Most Americans honestly don’t want to spend much time, energy or emotion thinking about people in jail or prison—unless, by chance they have a family member who is locked up.
We harp on the issue here at WitnessLA since criminal justice is, after all, central to the mission of the site. But if the topic comes up in a social setting, I see eyes starting to glaze over, even among friends who try to be interested.
That’s why the article by Adam Gopnick in the current New Yorker, The Caging of America, is so heartening.
Gopnick is a critic and commentator with no particular expertise in criminal justice matters. But he’s also a very smart guy and clear headed thinker. Somehow the topic grabbed his interest, and he dove deeply.
I won’t try to summarize Gopnick’s work here. The essay is carefully crafted, thought by thought, and should be read in it’s totality. But some clips will give you an idea of what he’s on about.
To wit:
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
Conservatives and other law and order types insist that the nationwide 40 percent drop in crime we’ve seen in the past few years can be laid at the feet of all this incarcerating. But, as Gopnick, channeling Zimring, points out, that assumption falls apart when one looks at New York’s crime stats, which happen to be another 40 percent lower still than the rest of the nation—the lowest since 1900—while its incarceration rate, rather than rising, has also dropped precipitously.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
And still we go on locking people up at a ferocious clip—even though, in terms of our incarceration rates, we increasingly stand alone in the world.
To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent….
So how do we go about ending this plague of imprisoning? Gopnick suggests that we must start thinking and acting sanely—in a thousand small ways.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime….
HOUSE PANEL QUESTIONS US ATTORNEY GENERAL ABOUT PARDONS OFFICE AFTER PROPUBLICA INVESTIGATION ON RACIAL DISPARITIES IN PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS
In December of this past year, in an investigation co-published by the Washington Post, ProPublica reporters Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur found that, in the past ten years of presidential pardons, white criminals seeking pardons were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities pardon seekers. Black pardon seekers had the lowest chance of all.
Here’s a clip:
Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.
“I’m just astounded by those numbers,” said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department’s pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office’s practices that would have skewed the recommendations. “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.’’
The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.
The facts uncovered by the reporters’ investigation caused the House Judiciary Committee to pose a series of probing questions to Attorney General Eric Holder about what he was doing to look into this issue.
A WOMAN RELIVES THE TRAUMA OF FORCED STERILIZATION AND THE NIGHTMARE OF EUGENICS
This LA Times Column One story story by David Zucchino is dizzyingly painful to read, but also essential.
Here’s how it opens:
Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood.
Riddick’s miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state’s Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general’s office.
Board members concluded that the girl was “feebleminded” and doomed to “promiscuity.” They recommended sterilization. Riddick’s illiterate grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as “Miss Peaches,” marked an “X” on a consent form.
Hours after Riddick gave birth to a son in Edenton, N.C., on March 5, 1968, a doctor sliced through her fallopian tubes and cauterized them.
“They butchered me like a hog,” recalls Riddick, now a poised and determined woman of 57.
Between the years of 1929 and 1974, reports Zuccinno, close to 7,600 people were sterilized under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. Nearly 85% were women or girls, some as young as 10…
Normally, it’s our business to investigate more than it is to praise.
However, this story is just to remind everyone that we do also notice the everyday heroism performed week after week, year in, year out, by the men and women of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (and the Los Angeles Police Department too, of course, although the LAPD is not the topic of the story today).
In any case, both multi-person rescues shown in these cool helmet cam videos took place this past Sunday.
A 14-year old boy trapped with three of his friends on an Azuza Canyon cliff managed to get cell phone reception and called 911.. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Air-5 Rescue pilots were alerted and flew in with deputy paramedics to rescue all four of the boys, lifting them off the cliff, one at a time.
In order to rescue a 19-year-old woman trapped on a ledge, a deputy paramedic was lowered from an LASD Air-5 helicopter via a hoist as the craft hovered hundreds of feet above Millard Canyon. The deputy then hooked the hoist to the woman and got her safely into the helicopter
Meanwhile, two more teens, a 17-year-old boy, and an 18-year-old girl, trapped 40 feet above the canyon bottom, were also rescued by the Sheriff’s Altadena Search and Rescue Team, using rope lines. (For more details of the rescue go here.)
At Tuesday’s board meeting, several of the LA County Supervisors surprised many observers by balking at rubber stamping a $5.7 million planning package to design various jail building and jail renovation options. Instead the Supes sent the high ticket planning package, jointly proposed by County CEO, Bill Fujioka, and LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, back to the drawing board.
The $5.7 report was ostensibly aimed at exploring all possible options for addressing the overcrowding issues that plague the county’s troubled jail facilities, and that are expected to get worse under the state’s new realignment policy, even though the County has somewhere upwards of 4000 empty jail beds, even as I type.
Yet, the Sheriff has strongly suggested that what he really wants is for the Supervisors to authorize $1.4 billion to build a brand new jail that would replace Men’s Central Jail, an old and ghastly facility that everyone agrees has to be torn down, thus the suspicion is that he means the $5.7 design report to lay down track that will lead inevitably to his desired goal of construction.
However, Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina, in particular, made it clear they were not all that willing to climb on the Sheriff’s construction train just yet. Instead, they asked for a better discussion of creative alternatives to lowering the jail numbers before rushing any further toward billion dollar building projects.
In the course of discussion, Zev brought up a recently commissioned report-in-progress by prisons and jails expert Dr. James Austin, that is to be completed next month. The Austin report will make recommendations about ways to lower the jail population numbers, by the use of such strategies as a well-run pretrial release program, which other cities have successfully implemented to lower their own jail numbers. (WitnessLA mentioned the existence of the Austin report in Monday’s post.)
Yaroslavsky also mentioned a 289-page study by the Vera institute, titled the Los Angeles County Jail Overcrowding Reduction Project, that had been previously commissioned by the CEO’s office. (The report was first completed in 2008, then revised in Sept. 2011.)
