On Monday, the US Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal that could have shielded Sheriff Lee Baca from legal responsibility for a pending jail abuse case. The case involves an inmate named Dion Starr who was stabbed 23 times with a jail-made shank by three alleged Latino gang members in a racially charged attack that occurred when Starr was in the 2400 block of Men’s Central Jail awaiting trial on minor charge.

Interestingly, in looking more closely at the chain of supervisory control in Men’s Central Jail at the time of the reported attack against Starr, it appears that any legal exposure might better be shared by Undersheriff Paul Tanaka.

But before we get to that part of the story, it helps to know at least the rough parameters of the case and of the recent action (or more accurately, the deliberate inaction) by the U.S. Supreme Court:

Starr’s complaint states that the attack against him was made possible when a deputy named Jose Garibay, who controlled inmate ingress and egress from the 2400 cells, wrongly opened the door to Starr’s cell, then walked away from his observation post while Starr—who is African American and reportedly has no gang affiliation—screamed and called out for help as the attack continued.

Eventually, other deputies arrived, including a Sergeant Inge, who rapidly stopped the attack. But as Starr lay on the floor of his cell, bleeding and moaning in pain, one of the deputies—Deputy Maybet Bugarin—allegedly yelled racial epithets at him, things like, “shut up nigger.” Then Bugarin reportedly kicked Starr in the face, fracturing his nose. According to the complaint, Sergeant Inge, who was the floor sergeant for the 2000 block, saw Bugarin deliver the kick.

Starr’s attorneys, Sonia Mercado and Samuel Paz, contend that the inmate attacks and the deputy abuse, and the lack of a rigorous follow-up investigation, are part of an ongoing pattern of such incidents in Men’s Central Jail, and that Sheriff Baca had been repeatedly informed about the problems by supervisors, and through reports from people like Mike Gennaco of the Office of Independent Review, and LA County Special Counsel Merrick Bobb, whose 2004 and 2005 reports wrote of similar attacks. One high profile inmate on inmate attack that involved a mentally ill inmate named Chadwick Shane Cochran, had occurred a few months before in November of 2005, in the same 2400 block, of CJ, where Starr was stabbed. Cochran was left incorrectly in a room with 30 inmates some of whom beat him to death, while other inmates screamed for deputy intervention that did not arrive. “It was a systemic failure,” Bobb told an AP reporter of the Cochran case. In short, in the face of a rash of violent and in some cases, fatal incidents, multiple critical outside reports and lawsuits, Baca had not exerted the leadership necessary to put a stop to the problems and to keep inmates safe.

And so he’s liable, said the attorneys.

Last summer, a three judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed when it ruled in the case of Baca v. Starr that Dion Starr could hold the sheriff legally accountable for the serious injuries he received on January 27, 2006 in Men’s Central Jail.

That the Supremes declined to fiddle with the 9th Circuit’s ruling was a surprising setback for Baca and his LA lawyer, Timothy Coates. And if Starr and his attorneys are successful at trial, it will open a wide highway for other inmates in jail abuse cases to sue the sheriff directly.

In reading the text of the 9th Circuit’s ruling its evident that, in addition to the justices’ interpretation of legal precedent, they took seriously the detailed line up of similar inmate-on-inmate abuse cases, including five killings in six months in late 2003 to early 2004. Most of the incidents had occurred in CJ when deputies unaccountably allowed the wrong inmates together in a cell or room, and then walked away.

After examining the Starr case, we reviewed our own records here at WitnessLA, and noticed that the timing of Starr’s reported attacks (and some of the other attacks referenced in the case) seemed to logically point to supervisory culpability in addition to Baca’s, namely that of Undersheriff Tanaka.

To wit:

Starr was injured on January 27, 2006. This means the incident occurred during Captain John Clark’s tenure as head of Men’s Central Jail. If you remember, Clark is the CJ captain who became concerned about spiking levels of deputy use of force and the increasingly toxic deputy cliques like the 3000 Boys, and the 2000 Boys—the latter being the deputies who could have potentially guarded the 2400 block where Starr was housed.

WitnessLA has recently obtained a copy of a February 8, 2006, memo that Clark sent out to the deputies and supervisors in his charge in which he announced a new policy of job rotation that would begin in March of 2006, and was specifically designed to help break up the deputy gangs.

If you’ll remember from Parts 1 and 2 and 3 of Matt Fleischer’s Dangerous Jails series, then Assistant Sheriff (now Undersheriff) Paul Tanaka, reversed the reforms Clark had announced in the memo, and subverted the authority of the captain and his supervisors to discipline deputies for wrongdoing by meeting with the deputies separately and telling them to come directly to him—Tanaka— not their immediate bosses.

We were also interested to note that Clark’s Feb. 8, 2006 memo was sent out 12 days after the attack on Dion Starr, meaning that the Starr incident fell smack within the period during which Clark was the most concerned about deputy misconduct, and was attempting to act constructively to address his concerns—but was thwarted by those above him, specifically Tanaka. That would be the same Tanaka who has, as WLA has reported, often exhorted deputies to “work in the gray.”

With the above events in mind, now that the 9th Circuit has opened the door to holding supervisors like Sheriff Baca legally accountable in jail abuse cases like Dion Starr’s, one cannot help but wonder where the undersheriff’s legal responsibility in such cases might conceivably lie.

LEGAL NOTE: David Savage at the LA Times has an extended report on the Supreme’s ruling that is worth reading.

In it he mentions SCOTUS’s earlier ruling on a similar issue:

In 2009, the Supreme Court made it harder to sue top officials. In a 5-4 decision, it threw out a suit against former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft seeking to hold him liable for the arrest and jailhouse beating of Muslim men after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Ashcroft is considered by many to be a clumsily written ruling. Thus a couple of the lawyers I spoke to yesterday thought that SCOTUS might be trying to at least somewhat amend their Ashcroftian mistake through the back door by declining to take Baca v. Starr, thus allowing the 9th circuit’s precedent-making ruling in the matter to stand.

On April 29, 1992, I began the day worrying about the threat of gang violence, not city-altering conflagration that the afternoon’s news would bring.

As every local media outlet has been discussing all week , twenty years ago on Sunday, Los Angeles exploded in what is generally considered to be the worst civil disturbance of the 20th Century. But even before the four LAPD officers were acquitted by a Simi Valley jury, triggering a citywide spasm of violence that would kill 63 people, Los Angeles was already living through the deadliest period in its history, with homicides skyrocketing past the 2000 mark county-wide in 1991, and headed still higher in the first quarter of ‘92, with nearly 40 percent of the killings marked as gang-related.

It was one of those gang killings that had an initially skewing effect on the way I experienced the events of April 29, 1992.

At the time, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’ reaction to what would come to be known as the decade of death in East and South LA, was to institute a clumsily designed and brutal policy he named Operation Hammer. The Big Blue Hammer, as it was sometimes known colloquially, consisted mainly of massive gang sweeps in which as many as a thousand young people were arrested at a time, with sometimes no more pretext than the kid had on a black Raiders’ jacket. The broad brush arrests resulted in a miniscule number of actual charges, which could have been better accomplished with normal police work. Yet they gave permission for lots of acts of deliberate humiliation and ongoing incidents of cop-administered beatings, most of which were never reported, since the mothers of the beat-up kids learned that the complaints went exactly nowhere. And still the homicides continued to rise. The Hammer’s main collateral effect was to drive a wedge between law enforcement and the communities that were most in need of the LAPD’s protection and service that would take years and two enlightened chiefs of police to undo.

In was into this climate that the verdicts were delivered.

At the time, I was spending most of my working hours reporting on gangs in the Pico Aliso housing projects of East Los Angeles, where I was researching a book on Father Greg Boyle, and on the six active street gangs who claimed territory within the mile-square boundaries of Pico-Aliso. This meant I was often in the projects late at night when shootings erupted, and I had frequently seen first hand the aftermath of an LAPD beat down that resulted in no arrest.

I had also been to an unhealthy number of funerals of kids I’d gotten to know and like.

On April 29, 1992, the afternoon that the verdicts in the Rodney King beating case were announced, I was on my way to the projects to talk to some homeboys whose lives I’d been tracking for the book, after which time I was going to pick up Father Greg at his office inside Dolores Mission Church, which was situated between the twinned housing projects, and then I’d accompany him on a series of errands, as I often did during the four years I all but bungee-corded myself to the priest’s ankle.

Entirely apart from the citywide storm that would break with staggering force before the day was out, it was already a perilous week in the Pico-Aliso projects: A few days before, a member of the East Coast Crips,—a smallish Crip set that was one of the six projects gangs—had been shot and killed by a member of one of the other projects gangs, The Mob Crew, or TMC, and retaliation was expected to be imminent.

The murder itself was already round two of a deadly game of tit-for-tat. It seemed that in the midst of an argument over some territorial issue or other, the dead boy, who had the unlikely street name of New York, had pulled out a gun and shot a TMC homeboy in the foot. Rumor had it that a second TMC homeboy had a gun trained on New York from a nearby apartment roof and fired a couple of warning shots, thus discouraging the Crip from shooting a second time. It was assumed that the foot-shot gangster, a baby-faced 16-year-old who would later go to work for Power 106 radio, or one of his homeboys, most likely the roof shooter, had tragically upped the ante by killing New York.

By this time, I’d been reporting on Father Greg and the various clusters of gang members for nearly two years, so I knew most all of the significant players in the gang world of Pico-Aliso, and had come to care about many of them, and their mothers, sisters, cousins, and little brothers, some of whom regularly tumbled in an out of my car like rowdy puppies. In other words, I had long ago lost most of my reportorial distance. In this case, although I had not known New York, who was just out of prison, I did know the two TMC teenagers in question, either one of whom I realized with dread could easily be New York’s killer, and could therefore also easily become the next victim in the projects’ latest escalating cycle of gang madness.

