BRATTON REALLY, REALLY, REALLY WANTED TO BECOME BRITAIN’S TOP COP

You gotta love Bill. Sunday’s Guardian reports on how much Bratton wanted to apply for the position of commissioner of the Metropolitan police—an ambition that got squashed over the weekend. The Guardian also reports in great detail about how Bill verbally thrashed anybody who suggested that one ought to be born in Britain to hold such a job.

The New York Times also has a report on the Bratton in London adventure.

Adore the aviator glasses, by the way.

CITY ATTORNEY’S OFFICE SAYS VETERAN’S ADMINISTRATION DUMPED PATIENT AT A DOWNTOWN SHELTER

The LA Times Alexandra Zavis and Richard Winton have the alarming story. Here’s a clip:

The graying veteran in a wheelchair was found in the parking lot of a Westside cold weather shelter wearing hospital pants, carrying a urine bottle and screaming for help.

Senior officials at the Los Angeles city attorney’s office say they believe James Boykin was “dumped” Dec. 1 at the shelter after his toe was removed at the nearby Department of Veterans Affairs medical center because of a bone infection. Moreover, according to city prosecutors, VA officials blocked an investigation that could have shed light on whether there were other similar incidents.

“This was an unprecedented interference with an investigation,” said Jeffrey B. Isaacs, who heads the office’s criminal and special litigation branch.

VA officials strongly dispute the allegations involving Boykin, adding that the city does not have authority to conduct a criminal investigation on federal property.

RE: SECURE COMMUNITIES – DEAR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, YOU’RE NOT HELPING

Julia Preston for the New York Times writes that resistance to the Secure Communities program is growing. Here’s a clip:

Mayor Thomas Menino, who often invokes his heritage as the grandson of an Italian immigrant, was one of the first local leaders in the country to embrace a federal program intended to improve community safety by deporting dangerous immigrant criminals.

But five years after Boston became a testing ground for the fingerprinting program, known as Secure Communities, Mr. Menino is one of the latest local officials to sour on it and seek to withdraw. He found that many immigrants the program deported from Boston, though here illegally, had committed no crimes. The mayor believed it was eroding hard-earned ties between Boston’s police force and its melting-pot mix of ethnic neighborhoods.

Last month, Mr. Menino sent a letter to the program with a blunt assessment. “Secure Communities is negatively impacting public safety,” he wrote, asking how Boston could get out.

On Aug. 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs the program, gave an equally blunt response. Its director, John Morton, announced he was canceling all agreements that 40 states and cities had signed to start Secure Communities. Their assent was not legally required, he said, and he planned to move ahead anyway to extend the program nationwide by 2013.

A STRING OF NEW CASES COULD HIT THE SUPREMES ASKING FOR A CLARIFICATION OF THE 2ND AMENDMENT

In Monday’s Washington Post, Robert Barnes has a round up of the second Amendment cases that are likely headed to the Supreme Court.

A funny thing has happened in the three years since gun-rights activists won their biggest victory at the Supreme Court.

They’ve been on a losing streak in the lower courts.

The activists found the holy grail in 2008 when the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller said the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to own a firearm unconnected to military service. The court followed it up with McDonald v. Chicago two years later, holding that the amendment applies not just to gun control laws passed by Congress but to local and state laws as well.

The decisions were seen as a green light to challenge gun restrictions across the country, and the lawsuits have come raining down — more than two a week, according to the anti-gun Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

But it is the Brady Center that is crowing about the results.

“Three years and more than 400 legal challenges later, courts — so far — have held that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller was narrow and limited, and that the Second Amendment does not interfere with the people’s right to enact legislation protecting families and communities from gun violence,” the center said in a report optimistically titled “Hollow Victory?

NEW HOPE FOR FINDING A JOB—EVEN AFTER PRISON

On Monday, Jim Newton’s LA Times column profiles Chrysalis. A Los Angeles-based nonprofit with facilities in Santa Monica, Pacoima and on the edge of skid row that manages to put desperate people to work.

Read it. It’ll cheer you up.

SKID ROW DRUG DEALER GANG INJUNCTION

On Wednesday, the LA City Attorney’s office announced a new kind of gang injunction that doesn’t target particular gangs per se, but names individuals from a variety of LA gangs who are believed to be coming into Skid Row on a commuter basis to sell drugs.

Kate Linthicum of the LA Times has the story as does C.J. Lin of The Daily News.

There are those who object to the injunction saying that homeless who are merely addicts—who may have run messages for dealers to get their own stash— will be driven away from the Skid Row area where they can acquire much needed services and help.

But others who serve the homeless, like the Union Rescue Mission’s Andy Bales, see the injunction as a good move. “This is the best news we’ve had in a while,” Andy Bales told the Times.

Bruce Riordan, the city attorney’s director of anti-gang operations, said that those listed in the injunction will have plenty of time to challenge their inclusion before the injunction actually kicks in.

Speaking personally, while I know there are more than a few possible abuses that can occur, and mistakes will no doubt be made, still I think the use of an injunction to dissuade the drive-through drug dealers who prey on the homeless is an idea that has appeal.

In the end, whether the injunction is used as valuable tool or a cudgel will depend upon the intelligence and the finesse—or lack thereof— with which it is enforced.

PARENTS’ SCHOOL CHOICE WINS—TEMPORARILY

In past years, around 12,000 students who live in the LAUSD area have been given permission to transfer to a school in a district outside LAUSD—districts such as Beverly Hills, Las Virgenes, Culver City and so on. The idea is that students can transfer to take advantage of a particular program that their local schools didn’t have. Sometimes the requests were just what they said they were. Other times, it was merely a case of frustrated parents who had learned to work the system because they wanted to get their children the hell out of the overcrowded, over-bureaucratized, often-failing Los Angeles Unified School District.

