Push Back on the Fear and Safety of Law Enforcement

Baca stepped out of the courthouse on August 1st, came down to face the cameras, and began to justify all the reasons why he was withdrawing his guilty plea. I listened to him make his statement and a couple things came up for me…

There’s a really offensive irony in the fact that he continues to play up his Alzheimer’s diagnosis as a reason why he shouldn’t go to prison. Meanwhile we still have hella folks inside who aren’t getting proper treatment. Law enforcement’s psychological and emotional wellbeing has so much more value and weight than the psychological and emotional wellbeing of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles County; particularly incarcerated people. Clearly Baca is using his diagnosis as a legal maneuver while many of our folks in the jail system, which he ran for years, are experiencing cognitive “impairments that are beyond minimal” (as his lawyer described him.) Baca may in fact benefit from the “mental health diversion” climate that has the county’s attention but our loved ones inside have yet to see those benefits.

Even when you talk about an officer involved shooting the popular narrative is that “police are scared for their lives.” The family members of Donnell Thompson, Jr. have expressed that he had a disability. Those needs were met with military force. The Sheriff’s response in his case was to deploy SWAT, deploy armored vehicles, and kill him.

https://www.facebook.com/fusionmedianetwork/videos/1514818068544166/

Donnell Thompson, Jr.’s case is a clear indication of how the fear and psychological health of law enforcement is valued over the safety and lives of people in our community. They are given so much more priority – even in a legal context, which is why Baca is playing up his diagnosis so hard. All the while Donnell’s family endures another example of “treatment” for Black people. This is a clear indicator of the crisis of state violence.

The health and wellness of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black and Brown people and their loved ones is the necessary priority. It is all the more critical that we look at it not as supplement to the conversations of stopping lethal and excessive force, but as essential. Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown LA is still the largest mental healthcare provider in the country and Los Angeles County is looking to build another jail to function as a treatment facility. As long as incarceration and public safety are the lenses through which we “treat” Black and Brown people’s health our communities will never be safe.

It is necessary that we push back on this narrative that the fear and safety of law enforcement should be the deciding factor in determining the life and death of Black and Brown people.

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2.3 BILLION Reasons Los Angeles Must Stop Building Jails

These days when you search the news for “Los Angeles County Jail” you are bombarded with articles about racist emails from a top sheriff’s official, use of force increasing by 40%, deputies being convicted of assault, Former Undersheriff Paul Tanaka’s conviction, Former Sheriff Lee Baca’s conviction, and the deaths of Matrice Richardson and Wakiesha Wilson.

If you look hard hidden within all of the news about sheriff brutality you can find a sentence here and there about the fact that Los Angeles County is moving forward with a plan to build two more jails to house this rampant culture of violence.

Let’s be clear, stopping this jail plan is not about money – it is about people’s lives. But, just to show how incredibly negligent the county is, let’s talk about money for a minute…

Los Angeles County’s proposed budget for the next year includes $118 million dollars for a new women’s jail to be built in the toxic Mira Loma site in Lancaster, more than 80 miles away from the current location in Lynwood, and another $5 million towards the planning of a new Men’s Central Jail, marketed as a “mental health jail.” The entire project is estimated to cost at least $2.3 BILLION dollars, but if the LASD has it their way it’ll cost even more. In an effort to ramp up the jail plan the sheriff’s department has been doing their own deal on the state level, scheming to get an additional BILLION dollars to take on 600 state prisoners within the county jails. That would make the jail expansion cost $3.5 BILLION at the minimum.

The LASD and the county would like to have you believe that they are “reforming,” “building trust,” and “focusing on alternatives,” but the fact is that although the county is planning on investing a few million towards mental health and reentry projects, they have not yet taken the multi-billion dollar jail plan off the table.

