Creating Civilian Oversight of the Sheriff’s Dept….Paul Tanaka Campaign Inactive….LA Times Urges Five More Years for LAPD Chief Beck….and 91% ATF Drug Sting Arrests are of Minorities

SUPE RIDLEY-THOMAS, JIM MCDONNELL, OTHERS DISCUSS LASD CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT ON ABC7 “EYEWITNESS NEWSMAKERS”

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors will consider creating a civilian commission to oversee the sheriff’s department.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas appeared on ABC7’s “Eyewitness Newsmakers” Sunday morning with host Adrienne Alpert to discuss the issue. He was joined by LBPD Chief (and LA sheriff hopeful) Jim McDonnell, Miriam Krinsky, the former executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence, and Lt. Brian Moriguchi, president of the Professional Peace Officers Association.

Ridley-Thomas urged his fellow supervisors to vote in favor of the commission Tuesday, without further delay.

Jim McDonnell agreed that the commission should be created, and said that it’s establishment could help the county ward off a federal consent decree. McDonnell said it should be set up while the particulars of the Office of Inspector General are being decided, so that they work together properly. McDonnell also told Alpert that the IG should report to the civilian commission and that he does not believe the IG should have to be bound to the LASD by attorney-client privilege (as interim Sheriff John Scott has recommended).

PPOA president Moriguchi disagreed with Ridley-Thomas and McDonnell about the timing, saying that the OIG should be established before a civilian commission, and that effective oversight is of greater importance than simply creating more oversight.

And while the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence chose to not take a position on the issue, former executive director of the commission, Miriam Krinsky, urged the creation of a permanent civilian watchdog panel.

Here’s a clip from Alpert’s pre-show story:

After years of reports of mismanagement, corruption and brutality in the sheriff’s department, Ridley-Thomas says the board should not wait any longer to approve the commission.

Speaking on Sunday’s “Eyewitness Newsmakers,” Ridley-Thomas said, “What are we waiting for? More federal indictments? What are we waiting for? More embarrassment?”

Appearing with the supervisor, the leading candidate for sheriff, Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell, who supports the citizen commission, said it could help L.A. County avoid a federal consent decree imposed on the sheriff’s department. “I think it could happen,” said McDonnell. “We have an opportunity to put oversight in place.”

The LA Times also had a Sunday editorial urging the board to vote in favor of creating the commission.

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PAUL TANAKA, CAMPAIGN STAFF M.I.A.

Former undersheriff Paul Tanaka did not respond to requests to speak on Newsmakers (story above).

In fact, KPCC’s Frank Stoltze says it appears his campaign headquarters has been deserted for about a month. While Tanaka was unreachable (as were his campaign manager and his chief fundraiser), his campaign consultant, Reed Galen, says he is no longer employed by Tanaka.

Political scientist and head of the Center for the Study of L.A. at Loyola Marymount, Fernando Guerra, says the former undersheriff should shut down campaign operations and go on vacation after only receiving 15% of the vote in the primary election (to Jim McDonnell’s 49%).

What Tanaka is actually going to do remains unknown.

Here are some clips from Stoltze’s story:

The once bustling campaign headquarters of Paul Tanaka, tucked in the middle of a Torrance strip mall is empty now. No volunteers busily calling voters, no campaign signs stacked high. No Tanaka buzzing around, giving orders and thanking people. One of the agents at the State Farm Insurance office next door says Tanaka’s people decamped about a month ago.

KPCC calls and emails to both the would-be sheriff’s campaign manager and chief fundraiser went unreturned. His campaign consultant during the primary election, Reed Galen, said he no longer works for Tanaka. He did not elaborate.

Tanaka, a former undersheriff who finished second in the primary, has not returned numerous calls this week or responded to emails. He didn’t appear to be home at his Gardena residence on Friday afternoon.

[SNIP]

The most recent post on Tanaka’s campaign website was June 5, when he thanked supporters. He has no upcoming events listed on the website.

Tanaka garnered just 15 percent of the vote in the primary, a distant second to Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell’s 49 percent of the vote.

“I think his best strategy is to shut down, don’t spend any money, and go on vacation,” said Fernando Guerra, a political scientist who heads the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University and a KPCC board member. “He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance.”

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LA TIMES ENDORSES REAPPOINTMENT OF LAPD CHIEF CHARLIE BECK

The LA Times editorial board says despite a few missteps, Charlie Beck deserves to be reappointed for another five-year term as Los Angeles Police Chief. (We at WLA agree wholeheartedly with their endorsement.) Here’s a clip:

Just look at the numbers. Crime in the city has decreased for 11 years in a row, beginning under the previous chief, William J. Bratton, and continuing for the last five years under Beck. It’s true that L.A. has benefited from a long-term trend in which cities across the country are becoming safer, but that doesn’t negate the impact that smart policing and good management have had here. In fact, Los Angeles has continued to cut crime even as other cities, such as Chicago, have experienced a resurgence in homicides and gang violence. While overall crime in L.A. was down in the first six months of this year, it should be noted that there was a small increase in violent crime, due partly to a rise in aggravated assaults. If Beck is reappointed, he will be under tremendous pressure to turn that around.

