RICHARD WALDON AND OPERATION USA: THE “CHARITY BUCCANEER” STILL RIDES AFTER 35 YEARS

In Wednesday’s LA Times, Patt Morrison interviews Richard Waldon, the LA guy who, as the founder of Operation USA, has managed for 35 years to bring medicines, food and other aid to areas of the world deeply in need—sometimes when others could not or would not venture in.

International relief work is a little outside WLA’s normal story area But I’ve known Richard for all of those 35 years and, as a reporter and friend, was on a couple of Op USA’s earliest wild adventures in aid bringing.

Richard’s the real deal, and I thought you might enjoy the interview as a change of pace, (Be sure to read the whole story. Otherwise you’ll miss such excellent tidbits as how Richard uses the latest issue of Playboy Magazine as a rarely-fails bribe to get past certain roadblocks in certain countries.)

Here are some clips:

Almost on impulse, almost 35 years ago, Richard M. Walden and a friend rounded up six tons of relief supplies and a jet to ferry them to Vietnamese boat people in Malaysia. Thus was Operation California — now Operation USA — born. A Times headline soon called him the “charity buccaneer,” a red-tape-slashing contrarian who fretted about the “international web of neglect,” and who still has sharp words for relief efforts unmet and relief agencies that don’t measure up. He has steadfast celebrity supporters, like Julie Andrews, but the advent of social media that let anyone text a few bucks to Lady Gaga’s favorite charity in the middle of a concert has made things harder for brick-and-mortar charities like Operation USA. Walden soldiers on, boldly going where too many charity-come-latelies can only try to go.

[SNIP]

What sort of dangers in general do you face?

We were not far from Abbottabad, Pakistan. We had an ambulance to evacuate women in complicated labor from the frontier to Islamabad hospitals. It went up with no English-language markings [but] it got stopped, trashed and burned. They didn’t harm the lady in labor and the driver, but that kind of stuff goes on.

How does Operation USA work?

In most cases we look for partners, from U.N. agencies to small, in-country NGOs.

One of our all-time bests is in Jacmel, Haiti, where for $1 million we built a public primary school which has 1,000 kids, no fees, and is a center of community activities, with free architecture from L.A.-based Gensler, money from Honeywell Corp.’s foundation and quake-proofing engineering from Sacramento-based Miyamoto; 100% Haitian-built. Another is a seniors center in Ofunato, Japan, for abandoned seniors in a small port mostly destroyed by the quake. [Again] free architecture, free engineering, free land, all from Japanese partners with money from Honeywell’s foundation.

We [ran] the first U.S. aid to Cambodia after the war, the first to Vietnam, to Ethiopia [in 1984]. Operation USA predates nearly all the major entertainment industry-driven causes by years. In 1980 we had a two-hour prime-time special on the Cambodian famine which featured Julie Andrews, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Jane Fonda and others.

I can’t say we are still unique, only that we were often the “only Indians in a cowboy town….”

DECADE OLD STRIP & CAVITY SEARCHES IN SF JAIL MAY GARNER COUNTY PAYOUT OF $450,000

Thirteen male and female plaintiffs appear about to receive $450,000 from San Francisco County for being subjected to strip and body cavity searches after being arrested on minor charges more than ten years ago.

The settlement, that has been recommended by the SF City Attorney, is interesting in light of the fact that, last spring the U.S. Supreme Courted ruled in a 5-4 decision that strip searches in the nation’s jails were perfectly constitutional, even absent any kind of probable cause.

However, in the case of the 13 San Francisco plaintiffs, there was some kind of cavity searche—either “visual” or…the more invasive kind—in addition to the strip search, hence the settlement offer.

When I spoke to an LASD spokesman, Sgt. Pena, he confirmed that, yes, strip searches in LA County Jail are indeed standard operating procedure, regardless of why one has landed in lock-up. But real cavity searches require the okay of a judge, just as one would need for a search warrant.

KCBS San Francisco also reports on the upcoming settlement.

STAR WITNESS FOR PRO-PROP 8 IN CALIFORNIA COURT NOW WANTS A GAY-STRAIGHT COALITION TO STRENGTHEN MARRIAGE (OKAY. THAT WORKS.)

Mark Oppenheimer has the story in Wednesday’s New York Times. Here’s a clip:

David Blankenhorn, a traditional-marriage advocate and star witness in the Proposition 8 trial in California in 2010, shocked his allies with an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last June announcing that he was quitting the fight against same-sex marriage. “Instead of fighting gay marriage,” Mr. Blankenhorn wrote, “I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.”

He is about to find out how much support such a coalition can get.

On Thursday, Mr. Blankenhorn’s research group, the Institute for American Values in New York, plans to issue “A Call for a New Conversation on Marriage,” a tract renouncing the culture war that he was once part of, in favor of a different pro-marriage agenda. The proposed conversation will try to bring together gay men and lesbians who want to strengthen marriage with heterosexuals who want to do the same.

The document is signed by 74 well-known activists, writers and scholars, on the left and the right, including the conservative John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine; John Corvino, a gay philosopher; Robert N. Bellah, a sociologist; Caitlin Flanagan, a social critic; and Glenn C. Loury, an economist — once conservative, now less so.

“While the nation’s attention is riveted by a debate about whether a small proportion of our fellow citizens (gays and lesbians) should be allowed to marry,” the statement reads, “marriage is rapidly dividing along class lines, splitting the country that it used to unite.”

IMMIGRATION REFORM AND THE PROBLEM OF MISINFORMATION

Marcos Breton at the Sacramento Bee speaks rather plainly about the fact that much of the split among Americans on immigration reform has mostly to do with misinformation.

Here’s a clip:

As President Barack Obama gave the most important speech on immigration reform in years on Tuesday, it became clear that his greatest foe is not the Republican Party on this terribly divisive issue.

It’s misinformation.

There is so much we think we know about immigration that is wrong. Some don’t want to know the real truth or seem addicted to having little brown people to blame for all of America’s woes.

What’s more American than one group dumping on another?

For most of my 50 years, the punching bags of choice have been people with roots in Mexico…

OC SHERIFF HUTCHENS SAYS BREAST CANCER WON’T STOP HER

Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens held a press conference Monday afternoon to publicly address her recent breast cancer diagnosis, and to say that she doesn’t intend to let her health affect her ability to perform her duties as sheriff. (We at WLA are sending wishes for Sheriff Hutchen’s full recovery.)

The OC Register’s Salvador Hernandez has the story. Here’s a clip:

“I will be fully engaged,” Hutchens said during a news conference Monday, accompanied by members of her command staff. “And I plan to run for a second term in 2014.”

Hutchens voice cracked as she described details of her recent diagnosis of breast cancer, but said she is intent in being involved in the day-to-day operations of the department.

“I think the best thing for this is to keep your normal schedule as much as possible and keep engaged,” she said.

A resident of Dana Point, Hutchens, 57, said she was diagnosed with breast cancer Nov. 9, about six months after a mammogram had shown no signs of a cyst. The discovery came as a surprise, she said, especially because there is no history of cancer in her family.

“I’m very optimistic about it,” she said. “I really believe it was caught early.”

Hutchens notified employees in the department in a memo Nov. 19, in anticipation that treatment could change her appearance, her schedule and raise questions about her health, she said.

But there will be no change to the department’s command.

“I’m going to be in charge,” she said. “If at any time I felt I could not carry on my duties, I would make other arrangements. That’s not going to be the case.”

By the way, there’s a video of Sheriff Hutchen’s news conference beneath the body of the story, so be sure to go over to the OC Register.

RIORDAN’s PENSION PLAN GOES UP IN FLAMES

It was announced Monday that former LA Mayor Richard Riordan would drop his controversial city employee pension reform, an intended ballot measure for the May 2013 election.

The LA Times’ David Zahniser and Kate Linthicum have the story. Here’s a clip:

Tyler Izen, president of the Police Protective League, said he was not surprised by the collapse of the signature drive backed by Riordan. Izen said the pension proposal, which had been planned for the May ballot, never received the proper financial analysis in the weeks before Riordan began his push to get 300,000 signatures to put it on the ballot.

“The plan proposed by Riordan to close the defined benefit pension system as a way of saving money was both simplistic and costly … for the taxpayers,” Izen said in a statement.