A perfect example of the sheriff department’s eagerness to expand the largest jail system in the world is the recent MacArthur grant. The MacArthur Foundation just awarded 11 grants ranging from $1.5 to $3.5 million to reduce jail populations. New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans were among the winners. Los Angeles was not. They instead received a smaller, lower-tier award of $150,000. Our team that looked over the LASD application theorize that it was deliberately flubbed.

There is hope. First of all, the budget has not been approved and you better believe we will be at the County Board of Supervisors meetings in full force advocating for funding community solutions. Second, the supervisors do not seem keen on accepting this sheriff-lead state deal. And third, just look at San Francisco! The people there were successful in stopping the jail plan.

Let’s change the news headlines and #STOP2BILLIONJAIL!

LA County Board of Supervisors agendas are often posted last minute so keep your Tuesday days flexible and follow us on Facebook or Twitter and sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on actions. In the meantime contact your supervisor and tell them to stop the 2 billion dollar jail plan and invest in mental health diversion and community solutions! We. Will. Win.

Stay tuned to our blog for big updates regarding the Civilian Oversight Commission this month!

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Thanks to Prop 47, Californians are less oppressed than they were a year ago

One year ago California voters adopted Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reduced 6 low level felonies, including drug possession, to misdemeanors. Check out this report out of Stanford analyzing the first year of Prop 47 that highlights reduced jail and prison overcrowding, the resentencing and release of 13,000 people as of Sept 30 (4,454 of from state prison, the rest from jail), the state savings of $70 million already and an estimated $93 million more every year, the county savings of $203 million annually, and the recidivism rate at a mere 5% – far lower than the state’s average.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell and others in law enforcement have been quick to attack Prop 47. It’s no surprise this pushback is coming at a time when the sheriff’s department is trying to build two new jails. We agree that not enough funds were given to rehabilitation programs, education, and victim services. What Sheriff McDonnell fails to mention in his recent videos in the LA Times is that those funds are historically given to the sheriff’s department! Well, we’re addressing his failure in our own series of Prop 47 videos.

Here’s our LA Times video response:

We didn’t set Prop 47 up for success

Housing rather than criminalizing folks on Skid Row

Recidivism rates via Prop 47 are at 5%

Our communities have spoken

The idea of the Ferguson Effect

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Racial Discrimination: A Worldwide Issue, an LA Epidemic

In the UK, without “reasonable suspicion” as a law enforcement policy, Black people are 35x more likely to be stopped and questioned by police. With the policy in place, Black folks are 7x more likely than white people to be stopped and questioned. This statistic was presented to us at special convening of international “experts” on racism, hosted by Mutuma Ruteere, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenohobia and Related intolerance. I was excited to represent DPN at this convening for a two-day discussion on conditions and best practices for combating racial discrimination. Across the two day convening the statistic stuck with me for two reasons: 1) It points out how real anti-blackness is as an international practice in law enforcement, and 2) Racial profiling is much harder to track and monitor in the jail setting because it requires that that law enforcement be invested in tracking its own personnel’s racist practices. I can’t see the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department doing that.

Me and Kristina Ronnquist representing DPN’s Building Resilience at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland

Dignity and Power Now has been prioritizing the international human rights framework this year; including our shadow report we submitted to the UN as part of a review of US compliance with the international convention of eliminating racial discrimination. Our report focused on abuses and discrimination of Black people with mental health conditions in the jails and pointed out the same dilemma I mentioned above. The dilemma being that behind the jail walls the ever present violence against Black and Brown people is invisible. One of the clearest examples of this is the tremendous lack of data and tracking on racial and gender discrimination as well as human rights violations behind the jail walls.

The recent Department of Justice critique of the Los Angeles County Jails as unconstitutional is important but the United States is not immune to human rights violations. Our loved ones coming out of the jails know this. Our loved ones who are still inside know this. As we move forward with our campaign to win civilian oversight, stop the $2 billion jail plan, and win mental health diversion that decarcerates Black and Brown people from the county jail system, DPN is invested in protecting the civil and human rights of all incarcerated people.

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