July 2014 – Zev Yaroslavsky

Jail alternatives gain momentum

July 31, 2014 No Comments

Thousands of mentally ill inmates are in L.A. County jail cells, making succesful treatment unlikely.

In recent months, a single word has dominated Los Angeles’ criminal justice debate, one that’s positioned the county’s top prosecutor as a champion of reform and consumed meetings of the Board of Supervisors, including this week. The word: diversion.

District Atty. Jackie Lacey, in her first term, is at the forefront of a growing, multi-jurisdictional initiative to provide community-based diversion to thousands of county inmates who suffer from mental illness and can’t be effectively treated behind bars. This, she argues, creates a cycle of recidivism that’s harmful to the individual and that ripples through society. Lacey is expected to present her recommendations in September to the supervisors, who’ve also been confronting the diversion issue.

In early June, the U.S. Department of Justice, noting a rise in jail suicides, criticized the county’s handling of mentally ill inmates and said it was prepared to seek federal court oversight of the lock-up, which is operated by the Sheriff’s Department. But the agency made a point of praising the county for its recent efforts to explore diversion for low-risk offenders.

Diversion also played a key role in the board’s recent debate to raze the old Men’s Central Jail and build a new one designed to double as a treatment facility for inmates with mental health needs. At a cost of at least $2 billion, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky cast the only dissenting vote, arguing that community-based diversion programs should have been fully explored before the county committed to its most expensive construction project ever.

On Tuesday, the board again tackled the topic—this time debating a motion by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas to, among other things, commit $20 million for a “coordinated and comprehensive” diversion program for mentally ill inmates. The board, he argued in his motion, “needs to demonstrate its financial commitment to diversion.”

Although supervisors expressed strong support for placing low-risk mentally ill inmates in community-based diversion programs, the majority 0pposed earmarking money without a spending plan. The better way, they said, was to see what Lacey recommends and then consider the funding during the board’s late September budget process.

“We would be making a huge mistake just throwing money at it and saying: ‘Look at us. Aren’t we great at diversion?’” said Supervisor Gloria Molina. “We need to be thoughtful. We need to have a plan.”

Supervisor Yaroslavsky said that nearly a decade ago, the county set aside tens of millions of dollars to combat homelessness. But like now, he said, there was no blueprint for spending it. “We were so excited to have the money to set aside,” he said, “we forgot to develop a plan. And so we shouldn’t make that mistake a second time.”

“We need to have a road map,” Yaroslavsky continued. “I have confidence that under the leadership of the district attorney, with the participation of all of us, we can develop something like that.”

The board voted to consider the motion’s funding element during supplemental budget deliberations in late September.

Posted 7/31/14

Art is the next big thing

July 24, 2014 No Comments

“Nighthawks,” from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, will be seen in L.A. and nationwide.

Edward Hopper’s moody “Nighthawks” will be having their after-hours cups of java on a wall in San Francisco—and at 18 feet high by 50 feet wide, they’ll be hard to miss.

Grant Wood’s dour duo from “American Gothic” will be living large on the staircase of New York’s Port Authority.

And here in L.A., rush hour traffic will be getting a jolt of cultural uplift as buses rumble by wrapped in iconic works like Ed Ruscha’s “Hollywood.”

Just like millions of vacationers, American art is hitting the road this summer.

Starting August 4, 58 masterpieces will be breaking out of five major museums and onto the streets. The exhibition, called Art Everywhere US, is modeled after a similar show in the United Kingdom and is intended to create what the organizers call a “free, open-air art gallery across the country” throughout the month of August.

The featured reproductions include 11 pieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among them: Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Can,” Roy Lichtenstein’s “Cold Shoulder,” Willem de Kooning’s “Montauk Highway” and Mark Rothko’s “White Center.”

But L.A.’s al fresco gallery won’t be limited to the LACMA works; all 58 of the featured pieces will be on display here at some 500 locations around town. Exact locations will be announced soon on the project’s website, where an interactive map will make spotting the masterpieces easy. There also will be an Instagram contest for people to show off selfies they’ve taken with the oversized artworks.

Coming soon to a bus shelter near you.

In addition to the wrapped buses, “the digital billboards in L.A. will be featuring the art works,” said Stephen J. Freitas, chief marketing officer of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, which is collaborating on the project with LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery, the Whitney and the Dallas Museum of Art. “We’ve got a wonderful Warhol that’s going to be coming your way on a lot of bus shelters.”

Nationwide, the art is being displayed in all 50 states on donated billboard and other advertising space valued at tens of millions of dollars, Freitas said. The effort started with 100 works of art suggested by the museums; members of the public then had a chance to vote on their favorites to winnow down the list to the final 58.

