When is the Veterans Affairs Department going to meet its responsibility to house chronically homeless veterans in Los Angeles on the large tract of government-owned land that should have been put to this use long ago?

Maybe sometime in 2014, according to the department’s estimates, or halfway through President Obama’s second term, if he is re-elected. For a president who has made eloquent promises about the nation’s duty to veterans, that is a dismal expectation.
The problem predates Mr. Obama, of course. The sprawling 400-acre property in Los Angeles was deeded to the federal government in 1888 expressly for use as a home for disabled soldiers and sailors. But the Veterans Affairs Department long ago strayed from that mission. No long-term housing exists there anymore, though a large V.A. hospital with short-term treatment beds occupies part of that land.
Over the years, the property has been turned over to uses completely unrelated to the department’s mission, like athletic fields, a nine-hole public golf course, theater stages, hotel laundries, rental-car and bus storage, even oil wells and a dog park. Yet it’s unclear how much rent the department has collected from various businesses like Marriott Hotels or where that money has gone.
A class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California was filed last year on behalf of disabled homeless veterans, charging that the veterans are entitled by law to effective mental health care but cannot possibly get it if they have no place to live.
The Veterans Affairs Department would not comment, given the lawsuit. But a reporter for National Public Radio, using Freedom of Information requests, estimated that in the last 12 years, rental agreements have earned the department at least $28 million and maybe more than $40 million.
The property has been studied, scrutinized and fought over for more than 20 years. It has been misused for a long time, and now it’s the responsibility of Mr. Obama, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and members of Congress, including Representative Henry Waxman, to get to the bottom of this debacle. Mr. Waxman’s office said he had pressed Mr. Shinseki into finding the $20 million in July 2010 to renovate one building for long-term supportive housing. But nothing else has happened yet, and the July 2014 completion estimate is evidence of a department that is slow and unresponsive to its mission.
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/opinion/veterans-in-los-angeles-still-in-the-cold.html

The United States is increasingly a multiracial society, with white students accounting for just over half of all students in public schools, down from four-fifths in 1970.
Yet whites are still largely concentrated in schools with other whites, leaving the largest minority groups — black and Latino students — isolated in classrooms, according to a new analysis of Department of Education data.
The report showed that segregation is not limited to race: blacks and Latinos are twice as likely as white or Asian students to attend schools with a substantial majority of poor children.
Across the country, 43 percent of Latinos and 38 percent of blacks attend schools where fewer than 10 percent of their classmates are white, according to the report, released on Wednesday by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
And more than one in seven black and Latino students attend schools where fewer than 1 percent of their classmates are white, according to the group’s analysis of enrollment data from 2009-2010, the latest year for which federal statistics are available.
Segregation of Latino students is most pronounced in California, New York and Texas. The most segregated cities for blacks include Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia and Washington.
“Extreme segregation is becoming more common,” said Gary Orfield, an author of the report who is co-director of the Civil Rights Project.
The overlap between schools with high minority populations and those with high levels of poverty was significant. According to the report, the typical black or Latino student attends a school where almost two out of every three classmates come from low-income families. Mr. Orfield said that schools with mostly minority and poor students were likely to have fewer resources, less assertive parent groups and less experienced teachers.
The issue of segregation hovers over many discussions about the future of education.
Some education advocates say that policies being introduced across the nation about how teachers should granted tenure or fired as well as how they should be evaluated could inadvertently increase segregation.
Teacher evaluations that are based on student test scores, for example, could have unintended consequences, said Rucker C. Johnson, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Teachers would be reluctant to take assignments in high-poverty, high-minority communities, he said. “And you’re going to be at risk of being blamed for not increasing test scores as quickly as might be experienced in a suburban, more affluent area,” Mr. Johnson said.
The report’s authors criticized the Obama administration as failing to pursue integration policies, and argued that its support of charter schools was helping create “the most segregated sector of schools for black students.”
Daren Briscoe, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said the Obama administration had taken “historic steps to transform the schools that for too long have shortchanged the full potential of our young people and have been unsuccessful in providing the necessary resources and protections for students most at risk.”
Other advocates for minorities said charter schools had benefited their communities, even if they were not racially integrated.
Raul Gonzalez, director of legislative affairs and education policy at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group, said that black and Hispanic parents did not necessarily say “I want my kid to be in an integrated setting.” Instead, he said, “they’re going to say I want my kid’s school to do better than what it’s doing.”
Todd Ziebarth, vice president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, said he supported more money for transportation to charter schools and encouraging them to pursue more diversity. But, he said, “if a school is relatively homogeneous but is performing really well, we should be celebrating that school, not denigrating it.”
Critics of segregation in traditional public schools and charters said that there was more to education than pure academics.
“Is it possible to learn calculus in a segregated school? Of course it is,” said Mark D. Rosenbaum, chief counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles. “Is it possible to learn how the world operates and to think creatively about the rich diversity of cultures in this country? It is impossible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/education/segregation-prominent-in-sch...

SAN FRANCISCO—Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear the ACLU of Northern California's challenge to a California law that mandates that DNA is collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony, whether or not they are ever charged or convicted. Oral argument is scheduled for 10am in Courtroom 1 at the James R. Browning US Courthouse in San Francisco.
The federal class-action lawsuit, Haskell v. Harris, was filed on behalf of Lily Haskell and three other plaintiffs who were forced to turn over a cheek swab of their genetic blueprint to police. Lily was arrested after joining a peace rally in San Francisco. Although she was released without any charges, her DNA is now stored in national databank.
“I was told that if I didn’t give a DNA sample that I might spend two extra nights in jail. I felt strong-armed. It’s not right to take people’s DNA and put it in a government databank,” said plaintiff Lily Haskell.
“DNA collection at arrest doesn’t help solve crimes and it’s a huge invasion of privacy,” said Michael Risher, staff attorney for the ACLU-NC. “The Constitution protects against this kind of privacy invasion. That’s why we have a 4th Amendment.”
The government’s own data presented in court filings shows than taking DNA from everyone who is arrested for a felony, rather than just from people who are convicted of crimes, does not help solve crimes. In part, this is because California’s DNA collection law is not limited to violent crimes.
Under this law people must have DNA taken even if they are arrested after writing a bad check, defending themselves during an attack, or if they are wrongfully arrested, as in the case of Lily Haskell and the other three plaintiffs.
Taking DNA from innocent people causes further backlogs in DNA databanks. The resources spent collecting DNA samples from innocent people would better devoted to processing crime-scene samples to help solve violent and serious crimes like rape, assault and murder. Since this law took effect, DNA has been taken and stored from more than 80,000 Californians per year who have never been convicted of a crime.
The ACLU-NC’s court filings have noted that DNA is not the same as a fingerprint. AScientific American editorial about the also lawsuit makes this point, “DNA is not just a technological progression from fingerprinting. It is qualitatively different. As such, it needs to be treated as more than a mere formality of a police booking procedure.”
“DNA is more than patterns on our fingers. It’s our genetic blueprint,” Risher said.
The ACLU also points to the huge racial impact of this law, due to the realities of racial profiling and heavy police presence in neighborhoods that are predominantly inhabited by people of color.
The mandatory DNA collection policy is a result of Proposition 69, which was enacted by California voters in 2004 and went into effect on January 1, 2009.
This suit is the only civil suit in the country challenging a trend toward invasive DNA collection of people who haven't been convicted of crime. The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU of Northern California with pro bono assistance from Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP.