A Fracking Moratorium is the New Litmus Test for Elected Officials

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

After years of spirited battles by environmental activists, stacks of lawsuits, countless reports and studies by health officials, and the expression of concern by President Obama, California state officials finally agreed to impose some regulations on the practice of fracking. Governor Jerry Brown put the official state imprimatur on this concern when he released proposed draft regulations that would regulate fracking. Fracking entails pumping chemically treated high pressure water into the ground to fracture rock and soil to release more oil. The furious debate is over just how much of a health and environmental danger this poses. There’s much evidence that fracking contaminates the soil, water, air quality, increases the danger of earthquakes, and  has damaged homes and structures in residential neighborhoods that front oil drilling sites. The best example is the Inglewood oil field. Homeowner groups and environmentalists in the area abutting the fields have fought a protracted fight to get the state to impose either a total ban or moratorium on fracking until it’s fully determined what the health and safety risks are.

This is where local elected officials that represent the area come in. When fracking first became a major issue and concern of homeowners and residents in the Inglewood, Baldwin Hills, and Culver City area, local officials were largely silent about it. As the evidence mounted that fracking posed real dangers to health and property values, some officials called for studies of the practice, and later a temporary moratorium on fracking to determine how severe the dangers were. But there were other officials who still maintained a wall of silence on the issue, or, as some enraged neighborhood groups charged, were openly or quietly taking funding from the oil drilling site operators. They, of course, have countless piles of money to dump into the fight against any anti-fracking controls, and that means money to plop into the coffers of compliant politicians. They in essence had a vested interested in stonewalling efforts to get a moratorium on fracking. But the issue could not be ignored no matter how great the effort to suppress action against the practice.

The state legislature during this period was also deeply complicit in torpedoing any action on fracking. Bills that eventually were introduced after relentless pressure from environmentalists either were tabled in committee or voted down. This only intensified the determination of environmentalists, homeowner groups and some local officials to get the legislature to take action. It finally did when it finally passed a bill calling for regulations, and thus Governor Brown’s subsequent action on it.

However, there are two gaping problems with this. One is that the proposed regulations simply require the oil companies to tell what chemicals they use in the fracking process and some monitoring of them. It would not require the companies to implement any special controls to insure that the chemicals used pose no threat to the air, groundwater, not to mention damage to homes and streets in the area surrounding a field such as the Inglewood oil field. Even with this minimal disclosure requirement there is a loophole. There are exemptions against them disclosing the chemicals if they infringe on oil industry trade secrets. Who determines that? The oil companies do, of course. The state will do two more studies on the safety and environmental impact of fracking. But those reports won’t be finished until 2015. The other problem is that of the five cities chosen to hold public hearings on the proposed state fracking regulations. Los Angeles was not one of them. This is both a glaring and insulting omission. It was the battle over the drilling hazards at the Inglewood field that sparked state and local officials to take the action they did take on fracking.

This is now the new litmus test for current local elected officials and those who want to be elected in the future. Put simply, will they fully support a moratorium on fracking and if it’s confirmed that fracking does pose the severe health and environmental risks that activists claim and many studies bear out, will they support a full ban on the practice? In any election now and in the future, this is the point blank question that any elected official in Los Angeles must answer without any equivocation. They also must also fully disclose any monies they have received from the oil lobby. You can’t take gobs of oil lobby money without being hopelessly compromised in assessing the real hazard of fracking. Brown and the state legislature and some local elected officials took the first big step in protecting the health and safety of Los Angeles residents by establishing minimal rules on fracking. It’s clearly not enough. The Los Angeles City Council, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, and all state legislators that represent L.A. County cities must continue to put relentless pressure on the oil industry and regulatory agencies to control or end fracking. And this applies to all future elected officials as well. If they won’t commit to that they don’t deserve to hold office.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. Listen to his weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles every Friday, 9:00 to 9:30 AM and every Saturday at Noon on KPFK-Radio, 90.7 FM.

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The Two Sides of Daryl Gates That I Saw

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The on set camera crew and sound technicians had long since departed from the sound stage at KCBS and the lights had dimmed but we set there for what seemed like endless hours afterwards engaging in bare knuckles, heated debate. My at one moment fierce opponent and at another moment jovial associate was former LAPD chief Daryl Gates. We were co-commentators for the station during the O.J. Simpson trial. On and off the set, we went at it on everything from the Rodney King beating, the L.A. riots, the LAPD’s war on gang and drug violence, police misconduct and shootings, and of course, the Simpson trial. These were the issues that tore Los Angeles for a decade before and did more to poison relations between the LAPD and minority communities, especially African-Americans, than any other. Our debates were so intense that we continued the battle of words as we walked to our cars in the parking lot. After a while this became a routine, we’d spar on the set, and continue sparring as we walked to our cars.

There were moments when Gates would sigh in exasperation that I and other critics just didn’t understand what he had to face running a department that was under resourced, got little political and public support, and yet was expected to be a kinder, gentler department while battling a spiraling gang, drug and violence problem. I listened to his heart felt pleas that he sincerely tried to make change, even reform. He repeatedly cited the number of officers that he disciplined and terminated for misconduct and other offenses, but said that his hands were tied by city officials, police union, and the public who wanted more and tougher policing, and were loathe to see officers removed. He cited the community policing programs that he tried to put in place. Yet he pleaded nothing he did seemed to matter. He and the LAPD were still relentlessly maligned.

This was no play act or parking lot revisionism of his LAPD role to convince me that underneath the tough cop’s cop exterior he was a marshmallow soft reformer. Gates passionately believed that he had done the best that he could against the odds to move the LAPD into the modern era. As we parted, I always wondered which Daryl Gates I was talking too, the maligned, misunderstood reformer, or the chief whose name was synonymous with a department that in the decade immediately preceding the King beating and the riots, had become the nation’s poster police agent for a dysfunctional, brutal, racist, shoot first, police department.

During its big, bad years, the perception, and more often than not reality, was that the LAPD was in every sense an occupying army in South L.A. Officers went where they pleased, did what they pleased and cracked heads when they pleased, all with the blind-eye acquiescence of city officials. Two massive riots, the King beating, the Rampart scandal, the Christopher and Webster commissions and a federal consent decree all made it obvious that the LAPD had to change.

Gates stood at the center of the tumultuous events that engulfed the LAPD. He was depending on whom one talked to the top cop who expanded and popularized the kick butt, SWAT teams, or the top cop who devised and expanded innovative, programs such as DARE, which served as a national police model for drug prevention and education.
Gates was well aware that the years when the LAPD carried his indelible stamp were now well past. Los Angeles city officials talked incessantly about reform and change. There was a new African-American chief. The department was now under intense federal scrutiny, and soon a consent decree mandating a total top to bottom overhaul of its policies and practices on the use of deadly force, minority hiring and promotions, and the handling of misconduct complaints. He seemed resigned to the fact that time and the department had passed him by; a time when the LAPD reigned over a city that was predominantly white, with an insular city government, and where the police were roundly hailed by homeowners as heroes. That Los Angeles had rapidly faded into the past, and had morphed into one of the nation’s most diverse, that demanded accountability and transparency. This meant a police force that had to change with it.

Gates, then, was truly a man of another time. His pleas and sighs of exasperation over the problems that still haunted him as we talked and walked to our cars told me much about a man who still deeply believed that he had tried to do what was best for the city, despite everything. This was the two sides of Daryl Gates that I saw as we smiled, shook hands, exchanged a laugh and walked away from each other those nights in the studio parking lot.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst and the host of the Hutchinson Report on KTYM AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio Los Angeles.