“There are counties and cities and states all over the country that have rethought the way they deal with their prison populations that could save us hundreds of millions of dollars without compromising anything,” Zev said. “At least we have to look at that and go into this whole discussion with open minds about what can be done…….We have the opportunity here to look at alternatives to spending close to a billion and a half dollars on this kind of undertaking—money that, frankly, we can’t afford.” (Yaroslavsky made sure to note the inconvenient fact that has recently come to light—namely that the billion and a half dollar proposed new jail would only net the county around 400 new beds.)
Molina echoed Zev’s skepticism and raised it a notch. “We have the Department of Justice looking at us,” she said. “We have the ACLU lawsuit….We have all these issues and they all boil down to one thing: how we handle our jail populations. Yet all we ever talk about on this board is building.”
Molina too was high on the Vera Institute report, much of which she appeared to have read—or at the very least she had been fairly well briefed on its contents.
The Vera report has a detailed section about pretrial release and how and why LA’ County’s bail system needs to be rethought. It shows with plenty of graphs and pie charts how the current system lets wealth, or lack thereof, decide who gets out on bail, and who languishes in a cell while they wait for trial, when the deciding factor really ought to be “risk assessment”—namely who is most at risk of not showing up for trial, or might be a danger to public safety.
Molina pounced on Fujioka about the issue. “I’m asking you a simple question,” she said. “Here’re all the recommendations from Vera. Why aren’t we implementing them?….I don’t understand why we are waiting… Why can’t we do [some of these things]? We already have the report. It’s very thorough.”
Good question.—an inquiry that will likely be repeated after the report from the Austin group is delivered next month.
The fact that the Austin report will exist at all, required a confluence of events. Since 2007, Sheriff Baca had been offered Jim Austin’s services gratis, but the sheriff repeatedly declined to let Austin look at his jails data in order to make recommendations as to how best to reduce overcrowding—even though the ACLU said it would pay the tab for the study. In the summer, Baca semi-relented and said he’d let the study go ahead, on the condition that the report was sealed, and not in any way made public. Appalled, the ACLU said no to the secrecy required. Then finally, early this past November, Baca gave a total go-ahead. He was no doubt motivated in part by the media storm around the jails abuse scandal, and the FBI investigation. Yet, by all accounts Baca is now being very cooperative and seems anxious to see what Austin and his group will recommend.
Once the Austin report is delivered in February,—as Molina suggests—everything depends on whether it becomes one more stack of paper to be filed, or a roadmap for action.
And, if the county implements some of Vera’s and Austin’s solutions, will building a new jail still be necessary?
Maybe not, say some experts.
The ACLU, the Vera Report and others have pointed out that the vast majority of the inmates in Men’s Central Jail are pretrial detainees—many awaiting disposition on charges of low-level, nonviolent or trivial offenses. This means that a significant percentage of those in jail at any given moment, are there, not because a judge thought they were a danger, but because their families are simply too poor to post bond.
Still, if such policies are reformed, will they and related strategies be enough, or will we need creative building strategies too?
Mr. Fujioka has pledged to come back to the board with a proposal for a new uber planning, analysis and design package that will look at the whole picture and come back with recommendations by the summer.
So stay tuned.
PS: The Supervisors did approve an application for $100 million in state funding for a women’s jail, but the application does not commit them to taking the money and doing the construction.
I’m in the middle of working on another project today, so just one quick bit of news on jails:
The LA County Board of Supervisors will vote on Tuesday on a proposal to allocate $5.7 million for a study to explore various options to lower the inmate population and improve conditions in the county’s jail facilities —particularly in light of the new influx of prisoners due to the state’s realignment policy.
Nearly all of the options being studied have to do with some combination of building new facilities and renovating old facilities.
The proposal is expected to pass.
Plus, the Supervisors are also likely to authorize an application** for $100 million in state money toward building a new women’s jail.
Then, if Sheriff Baca has his way, the planning will lead to the allocation of really big bucks for jail construction, $1 billion plus to tear down the horrid old Men’s Central Jail and build a nice spanking new jail to take its place.
Critics like the ACLU argue that while the very troubled Men’s Central building, should have been torn down years ago, there are safe and cost-efficient ways to solve the jails population problem without going on a building spree.
For one thing, says the ACLU’s Peter Eliasberg, there are several thousand empty beds in the system right now, between the unused space in the Twin Towers and more unused beds up at Pitchess Detention Center. (Eliasberg says 7000 empty beds, but I’ve not confirmed that with the LASD. But suffice it to say, a lot of unused beds.)
For another thing, right now a study of the LA County jails and its population issues is in the works. It’s being conducted by Dr. James Austin, a national expert on prisons and overcrowding, who has helped other jurisdictions solve their jails population problems, without compromising public safety..
Dr. Austin is expected to meet with Sheriff Baca again in the early days of February to discuss his findings and recommendations, and hopefully to institute a pilot for a pre-trial release monitoring program. This program simply means that people who are given a reasonable bail (because the judge doesn’t consider them a flight risk or a danger to public safety) have an alternative method of getting out of jail before trial (which in some cases may mean electronic monitoring to make sure that they show up for trial) other than simply coming up with the money to hand to a bondsman—which many people don’t have the resources to do.
As it is now the bail system discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, who must languish in jail—away from jobs and family —while waiting for trial, while the wealthy get to go home—and our current system does nothing for public safety, plus it causes crowding in the jails, at the taxpayers expense.
(The only people who benefit from the current bail system are those in the bail industry, who really, really hatepre-trial release and monitoring programs.)
It’s all this stuff and much more that the Austin report and pilot program will ostensibly address in detail. So wouldn’t it be wiser to wait a few weeks until we can get the info Jim Austin has to offer before starting to allocate planning and building money?
In any case, more on all this later. I’ll let you know how the Supes vote goes.
