(No. None of these photos have to do with the articles listed below. They’re from this past 4th of July. But see if you can spot the City Council guy and the Congressman—BEFORE you click on the thumbnails.)
There’s a wide array of Must Read articles, essays and reviews in Sunday’s papers.
Frank Rich’s Wall-E for President column is high on the list.
And for all us would-be literary types there was the review in the NY Times trashing James Frey’s ickily cliche-infested LA novel, Bright Shiney Morning, which contrasted nicely with the LA Times review of Seth Greene’s extremely smart, quirky, original and delicious (and non-cliche-ridden) LA novel, Shining City.
(Yes, there do seem to be a lot of shiny book titles running about these days. An under-recognized new genre, perhaps?)
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But number one out of the necessary reads for those living in Los Angeles is the essay by my friend Joe Domanick in yesterday’s LA Times Opinion section.
Joe has long ago established himself as an expert in criminal justice through his journalism plus such works as his excellent book on the LAPD, his book on the passage of the Three Strikes law, and his upcoming book on the California prison system.
In his position as a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, Joe has gone beyond journalism to organize events designed to bring together many of the desparate elements in the LA criminal justice arena—law enforcement, probation, parole, the public defender’s office, the DA’s office, community groups, gang interventionists, and civil rights advocates—in other words, all the folks who, in past years, rarely got beyond their individual agendas long enough to talk to each other.
Joe’s events helped break the ice, the groups began exchanging ideas—and LA is better for it.
In Sunday’s Op Ed, Joe looks at what has gone wrong in the city and state’s criminal justice system, what is starting to go right—and what (and who) exactly is standing in the way of solving some of our most difficult crime and justice problems.
It’s an important read from beginning to end. But here’s the opening:
Over the last few decades, it’s been easy to blame the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office for the catastrophic failures of L.A.’s criminal justice system. These failures, as most Angelenos know, have led to a dangerously overcrowded, racially explosive county jail system; a violent gang problem that continues unabated after 10,000 deaths over 25 years, and generation after generation of young black and brown men ceaselessly shuttled off to state prisons at a rate of more than 22,000 a year — as many as 70% of whom, once released, will recycle back within three years.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department epitomized the problems with the criminal justice system: Leadership was calcified and visionless, disdainful of social science and innovative policing reforms, tolerant of brutal and abusive officers, unaccountable to civilian control and perennially at war with the African American community. Under LAPD chiefs Ed Davis and Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block, these departments generated scandal after scandal, culminating in 1992 in one of the worst riots in U.S. history.
For their part, Ira Reiner (1984-1992) and Gil Garcetti (1992-2000), as district attorneys, spent their time sniffing the political winds and playing to the worst instincts of voters. Reiner reacted to gang violence by calling for the “writing off” and imprisoning of the 70,000 young residents who had, often inaccurately, been identified as gang members. And Garcetti opportunistically prosecuted the pettiest of offenses as third-strike, 25-years-to-life crimes (even after having lobbied against the politically popular law in Sacramento).
Today, despite some notorious incidents, such as the 2007 May Day MacArthur Park police riot, and some ongoing disgraces such as the dangerous and inhuman conditions in our county jails, we’re better served by our law enforcement leaders. They’ve lowered the crime rate while largely making peace with the leaders of L.A.’s African American and Latino communities.
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There’s more. Read it!