RESHAPING LA COUNTY’S DISTRICTS – WHO WILL WIN THE POLITICAL BATTLE?

The final hearing on the topic of how and how much the county ought to be redistricted will be held at Tuesday’s LA County Supervisors’ meeting, at which time the three possible redistricting plans for LA will be discussed. Two of the plans aim to substantially re-carve the boundaries of the county’s supervisory districts in order to create a second Latino district—which may (or may not) be required to satisfy the legal parameters of the Voting Rights Act.

Theoretically the Supes will vote on all three plans on Tuesday—one proposed by Gloria Molina, one by Mark Ridley-Thomas, one by Don Knabe—and will select one of the three. But to pass a redistricting plan, a supermajority of four votes is required, not the usual three. And none of the plans has four supporters among the Supes.

If the Supervisors cannot agree, then the decision will be made by the LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley and LA County Assessor John R. Noguez—and the Supervisors are not fond of that option either.

If you’re confused about what all this means and want to acquire some kind of working knowledge of the politics at play with this decision, start by reading Monday’s column by the LA Times’ Jim Newton, which is pretty good, (except that I think that Newton has the boundaries of Mark-Ridley Thomas plan a little screwed up, but otherwise it’s quite informative).

After that, you should turn your attention to the analysis by LA Weekly’s Gene Maddeus who did a very savvy job of explaining the possible political implications of the decision with his column: The Politics of The L.A. County Redistricting Fight Explained — With Venn Diagrams!

If you want still more, the LAT also has an informative Op Ed in Tuesday’s paper.

And, of course, you can look at WLA’s report for yet another take.

I should have more from the meeting as the day wears on—that is if anything actually happens.

MORE ON THE FBI INVESTIGATION OF THE JAILS—AND THE NOW ESCALATING CELL PHONE CAPER

When we last left off, LA County Sheriff Lee Baca was mighty unhappy because FBI agents probing abuse of inmates by deputies and other misconduct at the LA County jails managed to get an illegal cell phone to a jail inmate in a sting operation. Now LAT reporter Robert Faturechi has more on the cell-phone kerfuffle.

Here’s a clip:

FBI agents probing misconduct allegations in the L.A. County Jail orchestrated an undercover sting in which they paid about $1,500 to a sheriff’s deputy to smuggle a cellphone to an inmate, sources said.

The revelation is the first public indication that the FBI’s investigations into allegations of inmate beatings and other deputy misconduct in the jails have uncovered possible criminal wrongdoing.

The FBI conducted the cellphone sting without notifying top Sheriff’s Department brass, enraging Sheriff Lee Baca and causing a rift between the two law enforcement agencies.

Baca, who is scheduled to meet Tuesday with U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr. to discuss the escalating tensions, went on television Monday to slam the FBI, saying smuggling a cellphone inside a secured lockup created a serious safety breach. Baca suggested that the FBI committed a crime by doing so.

“It’s illegal,” he said. “It’s a misdemeanor and then there’s a conspiracy law that goes along with it.

Yeah, that works. Federal law enforcement officers ran a successful sting and a dirty LASD deputy allegedly committed a criminal act and got stung. So the Sheriff wants to go after the Feds instead of cleaning up his own house? Really??

There’s more coming this week on the jails/abuse story, so stay tuned.

THE COMING PAROLEE HANDOVER

And as if those stories weren’t enough….

….Beginning this Saturday, Oct 1, a pile of state parolees will be handed over to LA County Probation for supervision (instead of being supervised by the state parole officers), and there is no telling how ready the county is for the handover.

I’ll have more on this too as the week progresses. But here’s a link to the LA Times Op Ed on the topic in the meantime. Read it as it provides excellent background for the news that will be coming.

On Tuesday the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to accept a new contract with Public Communications Services—or PCS—to provide the phones that inmates use to makes calls home from inside the county’s various jail facilities.

On Zev Yaroslavsky’s blog the deal was pronounced a WIN-WIN. And maybe it is.

But like most things in California that involve criminal justice, politics and money—it’s complicated.

Here’s the deal: back in 2008, activists complained to the Los Angeles County Supervisors that the collect calls inmates were allowed to make from county jail were too expensive. To their credit, the Sups agreed and thus declined to extend the incredibly lucrative existing phone contract—which was then held by Global Tel*Link—and instead voted to open the matter up for competitive bidding.

So how lucrative is the jails phone contract? Suffice it to say that when GTL was trying to talk the Sups into extending their contract, the company offered the county an extra $3.5 million to…you know….sweeten the deal.

Everybody benefits from correctional phone contracts. The provider makes a boatload of bucks. And the county or state that run the correctional facilities gets a healthy cut of the phone company’s profits.

Everyone benefits, that is, except the inmates’ families, who are the folks who take the fiscal hit for all this cheery prosperity.

We are living in a world few people in America pay by the minute for phone calls within the US and, even without Skype, calling China or Estonia costs far less than your mother used to pay to call her mother in Portland. But calling collect from jail costs $3.54 for the first minute, 10 cents for each minute thereafter, meaning a 10 minute call from lock-up to one’s mom costs $4.44 and a 30 minute call to talk to one’s wife and kids is $6.54.

To be fair, it needs to be pointed out that correctional phones in the jails and in the state prisons are expensive to maintain. They must be extra sturdy as, like payphones in rough areas, they are repeatedly damaged and often have to be replaced. Plus there are other expenses, like the fact that the phones are wired for the electronic eavesdropping necessary to try to keep inmates from engaging in nefarious activities.

Nevertheless, in this era of unlimited calling and texting (and Skyping) corrections contracts are among the few true cash cows remaining in a highly competitive industry. And since Los Angeles has the nation’s biggest jail system, the contract just voted on by the Supervisors on Tuesday, is a prize contract indeed.

(FYI: I did an extensive article on this issue in 2001 for the LA Weekly in which I went into even more detail about this industry and its history.) .

In any case, the RFP for the LA County contract went out in 2009 and enthusiastic bidding began. The bidding closed in August of 2010 having attracted four main candidates.

The ultimate the winner of the bidding battle was Public Communications Services.

Everyone seemed pleased by the outcome.—including Global Tel*Link, which promptly bought PCS three weeks after the bidding was over.

And, the new contract is also marginally better for the inmates—or at least their families who, after all, are the ones who pay for the pricey calls. (It is worth pointing out that the majority of those in jail are inside because they are awaiting trial, not because they have been convicted. And, of course, inmates’ families have not committed crimes but are simply trying to get by the best they can while their husband/wife/mother/father/son/daughter/brother/sister is in jail.)

Under the new contract, the first minute is $1.25, which is a big improvement over the existing $3.54 for the first minute. However, the subsequent minutes are 15 cents a minute under the new contract, rather than the old per minute charge of 10 cents—a 50 percent increase. Granted, on a 17 minute call—which the CEO’s office says in the average call length from jail—the inmates’ family will pay $3.65 for that call instead of $5.14, a 30 percent drop.

However, the real attraction of the new PCS (GTL-owned) contract is that a larger chunk of the profits goes to the County than under the old contract.

Specifically, the Sheriff’s department is guaranteed to receive at least $4 million more in annual revenues, with the Minimum Annual Guarantee from the phone company jumping from $11 million to $15 million. (And, remember, that’s the least the LASD will make.)

In addition, under the old contract, the County received only 52% of all phone revenues, with the phone company pocketing the rest. Under the new one, the LASD gets a whopping 67% of the profits. With inmate populations rising, the county is likely to realize a good chunk of bank as the years go by.

So what, you might ask, happens to that $15 million (or more) that the Sheriff’s department will gain in yearly commissions from this new phone contract?

