THE MYSTERY OF SHERIFF LEE BACA’S STUBBORN SECRECY AROUND LA’S COSTLY SECURE COMMUNITIES PROGRAM

This week, a New York based justice advocacy organization called Justice Strategies released a report that looked at the dollar cost of LA County’s participation in the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities” program, in which local law enforcement—in this case the LA County Sheriff’s Department—detains undocumented residents. It turns out that LA is spending $26 million a year on these Secure Communities prisoners—and it may be that we are keeping these same prisoners far longer than necessary in our already overcrowded jails.

Justice Strategies got their numbers through a lawsuit filed by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.under the Public Records Act, but still the LASD held back some of the most crucial information requested, as the LA Times notes in an important editorial that ran earlier this week.

The report and the editorial bring up several large questions that demand further discussion. But, before we get there, first a rundown by on how Secure Communities works. Here’s how Roxandra Guild of KPCC explains it.

Here’s how Secure Communities works: When local law enforcement makes any arrest, the detainees’ fingerprints are sent to a federal database. If the person is deportable, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will ask local law enforcement to keep the person in detention for no more than 48 hours, until federal agents can transfer that person to one of its facilities.

The report from New York-based advocacy organization Justice Strategies puts a dollar figure on L.A. County’s spending for immigrant detention. The report says the cost is so high because county jails hold undocumented immigrants, on average, for 20 days — not the mandated 48 hours.

So here are the questions:

1. Why was progressive lawman Baca so eager to leap into this controversial program way back in 2009?

2. Why, given that the county’s jails are so overcrowded that the sheriff plans to ship some of the inmates off to other areas of the state, does the Los Angeles Sheriff Department hold the ICE detainees an average of 20 days rather than the federally required 48 hours? This is an average of 17 days longer than legal residents facing the same criminal charge, notes the LA Times. Seriously, what’s that about?

3. What’s in it for Baca? Although the taxpayers of LA County are taking a hit with Secure Communities, is the LASD making a profit on the detentions?

Maybe not. But our suspicions would be better quelled if the sheriff would release those records that reveal how many immigrants were held for what length of time, and on what charges.

This is not a topic that should be allowed to let slide.

THE UNDERSHERIFF & THE GRAY

Other law enforcement officers weigh in, plus an internal LASD document puts the undersheriff’s “work in the gray” speeches into a troubling context

By Matt Fleischer

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Two weeks ago, at the most recent Jails Commission hearing, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Captain Pat Maxwell, who heads LASD’s Norwalk Station, testified about a disturbing meeting he had with LASD Undersheriff Paul Tanaka. The year was 2009, and Tanaka came to Norwalk to hold a meeting with the station’s supervisors. According to Maxwell, Tanaka, who was then an assistant sheriff, was quite blunt about what Norwalk’s supervisors were doing wrong. “He was talking to my sergeants, lieutenants and he said, ‘You need to let deputies do their job out there, they have a tough job. You need to allow the deputies to work in the gray area.”

Pressed by commission members to define “gray area,” Maxwell initially demurred. “Well, that’s the problem with the gray area, there’s a lot of different interpretations.”

When compounded with Tanaka’s repeated statements—to Maxwell and others—about his dislike for robust internal affairs investigations, the captain eventually revealed that he believed there was little doubt about Tanaka’s meaning: “To me, working in the gray area is outside of policy and outside the law.”

Maxwell is not the only LASD employee to arrive at this interpretation. His sentiment echoes our earlier reporting on Tanaka’s apparent infatuation with “the gray.”

“If we know there are drugs in a house, but we don’t have a warrant,” one supervisor who worked under Tanaka told us, “‘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.”

This past Tuesday, Tanaka penned a department-wide memo, which quickly found its way to WitnessLA and to the LA Times. In the memo, the undersheriff attempted to rebut that notion that his repeated work the gray area speeches promoted a borderline-straddling or extralegal style of law enforcement:

“I’ve come to learn in recent months that the term ’grey area’ can be easily misinterpreted by those that choose to do so. Some would like to believe that the grey area is the area between right and wrong, that it characterizes certain police misconduct as acceptable, and that the end justifies the means.

