A story in this morning’s LA Times gives an intelligent, nuanced glimpse of some South LA gang unit officers who seem to demonstrate the kind of policing that we’d all like to see more of in this city. The writer, Joe Mozingo, and photographer Barbara Davidson also include a video as part of the story and unlike some of the Times earlier efforts, it works pretty well, and genuinely augments the printed reporting.

Here’s an excerpt:

…Los Angeles Police Department officer, Ryan Whiteman, turns down an alley where a gray-haired man in a maroon velour tracksuit is standing in a carport.

“Rudy, I know you don’t live here,” he says. “Why are you over here?”

Whiteman opens his door and hears the clink-clink of glass on asphalt. He drops his head. “Rudy, I know the sound of a crack pipe dropping. Give me that pipe!”

Rudy sheepishly walks it over. Whiteman shakes his head. “I just wanted to talk to you,” the officer says.

He scribbles out a citation as he wheedles information out of the man.

Whiteman is in the vanguard of a push to target hard-core gangs, not with sweeping paramilitary force but with aggressive, targeted enforcement by officers who know the players in the hood.

The mayor’s office and the LAPD are promising to consolidate thinly scattered anti-gang resources and pour them into 12 beleaguered neighborhoods — gang reduction zones — where intense suppression would be coupled with gang intervention and prevention programs.

That coupling reflects an epiphany of sorts, with law enforcement now voicing a refrain that has long been the lonely cry of civil libertarians and community activists: Street gangs are a social phenomenon that cannot simply be bludgeoned out of existence.

“What we’ve really had in the past is a mass incarceration strategy,” said Jeff Carr, L.A.’s deputy mayor for gang reduction and youth development. “We’ve locked a lot of people up and we still have this epidemic problem.”

In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that gang reduction zones would be the linchpin of his plan to overhaul the city’s anti-gang efforts. The goal is to build a network of agencies and nonprofits to lock up hard-core gangbangers, break cycles of retaliatory violence and keep troubled kids off the precipice.

So far eight of the zones are running, with only the law enforcement part in place. The prevention and intervention side of the equation has been in disarray for years, with programs dispersed through different departments and never evaluated to see if they worked.

The mayor is vowing to change that…..

When Bill Bratton talks abut policing smarter not harder, this appears to be a move in the direction of what he means, officers who are focused on the true troublemakers, not the people on the fringe. With luck the officers have gotten to know (and hopefully like) a community well enough to know the difference.

(photo by Barbara Davidson, LA Times.)

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UPDATE: For those of you who didn’t get to go to the Festival, reading my pal Tod Goldberg’s Festival of Books Primer is almost as good, wa-a-a-ay funnier, and doesn’t require either driving time or sunscreen.
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Yesterday was glorious. Today is likely to be more glorious still. (If you live in LA, you still have time to get over there. Or tune in right this minute to hear good stuff like blogfather Marc Cooper moderating a panel on C-SPAN Books)



My panel, moderated by Jill Leovy (The Homocide Report), with Miles Corwin and brand new author Dashaun Morris, in which we talked about literature based on stories from the streets, could have easily gone twice its length judging by the enthusiasm of the questioners from the audience. (The photo above of me is with Dashaun and his brother, and clearly I look very cheered up by being flanked by two handsome, smart guys.) Dashaun is a former gang member who, after prison, transformed himself into a man with a great deal of worth to say to those trying to understand the problem of gang violence and how to solve it.

But the day was filled with a plethora of terrific panels and author talks, and thousands and thousands of men, women and children who come together at this event—all for the love of books.

Some of the panel and talks I most enjoyed were:

1. Dialogue-wizard Richard Price talking about his new novel Lush Life, a beautifully constructed and fabulously entertaining book that I’m betting will be up for multiple book awards this time next year.

2. The amazing Maxine Hong Kingston in conversation with my good pal LA Times Book Editor David Ulin, a wonderfully inspiring hour of talk about writing as a form of activism and how to convey the complexity of human experience through the interweave of truth and myth.

