Sheriff's officials are hoping to soon have a second terrorist-fighting boat patroling the waters off L.A. County.

Its crews have secured evidence from offshore pot busts. Its advanced sonar helped locate wreckage from a mid-air plane crash off the coast three years ago.

But mostly the Ocean Rescue II spends its days scanning for a threat that its crew hopes will never appear on any law enforcement blotter: the possibility that weapons of mass destruction might be smuggled into the massive Port of Los Angeles.

“This boat essentially provides homeland security for the entire L.A.County coast,” says Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Jack Ewell, who has worked on the 55-foot-long, super-high-tech vessel since its deployment in the port three years ago.

Paid for with a $2.25 million federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security and operated by a rotating 3-man crew from the sheriff’s special enforcement bureau, the Ocean Rescue II can scan ship hulls for traces of biological, radiological, chemical and nuclear weapons and can transmit the data to onshore labs in real time. Its sonar sees threats in the murkiest waters; its remote underwater vehicle can pluck bombs from ship bottoms and retrieve evidence 3,000 feet underwater.

“It’s pretty unique,” says David Gutierrez, vice-president of manufacturing at Willard Marine in Anaheim, which custom-built the vessel for the Sheriff’s Department. “It looks like just a standard boat with a lot of bells and whistles, but it’s a very important piece of equipment at the port.”

But the combination of all that technology and salt air is an ongoing issue: “You have to keep it painted, maintain the engines—to keep a boat like that working 7 days a week requires a lot of maintenance,” Ewell says.

“It’s like a patrol car,” agrees Gutierrez. “It has to always be ready to go.”

This, Ewell says, is why the sheriff hopes to bring in a backup with the help of a $3 million federal grant won by the department last year.

“A second boat will give us the capability to rotate vessels, or to have two boats in the water at the same time,” Ewell says.

It also will add to the sheriff’s already impressive counter-terrorism arsenal, which includes a radiation-detecting helicopter and a biological- and chemical-weapon-sniffing Labrador named Johnny Ringo.

At least eight of the 34 boats in the sheriff’s department fleet are assigned to the Special Enforcement Bureau, which includes the Homeland Security Division where Ewell works. Another dozen—including an offshore vessel with nuclear detection capabilities—patrol out of Marina del Rey or Catalina Island.

Backing them up, of course, are maritime forces from the U.S. Coast Guard as well as port-stationed boats manned by the Long Beach police, the Port of Los Angeles police and other law enforcement agencies.

The stakes are high, Ewell explains.

“It’s been estimated that an incident that shut down the port here would cost theU.S.economy $2 billion a day,” he says. “Forty percent of the nation’s imports come through here, and our coastal region is heavily populated. It would devastate the region if anything were to affect the port.”

So far, Ewell says, the boat’s daily scanning hasn’t uncovered any dirty bombs. (“Believe me, you’d know it if they did.”)

But it has been put to other uses. In April 2010, for instance, the sheriff’s department used it to help secure a large cache of marijuana from an isolated cove on Catalina Island where a smuggler’s boat had been stranded.

And in 2009, when two private planes collided in mid-air off the coast of Long Beach, Ewell says, “the boat was used for two weeks straight to recover parts of the planes, and to find the victims and return the remains to their families.”

The second boat, if authorized next week by the Board of Supervisors, would similarly do double duty, Ewell says. Like Ocean Rescue II, it is expected to be equipped with advanced life support equipment, and to be set up for large-scale diver operations.

“We’ll use it on medical emergencies, criminal investigations, plane crashes,” he says. “The way budgets are these days, you have to get a lot of bang from the buck.”

Posted 1/10/12 

County officials hope that new surveillance cameras will curb deputy misconduct. Photo/AP

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, responding to mounting public criticism and an increasingly impatient Board of Supervisors, said Tuesday that the long-overdue installation of surveillance cameras in the Men’s Central Jail is finally underway and that new measures have been mandated to ensure faster investigations of alleged brutality by deputies.

“My intent …is to reduce force to the absolute barest minimum,” Baca told the supervisors as he presented a report on the department’s progress in implementing an array of reform recommendations, from banning flashlights as “impact” weapons to nabbing violent deputies through undercover sting operations. Baca said some use of force in the jails is inevitable but that he wanted to manage such situations “so that we are not the provocateurs of force.”

The flurry of action inside the department comes at a time when an independent investigative commission, created recently by the Board of Supervisors, has started to take shape. As of Tuesday, three of the five supervisors had announced their selections to the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence, all of the nominees well known figures in judicial and criminal justice circles.

They are: Lourdes G. Baird, a former U.S. attorney and retired federal judge, selected by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky; retired U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian, named by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, and Carlos R. Moreno, a former associate justice of the California Supreme Court, who was picked by Supervisor Gloria Molina. [Updated 11/3/11: Supervisor Don Knabe announced Thursday that he has selected Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell, a former LAPD Medal of Valor recipient,  as his nominee to the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence.]

Lourdes Baird, nominated to new commission.

Baca, confronting the biggest controversy of his four terms as the county’s elected sheriff, has said he supports the commission’s scrutiny. Long considered one of the nation’s most forward-thinking law enforcement officials, Baca suddenly finds himself at the center of a storm over the alleged mistreatment of inmates under his department’s supervision. The ACLU, which monitors alleged brutality within the county’s bursting jail system, has called for the sheriff’s resignation.

In a stunning public concession several weeks ago, Baca told the Los Angeles Times that his command staff had not kept him fully informed about problems within the lockup, thus slowing the implementation of reforms to curb excessive force.

“I wasn’t ignoring the jails,” Baca said, “I just didn’t know. People can say, ‘What the hell kind of leader is that?’ The truth is I should’ve known. So now I do.”

Specifically, Baca said that during a recent visit to the Men’s Central Jail, he spotted 69 video cameras still sitting in boxes in the captain’s office. They’d been purchased more than a year ago, at a cost of $157,530, to monitor inmates and deputies.

In his testimony Tuesday, Baca said that all those cameras are now up and running, along with 17 others that have been installed in the booking area of the Twin Towers jail. An additional 300 cameras were ordered last week, at a cost of $308,306, and will be installed within five months, Baca told the board members.

“The need for them was yesterday, not five months from today,” Supervisor Antonovich responded.

“This is like the third time we’ve asked for these cameras to be installed,” Molina said.

Baca explained that the high cost of installation quoted by an outside company had slowed the timetable. Now, the work is being done in-house.

Despite skeptical questioning, Baca also assured supervisors that he has put in place new policies to review cases involving severe use of force in the jails within 30 days—one of a series of reforms recommended over the years by two Sheriff’s Department watchdogs, Special Counsel Merrick Bobb and the Office of Independent Review. Both report to the Board of Supervisors.

Currently, such cases “just sit around for a long time,” Molina said. Baca insisted that his new Custody Force Response Team will be able to meet the new 30-day deadline.

“I’m confident that when we talk about this in two more months, I’ll have some data for you,” Baca said.

According to the sheriff’s report, another potential reform being considered is whether jail deputies should wear video cameras while interacting with inmates. The report said the department currently is looking at three different camera models to see how they might work in county jails.

Another longstanding reform recommendation—creation of a “two-track career path” for deputies inside and out of the jails—also remains under review. Critics have long complained that the current policy of assigning all new deputies to years of service in the jails before they’re placed on patrol duty can contribute to hostility and brutality toward inmates. The department is now working with the deputies’ union on a way to offer alternatives, said Baca’s report, which begins with this “mission” statement:

“Until all deputies feel a sense of professional accomplishment while providing sensible and constitutionally established services to those in our care, our success as a department is not accomplished.”

Posted 11/1/11

During its Tuesday meeting, the board approved a series of get-tough recommendations that call for, among other things, the installation of surveillance cameras throughout the sprawling jail system, a ban on using heavy flashlights as weapons, a mandate for medical personnel to report “suspicious” inmate injuries and a requirement for more intensive supervision.

But perhaps most ambitiously, the board created a seven-member commission to examine excessive force in the nation’s largest jail operation and provide a road map for reform.

“There are jails around the country that have had problems like ours in the past and they’ve turned themselves around,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who, with board colleague Mark Ridley-Thomas, called for the commission’s creation. “We’ve got to do that here.”

Yaroslavsky said the job involves more than promulgating new policies or rules. The commission’s most crucial and daunting role, he said, will be to determine the “fundamental issue” of how a small minority of abusive jail deputies have succeeded in “contaminating the entire culture of the institution.”

Yaroslavsky said Sheriff Lee Baca, who did not attend Tuesday’s session, supports the new Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence, whose work is certain to be closely scrutinized by inmate advocates and civil liberties groups that have long complained about—and litigated over—conditions in the county’s overcrowded lockup.

“I think he needs help,” Yaroslavsky said of the sheriff. “And he recognizes he needs help. And I think we [the supervisors] need help. There is no monopoly of wisdom or information on the board, at the Sheriff’s Department or any other place.”

In pushing for “a fresh set of eyes” to examine inmate mistreatment, Ridley-Thomas said the Sheriff’s Department cannot be asked alone to tackle unwarranted deputy violence, which has persisted despite earlier and ongoing probes.

“There is a level of insularity that will only lead to our being back here over and over again,” he predicted. “To leave it exclusively under the domain of the Sheriff’s Department is problematic.”

Each of the five supervisors will appoint one member to the new commission, which will then name two more. The Board of Supervisors has asked staff for a budget plan for the commission, with funding coming from a Sheriff’s Department account used to pay lawsuits and settlements. It’s hoped that at least some of the commission’s staff will perform the work on a “pro bono” basis.

Before the board unanimously voted to create the commission and adopt nearly a dozen recommendations in a motion by Supervisor Gloria Molina, the deputies’ union chief urged supervisors to remain open-minded.

“I’m not here to claim that we have never had, nor will ever have, any bad personnel,” said Deputy Floyd Hayhurst, a 29-year-veteran of the department and president of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, or ALADS. “We do, just like all of the professions. However, I’m here to ask you not to paint all of us with a broad brush and think we are not performing our jobs to the best of our ability with honor, dignity and respect.”

Despite years of controversy, the issue of excessive force in the jails has gained momentum in recent weeks with reports by the ACLU and in the Los Angeles Times of cases in which deputies allegedly brutalized inmates in front of civilian monitors and others who were shocked and scared by the behavior. There were also revelations of an FBI investigation into alleged jailhouse beatings.

Meanwhile, the Office of Independent Review, which monitors the Sheriff’s Department and reports to the Board of Supervisors, released a study earlier this month that turned up the public heat.

Describing the jail as a “cauldron of inmates, many with violent criminal histories,” the report said “it cannot be denied that deputies sometimes use unnecessary force against inmates in the jails, either to exact punishment or to retaliate for something the inmate is perceived to have done.” The OIR study further stated say that some deputies “get away” with these beatings because they “can craft a story of justification for the force which may be impossible to disprove.”

Among the questions the board has asked the Sheriff’s Department to explore in the weeks ahead is one that has been debated for at least two decades. That is: should the department continue its policy of requiring all new hires to start their careers in the custody division, where they can serve for years before assuming patrol duties?

Critics contend that impressionable rookies become quickly hardened by spending years in a grim environment among violent and hostile criminals. Not only do some deputies become brutal jailers, according to the critics, they end up carrying these aggressive behaviors and poisoned perceptions with them when they eventually hit the streets.

On the other side, top sheriff’s officials have long argued that custody experience prepares deputies—many of them young and naïve—in learning how to deal with gang members and other criminals as well as how to assert control without the use of a gun.

Currently, according to the department, the 3,500 deputies assigned to the jail spend an average of 3 to 5 years there. The board wants to know whether that time can be reduced and whether it’s advisable to create two separate career paths for deputies—one for custody duties, the other for patrol—an idea to which Baca has said he might be open.

Ultimately, it’s the sheriff who’ll decide what changes will be made in a department that L.A. County voters have elected him to lead. But as Supervisor Molina noted: “We do have a little bit of leverage because he has to get his budget approved by us.”

Posted 10/20/11

“Every news report, it’s the same thing, ‘troubled, troubled, troubled,” Powers was saying just the other day. “I was joking with the board that my cards will have my name, title and ‘Troubled L.A. County Probation Department.’ ”

Powers, of course, knows that reporters are unlikely to abandon the descriptive shorthand until he gives them a new story line, a daunting challenge for an agency that has, among many other things, come under intense Justice Department scrutiny for failures in its juvenile camps, severe budgeting lapses and considerable churn at the top. Powers’ predecessor is leaving after only 18 months on the job.  

“We’ve got some flaws, and some work to do,” Powers acknowledges. “That’s been well documented. But I’m convinced we can fix that. This department can be a leader in the field again.”

Powers, who’ll begin work on December 5 and earn an annual salary of $255,000, is likely to experience some culture shock, not only because of the enormity of the issues confronting the department but because of its sheer bulk.

He’ll arrive here after a well respected career in Stanislaus Countyin the northern Central Valley, where he’s been chief probation officer since 2002. There, the department’s 250 employees oversee 7,000 adults and 900 juveniles. Its budget is $25 million.

Those numbers, however, represent a fraction of what Powers will confront inLos AngelesCounty, where 6,200 staffers supervise more than 50,000 adults and 20,000 juveniles. Its budget is $716 million.

What’s more, no probation department in Californiawill feel a greater impact from the state’s new criminal justice “realignment” law, which transfers to the counties the responsibility of supervising newly-released prison inmates who’d been serving sentences for non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual crimes.

In Los Angeles County, these paroled inmates—many with prior histories of serious and violent crimes—are predicted to number 9,000 by June.

Asked how he’ll make the adjustment from a relatively small operation to such a huge one, Powers says “that’s the No. 1 question.” But he’s convinced “it’s strictly a leadership issue,” whether you’re responsible for 250 employees or 2,500. And that means “being visible, holding people accountable and putting people in the right places to succeed.”

Powers, who is president of California’s association of probation chiefs—and was a reported finalist to become Stanislaus County’s chief executive officer until taking the L.A. job—describes himself as a “collaborative” and “flexible” leader, “who’s pretty sure about what I want and what I don’t want.”

“But at the end of the day,” he says, “I’m ultimately responsible, and we’re [the staff] going to move in the same direction. And if you’re not interested in pulling in the same direction, then we’ll get people who are. The vast majority of people here do not want to work for a ‘troubled’ department. They want to be proud of who they work for and know that what they do is of value to the community.”

Posted 10/26/11

So far, it’s not an encouraging sight.

Hundreds upon hundreds of prisoner files—some woefully incomplete—are haphazardly arriving by mail, fax and Fed-Ex at Los Angeles County’s “pre-screening” hub in the Probation Department’s Alhambra field office. Eagle-eyed probation workers are uncovering mistakes, large and small, in the state records, including inmates who should be sent to other counties and others whose crimes should disqualify them entirely from the new “realignment” program.

Only late last week, after intense pressure from L.A. County, did state corrections authorities even begin sending comprehensive mental health records on ex-convicts headed here for supervision, information that’s crucial in developing treatment plans for the clients and protection for the public.

What’s also become increasingly clear in recent days is that the state has not been entirely forthcoming about the fine print of the controversial realignment plan, which is aimed at reducing prison overcrowding while slashing the state’s budget deficit.

Again and again, the governor and legislature have publicly stressed that the ex-inmates who’ll be supervised by the counties are “low-level” offenders convicted of non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual crimes. They also note that these individuals would have returned to their home counties no matter who was responsible for their oversight. But that’s not the whole story, as L.A. County officials are quickly learning.

These same felons could—and sometimes do—have prior cases involving very serious crimes. Under the realignment law, AB 109, only the most recent conviction, or “commitment offense,” is considered in determining whether inmates will be supervised by counties or state parole agents after their release.

Take, for example, one inmate who was scheduled to be freed on Wednesday and has been ordered to report to L.A.County for post-release supervision. He was serving time for second-degree commercial burglary, attempted grand theft of personal property, forgery and identity theft—all non-serious, non-violent crimes under the penal code. But over the previous decade, he had more than a dozen arrests or convictions for a slew of serious and violent crimes, including assault with a deadly weapon, robbery and terrorist threats.

“We’re literally seeing every criminal record you could think of,” says Richard Giron of the Probation Department, who’s in charge of the pre-screening center in Alhambra, where nearly 2,000 files have been received. “We’re seeing prior violence, prior sex offenses—the full range of minimal criminal records to extensive, serious records.”

Giron says his staff is flagging such individuals for heightened supervision as part of the case plans developed when inmates arrive at other hubs throughout the region for face-to-face interviews.

Reaver Bingham, the Probation Department’s deputy chief of adult services and juvenile placement, called some of the county’s new charges “very hard core” but insisted that his agency is trained and prepared to deal with them. “This population is not unfamiliar to us,” he said, noting that the department currently supervises 15,000 adults with histories of serious and violent crimes.

In recent weeks, as AB 109’s October 1 implementation date drew near, concerns about public safety took center stage, with the harshest warnings coming from Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley. He predicted that crime rates would soar not only because of the freed inmates who’ll be under county supervision but because, under the law, defendants convicted of non-violent, non-serious crimes will now be sentenced to county jail rather than state prison. He and others argue that this will lead to even greater jail overcrowding and more inmates being released early by the Sheriff’s Department, which manages the sprawling system.

In the Alhambra screening center, Giron and his hand-picked team understand the high stakes for public safety and are determined to make sure no inmate is erroneously placed under the county’s jurisdiction. His 11 deputy probation officers and two supervisors scour every document the state sends and then comb criminal databases, as well as court records, for additional information on each of the inmates scheduled for release.

In the process, Giron says, his staff has uncovered mistakes that have given county officials ammunition to keep dozens of inmates from falling under probation’s purview.

“I’m doing everything I can in my power to reject cases that are inappropriate for supervision in L.A. County,” Giron says. Those cases have included an inmate who’d been serving time for molesting a child under the age of 14, a prisoner convicted of a serious extortion attempt and yet another who was described by the state’s own prison board as not safe to be released.

On Wednesday morning, Deputy Probation Officer Deanna English, a 22-year veteran of the department, found yet another, using the scant information contained in the state’s own file as a springboard.

Corrections officials had determined that a 20-year-old inmate at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco was eligible for county supervision because, according to a release form, he was serving time for a second degree burglary. But that was wrong. Contained within the file itself was the notation that he’d been sentenced for a robbery, a serious crime that would exempt him from the realignment program. English says she then checked the actual court record, which confirmed the robbery conviction.

“Honestly speaking, I thought they were trying to pull one over on us,” she says of corrections officials. “Their thing is to get as many [inmates] out of the state system as they can.” English says she feels “a high sense of duty” to thoroughly vet every file.

Making the job even more challenging for the Alhambra crew is the fact that the state has no centralized point of contact. The county is receiving files from 33 separate prisons. And those files are not being sent based on the chronological release dates of inmates, dates that seem to be constantly shifting.

Just the other day, as Giron talked with a visitor from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s office, another probation supervisor, Al Montellano, walked up with a handful of documents fresh off the fax. They stated that eight inmates scheduled for release on December 4 will now be freed on October 23, meaning that the time-consuming review of their cases will have to be rushed into the mix, putting others on hold.

“That,” Giron says with a hint of understatement, “is operationally inefficient.”

Progress finally has been achieved, however, in one of the most crucial facets of the screening process—determining the mental health status and needs for the estimated 20 percent of inmates coming to the county who’ll need some level of treatment.

For months, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, a key player in the realignment process, had been stymied in its efforts to obtain comprehensive treatment records for inmates. The information provided by the state was simply a notation that mental health services had been delivered in prison.

“We were getting promises and assertions that were not true,” says Dr. Marvin Southard, director of mental health. “It was very frustrating.”

Among other things, Southard says his department was directed to dial an information number on the inmate forms. “If you call that number, you get a correctional counselor—the cell-block staff person—but they have no access to the medical records,” Southard says.

Further, according to Southard, his staff was told that they’d have to individually contact each of the state’s 33 prisons for information, which would consume crucial time in learning an inmate’s needs and creating a treatment plan.

The issue reached a boiling point two weeks ago when the Board of Supervisors voted to send a stern letter to Gov. Jerry Brown. In it, they warned that, unless the necessary information was forthcoming, “we will not accept parolees with mental health issues.”

“After that, everything changed,” Southard says, noting that a centralized system was developed by California’s corrections officials. “The governor’s staff promised that we’d get the records we need.”

Still, even if the county manages to overcome all these logistical challenges, there’s still the overarching question of whether the state will provide the money necessary to make it all work today and in the future.

“This has been my concern from Day One,” says Supervisor Yaroslavsky. “We’ve been asked to take a leap of faith that the reimbursement is adequate to meet our responsibilities. You can’t blame us for being skeptical, especially given the problems that have emerged in the opening days of this program. Even though the governor has assured us he will make us whole, it’s not entirely up to him and that makes me nervous.”

Posted 10/6/11

In his 30^th semi-annual report to the Board of Supervisors, Special Counsel Merrick Bobb also expressed “deep concerns” about the consistently high numbers of shootings in the department’s Century Station, where a large percentage of deputies have been involved in multiple shootings and where many, he says, have fallen behind in the department’s mandated training.

Moreover, Bobb was sharply critical of the department’s record-keeping. He disclosed that data on shootings is “missing, inaccurate, lost, or lacking in basic internal integrity.” This, he said, undermines the department’s ability to thoroughly track and analyze the use of deadly force, an issue that carries with it powerful community emotions and potent financial risks for the county.

Sheriff Lee Baca had no immediate comment. But department executives, who were shown a copy of Bobb’s report last week, questioned some of its methodologies, assumptions and conclusions—especially those involving race. In some cases, they say, the report relies on dated information from the 2000 U.S. Census. They also expressed concerns that reporters might take some of the report’s sharply worded statements out of context.

As a result, Bobb agreed to include with his report a five-page “transmittal letter” addressed to Baca. In it, Bobb reiterates his findings but stresses that he is not contending that any shootings were racially motivated.

“Your staff has expressed concern that the media might misinterpret this report because of its frank discussion of the race and ethnicity of persons shot by the LASD,” Bobb wrote. “It would be a serious error for anyone to conclude from this report that LASD deputies intentionally shot any individual because that individual was black or Latino.”

He added: “The LASD’s beef should be directed more at the media than at the messenger.”

Bobb’s report examines hit-and-miss shootings between 1996 and 2010, a 15-year span during which 178 persons were killed by sheriff personnel and 204 were wounded. For the most part, however, he focuses on the past six years.

Although the numbers cited in the report are not large enough for formal statistical conclusions, Bobb and his staff reached their findings on racial breakdowns by, among other things, comparing shootings with overall arrest rates. By this measure, the report argues, Latinos are “overrepresented,” meaning that they are fired upon more often than other races when compared to their arrest rates. White individuals, the report says, are “underrepresented.”

“This disproportion is particularly stark,” Bobb writes, “in the year 2007, when a full 72 percent of all shootings Department-wide involved Latinos. Shootings of African Americans by LASD personnel appeared more proportionate to the overall arrest rate than that of other groups.”

The report also breaks down the race of the deputies involved in the shootings; 47 percent were Latino, 42 percent were white, 7 percent were black and 2 percent were Asian American or Filipino.

Bobb says one of the study’s most troubling findings involved a spike last year in so-called “state of mind” or “perception” shootings, those in which a deputy believes, accurately or not, that a suspect is armed or is reaching for a weapon. In 2010, these increased by 50 percent, from 9 to 15, according to the report. Of these, 8 suspects were wounded.

None of these 15 individuals were later confirmed to be carrying a firearm, though some may have had time to dispose of one before their apprehension. In these “state of mind” shootings, Latinos and blacks also were disproportionately represented, according to Bobb.

“It goes without saying that such incidents, particularly where the victim turns out to be unarmed, carry the potential for great tragedy,” the report states. “They also present a risk of significant liability to the County and may make the work of LASD deputies more difficult by fomenting distrust among the population they serve.”

Bobb’s report calls on the department to reevaluate and improve its training, while doing a better job of collecting data to track and reduce such shootings.

Bobb also urged the sheriff’s officials to scrutinize the reasons behind the Century Station’s consistently high number of shootings—nearly double the number at the department’s next busiest station, Lennox. Century is based in Lynwood and includes some of the region’s most active gang neighborhoods, including the Florence-Firestone area.

Although it would be expected that a station like Century would have more shootings, Bobb says the number has remained high even as homicide and violent crime rates have fallen, a trend that he argues should lead to fewer cases of deadly force.

He said that 56 percent of all shootings at Century, involved a deputy who’d been involved in an earlier incident. Deputies there also had “relatively poor results” in attending annual or bi-annual refresher “shoot/don’t shoot” training. (Deputies do, however, engage in other shooting scenarios at the practice range.)

“We urge the department,” the report says, “to focus intensely on Century and its performance in this area.”

Posted 9/22/11

Updated 9/22, 6 p.m.:

Late today, Sheriff’s Department officials released a 26-page response to the Bobb report, mostly reiterating earlier complaints they had voiced with the special counsel.

Specifically, the department challenged Bobb’s “flawed analysis” in which he used comparative arrest statistics to conclude that Latinos and blacks were more likely to be the targets of lethal force than other races. The department said that Bobb used countywide arrest statistics, not those that would specifically account for the kind of violence and weapons deputies confront daily in gang-plagued areas.

The department also criticized Bobb for relying on outdated, 2000 Census information. During the past 10 years, according to the department’s response, the Latino population within the sheriff’s territory has increased 21%, further skewing Bobb’s analysis.

As for “state of mind” shootings, the department acknowledged that, in 2010, deputies fired at 15 unarmed people, hitting 8 of them. But the department said that “all of them involve suspects who were engaging in activity that was criminal in nature, non-compliant or both.”