Thus it was that this other, much closer-to-hand threat of violence was most on my mind when, at 3:16 pm on Wednesday, April 29, I listened as KFWB all-news radio announced each one of the Simi Valley verdicts separately: Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. I remember that the content of the announcement was momentarily confusing. How can one be found not guilty of something that the whole country saw one do over and over again on video? The radio announcer said that there might be unrest, which anybody living or working in South or East LA already knew. Yet, as I drove toward Dolores Mission to meet Greg, the likelihood of citywide violence still seemed a distant concern with the shadow of Pico/Aliso’s own potential unrest looming much nearer.

By the time I arrived at the church, a group of community mothers were gathered with the idea of marching to Parker Center to protest the King verdicts and asked if I would come with them. I declined explaining that I’d already promised to accompany the priest to the Dorothy Kirby Center, a therapeutic juvenile facility run by LA County probation in which around 70 kids were housed, and where Greg went to say mass every first Wednesday of the month.

I’d been to Kirby with Greg multiple times before, but this visit was markedly different. During the mass, the kids were oddly agitated. After the service ended, Greg made a habit of visiting various “cottages” in order to talk to kids individually. It was just before 7 pm when we reached the first cottage where we found all its occupants gathered in a single, jittery clump around the cottage’s television. Hearing us enter, the kids looked up briefly and seemed glad to see Greg, but their gazes were drawn quickly back to the TV where a news clip of a white man being pulled from the cab of a semi truck and horribly beaten by a bunch of young black men, was being replayed over and over in a violent, balletic series of images that careened across the screen in an eerie visual reverse of the tape of the King beating. Greg attempted conversation at each cottage, but the point of diminishing returns was reached quickly; the kids were too agitated, unable to light anywhere for long, even for him.

After Kirby we drove to a Jesuit retreat house in Azusa where Greg had managed to wangle temporary employment for two Pico/Aliso homeboys. Their work as assistant groundskeepers had reportedly gone well, but they were both dreadfully homesick so Greg promised to pick up the two and bring them back to L.A. for a short visit.

Once homeboys and priest were safely stashed in my car for the trip back to the projects it was nearly 9:00 p.m. As we neared Los Angeles, we were surprised when we hit a colossal traffic jam, which was our first inkling that something might truly have gone terribly wrong in the city. Squinting ahead, I saw that the sky was bright to the northeast of us and also to the south, with veils of smoke wafting across the night’s waning crescent moon. I hurriedly flipped on the radio and we learned what the rest of Los Angeles already knew.

When I finally dropped Greg and the two homies at the church parking lot, Pico/Aliso was quiet and dark, a seeming haven from the storm that was quickening everywhere else else. I would not learn until the next morning that, after I left the church, Greg and the homies had remained trapped inside the sanctuary after cars full of Crips showed up and proceeded to drive up and down Gless Street for hours, the dull shine of gun barrels visible out open car windows.

Ignorant of the soon-to-be menacing Crips, I occupied myself with the task of trying to figure out some kind of safe route home. To my right was Hollywood, where the palm trees had become fantastic torches lining the freeway with furious light, and causing the shutdown of the 101, which would have been my usual path back to Topanga Canyon, where I lived with my then-six year old son. To my left was South Los Angeles, which still seemed to be the epicenter. Plus an hour before, Mayor Tom Bradley had ordered the closing of many of the exit ramps on the Harbor Freeway and maybe some on the 10, so going south seemed unwise. Using the radio news as a guide, I decided to head west across the First Street Bridge, straight through the middle of downtown.

I saw the first sign of trouble at what was then the New Otani Hotel at First and Los Angeles Streets. Nearly all of its ground floor windows were smashed and there was fire damage—although, by the time I passed it, the rioters had moved on. Hoping for more up-to-date information than the radio was able to provide, I veered north on Los Angeles Street to the LAPD headquarters at Parker Center, which was protectively surrounded by a shoulder-to-shoulder string of two hundred or more police officers top-heavy with riot helmets, their order to guard the building while the rest of downtown LA was evidently on its own.

I pulled to the curb and yelled that I was looking for a route west. “Get over to Third Street,” one of the cops yelled back. Relieved, I took his suggestion and raced back along Los Angeles Street toward third. But the insurrection was a live thing now, which no one could track or predict. After swerving around first one and then a second set of street barricades, I rounded yet one more corner and ran smack into everything I was trying to avoid.

Up and down the intersecting streets in front of me as far as I was able to see, several hundred people raced and twirled in zigzag patterns across streets like whole teams of football running backs suddenly seized by mania.

The craziness was auditory as well as visual. Glass erupted in a musical clatter seemingly from every angle, sometimes close, sometimes father away. Some of the people had guns in their hands, and I heard gunfire, close by, but sporadic, the bullets spent, I remember hoping absently, more for effect than for injury. Lots of stores were extravagantly on fire, while flames only barely sequined the facades of others. Every single trashcan on the street was burning, which caused me to think stupidly of the only sensory analogue I had for what I was seeing, the movie Blade Runner.

I crept my car cautiously forward into the darting crowd hoping that, although I seemed to be the only vehicle on the road, if I kept moving steadily, I would simply become another part of the cacophonous wallpaper. As I drove, my hands clinging with white knuckled correctness to the ten and two o’clock positions on my steering wheel, my eyes the size of dinner plates, I wished desperately for a camera.

Now, of course, I always carry a camera with me, in the form of a cell phone, if nothing else. But then I was a narrative journalist, not a hard news reporter. Plus in those years, reporters didn’t usually take pictures. That was left up to the photo pros. Yet, that night as I threaded and swerved around the runners, I longed for some method other than memory with which to capture what I was witnessing.

I also longed to get home safely, a goal it still wasn’t yet clear I could accomplish. I didn’t feel frightened exactly. The intensity of the moment didn’t leave room for fear. But I wondered in passing if I should be afraid. After all, that Reginald Denny guy had been in a truck, and look what good it did him.

With that thought still lingering, I braked to a halt at one last downtown intersection clogged by running, shooting looters, and my gaze locked with that of a thirty-ish black man who was one of the gun-holding runners. The moment occurred as he passed in front of my car and stared curiously in at me through the windshield. Then, evidently seeing something in my expression of which I still refused to be cognizant, in a silent exchange that could have taken no more than a millisecond, the man communicated as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud to me with brief but consummate kindness: Keep going, his gaze said. You’re okay. This is not about you.

A minute or two later, I did make it through the chaos of downtown, then over to Olympic Blvd. to La Brea, south to the 10, then west to PCH, and north to Topanga, where I sent the baby sitter home and hugged my son longer than he thought was seemly.

For the next forty-eight hours in Los Angeles, everything stopped and everything was in motion. However, in Pico/Aliso, and most of the rest of East LA, there was no rioting, no looting. Although I knew that some people made forays into other areas of the city, most of the projects residents huddled together like a family riding out a hurricane. The gun toting, church-circling Crips of Wednesday night, stayed at home too, their grief and fury subsumed for a while by the larger collective grief and fury. More gang violence and more heartbreak was to visit the projects in the months to come, but for now anyway, there was pause.

On Thursday, I stayed close to home, checking in with Greg a couple of times during the day. But by Friday I could no longer bear what felt like the psychological remove of the West Side. I went back to the projects. The dusk ‘till dawn curfew that Mayor Tom Bradley had called was still in place, and the violence and destruction would continue in shuddering fits for a few more days. But by Friday night, everyone knew that the worst of the fever had broken and spontaneous barbecues bloomed like sudden wildflowers in front yards all over the projects. I made a big salad and, at the invitation of some of the projects mothers I knew the best, joined in one of them, grateful that I had a place that would welcome me for the much needed communal ritual.

SANTA MONICA COLLEGE STUDENTS PROTESTING RATE HIKES PEPPER SPRAYED

(NOTE: Taylor Walker contributed to the following stories.)

Angry over a new system of pricey courses, around 30 not-very-dangerous looking Santa Monica College students tried to enter the trustees meeting on Tuesday night, and got lit up with pepper spray for their trouble.

Stay classy SMC cops. Stay classy.

The LA Times has more on the story as does the AP

SUPERVISORS GET SERIOUS ABOUT REHABILITATION

At Tuesday’s board meeting the LA County Supervisors demanded accountability and clear goals from Probation officials regarding the county’s realignment program instituted this past October. The Supes criticized Probation for failing to insure that the recently released inmates actually turned up at the rehabilitation programs to which they were assigned. (These are the non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offender releasees now overseen by the county, rather than the state, as part of the AB106 “realignment” plan). They noted that, of the 60% of the realignment parolees who have been referred to services like substance abuse and mental health counseling, only 15% have actually been treated.

With a unanimously adopted a motion by Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Supes called for Probation to establish a feasibility plan to explore how to better (and more quickly) get those percentages up. Probation’s deputy chief, Cal Remington, assured the Supes that progress was already being made, that as of now 48% of those in need of mental health services are actually receiving them.

Representatives from several community-based organizations spoke in favor of the motion, however, some urged the county to resist creating a structure of mandates and resulting probation violations that could lead to the re-incarceration of returning prisoners. (A strategy called “flash incarceration”—short, immediate jail terms, such as those being used successfully in Hawaii—was one of those being tossed around.)