The Slaying of Steven Eugene Washington is yet another Teaching Moment for the LAPD

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The agonizing killing of Steven Eugene Washington presents yet another teaching moment for the LAPD. Washington was gunned down in Koreatown by two LAPD gang unit officers. The details of the encounter are still blurry enough to raise lots of questions about why the killing happened. The twist is that Washington reportedly suffered from an autistic disability. Autism is virtually a no-man’s land for most police departments. There is virtually no formal training given to police on what to look for, how to approach, and engage individuals that may suffer from autism in street stops.
The grim record of encounters between police and autistic disabled suspects amply bears this out. According to FBI reports, individuals with developmental disabilities, and that includes autism, are seven times more likely to have contact with and confrontations with law enforcement than others. Mental health experts agree that the number that is likely to have contact with police is a serious and growing problem. The estimate is that upwards of a dozen persons with autism are harmed, hit with a stun gun, or killed by police each year. Washington may be the latest casualty to the list.
Autistic disabled individuals are more fearful, may exhibit strange or quirky movements, and suffer sudden panic attacks, when encountering strange sights, sounds and smells. In night time situations, and especially in high crime areas, these are the very things that attract police attention, and in far too many tragic cases, result in injury or death. In Washington’s case, the LAPD said that Washington apparently did all of the above, the panic, flight, and quick movement. It cost him his life.
The LAPD is no different than other police agencies when it comes to dealing with suspects such as Washington who may suffer from an autistic disability. They are simply clueless in how to deal with them.
And the evidence is that the numbers of those with autism in big cities such as L.A. is growing. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2007 found that one in 150 children in New Jersey was diagnosed as autistic, a rate that was fifteen times greater than previous estimates. The number of those with autism in California is just as great. A study by researchers at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute found a seven- to eight-fold increase in the number children born in California with autism since 1990. Other studies have found that children in Los Angeles were twice as likely to have autism as children in surrounding areas, and that testing, and treatment facilities and care services to identify and deal with autism are even more likely to be lacking, especially in South L.A.
Despite the staggering numbers of autistic disabled in New Jersey and California, and the much greater incidence of those with autism in Los Angeles, virtually none of the police departments in New Jersey had a comprehensive training program for officers on autism. The same can be said for police agencies in California.
LAPD officials recognize that a terrible mistake was made in the killing of Washington, a death that should not have happened. However, in the aftermath of the shooting, the inevitable deep soul search for answers is on with a vengeance. Those questions will center on the officer’s training, whether or not gunplay was necessary, and even why Washington was stopped, or even if he was stopped, in the first place.
These are questions that Washington’s family, friends, and LAPD officials want and need answered. When the dust finally settles, though, the tormenting question is what if anything the LAPD can and will do to see that a tragedy like the Washington killing doesn’t happen again.
In the absence of a firm training program to make LAPD officers recognize that there are a lot of individuals who walk L.A. streets who are autistic and what to do when they encounter them, the equally tormenting answer is that there could well be another tragedy such as Washington.
Washington’s slaying can, no must, be another teaching moment for the LAPD and the city. Let’s not waste that moment.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the Presisent of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundable. His Hutchinson Report can be heard on KPFK-Radio 90.7 FM, Saturdays, Noon to 1:00PM

Devaluing Black Lives: The Killing of Danica Denton and Child

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Devaluing Black Lives: The Killing of Danica Denton and Child by author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson will appear as his syndicated column in 100 newspapers and websites nationally September 10, 2009.

A young expectant mother observes all the pedestrian safety rules while crossing the street. She’s in a designated crosswalk. There appears to be no oncoming traffic. And if there is the cars are required to stop. For thousands of pedestrians crossing streets this is a routine, uneventful occurrence every hour, every day in every city. It should have been the same for 18 year old Danica Denton. But on February 11, 2009, Gina Garcia changed that.

The 34 year old driver barreled through the crosswalk and bowled over Denton in the desert city of Cathedral City near Palm Springs, California. Denton and her baby died later at a local hospital. Denton is an African-American. Garcia is white. The all too familiar tangle of legal, judicial and law enforcement dodges, delays, and blame shifting instantly began. The tangle ultimately called into question how seriously the local District Attorney, law enforcement, and even state officials take the deaths of African-Americans; especially when the alleged killer is white, female, and well-connected.

The tangle of legal and race tinged foot dragging in the case began immediately after Denton was struck. Garcia fled the scene and this made the killing a serious hit and run felony. Also Garcia earlier had been charged with a DUI offense. Though Cathedral City police were informed that she had checked into a local hospital, it took a full day before they arrested her. Despite the seriousness of the charges, Garcia was immediately released on $25,000 bail. The bail for felony hit and run offenses that result in death is generally ten times greater than Garcia’s bail.

Garcia’s husband is a special investigator with the Riverside DA’s Office, and this drew an outcry that Garcia was getting kid glove treatment. A month after Denton’s killing, Cathedral City police claimed that they were still investigating the deaths. This drew another outcry that Garcia was continuing to get special treatment. The DA claimed possible conflict of interest and turned prosecution over to the California Attorney General. In June, Garcia agreed to a plea bargain and a 15 year sentence. But this didn’t end the Denton family nightmare.

Garcia was given two more months to surrender and begin serving her sentence. This didn’t and hasn’t happened. On August 14, Garcia armed with backing from doctors and a hospital was a no show in court. Her excuse was that she underwent major surgery at an undisclosed hospital, for an undisclosed ailment, and that she was too sick to be moved. The judge and prosecutors bought it, and gave her more weeks in which to surrender. The judge added further insult with a hand wringing sympathy plea that he didn’t want to turn her alleged surgery into a death sentence. He added even more insult by tossing Denton’s father out of court for denouncing the judicial farce.

The charge by Denton’s family and local civil rights leaders that the police, DA, state Attorney General, and the judge are insensitive to the murder of African-Americans such as Denton and her child is not new. Countless groups have marched, picketed and screamed loudly that law enforcement and judges impose a hard racial double standard when the victim is a young African-American and the killer is white. The implicit message is that black lives are expendable. Many studies still confirm that the punishment whites receive when the victim is black is far less severe than when the victim is white and far more severe when the table is turned and the killer is black and the victim is white. Police officials and judges vehemently deny that they are any less diligent in prosecuting white on black killings than the reverse.

Yet the studies and reports on racial disparity in sentencing and the history of prosecuting crimes involving interracial violence show otherwise. In Denton’s case, the low bail, endless delays, DA conflict of interest, a questionable plea bargain, the killer’s alleged mysterious prison dodging illness, and the court’s willingness to go along with it paint a terrible picture of legal indifference and conciliation toward the killing of two blacks.

Seven months after Denton and child were flattened on a Cathedral City street, the record stands that her killer and her baby’s killer did not serve one full day of jail time. This is a record of shame, disgrace and an indictment of a criminal justice system that badly failed a young black mother and her child.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

The Other Culprits in Dae’von Bailey’s Death

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Marcas Fisher is the prime culprit in the beating death of 6 year old Dae’von Bailey. But Fisher is hardly the only culprit in Bailey’s death. The other culprits are the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the Department of Child and Family Services, medical practitioners, and an at times indifferent public.
The towering problems in the DCFS that include failure to follow up on abuse complaints, poor to non-existent record keeping, management and case worker inertia and even indifference and bungled investigations were well-documented in a dozen or more reports from investigators and in audits, as well as a slew of media exposes of agency failures. The Board of Supervisors knew of the problems in DCFS since the mid 1990s. The failure of the supervisors to immediately revamp the agency put hundreds of children directly in harms way. In 2006, 14 children in L.A. County died as a result of neglect, abuse and maltreatment. In 2007, 12 children died from the same causes. In 2008, the number of children who reportedly died from abuse or neglect soared to 32.

The reports of agency mismanagement and the deaths each time forced the supervisors to scramble. They repeatedly promised an immediate agency shake-up and overhaul. Yet the problems remained and the body count of child abuse victims continued to mount. With Bailey’s murder, the supervisors again have promised a big agency overhaul. The proposals for change look much like those that have been put on the table in the past. They include better reporting, and timely case follow-up, management accountability, more thorough and professional child abuse victim medical examinations. The proposals went nowhere in the past and Bailey and the other child victims of abuse paid a terrible price for the county supervisor’s inaction.
DCFS officials have also scrambled to deflect blame for agency ineptitude. They assure that more fail safe checks and balances will be put in place to insure that there are no more horrific deaths such as Bailey. Yet just as with the county supervisors the promises of immediate change have been made before and have gone nowhere. There’s not a lot of reason for optimism that big changes will happen this time either given the past failures and the management’s lackadaisical response to sweeping proposals put forth by the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable for immediate agency change. Roundtable officials asked for a meeting with Trish Ploehm, DCFS director, and senior staff to present and review the recommendations. Management agreed, and then didn’t show at the meeting. In the wake of Bailey’s murder, if Ploehm and other top DCFS heads fail to drastically overhaul how they handle child abuse cases child they should resign or be removed.

The private doctors and medical practitioners who examined Bailey and ultimately found no harm no foul in his injuries are also culprits in his death. That must change. Private doctors must not solely determine whether a child’s injuries are the result of abuse. Only trained, county certified, child abuse forensic examiners should make that call.
Bailey is the most horrific and shocking case of child abuse turned to child murder. However, there are thousands more children nationally who suffer abuse or mistreatment. The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System estimate that in the past decade nearly 1 million children have been victims of severe abuse. More than 1000 children died as a result of abuse or neglect. More than 80 percent of the child victims are age six and under. Bailey fit the profile of the at risk child to the letter. The abuse numbers reported almost certainly are a gross underestimate. Many cases simply aren’t reported or as in Bailey’s case the tangled web of inept reporting, bureaucratic bungling, and sloppy recordkeeping cause abused kids to fall through the cracks.