3. Mega-popular mystery writer Michael Connelly (LAPD Chief Bill Bratton’s favorite crime novelist) interviewing police procedural master Joe Wambaugh about his new novel, Hollywood Crows. Wambaugh entertained the adoring, packed-to-the-rafters crowd with his wild and woolly tales of the art of getting great stories out of cops, and the perils of getting Hollywood actors to do nude scenes. (Wambaugh himself in part produced the movie of his classic true crime bookThe Onion Field.)

So rush over now…..or watch it on C-Span Books, ….or buy the recordings of the panels and talks you wish you could have seen…..or just go out and have fun reading.

Books make the world a better place to be.

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OKAY, FIRST THE BOOKS:

The LA Times Festival of Books takes over the UCLA campus this weekend. All day Saturday and Sunday seventy or eighty thousand people will show up at UCLA to attend author panels and readings scheduled every hour from 10 am until 4 pm on eighteen different stage and lecture halls.

It’s all free. And it’s exceptionally cool, I promise you.

I’m on a Saturday panel at 10 am called “Nonfiction from the Streets” moderated by Jill Leovy (the Homicide Blog) with Miles Corwin (The Killing Season and And Still We Rise) and a new author named DaShaun Morris who has written a memoir about his time as a Blood gangster.

But ours is only one of many panels that are worth checking out.

At noon you can see famous LA mystery novelist, Michael Connelly, interview legendary LA police procedural novelist, Joe Wambaugh. (Damn. I’m going to that!)

At 3 PM LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick moderates an intriguing line up of writers for a panel called, “California, the Great Experiment.”

Come on down and see us on Saturday. Or failing that, just come on down. Whatever else the LA Times does or does not do right, it gives the residents of LA this fabulous gift once a year when the book fair rolls around.

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RADIO
Saturday at noon, Miles and I will be on KPFK’s Deadline LA (90.7 FM)—talking about the panel and the book fair.

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LA Times columnist Steve Lopez has been apologizing a lot in the last 48 hours.

Here’s what happened.

With homicides in LA spiking and the internecine war raging downtown about who should control the city’s gang programs, Lopez decided to dig up his own anecdotal story about the issue to remind the rest of us what’s at stake here.

In his Wednesday column Lopez writes about his trip to the San Fernando Valley to talk to the valley’s best known gang intervention guy, Blinky Rodriguez.

After visiting Blinky, Lopez goes on to check out a tiny but reputedly successful alternative charter school for at risk kids called the West Valley Leadership Academy. The school is located in Canoga Park and run by a fellow named Paul White. It is here that Lopez starts to go off course.

White has a reputation for running a tight ship. The 25 or so students at the academy have to toe the line or they’re out. But for the kids who stay in, according to the school’s supporters, it can be a life saver.

Unfortunately, along with his good points, White has a bit of a quirk: He doesn’t play well with others and has a habit of railing about how everybody working in gang intervention but….well…. him is doing it wrong. In fact, says White to anyone who will listen, all those other folks are gangster supporters who create “greater menaces to society.”

The gang intervention person who rates highest on White’s menace list? Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. According to White, Homeboy promotes “racial exclusiveness and ultra-leftist/anti-law enforcement philosophy.”

And that’s one of the nicer things White says.

A few months back, White managed to post a mouth-frothing diatribe at the Huffington Post, that stopped just short of labeling Father Greg evil.

Nevermind that as far as anyone at Homeboy knows, White has never set foot at the place. Where he lacked knowledge, White simply made things up.

During Lopez’ visit, Paul White evidently began dishing out his usual claptrap. And what did veteran columnist Steve Lopez do? Question White on his scurrilous and relentlessly self-promoting statements? (Naturally, White has a book that he’s promoting.) Nope, he just printed ‘em. Without qualification. Without fact checking. Without any mitigation.