Kim McGill of the Youth Justice Coalition praised the motion as a “positive step,” but pointed out that many of those returning are hindered in their efforts to comply. The lack of a valid or government-issued identification card, without which they often cannot access educational, housing and health care services, said McGill. (Simple obstacles like having the money to buy a bus pass to get to rehab programs can, for some of the newly released, seem insurmountable.)

Ridley-Thomas emphasized the importance of addressing the problem now, not later.

“The matter is urgent,” He said. “If we do not see substantially more people receiving the treatment and services they need, no one will be well served; public safety will be undermined and the cycle of recidivism will continue unabated.”

Indeed. For years, California’s recidivism rate has been stuck at abysmal levels, with approximately 65% of parolees passing through the revolving door back in prison within three years of release.

Good that the realignment issue is getting attention early.

Nice story from the LA Times’ Jenny Deam on how Colorado is managing to close a $184M prison facility built in 2010 thanks to a steadily declining prison population—thanks, in part, to a enlightened attitude toward rehab and alternative sentencing . Here’s an excerpt:

The 316-bed prison, called Colorado State Penitentiary II, is the fourth correctional facility in Colorado ordered closed in the last three years because of a dwindling prison population. At its peak in July 2009, the state’s inmate population was 23,220. As of February, it had dropped to 21,562. A decrease of 900 more inmates is expected by June 2013.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics recently reported that the overall prison population in the U.S. had declined for the first time in four decades.

Tom Clements, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, said the state was part of a seismic shift in attitudes in the U.S. about the wisdom of locking up nonviolent offenders for long periods.

In some states, decades of get-tough sentencing have given way to alternatives to prison. They include probation and parole, mandatory drug treatment, mental health care and community supervision such as halfway houses, GPS ankle bracelets and regular drug testing.

Research has shown that if alternatives are well implemented and include good supervision, repeat offenses can be cut by 30% and the cost is about one-tenth of the $30,000-a-year average for housing a prisoner, Gelb said.

“This is not about being soft on crime or being hard on crime,” Clements said. “This is about being smart on crime.”

THE EXTRAORDINARY MEANNESS OF “HOLIDAY ON ICE”

This is a story from last week, but in case you missed it: Displaying a bout of shocking callousness, the Republicans in the House Judiciary committee dubbed the hearings on the new guidelines for immigration detention issued last month…as Holiday on Ice, implying that being locked up in ICE detention is a vacation.

This after novelist and essayist Edwidge Danticat wrote an scathing OpEd for the NY Times with regard to this flip title and callous attitude.

Here’s a clip:

The flippant title of the hearing shows a blatant disregard for the more than 110 people who have died in immigration custody since 2003. One of them was my uncle Joseph, an 81-year-old throat cancer survivor who spoke with an artificial voice box. He arrived in Miami in October 2004 after fleeing an uprising in Haiti. He had a valid passport and visa, but when he requested political asylum, he was arrested and taken to the Krome detention center in Miami. His medications for high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate were taken away, and when he fell ill during a hearing, a Krome nurse accused him of faking his illness. When he was finally transported, in leg chains, to the prison ward of a nearby hospital, it was already too late. He died the next day.

My uncle’s brief and deadly stay in the United States immigration system was no holiday. Detention was no holiday for Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez, who was 35 years old and pregnant when she died in immigration custody in Texas in 2007. She had a history of blood clots, and said her complaints regarding leg pains were ignored. It was no holiday for Mayra Soto, a California woman who was raped by an immigration officer. It was no holiday for Hiu Lui Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese immigrant with a fractured spine who was dragged on the floor and refused the use of a wheelchair in an ICE detention center in Rhode Island….

Then here’re are the letters to the editor in response to what Danticat has written.

Responding to a motion by LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the board of supervisors voted unanimously to request an audit of Aero Bureau—the air support division of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

In particular, the audit will examine the allegations—reported by WitnessLA and the LA Times last week—that high ranking deputies at Aero have colluded to rig bidding to outfit the department’s fleet of 12 new helicopters, and then further colluded in allowing the vendor who won the bid to grossly overcharge as much as $11 million for equipment and services.

Last week, Yaroslavsky and other supervisors, were concerned by the news that an internal report—obtained privately by WitnessLA and the LA Times—had provided a detailed descriptions of various allegations of wrongdoing pertaining to the helicopter contract, including:

1. huge overcharges for labor

2. deliberately circumventing of the normal county approval process for millions of dollars of equipment that may or may not have been necessary.

3. Over-ordering and over charging for normal equipment, like more than a half million dollars in night vision goggles. (Where 12 or 14 were needed, 42 were purchased. And so on.) Plus equipping the helicopter with expensive gadgets that were not standard equipment.

4. Double dipping by charging for equipment installation that should commonly have already been factory installed, things like windshields and other basic parts, without which the plans could not have been flown from the factory in Texas to Los Angeles—as was the case with the 12 aircraft in question.

Supe Don Knabe also asked for an operational and fiscal audit of the sheriff’s Harbor Patrol, which operates in Marina del Rey and the Port of Los Angeles.. A Knabe spokesman said the audit was asked for “just to be sure nothing else is going on.”

There was also some discussion about whether the expenditure of $265,000 in federal Homeland Security money on a sonar-equipped boat to be used to look for explosive devices in the county’s
waterways should also be looked at or not.

Wisely, the Supes decided not to mix apples with oranges, audit-wise.

The Auditor-Controller’s Office is supposed to have the report completed and ready to present to the Board of Supervisors in 30 days.

POST SCRIPT: IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE that all the allegations regarding the LASD’s Aero Bureau, if proven, only involve a comparatively small group of people.

Aero in general, based on our experience, is filled with with dedicated professionals who simply want to do their jobs well.

Here’s another Rescue-5 video (this one involving a location in Topanga State Park I know well) to remind us all of that fact. Had it not been for Rescue 5 guys and their crew, I’m not at all confident that this 23-year old young woman would have made it home alive.

(Note: The patrol pilots in the AStars and other Aero personnel also often accomplish noteworthy deeds but, unfortunately, they don’t supply us with cool videos, like the Rescue-5 people do.)

To be exact, Supervisor Gloria Molina tossed two G-words in Sheriff Baca’s direction during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting when she was questioning the sheriff about the Sheriff’s Department’s progress—or lack thereof—-in implementing the recommendations made last October by Special Counsel Merrick Bobb and the Office of Independent Review relating violence in Baca’s troubled jails.

Among other things, Molina and Supervisor Mike Antonovitch wanted to know whether the sheriff was able to institute a plan in which deputies would be stuck for fewer years working in the jails before they are rotated to street patrol. (The existing multi-year tenure working the jails after young deputies first graduate from the Sheriff’s academy has long been flagged by Bobb and other experts as problematic.) Molina also asked about whether deputies had stopped using their heavy flashlights as batons to whack inmates, and if the camera’s were properly installed at Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers facilities, and, if so, had they been successful in capturing videos of any of the use of force incidents at CJ that have occurred since the installation.

The answers that the sheriff gave in response to many of the questions seemed mostly to amount to some version of “we’re working on it.”

For example, in terms of the cameras, of the 674 needed in Men’s Central Jail, according to the Sheriff’s report, more than half still have to yet to be installed or need to be replaced. At Twin Towers, according to the report, none of the 677 have been installed as yet.

As for the flashlights, the only progress made in nearly 2 1/2 months had been to schedule a meeting withe ALADS and the PPOA, the two deputies unions, to talk about the issue.

All this did not please Molina, so she marched out the first of her G-words: garbage.

“You know, Sheriff, you’re providing these reports and it’s all in the same tone. It’s like I’m going to give you all this garbage, and you can just take this garbage and shove it around however you want. I don’t think you’re taking us very seriously. I’m very disappointed.

“To the contrary,’ retorted the Sheriff. “I don’t think you’re taking what I’m saying seriously.”

But Molina didn’t back off and, instead, pulled out the second and largest G-word: Gobbledygook.

“I am [taking you seriously], and I’ve been listening and reading your reports. And I’ve asked questions about them. And that’s why we’re asking questions now. …Don’t give me Gobbledygook that you can’t get……

“I object to you referring..….” interrupted Baca…

And so it went.

(You can read a copy of the Sheriff’s report to the board on the various recommendations and actions here.)

Here’s KPCC Frank Stoltz’s rundown on the Molina/Baca verbal kerfuffle.

SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT REPORT SHOWS THAT USES OF FORCE IN JAILS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE USED AGAINST MENTALLY ILL INMATES.

At the same Board of Supervisors meeting, Sheriff Baca reported to the Supes that his own jails task force, formed last fall, had determined that deputies were more liable to use force on mentally ill inmates. He asked for additional $1.3 million dollars to hire specialized deputies and social workers to better address the problem.

Here’s a clip from the LA Times story on the issue:

Roughly a third of the 582 deputy use-of-force cases in the jail system last year involved inmates with mental health histories, according to an analysis released Tuesday. About 15% of the jail’s 15,000 inmates are classified as mentally ill.

The numbers provide a more detailed picture of the confrontations between deputies and inmates, an issue that has sparked intense scrutiny over the last few months and prompted a heated debate Tuesday between Sheriff Lee Baca and some L.A. County supervisors.

FOUR SHERIFF DEPUTY TRAINEES FILE LAWSUIT TUESDAY AND ACCUSE THEIR LASD SUPERVISORS OF TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE AND OTHER MISCONDUCT

Also on Tuesday, Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell announced the filing four lawsuits against the Sheriff’s department alleging criminal conduct and discrimination.

KPCC’s Corey Moore reports:

Terrell says the plaintiffs testified at recent depositions they saw training officers at two L.A. County stations commit crimes that include falsifying and destroying evidence and filing false police reports.