In 2005, only 20 states required that citizens who suspect abuse or neglect are required to report it. “Reasonable suspicion” based on objective evidence, which could be firsthand observation or statements made by a parent or child, is all that is needed to report abuse. This formula for reporting abuse is too vague and nebulous. It’s a prescription to insure that countless numbers of children continue to slip under the radar of child abuse danger. This also insures that when the furor about a shocking death such as Bailey’s dies down and drops from the headlines, public apathy and ignorance toward the danger again kicks in.
Bailey is a near textbook example of the child who was in mortal danger. Yet if prompt, timely action had been taken by all involved could have been saved. Marcas Fisher may have been the culprit who beat Bailey to death. But the inertia, indifference, and bungling of so many others make them culprits in his death too. They must also answer for that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

Devaluing a Black Life: The Murder of Marquis LeBlanc

Devaluing a Black Life: The Murder of Marquis LeBlanc will appear in Earl Ofari Hutchinson's nationally syndicated column on Friday, June 5.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Pomona is a quiet bedroom city near Los Angeles. Blacks make up less than 10 percent of the city’s population. Latinos make up more than 60 percent of the population. There are no blacks on the city council and all the top police officials are white. Still, city officials generally pride themselves that the city is a relative haven of racial peace. Yet on the night of April 18th the city’s quiet and illusion of racial harmony was rudely jolted. Neighbors watched in horror as at least a dozen young men and women chased down on foot and then beat, kicked, stabbed and shot Marquis LeBlanc, an 18 year old African-American to death. Another dozen or so persons watched the attack and did not help LeBlanc or call police. Eyewitnesses identified the assailants as Latinos, some with suspected gang affiliations.
Though the police station was nearby, police did not arrive at the murder scene for nearly a half hour after the call went out.

Police did not immediately contact LeBlanc’s parents, or ID him. They misidentified LeBlanc’s mother, Jessica Corde, on the coroner’s report. Corde claims police did not make a single call to the family to update them on the investigation, and rebuffed her many inquiries about it.
Days after the killing police claimed they found a gun that was LeBlanc’s. There were also hints that he was a gang member. Police officials have been tight lipped about the case and say that release of information will compromise the investigation. The Le Blanc murder remains unsolved.

LeBlanc’s family minces no words. To them it is a case of a police department that cares little about the murder of a young black. The family’s charge that the Pomona police are insensitive to the murder of LeBlanc is hardly new. Countless groups have marched, picketed and screamed loudly that police do little to catch killers in serial murder cases, the murders of homeless persons and of young black males. The common thread is that the victims are poor, poorly educated, young, black, often female with criminal records, and with few known family members. In times past crimes committed by blacks against other blacks were often ignored or lightly punished. The implicit message was that black lives were expendable. Many studies still confirm that the punishment blacks receive when the victim is white is far more severe than if the victim is black. The clearance rate for murders in some poor, black neighborhoods is far less than for murders in middle-class neighborhoods.
Police officials vehemently deny that they are any less diligent when it comes to nabbing the killers of blacks than the killers of whites. They blame the higher rate of unsolved murders of blacks on higher case loads, tight budgets, limited personnel, and the refusal of witnesses to provide information. But it’s the unsolved murders of blacks that fuel the perception that police take the loss of black lives less seriously than that of whites.

The blanket indictment of police for laxity in black homicides is unfair and a slap at the officers who put in long grueling, hours trying to crack murder cases in poor minority neighborhoods. There’s also the reality that more killings do occur in big city poor neighborhoods than in the suburbs. In 2007, the Violence Policy Center reported that black murders had hit epidemic proportions in some big cities.
The Bureau of Justice in a 2008 report on homicides found that the black murder rate is much higher than that of whites, or even Latinos. It's the leading cause of death among black males age 16 to 34. Black on black murders has fueled the nation's murder stats for a number of years. And only in the rarest of instances has it attracted more than passing mention in the national press. In Chicago, community activists, frustrated over the inability of authorities to stem the rash of murders of primary school age children, have appealed to President Obama to step in with an emergency program to help curtail the violence.

Despite the higher number black murders than of whites, tight police resources, and the hard work that many officers put in to solve black homicides, it takes only one real or perceived case of police laxity when the victim is black to stir suspicion of police racial insensitivity. Pomona for now is tragically that case.
Corde continues to plead with authorities to intensify their investigation into her son’s murder. She has appealed to the press, civil rights and victims of violence groups to prod the department to do more to catch the killers of her son. While her pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears, she is undeterred, “I’m not going to stop until the murderers are brought to justice.” That’s a message that no police official should have to be told or hear from a grieving mother no matter what the color of her murdered son.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

The LAPD Got a Handle on Deadly Force, now it’s Inglewood’s Turn

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

There were cheers and a bold cautionary note for Inglewood police officials, indeed all police officials, in the Harvard Study on the LAPD. The cheers were that the LAPD has done a near 180 degree turn in going from the national poster department for police abuse, brutality and corruption to a fine tuned, well-oiled, crime fighting department and most importantly a department that has done it by respecting civil rights and not abusing minorities.
The abuse part is the key to the LAPD’s image swap. That’s abuse that translates out to the wildly excessive overuse of physical and especially deadly force. The Harvard study found that in the past five years the most serious uses of force by the LAPD- shootings, carotid artery control holds or head strikes with impact weapons – plunged 30 percent. It also found that the incidence of physical force against blacks and Latinos plummeted far more than the force used against whites. The painful explanation for this is that the LAPD officers used much more force against blacks and Latinos in the first place, so the room for improvement here was much greater.

Getting the handle on the use of force is the single biggest reason why more blacks and Latinos in the city said that the LAPD has marched closer than ever to being the kinder, gentler department that it has long boasted that it wants to be. It accomplished the fete through solid, proactive political and department leadership, governance and most importantly independent monitoring, oversight, accountability and transparency. The stated goal is absolute zero tolerance for corruption, abuse, and especially the misuse of physical and deadly force. When cops behaved badly they were investigated and punished.
Now here’s the cautionary note in the Harvard study; a note that the LAPD, Inglewood, and other police officials must take note of. Physical and deadly force far from being a distant memory is still used in far too many instances, and many of those instances are questionable, and blacks and Latinos are more likely than not to be on the receiving end of that physical force. Researchers flatly chided the department for using force in what it called routine enforcement situations. The unmistakable message is that far too many persons are getting roughed up when cops make stops and arrests than may be warranted. That’s been painfully true in the two year surge in Inglewood police shootings.
Questionable cop shootings and their often pro forma stamp investigations stir turmoil and unrest, and deepen the distrust and cynicism of blacks and minorities toward the police. They reinforce the deep seated belief that cops are only out to cover up their dirt and that the lives of minorities are cheap. The multiple officer involved killings in Inglewood have stirred the same rage, frustration, and mistrust. The shootings have done much to make a small city police department the new national poster department for police violence.

Though Inglewood police officials hotly deny that their investigation will be a whitewash, few believe that. The disbelief has nothing to do with the heat, passion and fury over the shootings. It has everything to do with the history of cops investigating other cops who are alleged to have committed or actually are guilty of misconduct, and especially misconduct that involves the overuse of deadly force. These investigations rely heavily on often tightly orchestrated statements, or carefully scripted reports from the officer or officers about the incident, cursory review of citizen complaints, forensic evidence and a crime scene reenactment that’s heavily weighted to support the under fire officer’s version of the incident. Meanwhile, the statements and testimony from witnesses that contradict the officer’s version of the incident are often treated with skepticism, disbelief or are outright dismissed.
Often police officials tip their hand and publicly declare even before the first scrap of evidence is gathered that the shooting or physical confrontation was probably justified. The result of police investigating themselves is virtually preordained. The accused officer is almost always exonerated. If the officer kills or maims the shooting is almost always ruled in policy.

But the stain of these investigations is not totally scrubbed away when an officer skips off scot free. There are the grieving families, the inevitable and costly lawsuits, and increase in public ill-will toward the police.
This was the LAPD’s crushing burden for years precisely because so many cops got away with wrongdoing. Inglewood police and city officials can avoid shouldering that same burden by doing exactly what the Harvard study showed the LAPD has tried, and to a halting degree succeeded in doing, and that’s to get a firm handle on the use of deadly force.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

The Killing of Marcus Smith

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

In the past year, the Inglewood police department has been hit with a federal probe, a grueling investigation by the Office of Independent Review, probes by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, the implementation of intense and lengthy new training and retraining procedures for Inglewood officers, a vigilant and proactive police commission review, and an internal affairs investigation of officer involved shootings. Yet Marcus Smith, a thirty one year old African American, was still gunned down by an Inglewood police officer. Smith is the fifth to be killed by police gunfire in the past two years.