By law the county’s portion of revenues from jail phones must go into what is called the Inmate Welfare Fund, a pot of money that underwrite educational, recreational and other projects that are geared to the general welfare of inmates. This means it’s supposed to be spent on things like education programs, drug and alcohol treatment, other rehabilitative programs, the jail library….that sort of thing.

When I say, “by law” I mean this mandated use of commission money is written into the California penal code.

But are the funds truly spent on inmate programs, welfare and benefits?

A quick glance at the most recent County audit detailing how those funds are spent does not exactly make clear that lots of the phone contract $$ are being use for inmate programs.

But I’m looking further into the question and should know more a bit later.

In the meantime, it’s nice that the County is going to make out on this newly-minted contract. But it’s less nice to know, that despite the marginal price cut, calling from jail is still more expensive than nearly any other kind of call in the world. As a consequence, the sheriff’s department is still making substantial profits on the backs of some of the LA County families who can least afford it.

Photo of an inmate on the phone at the L.A. County Men’s Central Jail by Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

At Tuesday’s meeting, the LA County Supervisors wisely put aside personal feelings and worries about political ramifications and made the correct and rational choice—even if the circumstances were not ideal—when they finally voted to designate Probation as the lead agency in monitoring the group of parolees who will begin to be funneled to California counties for oversight beginning on October 1.

There were tense and fractious moments during the meeting. Supervisor Gloria Molina hectored Probation Chief Donald Blevins at length about making sure that a detailed plan for the oversight of the parolees got drafted by mid August.

The Sheriff got out of sorts and accused Blevins of not adequately power sharing, and then harrumphed that, as an elected official, he understood the BOS’s concerns better than anyone at Probation.

But in the end the Sups tuned out the interference (even their own) and did the right thing. They are to be strongly commended for doing so.

A rough transcript of the relevant parts of the meeting may be found here. {Baca’s comments start on p. 79. Molina is just above him.]

And here’s a more detailed account of the ups and downs of the discussion by Robert Jablon of the AP.

Also, the LA Times Robert Faturechi perfectly captures the spirit and context of Sheriff Baca’s unhappy speech at the meeting in his story on Tuesday’s decision..

Here’s a clip:

Baca accused Probation Chief Don Blevins of viewing the sheriff’s department “as some sort of threat” even after Baca had backed down in his bid to take sole responsibility for supervising of hundreds of state parolees who will soon be passed from state custody to the county.

Baca’s initial proposal was an unprecedented attempt to take the task from county probation officers, who already do that sort of work. No law enforcement agency in the nation handles parole or probation supervision, a task decidedly more oriented toward social work.

But after months of lobbying for the responsibility — and the funding that comes with it — Baca suddenly endorsed a hybrid plan this month that would leave his deputies out of rehabilitation casework. Despite that, sheriff’s officials said they believed Blevins was attempting to further diminish the role of the sheriff’s department.

On Tuesday, the L.A.County Board of Supervisors voted to make the Probation Department the lead agency in parolee supervision, with the hopes that the sheriff’s department will offer support, particularly for higher level offenders. However, the details of the plan are still being worked out in a special committee of county officials that includes Baca and Blevins.

“I offered to eliminate any sense of competition,” Baca said. “I was willing to say to the chief probation officer ‘You go ahead and run the whole program.’ ”

But Baca, visibly irritated, said Blevins had built a “moat around his department.” Baca said that with that kind of attitude Blevins could be “an unreliable partner” in any eventual hybrid arrangement for parolee supervision.

Next post we’ll go back to non-parolee-related topics, I promise.

On Thursday, the four primary unions that represent all those (save management) who work in the LA County Department of Probation announced what union leaders are calling an unprecedented “No Confidence” vote that was delivered in letter form to Probation Chief Donald Blevins.

Blevins, who took over the catastrophically troubled agency in the spring of 2010, was greeted with much hope when he was appointed nearly 15 months ago. But although Blevins is a very bright, experienced, likeable guy, with a much-needed progressive attitude toward juvenile probation, he has thus far demonstrated himself to be politically and managerially tone deaf.

For instance, during his first months on the job, through clumsy actions, he managed to actively alienate two of the five LA County Sups and has righteously irritated a 3rd.

At a management level, he failed to clean house at the top but instead allowed a lot of the holdovers from the previous administration (the one that caused much of the ghastly mess to begin with) to remain in place. Thus LA’s juvenile probation camps, which were already teetering on the verge of federal receivership, failed to make the progress that was demanded of them, and in certain crucial areas have actually back slid in ways that, according to the last report from the feds, endangered kids in some of the camps.

Then, most recently, when every other probation agency in every one of the other 57 counties in the state of California was preparing to take on the supervision of a pile of state parolees (bringing with them a pile of state money) through the new corrections policy known as “realignment,” in LA County, Blevins nearly lost the parolee contract to Sheriff Lee Baca and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. For one thing, Sheriff Baca went around and personally pitched his case to the Sups and others, while Blevins, whose pitch was a much better one, seemed lackadaisical, and even left town the for much of the last week before the Supervisors were expected to vote. (The vote has been delayed until next week, and the Sheriff has, in part, pulled out of the running.)

Plus, Blevins is rumored to have been out of town more this past year than makes any kind of sense for a guy who took over the most scarily troubled agency in Southern California.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from the unions’ press release:

The L.A. County Probation Department’s juvenile division is in turmoil and the Chief Probation Officer has until October 2011 to resolve outstanding issues or risk having the Department taken into receivership by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). This threat has not been without warning. Not only has DOJ long since advised the County of what needs to be done to comply, but Probation Department employees, through their respective unions, have been raising many of these same issues for decades – even filing lawsuits against the County of Los Angeles to demand remedy.

With the risk of DOJ action against the juvenile division, coupled with the reality that under AB 109, Public Safety Realignment, as many as 15,000 parolees will soon be the responsibility of the Probation Department’s Adult Field Services division, the time for fixing the Department is past due.

Probation Department employees – group supervisors, detention services officers, deputy probation officers, supervising deputy probation officers, and probation directors, as well as the staff who support our work – are deeply concerned with the pace of progress and, simply put, we can wait no longer.

I like Blevins. But, after talking to people in and out of county government for the past few days as the No Confidence announcement was brewing, its hard to know how he can survive this blow.

The LA Times and the LA Weekly also reported on the story.

NOTE: IN DILLON, MT, AND HEADED HOME: Since I’m writing this in the wee hours from my lodging in Dillon MT, although there is much other news, it will have to wait until I’m back in our fair city.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals were busy little bees on Tuesday.

THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL CROSS

Earlier in the day the 9th ruled that the much-quarreled about cross at Mt. Soledad is in violation of the US Constitution’s establishment clause. But interestingly, the 9th didn’t ask for the cross to be taken down. Clearly they are looking for a third legal path to walk between constitutional concerns and the very real significance that the cross has to a great many people as a veterans’ memorial.

The LA Times has some of the details:

The 43-foot cross atop public land on Mt. Soledad in San Diego is an unconstitutional “government endorsement of religion,” a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, the latest twist in a two-decade legal struggle.

But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did not order the cross removed, as the Jewish War Veterans and other litigants, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, had hoped.

Instead, a three-judge panel sent the case back to a federal trial judge for “further proceedings” on the issue of whether the cross can be modified to “pass constitutional muster” as a war memorial, wrote Judge M. Margaret McKeown……

THE PROP 8 “STANDING QUESTION GOES TO SCOTUS

Later in the day, they made their most significant move, which had to do with the Prop 8 case. Specifically, the 9th’s three judge panel that heard arguments on the matter early December, has asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether those bringing the appeal of the lower court hearing have legal standing to actually file said appeal, since the state of California (Brown and Schwarzenegger) declined to do so.

The judges’ decision to lob this hot potato to the Supremes is an interesting development.

There was much talk after the three judge panel heard the case last month that the 9th circuit might end up not ruling on the substance of the challenge to Prop 8, as it must first deal with the “standing” issue. And if it ruled that those filing the appeal indeed had no standing, while that would be a victory for marriage rights in California, but there would be no potentially precedent-setting trip to SCOTUS for the case, which is what David Bois and Ted Olson were aiming for when they launched the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8 to begin with.

Thus, recognizing the far reaching consequence of the standing issue, the three judges from the 9th wanted to have that ruling come from the nation’s highest court. Thus is the Supremes say there is no standing, then that is that. Prop 8 is null and void. The lawyers pack up and head home. And the wedding planning may commence.

However, if SCOTUS opines that the appeal has standing, then the 9th can freely rule on the substance of the challenge, without having to worry about any pesky technicalities, thus paving the way for the next step along a potentially historic pathway.

The Atlantic and KQED have more.

INDIANA 12-YEAR-OLD GETS 25 YEAR SENTENCE IN ADULT COURT FOR MURDER

An awful and tragic crime, but please read the details. Sentencing this 12-year old kid as an adult simply shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the the US sentencing and prison system.

The Fort Wayne, Indiana paper has the story.

Max this kid out in a juvenile facility. Fine. But not this.

AFTER DCFS HALF MILLION $$ IN CELL PHONE WASTE, COUNTY SUPS WANT TO LOOK INTO ALL COUNTY CELL PHONE USE

Good idea. Here’s the original story about the wasted $512 thousand. And the new story about the County Sups….concern (and subsequently ordered countywide audit—both from the LA Times

On Tuesday the LA County Board of Supervisors will vote on its state legislative agenda for the coming year. The package includes agenda items that range from topics relating to watershed management and flood control, to a push to steer kids away from sugared beverages.

Nestled within the 26-page single-spaced list of legislative priorities is a proposal that could easily fly under the radar. Yet it is an idea that has very large implications for the problems plaguing LA’s troubled foster care system, the Department of Children and Family Services.

The proposal—put forth by the County’s CEO with the blessing of DCFS, and long championed by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas** in concert with statewide foster care advocates such as the Children’s Advocacy Institute—is a simple one: make dependency court public.

As it stands now, the hearings in which it is decided which kids will be taken from their parents care, and for how long, are closed to almost anyone but family members required to be present, plus attorneys and those who work in the foster care system.

Theoretically, this arrangement is to protect the privacy of the children involved, but it has also created an unhealthy lack of adequate scrutiny—one that often works against the best interest of the kids and families affected by the court’s actions.

I have managed to weasel my way in to several of these hearings in the past few years and, in each case, it was a sobering and eye-opening experience. Suffice it to say that the light of day would do these proceedings great good.

In a statement he will read on Tuesday morning, Ridley-Thomas explains more of the reasoning behind the proposal.

Here is an excerpt:

“Opening dependency courts may yield the biggest bang-for-the-buck of any child protection measure. Any solution to our current child safety crisis lies in expanding, not curtailing civil rights.

“Dependency court proceedings are closed to protect children and their families from potential public humiliation and embarrassment.

“But doing so can also shield a failing system from public scrutiny. As a result, parents may be treated poorly behind closed doors – which many families in my district have said is the case.

“Making dependency court hearings public (with specific privacy protections remaining in place) will make the system accountable. Open proceedings also, however, enable child welfare officials to protect themselves from false accusations.

“In other words, those worthy of scrutiny could no longer hide behind confidentiality; and those who suffer false accusations silently could defend themselves with the public record.

“The news media, with full access to hearings, can be a powerful advocate for currently voiceless parents and children, and can keep an even more vigilant watch on the government…..”

This is an absolutely essential move that we should all support.

Other states such as New York, Illinois, Florida and Pennsylvania have public dependency courts.

It’s time that California open the doors of its courts as well-–sooner rather than later.

**CORRECTION: I originally wrote that Ridley-Thomas proposed the dependency court item, More correctly, the CEO put the item on the agenda at the request of DCFS, while Ridley-Thomas had been working along a parallel track with advocacy groups.

Photo of Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court

On Thursday of this week, the ACLU of So Cal, Public Counsel, the Disability Rights Legal Center announced the settlement of a landmark class action lawsuit filed in mid-January of this year, charging that LA County Probation’s largest juvenile probation camp, known as Challenger, had failed to provide the kids locked up within its boundaries with even the most basic kind of education. (Nevermind that it costs more than $50,000 a year to incarcerate a kid at Challenger.)

January’s lawsuit, filed also against he Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), described conditions inside the camps as “conscience-shocking.” As lead attorney Mark Rosenbaum put it, it was “a scandal of dimensions that would make Dickens shudder.”

Quite frankly, Rosenbaum was not speaking at all in hyperbole.

The stories detailed in the legal filing, plus the anecdotal tales I’ve been privy to since the suit was filed, live up to that description and then some.

A kid who spent his high school years at Challenger, received a “diploma” even though he was so functionally illiterate he couldn’t read street signs or the simplest words on a restaurant menu. Nonetheless, a specially designated teacher spoon-fed the kid answers so that he could pass the state-mandated exam, thus getting him a diploma—which he couldn’t read. (And he was one of many.) (Frank Stoltz of KPCC did a good report at the time of some of the individual cases.)

Kids were locked in solitary confinement for months with no instruction at all, excluded from class repeatedly for minor infractions, allegedly forced to stand outdoors for hours in 100 plus degree heat, and on and on.

In the class, state standards were not enforced, and there appeared to be no teacher accountability so teachers simply showed movies or failed to show up at all at times.

Oh, and by the way, this was the new and improved situation at Camp Challenger, which—at the time of the January lawsuit—was already the target of a United States Department of Justice investigation over mistreatment of the 650 students housed in the facility.

Not pretty.

Okay, that’s the bad news.

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS

The good news is that, under new probation Chief Donald Blevins, the lawsuit has been settled, with an entire action plan of hardcore but extremely constructive conditions attached to the settlement.

Furthermore, the settlement was one that both Blevins and company and the ACLU and partners truly seemed to jointly welcome. Thursday’s joint press conference was an absolute “love fest,” as one observer put it.

Love fest or no, the agreement has teeth in that it will be overseen by a federal judge for four years, just to make double sure that the planned reforms are fully implemented. (Not that anybody’s untrusting, or anything.)

One more thing, this week’s settlement also provides reading and educationally remedial instruction for the 2500 or so kids who were denied adequate education from 2008 until now at Challenger.

The latter structure only allocates around $2,000-$2500 a kid, which isn’t going to go far for some. But it’s a start. And that is a very good thing.

AND IN OTHER LEGAL NEWS….JUDGE RULES RESIDENCE LIMITS FOR SEX OFFENDERS IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

The LA Times Andrew Blankstein has the story. Here’s a clip:

California corrections officials this week stopped enforcing portions of Jessica’s Law in Los Angeles County after a judge ruled that the 2006 statute restricting how close sex offenders can live to parks or schools is unconstitutional.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza concluded that the controversial measure left sex offenders in some areas with the choice of being homeless or going to jail because the law restricts them from living in large swaths of some cities such as Los Angeles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE NIT-PICKY DETAILS

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

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

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

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

Here’s the list:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep, they did.

And what did they do about it?

Just about nothing.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

What do you think LA County should do about raves?

Photo by Winnie Jaing

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

It is, in a word, pathetic.

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

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

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

NO TRAIN AND NO TRACKS

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

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

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

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

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

First a few metaphors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEW BUCKS, LESS BANG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ABOUT THAT OTHER $142 MILLION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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