Service Employees International Union Local 721, which represents civilian city workers, released a statement from sanitation worker Simboa Wright, who said Riordan and his allies had failed because L.A. voters value the work of city employees.

“City residents weren’t about to let a bunch of billionaires rewrite city policies,” Wright said. “As city workers have been saying for a long time, Riordan’s half-baked plan wasn’t thought out. It died because it was bad for city workers and the city they serve.”

GREEN DOT CHARTER SCHOOLS BEAT OUT LAUSD IN QUEST FOR FEDERAL EDUCATION GRANT

The Los Angeles charter group Green Dot Public Schools has advanced as a finalist for a $30 million Dept. of Education grant. LAUSD had also applied for the grant, but was unable to get the support of their teachers union—a requirement for school districts to be in the running.

It is a rather amazing turn of events that Green Dot has made the cut, in that the applications were primarily to have been open to full school districts. But evidently (and happily) Green Dot’s presentation was a strong one.

The LA Times’ Howard Blume has the story. Here’s a clip:

Green Dot Public Schools, which operates 18 charter schools, remains in the running for a “Race to the Top” grant, the U.S. Department of Education announced Monday. If successful, Green Dot could receive $30 million over a four-year period.

In the application process, districts were supposed to set out a plan to “personalize education for students and provide school leaders and teachers with key tools that support them to meet students’ needs,” according to the Education Department.

But the devil for L.A. Unified was in the details. Participation by the teachers union was required and United Teachers Los Angeles would not sign on, citing concerns that Race to the Top could commit the school system to long-term spending not covered by the grant. Union leaders in L.A. and elsewhere also were concerned such a grant could commit them to the use of student test scores as part of a teacher’s evaluation.

KIDS ON SCHOOL DISCIPLINE: ZERO-TOLERANCE AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

The Fresno Bee and kNOw Youth Media partnered to produce a series of first-hand accounts of kids affected by “zero-tolerance” school policies, and alternately, kids who have benefited from restorative justice in the education system.

Here’s fourteen-year-old Jane Carretero’s story:

My name is Jane Carretero and I am 14 years old. Towards the beginning of my 8th grade school year at Fort Miller I started doing drugs, and my mom found out about it.

One day, she and I got into a huge fight and she found a bottle of marijuana in my backpack. It was a difficult choice for her to make, but she ended up calling the police. They ended up taking me in for that.

After three days at juvenile hall, it finally hit me. I remember falling on my knees and I started crying for my mom, and I was like, “Why did I have to mess up so badly?”

When I went back to school, I had fallen behind a lot. A lot of people thought that I snitched them out. Some people even thought that I had gotten pregnant, and a lot of girls wanted to fight me, because they thought I was saying things about them.

The teacher started yelling at everyone, and he turned to me. I said, “You’re yelling at us for no reason.” Then the teacher said, “Don’t talk back to me. I know kids like you. You’re messed up in life, and you’re going to mess up when you’re older, too. You’re going to go off to high school thinking you’re all cool and pretty like that, thinking you’re all hard. And you’re going to get beat up one day by a girl better than you,” he told me.

CLEARING UP THE CONFUSION ABOUT THE LASD DONATIONS & the PROMOTIONS LISTS

When we originally posted the data lists along with Matt Fleischer’s Pay to Play story, they were posted in a form that was extremely hard to read. As a consequence, a number of people erroneously believed that they or someone whom they knew were listed as having donated to one of Paul Tanaka’s campaigns—when in fact they had not done so.

In any case, as you’ll note below, we’ve now found a program that allows for easy posting of the files as Excel spreadsheets, which makes them far easier to read and navigate.

Hopefully these will cear up any confusion.

In the first spreadsheet, you’ll find the combined list of those who donated, and those who took tests to promote (designated as LtTEST or SgtTEST) and got “banded,” and then when and if they got promoted. In many cases there is overlap (people who got promoted, also donated, and vice versa). But in other cases not. This first spread sheet lists everything.

Below that spreadsheet, there is a second that shows only those who donated, when and how much.

A third spreadsheet notes testing to promote, and dates of promotions—exclusive of whether people donated or not. (Here, again, the UCLA guys have listed dates of the tests and subsequent banding, in this case with the word TEST, for landing on the Intent to Promote list as INT, and then the date of promotion, if and when that occurred.)

Again, we apologize for any confusion those messier versions may have caused.

PS: We were originally not clear ourselves that our UCLA guys were so thorough with their spreadsheets that they also charted the test dates, along with the promotion dates, so we could see who took tests and did NOT get promoted, along with noting those who did. This was another cause for confusion. But if you look at the spread sheets with this fuller explanation in mind, I think everything will be clear. (However, if you find any anomalies, don’t hesitate to let us know.)

The actual spread sheets are after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

SCOTUS TO TAKE A LOOK AT DRUG-DETECTING DOGS VS. FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS

The US Supreme Court will hear two new cases on Oct. 31st to determine whether the use of drug-sniffing dogs is a violation of the Fourth Amendment as “unreasonable search and seizure”—as in, how accurate does a dog’s sniffer have to be for their “alert” to constitute probable cause, and can officers have dogs sniff around the outside of residences in the hopes of being tipped off to drugs inside?

Law Professor Jeffrey Meyer breaks it down in an op-ed for the NY Times. Here’s a clip:

One of the new cases asks the court to clarify how accurate a dog must be in terms of its past identification of contraband — for, as Justice David H. Souter once warned in dissent, “The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction.”

My wife and I learned this firsthand at the Supreme Court itself several years ago. We were visiting the court for a reunion dinner of former law clerks of Justice Harry A. Blackmun. My mistake was to drive a car in which our dog — a tennis-ball-loving Australian shepherd — often rode. As we drove up to the back gate of the court to enter its highly secure underground parking garage, an officer emerged from a guard shack with a fearsome bomb-sniffing German shepherd and circled our car. The bomb dog suddenly perked up, and the officer coldly instructed me to open the trunk of my car. I watched as the court’s canine rose up on its haunches — tail wagging — and snagged from inside one of my dog’s prized tennis balls. No bombs or contraband were found.

The second of the court’s new dog cases asks if the police may take a drug-sniffing dog to the front porch of a home to sniff for evidence of marijuana inside. The court has always accorded special privacy protection for people’s homes. In 2001, the court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that police officers violated a homeowner’s privacy when they parked across the street from a home and, without a warrant, used a thermal imaging device to scan the outside of the house for signs of unusual heat inside that might be caused by high-intensity lighting, which is often used to grow marijuana.

If the police can’t thermal-scan your home from the street, why let them dog-scan it from your front porch? The government argues that a dog is alerted only by illegal contraband, while a thermal imager is set off more generally by “innocent” and “guilty” heat of all kinds coming from a home — whether from grow lights or from, as Justice Scalia noted in the thermal imager case, “the lady of the house” as she “takes her daily sauna and bath.”

IMPORTANT CRIMINAL JUSTICE ISSUES’ MARKED ABSENCE FROM CAMPAIGNING SEASON

In September we saw that both the Dem. and GOP platforms addressed serious criminal justice issues. It was promising. Now, however, in the throes of the presidential campaigns, there is an annoying avoidance of the topic.

Article 3′s Richard Trinick explains in great detail why criminal justice is such a critical issue, and why all parties involved are purposefully avoiding the subject. Here’s a clip:

Many people have written about why the USA’s criminal justice policy is a travesty, focusing on the human cost and the appalling conditions in which so many prisoners are kept, not to mention the problems with capital punishment. This is a hugely significant argument, and one that the candidates should be forced to address, but I am not going to dwell on it here, as other people have already written excellently about it (see related articles). It is probably the most important reason why criminal justice policy should be addressed by the candidates, but given the existing coverage, I want to focus on the other reasons why criminal justice policy is such an important part of domestic policy; and why politicians from both sides of the aisle, and much of the ‘mainstream media’, are so intent on ignoring it.

Reasons why criminal justice policy is so important

1)The biggest issue in this election is the economy and, on a related note, the deficit and the tax more/cut spending debate. For the 2010 fiscal year, prisons cost taxpayers about $63.4 billion, at an average of between $30-50,000 per prisoner (depending upon the state). The numbers vary, but in most states spending on “corrections” costs more than anything except Medicaid and takes 1 in every 14 dollars spent by the states. This is a colossal amount of money that neither candidate appears even to have contemplated reducing.

