At WitnessLA, we were very happy to learn that one of our ongoing investigative series made it into the finals of this year’s Southern California Journalism Awards, an important string of awards, which is sponsored each year by the Los Angeles Press Club.
This year, WitnessLA’s continuing investigative series, “Rosa Gonzalez, The Whistleblower,” Part 1 and Part 2, is a finalist in the category of “Investigative Reporting, Crime Related,” for “online publications.”
In our category, we are up against some tough and very deserving competition.
So we truly are happy to be a finalist.
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Regarding WLA’s entry, for those who have forgotten, here’s a reminder about what WitnessLA’s ongoing Whistleblower series contains thus far:
As most regular readers know, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department notoriously dislikes whistleblowers. In the case of Rosa Gonzalez, her whistleblower actions came with a very high cost.
Yet, Sergeant Rosa Gonzalez is exactly the kind of department member that the LASD should have treasured.
She is very smart, hardworking, emotionally stable, and wanted to be a cop ever since she was a kid. She saw the police as the hero of her neighborhood.
“I grew up in a bad environment,” she said when we talked about her childhood ambitions.
“My dad was a heroin addict. My mom had to work two jobs to make ends meet. She worked in the strawberry fields and cleaned houses for a living,” said Gonzalez.
“Growing up in that environment I grew up with a lot of shame—like I was a second class citizen,” she said.
“So for me law enforcement represented the good in society. They represented justice.”
Gonzalez resolved that she would become one of these badge-wearing icons.
In 2006, Rosa Gonzalez got her dream job when she was sworn in as a deputy sheriff in the nation’s largest sheriff’s department. All went well until she observed some serious wrongdoing in the LASD, and felt she had no choice but to say something.
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Back at the Southern California Journalism Awards, the winner of WLA’s reporting category, and a long list of other categories will be announced at the Awards Gala taking place on Sunday, June 22, at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
If you don’t attend in person, we’ll let you know how it goes.
Whatever the prize outcome, we’ll be bringing you more in the important Whistleblower series, as Gonzalez, and her civil rights attorney, Vincent Miller, prepare to take her case to court near the end of June.
So….stay tuned.