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	<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line ]]></title>
	<copyright>Copyright 2010 Copyright © 2009  Los Angeles Wave.  All rights reserved. </copyright>
	<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line</link>
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	<pubDate>Tue, 7 Dec 2010 14:04:36 PST</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Still flying, L.A.’s last sugar shack marks its half-century]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Still-flying-LAs-last-sugar-shack-marks-its-half-century-108832479.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 17 Nov 2010 19:35:34 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[Jerry's Flying Fox, the last sugar shack in the city that marked Black Angelenos' westward migration from storied Central Avenue to Crenshaw Boulevard, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Sunday and the joint is expected to be jumping, as usual.

The Flying Fox, 3724 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., has actually been in existence and in that location for 52 years, but its owner, Jerry Edwards, is just now getting around to observing the club's golden anniversary, thus directing attention to exactly what the club was to African-Americans in the 1950s, what it means today and what could happen to it in the future.

Given Los Angeles' segregated housing practice at the time, the Flying Fox was originally established just off Crenshaw by an unknown White man. 

'At the time, of course, Black people were not welcome there,' Edwards said. 'When I came here from Houston in 1955, this was a place where we could not go. At that time we had to go to places cautiously in order not to be insulted or not served.'

Central Avenue, with its legendary Dunbar Hotel and its numerous nightspots held sway as the center of the universe for Black residents of Los Angeles throughout the 1940s and they tended to live, love, worship and party on, along and beside that avenue from downtown south to Slauson Avenue.

But in the 1950s, things began to change and African-Americans discovered they could live — not hassle-free, of course — farther west, to say, Western Avenue, where the Watkins Hotel at Western and Adams began accepting Black guests and its Rubiyat Room became a place where Black patrons were no big deal.

Now, Blacks had encroached upon Crenshaw and ran smack dab into the lily-White Flying Fox, and inasmuch as the neighborhood was 'turning,' as they say, the club turned Black in 1959 when Hildegard Bostick, wife of saxophonist Earl Bostick, bought it. As a famous musician, Bostick attracted other musicians, singers and entertainers to his wife's Flying Fox and it became the premier place for Black L.A. to see and be seen.

Bostick owned the club for eight years and then sold it to a Black liquor store owner named Nate Jordan, who was an introverted fellow who didn't fit in with his clientele. Jordan is said to have been an anti-social person, which is not an asset for somebody running a nightclub. 

'But it was still the place,' Edwards said. 'We all hung out there and we just loved it.'

Then Edwards, who was a highly successful insurance salesman at the time, made Jordan an offer he couldn't refuse and bought the Flying Fox in 1970 and embellished and solidified its role in the community. 

The Flying Fox was never anything more than a place with a bar, a juke box and camaraderie (read' folks lying to each other) — where friends enjoyed each others' company. But Jerry's Flying Fox became something even more special. Edwards added meals — lunch, dinner and chef Eddie Oliphant's amazing gumbo — to the club's bill of fare, and added live entertainment after doubling the size of the club in 1980. Singer Johnnie Taylor was his first live act, followed by many others such as Little Milton, Sam Fletcher, Earl Garner, Lou Rawls, Joe Turner, Joe Williams and Ernie Andrews, who still hangs out at the club. 

'We had all of them,' Edwards said. 'If they lived in Los Angeles or played in the city they came in here.'

And so did the athletes' Muhammad Ali, Oscar Robinson, Jim Brown, Larry Holmes and Sugar Ray Robinson, etc., often frequented the club. And oh, did the politicians make the Flying Fox their favorite hang! The New Frontier Democratic Club, the oldest and largest Democratic club in the state, was organized in the Flying Fox. Tom Bradley's mayoral campaign was developed at the club, as were the campaigns of the late Rep. Julian Dixon and retiring Rep. Diane Watson and many other seekers of offices and political appointments and favors.

Currently, the Flying Fox, Edwards, his gumbo cooker of the past 35 years and his long-time bartender, Ben Stokes are at the nadir of their existence. Where the club was once a prominent feature of a commercial area known as San Barbara Plaza, it is now and has been for the past 15 years virtually the only business of significance sitting in 25 acres of blight in the heart of the African-American community.

'The city [Community Redevelopment Agency] came in here 15 years ago saying they were going to develop this plaza. They destroyed it,' Edwards said. 'Before the city came, we had 200 healthy small businesses operating here, in addition to a bank, a supermarket, and a 24-hour telephone company facility full of telephone operators who flocked to the club for lunch and dinner after their shifts. This is where a lot of them met the men they married.

'But now, since I'm in a ghost town with no businesses around me, I'm 
losing $3,000 to $4,000 a month,' Edwards continued. 'People still come in here, but basically, all I'm doing now is throwing bucketloads of water out of a sinking ship until the city decides what it's going do about replacing what it destroyed.'

In the meantime, Councilman Herb Wesson has arranged for the city to honor Jerry's Flying Fox upon its 50th anniversary, and on Sunday, the club's regulars and guests will show up after 5 p.m., dressed up and ready to celebrate like it was 1959 — the year Hildegard Bostick turned it Black.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Mishandled remains, 'cover-up' allegation]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Mishandled-remains-cover-up-allegation-107131183.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:32:36 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[The release Nov. 5 of the Los Angeles County coroner's report on the death of Mitrice Richardson answered no questions about the demise of the 24-year-old woman and has served only to fan the fires of suspicion as to the Sheriff's Department's involvement in her mysterious disappearance and the recovery of her skeletal remains in a rugged Malibu canyon 11 months later.

The community and Richardson's family have been looking askance at the Sheriff's Department ever since the woman was arrested by deputies and released from the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station — alone, on foot and after midnight — on Sept. 17, 2009. Despite what was reported to have been several wide searches and rumors of Mitrice sightings at various locations, she was not seen again until 1 p.m. on Aug. 9 when two Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority park rangers found her skull in a remote canyon near Piuma Road.

If one thought the handling of Richardson's arrest, release and search were troubling, well, the recovery of her remains is a doozy and defies all logic' According to the coroner's report, Richardson's almost totally intact skeleton was removed from the wilderness terrain by the already-suspect sheriff's deputies and air lifted to the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station command post against the explicit instructions of the coroner.

The coroner's report reads as follows' After having been informed that Richardson's body had been found, 'Assistant Chief [Coroner Ed] Winter informed the coroner personnel that we would be airlifted to the body shortly. At approximately 8 p.m., against the direction of Assistant Chief Winter, LASD detectives collected the remains and airlifted them to the CP [Lost Hills Station Command Post].' 

The report goes on to describe how the coroner's personnel of six people had to go to the sheriff's station to retrieve the body, conduct an initial body exam in the coroner's decedent transportation vehicle and then transport it to the coroner's Forensic Science Center. That's a lot of movement of a crime victim's body.

The report continues' 'The following day [Aug. 10 at 10 a.m.], the coroner's staff was airlifted by LASD helicopter to the body site. We were unable to locate where the body was originally found.' Now, those of us in the media who have been in the presence of dead bodies, and those of us who have seen covered-up dead bodies lying around for hours and those of us who ever watched procedural cop shows on TV, know that nobody removes a dead body from a crime scene but a coroner and only after he has done his routine work at the site. But no, in a case that is already fraught with anger, disbelief, missteps and blame, the Sheriff's Department has, again, done something out-of-the-ordinary and nonsensical.