2)It is an area of policy that disproportionately affects people from ethnic minorities. As just one sobering example, consider the fact that more black men are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War. In many respects, the current criminal justice policy of the USA is a more effective method of segregation than the Jim Crow laws were. Inequality of all kinds is one of the biggest problems facing the future of the US, and this is the worst example of it.

[SNIP]

Reasons why criminal justice policy is ignored

1) It’s politically toxic. Any move to alter the current tough stance on criminal justice is inevitably viewed as being ‘soft on crime’, regardless of how much sense a new policy might make or how much it might reduce crime in the long-run. No politician, especially one running in a race as close as the current match-up, wants to be seen as ‘soft on crime’. For Republicans, “the party of law and order”, it would be sacrilege to even suggest a change in policy. For Democrats, especially Obama, the aim appears to be to avoid looking “weak and liberal” and avoid alienating middle-class white voters. In addition, it lacks appeal — few voters (read ‘people likely to vote in swing states’) care about the issue as they perceive that it does not affect them and it requires hard choices to be made.

2) People don’t like to have to think about it. This relates to the point above about having to make hard choices, but there is more to it. By its very nature, criminal justice is difficult and unpleasant to think about and so most people shy away from it — who wants to think about prison and criminals when there’s the new series of Homeland? The majority of people will have no interaction with the criminal justice system, especially not on the ‘wrong’ side of it, and so they shut their eyes, pretend they cannot see the problem and hope it will go away. The politicians and media know this and cater to the demands of their audiences.

Be sure to read on, it’s a very well-thought-out assessment of the issue.

VILLARAIGOSA’S IMMIGRANT I.D. SUGGESTION COASTS THROUGH CITY COUNCIL

Mayor Villaraigosa’s immigrant I.D. proposal made it through the City Council meeting Wednesday without any opposition. The council voted unanimously, and will start soliciting pitches from vendors who want to take on implementation of the I.D. card project. (For a bit of back-story on the program, check out WitnessLA’s Tuesday post.)

LA Times’ Catherine Saillant has the story. Here’s a clip:

Opposition to the so-called City Services Card is inevitable because it touches on the hot-button issue of illegal immigration, Councilman Ed Reyes said. But in the end “cooler heads will prevail and understand the humanity of the suggestion,” he said.

The committee voted unanimously to begin soliciting proposals from potential vendors who would implement the program, backed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilman Richard Alarcon. That won’t happen, however, until a draft proposal is brought before the full council in about three weeks, officials said.

Although no one opposed to the ID cards spoke at Tuesday’s committee hearing, the Granada Hills North Neighborhood Council sent a letter stating that it had voted against the proposal.

Reyes, a member of the Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee, said it’s “about time” that Los Angeles residents, regardless of immigration status, have the ability to easily open bank accounts and access city services.

“Los Angeles is a cosmopolitan city with an international economy, Reyes said, and “this card allows people who have been living in the shadows to be out in the light of day.”

The photo ID would include the user’s name, address, date of birth and possibly other identifying information.
It could be used by any resident who lacks acceptable documentation to open a bank account or access city services, such as libraries or work-training programs, officials said.

Besides undocumented immigrants, seniors who no longer drive, the homeless and transgender people would also benefit, officials said, because they often lack official ID as well. City staff said the program won’t cost taxpayers anything because the third-party vendor would charge from $10 to $20 per card, and would also charge a few dollars a month if an applicant chooses to activate a debit card feature.

ARE THE FEDS EXAMINING ONE OF THE UNDERSHERIFF’S INMFAMOUS “WORK THE GRAY” SPEECHES?

WitnessLA has obtained the following email that went out to all LASD lieutenants this past Wednesday morning:

From: Federal Grand Jury Inquiry
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 7:36 AM
To: All Lieutenants
Subject: Federal Criminal Grand Jury Subpoena #1788

Good morning,
The Department has received a subpoena from the Federal Criminal Grand Jury which commands, in part, the following documents:

“4. Any and all correspondence between members or associates of the CCJV [Citizen's Committee on Jail Violence] and any member of the LASD at the level of Lieutenant or above.”
YOU MUST RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL. If you possess documents that are responsive to this subpoena, please indicate so in a reply email. If you do not have documents that are responsive, indicate such in a reply email.

It is of the utmost importance that we comply fully with this subpoena.
Your prompt attention to this matter is necessary and your cooperation is appreciated.

In that the memo was notably fuzzy about what this subpoena/grand jury business was about, there has much department speculation about what exactly the Feds are looking for.

Robert Faturechi from the LA Times wrote about the subpoena on Saturday. (You can read his article here.) In his story, he reported that the memo provoked concern that the subpoena could inadvertently “force department members to out themselves” if they have given testimony privately and in confidence to the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence.

However, a department source has told us that the subpoena may pertain to a story that WitnessLA first reported last month about an incident that occurred in mid-2005, after the murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Luis Gerardo Ortiz by a Hawaiian Gardens gang member.

According to our source, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka was ushered in to speak to a room full of 80 to 100 deputies, federal agents and other members of law enforcement, who were all part of a multi-agency task force being briefed before the service of a series of search warrants in connection with the killing of Deputy Ortiz. According to the story, before he began, Tanaka told anyone who was video taping the proceedings, to turn off all recording devices. Then he reportedly gave to those assembled a version of his “work the gray,” speech, and some of those listening were concerned by the skate-the-edge ethic they believed the speech tacitly encouraged.

Subsequent to our reporting, the CCJV [Citizen's Committee on Jail Violence] brought the incident into public testimony, and questioned Mr. Tanaka himself on what had occurred. (He denied telling anyone to turn off recording devices or saying anything that implied working on or over the legal line.)

We have been told that pursuant to the commission meeting, the feds became interested and that 11 federal officers have already been interviewed by the FBI on this matter.

Of course, due to what appears to be the general nature of the subpoena request, the “work the gray” incident, may be only one of the things that the feds are looking at.

One thing we do know is that the FBI investigation that began by looking into incidents of violence and corruption in Men’s Central Jail continues to widen.

As we learn more about the issue of the subpoena and the grand jury we will let you know.

LAPD’S DEPUTY CHIEF PAT GANNON IS RETIRING…AND NEARLY EVERYBODY HE KNOWS WANTS TO TALK HIM OUT OF IT

The South Bureau of the LAPD polices some of the most challenging real estate in in all of California. Yet in the last few years it has been led by a series of commanding officers who have managed to create good relationships with communities whose residents had, for decades, felt themselves to be at war with LA’s law enforcement.

The person commanding South Bureau right now is a guy named Pat Gannon, who is extraordinarily well liked by community members, activists, city government types, and the officers under him. Smart, strategic, warm and innovative, it is difficult to find anyone who doesn’t like the man.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Gannon is retiring on August 31.

Now that the dreaded time has nearly arrived, writer Diana Chapman has written a nice profile of Gannon for City Watch explaining why she and those in the communities LAPD’s South Bureau polices don’t want to see Pat Gannon go. Not at all.

Here’s a clip:

He returned phone calls.

He set up water polo and basketball games between his officers and community kids. Sometimes he even played in them. As the captain of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Division, he closed down an entire street Halloween night so parents and children could trick-or-treat safely in the neighborhood saturated with crime. His officers policed the event.

Most of all, LAPD Deputy Chief Pat Gannon, who retires from the department Aug. 31, listened to people like you and me.
“He was a saint,” said Neal Kleiner, who met Gannon when he was principal at one of the toughest middle schools — John Muir — in the 77th Division. Having called Gannon’s predecessor and never getting a response, Kleiner was astonished when Gannon, then the new captain, called him without provocation.

“He initiated a call to me and visited Muir,” Kleiner said still with amazement. “He let me know that his men were there to service the community and if I needed help to call. He was a frequent visitor to the school and met with the staff and parents and he demonstrated a genuine concern for my school and the community.”

Said Mike Lansing, the Harbor Area Boys and Girls Club executive director: “Pat always supported the Boys and Club and the work we do. He advocated for kids through his police work and had officers interact with our members — including playing basketball. Sometimes, Pat even played himself. He is one of the great leaders who actually wanted to know what we did — he took the time to listen and engage our members.”