** I originally reported that the $100 million was for a straight county allocation of funds, but it refers to an application for state funding.
SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES CAN’T BE GUARANTEED CONFIDENTIALITY IN JAILS COMMISSION TESTIMONY
The controversy over whether or not those testifying before the Citizens Commission on Jail Violence can be offered anonymity may have just been settled.
LA Times reporters Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard spoke to the Commission’s lead attorney,Richard E. Drooyan, who explained that legally, a promise of anonymity wouldn’t hold up if deputies were asked to testify in future criminal or civil cases in court.
A commission investigating allegations of deputy brutality inside Los Angeles County jails cannot guarantee confidentiality for deputies who want to testify, dealing a blow to efforts to combat what has been described as a code of silence among some jail guards.
Members of the special commission created by the county Board of Supervisors had raised the possibility of allowing deputies and others to provide anonymous testimony as they attempt to determine the scope of any brutality against inmates.
But Richard E. Drooyan, the panel’s general counsel, has told commissioners that a court could compel them to provide the identities during a criminal investigation or civil litigation. Allegations of excessive force against inmates is the subject of an FBI probe as well as civil lawsuits, including one filed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
In an interview with The Times on Saturday, Drooyan said he hoped former deputies and current guards would be willing to come forward despite the limits on confidentiality.
“There is at least some chance that we’ll be able to preserve confidentiality, but it’s not something we can guarantee,” he said.
Drooyan notes that the Commission will be looking at systemic issues, not criminality by individual deputies. In other words, the issue is reform, not nabbing people. So hopefully everyone with something important to say will say it anyway, even without anonymity.
A CALIFORNIA CASE OF WARRANT-FREE TRACKING HEADS FOR THE SUPREMES
A year and a half ago, a Silicon Valley community college student wound up in the cross hairs of a shadowy but common law enforcement practice now at the center of an unfolding legal drama in the U.S. Supreme Court.
On his way to school, Yasir Afifi, an Arab-American, stopped for an oil change and later discovered that the GPS tracking device he found on the underbelly of his car had been put there by the FBI without a warrant.
Now the Supreme Court is expected to decide any day whether the government has a right to use that tactic without a search warrant in a case that highlights the tensions between law enforcement needs and the privacy implications of new technologies that can track our every move.
In a Washington, D.C., case, the Supreme Court is considering whether warrantless GPS tracking violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable search and seizure, one of the core rules in any criminal case. The scope of the court’s ruling could have far-reaching implications when everything from smartphones to dashboard gadgets offer authorities a generous menu for tracking suspects.
The Obama administration and law enforcement groups say GPS tracking is no different from ordinary police surveillance on public streets. There is no constitutional barrier to GPS tracking in public places, they argue.
Really? Really?? Yeah, okay, we all know that privacy’s a thing of the past, but this sounds a little police state-ish.
The problem is that if the Supreme Court rules against the tracking, some righteous convictions will be tossed out. On the other hand, if one has a warrant, no problem with slapping on that tracker.
No one seems to have a clear bet as to which way SCOTUS will go.Yet, whatever their ruling, it will be significant, as this case will set the course for other technologies that have yet to appear.
UPDATE: THE SUPREMES REJECTED WARRANT-CHALLENGED TRACKING: GO, SCOTUS!
JUVENILE LIFE FOR NON-HOMICIDE CASES—LOUISIANA STRUGGLES WITH WHAT TO DO
In a 2010 decision (Graham vs. Florida), The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that kids convicted of crimes that don’t involve murder cannot be locked up for the rest of their lives.
The states with cases affected by the ruling are now struggling with how things should play out with their non-homicide LWOP cases. Louisiana is one of those states. Here’s the opening to a story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that deals with one such case that has pushed the issue into the open.
Giovanni Brown was 16 when he and another teen forced their way into a home in an upscale Harvey subdivision in 1999, armed with pistols and intent on mayhem. After holding four people against their will for hours, ransacking the home and trying in vain to force the homeowner to withdraw cash from an ATM, the teenagers stole two cars loaded with the family’s property.
Brown was prosecuted as an adult and convicted of aggravated kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery. He was sentenced in 2000 to life in prison with no chance of probation, parole or suspended sentence for the kidnapping, and another 40 years for robbery. Under Louisiana law, Brown would never leave prison, a reality his public defender Marquita Naquin argued during the trial.
“What can a 16-year-old do in the first 16 years of his life that demands that we throw him away?” Naquin asked the jury just before it unanimously rejected her plea.
Her argument proved prophetic.
Louisiana’s DA’s Association is arguing that inmates like Giovanni Brown should not be eligible for parole until they are 60 years old.
And while we’re having this discussion, at the risk of doing my broken record thing again (which I’ll be doing once more in the next week or so because California’s legislative attempt to modify juvenile LWOP may be coming up for a vote soon), please do remember that the U.S. is the only country in the world—IN THE WORLD— that imprisons kids for life. So either we have a much worse class of kid in this nation, or we’ve got a policy that……let’s just say it needs some improvement.
The prevailing mood was utter giddiness when the brand new 11,293 square foot LA County library opened on Saturday morning in Topanga Canyon with Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and actress (and longtime Topangan) Wendie Malick the duel masters of ceremonies for the speechifying part of the festivities that also featured Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, Al Martinez, and others. Then, just before the ribbon cutting, Henry Smith, a Native American canyon resident of more than 50-years duration, (and a man with a character-sculpted visage well-suited to Mt. Rushmore) gave the building its requisite blessing.
In the past, Topanga residents—in general a community of maniacal readers— had depended on a weekly bookmobile for their library urges. Either that or they found a city library, since the closest county library was in Malibu, too far away for homework forays, especially after school during rush hour.
Nevertheless, after several years of draconian cutbacks in the city’s library system (with disaster averted only when the voters passed Measure L last March), it seemed impossible that the county would actually manage to add a library, what with librarians’ hours getting whacked every time one turned around.