The plaintiffs claim that after speaking up about the wrongdoing, officers retaliated by, among other things, forcing them to work up to 20 hours without overtime pay.

ABC’s Rudabeh Shahbazi also has a report on the serious accusations.

(NOTE: We will have more on this issue as we get further details.)

AND IN NON-LASD NEWS—PUBLIC COUNSEL, THE ACLU AND OTHERS SCORE A VICTORY ON THE ISSUE OF STUDENT CURFEW TICKETS.

This is very good news. Here are some clips from the ACLU’s press release on the matter:

Students with tickets for being late to school faced hundreds of dollars in fines and were forced to miss more school time to appear in court.

Now Los Angeles’ top judge for juvenile courts [Judge Michael Nash] has released new guidelines to eliminate fines and unnecessary court time for students who were late to school and for other minor offenses. The court will also direct students who miss school to school- and community-based resources that are shown to improve academic achievement and get struggling students back on track.

It’s the latest step forward to reforming Los Angeles daytime curfew rules and truancy ticketing.

….Data collected by Public Counsel, the ACLU of Southern California, and the Community Rights Campaign shows that truancy and tardy ticketing unfairly and disproportionately targets African American and Latino students and their families, and results in more student time out of school and significant financial burdens on low-income families.

City Councilman Tony Cardenas has also been working for the last two years to reform the city’s student truancy policies.

Earlier this year, the LAPD and LA’s School Police Department dialed back the number of tickets written to students on their way to school.

Photo by Corey Moore/KPCC

9:50 PM UPDATE: Amazing! In Just a few hours you all came through, and Matt’s next story is funded. (It’ll appear early next week.) But please keep doing the questionnaire, as any $$ gathered will continue to be used exclusively to fund this investigation. (And, obviously, if you feel moved to through in a few bucks extra—as some of you already have —any and all will be gratefully accepted and applied directly to Matt’s continued reporting on the LASD.)

WITNESSLA REALLY, REALLY NEEDS YOUR HELP WITH OUR JAILS AND LASD REPORTING—BUT IT WON’T COST YOU ANYTHING (REALLY.)

Here’s the deal:

When Matt Fleischer started reporting on the abuse of inmates at the LA County Jails for WitnessLA’s California Justice Report project, it was our intention that he’d would report and write a hard hitting 2 or 3 part series on the topic—and that would be that.

Boy were we ever wrong.

Now that Matt has completed Part 3, we find we aren’t even close to being finished with this investigation.

What Matt has uncovered and reported, turns out to be only the first layer of excavation.

So many of you who work for the Sheriff’s department (or who have recently retired) have pointed out to us in emails, telephone calls and comments on the site, there is much, much more to this story—and that WE HAVE TO KEEP GOING.

Not to worry: Matt is already hard at work on Parts 4 and 5.

The problem is that we were only funded for those first three parts.

SO NOW WE NEED YOUR HELP TO FUND THESE NEXT ROUNDS OF REPORTING.

(But, as I said above, it won’t cost you any cash.)

Here’s what you can do:

If you follow this link to the Spot.Us site, and take a 5-question survey about what kinds of stories you think will be important in 2012, Spot.us will donate $4.50 toward to WitnessLA & The California Justice Report—every penny of which will go toward this LASD project.

You’ll have to register to take the survey, but you can use any name and email you wish if you want to preserve your anonymity. They really just want your opinions.

As of this writing, we merely need 68 of you to take that 5-question survey and the next round of reporting will be fully funded.

So do it.

Follow this link …and then hit the letters that say FREE CREDITS (It’s in the upper-ish right quarter of the page.) That should take you to the questionnaire.

Answer the 5 questions and you’re done. We’ll get $4.50. And you’ll have helped independent journalism in Los Angeles.

Do it right this minute, not later, okay? Right now, right now, right now!

Okay? Okay.

Thanks!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The article below is Part Three of WitnessLA’s investigation into the culture of violence and abuse that, for years, has been reported to exist inside the Los Angeles County Jail system—and the dysfunction inside the sheriff’s department that has allowed the abuse to flourish.

This 8-month investigation, reported and written by Matt Fleischer (and copy edited by Craig Gaines), is the second investigative series to come out of the LA Justice Report, which was created through a partnership between WitnessLA and Spot.Us.

DANGEROUS JAILS, PART 3: THE PRINCE

by Matthew Fleischer

LASD insiders say that, for years, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka—not Lee Baca—has ruled the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department though a system built of favoritism, pay-to-play campaign donations, and loyalty rewarded over competence—and the jails scandal is one of the results.

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SYSTEM BREAKDOWN

Six years ago, Men’s Central Jail commanding officer Captain John Clark had had enough. Plagued by a spate of bad press over some high-profile incidents, plus calls for reform from the ACLU and the County Board of Supervisors over the dangerous conditions inside his jail, Clark sent his operations lieutenant, Casey Bald—second in command in the jail behind the captain himself—to read his supervisors the riot act. It was time to get his facility under control.

The symptoms suggesting something was going wrong with the running of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s largest and most troubled facility were becoming increasingly evident to anyone paying attention. There had been the brutal beating death of mentally ill inmate Chadwick Shane Cochran on November 16, 2005. The emotionally unstable Cochran was locked in a room with 30 other inmates, where a group of gang members mistakenly believed his red ID tag indicating mental illness meant he was a police informant—a snitch. They attacked 35-year-old Cochran with fists and food trays and then, once he was on the floor, repeatedly stomped his head until his skull shattered. The frenzied assault lasted nearly a half hour. Yet no deputies intervened, even as other inmates in the locked room repeatedly pounded on the door and called out for guards to rescue the dying man.

“[What this] suggests to me is a cascade of errors,” Merrick Bobb, the special monitor who advises county supervisors on Sheriff’s Department matters, told an AP reporter when asked about Cochran’s death. “It wasn’t just one guy messing up one thing, it was a systemic failure.”

The “systemic failure” was one of eight murders in two-and-a-half years inside CJ—as Men’s Central Jail is known.

The Office of Independent Review would release a report in November 2006 noting that inmate deaths in the County Jail system in general nearly had nearly doubled from 2004 to 2005—from 23 to 43. Yet, despite the alarming uptick in fatalities, many of the departmental investigations into the jail deaths—inquiries known as “death reviews”—languished unfinished on desks of supervisors inside the jails. According to the OIR report, 18 of the 43 death reviews took more than a year to complete. Another 13 death reviews were more than 300 days old and still incomplete. The time frames are significant because departmental investigations of wrongdoing have a one-year time limit. After a year, even if a deputy behaves with gross negligence resulting grave harm or death to an inmate, unless the DA chooses to file criminal charges (the chances of which are miniscule without a departmental investigation) the matter is procedurally dead. There will be no discipline, no consequences.

“If you sit on these reviews and the year runs out, we can’t do anything about investigating them even if we want to,” explained a former LASD higher up.

But the death reviews were only the tip of the iceberg when it came to systemic failure. Force packages—reports on deputy-on-inmate violence—were also sitting uninvestigated on supervisors’ desks for months, if not years, inside the jail.

At the same time as this systemic breakdown in the realm of paperwork was occurring, cliques of deputy gangs like the now-infamous 3000 Boys were beginning to flex their muscles inside the jail. Like the gang members they often guarded, these groups shared flashy group tattoos and threw hand signs. Clique members also had the habit of waiting for their entire crew to get off work—sometimes lingering for hours at a time—before leaving the station together en masse. Not only was this a violation of departmental policy—off-duty deputies are not supposed to mill around the jail—but it was eerie gang-like behavior, meant to intimidate both inmates and other nonmember deputies, the message being “screw with us at your own peril.”

More ominous than these showy displays, however, was the violence Clark determined the cliques were inflicting on inmates behind closed doors—which accounted for the growing piles of force reports littering his supervisors’ desks.

Inside CJ, a perfect storm of departmental dysfunction was quickening: bold groups of deputies prone to violence were being overseen by supervisors who failed to consistently hold anyone accountable. It was with these growing concerns that Clark summoned Bald and tasked him with cracking the whip on jail supervisors to finish their paperwork and stay on top of troublesome deputies. Bald immediately went to a supervisor who sources with knowledge of the situation say was one of the worst offenders, a lieutenant named Christopher Nee, who had nearly a year’s backlog of force packages piled on his desk and was seen by many as too friendly with the third-floor deputies.

Bald instructed Nee in clear terms to catch up on his paperwork and help crack down on the deputy gangs, but he did not get the response from his subordinate that he anticipated.

“I don’t work for John Clark,” Nee said. “I work for Paul Tanaka.”

In a paramilitary organization like a police force, or the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, this was an extraordinary statement. As with the military, chain of command is everything. Sergeants report to lieutenants, who report to captains, who report to commanders and so on. What Nee was saying, in essence, was that he didn’t work for his superior officer, Bald, thus did not have to do as Bald said. Nor did he have to obey Bald’s superior officer, Captain Clark, or for that matter Clark’s superior who was, at the time, Commander Dennis Conte. The only person whose orders he really had to follow was Paul Tanaka.

It was an extremely telling statement that pointed to a power struggle going on inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that would help foster patterns of misbehavior and violence into the next decade. One of the primary flash points of this struggle was CJ.

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THE TANAKA FACTOR

So who is Paul Tanaka? As it turns out, this is not a simple question to answer.

At the time of Nee’s statement, Tanaka was the assistant sheriff of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in charge of custody. These days he’s the department’s undersheriff, Sheriff Lee Baca’s No. 2 in charge. Tanaka is also a man of political ambition, whom sources say Baca has been grooming for years to take over the department when the sheriff himself decides to step down. Added to that, he’s the mayor of the city of Gardena, a position he’s held since 2005. Prior to being elected mayor, he was a Gardena city council member, first elected in 1999, the same year Lee Baca became the L.A. County Sheriff.

Tanaka ascended to the powerful undersheriff position in June 2011. Yet, according to sources close to and inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it is Tanaka, not Lee Baca, who has effectively been running huge portions of the day-to-day operations of the department for nearly eight years.

When the ongoing jail inmate abuse scandal heated to a boil three months ago and Sheriff Baca told the L.A. Times editorial board that he was unaware of much that was going on in his jails, that his command staff kept information from him, this was likely true. For years, Baca has showed up to his weekly Wednesday executive planning council meetings at 9:30 a.m.—one hour later than the rest of his command staff. According to sources who have attended these meetings, before Baca arrives his staff carefully decides what information they should or should not tell him. The person in charge of orchestrating these meetings and choosing what information is filtered to Baca is Paul Tanaka.

“Tanaka tells Lee only what he wants him to hear,” says a former LASD higher-up who was privy to multiple meetings. “It gives Baca plausible deniability for the department’s problems and it gives Tanaka a tremendous amount of control.”

Another former command staffer agrees. “The attitude is always that Lee has to be ‘handled.’”

With this informational control, plus control of most of the LASD departments that oversee revenue streams and resource allocation, Tanaka has obtained power in the department that often far outstrips his rank.

Our sources on these matters are all either current or former LASD members with deep internal knowledge of the department. They range from retired LASD higher-ups who worked alongside Tanaka for years to current members of the force who are fed up with the state of the department.

No matter the departmental rank, all our sources tell us the same thing: Long before Tanaka officially inherited the No. 2 spot there were already two camps inside the Sheriff’s Department—those “in the car” with Tanaka and those on the outside. Those outside the car can be “rolled up”—meaning transferred to department backwaters—if they cross Tanaka, regardless of their performance on the job. Those in the car with Tanaka are promoted quickly and insulated from performance failures. For years, Lee Baca has, with few exceptions, granted Tanaka the power to pick and choose what supervisors get promoted and where they’re placed—even in units over which Tanaka has no formal organizational control.

Furthermore, our sources allege a pay-to-play-like promotional system headed by Tanaka—whereby donors to Tanaka’s Gardena political campaigns have moved up the ranks faster than nondonors, even when the nondonors are more qualified. Campaign finance records we acquired from Tanaka’s Gardena political campaigns through Public Records Act requests, together with internal Sheriff’s Department documents obtained by the LA Justice Report, back our sources’ contentions. Tanaka campaign donors—often with troubled or mediocre service records—have found themselves in critical supervisory positions in the department in lieu of more qualified individuals. The result of this in-crowd/out-crowd system is a department beset by violence in its jails, insubordination in its ranks and multiple federal investigations into criminal misdeeds—a large part of which, argue our sources, can be traced to Paul Tanaka’s rise.

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WORKING IN THE GREY

For one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles law enforcement, Paul Tanaka keeps a remarkably low public profile. He avoids the media whenever possible, preferring to operate behind the scenes. When Baca recently gave a press conference to address media reports of uncontrolled violence within the L.A. County jail system, the sheriff stood flanked by all of his command staff—except Tanaka, who was conspicuously absent, especially considering how Baca had appointed him to lead the departmental investigation into the jail situation.

(Tanaka declined to comment for this story.)

Colleagues who have worked with Tanaka describe him as a highly intelligent man with a gift for number crunching. He’s a certified public accountant who sources say has been doing Lee Baca’s taxes for years. In 1992, ten years after joining the LASD, he scored top in his class on the department’s lieutenant’s exam. But then, because of some early clouds over his service record, under former sheriff Sherman Block, his career appeared to get stuck. Under Lee Baca, by contrast, his rise has been nothing short of meteoric.

“Baca plucked him up from obscurity,” says a source who is a contemporary of Tanaka’s in the department. “He was going nowhere under Sheriff Block.”

Tanaka’s career reportedly stalled under Block largely because of his involvement in the 1988 shooting death of Korean immigrant Hong Pyo Lee. Tanaka was one of five deputies who shot the 21-year-old 15 times after a car chase left Hong cornered at a dead-end street.

A Long Beach police officer who witnessed the shooting told investigators he “just observed the sheriffs execute somebody.”

L.A. County paid out $999,999 in a settlement with Hong’s family. Tanaka and his fellow deputies were cleared of all charges. But Block had to do major community damage control—especially after it was revealed that Tanaka had a Viking tattoo, the insignia of a controversial deputy clique that a federal judge once labeled a “neo-Nazi white supremacist gang.”

Despite the shooting and the Vikings membership, Tanaka made lieutenant thanks to his high-scoring exam. But, sources say, Tanaka’s career was dead in terms of further promotions as long as Sheriff Block was in charge.

All that changed in 1998, when Block died days before the sheriff’s election, suddenly leaving dark horse candidate Baca the winner. Tanaka had jumped on Baca’s initial long-shot campaign for sheriff early. (Sources say he managed—and continues to manage—Baca’s campaign funds.) Baca rewarded him by making him one of his top aides shortly after the election.

Within four years of Baca becoming sheriff in 1998, Tanaka went from lieutenant to chief of the Administrative Services Division—effectively running the department’s 2.4 billion dollar budget. By 2005 he was an assistant sheriff—the third most powerful position in the department.

Baca’s ascendancy to sheriff happened to correspond with Tanaka’s own political ambitions. In 1999 he was elected to the Gardena City Council—mainly with the support of the regional Asian-American community. By 2002, however, when Tanaka became a department chief, his campaign finance reports show a marked influx of donations by LASD deputies. By 2004, when he was made assistant sheriff, Tanaka had dozens of deputies and supervisors—and in some cases, their family members—on his donor rolls, helping him raise more than $100,000. He was elected mayor of Gardena in 2005.

But despite his intelligence and political acumen, sources say, Tanaka has a fondness for vulgarity and tough-guy swagger. “Everything with Paul is ‘fuck this’ or ‘fuck that,” says a former LASD higher up. “The guy has an extremely short fuse.”

Tanaka is known for telling deputies to “work in the gray”—a phrase that essentially translates to “do whatever it takes” to hook ’em and book ’em.

“If we know there are drugs in a house, but we don’t have a warrant,” explains one deputy who worked under Tanaka, “‘working the gray’ would mean manufacturing a reason to search the house. We could say we were responding to a complaint of a domestic disturbance, or that we personally heard a disturbance. Whatever it takes to get inside that house and get the job done.”

Tanaka has repeated this advice even at the department’s most troubled stations. In 2005, Century Station was struggling with violence stemming from the resurgence of a deputy gang known as the Regulators. As supervisors struggled to deal with the rogue deputies, Tanaka visited the station and gave his “work the gray” speech. He then went on to tell the assembled deputies—“I don’t think much of Internal Affairs.”

“That is not the kind of thing a supervisor should tell a station like Century,” says a former supervisor with knowledge of the situation. “For their own protection, these deputies need to be taught to respect IA.”

Interestingly, despite his cowboy attitude, most people we interviewed described Tanaka as “deputy five”—a supervisor who talks a tough game but doesn’t have the track record to back it up. Tanaka did his patrol time at Carson Station—not considered a hotbed of action.

Tanaka did work at Lennox—a renowned tough-guy station—as a lieutenant. But, says one retired supervisor who worked under Tanaka for years: “He was behind a desk. He’s spent almost his whole career at headquarters. I’ve never seen a guy rise as far as he has in the department without moving around.”

His insulation from the day-to-day realities of deputy work failed to strip him of his cowboy notions about how the job needs to be done.

“He lives vicariously through his deputies,” says a supervisor. “He never got the chance to work a serious patrol. So he has no idea what constitutes good police work.”

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THE SMOKING CLUB

In a back courtyard of the COPS Bureau at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department headquarters building in Monterey Park sits a quiet area reserved for LASD personnel. (COPS oversees federally funded community policing teams and other specialized units.) Technically you could call the area a smoking patio, but the space is not your typical civil servant’s break room. The patio is tented and climate controlled, complete with a refrigerator, a sink, a barbeque island and an elaborate cigar-smoking section. Sources say its construction cost upward of $25,000.

But there’s a catch. Not all members of the Sheriff’s Department are allowed access to this pleasantly appointed enclave. Since its construction sometime in 2008, the patio has reportedly been reserved exclusively for friends and allies of Paul Tanaka.

“I would classify the patio as an executive meeting space,” says LASD spokesman Captain Mike Parker. “Can any member of the department hang out at the patio? No. But they wouldn’t have access to an executive meeting room either.”

But there’s more to the patio than simple executive privilege. There’s only one entrance to the smoking patio—directly through the COPS Bureau captain’s personal office. To use the facility, sheriff’s deputies need a unique coin—known as a “challenge coin”—or someone with a coin must accompany the deputy. Each of these coins is presented to the bearer by Tanaka himself. The LA Justice Report has obtained photographs of the smoking club coins from two different sources. The front bears the emblem of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, bracketed by the words “Ramona Blvd. Smoking Patio.” The back features a picture of a cigar wrapped in a leaf, encircled by the names of various LASD divisions.

Tanaka gives out these coins to only a selected few, and each coin is serially numbered, in part, so no forgeries can be made, but mostly to emphasize the special nature of the talismans. They are earned, say sources, through loyalty to Paul Tanaka.

“I can’t prove it, but from what I’ve observed, there are two ways to get ahead in this department,” says retired LASD commander Bob Olmsted. “The official way is the civil service way of solid performance reviews, expected performance and various forms of testing. The real way is to become a ‘Tanaka boy’—by volunteering and donating to his campaign and smoking cigars with his inner circle.”

The LA Justice Report sat down with one LASD supervisor who donated and was among roughly 40 volunteers working on one of Tanaka’s Gardena political campaigns at the behest of a friend in the department. (Our source asked we not mention the year he volunteered, nor his name or rank, for fear of being identified. But we were able confirm his name among the political donor rolls for the year in question.)

“Tanaka was a rising star in the department,” says the supervisor. “It was understood that volunteering would be good for our careers.”

Although there is no airtight pattern of cause and effect, the supervisor, his friend and several other campaign contributors were given choice assignments within the department within a year of their donations.

The LA Justice Report has obtained Paul Tanaka’s campaign finance statements dating back to his early days as a Gardena city councilman in 1999. They reveal a number of disturbing trends. For instance, in 2004, in the run-up to his first mayoral election, Tanaka had a banner year in fundraising—pulling in more than $42,500 from members of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Since that time, the majority of those donors have been promoted or given plum positions, like that of the Sheriff Baca’s driver, a Tanaka-controlled post that brings with it substantial monetary rewards in overtime pay, and is considered a surefire springboard to better things. Several of the larger donors have seen particularly dramatic rises in their careers.

Christopher Nee, the lieutenant who told Casey Bald “I work for Paul Tanaka,” has been donating generously to Tanaka’s campaign since June 2002—when he gave $500 as a deputy. Two years later he was a sergeant—and donated $900. He made lieutenant soon after and was placed inside CJ.

Sources say Nee was never punished for his 2006 insubordination against Bald. In fact, in the months that followed, Paul Tanaka himself visited the jail to speak with Clark and Bald.

“Leave these deputies alone,” Tanaka explicitly told them, in reference to the deputy cliques whose growing influence—and violence—Clark was attempting to stifle. When Bald attempted to justify the need for a crackdown, citing the obvious violations of code, Tanaka reportedly shouted him down. Clark and Bald were transferred out of the jail to lesser assignments soon after. Nee, meanwhile, was allowed to stay on inside CJ, and worked under Clark’s replacement, then-Captain Bob Olmsted (now retired). Nee was later transferred as a lieutenant to the personnel department—a powerful position that makes one extremely useful to higher ups, because of the ease of obtaining information from various divisions throughout the department. He was recently promoted to captain.

Bald, meanwhile, who has never donated to Tanaka’s campaign, languishes as a lieutenant in the court services division.

Loyalty is more important to Tanaka than competence, says a retired LASD higher-up, thus Tanaka acolytes are often placed in positions for which they are unsuited. “That way they come to him when they run into problems, and he gets to micromanage every situation in the department.”

The effect of this leadership style, the source tells us, has been amplified in recent years as Tanaka has effectively taken control of nearly all major promotions within the department.

“The chiefs have no input at all [in promotions]. These days, qualified is the last thing on the board. Paul has the first and final say-so. … That creates a morale problem, because the deputies know what’s going on. They know their division chiefs have no juice.

“You never used to see deputies involved in department politics,” the source continues. “Now, as soon as guys get on the force they start asking, ‘How do I get in Tanaka’s car?’”

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IN CROWD/OUT CROWD

Nee is certainly not the only member of the department with a less-than-perfect track record who has seen his pay grade boosted in the wake of a campaign donation—and has been insulated from the standard repercussions of poor job performance. Former CJ captain Dan Cruz, who, thus far, has been the highest-ranking member of the department to be put on leave in relation to the recent jails scandal, is among Tanaka’s campaign donors and someone whose promotions the undersheriff has shepherded.

As the LA Justice Report previously reported, Tanaka promoted Cruz and then installed him as captain of CJ in April 2008. He arrived at the job with a troubled supervisory past. As a lieutenant at Lennox Station in Inglewood several years earlier, Cruz’s boss, Commander Ralph Martin, and Martin’s boss, LASD field operations Region II Chief Ronnie Williams, pushed hard to get Cruz transferred out of their area because he was as much as 18 months behind in investigating citizen complaints (called “watch commander service comment reports” or SCR’s) against the station. A source describes “at least three massive boxes of complaints” piled on his desk.

Cruz was transferred to what was universally known as a “dead end” job inside the department at the Facility Services Bureau. Coming from a high-profile station like Lennox, this was a major punishment. And yet, less than a year later, in fall 2006, he was rescued by Paul Tanaka and installed as operations lieutenant of Men’s Central Jail—second in charge under Olmsted.

Less than two years later, Dan Cruz was running Men’s Central Jail.

“When we saw Cruz made captain,” says a former supervisor who knew Cruz from his Lennox days and was surprised by his sudden sprint up the promotional ladder, “all of us thought the same thing—it sure must be nice riding in Tanaka’s car.”

Just as at Lennox, problems arose almost immediately under Cruz’s watch. In 2009, after two years of steady decline, deputy-on-inmate force incidents jumped from 273 to 330. Force packages and complaints again started to pile up.

The troubling rise in violence inside CJ prompted an investigation by Cruz’s supervising officer, Bob Olmsted, by then the Custody Division commander—who had a lieutenant pull 30 force reports at random that were in various stages of oversight. A second lieutenant, Mark McCorkle, analyzed them. Of that group of 30, 18 uses of force were questionable in nature and conceivably fell outside department policy. And yet, all were either signed off on or were on the verge of being cleared.

Olmsted says he took McCorkle’s findings up the chain of command to Custody Chief Dennis Burns, Assistant Sheriff in charge of custody Marvin Cavanaugh, and Paul Tanaka. No action was taken.

In fact, sources say, Cruz only became more emboldened. When one of Cruz’s lieutenants came to Cruz relaying directions from Olmsted, the captain allegedly recited his own version of Christopher Nee’s message: “I don’t work for fucking Olmsted, I work for Paul Tanaka.”

As it happens, public records show, right around the time Olmsted began to ramp up his criticism of Cruz, the CJ captain made two very timely donations to Paul Tanaka’s political campaign—on December 18, 2008, and on January 6, 2009.

Could these donations have been a contributing factor to why Cruz was never reprimanded by Tanaka for his performance inside CJ? Sources claim that they were. As evidence, they point to the way Cruz’s exit from the jail was handled.

In the fall of 2010, Olmsted’s insistence that CJ was out of control under Dan Cruz finally forced Tanaka to investigate what was happening. Up until that time Tanaka had been relying almost exclusively on Cruz’s word that all was well at the facility. Tanaka sent his close ally and longtime campaign donor, Duane Harris, into the jail to lead an investigation. Harris came back 10 days later with a report that found Cruz culpable for the escalating violence in the jail—which, in turn, forced Tanaka’s hand in transferring the captain from his post.

Bob Olmsted says he met with Tanaka to plan Dan Cruz’s exit strategy from CJ. Olmsted says he was surprised to find that the plan was not to punish Cruz for his inaction and incompetence, but to transfer and then reward him. Cruz would be made a commander.

“Tanaka told me Cruz was ‘the only viable candidate’ he was willing to promote to commander,” says Olmsted. “And this was after he had received Harris’ report that Cruz was 100 percent at fault for what was happening in the jail. The plan was for Harris to come in as the operations lieutenant, I would be his commander, and together we’d sandwich Cruz and turn him into a viable candidate.”

Olmsted says Tanaka then ticked off a list of three candidates for commander that, for reasons he did not specify, he was unwilling to promote, under any circumstances: Ralph Webb, Joaquin Herran and Ray Leyva.

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THE LAWSUIT

As it happens, both Leyva, who ran Men’s Central Jail in 2003 and 2004, and Herran are suing the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for what they allege is discrimination and unfair practices in its promotional system.

“Based on our investigation,” says Herran and Leyva’s lawyer, Bradley Gage, “it appears that Tanaka is at the heart of most Sheriff’s Department actions. Officially, Baca runs this department. Unofficially it’s Tanaka. And he appears heavily involved in the retaliation against the plaintiffs.”

Both Leyva and Herran are still active members of the force and, due to the pending lawsuit, are not authorized to speak to the media. But Gage told the LA Justice Report that in 2004 it was Leyva who, even prior to Clark, proposed the concepts of shift and assignment rotations as antidotes to the growing problem of violent deputy cliques inside the jail. In response to his reform efforts, Gage says, Leyva was summarily “rolled up” and transferred to the Pitchess Detention Center—a major demotion—where he has remained ever since.

In 2006, when John Clark followed up on Leyva’s recommendations for reform and instituted assignment rotation, Tanaka reversed his strategies and Clark too was “rolled up.”

Gage says that Leyva has been passed over for promotion 58 times since his transfer to Pitchess—the most in the department.

“In a normal situation, you’d really have to be incompetent to be passed over that many times for promotion,” says a former LASD higher-up with knowledge of Leyva’s situation. “That’s not Ray Leyva. He’s being punished.”

Indeed, as Bob Olmsted’s conversation with Tanaka suggests, Leyva is on a blacklist. The question is why.

Sources point to the fact that Leyva ran for sheriff against Baca in the last election.

“You have a constitutional right to run for office,” says one LASD insider. “But not in the sheriff’s department. You run against the sheriff, that’s the kiss of death.”

Gage agrees that the election may be a factor: “There’s always the possibility that Baca wants to punish those who exercise their constitutional democratic rights.” But he had more to say about the LA Justice Report’s findings that there is an in-crowd/out-crowd dynamic in the Sheriff’s Department—centered on Paul Tanaka.

“I have seen some documents of certain people who were promoted over the years who have contributed money. Other people who have not contributed have been passed over. That does raise concerns that a pay-to-play scenario is going on.