Winter has made public statements criticizing the LASD for removing Richardson's remains, particularly after he specifically told them not to. Winter added that the sheriff's personnel having done so was a violation of the law. The coroner's and the sheriff's departments have fallen out over the removal and the two sides held an acrimonious meeting Monday afternoon, from which sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore emerged saying the removal of Richardson's remains resulted from a 'miscommunication' between the two departments.

I asked Winter Tuesday if he had been browbeaten into changing his position and attitude about the Sheriff's Department's action. He said' 'No. I stand by everything I've said.' Then I asked' 'Well, why is Whitmore telling the media there was a 'miscommunication?'' An audibly angry Winter snapped' 'I don't know. You have to ask him.'

What was not found with Richardson's remains is puzzling. Three items of Richardson's clothing are reported to have been found about 100 feet from her body. They are a Navy blue or black padded bra, a narrow pink alligator-skinned patterned belt and a pair of blue jeans. They found no shoes, no socks, no panties and no shirt. What happened to them? How did her bra get unhooked, come off and travel 100 feet away from her body?

These are the questions that try Mitrice's father, Michael Richardson's soul, as the bottom line of this report is that the coroner is unable to determine the cause of his daughter's death. Her identity was established through dental records, but there was no trauma to her bones and no flesh or organs on or in them with which to identify a cause. Her death is recorded as 'undetermined.'

Michael Richardson recalled how, in December, after his daughter had been missing for three months, Sheriff Lee Baca told him that he needed to accept the fact that he may never know what happened to his daughter; that 'she had succumbed to the elements of the earth.' Then in August, 'it became clear that Baca was right' it was confirmed that she had, indeed, succumbed to the elements of the earth,' Richardson said. 

'I try to be politically correct and believe that people in authority are conscientious and follow the rules and carry out their functions efficiently and knowledgeably. They kept saying that the Sheriff's Department did everything 'by the book' with my daughter, yet everything they did was botched,' Richardson said. 'But now, finally, I can honestly say' they did it! They killed her and they're doing everything they can to cover it up.'
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Not so easy to agree on chain’s plans for  market on Crenshaw]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Not-so-easy-to-agree-on-chains-plans-for--market-on-Crenshaw-106659663.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 3 Nov 2010 18:42:12 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[While eager to see a popular supermarket chain established in their midst, Crenshaw area residents are offended by the way the proposed structure may look and are poised to do battle with the Los Angeles City Council about it.

The Hyde Park Organizational Partnership for Empowerment (HOPE), along with several other Crenshaw area groups, are fighting to have a proposed Fresh and Easy market meet the standards established by the Crenshaw Specific Plan, which governs how Crenshaw Boulevard — the main thoroughfare of Los Angeles' only predominately African-American community — will look.

After years of studies, negotiations, and planning by HOPE, community residents and city officials, Los Angeles adopted the Crenshaw Specific Plan in 2004, to the considerable ballyhooing and back-patting of politicians and community leaders. The adoption was such a momentous event in the Black community that I wrote a front page Wave story back then heralding the milestone and crediting Councilman Bernard Parks with having done a great job in getting the city of Los Angeles to finally afford Crenshaw Boulevard the same respect it does to the commercial districts in other parts of the city —such as Hollywood, Westwood, the Valley, etc.

The purpose of the Crenshaw — or any community's specific plan — is to eliminate the unsightly mishmash of businesses, buildings, facilities and 'anything goes' enterprises that spring up along the thoroughfare. The plan's goal is to make the commercial district look good; make it amenable and attractive to shoppers; make it a place people want to go to; make it a source of community pride.

The Crenshaw Specific Plan, which extends along Crenshaw Boulevard from the Santa Monica Freeway down to the city of Inglewood, spells out in explicit and no-uncertain-terms exactly the kinds of commercial activities will be allowed in it, the kinds of structures those activities will be housed in, and the kinds of signage those structures will display. The specific plans designate how big a thing will be, the parking and walking areas that will be established and the color schemes and landscaping that would be acceptable in the area.

The Crenshaw Specific Plan, for example, forbids anymore automotive businesses, drive-through establishments, gun and pawn shops, swap meets, public storage, motels, bars not attached to dining and dancing businesses, recycling and buy-back centers and strip malls.

And therein lies the problem' The community says the Fresh and Easy market proposed for the corner of 52nd Street and Crenshaw Boulevard is a strip mall. Residents say it violates the clearly defined dimensions governing the distance between a business and the street. As proposed, It has an unsightly parking lot in front of the building — something you don't see in other neighborhoods with specific plans. The residents want the standards of the Crenshaw Specific Plan met and they want the parking lot moved to either the back or side of the building and the building, itself, to sit immediately upon the street.

'The Fresh and Easy on Central and Adams is exactly like we want ours to be,' declared Winnie Jackson, president of HOPE. 'Our plan specifically forbids strip malls and that is what Fresh and Easy is proposing to give us. They plan to build on the lot next to an adjacent structure and the rest of the lot is for parking. We don't want parking on the corner. We want the building on the corner, not cars. Otherwise, it's a strip mall.

'We fought long and hard to get this specific plan in place, not to have companies like Fresh and Easy show up and not have to comply with our plan. Don't get me wrong,' Jackson continued. 'We are not against Fresh and Easy. We just want them to comply with the plan."

Asata Umoja, a Crenshaw activist, explained that one of the goals of the specific plan was to encourage pedestrian-oriented development. 'But now Fresh and Easy is proposing to build a typical auto-related strip mall, which is contrary to our plans to encourage a pedestrian-oriented area around the Slauson Avenue portion of the boulevard,' Umoja said. 'We have hopes and aspirations for a better looking community."

The issue puts the Crenshaw community at odds with its councilman, Parks, who championed the adoption of the plan in 2004 but who is now reported to favor letting Fresh and Easy do what it wants. Linda Ricks, chairman of the Crenshaw-Slauson Community Advisory Committee, said' 'What I object to is that our community is treated like the wild, wild west and we are not supposed to have any standards. While our councilman says our specific plan is 'outdated,' I've never heard anyone say that about the specific plan in Westwood, which by the way, has four specific plans.'

York Knowlton of the Windsor Hills Village Extended Block Club, said' 'We specifically wrote in the plan that projects in this area would be 'walkable' and pedestrian-friendly. Fresh and Easy knows this. The CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) knows this and Councilman Parks knows this, but they all choose to ignore the plan.'

Councilman Parks did not return a call for comments on this issue, but Brendan Wonnacott, a communications official with Fresh and Easy, said his company 'is working and will continue to work with city officials and neighbors to make everyone happy with what's going on.' He added' 'Every site has its own story and we intend to work with the community as we go through this process.'