Taken together, the pieces represent a kind of American Art 101—from Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington to Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of “Ken Moody and Robert Sherman.”

“It’s a great opportunity not only for LACMA to represent Los Angeles, but to show its history through a painting like Millard Sheets’ ‘Angel’s Flight,’ or Ed Ruscha’s depiction of the Hollywood sign,” said Michael Govan, LACMA’s director and CEO.

And you don’t need to be an art history major to enjoy it.

“We’re hoping this campaign will help drive more interest in American art and drive people to more American museums to see art in person. But we also think it’s a great way to just give people a lift in their day, give them something unexpected on their way to work or traveling down the road,” Freitas said. “We think it will inspire a little happiness in American life, we hope, for a few days or a few moments.”

Ed Ruscha’s “Hollywood” moves from LACMA to the streets in August.

Posted 7/24/14

Tough audit sparks reforms

July 17, 2014 No Comments

A sheriff’s deputy keeps an eye on goings-on at a Blue Line platform last fall. Photo/Los Angeles Times

A hard-hitting new audit says the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has failed to live up to its multimillion dollar contract to police the Metro system, while the transit agency itself has done a poor job of monitoring the sheriff’s performance.

The audit was commissioned by Metro’s Board of Directors last year and performed by the firm Bazilio Cobb Associates, with a team including members of the Bratton Group, LLC. The May 27 report faulted the sheriff on a number of fronts, including lack of a community-policing plan for the nation’s third-largest bus and rail system, perennial staff vacancies, tardy responses to citizen complaints and inadequate records to support its billings.

Overall, the audit determined that both the Sheriff’s Department and Metro had significant improvements to make.

“We found that Metro needs to substantially strengthen and enhance its oversight of LASD contract performance,” it said. “We found LASD has not met many of the targets for performance metrics, including crime reduction, continuity of staff, and fare enforcement saturation and activity rates.”

The audit was presented to Metro’s System Safety and Operations Committee on Thursday. CEO Art Leahy told the panel that new management at the sheriff’s department now has “an intense focus on delivering the goods here. There’s no finger-pointing, there’s no excuses. They can do better and Metro can do better.”

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Michael Claus, while disagreeing with a few of the report’s conclusions, said most of its 50 findings were on target.

“The bottom line is: we didn’t do what we should have done,” Claus said in an interview. “No one likes to be told they’re not doing a good job, but they were right in a lot of areas.”

Claus, who became Metro’s head of security in January, said reforms already are underway. Those include upgrading the Transit Services Bureau into a full-fledged sheriff’s division with its own chief, to whom Claus now reports. That move, effective July 1, will give structure to the team and enable it to advocate more effectively for staff resources, Claus said. It also may be a morale-booster for deputies assigned to the transit beat, which the audit said has been considered undesirable or even punitive by some within the department.

“By making it its own division, probably 20 people have removed their transfer requests,” Claus said.

The audit comes as the sheriff’s Metro contract—by far the department’s largest—is up for renewal. The new contract will likely be worth more than $400 million over five years, the report said. The department currently is working under a $42 million six-month contract extension that expires on Dec. 31.

The audit covered five years beginning July 1, 2009 and found lots of room for improvement. Among its findings:

Critical information—such as up-to-date blueprints and maps of station layouts—needed in the event of an attack on Metro’s transit system has not been shared with key tactical response units within the sheriff’s department. (Claus, a former SWAT officer and commander, said an effort to provide up-to-date, digitized information is underway, but insisted that the sheriff’s units in question already are familiar with Metro facilities.)

The transit security operation has operated with high levels of vacancies and too often sends in substitute staff without the necessary transit expertise.

The department has double-billed for some supervisors’ time; billed Metro at the full rate even when managerial, supervisorial and support positions went vacant; failed to provide enough backup documentation of time being worked; and in fiscal 2011 submitted bills of $59,368 above the maximum amount allowed under the contract.

Customer complaints against deputies often are not processed on time, and deputies with multiple complaints against them usually aren’t routed into the department’s “performance mentoring program.” (Claus said a backlog stretching to 2010 has now been eliminated.)

Mobile phone validators used by deputies to check patrons’ TAP cards are technologically inadequate and can’t be used for basic crime-fighting tasks, such as looking for outstanding warrants when people are stopped for fare checks. Better fare-validation devices are being developed, the audit said, but other issues involving checking TAP cards remain unresolved—notably the question of whether that duty should be handled primarily by Metro’s own security staff rather than sworn deputies.