“You take that,” says Gage, “and then you include the coin to get in the smoking club—which has become a private fiefdom for Tanaka and his cohorts. It sends the wrong message.”

Gage’s legal complaint cites ten captains who were promoted to commander ahead of Leyva and Herran in 2009 and 2010. Of that ten, the LA Justice Report has identified six who have donated to Tanaka’s various campaigns: Jaques La Berge, Buddy Goldman, Jack Jordan, Thomas Martin, Eric Parra and Daryl Evans.

As yet a more striking example, sources point to the case of James Lopez, chief of field operations Region II.

In 2009, Lopez was Paul Tanaka’s most generous campaign donor—giving $1,000 on February 2, which is the maximum allowed by Gardena city law. He was transferred to a choice position inside Sheriff’s Headquarters and promoted to chief shortly thereafter—despite an underwhelming supervisory performance record that sources say rivals Dan Cruz’s.

In 2004, Lopez was the captain of the Century Station in Lynwood, which was struggling to get a handle on a troublesome Viking-like gang of deputies who called themselves the Regulators.

“The whole point of the Regulators was to find supervisors who were weak and walk all over them,” says a retired LASD supervisor with experience at Century Station.

As had happened inside CJ, force packages and watch commander service reports were not being investigated in a timely fashion while Lopez led Century. Internal sheriff’s documents obtained by the LA Justice Report show that, in 2004, of the 40 closed investigations into deputy misconduct at Century under Lopez’s watch, eight had been allowed to sit for more than a year. Included among those eight were one allegation of excessive force and another complaint that a deputy had lied on the witness stand during a trial.

“If you lie under oath, that’s a violation of the Brady Law,” says a retired LASD supervisor with knowledge of the problems at Century. “You’re never allowed to testify again. And if you can’t testify, you can’t be in law enforcement. This deputy got a free pass.”

In a legal deposition taken from Lopez in 2006, obtained by the LA Justice Report, Lopez admitted to being lax on completing SCRs. In one case, Lopez left a pile of SCRs in his car for weeks or months, making it impossible for one of his subordinates to complete them in a timely fashion.

When asked in the deposition if he had taken too long to sign off on SCRs at Century, creating a backlog that reflected poorly on his subordinates, Lopez answered, “Probably in retrospect, too long on my behalf, on my action.”

When Ronnie Williams was made chief of field operations Region II, the swath of LASD territory that includes Century Station, he told all the station heads under his umbrella that captains who let internal investigations sit for more than a year would be disciplined. Williams was good to his word. In November 2004, Lopez was given a written reprimand over his stalled SCRs, a sanction that was later deemed “founded.”

LASD spokesman Parker confirms that late SCRs are a serious business. “For a person in management with supervision over employees,” says Parker, “it is the minimum expectation that an investigation will be completed in under a year. It’s a reasonable expectation of the public that we manage this department well, and that’s one of the expectations.”

In March 2005, however, Lopez made yet another glaring supervisory error in judgment. Sources who worked Century at the time say that Lopez allowed members of the Regulators deputy gang to use the station to throw a fundraiser for a deputy who had been put on 20-day administrative leave for a laundry list of infractions—including sexual harassment, inappropriate conduct and misuse of electronic communication equipment.

“They raised more money for [this deputy] from that fundraiser than he would have made if he had been working,” says one source. “That’s not punishment. That’s a vacation. And Lopez let it happen on county property.”

Those we spoke with in the department say this is not the kind of track record that warrants fast-track promotion—especially with seasoned captains like Ray Leyva waiting in the wings. But on March 3, 2004, Lopez donated $500 to Tanaka’s mayoral campaign. Less than a year later, Lopez was promoted to commander, with full supervisory oversight over Century. He has since taken over his old boss Ronnie Williams’ job as chief of field operations Region II.

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THE BILLION $ QUESTION

The question remains as to why, with the controversy surrounding the LASD, with so many of his rank-and-file pointing fingers in his undersheriff’s direction, Lee Baca has allowed Tanaka to gain—and retain—so much control in the department.

Some believe that Baca enjoys shepherding his progressive projects, like the Education-Based Incarceration program, plus his frequent trips out of the country as “Sheriff to the World”—but that he no longer wants to deal with the daily operation of running the department.

“When Baca was first elected sheriff,” explains an LASD veteran, “he would constantly hold meetings at the various stations across the department, asking what we needed. And he would make those things happen.

“But after a few years of that he seemed more interested in taking trips to the Middle East and bolstering his political career. He thinks he’s going to be governor or something.”

Others suggest that Tanaka, with his skill in financial matters, used his budget-crunching acumen to rescue the sheriff in crucial instances when a countywide budget crisis meant that the department faced huge cash-flow shortfalls, and that Baca was grateful ever after.

Still others mutter darkly that Tanaka must “have something” on the sheriff, although they offer no specifics.

In the end, no one seems able to explain definitively why Lee Baca continues to allow Paul Tanaka to control so much of the department that he was elected to lead.

Attempts to reach Baca for comment were unsuccessful as he is currently in Abu Dhabi.

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BACA, TANAKA AND THE SHAPE OF DEPARTMENTAL REFORM

Removing an LASD captain from his or her duty is such a rare occurrence that most sources we spoke with cannot remember it ever happening. In the past several months, however, two Tanaka-appointed captains have been relieved of duty: Dan Cruz and Bernice Abram.

Cruz was, of course, removed while he was being investigated in connection with the jail abuse scandal. Abram, the head of Carson Station and a close ally of Tanaka who has contributed to his campaign since 2004, was relieved of duty in August after federal investigators notified sheriff’s officials that Abram’s voice may have been heard on a narcotics wiretap relating to an investigation of a Compton drug ring.

So what does all this suggest about the departmental reform—particularly of the custody division—that LASD watchers agree is so urgently needed?

LASD spokesman Parker says our sources’ concerns are overblown. “This is a department with 18,000 employees,” he says. “I’m a captain and I have never donated to Paul Tanaka’s campaign. I earned my position through hard work.”

To be sure, most of those in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department are dedicated, hard working men and women who are deserving of their promotions—likely including many of those who are part of Paul Tanaka’s inner circle. Yet, the perception—and evidence— that in crucial areas of the department one man’s power and influence supersedes all else, to the LASD’s detriment, is difficult to ignore.

Three months ago, in the wake of investigations into the violent treatment of inmates by sheriff’s deputies inside the L.A. County jail system by the LA Justice Report, the ACLU, the L.A. Times and other media outlets, and by the FBI, Lee Baca promised to appoint an internal LASD investigatory panel to look into the dangerous state of the county’s jails. Baca made good on his word. On October 9 he announced that he had convened a “Special Jail Investigations Task Force” with a staff of 35 full-time deputies to get to the bottom of what was happening in his jails.

The man Baca selected to head that task force? Paul Tanaka.

Underneath Tanaka on the task force is Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo—who is Tanaka’s oldest friend in the department. The two were once deputy squad car partners. Rhambo has been generously donating to Tanaka’s campaign since 1998. Filling out the task force are commanders Eric Parra, Joseph Fennel, Christy Guyovich and James Hellmold—all of whom are longtime Tanaka campaign contributors; and all but Parra are reportedly Tanaka’s closest allies in the department.

Says one LASD supervisor of the new Tanaka-led investigative group: “It’s like sending the wolves in to figure out what happened to the henhouse.”

NOTE: Be sure also to read Chris Vogel’s excellent and horrific story in Thursday’s LA Weekly about disabled inmates being denied basic care in Men’s Central Jail.

Soon to be ankling Probation Chief Don Blevins is back from vacation looking very tanned and cheerful.

The latest word (from sources close to probation and the Board of Supes) is that, although Blevins was informed two weeks ago (as WLA reported) it is time for him and LA County Probation to part ways (translation: the Supervisors have the votes to fire him if they want to), he will likely not be fired but will resign—which would be better for everyone. It’s not clear that his exit package has been finalized, which may still be the sticking point. But the deal is reportedly close.

As reported earlier, the Sups interviewed a contender for Blevins’ job on Tuesday. No word what they thought of the candidate.

Probation’s second in command, Cal Remington, is reportedly set to step in as the Interim Chief. (He was Interim Chief before Blevins arrived.)

Remington is well liked as a smart and solid administrator with an ability to get along with the various personalities on the Board of Supervisors plus others such as union bosses.

Although at first, some were startled by the move to replace Blevins just as the first of the state’s “realignment” parolees were being handed over to LA County control on October 1. But Remington is viewed as having a steady hand.

Some would like him to stay on for the duration, but thus far he has not agreed to do so.

Rumors that the Probation Chief was headed for the door have been circulating for nearly six months. Yet, until last month, the Board of Supes didn’t have three firm votes to oust Chief Blevins who was increasingly viewed as not up to the task of reforming a badly broken Probation Department.

Now they do have the necessary three votes.

It didn’t help the beleaguered Chief that, in July, multiple employees’ unions called a press conference and announced a very public vote of No Confidence in Blevins.
Blevins.

However, it is likely that the decision to replace Blevins has most to do with the last couple of scathing reports from the Justice Department regarding the depressing lack of progress in reforming the County’s juvenile probation camps, as required by the Department of Justice.

The juvenile camps must be in “substantial compliance” with the Feds requirements by Oct. 31, or Justice could impose a consent decree and take over management of juvenile camps. As it stands now, sources close to the compliance efforts say that the Oct. 31 marks will not be met—not even close.

With the threat of a Federal Consent Decree looming ever larger, and problems like widespread employee absenteeism throughout the Probation department remaining unsolved, the Supervisors likely felt they had little choice but to move on Blevins, and to move fast.

