LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King. IMAGE: KTLA

 

By Benjamin Grush

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Michelle King is expected this month to present a plan designed to help students who may be affected by stepped-up immigration enforcement actions.

The proposal comes nearly three months after the nation’s second largest school district adopted a resolution that aims to limit federal immigration agents’ access to school grounds.

The resolution calls for agents to obtain explicit approval from the superintendent and LAUSD’s lawyers before stepping onto a campus, and instructs school officials to refrain from questioning students about the immigration status of students and their families.

The resolution, together with the plan, is intended to quell growing fear among students who worry that the current anti-immigrant rhetoric will lead to raids in and around LAUSD schools.
Such fears aren’t baseless, despite public statements from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that schools are generally off limits.

Consider that in 2011, ICE agents surrounded a Detroit-area school while parents dropped off their kids. The incident sparked outrage and an internal ICE investigation. More recently, the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) received reports that officials in the Compton Unified School District threatened to call immigration officials on parents in that community.

That’s why LAUSD’s push to protect students is so important. Los Angeles is a diverse city where an estimated 10 percent of residents are undocumented, and far more belong to mixed-status families, where one or more family members lack permission to be in the U.S.

By adopting a resolution, and presenting a clear plan to help students whose families may be affected by immigration enforcement, the district is sending a strong message that may help keep students in school at a time when many kids face unprecedented trouble accessing a public education.

A recent report by Georgetown University Law Center found schools in several states have blocked immigrant children from registering for classes because they lacked legal status, despite federal requirements that all children, regardless of immigration status, be allowed to attend school.

No doubt, some critics will insist that such restrictions exceed the LAUSD’s authority to limit ICE agents.

Such arguments ignore that similar policies already exist for other law enforcement agencies. The Los Angeles County Office of Education, for example, generally requires that police officers obtain a court order or a warrant before speaking with a student.

While LAUSD is among the largest districts to adopt such protections, it may well serve as a good blueprint for other districts hoping to ensure the classroom remains an immigration enforcement-free zone where kids can learn.

Benjamin Grush is communications intern at the ACLU of Southern California. 

A federal jury needed little time last week to convict two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies for beating an inmate with mental illness and filing false reports to cover up the assault. Convictions stemming from the scandalous abuse in the jails have become commonplace – 21 current or former L.A. County Sheriff’s Department members have now been convicted.

This case stemmed from a 2010 incident in which deputies kicked, punched and pepper sprayed the inmate in a locked hallway, out of sight of surveillance cameras, as punishment for having been disrespectful. The deputies then cooked up a story to justify the beating, claiming the inmate left his cell without permission, ignored orders to return to it and instead walked into the hallway, where he tried to punch a deputy and violently resisted being restrained. The deputies even went so far as to leave certain deputies out of their reports because they had been involved in too many other force incidents.

Now, police lying shouldn’t be news to anyone. A poll last year found that one in three Americans believe police routinely lie. Residents of Los Angeles don’t have to look too far for evidence of police dishonesty. Disgraced former L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca pled guilty to lying to federal agents investigating civil rights abuses in the jails, and a federal jury convicted Baca’s second-in-command – former Undersheriff Paul Tanaka – of obstruction of justice for interfering with that investigation.

In jail settings we should be particularly wary about the potential for police dishonesty. The ACLU of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) published reports over several years compiling inmate complaints of brutal violence at the hands of L.A. County sheriff’s deputies. Baca reflexively responded to these complaints with the refrain that inmates lie and exaggerate—and it unsurprisingly worked.

We as society are told, over and over, that those imprisoned are the worst of the worst and cannot be trusted. As a result, many in the public don’t care what happens to inmates or feel they deserve whatever they get. And for others the jails are simply an instance of out of sight, out of mind. Despite our long-term societal addiction to incarceration, relatively few of us will ever see the inside of a jail, and fewer still will think very long about what happens there.