Last month, however, LAUSD superintendent Roman Cortines said that, next year, all of those 12,000 plus kids had to come back. The reasons had nothing to do with the kids’ well being. It was purely a money issue. If most of those students came back to Los Angeles schools LAUSD would get around $50 million more from the state in ADA money—ADA being the sacred average daily attendance figure that dictates much of school funding.

After weeks of parents flipping out, on Tuesday, Cortines and the school board reluctantly walked that very unpopular cat back, and said yes to the transfers—temporarily.

State Senator Gloria Romero, who wants to be the next head of Education for California—was vocally in favor of keeping the transfer policy. “While some might argue that LAUSD will suffer by implementing these reform measures…..Let us not forget that the needs of students must always come first,” she wrote.

Uh, yeah. That last part, the students come first thingy, would be very good to remember.

CALIFORNIA MOVES ONE STEP CLOSER TO REPEALING STATE LAW MANDATING A “GAY CURE.”

On Tuesday, the Assembly’s Public Safety committee passed AB 2199, a bill that would repeal a section of the California Welfare and Institutions code, created in the 1950s, which—no kidding—requires the State Department of Mental Health to conduct research into the “causes and cures of homosexuality.”

Startling to find that such a sad and loathsome thing is on the books, but it is. And it codifies bigotry.

The bill to repeal the statute passed out of committee with a 4-0 vote, but there were also three abstentions—namely Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, Assemblymen Curt Hagman, R-Diamond Bar, and Danny Gilmore, R-Hanford.

(What’s that about? No, don’t tell me.)

The bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, explains the genesis of the icky statute in question here in the LA Times.

Witnesses said it happened a week after Katrina hit as people were trying desperately to get to some kind of safety. Officers denied it and aggressively covered the incident up. But now,former New Orleans police officer Michael Hunt says he participated in covering up the murders of unarmed civilians, and told the whole horrifying story on the record in federal court on Wednesday.

The NOLA Times Picayune has the fullest account.

And here is their earlier investigation of the shootings.

Photo from AP

Remember that creepy Skid Row/hospital dumping case caught on video last Spring? (I know, I know. There’ve been a lot of really creepy Skid Row dumping cases in the past 12 months. So, to refresh your memory about this particular case, you’ll find the video below.)

Here’s the deal: there will be an announcement at a Tuesday morning press conference regarding both the ACLU’s lawsuit and LA City Attorney, Rocky Delgadillo’s criminal charges stemming from the case. The lawsuit and the charges arose from an incident in March of 2006, in which a 63-year-old woman, Carol Ann Reyes, was found wandering on Skid Row, allegedly dumped there after she was was discharged from Kaiser Permanente’s Bellflower hospital. The hospital was accused of sending Ms. Reyes to Skid Row in a taxi cab, whereupon the driver essentially booted her out near the corner of 5th and San Pedro, in front of the Union Rescue Mission.

What won’t be announced until tomorrow, (but what we’re telling you tonight) is that ACLU and Kaiser have agreed to a mutual settlement, and that, based on what we hear from well-connected friends, the ACLU folks are extremely pleased.

As for Rocky’s office, they’ll be will be making their own announcement tomorrow. It will have to do with “guidelines” that have been worked out with Kaiser that prevent the hospital from misbehaving in the future—or words to that effect. Presumably this guideline agreement saves the hospital from a criminal prosecution, which might have a nasty effect on its accreditation, et al.

Despite all these swell announcements to come, the still-pressing question is whether the settlements and guidelines constitute a hard enough legal and monetary smack that it will dissuade other hospitals from dumping in the future.

If the past is any guide, the answer is: Not really.

If you’ll remember, for months before the Carol Ann Reyes incident, service providers and city officials, Jan Perry included, had been complaining that hospitals were dumping their indigent patients on Skid row, and the Central division of the LAPD had been actively investigating the complaints.

The tough part, said the cops and the prosecutors, was getting enough to charge a hospital then making charges stick, since homeless and/or mentally ill folks often don’t make for the best witnesses. But this time, the Union Mission’s surveillance video caught the dumping on tape. While the camera rolled, a taxi hung a U in the middle of San Pedro St., pulled up to the curb, dropped off an elderly woman in a hospital gown, then drove away. A disoriented Ms. Reyes was then seen shuffling along the sidewalk (and through the video frame) in her gown and hospital booties.

Amazingly, even that video and the threat of criminal prosecution didn’t stop other hospitals from continuing to dump homeless patients after discharge as this October 2006 NPR story shows:

Police who interviewed some of the patients being left at Skid Row say that none of them reported asking to go there. One man, says [LAPD Central Division] Capt. Smith, had asked to be released to his children’s home in Pasadena.

Our supervisors actually gave that guy a ride back to his house, and his family was outraged,” Smith says. “Not only did they not know that he’d been discharged but the fact that he’d been brought to Skid Row instead of home further outraged that family.”

And then, of course, there was February’s award-winningly horrifying case of the paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown “and a broken colostomy bag” who was “found crawling in a gutter” in Skid Row (as the LA Times then described it).

Obviously, there are no guarantees, but here’s hoping that tomorrow’s announced deals will accomplish what a string of embarrassing news stories and repeated appeals to LA’s hospitals’ humanity could not.

I’m not betting the ranch on it.

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UPDATE – POST PRESS CONFERENCE

Well, maybe there is reason to be optimistic. In addition to the terms of the civil suit, which are confidential, the joint settlement works out a series of protocols and practices that Kaiser has agreed to follow ever after. The idea is less to be punitive, than to set up well-thought out guidelines that Kaiser and, following their lead, other hospitals can live with on a practical basis, but that treat the vulnerable among us in a humane, dignified, and compassionate manner. Hey, improvement is possible.