In September, the City Planning Department's South Los Angeles Area Planning Commission granted Fresh and Easy's request to disregard five elements of the Crenshaw Specific Plan, including the strip mall prohibition. HOPE and the community coalition has appealed that decision to the City Council and the matter will be heard by the Planning and Land Management Committee on Nov. 16 at 2'30 p.m. in the Board of Public Works Hearing Room in City Hall.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: New friends call when catastrophe strikes again]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-New-friends-call-when-catastrophe-strikes-again-105936288.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:19:27 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[Still reeling from an earthquake that destroyed its capital and adjacent cities and killed 300,000 people, a fresh hell has engulfed Haiti — cholera.

The Jan. 12 earthquake leveled Haiti's densely populated cities, but it left the rural northwestern areas virtually undamaged, yet death has stalked them, too. 

An outbreak of cholera occurred in those areas within the last two weeks, resulting in at least 292 deaths as of Wednesday, with a confirmed number 4,147 cholera-stricken patients being treated in rudimentary conditions.

According to my friends in Haiti, the number of new cases is increasing rapidly and resources to combat the deadly disease are sorely limited. Robert Nicolas, executive director of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Service and Development Agency, which has been providing health services in Haiti for 28 years, said his SADA clinics — already challenged by residents' health needs resulting from the earthquake — are now overwhelmed by the cholera epidemic.

He said the eight communities covered by the AME-SADA clinics are either in or abut the Artibonite region, which is currently considered the epicenter of the epidemic. Nicolas said all the clinics, except one, are outpatient facilities and patients are put on the floors throughout the buildings, wherever space can be found. 'Conditions are not ideal, but we cannot turn away any patients,' Nicolas said. 

Dr. Ketty Philogene, AME-SADA's health program officer, said Tuesday the AME-SADA clinic in Port Martheux has a total of five beds in it, and is treating 219 cholera cases. Six patients have died in that clinic so far, including one who died at the gate while being brought to the facility on a motorcycle. 

'Patients are placed on chairs, benches and floors. The conditions for patients and staff are not adequate, but they are being provided the best treatment available. Our staff is being severely overtaxed,' Philogene said.

The doctor said AME-SADA has received a limited amount of medical supplies from USAID/Haiti and the USAID-funded Management Services for Health organization. She said representatives of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta visited the Pont Matheux clinic last week and took samples from some of the patients for further laboratory tests.

Cholera, which first appeared in India in 1816, is contracted by consuming water or food contaminated by fecal matter or by some other kind of nasty effluent wastewater. Cholera causes volumes of watery diarrhea and vomiting. Victims can lose as much as 10 quarts of water a day from diarrhea and vomiting and they die in short order when their electrolytes are so depleted that their hearts stop.

The Artibonite region is now the host to thousands of earthquake victims who fled the crumbled cities. The region has an open sewer running through it, called the St. Marc River, from which many of the newcomers drink and play. 

The disease has not appeared in Port-au-Prince yet because the city has no water, period, and inhabitants drink bottled and chlorinated tanked water trucked in from other countries and from Haiti's mountain region.

Health officials say, given Haiti's extremely mobile population, it is probably impossible to contain the disease in the Artibonite region and, therefore, they expect the germ to arrive in the urban areas — where thousands and thousands of people are huddled together in camps — very soon.

AME-SADA is asking for help; it needs money and/or medical supplies. Nicolas and Dr. Philogene said the clinics need the following' four large tents, portable toilettes, antibiotics (flagyl, tetracycline, cipro, doxycycline, and erythromycin). 

Please note' All medications must have a minimum of a six-months expiration date.

They need cholera kits, mosquito nets, water purification tablets, cleansers and disinfectants, oral rehydration packets, IV kits (adult and pediatric), IV fluids (sodium chloride/dextrose; adult and pediatric), gloves, masks, disposable protective clothing for medical staff and patients and bed pans and wash basins.

All donations to help Haiti in the time of cholera should be sent to AME-SADA, 1134 11th St., N.W., Suite 214, Washington, D.C., 20001.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: For lawmakers, Senate work is bills, bills, bills]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-For-lawmakers-Senate-work-is-bills-bills-bills-105403403.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:06:20 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[Regardless of where the district attorney says state Sen. Roderick Wright may or may not live, the 25th District senator has been a lawmaking machine in the Legislature and is easily among the most productive of California's 40 senators.

In office for only a term-and-a-half, the Inglewood senator has introduced 48 bills of which 29 made it to the governor's desk and 25 of which were signed into law. The Republican governor vetoed four of the Democratic senator's bills, affording him an impressive 86 percent law enactment rate.

Of the 25 Wright-authored bills Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law, I asked the senator to identify those that were the most important to him. He identified 11. We will discuss four of my choosing.

Starting close to home is Wright's SCR 106, the 'Kenneth Garner Exit Bill,' which designates the Florence Avenue exit of the Harbor Freeway as the Deputy Chief Kenneth O. Garner Memorial Exit, in honor of the late esteemed official's 32-year career with the LAPD and his outstanding contributions toward changing the LAPD's image from armed terrorists to community peace keepers working in conjunction with residents to improve their quality of life and their sense of security.

Another one I like is SJR 21, Wright's 'Port Chicago Disaster Bill.' This one calls on Congress, the president and the Department of Defense to take immediate actions to vindicate the sailors unjustly blamed for, and the sailors convicted of mutiny following the Port Chicago disaster, and to rectify any mistreatment by the military of those sailors.

For those of you who are not war history buffs, this is what happened' The Port Chicago disaster was a munitions explosion that occurred on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine (depot) in Port Chicago, Ca. The munitions were being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater. This was dangerous work, so, of course, it was assigned to Black, poorly trained sailors functioning in unsafe conditions.

The munitions detonated killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Most of those killed and injured were enlisted African-American sailors. The Blacks were blamed for the explosion and nothing was done to make the job safer for them. A month later, sailors rebelled against the deadly duty and hundreds of servicemen refused to load munitions, an act known as the Port Chicago Mutiny. Fifty men were court martialed, convicted of mutiny and sentenced to long prison terms for their refusal. The case became a cause célèbre among African-Americans and led to race-related protests as to the unfairness and illegality of the court martial proceedings. Wright's bill will force the U.S. to revisit the disaster and its aftermath.

The governor signed Wright's SB 1122, the 'UC Contracts Bidding and Employment Bill,' which enhances and makes more effective the University of California system of reaching out to small businesses, as well as reducing university costs, and he enacted the senator's SB 1353, which improves the education of foster care children. The bill ensures educational continuity by regulating when and where foster care children can be transferred from one school to another.

State Sen. Curren Price, who has not been in the state Senate for a year yet, is on pace with Wright. Price, of the 26th District, has written 17 bills, five of which were recently signed into law by the governor and the rest are wending their way through the appropriate committees. Price wrote SB 1088, the law that prohibits the limiting age for dependent children covered by health care service plans and insurance policies from being less than 26 years, and prohibits discrimination on the basis of a pre-existing condition.

SB 1088 implements state law pertaining to the expansion of health care coverage to dependent adults making it conform with President Obama's federal Health Reform Act. 'This legislation will put us in compliance with federal law by the most succinct and cost-effective way possible,' Price said.

The senator's SB 1341 was sponsored by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority and will codify the means by which the MTA can enhance participation of small businesses in its procurement practices. The new law allows the MTA to grant a five percent bidding preference to the lowest responsive and responsible bidders, or 'best value' proposers who subcontract with firms certified as small business enterprises under federal definitions.

