A week ago DPN and the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence turned out to the first town hall put on by the Civilian Oversight Commission. Despite the Lakewood venue being far away and difficult to find we showed up along with organization members of our coalition including the Youth Justice Coalition, Black Jewish Justice Alliance, and the ACLU. The evening though belonged to a team of five mothers, four of them DPN members, who’ve been fighting to expose sheriff’s deputies that have been targeting their families in Compton for months.

Alicia had been coming to every single commission meeting demanding justice for her sons. Every month she shows up. Every month she continues to tell the story of the sheriff’s department raiding her house and wrongfully arresting her sons for a shooting in the area. Every month she vows to keep coming until the commission, the Inspector General, anyone will hold the sheriff accountable for tearing her family apart and holding her sons in custody.

One of the mothers, a Youth Justice Coalition leader, shared all the steps she’s been going through to protect her son who is currently in the jails and is not being treated for very serious health conditions. She vividly described not only his medical condition but the process she has been dragged through to advocate for her son who is receiving zero care. You can’t make this stuff up. You can’t stop fighting.

Watch our latest collaboration with Fusion on medical neglect inside prisons and jails:

The data presented by the Inspector General’s Office at the regular commission meeting last Thursday was more confirmation of what Dignity and Power Now has been saying from the beginning: the Los Angeles jails are killing our people. We’ve known this. The Department of Justice has known this. The Sheriff has known this. The anonymous source who contacted us to tip us off of another serious suicide attempt two days ago knew this. Helen, whose son was beaten to death by deputies who called it a suicide, knows this.

The LA Times highlighted our work this week around exposing jail suicides:

‘How many people are being shot?’ L.A. sheriff’s watchdog decries lack of transparency

A little more than two years ago, the primary watchdog over the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department laid out numerous ways the agency was failing to provide the public with basic information about how often deputies use force, the number of complaints alleging misconduct and how many deputies were being disciplined.

Over the last five years the rate of “self-directed violence” as reported by the Inspector General has quadrupled. It’s a crisis in the realest sense of the word and the common denominator is a jail system that destroys the lives of our loved ones.