and care.

Demonstrating their concern in a concrete way, today, a flood of Los Angeles residents showed up at the UCLA Blood & Platelet Center in order to donate blood, according to the LA Times.

Metrolink is providing updates here.

(Photo by Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times.)