For these reasons we should be on the lookout for police officials and agencies that whitewash inmate allegations of abuse. A key tell-tale sign is the investigation that relies exclusively on statements made by the officers involved and fails to include available civilian witnesses. In many instances documented by ACLU SoCal, chaplains and volunteers who witnessed inmate abuse made themselves available to investigators, but were never questioned.

The deputies who beat inmates and lied about it acted with impunity because they knew just how cursory the investigation into the beating would be and that no one in the department would ever believe the victim. It’s why officers lie – because they know they can get away with it.

Police know that in a typical swearing match, where it is their word against someone else’s, they will likely win. Notwithstanding the percentage of the people who believe police lie regularly, police still receive high honesty ratings, with 56% of Americans giving them a very high or high score. A deputy’s odds of winning a swearing match only improve when he squares off against, say, an inmate in the jails – the deputy knows full well how little weight the inmate’s testimony will carry. What little doubt remains can be practically eliminated when multiple deputies give corroborating testimony.

It’s why officers lie – because they know they can get away with it.

Who are prosecutors, judges and jurors going to believe? That’s the tempting question that leads down the rabbit hole where officers end up brazenly and coolly beating an inmate and lying about his being the aggressor.

Before anyone concludes that this is just a case of a few bad apples, remember that these were training officers who were trying both to teach an inmate a lesson and educate a young recruit in how things get done in the jails. They were trying to perpetuate a culture that the leadership either encouraged or condoned.

Human nature and history should have taught us by now that if power can be abused, it will be abused. We must put specific checks and balances in place to test the veracity of police – not because they are less trustworthy than others, but because they have been deemed credible and therefore given the power to lie.

Hector Villagra is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. Follow @OHectorV.

By Margaret Dooley-Sammuli

Did you know that in 2014 police took more property from people in the U.S. than burglars did? Frightening, but absolutely legal.

Police are allowed to take your money and property even if you aren't convicted of a crime, or arrested. California law enforcement agencies use federal civil asset forfeiture laws to plump up their budgets and unfairly target Californians. You can help change this here.

A report we released today finds that, although this tactic of policing for profit can impact innocent people from all walks of life, people of color and those who can’t afford to fight the government in court are the ones who bear the heaviest burden.

The report found that:

• The vast majority (85%) of the proceeds of federal asset forfeiture in California goes to agencies that police communities that are majority people of color;
• Half of DEA seizures from California involved people with Latino surnames;
• Counties with higher per capita seizure rates have an annual household income below the state median; and
• The number of California law enforcement agencies taking advantage of federal civil asset forfeiture laws has increased from 200 to 232 in just the last two years.

Established in the heyday of the war on drugs—a.k.a. the war on low-income people of color—asset forfeiture laws were supposed to target drug “kingpins” by confiscating their cash and property. Instead, these laws, which allow law enforcement to keep a portion of what they take, have been abused by those who have a financial incentive to take Californians’ money and property even when they haven’t done anything wrong.

Policing for profit leaves Californians empty-handed and unable to get their hard-earned money or property back. For example, the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department confiscated $10,000 from a taco truck owner even though there was no evidence of a crime and the driver was not arrested or charged. A California judge ordered the money returned, but by then the money had already been transferred to federal jurisdiction. At that point, he was advised by his attorney to drop the case because fighting the U.S. Government is too expensive and has been known to morph from asset forfeiture into deportation of relatives or IRS involvement.

Fortunately, our state legislature has the opportunity to pass a bill that would forbid cops from permanently keeping someone's money or property unless that person was convicted of a crime. SB 443, introduced by Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) and co-authored by Assemblymember David Hadley (R-Manhattan Beach), would protect innocent Californians. The bill promotes a simple concept: if someone isn’t convicted of a crime, the government can’t take and keep their money or property.

Legislators are wavering in the face of the law enforcement lobby, which swarmed the state Capitol to make sure money would keep flowing from the pockets of hardworking Californians. The bill is still pending in the California Assembly and will likely be called up for a vote later this month.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli is criminal justice and drug policy director with the ACLU of California.

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Take action: Send a message to your state representative to ensure police don’t keep treating innocent Californians like their personal ATMs!