But if a mutual parting of the ways can be engineered-–as it appears that it nearly has been—so much the better.

Last week WitnessLA reported (based on the word of multiple inside sources) that Probation Chief Donald Blevins had been informed the week before that his tenure in LA County Probation was over; he was being given the boot.

When other news outlets, like KPCC, called Probation to confirm our report they were told no such firing had take place. (Never mind that we know that Blevins’ employment situation was as we reported it.)

Now on Tuesday morning, the Supervisors will meet in a closed door session, the purpose being, according to their agenda, for: Interview and consideration of candidate for appointment to the position of Chief Probation Officer.

Last week Spokesperson Kerry Webb did confirm another pesky rumor—namely that last week Blevins left for a vacation that “had been planned months in advance ” reported the LA Times.

There was some muttering in and around some of the supervisors’ offices about the wisdom of the Probation Chief planning a vacation that kicked in just days before Los Angeles was to get an influx of parolees from the state to be overseen by LA County Probation.

But whatever. The beat goes on. More soon.

SINCE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF REALIGNMENT, MORE CITY OFFICIALS ARE PREDICTING DOOM AND GLOOM

The LA Times’ Joel Rubin and Andrew Blankstein report that the LAPD will be additionally burdened by the realignment parolees and that the mayor and others have expressed concern while a Governor’s aide calls all this public worrying political posturing.

Who is correct remains to be seen, although I do notice that, according to the article, the City of LA is predicting a much larger number of parolees to come to LA before the end of the year than the actual CDCR numbers reflect. Not sure what’s up with that.

THOUSANDS OF CALIFORNIA INMATES RENEW HUNGER STRIKE, AND THE CDCR INVESTIGATES TWO STRIKE ATTORNEYS

I’m playing catch up on this story, but the very knowledgeable Michael Montgomery from California Watch
is doing great coverage. Here’s an excerpt from his latest.

Just days after thousands of California inmates renewed a hunger strike, two Bay Area attorneys closely involved in mediation efforts got a surprise: They were under investigation by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for allegations of misconduct and unspecified security threats.

The attorneys – Marilyn McMahon, executive director of California Prison Focus, and Carol Strickman of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children – have been banned from state institutions until the investigation is resolved, according to temporary exclusion orders signed by Corrections Undersecretary Scott Kernan on Sept. 29.

The investigation will determine whether the attorneys “violated the laws and policies governing the safe operations of institutions within the CDCR,” the order states.

The document does not provide details about the allegations.

SANDY BANKS ON SHERIFF LEE BACA AND THE JAILS ABUSE SCANDAL

Yesterday, I missed linking to Sandy Banks’ excellent and very welcome column about Sheriff Baca and the growing jails abuse scandal. If you’ve already seen it, great. If not, it’s a BIGTIME must read. Banks lays it all out for the Sheriff, with no punches pulled. For his sake as well as ours, I hope he is listening.

WHERE TO WATCH TUESDAY’S IPHONE 5 APPLESTRAVAGANZA

YES, it is presumed that the iPhone 5 is launching Tuesday at 10 am Pacific (not just the undramatic iPhone 4s).

And NO this is not a social justice issue.

It’s an Apple cult issue.

So if you too are a cult member, here’s where you can find out where to follow real-time commentary and/or live streaming.

An 11th hour deal was struck in the LA County redistricting battle on Tuesday afternoon after a brief closed door session. When the Supes emerged from behind the closed doors, they voted and, all at once, the deed was done.

The winning plan that finally got the necessary four votes after weeks of stalemate was A 3, the redistricting scheme proposed by Supervisor Don Knabe—which leaves most of the supervisory districts largely unchanged.

The decision came after an earlier vote of 2 to 3 for the plan, which meant that no plan could be chosen—in that, for redistricting, four votes are required. That crucial last vote came after the addition of a somewhat complex amendment that moves a few communities from one district to another and, in so doing, made Knabe’s plan presumably more palatable.

Mark Ridley-Thomas cast the swing vote that made the difference, added as it was to the existing votes of Zev Yaroslavsky, Don Knabe and Mike Antonovich.

Yet, why Ridley-Thomas decided to switch sides is a longer story.

For one thing, the last minute passage of a plan—any plan— kept the decision from being yanked out of the Supes collective hands and bounced over to a three-person committee made up of Sheriff Lee Baca, LA District Attorney, Steve Cooley and LA County Assessor John Noguez—an event that no one on the Board wanted.

But there’s more to it.

First the back story.

Up until Ridley-Thomas’s decision, the battle lines had been drawn as follows. (This is complicated, so bear with me.)

Zev Yaroslavsky, Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe supported Knabe’s plan, A 3, which mostly left things as is, but—in an effort to satisfy the Voting Rights Act—took a little from Molina’s District 1, still leaving her with a Latino majority of qualified Latino voters (59.7 percent), giving Knabe’s District 4 a slightly larger citizen voting age Latino population (32.8 percent)—albeit not the majority necessary to easily outvote the district’s white plurality (40.9 percent) to elect a Latino candidate, unless voters could be siphoned off from other blocks like the Asian/Pacific Islanders (17.3 percent) or African American voters (7.6 percent), or White voters, for heaven’s sake. Of course, this is all presuming that racial and ethnic groups all vote as a block, which they don’t (except when they do). In any case, you get my point. A 3’s supporters contend that the plan puts another Latino supervisor within reasonable political striking range, without having to stack the deck.

Gloria Molina supported Gloria Molina’s plan (obviously), known as T 1, which forces the slam dunk creation of a second Latino District, mainly by moving much of Zev Yaroslavsky’s highly Democratic District 3 to into Republican Don Knabe’s District 4, and giving Yaroslavsky a new District 3 that is cobbled together out of largely Latino areas of the north-ish mid-ish San Fernando Valley. In an effort to get some of the White Guys’ support, Molina’s plan leaves Knabe’s district pretty much in place, the reasoning presumably being that Zev is terming out in 2014, so what does he care? Whereas Knabe is up for reelection in 2012 so will fight any plan that attempts to snatch away his base.

However, for Zev to have accepted Molina’s plan, while it might have gained him some extra Latino support, would have meant infuriating much of his base, namely environmentally-focused progressives, and West Side and West Valleyite Dems, all of whom will be crucial for any mayoral run he might be planning.

Plus it seems Zev just didn’t like the Molina plan.

Mark Ridley-Thomas, who also had a plan, which left Zev’s progressive, environmentally-oriented, District 3 mostly in one piece, but carved up and moved Knabe’s District 4 to the east end of the County, moving soon-to-term-out Molina’s District 1 to the north-ish and mid-ish Valley in order to create two Latino majority districts.

(Are you still with me? Or did you just decide to flee and instead read about Nancy Grace’s wardrobe malfunction on Dancing With the Stars?)

The problem with Ridley-Thomas’s plan was that it was a no go with Knabe, and Molina was already committed to her own plan. Antonovich wasn’t about to rattle any cages. And so on. Thus, while in some ways more agreeable to a majority than Molina’s plan, it was still a non-starter.

This meant that the only swing vote, if there was going to be a swing vote, was Ridley-Thomas, mostly because his was the plan that couldn’t possibly win, and everybody else had political reasons not to move from their positions. That meant, by default, MRT was the only person standing in the way of the decision being dropped into the waiting paws of the Gang of Three (Baca, Cooley and Noguez). However, for Ridley-Thomas to suddenly switch to the status quo plan proposed by the Republican White guy (Knabe), would not exactly thrill his base, which includes a large chunk of Latino voters in his district—unless….unless…. it was part of a SECRET PLAN.

The secret plan (okay, it wasn’t that secret) is as follows: MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) and the So Cal ACLU have repeatedly threatened to sue if A 3 passes, contending that Knabe’s plan is a violation of the Voting Rights Act, meaning that a court challenge will be successful. If A 3 is challenged, and a challenge is successful, this means a judge will create a brand spanking new second Latino district, Supes votes be damned. So, one could arguably say that a vote for A 3 is really a very savvy, super-ninja, back door vote to expedite the creation of two Latino districts—with the new district created by judges who are presumably free of the swamp of political concerns that plague all three of the Supervisors’ plans.

Whew! Cool, huh?

(It should be mentioned here that not absolutely everyone agrees that A 3 will be struck down by the court. In fact there’s a strong legal argument to be made against that conclusion. However, the viability of the legal challenge is sorta the conventional wisdom, at least this week, which in no way guarantees it’s true, of course. But what is truth anyway, grasshopper? Ahem. Sorry. I digress.)

So there you have it. Plan A 3 wins—for now.

As for the future? Gentlemen and women start your engines. Let the lawsuits begin.

UPDATE: MARK RIDLEY THOMAS’S OFFICE JUST RELEASED THE SUPERVISOR’S STATEMENT RE: THE VOTE

Here’re the heart of it:

I believe strongly that either S2 or T1 is the right redistricting map, reflecting appropriate communities of interest and complying with the Voting Rights Act. Unfortunately, the board was unwilling to compromise. Ultimately, a federal court will likely determine whether a second, effective Latino-majority district is legally required.

In order to expedite that court review, to avoid further divisive delay and to avoid an unnecessary gamble on the uncertainty of an untested political process, I voted for A3 as amended. However, let me be clear: in voting for the A3 map, my sentiments remain unchanged. I am not endorsing the status quo. Rather, it is my expectation that endorsing the status quo will have the opposite effect; far from resolving the issue, the Board has hastened the court decision that appears necessary to determine district lines that comply with the VRA. [Voting Rights Act]

When there is no compromise, the courts must decide.