Crime reporting and response time statistics are not being appropriately reported. (The department has switched, as recommended, to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting standards, Claus said. He said the department disagrees, however, with a recommended change in reporting response times that would start the clock running when a Metro operator receives a call—not when it reaches the sheriff’s department.)

The audit also said the sheriff’s transit security team was not engaged enough in making quality of life improvements in Metro facilities.

But, according to the sheriff’s department, that finding overlooks a notable recent success story.

“Deputies have made tremendous strides in cleaning up Union Station; examining and solving delicate homeless rights issues, solving quality of life issues, making the area a cleaner, hazard-free experience for patrons, etc.,” according to the official response to the audit from interim Sheriff John Scott. “More is to be done, but to say that great strides have not been obtained would simply not be reflective of the current status.”

As for Metro, the audit found that the agency has failed to set forth adequate contractual requirements for the sheriff’s department, and has been lax about keeping tabs on the requirements that are in place.

In a response to the audit, Duane Martin, the agency’s deputy executive officer for project management, wrote that his department is asking for more staff to provide better contract oversight. He said Metro also will seek to modify its existing contract to enable it to seek damages if the sheriff doesn’t live up to specified performance targets—including crime reduction and continuity of staffing—and will write that into the next contract as well.

Beyond the audit, Metro CEO Leahy said he also has ordered a peer review of his agency’s security services by the American Public Transportation Association. Those findings will be examined, along with the audit, by Metro’s board this fall.

There is debate about how big a role deputies should play in fare enforcement. Photo/Metro

Posted 7/17/14

Looking at Valley rail and beyond

July 17, 2014 No Comments

The Orange Line, shown above in Warner Center, is a public transit success story. Photo/L.A. Times

A push to transform the popular Orange Line busway into the San Fernando Valley’s first light rail line may also jumpstart a broader examination of what the next chapter in L.A. County transportation could look like.

Metro’s Board of Directors next week will consider a motion to study options for improving the Orange Line, along with the possibility of connecting the Orange, Red and Gold Lines with Burbank and Bob Hope Airport. But that motion—by L.A. City Councilmember Paul Krekorian, Mayor Eric Garcetti, Glendale City Councilman Ara Najarian, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and Duarte Mayor John Fasana—has now prompted a related push to create a roadmap to update Metro’s long term plans for the entire county.

Taken together, both concepts, if approved by the agency’s full board, could begin to give shape to the list of projects that might be included in potential new transit sales tax measure that could be on the 2016 ballot.

“It has to be part of a transparent, inclusive and innovative long range planning process from which a new sales tax ballot initiative should emerge,” said Santa Monica Mayor Pam O’Connor, who proposed the countywide amendment along with Lakewood Councilmember Diane Dubois and Supervisor Don Knabe at Metro’s Planning and Programming Committee meeting this week.

The current push to investigate upgrades to the Orange Line comes after Governor Jerry Brown recently signed into law a bill permitting ground-level rail in the busway’s corridor.

Some have argued that other, less costly improvements are the best way to improve the Orange Line—which is carrying nearly twice the people originally projected and has been reaching capacity during rush hours.

But Coby King, board chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, the primary backer of the new state legislation, said converting the bus line to rail is the best way to serve the Valley’s 1.77 million residents.

“The problem is that the Orange Line has become a victim of its own success,” King said. “We believe that rail is the answer. Let’s do the objective study and let the chips fall where they will and we can make a decision on the facts—and a certain amount of equity.”

King added that Measure R, the original 2008 half-cent sales tax measure to fund transit projects, brought 36 miles of new rail to other parts of the county but left the Valley with none. For the region to support a new tax measure, additional rail lines for the Valley would have to be a part of the equation, he said.

At the committee meeting, Metro CEO Art Leahy weighed in on the big picture as well as the specific concerns of Valley residents.

“Without a doubt the number of projects is going to exceed the amount of money a measure is going to generate, so at some point we are going to have to sit down with the subregions and talk turkey about what goes in,” Leahy said.

Posted 7/17/14

A farewell to lawns

July 17, 2014 No Comments

The iconic lawns of SoCal are giving way to a more varied and eco-friendly front-yard sensibility.

Start saying so long to the lawns of Southern California.

As the realities of climate change and drought have begun to sink in statewide, local figures indicate that homeowners have finally begun—gradually—to let go of their grass.

Amid new state conservation mandates and growing financial incentives, thousands of lawns and millions of square feet of green turf have disappeared during the last three years in Los Angeles County, much of it during the past year of record-low rainfall.

