LA County’s Broken Juvenile Probation System – Part 3: Credit Card Frenzy

When I was on Which Way LA? on Monday, I mentioned that we had not come close to seeing the bottom of the awful juvenile probation revelations.

Well, a creepy new batch may arrive faster than I anticipated.

In his Wednesday column, Steve Lopez flags one of the lurking reports that I’ve been waiting to see, but that had not yet been formally released.

Here is a representative clip:

I’m told the next bombshell will be the revelation that some employees appear to have been ripping off taxpayers by using county-issued credit cards for personal items, including LCD televisions, DVD players, Sony PlayStations and video games, and barbecue grills. Now maybe some of that loot will turn out to have been authorized, but I can tell you they’re having trouble finding the stuff at county offices.

The purchases were made at Best Buy, Sears and Home Depot, I’m told, and at times there were so-called split purchases, in which the shopper made separate buys, perhaps to avoid calling attention to any single large haul.

“I will tell you that when I looked at it, I was outraged,” L.A. County Chief Executive William Fujioka said of a preliminary report indicating more than 80 suspicious uses of credit cards. “I told my folks to immediately start working with the D.A. on it.”

He and other county officials told me they haven’t yet seen the full accounting of an investigation by the county auditor-controller, but they’ve seen enough to work up a good lather.

“I think the hammer will come down very hard,” said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who was briefed on the credit card caper, said we’ve seen only “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to department malfeasance.

He’s got that right.

It’s nice that the Supervisors are sounding appropriately outraged and all. But where were they when various watchdogs and activists were shrieking about this malfeasance-fraught, kid-abusing probation department for the last several years?

And what IS the deal with Bill Fujioka, the County CEO, who was in theory the one who was supposed to be keeping budgetary tabs on the place?

Now that all those in charge are shocked-shocked because some of this ghastly mess is finally coming to light, what exactly are they going to do to make sure it gets fixed—really fixed?

I realize we have a new Probation Chief, Donald Blevins, who is supposed to be a good guy. But let’s be real. The man has walked into a shredder.

And the truth is, it wasn’t until the staggering piles of fiscal misbehavior began coming to light—the 2000 or so misplaced employees, the unaccounted for $79 million, and this newest report on the horizon—that anyone started paying attention. In this bad budget season, financial misappropriation and incompetence is, at least, taken reasonably seriously.

But the human cost of all the mal-management still seems hardly to register.

A decade of federal threats and last year’s big bad ACLU lawsuit have, quite honestly, produced few changes.

Instead, the county’s camps and juvenile halls Have continued to house 2200 kids under circumstances that, in all too many cases, harm, neglect and abuse the very children we are supposed to be helping.

What that says about the priorities of our county government is not particularly pretty.

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NOTE: MORE ABOUT MILAGRO THE DOG TOMORROW