The Smith killing as in several of the others ignited shock, frustration and rage. The killing of Smith also evoked painful memories of the gunning down by NYPD officers of Sean Bell in 2007. Smith, as Bell was a would-be bride groom, and the shooting took place after a family party; a party that Smith and his bride attended. There is no indication that Smith, as Bell, was involved in any gang or criminal involvement.

Inglewood police officials say they recovered a gun at the scene. But that only raises more thorny and disturbing questions. Did the officers issue a warning or command to Smith before opening fire?

That in turn raises even more questions. Was the gun Smith’s? If so, did he point the gun at the officers, or make any threatening move or gesture that led officers to believe that their lives were in jeopardy? Did eyewitnesses corroborate the officers version of the shooting, namely that Smith had a gun and menaced the officers? The answers are murky and blurred on the first two questions. But there’s nothing vague in the answer to the third question regarding the eyewitness corroboration of the officer’s account of the killing. All the witnesses give a wildly different version of the shooting than that of the police. They say that Smith did not have a gun, that the officers gave no warning or command, and that Smith was not given immediate medical help after he was shot. They also claim that they were beaten, verbally abused, and subject to arrest for protesting the killing.

This is not simply another instance of he said, she said when it comes to the bleary details of controversial police killings. The single most important policy directive that a police department can, no must have, is the directive on the use of deadly force by officers. Vague, or poorly written directives, or worse directives that are not bolstered with officer training, retraining, and discipline for violation of the deadly force directive is the single biggest thing that gets police departments in hot water with outside investigating agencies, stirs community anger and unrest, and results in crushing mega dollar wrongful death lawsuits and settlements that city officials must shell out. This is even more problematic in the Smith killing when it was revealed that the officer who shot Smith has also been involved in another shooting.

Nearly two decades ago, the Christopher Commission investigated the Rodney King beating. It made sweeping and landmark recommendations on LAPD reform. The most disturbing and explosive part of its report was the fingering of “problem” officers. These were officers who were involved in multiple shootings, acts of violence, and had mountains of citizen complaints lodged against them. The Commission made it clear that these officers had created a toxic environment within the LAPD. The environment was made worse by higher ups. LAPD brass had a cavalier wink and nod attitude toward their dubious conduct.

The failure to reprimand, discipline, and where warranted fire them caused huge headaches for the department. This is an especially crucial and sensitive point for in nearly all officer involved shootings, even the most questionable ones, and even where officers are found to have used excessive force, the punishment has often been minimal or totally lacking. This reinforces the deep suspicion that police officials look for ways to exonerate officers rather than to hold them accountable for violating department policies and procedures. This in turn feeds the fear and distrust that many African-Americans and Latinos have toward the police.

There are more questions that Inglewood officials must ask and answer about the Smith killing. And it’s important that accurate answers be given especially since Inglewood police have been hammered in past years for incidents involving excessive force and charges of misconduct. The memories of the videotape beating of Donovan Jackson in 2002 that shocked the nation are still fresh in the minds.



Now there’s the Smith killing. This is another one that won’t go away and again will sorely test whether the Inglewood police department and indeed Inglewood city officials have truly come to grips with the chronic problem of deadly force by its officers.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

Hutchinson will have the family of Marcus Smith and invited Inglewood police and city officials on “The Hutchinson Report” on Friday May 22 at 9:30 AM

Murder-Suicide Rise a Terrible Wake up Call for All

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


Ervin Antonio Lupoe, who Tuesday killed his family then himself, tried to contact my organization, the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, with complaints that he had experienced discrimination and harassment at his workplace, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center West Los Angeles. The complaints now are even more alarming. Lupoe killed himself, his wife and his five children in their south Los Angeles home and left no doubt why he committed this horrific act. In a bitter letter to a Los Angeles TV station, the former Kaiser Hospital lab technician railed at the hospital for unjustly firing him and his wife.

There were other reports that Lupoe had been harassed by supervisors. The allegation was that some of it was racially motivated. One supervisor allegedly told Ervin Lupoe and his wife, according to the letter Lupoe left behind, “You should have blown your brains out.”

Kaiser denied the allegations and hinted that the reason for the couple’s firing involved unspecified detrimental actions.

This writer has received past complaints of harassment and discrimination from black employees and a Kaiser union representative. Lupoe was only one. The employee complaints of discrimination cannot be substantiated. However, they do set off loud warning bells that something went terribly wrong in the way Kaiser handled the Lupoes’ firings. And that the Kaiser management should take a long, hard look at how it handles its employee relations.

The Lupoe family tragedy is only the latest such incident. The murder-suicide last October of Karthik Rajaram and his family in Porter Ranch, a bedroom community north of Los Angeles, set off the first alarm that the mounting economic wreckage could push more people over the edge.

The edge in this case is not just a distressed individual committing suicide but taking out his or her family members, too. This horrific desperate act has been tragically played out three times in the last two weeks in L.A. County. Each time a family member, apparently despondent over job loss or financial worries, killed himself and other family members. Each time the family carnage has been more gruesome.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, more than 30,000 persons kill themselves each year. The CDC noted that in a significant number of these cases there was job loss or severe financial hardship. One mental health agency that tracks mental health referrals in California found that the number of such referrals leaped more than 200 percent in 2008.

Nearly all of those seeking help suffered some type of financial hardship. In a grotesque irony, San Francisco Medical Center, owned by Kaiser, the Lupoe’s employer, recently reported that psychiatric referrals had leaped more than 400 percent in 2008. The overwhelming majority of them were related to financial distress.

The CDC expects the number of those severely financially strapped to rise as the economy continues to tank. Minorities have borne the brunt of the wave of job losses and home foreclosures. And mental health professionals warn that as the economy slides they expect to see a continued jump in the number of those seeking treatment for depression.

While researchers say that unemployment alone does not cause suicide, losing a job combined with financial uncertainty, the loss of retirement savings, and the stress of overdue bills, and mortgage or rent payments can create the perfect storm for an individual to feel that suicide is the only way out, and that often includes taking the lives of his or her family.

The murder-suicide of an entire family is the ultimate desperate act. And it’s a dire warning to cities and counties, health professionals and employers that a financially stressed employee or former employee represents a potential powder keg, which can explode at any time.

This calls for drastically increasing funding and expansion of counseling jobs, and referral and crisis prevention hotline services. It also means insuring that the general public knows where it can go to get help.

This may not have been enough to stop Lupoe from committing his heinous act. However, it could save others who are in desperate need of help. With the economy in steady free fall, it’s almost certain that there will be thousands more Americans, facing unemployment, who will want and need that help.
When men such as Lupoe kill themselves innocents also pay the price. Invariably those innocents are children. That’s a terrible wake-up call for us all.

No Free Pass for the Twenty-Sixth District Senate Contenders Pt 1

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Here’s a political trivia quiz for the voters who will decide who’ll fill the vacated twenty sixth district state senate seat formerly held by Mark Ridley Thomas. What does the district encompass? What committees does the senator sit on? Did you receive a newsletter, eletter, bulletin, or attend a townhall or meeting from the senator telling you what legislative bills, motions, hearings, initatives he introduced or passed? Did he invite you to a community event, activity, or meeting to give you an update on his legislative actions?
If you answered no to these questions you’re not a political flunk out. Politicians have infinite dodges not to inform, engage, and involve their constituents. The political fog they envelop themselves and their Sacramento tenure in is a self-preserving, defense mechanism to insure election and re-election. This has effectively turned holding a political office and the race to get it into endless deal making, and self-promoting political careerism. This mocks the notion of accountability and enshrines regal entitlement on black elected officials.
Take the two purported front runners for the twenty-sixth senate district seat, Mike Davis and Curren Price. Both are state assemblypersons. One has barely warmed the seat for his first term. The other is barely into his second term. The obvious question is how does abandoning their barely warmed seat to seat hop at their first chance serve the constituents who backed them for the assembly? And if another seat, say a congressional seat, opens up say next month will they seat hop again? Then there’s the campaign. This tells even more about what’s wrong with careerism politics in L.A.. The frontrunners jockey to grab all the cash they can, and nab the usual suspect endorsements from politicians, special interest businees groups and labor unions. One front runner boasts that he’s a shoo-in because he got the incumbent and the L.A. County Labor Federation’s endorsement. The idea is to scare anyone without either, which is everybody else, away. Entitlement Again.
The self-designated frontrunners then blitz district voters with showy, photo-op brochures touting their accomplishments, make the rounds of the black churches, people a last day phone bank, and send blaring car caravans around on election day. This will likely be the first and last time that any other than the union and business special interest donors who bankrolled them see their recycled elected official until re-election time.
This take their constituents for granted mind set is hardly unique to black politicians in L.A. . It’s endemic in American politics. And that’s all the more reason to put a word that’s been sorely missing back into the race for the twenty sixth senate district seat and that’s accountability.

A Mother’s Plea for Justice

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The silence in the courtroom was deafening. Everyone in the court and that included this writer was riveted by the impassioned, tear filled plea from the mother of Eron Michael Mull. Jocelyn Mull had asked this writer to accompany her to court to see for myself how the juvenile system had gone badly awry in handling the killer of her son.
Mull was an eighteen year old African-American gunned down in a cross fire between two suspected gang rivals last January outside an after hours party near Hollywood. Mull had no gang involvement, was a highly talented musician, and had scholarship offers to several universities. The outpouring of grief for Mull was just as heartfelt. His funeral drew more than 2000 students, teachers and friends. He was Mull’s only son. Mull made the plea for remembrance within arms length of the young man who confessed to the murder.
Mull could easily have been another of the legions of nameless, faceless young black victims of chronic murder violence that has plagued L.A. and other big cities. His mother’s teary eyed court plea for her son likely would have drawn a momentary touch of public attention, sympathy and then just as quickly been forgotten. But this was different.
Mull’s plea was not solely a plea from an aggrieved mother for the remembrance of her dead son. It was a plea for justice. Mull’s killer did not come to court from a jail cell but from his home. He was not in court to be sentenced but for the court to determine if or when he would be tried as an adult. At the close of the hearing, he walked out of court and went back home where he has been detained since June. The home detention triggered Mull’s rage and plea for justice. Mull’s killer did not commit a petty, non-violent crime but potentially a first degree murder. He has suspected gang ties and is accused of prior handgun brandishing. In many states, including California, teens much younger than Mull’s killer who have been charged with murder and accused of prior gun use are routinely jailed for long stretches in juvenile or adult jails, tried as adults, convicted, and receive lengthy sentences. In the past, some have received death sentences and in a few cases been executed. The Supreme Court narrowly outlawed juvenile executions in March 2005.
Mull’s killer would not suffer that fate and that’s a good thing. But that still doesn’t ease the personal pain of Mull’s mother and the deep sense that a grievous legal wrong has been committed by the court’s allowing her son’s confessed killer to remain out of jail. And then adding to her anguish by handling the case with kid glove, snail paced lethargy.
This is hardly unique. According to reports from multiple state agencies, and a ten year Longitudinal Analysis of Juvenile Detention programs by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, since the late 1980s home detention for juveniles while awaiting trial or a court disposition of their case and who were accused of even serious felony offenses has sharply increased. This is in part a cost saving measure, and in part a way to reduce overcrowding in America’s bulging jails and juvenile detention centers. Juveniles sentenced or confined to home detention wear ankle bracelets that emit an electronic signal sent to a remote command center whenever an offender ventures outside the home or other confined area set by the courts. In theory if the signal goes off that’s a potential violation, if it’s verified than police are notified and the offender can be arrested.
But there’s a giant loophole. Police are often not notified if a juvenile is under home detention and are only aware of it when a detainee violates home detention rules and they make an arrest. Home detention violations are not uncommon. There have been frequent reports of juveniles committing or accused of crimes while supposedly confined to their homes.
Still, home detention is a sensible and humane penal method for dealing with non-violent, low risk juveniles and adults. But Mull’s killer hardly fits that bill.
Jocelyn Mull is no lock em up and throw away the key crusader. She is a dedicated educator and community activist. She’s well aware of the well-documented gaping racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. Young black males are more likely than young whites who commit violent crimes to be jailed, too languish in preventive detention, be tried as adults, convicted and then warehoused in adult prisons for long sentences.
Mull’s sole concern is that the tiny cracks that permit young men who kill either through legal sloppiness, a technicality, laxity, or expediency to at least for a time evade justice be filled. She is campaigning to prevent the use of house detention for violent felony cases. Until that change happens, the tacit message is that when young blacks kill other young blacks, black life is deemed cheap and devalued. In her emotional plea Mull repeatedly noted that her son’s killer would spend the holidays at his home. Her son won’t. And that’s not justice.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009). http://www.learnhowobamawon.blogspot.com

Why I Called for a Christopher Model Commission on Inglewood Cop Killings

Earl Ofari Hutchinson



Beleaguered Inglewood police chief Jacqueline Seabrooks dropped a faint hint in her July 25 press conference that she would welcome an independent agency to take a hard look at the policies and procedures of her department. Seabrooks dropped the hint that the department welcomes outside intervention mostly in response to the call this writer made for a Christopher style Commission in Inglewood.

She had little choice but to welcome an outside look at her department. Three very questionable fatal shootings in three months, piles of complaints from citizens of police abuse, harassment, and misconduct, and a department under intense public and media fire. This screamed for some kind of action to dispel the fervent feeling that the Inglewood police are wildly out of control.

The shooting of postal worker Kevin Wicks by the same cop who gunned down a black teen weeks earlier was the last draw. Almost no one believes the chief’s vehement contention that the department is capable of conducting a fair and impartial investigation of itself.



This has nothing to do with the heat, passion and fury over the Wicks shooting, or even distrust of Seabrooks. It has everything to do with the history of cops investigating other cops who are alleged to have committed or actually are guilty of misconduct, and especially misconduct that involves the overuse of deadly force. These investigations rely heavily on often tightly orchestrated statements, or carefully scripted reports from the officer or officers about the incident, cursory review of citizen complaints, forensic evidence and a crime scene reenactment that’s heavily weighted to support the under fire officer’s version of the incident. Meanwhile, the statements and testimony from witnesses that contradict the officer’s version of the incident are often treated with skepticism, disbelief or are outright dismissed.

Often police officials tip their hand and publicly declare even before the first scarp of evidence is gathered that the shooting or physical confrontation was probably justified. The result of police investigating themselves is virtually preordained. The accused officer is almost always exonerated. If the officer kills or maims the shooting is almost always ruled in policy.

But the stain of these investigations is not totally scrubbed away when an officer skips off scot free. There are the grieving families, the inevitable and costly lawsuits, and increase in public ill-will toward the police.

There are even more deadly consequences. Questionable cop shootings and their subsequent pro forma stamp investigations stir turmoil and unrest, and deepen the distrust and cynicism of blacks and minorities toward the police. They reinforce the deep seated belief that cops are only out to cover up their dirt and that the lives of minorities are cheap.

The Wicks shooting doesn’t have to follow that predictable and infuriating script. Inglewood officials have a made-in-heaven chance to rewrite that script. The call for a Christopher Model Commission was a good call in the wake of the Wicks shooting. The Christopher Commission was established by L.A. officials after the beating of black motorist Rodney King in 1991. It tore apart all LAPD policies and procedures, but it took the hardest look at the department’s lax use of deadly force, and the almost total absence of any checks and balances and punishment for such use.

Inglewood officials, led by Mayor Roosevelt Dorn, took a big step in the direction of bringing in independent scrutiny when it agreed to push for an Independent Counsel to take a hard look at the Inglewood police shootings. Here are the crucial questions that an Independent Counsel must ask and Inglewood police officials must answer:

What is appropriate use of force?

Under what circumstances should an officer use deadly force?

What type of force is necessary in specific situations?

What type of training do officers receive on when to use or not use deadly force?

What is excessive force?

What are the current department policies on the use of force?

What are the alternatives to deadly force, and when should they be used?

What are the investigation procedures into the use of deadly force?

What punishment is imposed when deadly force is found to be out of policy?