In truth, this new addition to the LA County system had been in the works for over a decade, and broke ground in 2008—right about the time the nation’s economy was collapsing. But once having cleared the land and dug the foundation, it seemed like a good idea to somehow struggle forward.
Still, the place was to have opened in the summer of 2009, but got bogged down with seemingly a zillion set backs. There were the expected money problems, plus the discovery of Native American artifacts on the site, and some issues with the design and….well, nothing seems to be simple in the world of public works.
Plus there’s the fact that Topangans tend to be a meddling group so they wanted to weigh in on everything. (I live in Topanga, so I can say this with affection.)
Despite the hurdles, Yaroslavsky’s office championed the project, and managed to shove it back on track during the instances it fell off. It helped that two of Zev’s field deputies, Susan Nissman and Cynthia Scott, both happen to live in the canyon and were ferociously determined to see the damned thing get built.
As the $19.6 million building neared completion—with its silver LEED certified green construction strategies and its whimsical public art pieces made by canyon artists—locals who had been grousing noisily for months about the library construction crews blocking part of the road, screwing up their work commute, now suddenly were wonderstruck that this sprawling new thing had finally managed to bloom at the canyon’s center, and that it was actually going to belong to everyone.
On Saturday morning, after the speeches had been given, the ribbon was finally cut, and the packed-to-the-rafters crowd and their kids gushed at a near run into the library building itself for the first time, all at once several hundred people became simultaneously goofy with delight, myself included.
In our digital-centric age to see so much obvious happiness over a structure devoted mostly to books, literature and reading—well, it was a very nice thing to behold.
“It’s as if the community finally has a physical heart,” one neighbor said to me, “And it’s a library, of all things! How cool is that?!”"
Very cool indeed.
Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The article below is Part Four of WitnessLA’s investigation into the culture of violence and abuse that, for years, has been reported to exist inside the Los Angeles County Jail system—and the dysfunction inside the sheriff’s department that has allowed the abuse to flourish.
(You can find Part One of the series here, Part Two, here, Part Three here.)
LASD insiders say that, for years, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka—not Lee Baca—has ruled the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department though a system built of favoritism, pay-to-play campaign donations, and loyalty rewarded over competence.
Now he has assumed command of the department’s two internal investigative units—Internal Affairs and the Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau—a move that many close to the department view as a hostile takeover.
On May 15, 2011, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department quietly made a series of small, seemingly innocuous changes to its command structure. The Internal Affairs unit, which investigates violations of departmental policy, and the Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau, which looks into criminal acts that may have been committed by department personnel, were taken out from under the oversight of the Leadership and Training Division—where the twin divisions have been for nearly two decades—-and were placed under the control of the then-Assistant Sheriff, soon-to-be- Undersheriff, Paul Tanaka. In practical terms, this meant that, instead of the heads of the two bureaus reporting to Leadership and Training’s Chief, Roberta Abner, Tanaka appointed a brand new captain and commander from his own inner circle to head IA and report to him. At the same time, he selected a new captain to run ICIB, also reporting to him. Abner was taken out of the loop altogether, and a commander position overseeing ICIB was eliminated. Two levels of oversight and accountability in the system with which the department investigated itself vanished overnight.
To the casual observer, the moves might appear to be little more than the bureaucratic shuffling of departmental chess pieces. But to those inside the sheriff’s department, the sudden switch in oversight was alarming. As one former IA investigator explained, “To have a commander and a captain reporting directly to the Undersheriff…there’s no precedent for that.”
In order to check, the LA Justice Report called around to five law enforcement agencies across California—San Diego Sheriff’s Department; Orange County Sheriff’s Department; San Francisco Sheriff’s Department; Los Angeles Police Department; and the San Francisco Police Department–and found that only the SFSD has its “investigative services” unit report directly to someone as high up as the undersheriff without intervening layers. “We’re much smaller than LASD,” explained an SFSD spokesperson, “we only have about 850 employees. So it makes things more manageable.”
In a department of 18,000, like the LASD, the layered chain of command existed for good reason, according to our IA source (and validated by other department insiders with IA knowledge). “Personnel investigations are extremely in-depth. IA is a relatively large unit, with 35-40 people in it. You have to have time to oversee and manage them. But the undersheriff has constantly got an 800 pound gorilla banging on his head.”
So why the change?
LASD spokesman Captain Mike Parker explained in an email that the move was simply so the Sheriff could keep a better eye on the two bureaus. “All reorganization changes within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are done at the direction of Sheriff Baca…Recent changes have been made to the oversight of Internal Affairs Bureau and Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau to increase accountability and efficiency, and to streamline the process.”
However, sources inside the department say the move had little to do with increased accountability, but rather was a realignment that allowed the undersheriff to protect any of his insiders that needed protecting.
As The LA Justice Report has previously reported, Tanaka has a history of rescuing, promoting and protecting supervisors with less-than-spectacular and often downright troubled performance records, people who then become his most loyal supporters.
There was, for example, Dan Cruz, the highest ranking member of the Sheriff’s Department to be put on leave for his role in the recent jail abuse scandal—and also a Tanaka appointee and loyal donor to the undersheriff’s political campaign in Gardena. Cruz arrived at CJ as an operations lieutenant with a checkered supervisory record. Nonetheless, he was promoted to captain and put in charge of the already troubled Men’s Central Jail. Deputy-on-inmate force incidents spiked almost immediately under his watch. The situation was desperate enough that Cruz’s direct supervisor, Commander Bob Olmsted, told Tanaka directly of problems inside the jail under Cruz—and told Lee Baca as well. Olmsted says he was ignored.
If supervisors like Olmsted came to Tanaka with reports of uncontrolled violence and were waved away, how will the undersheriff respond to critical IA and ICIB investigations into favored people and groups his department?