The governor signed Price's SB 1076, which authorizes taxpayers to make voluntary contributions to the Arts Council when filing their state personal income taxes, which the senator sees as a small but essential step in providing an additional source of funding that is sorely needed for the arts in California.

Both senators Price and Wright wrote SB 1155, which streamlines California's Capital Access Company law to make it easier for small businesses to access capital for expansion. The complexity of current law has prevented companies from taking advantage of it. 

'Fortunately, now we have legislation that will help small businesses obtain the resources they desperately need to keep their doors open and to prosper,' Price said. 

Both senators hailed the enactment of their jointly authored bill as a step in the right direction to help small businesses create jobs in California, which has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: At bill-signing time, a mixed bag for Black L.A. legislators]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-At-bill-signing-time-a-mixed-bag-for-Black-LA-legislators-104914934.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:11:15 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



															<enclosure url="http://media.wavenewspapers.com/images/320*177/Steve+Bradford1.jpg" length="64683" type="image/jpeg" />
																																																			<description><![CDATA[When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the 2010 legislation package sent to him earlier this month, he enacted into law a host of bills written by the Southland's six African-American state legislators which will significantly improve the lives of local residents. On the same token, the governor vetoed some Black legislators' bills which, if enacted, would have worked wonders for the communities they serve.

The enactment of two bills authored by the past and present Assembly speakers paced the round of legislation the governor saw fit to sign. One was Speaker Emeritus Karen Bass' AB 12, which extended California's foster youth support from age 18 to age 21. Bass, who chaired the Assembly's Select Committee on Foster Care and served on the California Supreme Court's Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care, has been a leading advocate for foster youth throughout her tenure in the Legislature and campaigned on foster care issues before she was elected.

AB 12 was co-authored by Assemblyman Jim Beall Jr., D-San Jose, and supported by virtually every agency and organization in the state that deals with children.

The other piece of landmark legislation enacted into law this month was written by Assembly Speaker John A. Perez, D-Los Angeles, and pushed by the California Endowment. The signing of AB 1602 and SB 900, co-authored by Sens. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, and Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, has given California the lead in President Barack Obama's national health care reforms, as it has created the nation's first state health benefits exchange since the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law. 

The web-based California Health Benefits Exchange is established, pursuant to federal law, to be 'a marketplace where individuals and small businesses can easily understand their insurance choices and costs, draw down several billion dollars in available federal tax credits and be provided the health insurance purchasing power of very large employer groups.' The California Endowment calls the creation of the health insurance exchange 'the single most important component of health care reform for California's businesses.'

A new state law will hit local residents exactly where a lot of them live' the Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens Housing projects. Thanks to the enactment of Assemblyman Isadore Hall's AB 1641, the two troubled housing project sites in Watts will be classified as redevelopment areas, a designation required for them to receive the funds necessary to undertake a planned $5 billion revitalization of the area.

For more than 50 years, the two housing projects have provided almost 2,000 units of affordable housing in Watts. Over the years, the projects have fallen into various states of disrepair and have become a dilapidated blight upon the general South L.A. community. While Los Angeles city and county have invested considerable resources into improving the projects, Hall said his bill was needed so the project would be eligible for government funds to fill in financial gaps and to complete the rehabilitation of those areas. The multiphase redevelopment project is expected to break ground in 2012.

Freshman Assemblyman Steven Bradford has been a busy bee this year, as the governor signed five Bradford bills into law and vetoed one. 

Schwarzenegger signed AB 2758, Bradford's 'Modernizing Supplier Diversity Reporting Bill,' which requires utility providers to report specifically on their procurement with minority, women and disabled veteran-owned businesses on renewable, broadband, wireless and rail projects. 

The governor also signed AB 2188, Bradford's 'Disability Benefits — EBT Bill,' which paves the way for the state to issue disability, unemployment and paid family leave benefits through direct deposit and pay cards.

While the governor signed three other bills of lesser scope written by Bradford, he vetoed one that could had have a substantial impact on a whole lot of people. He refused to sign the assemblyman's AB 2581, the 'Banking Development District Bill,' which would have helped more Californians eschew check cashing and payday loan joints and enter the financial mainstream through participation in banks and credit unions. The rejected legislation, modeled after a successful New York state program, would have provided financial institutions assistance to offer services in underserved areas, thus spurring greater financial inclusion and promoting local economic development. 

'While a financial institution may see the long-term potential of branching into an unbanked area, it may take a number of years before the branch can attract enough deposits to become viable,' Bradford said. 'This bill would have helped in that regard.

'I am very upset,' Bradford continued. 'AB 2581 would have targeted specific locations in the state that lack financial services. These are often our families and our communities that don't have access to financial products.'

Assemblyman Mike Davis wrote seven bills, of which four were signed into law by the governor, two were vetoed by him and one, ACR 126 — recognizing the Los Angeles area along Vermont Avenue, between Adams Boulevard and 11th Street, as the El Salvador Community Corridor — was approved by both houses of the Legislature and, therefore, did not need the governor's yeah or nay.

The governor signed Davis' AB 1918, which expands General Order 156 to include wireless telecommunications providers among public utilities required to file annual reports on their progress related to increasing contracting with women, minority-owned and disabled veteran business enterprises. He also signed AB 2079, called the 'Student Athlete's Right to Know Bill,' which requires all institutions with intercollegiate athletic programs to provide a disclosure letter to all their student recruits within one week of a recruiter's contact with the student-athlete and post specified information on their web pages. Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch, and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, helped Davis write this bill.

Davis' gang injunction bill, AB 2632, was enacted at the behest of the Los Angeles County district attorney. The law specifies that 'disobedience of the terms of a gang injunction constitutes contempt of court, and is punishable as a misdemeanor,' and creates a separate code section to report this sort of thing. Davis' AB 1921 was signed. Tangentially, it's about political reform, but it doesn't involve us, unless we're running for office in Santa Clara and Ventura counties or the city of Long Beach. It's something county clerks and election officials wanted and got.

The governor vetoed two of Davis' bills' AB 1369, which alters requirements of inmates subject to involuntary home detention. This was something the L.A. County Sheriff's Department wanted. It didn't get it.

Schwarzenegger also vetoed Davis' AB 1914, which would have required the state to provide emergency food stamp benefits to those waiting for their unemployment benefits or an extension of unemployment benefits to become available. This was something thousands of destitute and hungry laid-off Californians needed. They didn't get it.

Our last two legislators — state senators Roderick Wright and Curren Price — are lawmaking monsters! The two of them have written more bills than the four Assembly members combined! I haven't finished reading them all, let alone understanding them. I will ask the senators to help me pick out a few of their most important bills and report them in a separate article next week. They're monsters, I tell you! Monsters!
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: In Haiti recovery effort, it's tricky to follow the dollars]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-In-Haiti-recovery-effort-its-tricky-to-follow-the-dollars-104458378.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">104458378</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 6 Oct 2010 18:03:50 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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Wave Contributing Editor Betty Pleasant spent three days (Aug. 30-Sept. 1) in Haiti with members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Global Mission. This is the fifth in a series of reports on the people and places she saw while visiting the earthquake-ravaged nation.

