LASD Captain Kelley Frazer (see above video) is scheduled to be promoted to the position of commander and will be working under Assistant Sheriff Terri McDonald, the recently recruited head of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Custody Division.
Frazer is an openly lesbian officer.
To take the promotion, Frazer will leave her post as the highly-regarded head of the LASD’s West Hollywood station, which she has led since April 2010.
When Frazer was promoted to captain and given charge of WeHo she was, at that time, the first openly gay person in department history to serve as an LASD branch commander.
Prior to WeHo, Frazer worked for the department’s Emergency Operations Bureau, and at Carson, Lennox and Temple stations, among other postings.
So what do her troops think of her?
“She’s Amazing!” said watch commander Lt. William Nash, when I called West Hollywood to get a reading. “It’s really bitter-sweet for us. We’re happy for her, and we know she deserves this opportunity but….she will be missed. She’s a great person. Ask anyone here.”
According to Nash, Fraser “cares for everyone in her command,” really looks out for their well being, and knows how to get the best out of people. “But she’s also a tough as nails as a cop,” said Nash. “She wants to make sure we’re on top of our jobs. She wants us to be safe, but she wants this community to be safe. And she really wants to get the bad guys off the street.”
West Hollywood Mayor, Jeff Prang, told the WeHo News that,”That an out member of the LGBT community now is in the highest ranks of the sheriff’s department is really good for West Hollywood and it’s good for LGBT people.”
Indeed. And with any luck Frazer will be good for the LASD Custody Division.
PREDICTING WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS
In a fascinating new study, the National institue for Justice looked at 460 erroneous convictions and “near misses,” in which “factually innocent” defendants were released or acquitted post-indictment, and found that there were 10 factors that were most most often led to a wrongful conviction. We’ve long known the elements that most often went wrong in a wrongful conviction (mistaken or coerced eyewitness testimony, false confessions, perjured informant testimony, etc.) but the study concluded that it was incorrect to call those factors “causes.”
Causes, they found, were different. So what elements, if they appear in combination, are most likely to cause a wrongful conviction? Here are the ten factors they found:
*A younger defendant
*A criminal history
*A weak prosecution case
*Prosecution withheld evidence
*Lying by a non-eyewitness
*Unintentional witness misidentification
*Misinterpreting forensic evidence at trial
*A weak defense
*Defendant offered a family witness
*A “punitive” state culture
Anyway, to find out more, here’s the 410-page study itself. (Scroll to the executive summery.) And here’s a quickie look at the study’s contents at The Crime Report.
THE RIDICULOUS MATTER OF THE SHOT-UP-AND-NEARLY-KILLED NEWSPAPER WOMEN, THEIR LAPD-PROMISED REPLACEMENT TRUCK…AND THE HOT POTATO OF TAXES (!!!)
Surely someone at the LAPD can find a way to cut through this idiotic tax-related impasse… But, evidently so far, they haven’t.
The Huffington Post’s Anna Almendrala has the story. Here’s a clip:
Accusations are flying over the Los Angeles Police Department’s bungled effort to replace a bullet-ridden pickup truck that belonged to two women who were mistaken for fugitive Christopher Dorner one horrifying morning.
Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71, were delivering newspapers in Torrance, Calif., during the early hours of Feb. 7 when members of the LAPD mistook their blue Toyota Tacoma for Dorner’s getaway car, a gray Nissan Titan pickup. Officers fired 102 bullets into Carranza’s truck. While Carranza was injured by the shattered glass, Hernandez was shot in the back.
Two days after the almost-deadly case of mistaken identity, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck visited the victims’ homes to apologize, and the department publicly promised to give them a new pickup truck by the next week.
Now, more than a month after the shooting, the police still haven’t replaced Carranza’s truck. A prominent car dealership owner and a lawyer representing the two women are pointing fingers about whose fault it is….
YOUNG UNDOCUMENTED “DREAMERS” WANT TO KNOW WHY THEY DON’T CAN’T HAVE ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE SINCE THEY ARE, THEY SAY, FOR THE MOMENT ANYWAY, LEGAL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK6IG67IuLI&feature=youtu.be
The video above was just released by the The California Endowment, in partnership with a group of undocumented youth in Southern and Central California. It kicked off the Endowment’s new #Health4All campaign, “an effort to drive a dialog about providing a health care solution for the remaining uninsured.”
This earlier story by Drew Joseph for the San Francisco Chronicle explains the issue from the Dreamers’ perspective. Here’s a clip:
California’s young immigrants who have been granted reprieves to stay in the country stand to gain little from the federal health reform law that the state Legislature is working to implement.
The Affordable Care Act excludes illegal immigrants from accessing the law’s benefits, but some immigrant and health advocates are angry that the young people known as Dreamers have been left out, saying the policy contradicts the law’s intent of expanding coverage to more people.
“It really defeats what the goals of the ACA were to begin with,” said Sonal Ambegaokar, health policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center….
Read the rest (and watch the video!)
Even President Obama has said that Obamacare needs to be modified because it is too expensive. While I am for the “Dream Act”, I don’t believe that individuals in this category should get insurance. These business are just money wanting more money from the American tax payer. Many of these students attending college are eligible to received medical insurance for a minimal fee at the colleges they attend. You will hear an uproar if this ever came to pass.
Where is the love and compassion in america gone. A group
of whealthy demonic creedy ungodly narissist corporate
billionnairs have set the stage for the american way of thinking with the use of propaganda and hate speach. These men have created clansmen who do no reading or investigation on there own. They are just repeaters of
their clan leaders. These are people with no brains and who
are just sheep and don´t even know it. These billonairs
have no concern about you are your family. you are actually their thorn in there side because you want union scale wages decent living condition and so on. They want just
profits Thats why they do most of there business dealings in China`s slave market. Wake up and smell the coffee these are not your friends. helping the american people live a healthy life is most important. can you see how demonic you people have become. Please dont speak for me about paying higher taxes because I will greatfully accepted paying higher taxes if it helps the people in need. I ám not concerned about making the medical industry rich. They don´t
care about us. We can all die from pre-medical conditions
if they can´t draw their profits.
no further comment necessary