The reason? Outdoor irrigation is now consuming an estimated 50 percent of the average water bill.

This week, in an unprecedented action, the State Water Resources Control Board made it a statewide criminal infraction to waste water, particularly on landscape irrigation. Meanwhile, cities throughout the county have upped turf removal incentives encouraging homeowners to go drought-tolerant, at least in their front yards.

The moves have accelerated a trend that is already approaching critical mass in Southern California, even as they reorder a landscape that has long characterized the region.

“It’s slow, but things are really changing,” says Matthew Lyons, director of planning and water conservation for the Long Beach Water Department.

“Three of the last four years have been dry and this last winter was catastrophic. There’s just not a future here for grass lawns.”

Acceptance of that reality hasn’t been easy.

“People have had a hard time letting go of their beautiful green sward,” says Lili Singer, director of special projects and adult education for the Sun Valley-based Theodore Payne Foundation, a native plant organization that has done a land-office business this year helping county homeowners rethink their landscapes.

“Everybody on the block has the same setback and the same yard and people don’t want to be the oddball,” said Singer. “But there’s also this thing about having an estate.”

“It’s an enormously emotional thing,” agrees Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. “People’s property values are tied up in it. And there’s the sort of iconic manliness in having a good-looking lawn that’s reinforced by TV programs and ads and all sorts of cultural messages.”

Generations of L.A. suburbanites can attest to this cultural attachment, whether they grew up tending the dichondra around a San Fernando Valley ranch house or assiduously edging the Bermuda grass at a Mid-Wilshire cottage.

Pincetl said that when she replaced the grass on the median strip of her small condominium complex last year with colorful, drought-tolerant plantings, a neighbor sent her a note accusing her of “threatening to destroy the aesthetic of the street and overpower the parkway.”

Cultural historian Ann Scheid says that aesthetic dates to the 1800s, to East Coast settlers who “imported their architecture from the East, and imported their lawns, too.”

Though a native plant movement did crop up here in the 1890s, she said, it didn’t catch on then because many of the large estates were second homes whose owners only visited during the winter.

By 1912, she noted, Los Angeles also had the L.A. Aqueduct, and, later, the Metropolitan Water District, which imports water from the Colorado River.

“So we never really had to face the problem,” she says. “Until now.”

Now, with climate change heating an already arid and densely populated region, conservation has become a mantra.

Some communities have been ahead of the curve: In Santa Monica, where no-grass lawns have become common, a pair of decade-old demonstration gardens have helped show the value of drought-tolerant landscapes, not just in water savings but in diminished labor and green waste.

The City of Los Angeles has imposed mandatory water conservation rules on homeowners since 2007, including alternating watering days and a ban on daytime lawn sprinkling. The city Department of Water and Power says the strategy has cut L.A.’s water use by 17 percent over the last seven years.

Also useful have been MWD’s conservation incentives and turf removal rebates, which have been increasingly adopted by member cities this year as the drought has worsened. The MWD rebate doubled in May to $2 per square foot, an incentive that can be augmented by member cities. In Los Angeles, the rebate is $3 per square foot; in Long Beach, it’s $3.50.

The program has prompted more than 1,900 L.A. homeowners to switch from grass to “California Friendly” landscapes during the past three years; in Long Beach, the toll has been 1,300 lawns, including 433 so far this year.

“I have a lot of cactus now, and perennials and lavender and lily of the valley,” says Long Beach resident Argy Abel, who took advantage of her city’s program two years ago, and is now one of three homeowners on her block alone to have gone grass-less.

Even smaller programs have made a mark: Though only a limited number of water users have qualified for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works’ turf replacement program, the “Cash for Grass” incentive has made more than 250 grass lawns disappear, mostly in the Antelope Valley. And that’s not counting the people who went drought-tolerant on their own.

Still, some neighborhoods remain cautious. Beverly Hills, for example, not only has a longstanding lawn culture, but also supplies about 10 percent of its own drinking water through a municipal water treatment plant.

There, turf replacement incentives haven’t found many takers, though the city has had some luck with voluntary conservation and a high-tech, remote leak detection system, says City Manager Jeff Kolin. He says that with the new state mandates, “we’ll probably be adding some more incentives and enforcement.”

Good luck, says Peter Eberhard, a Westside landscape designer, who notes that wealthier homeowners tend to have bigger lawns and less sensitivity to the price of water.

“No one is calling us and saying, ‘Oh, I’m concerned about this drought, please take my lawn out’,” he laughed.

Beverly Hills landscapers are not seeing a surge in homeowners wanting to uproot their lawns.