Department officials also took issue with Bobb’s contention that many deputies were not complying with departmental training mandates that would help them determine when—and when not—to shoot. They said this training could be fulfilled through various courses, not just the one identified by the special counsel.

The department did agree that elements of its data collection could and will be improved.

To read the sheriff’s complete response, click here.

“It was OK,” he recalls with a laugh in his French-accented English. “You do not have snow in Los Angeles, but you have a lot of the winter decoration. One time in each four or five years, it is not so bad.”

For the past 18 years, an elite band of French-Canadian pilots and mechanics has left the Quebec backcountry to spend their autumns—and occasionally their winters—fighting fires in Los Angeles.

Fresh from their own wildfire season, they board two Bombardier CL-415 Super Scoopers leased from the government of Quebec by Los Angeles County. In the bright fixed-wing aircraft, which fly much lower and slower than commercial jet planes, they make the long trip south and west to the land of sunshine, celebrities and Santa Anas.

Once here, they check into the Burbank Holiday Inn—”our Hollywood house,” as Proulx jokingly calls it. Some meet wives and children. Some unpack sports equipment. Some pull out fiddles and guitars and hold Acadian jam sessions in their hotel rooms.

Then they get down to some of the most dangerous work on either side of the nation’s northern border.

“It’s really a unique situation, ” says Battalion Chief Anthony Marrone, who for the past seven years has acted as the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s liaison with the fliers from Canada’s Service Aérien Gouvernemental.

“They come here to risk their lives for people they don’t know, for a place that isn’t their country, for a job in which they’re not making a ton of money. But over the years, they’ve really become a part of our firefighting family.”

The famed Super Scoopers, which over the years have become a red-and-yellow icon of Southern California’s fire season, skim water from local lakes and the ocean and airdrop it onto wildfires. Los Angeles County has leased two of the sturdy aircraft during fire season annually since 1994, a year after the Old Topanga Fire killed three people and destroyed hundreds of homes in Topanga, Malibu and Calabasas. Each plane can pull in 1,620 gallons in 12 seconds, dump it and circle back at more than 170 miles an hour.

Marrone says the Super Scoopers cost the county about $2.75 million each fire season, which typically runs for 90 to 120 days, from September into December.

That price includes the pilots and their support crews, who work in 11-man rotations—four captains, four copilots and three mechanics. Each group stays for about a month, working out of the county’s air tanker base at the Van Nuys Airport, before a new group arrives via commercial airlines.

Over the years, the crews have been summoned to nearly every major fire in the county, particularly since the devastating 2009 Station Fire, when the U.S. Forest Service, which was managing the blaze, was criticized for not deploying more air power. The fire, the largest in county history, claimed the lives of two Los Angeles County firefighters while burning more than 160,000 acres and destroying some 200 homes and other buildings.

Since their arrival September 1, the planes and their crews have helped extinguish blazes in Newhall, Agua Dulce and Mandeville Canyon, among other hotspots.

“They’ve been there in Malibu, in the Buckweed Fire in Santa Clarita, in La Cañada Flintridge, in Diamond Bar and Palos Verdes, in Calabasas—everywhere,” says Marrone. “I was the helicopter coordinator on the Marek Fire in 2008 and they were out there long after any other air tanker would have had to turn back.”

The pilots downplay the danger.

“Sometimes we get bounced around when the Santa Ana winds pick up and we’re in the canyons, but mostly it is business as usual,” says Proulx, 46, who has been coming to L.A. since 2001. “We fly an aircraft that performs well in that kind of situation. When you’re using the right tool, it’s like driving a rig—it’s just a job.”

“We manage the risk carefully,” agrees chief pilot Villeneuve, who spent 11 years as a Canadian bush pilot before signing on with the Service Aérien Gouvernemental 15 years ago.

The biggest challenge, they say, is to keep track of all the moving parts of an urban fire scene. The wilderness of Quebec has its pitfalls, but news choppers and power lines and dolphins leaping in and out of the waves don’t tend to be among them. Nor do subdivisions and milling crowds.

In Canada, Proulx says, their work mostly involves dipping into remote lakes to put out forest fires. But L.A. “looks like Legoland from the sky—I don’t know the English word for it, but the city goes on and on forever and ever. When we drop the water, we’re about 75 to 100 feet above the ground and we can see the people waving and all that. Sometimes we can see the firefighters’ faces down there.”

In fact, Monette says, one of his most vivid experiences here was in 1999 during his first L.A. fire season, when he looked down from the cockpit and realized for the first time just how high the human stakes would be on this job.

“The fires were so close to the people and the cities—it made me feel that to miss just one drop would be awful,” remembers the veteran pilot. Now 46 and the father of two teenagers in Quebec City, Monette has volunteered for the Los Angeles County contract at least a dozen times since that initial flight.

For the Canadians, the L.A. rotation is more than just a chance to hone their job skills. It’s also an opportunity to create a traveling hybrid of north-south culture. Some, like avionics technician Jean Larocque, go mountain climbing in their off hours. Eric Tremblay, 45 and on his first stint here, went to Lake Arrowhead during some time off last weekend. Jean-David St.-Laurent, a 37-year-old serving his second year in L.A., says he has taken to starting each day with a brisk 2-hour hike through the chaparral in Wildwood Canyon Park, near the hotel.

Monette is drawn to the beaches when he manages to get a day off; over the years, he says, he has acquired two surfboards. He also has worked on his communication skills. “I was surprised when I came here that everything was more or less in Spanish, not English, so I learned the language,” he recalls.

Coming to California, he says, “was a dream, since I was a little boy—this place is so associated with freedom, the California way of life.” The reality is, of course, more complex, he has since decided. “How free are you, really,” he asks, “when your way of living turns out to be an eternal rush hour?”

Proulx, whose rotation starts in October, plans to find an amateur hockey game as soon as he gets here, a habit he developed after he hooked up with an organization for Quebec expatriates online. “This year, I’m thinking about Burbank—I’ve already played in Simi Valley and Van Nuys.”

And, he adds, he’ll be bringing his fiddle.

“Another guy brings his guitar, and sometimes in the evenings, we have a few beers and play music until the bursar from the hotel comes and tells us to lower the noise.

“We play funny songs, dirty songs…My favorite one is called in English, ‘You’ve Broken the Chain on my Tractor.’ Hey, you got to do something besides just wait for fires.”

But the best part of coming to L.A., they say, is the chance to be of assistance.

Each year, they are touched by the grateful fan mail they receive. Once, they were feted by Topanga homeowners; another time, a classroom of schoolchildren drew them a packet of pictures.

And the Canadians have a secret: L.A. brushfires die more readily than Quebec’s tree-fueled conflagrations, especially with fire operations as well-run as those here.

“In Canada, we can be working on a fire for days and days and you can almost never see the end of it,” Proulx says. “But in L.A., you take off and see that big smoke, and every time, we know we’re going to go work hard and fight hard, but we got a good chance to win.”

Posted 9/14/11

For years, when Los Angeles County has needed help rescuing animals in peril, local municipalities and nonprofit animal welfare societies have willingly pitched in. The system has had just one problem, says county Directorof Animal Care and Control Marcia Mayeda: It hasn’t been official.

Now that situation is about to change, thanks to a mutual assistance agreement that spells out the framework under which the county and animal welfare groups will cooperate.

“No one has ever had a problem,” says Mayeda, “but over time, we began to realize that signing a formal Memorandum of Understanding might be good.” Although local agencies always responded gladly, she says, disasters elsewhere made it clear that potential liability questions and lines of communication could be clarified and federal reimbursement could be streamlined if a formal agreement were put in place.

This week, to the relief of Southern Californians of many species, the Board of Supervisors set the process in motion, approving an MOU with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles.

Mayeda says the agreement, which lays out general lines of authority and resource sharing between the county and spcaLA, will help local officials respond to disasters more efficiently. Over time, she says, the department will ask other animal services agencies to sign on; the MOU can be expanded to include various humane societies and local animal control offices as co-signatories in times of need.

“There are about a dozen agencies like this that we’ve worked with in L.A.County,” she says. Cooperation is crucial, she says, because “a disaster or emergency knows no boundaries.”

“There aren’t a lot of us in the world who spend our time being concerned about the welfare of animals,” says Madeline Bernstein, executive director of spcaLA. “So we can get a lot more done when we help each other out in mutual aid.”

Bernstein says spcaLA has teamed up with the county informally on many occasions, manning shelters when county workers were out doing rescues, rounding up and dispersing food at pet evacuation centers, even joining forces with county investigators to help prosecute cases of animal cruelty.

During the Station Fire, she says, spcaLA helped the county feed and house countless animals who were rendered homeless by the conflagration near the Angeles National Forest.

“We had dogs, cats, birds, a very large pig, a llama they were trying to pull to safety,” she remembered. “A buffalo who was someone’s pet. We evacuated part of the Wildlife Way Station in conjunction with the county. In a disaster, there are all sorts of animals other than the ones you’d expect.”

Bernstein says Hurricane Katrina and other recent natural disasters spurred the move toward formalization.

“After Katrina, when we could see that people were choosing not to evacuate rather than to leave pets behind, it became clearer that a disaster plan should include animals,” she says.

“We have done exactly this forever,” says Bernstein. “This just puts forth a more organized face.”

Posted 9/21/11

Under the new contract with Public Communications Services Inc., the county’s share of revenue for the Inmate Welfare Fund will rise to 67.5%, with a guaranteed annual minimum of $15 million. That’s a 30% increase over the $10 million or so that was generated for the fund last year.

Meanwhile, the price of a collect call from jail will be cut from $3.54 to $1.25 for the first minute, with a 15-cent-per-minute charge thereafter. The price of a 17-minute phone call will fall 30% to about $3.65.

“This is a win-win,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who congratulated Sheriff Lee Baca for changing direction three years ago after the Board unanimously denied the department’s request to extend the contract with the current vendor, Global Tel*Link, and insisted that it be put out to competitive bid.

“It wasn’t your original path forward, but once it became the Board’s path forward, you did it with zeal, and I think the results are spectacular.”

PCS was the top scoring bidder among four who were vying for the contract, including the current vendor, GTL. Shortly after PCS submitted its winning bid, the company, then headquartered in Los Angeles, was acquired by GTL, which in the past year or so has acquired at least one other rival and has announced plans to acquire at least two more.

The terms of PCS’ bid are binding regardless of the change of ownership, according to the contract approved by supervisors on Tuesday.

The new contract, which takes effect in November, will cut the price of calls to public defenders via a special speed-dial number to a flat 12 cents per minute. Families of international callers will be charged a 50-cent connection fee in addition to the cost of the call, which will vary according to the country.

Calls to Mexico, for instance, will cost 50 cents to connect plus 50 cents per minute thereafter and calls to El Salvador and Guatemala will cost 50 cents plus 95 cents per minute; calls to most other countries will cost $1.25 per minute after the connection fee.

Sheriff’s officials told the board that the contract will cover some 5,800 phones in the jail and probation system—one of the largest public phone systems in the state.

Posted 9/20/11

A proposed change of vendors, outlined in a letter to the Board of Supervisors from Sheriff Lee Baca and Chief Probation Officer Donald Blevins, would cut rates for an average phone call from the county lockup by about 30% while adding millions in guaranteed annual funding for key inmate programs and jail maintenance.

Tentatively scheduled for consideration by the board on September 20, the recommendation to hire Public Communications Services, Inc., is the result of a competitive bidding process urged by critics, including Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who complained that families were paying too much for jail phone calls and that the county was receiving too little in the existing contract’s revenue sharing provisions.

“My argument from Day One has been that if the rates were less burdensome on inmates families who were being overcharged, then more calls would be made and more money would be generated for the Sheriff’s Department,” Yaroslavsky said. “Now we have a proposal in place that hopefully will achieve those objectives.”

The price of phone calls from county jails has been controversial. Studies show that maintaining close contact with families via phone, correspondence and visits, can reduce recidivism among inmates and improve their chances of a successful reentry into society.

High phone rates deter that crucial communication. But they can also indirectly benefit inmates because, by law, the county’s portion of revenues from jail phones must go into special Inmate Welfare Funds that underwrite educational, recreational and other projects that are geared to them.

Debate over the rates charged to Los Angeles County jail phone users dates back several years to early preparations for the renewal of the current contract, which is held by Global Tel*Link Corp., a private, Alabama-based company that provides jail and prison phone systems nationally.

GTL had offered a $3.5 million fee to the county in exchange for a contract extension. The sheriff, meanwhile, argued against opening the contract to competitive bidding, saying that it might damage the department’s revenue stream.

But the supervisors and County CEO William T Fujioka insisted that putting the contract out to bid would be the best way to lower prices and maintain funding.

“I’m absolutely convinced, you put this out on the street, we’re going to get a more competitive contract,” Fujioka told Supervisors in 2008. Ultimately, in the fall of 2009, a competitive process was undertaken, leading to the new proposal.

The push for more competitive rates comes amid a shrinking competitive landscape. In fact, the winning bidder, PCS, was acquired by GTL three months after the bidding closed. GTL is among the larger firms in the prison telecommunications sector; PCS, whose customers include the Michigan Department of Corrections, was its Los Angeles-based rival.

Earlier in 2010, GTL acquired another competitor, Digital Solutions Inc., and has announced plans to acquire at least two more this year, Conversant Technologies Inc. and Value-Added Communications.

Unlike phone contracts that govern the rates of residential users, jail phone pacts have had little regulation, allowing a handful of specialized service providers to charge whatever the market will bear.

Such high prices allow carriers to offer counties lucrative revenue sharing arrangements on contracts that, in Los Angeles County’s case, have typically amounted to millions of dollars a year.

But the situation has had its downsides. Families of inmates—many of whom are among the poorest people in the county—have borne some of the highest phone rates in California at a time when the price of phone service in even far-flung places has been slashed by technology.

Under the county’s current contract, GTL charges families of Los Angeles County jail inmates $3.54 for the first minute of a collect call—more than almost every other county jail in Southern California and about seven times the price of a 50-cent pay phone call. The Sheriff’s Department gets 52% of the revenue generated by the roughly 5,400 phones in the county’s jail system—a split that last year generated about $10 million for the county’s Inmate Welfare Fund.

In contrast, the 5-year PCS plan would cut the first-minute rate to $1.25, with a 15-cent-per-minute charge thereafter. The cost for an average 17-minute inmate phone call would fall from about $5.20 to around $3.65. The new contract also would increase the county’s share of revenue to 67.5 percent, with a guaranteed minimum of $15 million annually for the Inmate Welfare Fund and $59,000 for the county’s Probation Department.

Lt. Ronald E. Gilbert of the Sheriff’s Inmate Services Bureau said PCS was one of four bidders whose names will become a matter of public record after the supervisors’ upcoming vote.

Gilbert said PCS submitted its proposal before bidding was closed in August, 2010, three months before its acquisition by GTL. The terms of PCS’ bid would be binding, despite the change in ownership, Gilbert said, adding: “They’re still their own entity. As far as the contract is concerned, we’re dealing with them as PCS.”

Gilbert said the proposal’s guaranteed revenue is especially welcome in a time of constricted state funding. In recent years, Gilbert said, the county’s share of money has dropped as steep budget cuts have prompted the release of thousands of inmates from overcrowded jails while the tough economy has forced families to limit phone time with those who remain incarcerated. Gilbert predicted that the lower prices would likely increase inmate calls, which during the first six months of this year numbered 2.4 million.

“It generates a more stable income stream for the Inmate Welfare Fund, and it benefits the inmate and family population,” he said. “Everybody seems to win on this deal.”

Posted 9/8/11