Beck should get extra credit for keeping crime low even though he has had, on average, significantly fewer officers on duty each day than his predecessor did, as a result of budget cuts that forced officers to stay home rather than be paid overtime.

[SNIP]

This is not to say that Beck is above criticism. In recent months, some weaknesses in his management style have become apparent; left unchecked, they could undermine some of the tremendous improvements of the last decade. There is, for instance, a widespread perception in the department that Beck, who has the final say on discipline of officers, has been unfair in meting out punishment — too harsh on some unlucky officers and too easy on favored employees. In one case, Beck overruled a panel’s recommendation that he fire an officer caught lying to investigators — an officer who also happened to be the nephew of a former deputy chief.

Beck also faced some discontent inside and outside the department when he returned eight officers to duty even though they had violated policy by carelessly firing more than 100 rounds at two women delivering newspapers during the Christopher Dorner manhunt last year.

Beck has repeatedly chosen to retrain officers rather than fire them for mistakes on the job, including out-of-policy shootings that killed or injured people. He was challenged publicly on this in 2012 by members of the Police Commission, who said his seemingly lenient punishments could send the wrong message to officers. Two years later, the police officers’ union and a new civilian panel appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti also expressed concern about uneven discipline. If reappointed, Beck must address lingering perceptions of leniency and favoritism. He should lay out clear standards for discipline so officers know what to expect and so commissioners can hold him accountable if he deviates from his own policy.

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ATF DRUG STINGS: 91% ARRESTED ARE MINORITIES, SAYS USA TODAY INVESTIGATION

A whopping 91% of those arrested by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives during drug sting operations during the last ten years were minorities (55% black, and over 33% hispanic), according to a USA Today investigation we didn’t want you to miss.

ATF officials say there is no racial bias occurring in their drug stings—that they are simply targeting “the worst of the worst.” Academics and criminal justice advocates say otherwise. US District Court Judge – and many others say otherwise.

USA Today’s Brad Heath has this story. Here’s how it opens, but there’s a lot more, so do go read the rest:

The nation’s top gun-enforcement agency overwhelmingly targeted racial and ethnic minorities as it expanded its use of controversial drug sting operations, a USA TODAY investigation shows.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has more than quadrupled its use of those stings during the past decade, quietly making them a central part of its attempts to combat gun crime. The operations are designed to produce long prison sentences for suspects enticed by the promise of pocketing as much as $100,000 for robbing a drug stash house that does not actually exist.

At least 91% of the people agents have locked up using those stings were racial or ethnic minorities, USA TODAY found after reviewing court files and prison records from across the United States. Nearly all were either black or Hispanic. That rate is far higher than among people arrested for big-city violent crimes, or for other federal robbery, drug and gun offenses.

The ATF operations raise particular concerns because they seek to enlist suspected criminals in new crimes rather than merely solving old ones, giving agents and their underworld informants unusually wide latitude to select who will be targeted. In some cases, informants said they identified targets for the stings after simply meeting them on the street.

“There’s something very wrong going on here,” said University of Chicago law professor Alison Siegler, part of a team of lawyers challenging the ATF’s tactics in an Illinois federal court. “The government is creating these crimes and then choosing who it’s going to target.”

Current and former ATF officials insist that race plays no part in the operations. Instead, they said, agents seek to identify people already committing violent robberies in crime-ridden areas, usually focusing on those who have amassed long and violent rap sheets.

“There is no profiling going on here,” said Melvin King, ATF’s deputy assistant director for field operations, who has supervised some of the investigations. “We’re targeting the worst of the worst, and we’re looking for violent criminals that are using firearms in furtherance of other illegal activities.”

The ATF’s stash-house investigations already face a legal backlash. Two federal judges in California ruled this year that agents violated the Constitution by setting people up for “fictitious crime” they wouldn’t otherwise commit; a federal appeals court in Chicago is weighing whether an operation there amounted to entrapment. Even some of the judges who have signed off on the operations have expressed misgivings about them.

On top of that, defense lawyers in three states have charged that ATF is profiling minority suspects. They asked judges to force the Justice Department to turn over records they hope will prove those claims. Last year, the chief federal judge in Chicago, U.S. District Court Judge Ruben Castillo, agreed and ordered government lawyers to produce a trove of information, saying there was a “strong showing of potential bias.”

Justice Department lawyers fought to block the disclosures. In one case in Chicago, the department refused to comply with another judge’s order that it produce information about the stings. The records it has so far produced in other cases remain sealed.

Because of that secrecy, the data compiled by USA TODAY offer the broadest evidence yet that ATF’s operations have overwhelmingly had minority suspects in their cross hairs. The newspaper identified a sample of 635 defendants arrested in stash-house stings during the past decade, and found 579, or 91%, were minorities.