Over the previous four weeks since my return from Haiti, we have looked at the plight of the earthquake-devastated country, the suffering and hopes of its people and the plan to meet their immediate survival needs, as well as Haiti&rsquo;s crucial long-term need for economic and political development. Individuals, organizations and countries around the globe have opened their hearts and pocketbooks to help Haiti through this, the most difficult time in its hard-scrabbled existence.

Yet, the question remains' Whither the money? Where has all the money raised, donated, legislated and allocated for Haiti gone? There are two responses to that question' Who knows? And God knows. I and several of my journalist colleagues have been asking that question of humanitarians, service providers and government officials in Haiti, in Washington, D.C., and in Los Angeles and we find that people either don&rsquo;t know or they won&rsquo;t talk about it.

We do know this' In March, with the president of Haiti standing at her side, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood before the world&rsquo;s cameras and promised to provide $1.15 billion for Haiti to rebuild after the earthquake. As of today, not one cent of that money has been sent.

Banking on that promise, the worldwide consortium that created the Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti, included that U.S.-promised $1.15 billion in its redesign of a brand new Haiti. Each redevelopment activity in the 60-page plan ends with two monetary figures' a total budget amount to complete that activity and an amount almost as large as the first one, called &ldquo;budget support,&rdquo; which means it is an amount Haiti does not have but it expects to receive based on promises from other international sources.

The week before Clinton made her promise, President Barack Obama asked Congress for $2.8 billion in emergency aid to Haiti, of which about half was to reimburse the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Defense Department and other government agencies for the money they had already spent helping Haiti during the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake. Another $212 million of the total sum went to writing off Haiti&rsquo;s debt to the U.S., but the $1.15 billion in reconstruction funds of which Clinton spoke was the heart of the request. Political fighting among members of Congress has kept that money from flowing from the U.S. into Haiti.

The U.S is not the only nation that has failed, so far, to deliver on its promises. My Associated Press colleagues, Jonathan Katz and Martha Mendoza, report in the Christian Recorder that some 50 other nations and organizations pledged a total of $8.75 billion for reconstruction of Haiti, but just $686 million of that has reached Haiti so far, which is less than 15 percent of the total promised for 2010-2011.

AP reports that the United States has already spent more than $1.1 billion on post-quake relief, but without the promised long-term funds, the reconstruction of the country cannot begin. And even a shortage of emergency money is holding up the most preliminary of steps needed to nudge the country forward' rubbish removal. As I mentioned in a previous piece, Port-au-Prince looks today pretty much as it did the day after the quake &mdash; huge mounds of collapsed buildings with dead bodies rotting among and beneath them.
Some of the $1.1 billion in quake relief money went to Maryland-based CHF International, as it is the primary U.S.-funded group assigned to remove rubble from the country and build temporary shelters. According to AP, only two percent of the rubble has been cleared and 13,000 temporary shelters have been built &mdash; less than 10 percent of the number planned.

The company has asked the U.S. government for $16.5 million to remove more than 21 million cubic feet of additional rubble and build 4,000 more temporary houses out of wood and metal and get the country&rsquo;s thousands of tent-dwellers into more substantial abodes. And not a moment too soon, as violence may be looming on the horizon, what with fed-up landowners threatening to evict entire encampments of homeless Haitians squatting on their land in tents, tarps and assorted lean-tos.

CHF Director Alberto Wilde told AP' &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just a matter of one phone call and the trucks are out again. We have contractors ready to continue removing rubble. We have local suppliers and international suppliers ready to ship the amount of wood and construction materials we need. It&rsquo;s just a matter of money.&rdquo;

No one seems to know or would even hazard a guess as to what the Haitian government is doing to help its people. The government is hugely overwhelmed and is in a catatonic state. The government has a little money and I suspect it is doing the best it can with its sorely limited resources. It is relying heavily on the kindness of others, and the private sector others &mdash; people like you and I &mdash; are keeping Haitians alive. Religious and humanitarian organizations are the ones providing direct aid Haitians need to make it through the day.

Here in the neighborhood, Ward AME Church is working with the long-established AME Service and Development Agency (SADA) to acquire state-of-the-art mobil hospital units so the SADA clinics can reach ailing residents and earthquake victims in the stricken outlying areas of Haiti. In the best of Haitian times, the 28-year-old SADA was providing medical care to more than 20,000 patients a year. But since the quake collapsed or rendered unusable more than 50 hospitals and medical centers in three regions of the country, the need for SADA is at its greatest and its resources are at its lowest. Ward is focusing on providing direct assistance to SADA so it can help treat the thousands of sick and injured people in Haiti.

In addition to providing donations to the AME church&rsquo;s overall Haiti relief campaign, First AME Church has undertaken a direct project to deal with the scarcity of potable water in Haiti. The quake seriously damaged an already weak drinking water system, leaving Haitians scrambling for drinking water &mdash; in a hot country. In fact, when I was there, I saw constant caravans of international relief vehicles going through Port-au-Prince ladened with nothing but bottles of water.

FAME is not only providing bottled water and food to the Haitians, but it is committed to building a well for one of the communities.
&ldquo;A well can last a year and sustain life for many people,&rdquo; said the Rev. John Hunter, FAME&rsquo;s senior pastor.

Like Ward, FAME is not funneling its assistance through the Haitian government, which is an entity Hunter derides. &ldquo;The government is not feeding the people,&rdquo; Hunter said. &ldquo;The government is keeping food in storage waiting for a hurricane! The people are starving now. They need food now. It makes no sense for the government to stockpile it until a hurricane hits. It is inhumane!&rdquo; an agitated Hunter said.
Yes, there are transglobal reneging and wavering on aid to Haiti and petty internice bickering in Congress is holding up promised funds from the United States, but assistance from non-governmental sources is getting to the people in need &mdash; in fact, its probably the only thing that&rsquo;s keeping them alive.

When I arrived in Haiti, the Rt. Rev. Sarah Frances Davis, prelate of the AME&rsquo;s 16th episcopal district, which includes Haiti, told me' &ldquo;I want to keep the issue and need to donate to Haiti on the front burner. Emotional giving has waned and donations are down.&rdquo; Our own Rev. Hunter seconded that sentiment and added, &ldquo;We need to keep Haiti on our minds.&rdquo;

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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: On troubled island, people  are the true glimmer of hope]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-On-troubled-island-people-are-the-true-glimmer-of-hope-104051444.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">104051444</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:01:06 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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Wave Contributing Editor Betty Pleasant spent three days (Aug. 30-Sept. 1) in Haiti with members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Global Mission. This is the fourth in a series of reports on the people and places she saw while visiting the earthquake-ravaged nation.

I am the senior member of a racially diverse family that includes Black people, White people, Asians and Native Americans. The only people missing from the Pleasant/Miller/Boyd/Rosenthal/Metcalf/McViegh/Wheeler/Henry family are Latinos, Middle Easterners and Pacific Islanders &mdash; so far. When we get together for weddings and funerals and holidays, we look like a gathering of United Nations delegates of various and sundry sizes.

I said all that to say this' When I was in Haiti, I didn&rsquo;t see a single White person. I saw nothing but Black people. And it felt good. As you can tell, I am accustomed to being around people of all races, but somehow, being surrounded by nothing but Blacks &mdash; regardless of their dire living conditions &mdash; was awesome. It felt like it did when I was growing up in South L.A. in the 1960s. It felt like it does when I drive down Crenshaw Boulevard now. It felt like it probably did on Central Avenue in the &rsquo;40s and in Harlem in the &rsquo;30s. It felt warm and cozy and comfortable. I felt a lot different in Haiti than when I was in Austria and Scotland. It felt like I was at home in Haiti.

The oddest thing about it was that all these Black people couldn&rsquo;t speak a word of English! Have you ever walked up to a Black person and started talking and have him fix you with a blank stare and tell you, &ldquo;I do not speak English?&rdquo; That is the weirdest thing. You get that from Latinos all day long, but never from a Black person! From the government officials, to the merchants, to the hotel and restaurant staffs, to the airport workers, to the beggars on the streets &mdash; no Haitian spoke English, not even as a second language. They spoke French only and it was amazing. Among themselves and to each other they spoke Creole, which is basically French ebonics, but to me, they spoke rapid fire French like Parisians and I enjoyed listening to them. And it&rsquo;s the strangest feeling to have a Black down-and-out panhandler beg me for money in elegant French, to whom I had to reply' &ldquo;Je n&rsquo;ai pas d&rsquo;argent,&rdquo; because one of my traveling companions had taken my wallet to make sure I gave no money to anyone on the street, as I was sorely tempted to do.

During a trip arranged by Ward AME&rsquo;s Jackie DuPont Walker, the director/consultant of the AME church&rsquo;s Social Action Commission, I spent three days and nights in Haiti in the company of 25 AME church clerics and officials, including three interpreters and a bodyguard who carried a sawed-off shotgun. As there was nowhere for us to live in Port-au-Prince, the closest place to the devastated city where we could find lodging was in the Kaliko Beach Club in the town of Cabaret, which was a two-hour drive from the capital city. The beach club, which had sustained some earthquake damage and had been repaired, was beautiful. We stayed in bungalows right on the Caribbean Sea and I would lie in bed and listen to the gentle waves of the Caribbean Sea splash on the rocks just outside my door. Ah-h-h-h. And we were well cared for by the efficient, fantastic and amiable Black personnel who ran the place and who, of course, couldn&rsquo;t speak a word of English, but my French began to improve. The club personnel prepared all our meals &mdash; breakfasts, boxed lunches and dinners.

Did you know Haiti does not have enough electricity for the country? It never did; not even before the earthquake. I discovered that when at a certain point each day the TV stopped working and the computers went offline. Continuous electricity is an upper class luxury among Haitians. Whoa. The redevelopment plan calls for them to rectify that in the New Haiti.

The ride to and from our bleach club was always like an amusement park thrill ride. Haitian traffic is chaotic' There are no speed limits and they have very few traffic signals and no traffic rules. People drive as fast as they can and constantly sound their vehicles&rsquo; horns to warn whomever is in their way to get out of their way &mdash; be they cars, trucks, buses, bicyclists, pedestrians, dogs or goats. Haitians drive recklessly and, according to one of our interpreters, &ldquo;drivers don&rsquo;t respect each other; they don&rsquo;t care about anything,&rdquo; consequently, thousands of people are killed in traffic accidents.

Despite the fact that Haitians are living in tents in 1,300 official emergency camps (and in a much greater number of unofficial camps), have no jobs and are eating out of steaming gigantic caldrons of foodstuffs cooked on street corners, I am told that Haitians are, by nature, great gamblers. As you travel through Port-au-Prince and its outlying environs, you see lots of little square colorfully painted huts along the side of the road, with the word &ldquo;Bank&rdquo; painted on them. After a day or so, I began to question the nature of these &ldquo;banks,&rdquo; as they seemed woefully insecure for financial institutions. I was informed that these ever-present &ldquo;banks&rdquo; were actually gambling booths wherein lottery tickets are sold, to which any Haitian with a gouda in his pocket was loathe to pass by without stopping. Amazing.

And then there are goats &mdash; everywhere. Goats are much more plentiful than dogs and they roam the streets, unleashed and unattended, like dogs do here. In fact, a really cute stray puppy goat was wandering around my bungalow snacking on the greenery and making little goat noises, but I shooed him away, lest somebody caught him and cooked him and ate him. Haitians like to eat goat. I ate no meat in Haiti because I didn&rsquo;t want to accidentally end up with goat in my mouth. I stuck to seafood &mdash; cod and shrimp. I don&rsquo;t eat lamb or rabbit, either. I don&rsquo;t eat anything cute.

The two-hour drive into and out of Port-au-Prince (or PAP, as the locals render it) each day afforded us a great opportunity to really see the Haitian countryside and seaside. And both are truly beautiful. Actually, once you get away from the devastated city and towns and travel out onto the land and mountains and waterways that are just as the Lord has made, you realize that even though the country is in the biggest mess it&rsquo;s ever been, this country is absolutely gorgeous! It&rsquo;s serene and fairy tale-like with lush forestation and beautiful and unusual plants growing wild, of which I wished I could get clippings past Customs inspectors and bring home and plant in my yard. It&rsquo;s just a lovely place, very unlike our Pacific Ocean-fronted, jagged mountain-studded homeland. Haiti&rsquo;s landscape is much more gentle and genteel.

And the people in Haiti are great, too. You don&rsquo;t see a lot of weepin&rsquo; and wailin&rsquo; and whoopin&rsquo; and hollerin&rsquo; there, despite their plight. Our interpreter&rsquo;s daughter is missing and presumed dead because she was in school when the quake hit and the school was flattened like a pancake. I did not know this until I got home. These are resilient people, pleasant people trying to make it through the day, much like our parents did back when we were kids and racism was our constant woe. We have to help Haitians because they are us.
And you know what else, ladies? They&rsquo;ve got some good looking men in Haiti. They look like Sidney Poitiers and Lewis Logans and they speak French.

Once they fix the place up a bit, I believe I could totally do Haiti.

Next Week' The final installment &mdash; Who got the earthquake relief and rebuilding money? Where is it? What&rsquo;s being done?

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			<title><![CDATA[Haiti in Crisis: Can an ambitious plan save an abused nation once and for all?]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Haiti-in-Crisis-103587889.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">103587889</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:35:01 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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Editor's Note' Wave Contributing Editor Betty Pleasant spent three days (Aug. 30-Sept. 1) in Haiti with members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Global Mission. This is the third in a series of reports on the people and places she saw while visiting the earthquake-ravaged nation.

Haiti &mdash; a country created by Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved by Spain and France in the 17th and 18th centuries &mdash; has always been a land of extreme deprivation and misery caused by White people, Black people and people of both colors' mulattos.

Between its discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1492 until the infamous Duvaliers took over the country in the mid-1950s, Haiti was not that poor a place. In fact, for about 100 years &mdash; from the 1690s to the 1790s &mdash; Saint Domingue, as Haiti was called then, was the richest colony in the world, and its capital, Cap Fran&ccedil;ais, was known as the Paris of the New World.