Posted 7/17/14

Shark bite opens debate

July 10, 2014 No Comments

Steve Robles is pulled from the Manhattan Beach surf after his encounter with a snagged white shark.

The fisherman is off the hook. But his headline-grabbing behavior on the Manhattan Beach pier—when he snagged a young great white shark that thrashed and ended up biting a swimmer—is still churning up debate over how best to protect the beach-going public.

Manhattan Beach has quickly moved to ban all fishing from the pier for up to 60 days, although the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is weighing whether the city may have overstepped its authority on the state-owned pier. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County lifeguard officials have begun refining a new policy to create buffer zones between swimmers, surfers and the young sharks that increasingly are making Manhattan Beach their home before they head to deeper waters.

What’s more, officials now are being forced to confront an undercurrent of hostility that for years has strained relationships around the 94-year-old concrete pier, the oldest in California.

The sensational incident during the July 4^th weekend—mistakenly characterized in early news reports as a shark attack—has exposed long-running complaints by surfers and swimmers that some pier fishermen have been endangering them. Among other things, they accuse fishermen of illegally “chumming”—dumping buckets of fish guts off the pier—to attract sharks.

“Tempers have been flaring,” said Los Angeles County Lifeguard Captain Kyle Daniels, who’s stationed in Manhattan Beach. “We do our best to separate the groups but it’s a dynamic situation. This goes back years.”

The Saturday incident brought it all to the surface, generating a wave of national news coverage and social media finger-pointing—most of it aimed at the fisherman and his friends, who were bombarded with allegations of animal cruelty and human indifference. The group was caught on video laughing and joking in the moments before they realized that a swimmer had been hurt by the distressed shark on the end of their high-gauge line. As of Thursday, the video had more than 1.4 million views.

According to witnesses, fisherman Jason Hagermann had been battling with the 7-footer for 45 minutes. The fish surfaced just as a group of distance swimmers passed while training for an upcoming pier-to-pier event. The victim, Steve Robles, can be heard on the video wailing as other swimmers rush to his rescue. Robles, a former L.A. County lifeguard himself, suffered serious but non-lethal gashes under his arm and along his side.

Juvenile great whites have been feeding in Manhattan Beach “like infants at an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Under state and federal law, it’s illegal to target great whites. If one gets hooked, then the line must be promptly cut. Hagermann told Fish and Wildlife investigators that he hadn’t been fishing for great whites and that he was afraid to cut the line while so many swimmers were nearby. With no evidence to contradict him, an agency spokeswoman said, no charges were filed.

Still, county lifeguard Daniels and others familiar with shark behavior insist the fish would never have bitten anyone had it not been fighting for its life. “If you lassoed and dragged a bear through a crowd,” he said, “I’m sure someone would get hurt.”

Daniels also said that the exceptionally strong wire-like line the fisherman was using posed a far greater danger to public safety than the juvenile shark. Had the fish quickly darted across and underneath the group of swimmers, “the line would have cut through to the bone.”

Laurie Jester, acting director of community development for Manhattan Beach, said the 60-day ban on pier fishing will give officials an opportunity to determine whether new restrictions should be imposed to avert these kinds of preventable risks.

“There’s a public safety concern with fishing on the pier,” she said, “and we want to make sure we’re covering all our bases, consulting with all the right people.”

The Los Angeles County Fire Department, which oversees lifeguard operations, has also moved in recent weeks to protect swimmers and surfers from potential harm.

Chief Daryl Osby said the department introduced a policy this summer to create “exclusionary zones” 300 yards into the water when sharks bigger than 8 feet are spotted because, unlike juveniles, these animals “can sometimes exhibit aggressive behavior, representing a public threat.” Osby said the department, in consultation with scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, has developed a public education program “so beachgoers can become aware of the environment and habitat they’re about to enter.”

That habitat, scientists and others say, is increasingly a shared one, as rising numbers of young white sharks are taking up temporary residence at the popular El Porto surfing area, at Manhattan Beach’s northern end.

As a result, “the curious and the YouTube seekers” are boarding all sorts of crafts for a view of the sharks as they feast on the bay’s plentiful offerings, “like infants at an all-you-can-eat buffet,” said Manhattan Beach’s ex-mayor, Steve Napolitano, now a senior aide to Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, whose district includes the South Bay.

International big-wave rider Alex Gray, who’s also an avid fisherman, has been playing in the Manhattan Beach surf since he was a kid. He resents the human intrusions into the young white sharks’ habitat.

“Give the animals the respect they deserve and allow them to be at home,” he said the other day, as he looked out across the Pacific. “What if I walked into your house, took a picture of your family eating dinner and then walked out? Give respect, get respect. Just let them be.”

