Top Story: Public Safety

A boatload of homeland security

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 

Jail cameras now rolling, sheriff says

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.]

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

 

Cracking down on jail beatings

A united Board of Supervisors sent a strong message to the Sheriff’s Department this week that it will not tolerate brutality in the county’s jails, insisting that such conduct by deputies not only undermines the constitutional rights of inmates but also shatters public confidence in the wider law enforcement community.

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

Deadly force by deputies targeted [updated]

A study released Thursday takes aim at shootings by deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, concluding that Latinos and blacks are shot in disproportionately higher numbers when compared to their arrest rates and that an unusually large number of unarmed individuals were fired upon last year.

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.

Ready or not, here they come

With the clock ticking, a multi-agency panel in Los Angeles County has approved a plan to confront a “monumental” shift in California’s criminal justice system, one that forces the county to supervise thousands of newly released state inmates and incarcerate thousands more in its strained jail system.

Passage of the complex plan by the Community Corrections Partnership was required under a new state “realignment” law pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown and aimed at reducing California’s prison population while narrowing the state’s budget deficit. On Tuesday, the CCP’s plan goes before the Board of Supervisors, where it can only be rejected by a 4/5 vote.

Supervisors had lobbied hard against the state’s realignment law. They argued that Brown and the legislature were simply shifting the state’s burdens to California’s hard-pressed counties, with little regard for the financial implications or public safety risks. In fact, the state has committed to funding only the first year with a $112-million block grant and $8 million in start-up funds.

“This is going to be a tragedy for justice in our county,” CCP member Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Wednesday before casting the sole vote against the realignment implementation plan. “It’s predictable, it’s inevitable.”

The reality is that not even a unanimous rejection of the plan would have blocked or delayed implementation of the new law, known as AB 109.

Beginning October 1, the first flow of newly released state prisoners will begin arriving here and in counties across the state, where they’ll be supervised by local authorities rather than state parole officers. Under the state’s realignment program, only inmates convicted of non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenses will be placed under county supervision.

In Los Angeles County, that number is expected to hit 9,000 by June, swelling to as many as 15,000 in the second year. Taking the lead in their post-release supervision will be the county’s Probation Department, despite a highly publicized and contentious bid by Sheriff Lee Baca to assume that role.

Already, inmate files have begun arriving for pre-release review by probation, mental health and other designated officials. The goal is to make sure each parolee is provided with the necessary oversight and programs for rehabilitation. The process also is intended to weed out inmates who should have been exempted from the program because of serious or violent criminal histories or because they’d been earlier designated by corrections officials as “mentally disordered offenders.”

Inmates participating in “post-release community supervision,” who’ll be freed from 33 state prison locations, will be given $200, with orders to report to their designated locations within two business days. Despite the expressed fears of the Sheriff’s Department, the state says that only 2% of this type of inmate population has historically failed to show up for parole orientations within five days of their scheduled appearances.

Once they arrive at their assigned locations, a more thorough evaluation will take place, including risk assessments and “behavioral health screening.” Each supervised person will receive a “risk level determination” of Tier I (high), Tier II (medium) and Tier III (low).

Community-based organizations will be tapped to provide such services as substance abuse treatment, job training and other assessed needs. In the short term, because of time constraints, only organizations with existing county contracts will provide services. But longer term, the county will soon request proposals so more organizations can participate and specific service gaps can be filled.

One of the trickiest elements of the plan—described as a work in progress—will be to determine the precise mental health histories and needs of the new charges. Initial prisoner packets will include no detailed medical information. Talks are underway with state corrections officials to provide mental health records directly to the county’s Department of Mental Health but cost and confidentiality issues have yet to be resolved.

Post-release supervision represents just one component of the realignment challenges. The bill’s most controversial and daunting requirement changes the very nature of California’s county jails and, according to some criminal justice officials, poses the highest potential risk to public safety.

Under the legislation, defendants convicted of non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual crimes will no longer be sentenced to state prison unless they have prior violent or serious convictions or are required to register as sex offenders. Beginning in October, this class of defendants will be serving their time in county jail at an estimated rate of 7,000 a year. That means Sheriff Baca will have to further juggle and prioritize who stays behind bars and who’s freed on work release, GPS monitoring or other “community based alternatives.” Thousands of more beds, depending on funding, also would have to be opened at various jail facilities.

District attorney officials and others worry that, because of overcrowding, this new class of inmate will inevitably be sprung early and end up back on the streets, committing crimes at a time when, in the past, they’d be sitting in state prison cells.

In a section of the CCP implementation report titled “jail population management,” the authors state that the wholesale transfer of such responsibilities from the state to Los Angeles County “is monumental and will not only mark a challenge for the Sheriff’s Department but also the District Attorney, the Public Defender, the Probation Department, the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Health Services, the Superior Court, and all municipalities.”

But there are others who say they’re ready and anxious for the opportunity to help the returning inmates get fresh starts. For the past two months, representatives of community and faith-based groups have shown up at CCP meetings, where they’ve urged that a greater emphasis in the discussions be placed on rehabilitation rather than incarceration. And Wednesday was no exception.

As one speaker put it: “Let’s take a mess and turn it into a blessing.”

Posted 8/26/11

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