Here’s the section in question:

Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s late, but in the midst of all the primary election furor, I don’t want to let this day go by without acknowledging the brave and important accomplishment that was celebrated in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Today, Monday (it’s still Monday as I’m writing this), the blog known as the Homicide Report, created and written by LA Times reporter, Jill Leovy, is a year old.

The Homicide Report was born after Leovy had been covering crime in LA’s poorest neighborhoods for some time and had become bothered by all the deaths that went completely unnoticed, except perhaps by friends and immediate family of those murdered. It was as if some lives—and their endings—simply mattered far more than others. So Leovy talked the Times into an unusual project. She wanted to record every single murder in Los Angeles County for one year, reporting and writing what she could about these deaths as time and energy permitted.

Now the year has passed and Jill has written a Column One story about those 12 months she spent tracking down every homicide, doing what she could to acknowledge that each killing produced a loss for someone, and that attention must be paid. Here’s a bit of what she wrote:
Read the rest of this entry »

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“How come there’s cuts in the newsroom when the company’s still profitable,” says an unhappy editor when a new round of staff buyouts are announced.

No, this quote didn’t come from someone on the LA Times editorial staff (pointing out that the LA Times has a very healthy 20 percent profit margin) after the news broke yesterday about the firing of Jim O’Shea for refusing to again slash the Times editorial staff. It was said by a fictional Metro editor working for the (fictionalized version) of the Baltimore Sun on last night’s episode of the brilliant HBO series The Wire.

In the scene in question, the Sun’s editor-in-chief has to make drastic cuts in the newsroom as demanded by management in Chicago, namely the Tribune company.

As with last year’s season of The Wire— which illuminated problems in public education (including the grindingly counterproductive teach-to-the-test downside of No Child Left Behind) with more precision and intelligence than any news or magazine story—this season’s focus on the news media is already stunningly insightful….and depressingly accurate.

The only character missing was Sam Zell.

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AN IRONIC SIDE NOTE: As most hard core fans of the series know, The Wire’s creator David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun until 1995, when he took a buyout during one of that paper’s cost cutting frenzies. According to Simon, his bete noir in the Sun’s cost-cutting battles was the paper’s then editor-in-chief John Carroll who, a decade later, became the first of three editors-in-chief at the LA Times to take a figurative bullet for his opposition to demanded newsroom cuts. (Next would come Dean Baquet and now Jim O’Shea.) UPDATE: Carroll, who led the Times to five Pulitzers, is quoted in today’s Editor and Publisher.

The real John Carroll during the first round of the ongoing cost cut battles that have now cost three top editors their jobs.

The fictional but remarkably Carrollesque-looking editor explaining the “need” for draconian cost cuts at the fictional paper on The Wire.

UPDATE: Again LA Observed is the place to go to monitor unfolding gossip and news about the latest LA Times plot twists. This morning, among other pieces of news, he quotes USC Annenberg professor Marty Kaplin:

“Haven’t I seen that movie before?” Kaplan said. “It certainly makes the replacement want ad very peculiar. ‘Wanted: Great journalist with superb firing skills.’ “

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I step away from the computer for a few hours to, like, have a life, and while I’m out the Los Angeles Times implodes. He’s the opening of paper’s own story about what happened:

For the second time in 15 months, the editor of The Los Angeles Times has been fired in a dispute over budget cuts ordered by his publisher.

Times Publisher David D. Hiller told Editor James E. O’Shea to step down after the two were unable to agree on Hiller’s plan to cut $4 million this year from a $120-million newsroom budget, according to people familiar with the situation.

The $4 million would be in addition to reductions valued at about $3 million in the newshole, the space in the newspaper devoted to editorial content, these people said.

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has it right with the opening to his story on the sad and all too familiar tale:

It’s amazing to me that the journalists left at the L.A. Times can put out a paper and a website every day, with all the turmoil that swirls around down there.