Gannon, 56, retires not because he wants to, but because he signed on to an economically savvy retirement package the LAPD offered years ago which he now regrets.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: It's called the DROP program and it can seem like a good idea at the time, and then becomes something that LAPD officers wish they could reverse as retirement time approaches. That's the situation with Gannon. I know because I've asked him about the issue mournfully several times.]

“I could have stayed forever,” said Gannon, who plans to look for other police work. “I’m going to continue working. It was interesting to me. I worked cases. I solved them and I enjoyed that.”

ENDING THE OVERUSE OF SOLITARY

The wide use of solitary confinement as a punitive measure in U.S. prisons continues to be controversial. On Sunday, the online only version of the New York Times featured a new op ed challenging the cost/benefit wisdom (or lack thereof) of the practice, written by Vanderbilt University associate professor, Lisa Guenther, who is the author of the forthcoming book “Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement.”

Here’s how it opens:

There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating might be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners often come unhinged. They experience intense anxiety, paranoia, depression, memory loss, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this cluster of symptoms SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units of many supermax prisons. Prisoners have more direct ways of naming their experience. They call it “living death,” the “gray box,” or “living in a black hole.”

In June the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, headed by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, held the first Congressional hearing on solitary confinement. Advocates and experts in the field were invited to submit testimony on the psychological, ethical, social and economic issues raised by punitive isolation. Among the many contributors was Anthony Graves, who spent over 18 years on death row in Texas, most of them in solitary confinement, for a crime he did not commit. Graves describes his isolation as a form of “emotional torture.” Two years after his exoneration and release, he still feels trapped in isolation: “I am living amongst millions of people in the world today, but most of the time I feel alone. I cry at night because of this feeling. I just want to stop feeling this way, but I haven’t been able to.”

We tend to assume that solitary confinement is reserved for “the worst of the worst”: violent inmates who have proved themselves unwilling or unable to live in the general population. But the truth is that an inmate can be sent to the hole for failing to return a meal tray, or for possession of contraband (which can include anything from weapons to spicy tortilla chips). According to the Bureau of Justice, there were 81,622 prisoners in some form of “restricted housing” (code for solitary confinement) in 2005. If anything, these numbers have increased as isolation units continue to be built in prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers across the country. Given that 95 percent of all inmates are eventually released into the public, and that many of these will be released without any form of transition or therapy, solitary confinement is a problem that potentially affects every one of us.

HEAD OF DEPT. OF FISH AND GAME LOSES JOB AFTER KILLING COUGAR

The Dept. of Fish and Game Commission voted Wednesday to replace the department’s current president, Dan Richards, seven months after he shot and killed a mountain lion on a hunting trip in Idaho.

KPCC’s Julie Small has the story. Here’s a clip:

California banned the practice decades ago, but Idaho and other states allow it. Richards has defended his actions as “legal” and proper.

But animal activists and dozens of state lawmakers said as head of the agency that enforces California’s wildlife laws Richards showed “poor judgment.”

Pictures of Richards crouched over his kill that circulated on the Internet didn’t help his case. He further incensed critics when he told KFI’s John and Ken Show the mountain lion tasted “like pork loin.”

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE MEETS TWO NEW COUGAR CUBS

Richard’s actions are a sharp contrast to last week’s happier news: two mountain lion cubs were found in the Santa Monica Mountains. They were tagged by the National Park Service and released near their den in Malibu. You can read more about the cubs on the NPS website here.

AUDIT ON CA DEPT. OF PARKS AND RECREATION TO BE SPED UP

Last month’s discovery of a hidden $54M surplus in the supposedly cash-strapped CA Dept. of Parks and Recreation caused CA officials to order an expedited audit of the department, Wednesday.

LA Times’ Chris Megerian and Christine Mai-Duc have the story. Here’s a clip:

The review, to be conducted by the state auditor, will examine a hidden $54-million surplus discovered in parks accounts last month and an unauthorized program allowing employees to trade in unused vacation time for more than $271,000 in cash.

“It’s a victory for transparency in state government,” said Assemblywoman Beth Gaines (R-Rocklin), part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who had pushed for the audit.

The parks money, which had been stashed away for at least a dozen years, was found as the state was soliciting donations to keep as many as 70 parks open amid a budget crisis. Some local governments that forked over money to keep parks open have demanded it back, and lawmakers are concerned that the accounting scandal will create a rift between the state and a community of parks supporters.

HOLLYWOOD INTERSECTION TO BE NAMED AFTER OFFICER IAN CAMPBELL

The intersection of Carlos and Gower in Hollywood will be officially renamed after fallen LAPD Officer Ian Campbell, 49 years after his tragic murder, which became the basis for Joseph Wambaugh’s novel The Onion Field and the subsequent movie.

Here’s a clip from the Los Angeles Police Protective League’s press release:

A dedication ceremony to unveil the sign will be held at Carlos Street and Gower Street in Hollywood at 1:30 p.m. [Friday]. The case known as “The Onion Field” remains one of the great tragedies in LAPD history. On Friday, Officer Ian Campbell will be formally honored, while we keep his partner, Karl Hettinger, in our thoughts.

[SNIP]

Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger were assigned to a detail from Hollywood station known as a felony car. On March 9, 1963, both officers were in plainclothes and driving an unmarked police car. Their task was to identify and apprehend persons involved in street felonies such as car burglaries and liquor store robberies. The officers stopped a car containing two ex-convicts, Gregory Powell and Jimmy Lee Smith. The suspects “got the drop” on the officers and held them at gunpoint. The suspects demanded the officers to surrender their revolvers and that was done.

The officers were then taken by gunpoint and forced to drive out of town. When the foursome reached southern Kern County, they proceeded off the road to the middle of field where onions were being grown. The two felons believed they had violated the “Lindbergh Law” and thought they would be facing the death penalty when captured. As such, when all four were out of the car, Powell shot Campbell in the face. His own weapon malfunctioned, so Powell used one of the officer’s own handguns to kill Campbell while he was lying defenseless on the ground.

[SNIP]

Ian Campbell was a bagpiper. Bagpipes were played at his funeral, and have been at the funerals for all LAPD officers killed in the line of duty since then. Out of this horrible murder was born a lasting LAPD tradition.

LA COUNTY DA HOPEFULS FACE OFF IN FIRST DEBATE

Tuesday night the two LA County district attorney candidates, Jackie Lacey and Alan Jackson, squared off in their first debate. Thursday, Lacey announced that she had received the endorsement of Kamala Harris.

KPCC’s Frank Stoltze has more on the debate.

First photo from Western Outdoor News. Cub photo credited to the National Park Service.

Last Friday, July 27, the Citizens Committee on Jail Violence heard public testimony from Sheriff Lee Baca and his Undersheriff, Paul Tanaka.

We will have more commentary on their appearances on Wednesday and again later in the week.

For those of you who are following the ongoing LASD drama—a drama where a so much at stake—I think you’ll find it absolutely essential reading.

THE COMMANDER

Straight-backed and going gray with a closely clipped beard, Bob Olmstead has the mysterious quality that law enforcement types refer to as command presence.

He came to oversee Men’s Central Jail in December of 2006, some months after then-Assistant Sheriff Paul Tanaka, the executive who oversaw the custody division from January 2005 to June 2007, reportedly became incensed at Captain John Clark, the man who was, at the time, overseeing the county’s largest and most troubled jail facility. It seems, Clark was not running CJ in the way that Mr. Tanaka wanted. Most specifically, in order to address escalating incidents of questionable force by deputies on inmates in the jail, Clark had elected to institute a job rotation plan for CJ personnel that had long been recommended by others who had studied the problem, but that Tanaka had decided he loathed. As a consequence, Tanaka rescinded Clark’s plan and then became intensely determined to get Clark out of CJ and out of the custody division altogether.

[WitnessLA has reported on the back story between Mr. Tanaka and Mr. Clark and some of his supervisors, here, here and here.]

Olmsted, whom he knew to be well-liked by Sheriff Baca, was the person whom Tanaka tapped to replace Clark.

Olmsted told the commission that when he got the call about replacing Clark, he had only spoken to Mr. Tanaka once before. He said that while he had zero interest in leaving his existing post, a prestigious job in commercial crimes investigations, when Tanaka asked him to make the move, he agreed to do it.

“I’m a team player,” Olmsted told the commission.

Tanaka did not tell Olmsted much about why he wanted Clark out so much. “He said there were morale issues, force issues,” Olmsted explained, “and there was an attempt to rotate all the deputies on the jail”—a strategy that Tanaka made clear to Olmsted that he despised.

Olmsted said that Tanaka reportedly said nothing specific about what he’d like a new captain to do differently, in terms of supervision or strategy, or even goals he wanted hit, he was emphatic about certain additional personnel changes he wanted. There were three sergeants and a lieutenant whom Tanaka wanted Olmsted to get rid of, for reasons that were never made clear. (Olmsted checked the four out, determined they were doing a fine job, and kept them on anyway.)

Most importantly, Tanaka said, he had a guy named Dan Cruz whom he told Olmsted was to be his operations lieutenant, making him the second in command at the jail.

“He wouldn’t have been my choice,” Olmsted said of Cruz. He would have chosen someone, he said, who was “more hands on, more personable, someone who could talk to the deputies and get ‘em motivated.” Still Olmsted agreed to take Cruz out of courtesy to the assistant sheriff, who made it plain he was keen on the transfer.

He would learn much later how drastically unsuited Cruz was for the job, and how his assignment to the jails had little to do with merit, and everything to do with his relationship to Mr. Tanaka.

THE CRUZ FACTOR

To understand this next section of the testimony having to do with Dan Cruz, it helps to know a little about Cruz’s past in the department, a past that Olmsted discovered only much later, as he explained to the commission.

“After I was retired,” Omsted told the commissioners, “I was getting phone calls right and left about stuff that was transpiring at the department.” One such contact, he said, was from a recently retired commander. [He] gave me a call and said, ‘I’m the one that mandated Dan Cruz be transferred from Lennox station.’ He and another lieutenant over there were deficient in the way they handled service comment report and force packages. They were eighteen months behind.”

In response to quizzical looks from the commissioner members, Olmsted explained. “Service comment reports are citizen complaints,” he said. “And ‘use of force packages’ are generated when force is used on individual, a suspect or otherwise. The sergeant looks at the package first. Then the operations lieutenant or station captain “makes the final adjudication.”

This last action is what Cruz neglected inexcusably.

Olmsted went on to explain how the consequence of Cruz holding on to these “packages” of paperwork for 18 months. “You only have one year to look into [a charge of excessive force or a citizen complaint],” said Olmsted. So when Cruz let the complaints and the force reports languish for a year and a half, this meant he effectively rendered each one worthless. This meant if real wrongdoing had occurred on the part of a deputy, or if force was found to be out of policy, “there was nothing you can do.”

“All this made everything make sense after the fact about the problems I had as a commander at Men’s Central Jail,” Olmsted said, of his belated revelations about his new operations lieutenant.

But, back in 2006, Olmsted knew none of Cruz’s history of ignoring complaints. He only knew, he said, that Cruz seemed overly concerned by being one-of-the guys the deputies. “Dan’s the kind of guy who wants to be liked. He’ll do everything he can to try make the deputies happy. I have no problem with that. But sometimes discipline needs to come into play. “

Since part of his job as a supervisor, Olmsted told the commission, was to groom those officers directly under him, he wasn’t bothered by Cruz’s lack of supervisory skills, as he saw the younger man as someone he could mentor.

USE OF FORCE & DEPUTY CLIQUES

Olmsted is a very thorough man by nature. Thus in order have the best possible grasp of what he was walking into at Men’s Central Jail, before he began at his new post, he made a point of setting up a meeting with Clark, the captain whom he was replacing.

“We talked for hours about what was going on,” Olmsted told the commissioners. “He said there were force issues, deputy clicks”—like the now infamous 2000 Boys and 3000 Boys. Clark talked about his (now much written about) attempt to institute the assignment rotation to deal with the cliques.

He also warned Olmsted that three of the lieutenants who would be working under him would be reporting—not to him, but directly to the Assistant Sheriff. “I was told that Wes Sutton, Chris Nee, and Kevin Ebert all reported surreptitiously [to the assistant sheriff] after work, and had monthly meetings with Mr. Tanaka.”

It was, to say the least, a highly unorthodox breech of command structure.

But the undersheriff was becoming known for such breeches.

WORK THE GRAY

In answer to a question from the Commission’s legal counsel, Richard Drooyan, Olmsted said he had no knowledge of the content of those off-the-reservation meetings with Assistant Sheriff Tanaka.

But when Drooyan followed up and asked the commander if he ever heard Mr. Tanaka “…using a term called working in the gray?” Olmsted said he had indeed. He’d not heard it first hand, he said, but he’d definitely heard about it from a variety of close colleagues who had been present when Paul Tanaka gave one of his Work the Gray speeches.

“A very good friend of mine said that when he was in sergeant super school, he said Mr. Tanaka came in and said, ‘You guys need to work the gray area. Work it hard!’”

Drooyan interrupted. “What do you consider ‘working the gray area’ meant?’

Olmsted: “Anything in the gray areas in considered outside policy, as far as I’m concerned. The ‘gray area’ can be interpreted any personal way you want. But it can very easily be construed to be illegal by nature.”

When Olmsted took over CJ, he felt that the work the gray ethic was on display in many areas of the jail’s daily operations. Olmsted then listed for the commission some of the issues at the jail that caused him the most immediate concern.

DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS

In his first week as captain, he said he made a point of walking the floors so he could become acquainted with the deputies and make his presence known. In one of these first walks, he said, he had an “amazing experience. It began, he said, when he walked into the 2000 floor control booth, and saw a deputy with a broken right hand. “What happened to you?” asked Olmsted. “I hit a inmate in the head.” Olmsted said that the deputy replied.

Olmsted was taken aback. “’Really?!” he testified he said to the deputy. “You know, that’s not good for your career.” He chatted with the man, and suggested “there were other ways to subdue an inmate.”

Olmsted then walked up to the floor above, the 3000 floor, and again strolled into the control both. “Same thing. There was a deputy with a broken right hand. I said, ‘What happened to you?’” He too said he’d hit an inmate in the head. Olmsted stayed to talk to the second deputy about all the reasons that head slugging was not the way to go.

Since at this point, Olmsted’s account was starting to sound like a standup comedy routine, one of the commissioners blurted, “Are you serious?”

“Serious as a heart attack,” said Olmsted.

Then he went up to the 4000 floor. Another deputy, another broken hand.

“Don’t tell me,” said Olmsted. “You hit a deputy in the head.”

“No I missed and hit the wall.”

Ba-da-bum!

Olmsted related the events with a storyteller’s touch, but he appeared dead serous about the disturbing implication: on floor after floor, certain deputies were using intense physical violence as their default strategy to control inmate behavior.

It was a matter, Olmsted said, he began taking aggressive steps to stop.

Yet, even before Olmsted encountered the string of broken-handed deputies, he saw other signs of the kind of attitude toward inmates that could easily presage violence:

During his first week on duty, Olmsted told the commissioners, a federal judge called to enquire regarding a rumor he’d heard about problematic graffiti scrawled by deputies inside one of the 3000 floor control booths, specifically the booth on the 3100 block.

“He gave me a call around noon one day. I remember it distinctly because you don’t have a judge call you up often.” The judge met Olmsted at the jail and together the two men went to inspect the control booth in question. When they arrived inside the booth, Olmsted was aghast.

“I found an atrocious sight!” he told the commissioners. Only sworn personnel operate such control booths, he explained, so there could be no blaming of anyone else for the hostile and juvenile vandalism but deputies and their supervisors.

“You have to get two keys to get into it. Inside the second area that you have to go through two locked doors to get access. “ Once past those sets of locked doors, “there was malicious scribbling all over the walls,” he said. “Around the computer keyboard, on the monitor, on the fire hose, which was on strung out on the floor. Olmsted said that the judge was particular concerned with a bumper sticker that was on the control key box. “Please don’t feed the animals.”

Given the high use-of-force statistics in CJ, neither Olmsted nor the judge were inclined to dismiss the scrawled messages as a boys-will-be-boys prank.

“It was ugly. It was just plain ugly,” Olmsted told the commission.

Olmsted said he asked for an immediate “roll-out” from the Internal Affairs Bureau. But after a day or two of taking photographs and analyzing the situation, the two-person IAB team returned to the jail and told Olmsted not to pursue the matter. Their reasoning, he said, was that they had determined that the graffiti had been present for at least six months.

“Now, because this is a violation of policy,” said Olmsted, “everyone who’d walked into 3100—every deputy, every sergeant and every lieutenant who’d walked and out of the control booth and not reported it—would have to be investigated.”

The IAB officers recommend that Olmsted have the room cleaned up, put everyone on notice, but “write this one off” and start over.

Olmsted wasn’t pleased, but after running the decision by his superior officer, he did as was suggested, and let the matter go.

Olmsted also told how constructive interactions with inmates got subverted. When he complimented one deputy for showing a room full of inmates a movie on DVD, which had a measurable calming effect on the men, the very next day the TV connecting cord for the DVD player had been cut—clearly by other deputies—thus effectively ending the movie viewing.

But when Olmsted put his foot down and rectified the situation, deputy who had been showing the films approached him, his expression uncomfortable.

“Please don’t come talk to me any more,” Olmsted said the man told him. “I want to make this stuff work, but I’m getting pressure from my peers. They don’t like the fact that I’m talking to you because they think I’m snitching.

Nevertheless, Olmsted told the commissioners, he continued to set down firm rules regarding force and its use, put confident sergeants into key places, and flooded problem areas of the jail with supervisors. At the same time found out what tools the deputies lacked to do their jobs well, and made sure they were actively supplied.

And after a while, the force numbers in CJ started to go down.

THE CAPTAIN BECOMES A COMMANDER

In April 2008, after he had been captain of CJ for about 15 months, Olmsted was promoted to Commander of all the Southern jails. Dan Cruz was tapped by Mr. Tanaka to move into Olmsted’s place as head of Men’s Central Jail—nevermind that Tanaka was no longer the Assistant Sheriff in charge of custody, but had now moved over to supervising patrol.

When he became a commander, Olmsted was still Cruz’s direct superior. However, once Cruz was in charge of CJ, Olmsted said, his relationship with the man changed “significantly.”

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ANATOMY OF A JAILS COMMISSION MEETING – A SERIES IN THREE PARTS

PART 2 – THE LIEUTENANT

May 15, 2012,

Lieutenant Alfred Gonzales, a retired 35-year veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, took a seat at the microphone reserved for guests in the main chamber of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration. Gonzales had agreed to give testimony before the Los Angeles County Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence but his grim expression suggested he still had mixed feelings about doing so.

Since early this year, the jail commission’s five teams of pro-bono investigators have been seeking out and interviewing a growing list of people with knowledge of the jails—retired and current sheriff’s department personnel, former inmates, jail chaplains, and others. The goal is to talk to at least 60 “witnesses.” Only a small percentage of that 60 plus would wind up in the chair that Gonzales now occupied.

At this May meeting only six of the seven commission members were present:. Four are former federal judges, Robert Bonner, Dickran Tevrizian, Carlos Moreno and Lourdes Baird, the only woman on the commission and the one elected by the rest to chair these meetings. Bonner is arguably the heaviest hitter of the judicial group in that he has also headed both the DEA and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection the during the period when it became the part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. The two non-judges on the day’s panel were former First AME Church pastor, Reverend Cecil “Chip” Murray, who is the one looked to by the others for his roots in LA’s communities, and Alex Busansky, a former DOJ civil rights attorney who is now the current president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and the most directly familiar of the group with the issue of custody problems in general in that, among other relevant qualifications, he headed up the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons for the Vera Institute. The missing commissioner was Long Beach Chief of Police Jim McDonnell, once on the short list to be LAPD chief, thus the person knowledgeable about the law enforcement perspective. McDonnell evidently missed today’s hearing due to some irresolvable conflict or other.

Gonzales was the second of the day’s witnesses. The first round of testimony was provided by a retired sheriff’s department sergeant named Daniel Pollaro, who described men’s central jail as an increasingly out of control and violent place featuring deputy cliques whose members routinely ignored supervisors, and use of force numbers that were far higher they they should be. Yet the thing that seemed to especially get the attention of commission members was the revelation by Pollaro that Paul Tanaka—then the Assistant Sheriff in charge of custody, now the undersheriff—had reached down from his lofty executive perch to make a series of moves that, according to Pollaro, effectively smashed the chain-of-command at Men’s Central Jail and gutted the authority of its supervisors.

With Pollaro’s testimony in mind, the commissioners were intensely interested to hear what Gonzales, a former Men’s Central Jail supervisor, a rank above Pollaro, had to say about these matters.

Before Gonzales began his official testimony, he asked to first present a prewritten statement, which was clearly important to him. At a nod from the commission’s chief counsel, Richard Drooyan, he fished a folded sheer of paper out of his jacket pocket, and read the following, his voice roughened by emotion:

I come from a family with a long history of public service. My father was severely wounded in World War II and retired as a federal civil servant. I am one of eight family members, which includes my wife who is in the audience, who are current or retired law enforcement officers. Four of these members also served in the military, including 3 Vietnam veterans and one Iraqi war veteran. I am a Viet Nam Veteran of the united states Marine Corp. I have 35 years of public service, 26 years with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. I retired with the rank of Lt.

Although I am here voluntarily, …. I did not ask to participate in these proceedings. It pains me to be here. And my intent today is not to malign or bring discredit on the sheriff’s department. My goal is to bring transparency to what was occurring at Men’s Central Jail between 2003 and when I retired in 2007. In my opinion 90 to 95 percent of sheriffs deputies perform their duties in an honorable and professional manner.

That done, for the first few minutes of his testimony, Gonzales covered many of the same problems at Men’s Central Jail that Sergeant Pollaro had already described earlier [see Part 1]— the chronic, in-your-face tardiness by certain deputies, the dismissive attitude among many of those same deputies toward supervisors who attempted to rein in their behavior, and the relationship of these problematic actions to the deputy power cliques that had formed among those who worked on the 2000 and 3000 floors.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of the deputies were outstanding,” Gonzales told the commissioners. “But there was that segment…”

Gonzales explained how he managed to wrestle the tardiness and insubordination problems mostly to the ground, but how there was a strong push back from those deputies affected. “I was holding their feet to the fire. I was holding them to the hours of their work. It wasn’t well received by a lot of personnel,” he said.

But while he was able to get a handle on much of the unruly deputy behavior, there were other issues that Gonzales found unsettling and more difficult to combat.

“ I noticed some eerie movement on the 2000 and 3000 floors specifically.” Gonzales said. “The deputies, once their shifts were over, would congregate on that floors until the entire shift was congregated at the entrance to that floor, and they would all march off the floor, and down the elevators, and then walk out together into the parking lot.” He paused. “But what was so weird about it is these groups wouldn’t comingle with other floors.”

Nor, he found, would they acknowledge the presence of a supervisor. “They would just stone-faced walk right by me.” Such actions weren’t hugely against the rules, exactly. It was more that they were yet another discomforting weirdity in a paramilitary organization where the loyalty to the department and to the law was supposed to be paramount—-not allegiance to one’s more-bad-ass-then-you-are deputy posse.

CLIQUES AND FORCE

Most to the point, as far as the commissioners were concerned, was Gonzales’ testimony about how he started to observe that the deputy clique behavior seemed to correlate with some alarming trends in the use of force at CJ.

“I began to notice patterns of force on [the 2000 and 3000] floors, and I began to identify who my heavy-handed deputies were” Gonzales said, adding that he instituted strategies to combat the problem right away. “To limit their exposure on those floors, when I assigned overtime, I’d assign them to another floor.” The idea wasn’t to rotate their assignments exactly, which wasn’t within a lieutenant’s power, but just to vary their extra assignments, so that the deputies who were amassing force reports on certain floors, would hopefully break out of their patterns.

The strategy was notably unsuccessful, mainly since the deputies flatly refused to cooperate. Gonzales said he would come in the next day after making such assignments, and find that men and women whom he’d assigned to, say, the 5th floor would be right back on their preferred floor, assignments be damned. “They’d browbeat the deputy who was working the assignment they wanted into letting them change.”

Gonzales met with his sergeants and made it clear that all this changing of overtime locations was a no-go. The high-handed self-assignments slowed down, he said. But the worrisome use-of-force patterns continued. For one thing, Gonzales noted that there was an unnatural similarity in the way that many of the force reports involving inmate injuries were written, as if everyone had cribbed from the same outline. As a consequence, what logically should have been very different force descriptions were written up in cookie-cutter fashion as having occurred in almost exactly the same way, which Gonzales knew to be impossible. “I thought, ‘Wow, this wasn’t right,’” he said.