While the ruling French enjoyed the riches the country had to offer, White people flogged, starved and buried alive their predominate African slave population at will and any whim, until the first Black rebellion occurred in 1791 against the White slave masters and the slaves freed themselves. This success resulted in civil wars in which the former Black slaves in the north of Haiti and the mulattos in the south savagely slew one another.

Led by Haiti&rsquo;s national hero, Toussaint L&rsquo;Ouverture, the former slaves beat Napoleon Bonaparte and his 34,000-man army&rsquo;s attempt to re-enslave them and the country was proclaimed the independent Black Republic of Haiti in 1804 &mdash; the first Black republic on the planet.

Nevertheless, rivalry continued between the Whites, Blacks and mulattos of Haiti and between 1843 and 1915 the country was led by 22 heads of state &mdash; many of whom were tyrants and self-proclaimed &ldquo;kings&rdquo; and most of whom left office by violent means. And when the last one, President Guillaume Sam, was found dismembered, the United States invaded Haiti and stayed there for 19 years, to the great displeasure of the Haitian people. Americans made some improvements to the Haitian infrastructure and when they left in 1934, the country was prospering again.

By the time Fran&ccedil;ois Duvalier, strongman terrorizer of the country and &ldquo;president for life,&rdquo; died in 1971 and was replaced by his 19-year-old son, Jean Claude, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has been the world&rsquo;s most entrenched welfare recipient to this day.

The devastating effect of the Jan. 12 earthquake has put Haitian residents, Haitian expatriates, Haitian government officials, international benevolent organizations, foreign countries and people of goodwill around the world in a mindset to fix Haiti once and for all. Experts from everywhere came together in Haiti and generated a 60-page &ldquo;Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti&rdquo; in March, which describes &mdash; almost to the point of minutiae &mdash; the plans for a whole new Haiti. The document is impressive, covering, as it does, every aspect of a country and its people. It describes needs and how to meet them; it has timelines and projected costs; it relates the amount of money Haiti has on hand to pay for each specific renewal project, the amount of money it lacks to meet a specific goal and the source from which it expects to acquire the funds it still needs to get each job done. Every document I read should be so thorough and understandable and forthright.

Developers of the plan acknowledge that the earthquake&rsquo;s horrendous toll on the country could not be caused just by the force of the tremor, but is also due to Haiti&rsquo;s excessively dense population, inadequate building standards, disastrous state of the environment, as well as an unbalanced division of economic activity in which the capital city, Port-au-Prince, accounts for more than 65 percent of the country&rsquo;s economic activity and 85 percent of Haiti&rsquo;s tax revenue.

Authors of the plan insist that &ldquo;Rebuilding Haiti does not mean returning to the situation that prevailed before the earthquake. It means addressing all of these areas of vulnerability so the vagaries of nature or natural disasters never again inflict such suffering or cause so much damage or loss.&rdquo;

The plan is inspired by a vision that goes beyond a response to the losses and damages. Even though it proposes actions to be taken within the next 18 months that deal with immediate earthquake-related matters, it also launches a number of key initiatives to act upon now to deal with the structural causes of Haiti&rsquo;s continuous underdevelopment.

The plan is divided into two phases. The first is in the immediate future through the next 18 months and covers the end of the emergency period and includes preparations of projects to generate genuine renewal. The second phase has a horizon of 10 years and takes into account programs in Haiti&rsquo;s already developed &ldquo;National Strategy for Growth and Poverty Reduction.&rdquo;

The plan does not ignore or downplay the country&rsquo;s long history of corrupt governments, but rather tackles it head on, and the authors have pledged to review the country&rsquo;s political, economic and social governance practices. In conjunction with that review, the plan itself has a whole section of activities designed to rebuild Democratic institutions, relaunch central governmental functions and administrations and secure justice and security for the people.

In addition to that, authors of the plan have included within it funding and management apparatus for Haiti&rsquo;s renewal and have designated by name and/or country (including the United States) who will be voting members of the Haiti Interim Commission for Reconstruction (HICR) and serve as the board to oversee the entire renewal process.

All of this was shared by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive&rsquo;s chief of staff with a group of AME clerics and officials when he briefed them last month on the status of recovery efforts in the country. The African Methodist Episcopal church has been deeply involved in Haitian humanitarian efforts for 28 years through its AME Service and Development Agency (SADA), and the denomination has raised $1.5 million for earthquake relief.

Bishop Sarah Frances David, prelate of the AME 16th Episcopal District, expressed approval of the plan and said she would recommend a five year commitment of the AME church to help build a new Haiti as set forth in the plan.

Rep. Maxine Waters, whose Haiti Debt Relief Bill was signed into law by President Obama in April, has indicated her support for the plan. In addition to canceling the Haitian government&rsquo;s heavy financial burden to the United States and making outright grants available to the country, Waters is taking further steps to help Haiti move forward.

&ldquo;I will be assisting Haitian small business people and non-governmental organizations in forming partnerships with the United States Agency for International Development so they can have a substantive role in the rebuilding of their own country,&rdquo; Waters said.

Next week' Haiti &mdash; its people and its places.

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			<title><![CDATA[Haiti in Crisis: Thinking of disaster in L.A. terms helps to illustrate the magnitude of destruction]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Haiti-in-Crisis-Thinking-of-disaster-in-LA-terms-helps-to-illustrate-the-magnitude-of-destruction-103012584.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:58:02 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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Editor's Note' Wave Contributing Editor Betty Pleasant spent three days (Aug. 30-Sept. 1) in Haiti with members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Global Mission. This is the second in a series of reports on the people and places she saw while visiting the earthquake-ravaged nation.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, I&rsquo;m going to use a thousand words to paint a picture of earthquake ravaged Haiti that rivals depictions of the ancient city of Pompeii after Mt. Vesuvius erupted on it in 79 AD.

Wrap your mind around this' An earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter Scale has struck Los Angeles at 5 o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon and its epicenter is the Crenshaw District at a depth very near the earth&rsquo;s surface at only 6.25 miles. Virtually everything along and around Crenshaw Boulevard from, say, Olympic Boulevard to maybe Florence Avenue, is totally destroyed. All the buildings along the &lsquo;Shaw &mdash; the mall, the markets, the banks, the businesses, the huge West Angeles church are flattened and the people in them are dead. Crenshaw High School is reduced to a pile of rubble and everybody in it at the time is dead. (As was the case with a Port-au-Prince high school.) Envision all the homes and churches and schools in Leimert Park and Jefferson Park, and all of those dwellings west of Crenshaw, up into Baldwin Hills &mdash; all gone.

And, since the Jan. 12 quake in Haiti destroyed not only Port-au-Prince, the country&rsquo;s capital, but its abutting towns of L&eacute;og&acirc;ne, Carrefour, P&eacute;tionville, Delmas, Tabarre, Cit&eacute;-Soleil and Kenscoff too, then imagine a quake taking out not only the huge Crenshaw area, but the surrounding Los Angeles city and county communities and the cities of Compton, Inglewood and Culver City, as well.