“I’ve traveled the world and I’ve never once had a bad encounter with a shark,” he added. “If I see a shark, I give it its area. I would never paddle up to it for a picture.”

Gray, 28, said the one thing that “breaks my heart” about the Manhattan Beach incident is that “kids might now be afraid to go into the ocean…I love this community more than anything. It hurts me when I see negativity that doesn’t need to be there.”

Manhattan Beach officials have imposed a temporary ban on pier fishing. Photo/KPCC

Posted 7/10/14

Elementary, my dear camper

July 10, 2014 No Comments

Sheriff’s Det. Greg Taylor goes over a mock surveillance video with a group of young campers in June.

It’s been a while since his dad noticed the ad for the summer camp in the local Agoura Hills newspaper. Still, the experience made an impression on Max Bartolomea, now 17.

“It was a murder in a hotel room,” the Oak Park high school senior recalls, chuckling. “The body was gone but the room was still bloody. I loved it—I remember thinking it was exactly how it looked on TV.”

Now in its fifth year, the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Teen C.S.I. Camp, complete with mock crime scenes, has evolved and expanded, but its impact on kids remains.

“It’s fun and they learn a lot,” says Deputy Scott Rule, who devised the camp curriculum in 2009 at the behest of Agoura Hills city officials. Then a member of the Juvenile Intervention Team at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, Rule has since taken the show to the sheriff’s Altadena station, where he’s now posted.

“It’s like getting to solve a mystery.”

Los Angeles County has summer diversions aplenty, from art camps at LACMA to nature adventures at the Natural History Museum.

But the sheriff’s Teen C.S.I. Camp has been a sleeper, locally available until now only through the City of Agoura Hills, where municipal officials inspired by crime scene investigation TV shows first floated the idea to the sheriff’s department.

“I actually had one of my own kids go the first year,” recalls Sheriff’s Lt. Jim Royal. “They did a mock murder. There was a preliminary lecture on technique, and then they did forensics—we had our print person come out, and the kids got to take notes and try to figure out who did it. After that first session, it was standing room only. It was a really great idea.”

Learning the tricks of the trade in Altadena.

Since then, sheriff’s officials say, the 5-day camp has steadily added features, though it always revolves around a single “crime.”

“That first year, we did a homicide in a party setting,” recalls Rule. “We used a mannequin for a victim and set it up in a room at a park that the city rented for parties. The murder weapon was an alcohol bottle.

“But we’ve done all sorts of things—one year we had a shooting victim, another year we had a stabbing. Once I even had a bar fight with a pool cue as a weapon. This summer in Altadena, it was a baseball bat.”

Each crime scene, he says, is carefully seeded with clues, from fingerprints to footprints to footage from security cameras. Then the campers, who range in age from 11 to 16, try to deduce whodunnit.

“We don’t make it graphic,” adds Rule, noting that the “victims” are rarely female and never children.

“We want it to be easy and solvable, not gory and bloody. We use plastic knives and the one year we did a gunshot victim, we used a plastic training gun. But every one of those cases are like scenes our detectives have been on—murder scenes, assault scenes, thefts, burglaries.”

The aim, he says, is to put forth a positive image for the department and to engage adolescents with technology that intrigues them (polygraphs, he says, are a guaranteed crowd pleaser.)

But, he adds, the camp also introduces teens to the range of potential careers in law enforcement, from crime lab work to prosecutions.

“I always try to find a local attorney to come out and play the District Attorney, so the kids can present their case and see what kind of charges they can get.”

This is the first year the camp has been offered at the Altadena station, Rule says. A $75 June session drew 23 youngsters—enough to prompt the addition of a second session from August 4-8. (For more information, click here.)

Meanwhile, in Malibu, sheriff’s officials say they had to tweak the curriculum slightly because the local forensic specialists who usually help guide campers were so occupied with real crime that they couldn’t participate without an overtime budget.

Instead of a C.S.I. Camp, the sheriff’s offering will be called “Secret Agent Camp” this year. The camp will run from August 11-14, and will be available through the City of Agoura Hills for $74. (Details are here.)

“We have our own fingerprint [technician] who works here already, and I supervised the crime lab for years, so we will still have a forensic element—it just won’t be as technical,” says Malibu/Lost Hills Lt. David Thompson.

Deputy Alicia Kohno, who has succeeded Rule, promises that the camp will still include all the usual, popular features—a murder, a crime scene, fingerprints, footprints, lie detectors.

Good, says Bartolomea.

Though the teen never aspired to a career in law enforcement—according to his mother, he’s headed later this summer to a USC program for potential medical students—one of his favorite things about the camp was its taste of serious police work.

“I remember thinking that it was really cool,” he says. “And really real.”

The truth comes out: polygraphs are a popular part of CSI camp.

Posted 7/10/14

Not just a drop in the bucket

July 9, 2014 No Comments

The Pacoima Spreading Grounds will be able to store more stormwater. Photo/Architect Magazine

When it comes to quenching the water needs of a thirsty region, seemingly modest or far-flung efforts can come together to make quite a splash.

Witness a dozen local projects, from Agoura Hills to south Gardena, that just received an infusion of state grant funding totaling $23.4 million. Each initiative has a singular focus—creating bigger and better groundwater supplies in Pacoima, for instance, or installing curb screens in Calabasas to keep debris from flowing from city streets to the ocean.

But collectively, these endeavors add up to something greater than the sum of their parts: an integrated approach as diverse agencies come together to advance the kinds of water projects that will do the most good across the region.

As California’s drought makes headlines and prompts consideration of mandatory conservation measures, several of the projects have an extremely timely aim: retaining as much stormwater as possible to boost the region’s drinking water supply. Others focus on improving water quality, while some combine water initiatives with community recreation and beautification efforts.

Together, they’re the wave of the future, as the Los Angeles region looks beyond its Mulholland-era history and imagines a new approach to the next 100 years.

“It’s a new paradigm, a paradigm of cooperation and collaboration,” said Mark Pestrella, chief deputy director of the county’s Department of Public Works, which is overseeing the grant projects as leader of the Integrated Regional Water Management coalition in greater Los Angeles.

“There are 500 small water agencies in L.A. County alone, and probably six major water agencies, all talking to each other, reaching out to the communities that we serve and identifying projects that have the biggest community benefit,” Pestrella said.

The $23.4 million in Prop. 84 grant funding that was formally accepted by the Board of Supervisors this week is just one such infusion over the past decade. Since the collaborative water management model went into effect in California in 2002, nearly $100 million has been awarded to water resource agencies in the county, Public Works Director Gail Farber said. The state grant funds, she added, “go a long way towards ensuring a more sustainable water future for L.A. County.”

The endeavors awarded the grant funds approved this week include:

The Pacoima Spreading Grounds Improvement Project, where new and updated equipment and improved stormwater storage will yield enough new drinking water to supply 42,000 Los Angeles residents for a year. Plans also are under consideration to create a park or open space on the grounds of an adjacent channel.
Development of a second phase of Marsh Park in the Elysian Valley neighborhood near the L.A. River. The new design will convert industrial land into an open space park that also happens to collect and treat stormwater.
Restoration of a 34-acre “flood retention basin” in the Upper Malibu Creek Watershed area.
Design and construction of a 1¼-mile recycled water pipeline in south Gardena.

And, with California’s drought front and center, more help may be on the way soon. The state later this month is expected to issue a new round of grant funding devoted exclusively to drought-fighting projects.

An ambitious slate of 14 L.A. County projects seeking more than $28.8 million in funding has been submitted, with an emphasis on water recycling and replenishing groundwater. The overall goal of the drought-related projects is building the local water supply and reducing dependence on imports.

Posted 7/9/14

Picking up pace to protect kids

July 3, 2014 No Comments

David Sanders and Leslie Gilbert-Lurie are moving from the blue ribbon panel to a new transition team.

As Los Angeles County prepares to hire its first-ever child protection czar to lead an ambitious new oversight program, efforts to build that system accelerated this week with the appointment of a high-profile transition team to help get the initiative off the ground.

The nine-member team approved by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday includes a mix of newcomers as well as several veterans of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection, which earlier this year urged the county to create an Office of Child Protection as the cornerstone of a wide-ranging package of reforms.

The transition team is charged with sifting through more than 40 of the commission’s recommendations to help prioritize which the county should implement first.

David Sanders, who chaired the blue ribbon panel and also will be a member of the transition team, said a big part of the interim group’s job will be to make sure that proposed reforms receive the necessary follow-through.

“We really have concerns about that…We didn’t want to just add a new series of recommendations,” said Sanders, a former head of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services who now is an executive vice president of the Seattle-based Casey Family Programs.

The team, which is meant to disband once the Office of Child Protection is up and running, will also help recruit and shape the job description for the person who will run the new agency.