“I think we should be concerned,” says the ACLU’s Peter Eliasberg. “The reality is that one of the key components in dealing with deputy use of force on inmates is a system that provides for appropriate discipline of deputies. If you have someone at the top overseeing that system who’s not aggressively committed to policing what deputies are doing, that’s a very bad thing.”
KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER
Part of the problem with the undersheriff’s takeover of the two bureaus, sources tell the LA Justice Report, is the fact that Tanaka has openly, and vociferously, expressed his contempt for IA throughout his career.
In early 2007, LASD Internal Affairs Sergeant Larry Landreth was named the lead investigator of an extremely sensitive case. An LASD deputy trainee had been caught on a wiretap allegedly giving information to the Mexican Mafia. The incident had the makings of a huge scandal for the department, and the brass were all over Landreth to look into this case as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.
Shortly before the investigation began, Paul Tanaka—who was then the assistant sheriff–called Landreth into his office for a closed-door meeting. The meeting began in a normal manner. Tanaka stressed the importance of the case, and gave Landreth his blessing to investigate aggressively.
Tanaka then said something Landreth wasn’t expecting. “He looked at me straight-faced,” Landreth, now retired, tells the LA Justice Report, “and said ‘This is the only time you’re going to see me be an advocate of IA, because I hate you fuckers.’
Startled by the outburst, Landreth scanned Tanaka’s face for a trace of humor but found none.
“You take pride in your job,” says Landreth, “and to be called a ‘fucker’ to my face out of nowhere…It was an affront.”
He asked Tanaka what, exactly, his problem was with Internal Affairs? Landreth and his colleagues had noticed that Tanaka seemed unwilling to promote out of IA–despite the unit being among the most important in the department, and traditionally considered a career enhancing stepping stone in the LASD.
Landreth says he reminded Tanaka that the purpose of IA was far more than proving wrongdoing. It was also bureau in the department with the power to protect innocent deputies who get falsely accused of misbehavior—which happens, says Landreth “all the time.” It is IA’s job to launch the investigations that clear these deputies’ names.
“It is just as important to free the innocent as it is to punish the guilty,” says Landreth.
But Tanaka wouldn’t hear any of it. Pressed by Landreth, Tanaka muttered vaguely that he’d had some bad run-ins with IA back in the 80’s–and that soured him on the unit. He referenced an incident at Men’s Central Jail early in his career, but provided no details.
THE SHOOTING
Tanaka’s worst “run-in” with IA in the 1980s is well known. In 1988 he was the senior officer on the scene when five Sheriff’s deputies shot and killed an unarmed Korean immigrant named Hong Pyo Lee after a car chase found Lee cornered at a dead-end street. The group of deputies fired fifteen rounds at 21-year-old Lee, hitting him 9 times in the back and neck. Tanaka and the other four deputies claimed they shot because Lee was attempting to hit them with his car. However, Long Beach police officer Richard R. Boatwright, who witnessed the shooting, said in a sworn deposition that Lee’s car was moving away from deputies when the shooting began. “We just observed the sheriffs execute somebody,” Boatwright said he told his partner. LA County paid Lee’s family $1 short of a $1 million in a settlement after the shooting.
Then in 1993, sources tell us, Tanaka was reportedly shipped to West Hollywood station as a disciplinary measure for using harsh and inappropriate language to berate a female deputy at Century station, where Tanaka was a lieutenant.
“He’s been carrying a grudge around for more than 20 years,” says Landreth. “That should not be the position of any department head.” And certainly not the man leading the department’s two internal investigative units.
The encounter with Landreth is one of a number of occasions in which Tanaka reportedly badmouthed IA in front of other department personnel. In 2005, Tanaka called a “deputies only” meeting at Century Station in Inglewood, which was, at the time, struggling with violence stemming from a deputy gang called The Regulators—who, like the better known deputy gang of the 1980s to 1990’s era, the Vikings, were notorious for finding weak supervisors they could gang up on and control. Tanaka’s message to this troublesome group: “I never liked IA. Never liked the way they do business.”
“He signs off on discipline,” says a department source familiar with Century Station and the Regulators, “he can’t say that.”
Century’s captain at the time, Steve Roller, agreed—and wrote a memo critical of Tanaka’s statements that he sent up the chain of command. The memo was harsh enough, sources say, that Lee Baca himself visited Century to do damage control.
A few months later, Roller was unexpectedly transferred out of Century while away on an Alaskan cruise. Several sources tell The LA Justice Report that it was the captain’s aggressive, by-the-books ways that got him ”rolled up”—as it was a supervisory style that clashed with Paul Tanaka’s vision for how to run a high profile station like Century.
As we reported in Dangerous Jails, Part 3, department sources cite multiple incidents in which Undersheriff Tanaka has told deputies in the department to “work in they grey”—a skate the edge style of policing that essentially translates to “do whatever it takes.”
The LA Justice Report spoke with three former IA investigators who each made clear that “working in the grey” policing, and aggressive internal affairs monitoring of departmental wrongdoing are irreconcilable. Robust internal affairs and deputies told by their undersheriff to push the boundaries of departmental policy cannot coexist. Something has to give. And by all accounts, when it comes to Paul Tanaka, it will be IA, not the deputies under his wing who are forced to cede ground.
HANDCUFFING THE ADULTS
An example of the slippery slope that comes with ceding this supervisory ground occurred in 2006, when Paul Tanaka called an impromptu meeting for all the supervisors inside Men’s Central Jail. Tanaka was then the assistant sheriff in charge of custody and the meeting was not unexpected. There had been a string of high profile violent incidents in the jail that had drawn the scrutiny of the LA County Board of Supervisors, the ACLU and the media.
As The LA Justice Report has previously reported, CJ’s then-captain John Clark traced much of the violence back to bands of deputies who were forming gang-like cliques on the second, third and fourth floors of the jail—the 3000 Boys, et al. Modeled after the law-suit producing deputy cliques of the previous decades, like the Vikings, these cliques featured special tattoos, threw gang-like hand signs and, in some cases, refused to socialize with “rival” cliques within the department. In the case of the 3000 Boys and the matching group from the 2nd floor, the 2000 Boys, the cliques had also recently started waiting for their entire crew to get off work—sometimes lingering for hours at a time—before leaving the station together en masse. This was not only a violation of departmental policy, but it was eerie gang-like behavior intended to intimidate—to show both inmates and supervisors alike who really ran the jail.
“You had guys taking off one or two hours early so they could leave with their crew,” says one former CJ supervisor (who asked that we not give his rank for fear of being identified). “This is what gangs do.”
It was in this climate, that Paul Tanaka called his meeting. Our source, who was in the room that day, tells us that, instead of demanding better supervision of the increasingly out-of-control deputies—whose actions have now been reported by The LA Justice report here, along with the ACLU, the LA Weekly, KTLA and the LA Times, not to mention an ongoing series of high ticket law suits, and an investigation by the FBI—Tanaka told everyone to back off.
“I want you supervisors to stay out of the way and let the deputies do their jobs,” Tanaka said. “Your type of supervision is like a dinosaur. You remind me of my father.”
Our source says Tanaka was particularly livid at the suggestion that deputies in cliques like the 3,000 Boys were acting like gangsters. “How dare any supervisor refer to a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputy as a gang member.”
Tanaka then made a cradling gesture with his hands. “This is Generation Y. You will coddle these men.”
Our source says that he and his fellow CJ supervisors were shocked at the counter-disciplinary instructions. Here was one of the most powerful men in the department essentially telling them to not do their jobs—not to provide boundaries, and guidance for these inexperienced deputies. Many of these men and women were a few months out of the Sheriff’s Academy and were not just risking doing harm to inmates, but also—if their mistakes were big enough— potentially sacrificing their careers. This is why a big law enforcement agency like the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has structural fail safes: Just because the assistant sheriff wanted lax supervision, didn’t mean IA or ICIB couldn’t investigate these same deputies for wrongdoing, if their actions were serious and well documented.
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“We weren’t trying to be autocratic,” says our source. “We’re a paramilitary organization. There are rules and regulations. We need discipline. And that discipline had broken down.
“Tanaka’s intervention put handcuffs on all of us.”
Sources tell us Tanaka’s hands-free management style is nothing new—it dates back to his days as a sergeant at Lynwood station in the late-80’s early 90’s. According to a source who worked at Lynwood, Tanaka was the supervisor of choice for deputies who were “sergeant shopping”—looking for a supervisor mostly likely to give permission or protection. This was particularly true with members of the Vikings, of whom Tanaka was, by then, a tattooed member.
[For more on the undersheriff and the Vikings see the sidebar below]
Since Tanaka was just a sergeant, back then, he wouldn’t have had the “juice” to head off something as serious as an IA investigation. But in basic disciplinary battles between deputies and fellow sergeants, Tanaka nearly always sided with deputies—in the process, eroding the authority of supervision at the station.
“He was emotionally close with these guys,” explains our source. “They bonded. He was one of them. He was too immature and not intellectually aware enough to realize the inherent problems with this arrangement. Departmental standards were not being enforced.”
“They’d go running to him like Mommy,” says another LASD source from Tanaka’s Lynwood days. “Tanaka sold out his fellow supervisors to curry favor with the Vikings. It breeds arrogance on steroids. Because these guys know, even if they’re in the wrong, someone has their back. It’s the same story today with the 3,000 Boys. This is a pattern with Tanaka.”
CONTROL ISSUES
So why does a man who has repeatedly made known to all his dislike of Internal Affairs, and aggressive supervision of deputies, suddenly wish to have power over over the unit responsible for investigating departmental misdeeds?
The three former LASD Internal Affairs investigators we spoke to all told us versions of the same thing: “It’s about control.”
These former IA investigators, as well as other sources inside the department, point to the questionable timing of Tanaka’s takeover—a few weeks after his high school friend Bernice Abraham was put on leave when federal investigators notified Sheriff’s officials that Abram’s voice may have been heard on a narcotics wiretap relating to an investigation of a Compton drug ring. Abram had been the head of Carson Station and a close ally of Tanaka. She has contributed to his Gardena political campaigns since 2004.
“Ever since Abram was relieved of duty, things changed,” says one LASD supervisor.
According to the supervisor, prior to Tanaka’s takeover of IA and ICIB, whenever someone in the department was arrested or put on leave, a departmental memo called a “confidential operational log,” which summarized the circumstances surrounding the action, would go out to LASD supervisors with the rank of captain or higher. However, a confidential operational log was never sent out about Abram, nor, according to our insider, have any others been sent since Tanaka became Undersheriff.
“People inquiring about [Abram], mostly out of concern, were quickly told to ‘mind their own business.’
“All this did was weaken trust within the department,” he says. “There was no more transparency and many felt, and feel, that there is something to hide, not only as it relates to Bernice Abram, but to others and any potential future investigations.”
“It was standard operating procedure, no big deal,” says another former LASD higher-up of the confidential operational logs, “the way business was done. Now it’s all about trying to stifle information from getting outside the organization.”
DOUBLE STANDARDS
Multiple sources tell us they worry there is a standard of permissiveness for some people—namely Tanaka insiders—-that doesn’t apply to others in the department. They argue that there were instances of the Undersheriff and other LASD brass applying pressure on IA investigations even before Tanaka took direct control of the bureau. As an example, they point to an investigation into the May 9, 2005 shooting of Winston Hayes by LASD deputies. Hayes was a black motorist who, high on drugs, led Sheriff’s deputies on a low-speed pursuit through Compton. Deputies eventually pulled Hayes over, and advanced in his direction. Then, claiming he tried to run them down, deputies fired 120 shots at Hayes’ car, hitting him nine times and his vehicle 66 more times. In the crossfire, the deputies also managed to shoot one of their own officers (non-fatally), plus strafe several squad cars with 11 rounds. Another 11 bullets slammed into surrounding homes.