Inglewood police officials did the right thing when they expressed deep regret over Wick’s killing. They can do the right thing again by putting iron clad guidelines and rules in place on the use of deadly force. This will do much to insure that they will not be back again in a few months or even weeks to express regrets to yet another family for a police killing that should never have happened.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

The Southeast Symphony Orchestra’s Message Is Simple: The Classical Music Experience is Our Experience Too
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Despite what some mistakenly think, classical music is our experience too. That’s the black experience. For six decades, the Southeast Symphony Orchestra in Los Angeles has had this ambitious goal: to nourish the classical music experience among African-Americans, provide a venue for artists and musicians to play and for audience’s to learn and enjoy classical music, as well as to train the next generation of young African-American classical musicians. The orchestra under the direction of nationally renowned musicologist, conductor and concert artist maestro Charles Dickerson will hold its 60th anniversary season closing concert on Sunday, July 20 at 3:00 PM at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with a powerhouse afternoon of American classical music gems. They include Gershwin’s American in Paris, Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess. The program will feature some of Los Angeles’s renowned black virtuoso performers.
In spite of the symphony’s phenomenal work over the years to deepen the experience of classical music among blacks, there’s one comment that has always stuck with me when the subject is classical music and African-Americans. A couple of years ago when I mentioned that I would attend a classical music performance at a local concert hall, a good friend snapped who, you and three other blacks. She did not mean to offend with her quip. In fact, we both laughed at it. But underneath the pithy and dismissive retort, lay a world of misunderstanding, ignorance, and flat out rejection of the towering, but largely ignored role and importance of blacks in the world of classical music. Put bluntly, far too many blacks still regard classical music as exclusively a white European music form. Or put even more bluntly, many sneer at it as white man’s music that has no relation to the black experience. Nothing could be further from the truth.
African-American Heritage in Classical Music (AfriClassical.com) lists 52 composers, conductors and instrumental performers - Africans, African Americans and Afro-Europeans spanning five centuries. These artists are unknown to most of us, yet are so numerous the web site can present only a fraction of them. They have made enduring contributions to classical music. Several have composed, conducted and performed classical music. Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) of Guadeloupe is one of those multi-talented musicians. Cuban classical guitarist Leo Brouwer (born 1939) is another. Over 100 sound samples can be heard at the Audio page and at the biographical pages on the web site and others.
Classical musical world giants Ludwig Van Beethoven, Antonin Dvorak, Camille Saint Saens, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and others have either befriended black classical music artists or incorporated jazz, spirituals, and/or African rhythms in their compositions. Living legend Wynton Marsalis has virtually made a second career in music recording Haydn, Teleman, and other classical music composers trumpet concertos.
The numbers of black singers, dancers, symphony conductors, and virtuoso performers that now regularly grace the symphonic, and Opera hall and ballet stage today is legion. The number of black symphonic groups has increased nationally.
Dickerson, and the dedicated board members and core of loyal patrons of the Southeast Symphony, have labored in the shadows for years to fund and sustain the orchestra and its community outreach programs. It’s strictly been a labor of love, in this case driven by their profound love of classical music and the belief that classical music can enrich the black community and the lives of those that hear, enjoy and play it.
Fulfilling the mission hasn’t been easy. Southeast Symphony does not get the mega foundation or corporate dollars that the big, prestigious, and deeply endowed philharmonic orchestras receive. It must rely on small donations to maintain and grow their efforts.
The July 20th gala concert is the way to help them.
But this is more than a concert. It’s a statement that African-Americans have been and will continue to be in the pantheon of the classical music world. It’s a bold declaration that the black experience has been and continues to be a vital, dynamic, and profoundly enriching part of classical music. The orchestra fully intends to make sure the world knows that.
The Southeast Symphony Orchestra’s message then is simple: The classical music experience is our experience too.


See you at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Sunday July 20th.

Ticket Information: 323-293-7372 310-973-2488 310-519-1806

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

A Triple Burden for Jamiel Shaw Sr.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson


Jamiel Shaw Sr. carries a crushing triple burden. He was in ear shot of the spot several doors down from his house where his son Jamiel Shaw Jr. was gunned down some weeks ago. The young Shaw was a highly sought after high school football and track prospect. His murder was Shaw Sr.’s first crushing burden. His son’s alleged killer is a reported gang member who earlier had been released from the Culver City jail, and he is an illegal immigrant. The pain and fury Shaw Sr. felt over the killing and the fact that the alleged killer is an illegal immigrant propelled him to crusade for the passage of Jamiel’s Law. The law would severely modify Special Order 40 which forbids LAPD officers from stopping and detaining suspects solely on suspicion that they are illegal immigrants. The fact that the alleged killer was an illegal immigrant and the uphill fight to get Jamiel’s Law passed is Shaw’s second burden.
The law and his fight to get it enacted is controversial, conflicting, and has inflamed and divided many blacks and Latinos. There‘s no question, though, that Shaw Sr. battles for the law out of the sincere desire to see that no other family suffer the pain and loss of a son or daughter to gang violence due to a screw up by authorities in the mishandling of known violence prone gang members of dubious legal status in the country.
The Shaw Jr. killing ignited an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy, support, and goodwill from city officials, church and community leaders, civil rights groups, and anti-gang violence activists. It also ignited a non-stop barrage of local and news stories on the pain and plight of the Shaw family. The media was properly gentile and deferential in its coverage of the killing. The danger is that could change. This is the third crushing burden dumped on Shaw Sr.
All it took to change that and add this burden were some unflattering shots, and pictures, and scrawl on Shaw Jr.’s My Space blog that purportedly shows him mugging and flipping gang signs, markings, and speaking gang code lingo. The inference is that Shaw Jr. was not the clean cut, upstanding highly praised, scholar-athlete that the media and the thousands that empathized with Shaw Sr. were led to belief. The even more painful inference is that Shaw Jr. was not an innocent who was gunned down by a hateful, vengeful gang member but that his alleged gang involvement, even affiliation, made him an inviting target for a hit.
There is absolutely no proof that any of this is true. There are thousands of young persons that talk the talk, swagger, posture, know the gang code lingo, dress the dress. Yet they are no more likely than Barack Obama to join a gang let alone be involved with gang violence. A near textbook example of this rush to judgment when any young black displays what is allegedly gang trappings is the case of Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce. He was slapped with a ludicrous $25,000 fine by the NBA for supposedly flashing a gang sign on the court. (Pierce is universally lauded for his community and charitable work) This certainly applies to Shaw Jr. But that means little once the rumor mill shifts into high gear. The innuendos, hints, and finger points fly with abandon.
It’s easy of course for many to think and believe the worst about young African-American males such as Shaw Jr. given the top heavy, relentless spew by much of the media of stereotypes and negative typecasting of young black males as gang bangers, drive by shooters, and inherent underachievers. When that happens no matter how false the assertions of gang involvement and how blurred the circumstances of a young man’s killing may be, the damage to the young person’s family and his reputation is done. In the case of Shaw Sr., he’s had to watch with piercing outrage as the memory of his slain son is tarred, tainted, and dragged through the mud. And when the alleged killer is eventually tried he will have to sit in court and listen as defense attorneys for the alleged killer sully his son’s name even more by dredging up his MySpace scrawls as alleged proof of Shaw Jr’s gang membership.
Shaw Sr. has had to suffer the devastation of the loss of a son that he had invested so much of his life into turning into a proud and productive adult. Then he’ll have to fight a controversial fight to get a law passed that many say is futile, wasteful and unnecessary. Now there’s the character assassination of his murdered son. This is a crushing triple burden that no parent should have to bear. Yet, sadly it’s one that Shaw Sr. has been forced to bear.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

The Byoune Killing Raises The Question: Do Police Rush to Judgment When They Investigate Themselves
Earl Ofari Hutchinson


Inglewood, California Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks faces a dilemma that many big city police chiefs face when their officer’s gun down unarmed civilians under dubious circumstances, and those civilians in almost all cases are young African Americans or Latinos. In this case the victim was 19 year-old Michael Byoune. The deep suspicion is that police routinely bend, twist and massage testimony and evidence to whitewash and ultimately exonerate officers. The way to counter that is to conduct a thorough and honest investigation and if the officer(s) are found guilty of wrongdoing impose swift punishment. But that almost always draws loud protests from police unions and some city officials.



The Byoune killing by any standard was a bad shooting. In fact, it evoked instant comparisons to the killing of bride-groom-to-be Sean Bell by NYPD officers in 2007. Bell, as Byoune, was a young African-American male. Bell and Byoune were unarmed. There is no indication that he, as Bell, was involved in any gang or criminal involvement. From tapes and news clips, Inglewood police officers riddled the car that Byoune was in with bullet holes. The car Bell was in was also riddled with gunfire.



The police killings of young blacks such as Bell and Byoune spark momentary outrage and demands for federal or local investigations, and prosecutions of the officers. That presents two problems.

The first is getting police officials to conduct an investigation that’s not weighted heavily toward the police version of the events when there is considerable witness evidence and testimony that contradicts the officer’s version. The second is getting a prosecution and then a conviction of the officers involved. The acquittal of the three NYPD officers charged in the shooting death of Bell was stark proof of that.