No kidding. The fact is, the LA Times is blessed by far better journalists and editors than its management deserves.

As Kevin R. points out, the Wall Street Journal broke the story a little after noon Pacific Time, and he provides links to the WSJ and other related stories. For my money, it’s the New York Times that has the most (sadly) gossipy take:

The removal of the editor, James E. O’Shea, by the publisher, David D. Hiller, mirrors the odd spectacle of a little more than a year ago, when the previous publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, was fired for refusing to eliminate newsroom jobs as directed by the paper’s owner, the Tribune Company. In each case, a longtime Tribune executive was expected to rein in costs at the paper, but instead sided with the newsroom and lost his job for it.

The departure of Mr. O’Shea appears to contradict statements by Samuel Zell, the Chicago real estate magnate who took over the company last month and is now its chairman and chief executive. Mr. Zell has repeatedly criticized the previous regime of the financially troubled company for trying to improve the bottom line by cutting costs, and he has said that he thinks the path to profit lies in finding new revenue, not paring costs.

[SNIP]

Officials at The Times said Mr. Hiller had ordered a $4 million cut in the newsroom budget. Some said he specifically sought to cut expenses related to covering the heated presidential campaign [ITALICS MINE], during a time when such expenses usually spike. Some editors and reporters said Mr. Hiller told them in a meeting in November that he wanted to reduce staff somewhat by the end of this year.

[SNIP]

People at The Times said they did not know whether Mr. Hiller was acting on orders from company headquarters in Chicago or on his own initiative; Mr. Zell has said he would allow each of the Tribune properties greater autonomy.

The Los Angeles Times had a newsroom staff of more than 1,100 people at the start of this decade, but the number has declined to below 900, officials say. Its weekday circulation has dropped to about 800,000, from 1.1 million.

The move, as my momma used to say, is penny wise and pound foolish. Actually, I think it defines the term.

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Jeremy and Theresa photo by Bret of Yo Venice

News of the sorrow-producing deaths of blogger, writer, filmmaker Theresa Duncan and her lover, new art star, Jeremy Blake, appeared in the blogs way before any of the conventional news outlets managed to be curious enough to write a story.

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed (LA’s primary morning must-read blogger) broke the story on Thursday, July 19, with a fuller entry the next day, plus multiple follow-ups. Various blogs soon followed. Whereas the New York Times and other New York papers finally managed to slap themselves awake a full 48 hours later, on Saturday, July 21 (or shortly thereafter).

Amazingly, the somnambulist LA Times didn’t get around to writing about Duncan and Blake until Wednesday, July 25 —never mind that Venice resident Duncan was a vibrant player in the LA’s new literary scene—thus her death was a story the Times should naturally have covered, (ahead of, say, yet another idiotic blurb on freaking Posh Spice).

For the record, WLA even saw fit to write about Duncan’s death three days ahead of the Times, even though it clearly wasn’t a social justice issue; it was nonetheless a story that wouldn’t leave my head.

Today, Roderick, does his KCRW commentary on the relationship of the blogs to the coverage of Duncan’s tragic story. (You can listen on the radio at 4:44 PM, or just find it online, whenever you like.) Judging by blogmaster Kevin’s other KCRW commentaries, it’s worth a listen.

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Okay, this is obviously not a social issue, per se, but when the LA Times does a brief 235-word story on a major gang study that relates directly to Los Angeles (a story that nearly every other major paper in the country—plus several of the Canadian papers— reports on in full [see below])…. then devotes three, count ‘em THREE stories to the &^%$#@#& Beckhams….AGAIN….it merits comment.

One of today’s three is titled, in all seriousness, “Hollywood breathlessly awaits Beckhams.”

(NOTE TO TIMES EDITORS: No, actually it doesn’t.)

And the Times’ Thursday News briefs section earnestly calls our attention to…. “Beckham-mania.”

