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California

One year in to realignment, local law enforcement voice fears

by Christina Villacorte

A year into the implementation of Gov. Jerry Brown's public safety realignment, dozens of law enforcement officials from across Southern California came together Tuesday to express concerns about its impact on crime and on their scarce resources.

"Crime appears to be on the increase," Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine said, citing statistics from downtown Los Angeles, Sacramento and Fresno. "It's frightening."

A spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, however, countered that a year is not enough time to judge whether transferring the supervision of certain criminals from the state to counties has been a success or a failure.

"It's incredibly early to make any kind of determination," spokeswoman Dana Simas said.

"I understand there's some local law enforcement concerns about rising crime rates but, at this point, it's all anecdotal," she added. "I don't have any numbers from any law enforcement agency saying these numbers are going up."

Realignment is Brown's way of carrying out the Supreme Court ruling ordering a reduction in the state prison population by more than 30,000 inmates by June 2013.

It mandated sending inmates sentenced on or after Oct. 1, 2011, with nonviolent, nonserious and nonsexual (N3) offenses to county jails instead of state prisons.

It also placed inmates released on or after Oct. 1, 2011, under the supervision of county probation officers, instead of parole agents, if their last offense was an N3.

Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Michel Moore said about 4,000 such recently released inmates came to the city of Los Angeles last year.

"We've had 11 arrested for attempted murder, and six for murder," he said.

In all, about 2,500 have been rearrested for new crimes and 500 have absconded.

Moore said L.A.'s crime rate has dropped steadily over the last decade, and that trend continues. The slide in property crimes has slowed, however, since realignment took effect.

"We still enjoy a nearly 7 percent reduction in violent crime but what we've seen is a steep deceleration of our property crime reduction," he said.

Los Angeles County Chief Probation Officer Jerry Powers said his department was put in charge of supervising 12,000 recently released inmates during the first year of realignment.

He admitted the county Probation Department has only now achieved the level of staffing and training to take over the job previously held by parole agents.

"To be frank, I wish we had the whole of last year to prepare for this," Powers said. "We've been behind the eight ball in running to try and catch up to this population."

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo said the influx of about 500 realignment inmates a month is pushing its jail system to its limits.

"We're incrementally growing monthly," he said. "Quite frankly, I'm going to be running out of jail space."

Rhambo said the Sheriff's Department admitted about 8,500 realignment inmates to its jails in the past year, and released 2,800 of them.

Currently, realignment inmates make up a third of the jail population of 18,900.

Rhambo said the department is looking at several options to manage the inmate population, including outsourcing the incarceration of some inmates to jails near Bakersfield.

He said lack of space has already prompted him to halve the time women inmates serve for misdemeanors. Previously, they served 20 percent of their sentences.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_21701846/one-year-realignment-local-law-enforcement-voice-fears

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California

LAPD won't turn over some illegal immigrants, Chief Charlie Beck announces

by Eric Hartley

The Los Angeles Police Department will refuse to turn over some arrestees to federal immigration authorities under a new policy announced Thursday by Chief Charlie Beck.

Beck said the LAPD won't honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement "detainer" requests for most undocumented immigrants arrested for public nuisance offenses or low-grade misdemeanors.

It will still honor the requests, Beck said, for people charged with felonies, drunken driving or crimes of violence, as well as those suspected of gang membership and those with prior felony records.

The department now honors all ICE detainer requests, which can lead to deportation.

The LAPD gets about 3,400 ICE detainer requests a year, and Beck said it could refuse to honor about 400 under the new policy. Those numbers are extrapolated annual figures based on a six-month internal study and are a small fraction of the LAPD's overall 105,000 annual arrests.

Beck said the new policy should go into effect Jan. 1. Police have not finalized the list of offenses that will be covered, and they will accept public comment before it goes into effect. As an example of people who probably won't be detained under the new policy, Beck mentioned someone charged with drinking in public.

An ICE spokeswoman said the agency had no immediate comment.

During a press conference at police headquarters downtown, Beck said he expected criticism from both sides: those who think he's going too far and those who think he's not going far enough.

But he said it's not a local police department's job to enforce federal immigration rules. He added that he believes strong families help prevent crime, so deporting people for misdemeanor arrests is "counterproductive."

"I don't want to be the cause of the uprooting of parents from their children," Beck said.

In a statement, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the policy will keep families together and help "rebuild the relationship between the immigrant community and local police."

The LAPD announcement came three days after Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have gone even further in limiting police cooperation with immigration authorities. That bill, the Trust Act, would have barred police from detaining people for possible deportation unless they were charged with serious or violent crimes.

Beck said the new policy is not in reaction to the governor's veto. It had been in the works for a while but needed legal approval from the city attorney, he said.

Beck said the policy does not go as far as the Trust Act and will "strike the right balance," allowing deportation of dangerous people but also building trust in immigrant communities.

Beck said that trust has been eroded by the federal Secure Communities program. Under that program, fingerprints that already are sent by local police and sheriffs to the FBI are sent on to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, and checked against immigration databases.

From July 2009 through July 2012, there were 25,223 Los Angeles County arrestees removed under Secure Communities, according to ICE.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles welcomed the move as a way to ensure strong relationships between police and immigrants.

"This is a small step in the right direction," said CHIRLA's policy director, Joseph Villela.

A spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that wants to stop illegal immigration, said the LAPD is flouting federal law and ignoring Brown's veto for political reasons.

FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman compared the move to President Barack Obama stopping some deportations of young people even though Congress failed to pass a law authorizing that policy. Mehlman called those policies "an assault on the rule of law."

Anticipating such criticism, Beck told reporters, "Please do not portray this as `the LAPD is instituting its own Trust Act'."

Beck said the new policy is legal because a recent opinion by City Attorney Carmen Trutanich found police have discretion to decline detainer requests.

A spokesman for the city attorney would not release that opinion, saying it was confidential advice to a client.

Mehlman said it's only a matter of time until someone who could have been deported is instead released and later commits a horrific crime.

Asked whether the move could make Los Angeles a "sanctuary city," a common criticism by groups such as FAIR, Mehlman said, "I'm not sure how you could make it any more of a sanctuary city than it already has been, but I guess the LAPD is going to try here."

Since 1979, the LAPD has been governed by Special Order 40, which bars officers from arresting someone for illegally entering the country under federal law or stopping people solely to find out whether they're here legally.

Immigration authorities will still get the fingerprints of most of those arrested by the LAPD, because the L.A. County Sheriff's Department sends them to the FBI when people are booked into its jails.

When an ensuing detainer request doesn't meet the LAPD's new standards, Beck said, the department will ask ICE for further reasons to detain the person.

If ICE doesn't provide a more compelling reason, the LAPD will not honor the request.

Beck said he thinks other police departments should consider similar policies, but he recognizes every city is different.

Mentioning L.A.'s huge Hispanic and immigrant population, he said, "A police department is a reflection of community standards. I believe this is the right way to police Los Angeles."

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_21699323/lapd-wont-turn-over-some-illegal-immigrants-chief