What really concerned him, Gonzales said, was the rising number of inmate injuries, not just bruises, but real damage. “I saw a lot of broken limbs. A lot of suturing.”

What is more, Gonzales started getting disconcerting calls about off duty problems with the same groups of force-using deputies.

In response to some of the commissioners’ quizzical expressions, Gonzales explained that other local law enforcement agencies would usually give him a courtesy call when they picked up any of his deputies outside of work for crossing some legal line or other, a matter that he found was happening with increasing frequency. Worse, in Gonzales’ mind, was the fact that he began hearing that the misbehaving deputies were referring to themselves off duty, not as Los Angeles deputy sheriffs, but as “2000 floor deputies” or “3000 floor deputies.”

To illustrate the point, Gonzales told the commission about one deputy who was picked up in 2003 for a DUI in Covina, at which time Gonzales got the usual courtesy call. Gonzales learned that, after the deputy was pulled over, the traffic officer tried to get him to take a field sobriety test, but the deputy was belligerent.

“Do you know who you’re F-ing with?’” the deputy reportedly yelled to the traffic cop. “’You’re F-ing with a 3000 floor deputy!”

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AT THE JAIL COMMISSION COMMUNITY MEETING, A FATHER’S ANGUISHED TESTIMONY HAS EVERYONE CAPTIVATED

by Matthew Fleischer

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The Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence held its first—and possibly only–community meeting at the EXPO Center at the Los Angeles Swimming Stadium Wednesday night. Three commission members, Chair Lourdes G. Baird, Vice Chair Cecil L. Murray, and Commissioner Alexander Busansky, were all in attendance to hear public testimony about the state of LA County’s jails, along with the commission’s executive director Miriam Krinsky and the group’s legal director, Richard Drooyan.

The results were a mixed bag, as the speakers’ lineup frequently seemed dominated by pro-LASD plants from Sheriff Baca’s Citizens Advisory Board, and well-intentioned social justice do-gooders looking for a soapbox. The night found its footing, however, thanks mostly to the striking testimony of Stephen Rochelle.

Stephen is the father of Matthew Rochelle–-a 24-year-old former Twin Towers inmate now serving an indeterminate sentence of 15-years to life in Patton State Hospital for the murder of a fellow inmate.

In 2006, Matthew—-a bright, personable kid, in his senior year of high school-—was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. With treatment and medication he was able to stabilize his condition, but in November of 2008, he went off his meds and, in a confused state, was arrested for breaking and entering a residence. While he waited to stand trial, he was to have been placed in Patton State Hospital. But Patton didn’t have a bed, so Matthew was taken to LA County’s Twin Towers jail—which houses a sizable population of mentally ill inmates.

“It was our hope to get Matthew stabilized and get him admitted to Patton State Hospital,” his father, who works as an LAUSD high school principal, told the captivated audience at the jails commission.

Instead, inside Twin Towers, Stephen said, things got far worse—due in large part to deputy treatment of his son. “They taunted him and called him a ‘piece of shit,’” said Stephen, his powerful voice betraying the slightest hint of a quaver. “They stopped feeding him for several days and shut off the water to his cell.** They broke his pinkie. And they orchestrated inmate fights. On one occasion Matthew was escorted to a hostile gang member’s cell and was locked in while deputies watched him get beaten up.”

Delivery of his medication was reportedly intermittent at best.

Eventually, in August of 2009, Matthew was placed inside a cell with a 56-year-old fellow schizophrenic inmate named Cedric Watson. Matthew had never been more unstable.

“He had stopped eating,” recalled Stephen. “His weight dropped from 165 to 126.We got a call from his lawyer telling us ‘your son is in a lot of trouble.’”

Soon after, an altercation ensued between Matthew and his fellow mentally ill cellmate that left Watson dead–and Matthew on trial for first-degree murder. This despite the fact that Matthew was clearly in a delusional state after the killing.

“He told investigating deputies that he was Hotep from Egypt” among other elaborate hallucinations, Stephen told me after the hearing.

Although the district attorney’s office pressed hard for a first degree murder conviction, Matthew was found not guilty of that charge, by reason of insanity. But he was convicted of second-degree and sentenced 15-to life in Patton State Hospital—the same facility that said they couldn’t admit him before the killing despite his parents’ desperate attempts to find him a bed there.

When the commission meeting ended at around 8:30 p.m., the commissioners each thanked those assembled, but several made a special point of thanking Stephen and Nina Rochelle, in particular, for coming forward.

Commissioner Cecil Murray was, on this night, the most expressive of the members. “Who will protect us from our protectors?” he said to the crowd, who nodded and murmured in response. “Who will defend us from our defenders?”

He also told the audience that, if they were worried the commission would be nothing more than “fluff,” to check back with them in September when they deliver their report.

“My expectations were low coming in here,” Stephen told me after the hearing concluded. “But I felt the commission was thankful and it renewed their commitment to do something substantive.”

“Our lives are an open book at this point. We just hope something comes of our son’s story.”

**EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s important to say that, although, like most people present Wednesday night, we found the Rochelle parents very compelling, we have in no way vetted any of their claims. And while some of the allegations—the verbal abuse and physical abuse, the inmate fights, the failure to deliver medication consistantly—are in keeping with other, better validated inmate experiences we are aware of, the charge of non feeding and turning of water to the cell, as it is described does not strike us as terribly logical, nor is it common to the other inmate experiences we have run across in the course of the past two years of reporting on the matter. Thus we surmise that part of their story may be misinterpretation of events by distraught parents. But we will let you know more, as we know more.

A SERIES IN THREE PARTS

No one knows for sure if the Jails Commission will matter at all. It is entirely possible it will issue a fat and earnest report that generates a few news stories, and some congratulatory action on the part of the Board of Supervisors, and then for all practical purposes vanishes.

Yet, having obsessively monitored their meetings for the past five months, I can report that at least some of the seven commissioners—maybe all, if we’re lucky—do not intend to be irrelevant, not if they can possibly help it. Furthermore, even the most conservative members of the commission are beginning to apprehend, to their evident surprise, the severity of the problem in the jails. It also appears they are starting to suspect that its real causes don’t lie with an old jail facility that needs to be shut down, and/or a few out of control deputies that need better training or whatever, that the issue is far more entrenched and complex and may very well have much to do with those at the very top of the department.

Whatever the case, we’ll be following it. And we’ll bring to you what we see.

Last Monday, May 14, the members of the Los Angeles County Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence heard testimony for the third month in a row, but this time some of what they heard appeared to genuinely startle the commission members in attendance.

The jails commission, if you’ll remember, is the seven-member body that was appointed by the LA County supervisors last fall to investigate the problems in the County’s violence-plagued jail system, and then to make recommendations about how to fix the mess.

In this particular commission meeting, three former Sheriff’s Department supervisors, plus two former inmates, painted a picture for the commissioners of a climate of dysfunction and violence at Men’s Central Jail involving groups of out-of-control deputies whose names turned up on force reports over and over.

Yet what truly got the commissioners’ attention was not so much the stories of abuse, which they’d heard about in testimony at earlier meetings, but what they were told regarding how Sheriff Baca repeatedly dodged and ignored warnings about deputy cliques and dangerous levels of violence at Men’s Central Jail, and how Baca’s second in command, Paul Tanaka, actively subverted any attempt to rein in the deputies who were perpetrating the violence.

The full commission has been meeting monthly since the first of the year. In the beginning, the meetings were mostly procedural in nature. A method of working and a timeline was agreed upon. An executive director, Miriam Krinsky, and General Counsel, Richard Drooyan, were hired and approved, and so on.

It is only in the last three months—March, April and now May—that the commissioners have heard testimony from a little more than a dozen of the approximately 60 witnesses that Richard Drooyan, the Commission’s general counsel, and his five teams of pro bono lawyer/investigators have been interviewing and vetting on an ongoing basis.

In the March witness meeting, the commissioners heard reports from Michael Gennaco, the head of the Office of Independent Review, and Merrick Bobb, the Special Counsel who has for years monitored the Sheriff’s Department for the Board of Supervisors.

Both men gave the commission a sort of overview of the jails’ functioning and some of its problems. However, Bobb, in particular, expressed his frustration at the fact that, after years of reports and recommendations, the real problems at the jails had changed very little.

This served to suddenly bring the commissioners face to face with the fact that their efforts too could easily come to nothing. After all, they had zero legal power to enforce anything.

The seven commission members, all heavy hitters in their fields, were not at all cheered by the fact that they could end up becoming so much window dressing, and appeared determined to do something to change all that.

In April, the commission heard from civilians who had witnessed abuse—or the aftermath of abuse— in the jails. This included two ACLU monitors, the ACLU’s national jail and prison expert, and three veteran jail chaplains, all of whom told of multiple incidents of abuse that they’d either personally witnessed or had seen the direct aftermath of. The stories were intense enough that the two ACLU monitors and one of the chaplains choked up while relating them.

In particular the commissioners appeared glued to the testimony of Deacon Paulino Juarez-Ramirez, a soft-spoken, diminutive man whose sense of terror and shock at the three horrific incidents of abuse he’d seen, one of them inside a jail chapel, visibly washed over him as he spoke.

Which brings us to last Monday’s meeting:

On Monday, although two former inmates spoke during the day in chilling and convincing detail of the abuse they’d allegedly experienced and observed, it was the three former LASD jail supervisors that most held the commissioners’ collective attention.

Yet, out of the three months of meetings, the witness whose testimony had the commissioners the most riveted of all was retired LASD Commander Robert Olmsted. But we’ll get to Olmsted later in this 3-part series.

First we have the sergeant.

The opening witness at last Monday’s meeting was retired LASD Sergeant Daniel Pollaro.

Pollaro is a compact man of medium height whose appearance and contained demeanor suggests a career in accounting, more than law enforcement. Although he’d agreed to give testimony before the commission, he looked jittery, and as if he’d prefer to be nearly anywhere else instead.

Pollaro worked in the jails from 2000 to 2007, in CJ from 2002 on. In response to Richard Drooyan’s questioning, he talked about how when he was first assigned to Men’s Central Jail, he found a work environment in which certain deputies, not their superior officers, ran much of the show.

Pollaro told how the cadres of rule-ignoring deputies would switch around work assignments at will to make sure that only certain people worked on the second and third floors of the jail—AKA the 2000 and 3000 floors that gave rise to the now-infamous deputy cliques, the 2000 Boys and the 3000 Boys. Similarly, when the deputies or their friends were assigned elsewhere in the jail than on their floor of choice, they simply declined to take those postings and rewrote the “in-service reports” to reassign themselves to the postings they preferred, pressuring deputies whom they thought that they could manipulate, to take the assignments they disliked—all with seemingly no consequence.

(In-service reports are the posted list of assignments designating, on any given day, who is working where and at what time, to make sure that all the posts in all the jail modules are adequately covered.)

“When I would get on the floor in the morning,” Pollaro said, “I would check the in-service report, but then I’d see that people who had been assigned to work on other floors, had just changed the report and were now back on my floor. Two or three times a week, I had that problem.”

The same thing was true, said Pollaro, when a deputy whom the 3rd or 2nd floor cliques didn’t like was assigned to what they considered their territory. The deputy cliques seemed to think they had the right, and evidently the power, to approve whomever was assigned to their floor.

Pollaro repeatedly countermanded the ad-hoc assignments, “but it was always a struggle,” he said. When he spoke to other sergeants, he found they were experiencing the same issues with deputies, which they battled with greater and lesser degrees of success.

Despite the efforts of Pollaro and others, the acts of insubordination increased over time. When rebuked, some deputies went so far as to say that they didn’t have to listen to supervisors. Instead, they openly gave their allegiance to what they referred to as the floor’s OGs—gang parlance for Original Gangsters. In the case of the jails, the term referred to veteran deputies who’d been at CJ for four years or more. “These guys had all the answers in the eyes of the younger deputies,” Pollaro said. And their influence was not always a positive one.

Another symptom of the rule-ignoring phenomenon was chronic deputy tardiness, again only among certain deputies. Yet it was a kind of lapse that ordinarily in the sections of a policing agency that involves shifts, is rarely if ever tolerated. Certain deputies would drift in late, and then leave their shifts as much as an hour early, meaning that some posts on the jail floor were inadequately covered, or not covered at all during those times.

(To give you an idea of how unusual this is, I spoke to two other sources on the matter, one from the LASD, and one from the LAPD. They both said in essence the same thing. This was highly unusual and inappropriate behavior. The LAPD source who is very knowledgeable about department policy, said he was stunned at the notion that this had become a pattern. “That’s outrageous,” he said. “It’s 100% unusual. If you did that more than two times, you’d be written up or worse.”)

The we-get-it-and-you-don’t-so-we can-do-what-we-want-when-we-want group attitude that produced the tardiness in some deputies, also got acted out by other deputies in ways that had far graver consequences than being late for a shift:

During this same period, Pollaro noticed that the incidents of “significant force”—-the term meaning that an injury was involved, an inmate’s bone had been broken, or sutures were required—were high and getting higher. Some of it he said he chalked up as an artifact of jail overcrowding, and the fact that the prison gangs had been reaching down from the state institutions to cause trouble. But a great deal of the force he was seeing , he told the commissioners cautiously, “was the problem of deputies doing their own thing. You had deputies who were going to run the floor as they wanted it. That means somebody might have done something a little bit outa line, they’d ‘tune them up.’”

And what did “tune them up” mean? the commissioners wanted to know.

“Used some type of force because they didn’t like the way it was going.” In other words, a “tune-up” didn’t designate force used to control an inmate, but as a punitive measure. A message.

When asked to illustrate, Pollaro told of incident in which three deputies walked an inmate from the 4000 floor into the discipline module—the “hole” at 2500—on the 2000 floor. Once the group got the inmate in the module, “one of the deputies told the other two deputies that they could leave, that he could handle it from there.” The other two complied and left. “The deputy then took inmate down the row, then he tuned ‘im up,” said Pollaro. “After that, he put him in the cell and then left without notifying anyone.” Pollaro learned about the incident the next day when a new shift came in and discovered the bloody and injured inmate, untreated in his cell.

“He was beaten up?” asked Richard Drooyan.

“Yes.”

(Although Pollaro didn’t specify, another LASD source said the inmate would have been handcuffed when he was walked down to the disciplinary unit, thus handcuffed when he was allegedly beaten.)

The matter was referred to Internal Affairs, and Pollaro said he believed the deputy was relieved of duty for some days. He wasn’t sure for how long.

(Editor’s Note: This after the deputy reportedly beat up an inmate who was under control when the other deputies left, failed to call a supervisor, failed to report the inmate’s injuries, or that force had been used, as protocol demands, but instead simply left the bloody inmate in a cell for others to find.)

To combat the rising force incidents, Pollaro, other sergeants, and their lieutenant at the time, Lt. Gonzales, regularly reviewed use of force policies at meetings.

Richard Drooyan asked if the policy reviews had an effect.

“Not really,” he said, his voice weary. “These deputies were their own little group that was going to do what they were going to do, without any discipline…or instruction.”

(NOTE: This WitnessLA article refers to some of the high profile incidents in which deputies failed to adequately supervise and inmate injuries and several deaths occurred during the period Pollaro is describing.)

Pollaro told how two different captains, one after the other,—Captain Ray Leyva and Captain John Clark—tried additional strategies to deal with the problems, but that they continued to grow. He described how, in February of 2006, Captain Clark finally decided to put in place a system of job rotation that would keep deputies from guarding too long on a single floor, but rather would rotate people between modules. (WitnessLA reported on this previously.)

Clark sent out a memo to all personnel at Men’s Central Jail about the job rotation strategy, that he explained would “assure all personnel are trained and prepared to address situations you face in all areas of the jail.”

(You can find the memo here. <— Click to enlarge.)

Cliqued-up deputies were predictably unhappy about the rotation mandate as it meant some of them would soon rotated away from their 2000 or 3000 floors. “They didn’t want any part of it,” Pollaro said. In response, the groups began an email campaign urging all CJ deputies to send complaints about the Clark policy to then Assistant Sheriff Paul Tanaka.

First an anonymous email went out to all deputies from an unnamed source, presumably from one of the deputy OGs.

It began as follows:

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