Hey, I like gossip as much as the next person. I read with enthusiastic abandon about the mayor’s love life. And I had more than one conversation with otherwise serious-minded friends about whether Paris Hilton ought to go to jail, (and whether or not Sheriff Lee Baca let her take her moisturizer in with her). But, when all was said and done, those were real stories. There was conflict. Drama. In each of the instances, something was at stake.

Look, I’m sure David Beckham is a swell guy and all, and it’s sort of interesting that the dude pulls down a salary equal to the gross national product of several developing countries—and certainly we in Los Angeles genuinely hope he’s not so much past his prime that he’s going to make us feel really SAD, from a….you know…. soccer perspective— but he’s a sports story. That’s it. And that over-thin blond woman who married him? She’s a pop singer with an extremely expensive publicist—AKA a non-story.

Even the National Enquirer knows the difference. (Yes, I admit I did do a web search, God help me, and the Enquirer has hardly touched this broad.)

So why is our home town newspaper behaving embarrassingly like Victoria Beckham’s PR flak?

Or as my friend John Leone put it, “Waiter, may I please have some real news with my paper this morning?”

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I have something to tell you that may come as a shock. Are you all sitting down? Okay, here it is: PRISON INMATES SOMETIMES HAVE SEX WITH EACH OTHER. Yes, yes, I know. Even though, it’s against the law, it sometimes occurs anyway.

As a consequence, the nation’s prisons have become fertile breeding grounds for deadly blood-borne viruses like hepatitis C and H.I.V..

California’s disastrously overcrowded prison system is particularly at risk. (And remember, our prisons feature a health care system that is so freaking awful it’s presently controlled by a federal monitor.) California is so at risk, in fact, that the NY Times saw fit this morning to publish an editorial on the subject, which reads in part:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscored this point last year when it urged states without condom-distribution programs to think about starting them as a way of preventing the spread of H.I.V. behind bars. By protecting the inmates, the states would also protect the all-too-vulnerable wives and lovers to whom they inevitably return when their sentences are completed.

The California State Legislature tried to take the C.D.C.’s advice last year, passing a landmark bill that would have allowed public health agencies to enter prisons and distribute condoms to inmates who wanted them. The bill had the overwhelming support of the voting public.

And what did Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger do in response to the passage of said bill? Did he congratulate the state’s lawmakers for managing to work together long enough to pass a sensible piece of legislation?

No, he did not. He vetoed it. Condoms might would justify illegal sexual activity, opined Arnold. (He also worried that inmates might use condoms to smuggle drugs into or out of prisons. News flash. Arnold, honey, it’s already as easy to get drugs inside prison, as it is on the street. You might want to ask around about this issue BEFORE you veto an important bill next time.)

Never mind that California inmates continue to become HIV positive at a rate that is eight times higher than the general population. Ditto when it comes to acquiring Hep C.

Why, by the way, is it only the NY Times who’s bothering to take a reasonable stand this? The Daily News has ZERO. The LA Times has ZIP. And the Orange County Register—whose editorial page editors should be locked immediately in a cell with a large, overly-affectionate, condom-free inmate named Bubba—writes the following:

Perhaps the epitome of Nanny State philosophy is embodied in the “Condoms for Cons” bill, AB1334. It’s against the law for prison inmates to engage one another in sex acts, but this bill would facilitate that activity by allowing private groups to distribute condoms and other “sexual barrier protection devices” to prisoners. Nanny Staters insist that if the law is going to be broken, it must be broken their way.

I mean, why bother acting in the best interest of public health and public safety when you can advance partisan talking points, right?

Fortunately, seventy percent of Californians are in favor of condom distribution in prison—mainly because most people are not idiots.

Now a new bill, proposed by Oakland Assemblyman Sandré Swanson, is working its way through the California legislature. Let’s hope it passes, and that Schwarzenegger does the right thing.

In the interim, listen: I’m really, really against determinate sentencing laws, but maybe for certain editors exceptions could be made.

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