The frequent media portrayal of young blacks as crime-prone, drug-dealing gangsters, the gang and murder violence that continues to wrack many black neighborhoods in Los Angeles and other cities and the glorification of the thug lifestyle by many young blacks reinforces negative racial perceptions. This makes many whites, non-blacks, and even many blacks guarded, suspicious and fearful of blacks. It's still virtually impossible to convince many jurors, that some police lie, beat, maim, and even kill unarmed suspects. That goes for judges too. A New York Supreme Court judge acquitted the officers charged in the Bell shooting.

Since there are no ironclad standards of what is or isn't acceptable use of force, or what degree of force is excessive, it often comes down to a judgment call by the officer. That creates just enough doubt that if the victim no matter how innocent he may appear to be was not the aggressor, than he at least put up enough resistance to the arrest to justify some use of force to restrain him, or worse the use of deadly force.









The near universal failure of police officials to take punitive action against officers that overuse deadly force almost always starts with the investigation. Eye witnesses are not sworn.
And invariably when evidence contradicts the officers' version of events, police officials reflexively rely on the testimony of the officers to sustain their version of what happened.





This insures that police officials will rule in nearly every case that the officers did not violate any department policies or procedures on the use of deadly force. Chicago is an immediate and tragic example of that. The past couple years, Chicago police have shot a civilian on average once every 10 days. More than 100 people have been killed in the last decade; 250 others have been injured. But only a tiny fraction of shootings are ruled unjustified -- less than 1 percent, police records and court testimony indicate. The secrecy in which the investigations are conducted and the perfunctory ruling that a shooting was in policy means that it is virtually impossible to determine how many are in fact legitimate. The Chicago police that killed were cleared almost in every case and that pattern is the same in dubious police shootings in other cities.

A fair and impartial investigation into the circumstances surrounding police killings, and that certainly includes the Byoune killing, must have one aim. That is to find out what went so horribly wrong that police had to resort to gunplay and then insure that there’s no repeat of the tragedy. These are the tough questions that then should be routinely asked in a truly impartial police investigation.



Did the officers give a warning before opening fire? Did they attempt to find out if the victim had a gun or weapon, or even in the case of Byoune was his car a deadly weapon, and was it an actual threat to the officer? Do eyewitnesses corroborate the officer’s version of the shooting?

The Byoune and Bell killings, as well as those of the other young blacks, demand answers, honest answers. Police officials should give them. When they don’t they simply reinforce the suspicion that police rush to judgment to exonerate wrongdoing by their own.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Byoune Killing Casts another Bad Glare on Inglewood
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Inglewood police chief Jacqueline Seabrooks did the right and smart thing. She headed off an almost certain demand from outraged family members and community activists for a federal investigation into the killing of 19-year-old Michael Byoune. Seabrooks expressed condolences to Byoune’s family and promised a full and vigorous investigation into the killing of Byoune by Inglewood police officers. Seabrooks got ahead of any possible call for federal intervention for two good reasons. The killing for some observers evoked instant memories of the gunning down by NYPD officers of Sean Bell in 2007. The would-be bride groom, Bell, like Byoune, was a young African-American male. Bell and Byoune were unarmed. There is no indication that he, as Bell, was involved in any gang or criminal involvement. From tapes and news clips, Inglewood police officers riddled the car that Byoune was with bullet holes. The car Bell was in was also riddled with gunfire.

There is no indication whether the officers issued any warning to Byoune before opening fire. Byoune was killed when he attempted to flee for his safety after shots had been fired from unknown shooters in a block adjacent to the parking lot where he was killed.

Now that Seabrooks has promised a full probe into the killing, the questions that she and Inglewood city officials must answer are: did the officers follow standard procedure and give a warning before opening fire? Did they attempt to find out where the shots were coming from and if indeed Byoune was involved in the shooting? Was there any evidence that the car that Byoune was in was a car that fit the description of a car or cars that the shooters were driving? Did eyewitnesses corroborate the officers version of the shooting, namely that they thought Byoune might have been involved in the shooting? Did the vehicle that he was in actually endanger the officer’s lives as he attempted to exit the parking lot?
Were the officers involved in the shooting removed from their street assignments pending the outcome of the investigation? And if, any officer (s) involved in the shooting are found guilty of violating department policy and procedures on the use of force, what of any punishment will the chief impose on them?

This is an especially crucial and sensitive point for in nearly all officer involved shootings, even the most questionable ones, and even where officers are found to have used excessive force, the punishment has often been minimal or totally lacking. This reinforces the deep suspicion that police officials look for ways to exonerate officers rather than to hold them accountable for violating department policies and procedures. This in turn deepens the fear and distrust that many African-Americans and Latinos have toward the police.
There are many more questions that Inglewood officials must ask and answer about the Byoune killing. It’s even more important that accurate answers be given especially given that Inglewood police have been hammered in past years for incidents involving excessive force and charges of misconduct.

They include the videotape beating of Donovan Jackson in 2002, followed by a series of questionable shootings of unarmed suspects, and the allegation that of some Inglewood officers engaged in shakedowns and trading sexual favors. This is yet another prescription for a full blown crisis of confidence in the methods of policing and the professionalism of the department.

The shooting of Byoune by any standard was a bad shooting. And though there is yet no evidence that Inglewood police officers acted with reckless endangerment in killing Byoune, the Byoune family and others will be watching closely to see what if anything Inglewood police officials and city officials ultimately do about his death.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Gross Overkill on a Supervisor’s seat
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Talk about gross overkill. What else could anyone call dumping a record $2.5 million dollars (with $1.5 million more on the way) by a special interest group in this case Los Angeles labor unions into the campaign kitty of State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas. The unions get away with this naked effort to buy a supervisor’s board seat through a thinly veiled skirt of the campaign finance rule limits by funneling the cash through independent committees. It’s all perfectly legal, and it’s all perfectly a sham to nab a seat.
Local unions have always pumped lots of cash into the campaigns of candidates that they believe are the most labor friendly. But they generally stayed within some recognizable bounds of spending proprieties. The Ridley-Thomas spending plunge obliterates that fine line.
It’s no surprise why. The supervisors manage the biggest county government in the nation. The more than 100,000 employees on the county payroll are the largest in the country. But the county is also tens of millions in the budget hole. That means two things. There will be deep slashes in spending on health and social services. With a projected nearly $200 million budget deficit for the county health department, for instance, the board talks of closing nearly all of the dwindling number of county-run health clinics but one. Other strapped county service agencies will be hit hard to make up for the shortfall.
That in turn means employee freezes, cuts in employee benefits and wages, and in an even worse case scenario, layoffs of county employees. Labor unions want and need the most dependable labor friendly guy they can get to keep a hawk like watch over any and every effort to gut employee contracts and staunch the pain of employee cuts. The $4 million that the labor unions are shoving to Ridley-Thomas is added insurance that they’ll get a supervisor who will keep a sharp eye on the supervisors when they start welding their budget slashing machete. With millions at stake in labor benefits, and jobs, the cash the unions are shelling out to grab the election seems like a relatively small price to protect fully labor’s back.
Parks is the last one that unions want on the board. He is a business friendly, fiscal conservative and he would be much more likely to take a long look at union contracts, and pensions and to fight anything that’s construed as excessive giveaways to county unions. He loudly protested that this kind of heavy handed spending on one candidate in a local race decidedly un levels the election playing field. He screams that the hefty union pay-off to Ridley-Thomas is proof that he’s in the hip pocket of labor.
His complaint can’t be waved off. Parks is no slouch when it comes to fundraising. He nearly doubled Ridley-Thomas’s total in the first quarter of this year, but much of it came from business groups. And it still pales in comparison to the king’s ransom Ridley-Thomas got from labor. In hard campaign dollar terms it amounts to six dollars for every one dollar that Ridley-Thomas got from non-labor campaign donors.
Ridley-Thomas’s suddenly swollen campaign war chest means that Parks now will have to work that much harder to pump the spigots from business groups and other campaign donors. The prospect that Parks could get even more cash from business groups is another big reason that labor upped the dollar ante for Ridley-Thomas. This is important for yet another reason. Running for an L.A. city or county office has become virtually a millionaire’s derby, and politicians spend nearly as much of their time arm-twisting, cajoling, pleading with, and jawboning donors to pony up money. A massive check from a special interest group gives the recipient a huge leg up over his or her opponent. They can bankroll tons of crucial ads, TV spots, and churn out reams of literature touting bragging about their accomplishments, make inflated election promises, and most importantly, beat up on their opponent. Almost certainly, much of Ridley-Thomas’s media hit will be to depict Park’s as a business industry shill.
For his part, Ridley-Thomas scoffs at the charge that he’ll be a compliant yes man on the board for labor unions. He says that he has business support too. He does. But the endorsements of a handful of prominent business leaders and the relatively small amount of money they’ve contributed to his campaign hardly add up to any semblance of balance between business and labor interests.
When the supervisors get around to making the inevitable tough decisions on labor contracts, wages and benefits, and possible job cuts, the hard fact is that labor will expect Ridley-Thomas to toe its line on resisting any cuts or give backs, no matter how bad a shape the county’s finances are in, and how fiscally prudent the cuts are.
But there’s much more at stake for labor in getting Ridley-Thomas on the board than just insuring a reliable labor vote in the coming board battles over pay and benefit issues for county employees. Los Angeles labor unions have been in the forefront of the continuing fight nationally for a living wage for newly organized union employees from security guards to hotel workers. The battles have been hard fought and labor’s successes have been mixed. With the economic meltdown and cites and counties facing massive budget cuts, the fight for a living wage will intensify, and the success or failure that unions have in that fight in L.A. County will be closely watched by unions in other states.
Labor unions can’t be faulted for doing what they do best and that’s tossing their cash at a candidate that they think will do their loyal bidding once in office. Business groups do the same. The problem is that the far over the top kind of heavy cash that the unions shoved out to Ridley-Thomas reinforces the deep public suspicion and even public disgust that candidates and their votes are for sale to the highest bidder. That may not be the case with Ridley-Thomas. At least he says not anyway. Yet, with $4 million in his pocket the voter’s eyes should stay riveted on him to see if he really means it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and frequent contributor to the Sunday Viewpoints. He can be reached at hutchinsonreport@aol.com