In addition, the transition panel is charged with making some critical assessments in the days and weeks ahead. For one thing, it will evaluate the performance—and potential for expansion—of the county’s network of so-called medical hubs, where the physical health of youngsters coming into the system is evaluated. And it will wade into the sometimes contentious issue of how best to use county nurses to help social workers conduct frontline investigations of suspected child abuse.

The transition team will provide monthly updates to the Board of Supervisors beginning on August 5.

The reforms now being implemented come after the horrific death last year of Gabriel Fernandez, an 8-year-old Palmdale boy was left by social workers in the care of his mother and her boyfriend despite multiple reports of abuse, neglect and torture.

Even before the blue ribbon commission began its work, current DCFS head Philip Browning had embarked on a reform mission from within the department, including expanded training, a plan to hire more staff and reduce caseloads, creation of a foster care search engine, and a new data-driven approach to making the agency function more effectively. Those efforts continue as the transition team’s work gets underway.

In addition to Sanders, transition team members who also served on the blue ribbon commission include Andrea Rich, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie and Janet Teague.

The newcomers include Dr. Mitchell Katz, the county’s director of Health of Services, along with former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, Supervising Dependency Court Judge Margaret Henry, Patricia Curry of the county Commission on Children and Families and Antonia Jimenez of the county’s Chief Executive Office.

Sanders said the group represents a rich mix of professional knowledge and L.A. County experience.

“I couldn’t be more excited,” he said. “I think it’s really a remarkable team.”

Posted 7/3/14

A diversion from the status quo

July 3, 2014 No Comments

Mentally ill inmates have been handcuffed to benches for therapy sessions. Photo/Los Angeles Times

When it comes to Los Angeles County’s decrepit Men’s Central Jail, building a better future doesn’t have to mean spending $2 billion to erect a replacement structure that would continue to house huge numbers of mentally ill inmates accused of low-level, non-violent crimes.

Two months ago, as the only member of the Board of Supervisors to vote against moving forward on this massive, publicly-financed construction plan, I argued that we must first fully investigate the opportunities for diverting low-risk members of this population into community-based treatment programs.

My reasoning was simple: if we can find more humane and effective treatment outside jail cells for these mentally ill individuals, then we might be able to scale back the size and cost of the proposed new downtown jail. At the same time, we might also be able to make our neighborhoods safer by reducing the high rate of recidivism typically associated with mentally ill offenders. They stand little chance of achieving lasting recovery inside an oppressive and teeming jail environment where they have been chained to tables during therapy sessions and victimized not only by fellow inmates but by some sheriff’s deputies who run the operation.

This week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California released a persuasive new report that should serve as yet another reminder of why we must confront this issue now, before we commit another dollar to a construction project that, while well intentioned, will continue to give our county the ignominious distinction of overseeing the biggest mental hospital in the nation.

The report, produced in conjunction with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, cites examples from around the country, where recidivism and incarceration costs have been slashed through jail diversion programs. One, in New York, reported a 70% reduction in arrests among participants during a two-year period, according to the report. A diversion program in Miami-Dade County, meanwhile, reduced recidivism among misdemeanor offenders from 75% to 20%.

The report also notes that, once an individual is placed in a community-based setting, federal and state funds can be tapped to help finance the treatment, which can’t be done as long as a person remains behind county bars.

Among the leadership of the Sheriff’s Department, there’s a belief that only a new 5,000 bed mental health jail will satisfy the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been monitoring the county’s treatment of mentally ill inmates for more than a decade, ever since concluding that their constitutional rights were being violated. Last month, the DOJ didn’t pull punches when it informed us that, despite improvements, serious problems remain in preventing inmate suicides. The justice department lawyers warned that they’re now prepared to step up the oversight by seeking the intervention of the federal courts.

It seems clear to me from the tenor of that 36-page letter that the Justice Department expects improvements now, not in 10 years, when the proposed new jail would be scheduled for completion. In fact, the DOJ lawyers praised a Board of Supervisors vote to analyze diversion programs and said “we strongly encourage the Sheriff, the Mental Health Director, and the County to consider alternatives to incarceration” for mentally ill inmates.

Finally, for those of you who might be inclined to dismiss the ACLU report as a predictably liberal position, I’d point out that the leading champion of community-based diversion programs is Los Angeles’ top prosecutor, Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey. During testimony before the Board of Supervisors on the day of the jail construction vote, she suggested that as many as 1,000 inmates may be needlessly held behind county bars. “The current system is, simply put, unjust,” Lacey said bluntly.

And that can’t be made right by embarking on the biggest capital-spending project in Los Angeles history. This issue, with the stakes so high, requires a level of intellectual capital that we’re only now starting to expend.

Posted 7/3/14

Month: July 2014

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