The incident prompted a gigantic community backlash and cost LA County $1,326,468.60 when a jury, after watching a citizen video of the incident, agreed that officers had used excessive force on Hayes, who miraculously survived the barrage. All deputies involved in the incident were given 15-day suspensions stemming from an Internal Affairs review, as was the sergeant who directed the chase over the police radio.
Yet two different sources tell us that the watch commander on the incident, a lieutenant out of Compton station, not only escaped any kind of sanctions, he was never made a subject of investigation by Internal Affairs—despite the fact that he was in the field and on the radio during the chase. According to our sources, this lieutenant upped the urgency of the chase by hopping on the radio to list Hayes’ past crimes as events were still unfolding.
“He absolutely inflamed the situation,” says one LASD insider with knowledge of the incident.
Sources say IA investigators attempted to interview the lieutenant as a subject, but were pressured by higher-ups to stay away. Landreth was one of the lead IA investigators on the Compton shooting, and he confirms our sources’ story. Departmental policy and the Policeman’s Bill of Rights prevent Landreth from discussing the case with us in detail, or naming the lieutenant in question, but other sources tell us the lieutenant was James Hellmold—one of Paul Tanaka’s leading campaign contributors and a former driver to Sheriff Lee Baca.
“Tanaka and Baca put Hellmold off in the corner and let the Sergeants take the fall,” says a former high-ranking insider with knowledge of the situation. “He absolutely should have been the subject of an IA investigation.”
Hellmold’s free pass earned him the nickname “Teflon Lieutenant” among those with knowledge of the shooting. A little more than a year after the incident, Hellmold was promoted to captain and placed in charge of Century Station. He has since risen to the rank of commander and is one of four commanders leading Baca’s panel to investigate jail violence.
However, Hellmold’s Teflon dodge happened under the old IA system–where an investigator like Landreth had the option going to his chief to try to earn the backing of a command staff ally. Under the new system, the only recourse an investigator would have would be to go straight to Paul Tanaka.
“If he’s stacking the deck with ‘his’ people in there,” says one former Internal Affairs investigator, “then I don’t have any faith in IA.”
EPILOGUE
On December 19 of 2011, the LA Justice Report submitted a series of questions to the LA Sheriff’s Department regarding Paul Tanaka’s takeover of Internal Affairs and Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau—and his notorious dislike for IA.
On January 4, 2012, two weeks after our conversation with Parker, Internal Affairs was put back under the umbrella of Chief Roberta Abner and the Leadership and Training Division. Internal Criminal Investigations remains under the control of Undersheriff Tanaka. How much or little unofficial influence over Internal Affairs that Paul Tanaka retains is unknown.
Editor’s Notes:
TANAKA & THE VIKINGS
In 1987, the year before the Hong Pyo Lee shooting, Paul Tanaka was asked to join the Vikings, the now notorious group of deputies operating out of the Lynwood station, whose members sported numbered Viking tattoos on their ankles, threw gang signs—L for Lynwood—occasionally spray-painted Vikings tags in the Lynwood area to mark their “turf,” and bragged openly about harassing supervisors who tried to reign them in until those supervisors transferred away from Lynwood. Tanaka was one of the group’s very few non-Caucasian members.
In the early 1990’s, members of the same Lynwood Vikings were the primary defendants in a massive class action suit against the department alleging a widespread pattern of brutality against Lynwood residents.
The suit resulted in a $9 million settlement and drew unusually harsh “findings of fact” from two sets of presiding judges.
U.S. District Court Judge Terry Hatter stated that a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” of deputies–the Vikings–exists at the Lynwood station with the knowledge of department officials. “Policy makers” in the department, Hatter said, “tacitly authorize deputies’ unconstitutional behavior.”
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. These deputies, wrote the 9th Circuit of the Lynwood Vikings, “…regularly disregard the civil rights of individuals they have sworn to protect.” They engaged in misconduct “both malicious and pervasive…” Black and hispanic men were “repeatedly arrested without cause and severely beaten at the Lynwood station, the County jail, and the ‘Operations Safe Streets’ trailer.” The court described “instances where deputies placed the muzzle of a firearm in a suspect’s ear, mouth or behind his head, and threatened to pull the trigger, or actually fired the gun without discharging a bullet…” and more.
The list of court-determined “facts” went on and on..
Tanaka was already a Viking at the time the lawsuit was filed, but was not one of those named in the complaint. However, we spoke to two of the attorneys who filled the lawsuit, as well as to department insiders with direct knowledge of the Vikings, all of whom confirmed Tanaka’s involvement with the group during his Lynwood years.
“[Tanaka] was well known as a member of the Vikings and what they stand for,” said former LASD lieutenant, Roger Clark. Now retired, Clark acts an expert witness who is frequently called to testify about his knowledge of law enforcement subcultures and what he calls “peer clans,” like the Vikings and the 3000 Boys. “There’s always been a tension in the department between people who are willing to bend the rules and those who are not.” Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, said Clark, falls firmly on the rule-bending side of the equation.
DANGEROUS JAILS – PART 5: COMING NEXT MONTH
THE PHOTOS: From Top to Bottom: Paul Tanaka, Cecil Rhambo and fellow deputies at the Carson Station flashing “C” for Carson, circa early to mid 1980s; 3000 Boys from Men’s Central Jail flashing their “3″ sign; frame of citizen’s video of Lynnwood deputy flashing Viking sign, “L” for Lynwood, circa late 1980s.
On Wednesday morning, The ACLU of Southern California filed a federal class action suit against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department with the idea of getting a sharp-toothed federal injunction that will force the department, at legal gunpoint, if necessary, to make the changes necessary clean up its desperately troubled jails.