Much Mythmaking About Special Order 40
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

A beleaguered LAPD chief William Bratton after weeks of being pounded and badgered by assorted right-wing talk radio show yakkers, and anti-immigrant rights groups, immigrant rights groups, and the L.A. City Council says that he’ll soon tell what LAPD officers can and can’t do in regards to the much attacked, much defended and much misunderstood Special Order 40. The controversy and the muddle has spawned much mythmaking about what the Order actually says and what it allows officers to do.
The Order specifically says that LAPD officers can’t initiate any “police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person,” and with the objective of arresting or booking a person for “illegal entry” into the United States.

In plain English, the Order and the policies and procedures that the LAPD top brass put in place decades back to under gird how the Order is interpreted and enforced on the streets prohibits officers from asking a person about his or her alien status and from notifying the ICE about a person’s undocumented status unless the person has been arrested.

That line has been widely cited by those that want the Order dumped and has stirred the anguish of Jamiel Shaw Sr., whipped up frenzy among anti-immigration reform activists, and gave right wing talk hosts the wedge they needed to pound the city council and Bratton and sneakily push their anti-immigration reform agenda. The part of the Order that they have sloppily misread or deliberately ignored never forbade LAPD officers from participating in task force investigations, responding to requests from the ICE for information regarding suspected illegal aliens, or assisting ICE agents in the execution of arrest warrants.

That’s just the start of the public and political mythmaking on the Order. It does not bar an LAPD officer from notifying ICE of the immigration status of a person arrested for a crime if the officer learns of that information. Further, nothing in the Order bars an officer who is investigating an individual for criminal activity other than an immigration violation from asking that person about his or her immigration status and then advising ICE.

The Order was never intended to prevent officers from not checking whether anyone being investigated for or arrested for a criminal offense, let alone arraigned and held in the county jail pending prosecution, from notifying ICE about the possible illegal status of the suspect. Even on the hotly disputed and debated point that the LAPD officers can’t ask a person who has been arrested for a crime about his or her alien status, there is nothing in the Department’s policies and procedures that explicitly prohibit that.


There’s nothing in the policies and procedures of Special Order 40 that prohibits LAPD officers from interacting with ICE agents for investigative purposes. This includes the issue that has caused the most confusion and inflamed public opinion and that’s officers providing the names of known gang members to the ICE in response to a request from the agency for information. There is also nothing in Special Order 40 that forbids LAPD officers from joining in a task force with ICE where the feds are investigating criminal violations of immigration laws at the same time that the LAPD is investigating violations of state criminal laws relating to say drug dealing or violent crimes. LAPD officers are certainly not prohibited from assisting the ICE to arrest a gang member for whom a warrant had been issued.

Here’s an added check list of what LAPD officers can do to nail gang members and violent criminals that are suspected illegals. They can:
*Respond to requests from ICE to provide information regarding an individual’s criminal activities or whereabouts.

*Assist ICE to execute arrest warrants for violations of the immigration laws.
*Provide tactical assistance when ICE is planning to conduct any operation that will prevent criminal acts and violence.

*Can provide the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department with the names of gang members or those suspected of involvement in criminal acts that are suspected illegals to ICE once the criminal investigation process has started.
The problem is not and never has been that Special Order 40 ties the LAPD in such tight knots that it has been hapless and ineffective in dealing with violent gang members who may be illegals. The problem is the muddle in interpretation and enforcement of the Order. LAPD officers have gotten confused and mixed signals from LAPD officials about what they can and can’t do on the streets with criminals suspected of being illegals.

As it turns out they can do a lot to get them off the streets and eventually out of the country. It doesn’t take a full blown, divisive, and racially polarizing campaign fueled by myths and misunderstanding about the Order to do that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Swatting SWAT
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The instant that LAPD chief William Bratton called for a fresh look at the practices and gender make-up of SWAT in 2005, the howls went up from the LAPD Police Protective League, and the reflexive opponents of any LAPD change that Bratton was out to gut SWAT. This was silly, hyper-defensive, and politically motivated. Bratton was hardly out to dampen down the effectiveness of SWAT. The unit has had a solid record in handling tough situations with tact, professionalism, and most importantly a relative minimum loss of life.

The problem is that SWAT has made glaring operational mistakes in some very volatile situations. The equally big problem is that SWAT simply does not reflect the changing face and gender of the LAPD. The department in its blunt report dissecting SWAT said so. It called it insular, a good ole boy, and self-protective unit. Translated that means the unit is an iron-clad closed shop outfit, that brooks no outside interference, direction, and has doggedly resisted the entrance into SWAT of any other than hand-picked, elite male officers. This is a sure fire prescription to reinforce the clubby “them versus us” mindset and code of silence that has bedeviled the LAPD for decades.
This is the mindset that Bratton has sworn that he will do whatever he can to end during his second term at the LAPD helm.
But judging from the horrified reaction to the report and the changes that it recommended to break down the insular culture of SWAT, Bratton will have his work cut out for him on this. He’ll have an even tougher job in trying to make operational changes, or better still policy changes, on the thorny issue of the use of force. While SWAT has been lauded for handling most stand-off situations without resort to gunplay, on a few occasions when it has used force the result has been disastrous.

The most glaring and tormenting example of this was the accidental slaying of 19 month old Susie Pena, in a South L.A. hostage standoff in 2005. That forced a deep soul search within the department and within SWAT on when and when not to use force, and how much force is appropriate in tense situations. It also forced the LAPD top brass and the police commission to look at something else about SWAT. And that is when force may be inappropriate, or flat out overkill, in a situation where innocent civilians are injured or slain as a result. The question is how accountable are SWAT commanders and officers for the killing, and what if any punishment is meted out when a shooting is ruled out of policy.

The report found that in almost all cases where there was the questionable use of force by SWAT, the shooting was not found out of policy. The couple of times that the shootings were ruled out of policy there was no indication what, if any punishment there was to the shooters?

This is no small point. This begs for a policy change and that change is that the department must establish clear and firm guidelines on when an officer, in this case a SWAT officer, can and can't use deadly force. The vague rule is that an officer can use deadly force when he or she feels their life is endangered. What does that really mean?

That's the first step to confronting this problem. The second is discipline. A chief must have full authority to punish an officer found guilty of using excessive force. That includes SWAT officers. This too must be addressed and changed.
The overuse of excessive force is still the single biggest thing that poisons relations between the police and minority communities. It has sparked deadly racial turmoil and civil unrest in Los Angeles and other cities.

Bratton should be applauded, not stoned, for having the foresight to examine all parts of the LAPD to see what works, what doesn’t work, and where appropriate changes can be made to make those parts work even better.

No one is condemning SWAT for the way it handles things, nor is anyone calling it an out of control bunch of Cowboys. It has repeatedly been praised for getting it right most of the time. However, it’s those times when it doesn’t that the report simply says demands some change. After all we all want to see SWAT be the absolute best that it can be. Don’t we?