by Taylor Walker
ANOTHER TRAGIC MURDER, ANOTHER 14-YEAR-OLD KID TRIED AS AN ADULT?
Los Angeles prosecutors plan to request that the 14-year-old who allegedly shot and killed his ICE agent father be tried as an adult. What is called a “fitness” hearing to determine whether the boy should be appropriately held to answer in an adult criminal justice system, will be held May 21st.
Parricide expert, Prof. Kathleen Heide, from the Dept. of Criminology at University of South Florida and Laurie Levenson, from at Loyola Law School, both weighed in on the issue on Larry Mantle’s Air Talk on KPCC.
IS LAPD CHIEF CHARLIE BECK PULLING PUNCHES ON POLICE DISCIPLINE? THE POLICE COMMISSION SAYS YES
The Los Angeles Police Commission opposed LAPD Chief Beck’s determination that Det. Arthur Gamboa operated within department regulations when he fatally shot a man in the back during a ruined drug bust. The Commission deemed Gamboa’s testimony and the evidence incongruent and added to their concern that Beck is not taking officer discipline seriously.
LA Times’ Joel Rubin has the story. Here’s a clip:
When the members of the Los Angeles Police Commission met behind closed doors last month to decide if a cop had been right to kill Dale Garrett, the two bullets in Garrett’s back raised serious concerns.
Det. Arthur Gamboa had insisted that Garrett left him no choice but to shoot when he pulled a knife and threatened to kill the detective during a botched drug bust. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and the commission’s own watchdog agreed, recommending the oversight board find that Gamboa’s decision to open fire was within department rules.
But for a majority of the five-person commission, errors and inconsistencies in Gamboa’s account, along with the fact that he shot Garrett in the back, could not be ignored. In a divided vote, the commission concluded the detective was not believable. The shooting, the panel ruled, violated the LAPD’s policy on when officers are justified in using lethal force.
With that decision, the shooting became the latest in a series of incidents in which Beck and his civilian bosses disagree on whether an officer’s decision to use deadly force was appropriate. These cases have given rise to a rare vein of tension between the chief and commissioners, who otherwise have heaped praise on Beck since he took over the department 2 1/2 years ago.
TO CLOSE OR NOT TO CLOSE CALIFORNIA’S LAST PRISONS FOR KIDS.
Barry Krisberg, Director of Research and Policy at UC Berkeley’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute has changed his stance on the Department of Juvenile Justice in the face of realignment to the county level, which he said would be far less capable of taking care of the most serious juvenile offenders.
Moreover, while the “realignment” strategy has saved some money, asthe DJJ population has been significantly reduced, the spending per kid has remained relatively unaffected due to inflexible union contracts and other expenses that seeme immune to cost cutting, even as the inmate population fell to a tenth of it what it once was.
KALW’s Sayre Quevedo interviewed Krisberg. Here’s a clip from what Dr. Krisberg had to say:
…For the thirty years I’ve been a critic of the California Youth Authority and the conditions of confinement and the problems there. But two things have changed in this situation. One is that the population is now only 10 percent of what it used to be. Many of the youth that we were advocating to get out of DJJ, are now out and in county programs and that’s gone generally pretty well. Now we’re down to a very small core of very troubled young people and so I think that people need to pay attention to the fact that these are not the youth who have been in the system in the past.
The second issue is that in the last eight years there have been significant improvements made—not enough, not as much as I would like. But one of the problems is that at the county level they’re at ground zero. My concern is that we’ve worked hard, we’ve developed policy and procedure, we’ve improved education and medical care, we’ve cut down on the use of force and isolation but at the county level they’ve done nothing. So it’d be going back to where we were eight years ago, very harsh conditions, very harsh practices, and having to start all over again.