“I’m writing this message to ensure that there is no misunderstanding — that when it comes to right or wrong, there is NO grey area. The discretionary authority given to us as law enforcement officers brings with it tremendous responsibility. It requires us to be knowledgeable of all applicable laws, rules, policies and protocols and to enforce them in a manner that is fair, impartial and compassionate. Being a peace officer necessitates that you maintain an unwavering sense of right and wrong. Cross this line and you violate our Department’s Core Values, dishonor the badge, let down your fellow deputies, bring shame to yourself and embarrass your family.”

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A SURVEY OF GRAY

The idea that Tanaka has been making the rounds to some of the most active stations in the department, calling closed door meetings in which he insisted deputies focus their efforts on exercising proper discretion when giving speeding tickets and the like, stretches the limits of plausibility. But to get a better idea of how the concept is viewed by other policing agencies, I called around to a variety of law enforcement departments in California and elsewhere in the country to get their take on “working in the gray.”

“Like a lot of idioms, it can be used in ways other than its accepted sense,” Riverside Police Chief and 33-year LAPD vet Sergio Diaz told me. “It’s a phrase about ethical ambiguity that is in itself very ambiguous.”

But Diaz and nearly all the law enforcement officials I spoke with made the distinction between a law enforcement officer’s discretion and the “gray area” of the law.

“I can’t imagine describing the gray area as discretion,” Diaz said.

El Paso Police Department training officer Allen Edington went even further. “There’s no such thing as a gray area,” he said. “There’s the law and that’s it. We address that right out of the gate [in training].

Edington, like Diaz, quickly drew a sharp line between an officer’s discretion and working in the ambiguous gray.

“There is a realm of officer discretion. The soccer mom speeding to get to her boy in the hospital who had an accident: do you give her a citation or let her go? We set boundaries on what we’re willing to accept on officer discretion.”

What if a recruit were to bring up the gray areas of law enforcement during training?

“We would shut that down in a heartbeat,” Edington said.

San Diego Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Jan Caldwell was equally dismissive of the notion of “gray” policing. “In all my time at the Sheriff’s Department and 32 years in the FBI before that, I have never heard the term used. Nor have I heard that term used by any law enforcement agency in the San Diego area.”

Of course, “gray area” is a universal term that occasionally gets bandied about in casual conversation. As it relates to law enforcement, Caldwell says those instances call for intensive collective circumspection.

“I think if a deputy or anyone comes to us and says there’s a ‘gray area,’ we would sit down and talk about that. We would weigh very carefully how the letter of the law applies to that situation.”

The bottom line, she says, “There is no gray area. Our mission is to enforce the law and the law is pretty specific. We have a mission statement and one of our points is, ‘we do the right thing, even when no one is looking.’”

Diaz, however, disagrees with the notion that there isn’t a legitimate place for a very circumscribed kind of ambiguity in law enforcement. “To say there’s no gray area is a totalitarian point of view.”

That said, he added, without very explicit guidance in the parameters of the gray area, its scope can easily be misconstrued, and abused.

“You have to know how that particular person used it,” Diaz says. “What I’m concerned about the phrase could be used as the verbal equivalent of a wink and a nod. It’s gray as long as you don’t get caught.”

Deputy Tom Peine, public information officer of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona, was reluctant to even comment on working in the gray, given a lack of universal clarity on the term.

“We don’t have such a definition here. There is no such thing as an official or an unofficial encouragement of the gray area in our department. We’re trying to do our job well and do it right. This department takes great pains to protect rights, not violate them. The courts look at this stuff under a magnifying glass, and rightfully so.”

Peine did acknowledge that working in the gray is an inevitability in law enforcement. “It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re talking about. There are situations where you don’t have a black or a white.”

However, these situations are far from ideal. “Those are tough places to be in. Those situations can arise, but you don’t necessarily want to be in them.”

Sgt. Ray Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department echoes Peine’s sentiment. “I’ve heard that term. It’s used in a lot of different professions. To me, it means sometimes there may not be a policy, procedure or law that governs a certain situation. But, when you’re dealing with a situation like that, you need to use moral and ethical decision-making.”

In other words, working in the gray is an inevitable, ethically perilous part of any law officer’s job. But is it something to be pursued?

“I wouldn’t encourage it as a rule,” says Kelly. “If you train your people right, the gray area should be very small, the black and white should be large. I certainly wouldn’t try to exploit the gray area. Search and seizure or use of force, you better be careful. You need solid foundation.”

Diaz agrees that application of ethical “gray” policing is extremely limited in scope. “There is no gray area when it comes to force,” he says. “A police supervisor speaking to subordinates on an issue as critical as force, you have to go to great pains not to be ambiguous and to be understood.”