The suit makes it clear that it’s not looking merely for symptomatic tinkering, that it views the problems as systemic, and that they start at the top.
With this in mind, in addition to suing the LASD in general, the suit charges that Sheriff Lee Baca, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo, and former Chief of Custody Operations Dennis Burns all knew about “a longstanding, widespread pattern of violence by deputies against inmates in the county jails” —but when confronted with the abuse by concerned supervisors (as we reported here and here and here in Matt Fleischer’s Dangerous Jails series), Baca, Tanaka and company basically told the supervisors to buzz off—and the abuse was allowed to continue.
The 77-page complaint details an avalanche of horrific alleged incidents of inmates being slugged, tased, kicked, head-bashed, slammed and, in one case, scalp-carved by deputies—with several of the reported incidents occurring in front of witnesses, or while the inmate was handcuffed, or both. Many of the beatings reportedly resulted in multi-day hospital stays and permanent injuries.
At a press conference Wednesday morning, So Cal ACLU legal director, Peter Eliasberg, and Margaret Winter, the associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, both said they expect the lawsuit to result in a federal injunction—likely in the form of a consent decree—- that will force the LASD into “real accountability.”
When I asked Winter whether or not she thought the ACLU had a good chance of getting the desired injunction, Winter answered strongly in the affirmative.
“I have really seldom felt more confident that litigation is going to result in a consent decree.” she said. “I mean, we have massive evidence even before discovery. And during the discovery phase of all this, we’re going to get everything. Everything. ”
(Just in case you’ve forgotten, discovery is the period of formal investigation — governed by court rules — that is conducted before trial. At that time one party may force the other to produce requested documents or other physical evidence, even if the second party really would rather not.)
Until very recently, said Winter, the department refused even to fork over its guidelines for use of force inside the jails. “We tried for years to get that.”
(For the record, I know from personal experience that one can easily get this kind of information from the LAPD, while the Sheriff’s Department is bothersomely withholding about trivial things.)
“Now [through the discovery process] we’re going to open the book and go into all the dark corners of the jails and shine a light on the fantastic secrecy that’s been the rule in the past.”
In reading over the just-filed 77 pages of the “Complaint for Injunctive Relief”—known formally as Rosas v. Baca— it does appear that the ACLU already has a lot of potent ammunition to get the court’s attention.
Some random examples of the allegations include:
In July 2011, two deputies beat a handcuffed inmate about the head and neck, the beating so severe that he required hospitalization outside the jail, and has permanent hearing loss in one ear.
In March 16, 2011, three deputies beat an African American inmate until he was unconscious then carved the letters M – Y into his scalp, the first two letters of “MYATE,” (or more commonly “MAYATE,”) a racial street slur meaning “black.”
In March 2011, deputies slammed a handcuffed inmate’s head into a cement wall, leaving him with a concussion and a gash that took 35 stitches to close, then beat him around the head and face when he came to, resulting in 2 days of hospitalization and four additional days in the jail’s medical unit. The ACLU reports that were several witnesses to this incident.
In February 2011, deputies severely beat a mentally ill inmate who was in jail on two warrants: for failure to pay his subway fare, and driving without a license. The beating resulted in a collapsed lung, two broken ribs, a nasal fracture and four broken teeth.
The list goes on from there, including the alleged 2008 rape by a deputy of Frank Mendoza, who was in LA County jail on a charge of public drunkenness. (That’s Mendoza in the video above.)
These are, of course, only allegations. But there are a lot of them. And included in the filing are accounts from a list of civilian witnesses, including two jails chaplains, and a former FBI agent.
LASD Commander James Hellmold was present at the press conference and answered reporters’ questions afterward. (Interestingly, Hellmold admitted he’d not been invited by the ACLU to the Press Conference, but saw a PR release announcing its existence, and simply decided he’d show up, like the rest of us, to find out what was being said. We, in the press, of course, were delighted that he chose to do so.)
In response to inquiries about the alleged beatings, Hellmold said that he “hoped deputies would be given the same courtesy given the inmates, of being considered innocent until proven guilty.”
(Winter said later, than if any deputies weren’t given due process, she guaranteed she’d be the first in line to bring suit to defend their constitutional rights.)
About the reported “culture of violence” inside the jail system, Helmold said that there was “a culture of violence,” inside the jails, but that it was “among the inmates,” more than half of whom he said, “are in jail on violent charges.”
When pressed on the topic by a TV reporter who asked what he thought about the sign-throwing, tattoo-sporting deputy gangs inside the jail, groups like the now-infamous 3000 Boys inside the jails, he said, “I have no comment.”
Hellmold is one of the three recently promoted commanders who are heading up the Sheriff’s special task force that was formed last fall to look into the accusations of inmate abuse by deputies. (As we have reported in the past, Hellmold is also part of Undersheriff Paul Tanaka’s inner circle, and a longtime donor to Tanaka’s political campaign outside the department. We also reported that Paul Tanaka was the one who was repeatedly obstructive when concerned department supervisors tried to institute reforms to curb the deputy on inmate violence.)
Oh, and Hellmold was one of those who told the LA Times back in October that reports on jail violence never reached the Sheriff.
Bring on the lawsuit—and the discovery.
PS: Matt Fleischer and I were happy to note that loads of material from our Dangerous Jails series was woven all through the ACLU’s 77-page lawsuit. (Just thought you’d like to know.)
While WitnessLA didn’t go dark on Wednesday for the SOPA blackout (too much jails stuff going
on to even consider it), the protest seems to be helping.
If you’re unfamiliar with the fuss about SOPA—the Stop Online Piracy Act—and its little sister PIPA …. the Protect IP Act, let writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky explain it all to you.
Shirky, who is one of the smartest people breathing on all things web, was asked to do an “emergency TED talk,” to address the issue of SOPA (and PIPA) in plain terms.
January 26th, 2012 by 
Celeste Fremon
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