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GRAY IN CONTEXT

This brings us to why, according to LASD sources we spoke with, Tanaka’s speeches about the virtues of “gray” policework have been so troubling: As we reported in Part 4 of our Dangerous Jails series, these speeches to station deputies did not occur in a vacuum.

Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS A ONLY BROAD STROKES PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS. A full set of reports on Friday’s meeting and more on the Jails Commission will appear Monday.

The newsiest, most startling moments during Friday’s jail commission meeting belonged to Captain Michael Bornman, who was the first of the “witnesses” to speak at the day-long hearing. Bornman, a 32-year veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, gave testimony about a period he spent working at Men’s Central Jail beginning in November of 2009.

In his testimony, which the commissioners seemed to find both riveting and disquieting, he described a string of telling incidents involving some CJ supervisors and their bosses.

Bornman’s was also the rawest testimony, given reluctantly and at a visible cost. This had much to do with the fact that, since Bornman is still actively working for the department, every revelation risked alienating colleagues and/or infuriating department executives who could conceivably do him professional harm if any of them took umbrage. The fact that Sheriff Baca reportedly okayed and even encouraged his appearance, only partially mitigated Borman’s risk. (Bornman heads up the Sheriff’s Education-Based Incarceration Bureau.)

After Bornman, the next LASD witness was Captain Pat Maxwell, the commanding officer for the Sheriff’s Department Norwalk station,and another longtime LASD veteran. His testimony was comparatively short, but it contained some startling—and assuredly controversial—elements.

Maxwell was an interesting choice since his testimony had nothing directly to do with the jails. (The operative word here is directly.) But more on Maxwell’s testimony on Monday.

Between Bornman and Maxwell, a former inmate named Gordon Grbavac testified. Grbavac is a businessman and father of four, who said he had no previous arrest record, prior to his stint in CJ, and who told a harrowing tale of getting his head slammed against a partitian by deputies, and other forms of reported abuse.

After lunch, the remaining witnesses mostly talked about solutions, not problems.

The five-person Commander Management Task Force—Commanders Joseph Fennell, Christy Guyovich, James Hellmold, Eric Parra and Paul Pietrantoni—testified in detail about what has been done in the past year to improve the jails.

And then Lt. Brian Moriguchi a 24 year veteran of the department, and also the president of the PPOA—the Professional Peace Officers Association— testified about the proposed plan that PPOA has recently put out regarding how to improve the jails. However, in the course of what was a largely technical exchange with the commission, Moriguchi managed to drop a couple of unexpected depth charges.

A custody assistant who works at the Men’s Central Jail testified for three minutes in the public comment period and then the ACLU’s Peter Eliasberg closed out the day.

Okay, that’s the short form.

Details Monday morning.

Naysayers have repeatedly asked why Michael Nash, the presiding judge of Los Angeles County’s juvenile courts, insisted on opening Family Dependency Court to responsible reporters—despite a raft of vociferous objections and various legal challenges.

A new story by the LA Times’ Garrett Therolf demonstrates precisely why Nash felt it was essential to shine a light into into these formerly secretive proceedings.

Here’s how the story opens:

The mother acknowledged she unleashed a bitter torrent of accusations against the social workers who took her children last year, calling incessantly to claim they were being abused in foster care.

But what the workers did in return has drawn a stern rebuke from a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. Amy Pellman, a jurist with deep experience in the county’s child welfare system, said they misused their power by retaliating and harassing the family.

After she affirmed a referee’s decision to return the children to their mother, Pellman declared that the workers acted out of “bad blood” to unravel the family’s progress and place the children at risk of being retaken by the county. “They told me they hate me just as much as I hate them,” the mother said in an interview.

The mother, who spoke on the condition that her family not be identified in The Times out of fear that such a disclosure might prompt increased scrutiny, said she never felt more broken. “Every time there’s a knock on the door, my heart skips a beat,” she said. “It can go wrong so easily. I still carry the scars.”

Therolf describes how the mom and dad had struggled with chronic homelessness for years but how, also, they “had strengths.” He reports, however, that when the parents started to right themselves enough that they were able to get their kids back, the social workers in charge of their case appeared to actively sabotage the parents’ healthy efforts.

For instance, according to Therolf, the mean girl workers did the following:

Read the rest of this entry »

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!