Just think of the human impact such an imaginary quake would have in these familiar areas, and behold the immense human toll wrought by the actual quake in Haiti' According to the Haitian government&rsquo;s action plan and report, roughly 1.5 million people (about 15 percent of the national population) were directly affected by the quake. More than 300,000 people died and an equal number were injured. More than 1.3 million people are living in temporary shelters in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and more than 600,000 people have left the devastated areas to seek shelter elsewhere in the country.

If our imaginary quake struck us &mdash; in fact, even when we&rsquo;re hit by real tremors &mdash; the owners of the damaged properties are expected to see to them' to get them razed or repaired and rebuilt. After all, these fallen and damaged buildings do belong to somebody, be they homeowners, business owners, government entities or religious organizations; something or somebody owns them all. Therein lies the problem that is causing the Port-au-Prince environs to look today pretty much as it did when the ground stopped shaking in January.

West Angeles is a big church with a lot of money and occupying a large piece of Crenshaw real estate. Suppose Bishop Charles Blake and what&rsquo;s left of his congregation moved with dispatch to deal with the destruction of the church, the parking structure beside it and the theater complex across the street. He hires the appropriate people to remove the rubble and dead bodies entombed therein and clears his properties so he can rebuild. But before he can even get plans drawn up, 10,000 homeless people from Leimert Park, Exposition Park, Jefferson Park, Baldwin Hills and thereabouts have set up housekeeping in makeshift tents they&rsquo;ve erected, cheek to jowl, on his huge cleared-away properties! They&rsquo;re squatters and the only way he can get them off his land is to shoot them! And we know he wouldn&rsquo;t do that. Yet, the squatters are stopping Blake from rebuilding. That is what&rsquo;s happening all over metropolitan Port-au-Prince where the homeless squat anywhere and virtually everywhere they can find a cleared-away spot.

You can multiply that example by the large numbers of Haitian property owners who, for various reasons, have not even begun to remove the rubble &mdash; or the bodies in it &mdash; from their properties and you see why Port-au-Prince looks as it did 35 seconds after the quake finished its business. Consequently, there are still virtually no houses for people to live in, no businesses for people to work in, no indoor structures for people to pray in (although the destroyed St. Paul AME Church is slowly rebuilding) and few schools for the children to return to when the next term begins in October.

According to Claytie Davis Jr., the AME church&rsquo;s episcopal supervisor of missions, the African Methodist Episcopal church has donated almost $1.5 million for Haiti earthquake relief. He confirmed that some of the money is being used to meet the immediate survival needs of the population, but the bulk of it has been set aside to be used for the actual rebuilding of the stricken areas. As the AMEs are committed to working for a new Haiti, the status of rebuilding the country was upper most in the minds of the 26 AME clerics and officials with whom I traveled in Haiti. A group of about 10 of them met with Jude Hervy Day, the chief of staff to Haiti&rsquo;s prime minister, to discuss the government-issued 60-page &ldquo;Action Plan for the National Recovery and Development of Haiti.&rdquo;

Following the meeting, Robert Nicolas, director of AME Services and Development, reported to the rest of us that the Haitian government has undertaken as its number one priority the removal of rubble and debris from all the city&rsquo;s properties, and will implement eminent domain to do it. He reported the government&rsquo;s plan to take over all the properties within a 30-block area surrounding the famous but now virtually useless Bicentennial Street, thus rendering it a vast urban redevelopment project. We were also told by another official who met with the prime minister&rsquo;s chief that the government&rsquo;s ultimate plan is to remove all the residents from Port au Prince and turn the city into a government town, where people would come to work, conduct business, and shop, but not live.

Next Week' Working for a new Haiti, once and for all.

In response to last week&rsquo;s story on Haiti, Bishop Sarah Frances Davis sent me the following notes' &ldquo;I did not meet with Rachel Yu and Paul-Emile Cesar the evening after our visit to the camp. However, in our meeting at the Kaliko that night, I did mention to Elvire Douglas, an international official of World Vision, our visit to the camp and the anger of the people. It was Elvire Douglas who shared the information about who is responsible for what goes on at the camp.&rdquo;

A day later, Bishop Davis sent me this note' &ldquo;You are eminently correct' I did state to the young man at the camp that afternoon that &lsquo;I had been told that the camp was managed by several NGOs [non-government organizations] and not just World Vision,&rsquo; yet he was criticizing only World Vision. Then that night ... I asked Sister Elvire if World Vision was aware of what was happening at the camp, how discontent the residents were becoming and how explosive the situation appeared to be. She told us that World Vision was aware of some of the discontent out there and than stated that &lsquo;the camp was not just the responsibility of World Vision, but several NGOs.&rsquo;&rdquo;

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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Desperate, ready to rise up]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Desperate-ready-to-rise-up-102497639.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">102497639</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 8 Sep 2010 18:02:55 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																															
													



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Editor's Note' Wave Contributing Editor Betty Pleasant spent three days (Aug. 30-Sept. 1) in Haiti with members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Global Mission. This is the first in a series of reports on the people and places she saw while visiting the earthquake-ravaged nation.

Sunday will mark the eighth month since the largest Caribbean earthquake in more than 200 years damaged much of Haiti and destroyed its densely populated capital city, and nothing much has changed since that fateful day.

The only difference between Jan. 12, the day the earth quaked, and Aug. 29, my first day in Port-au-Prince, is that the bodies of dead Haitians that littered the city&rsquo;s streets have been removed and thousands of Haitians are living in all manner of makeshift tents wherever a tent can be erected.

And the people are mad about it. The historically resilient, long-suffering Haitians are just about fed up with their lot and cries of protest and revolution against their living conditions since their homes were destroyed by the quake are being heard from those whose plight is better than most of their countrymen.

Displaced Haitians who are &ldquo;lucky&rdquo; enough to live in official, government-operated tent encampments are angry that their temporary, emergency housing arrangements have stretched into eight months with no end in sight.

Let me describe the situation for you' 1,350 Port-au-Prince families live in white government-issued tents inside an official camp. The residents receive government goods and services, such as food and water and sewage systems and shower facilities. The official camp is fenced and is guarded and patrolled by forces of the United Nations. It is roomy and clean.

On the other side of the fence are thousands of earthquake-rendered homeless families living in unofficial camps in whatever kind of tents they can find on their own and are receiving nothing from the government; they get no services. These families squat near the official camp in the hope that some of the &ldquo;goodies&rdquo; from inside the fence will fall on them. But they don&rsquo;t.

These campers survive anyway they can, as do the thousands of &ldquo;squatters&rdquo; who set up tents beyond the official camp all over the city in any spot big enough to hold one.

Trouble is brewing in the official camp. I joined the Rt. Rev. Sarah F. Davis, bishop of the AME Church&rsquo;s 16th Episcopal District and other AME clerics at a meeting in the official camp last week with seething residents eager to express their discontent with their temporary surroundings. They were organizing to launch public protests and they gathered around their leaders &mdash; Philip Ferrel, Laurent Yvon, Eloi Garry and Edonier Patrick &mdash; and supported them as they passionately and eloquently related the following'

&bull; The camp inhabitants had homes, jobs, businesses and careers before the quake destroyed them. Their relocation into the tents was supposed to provide them temporary shelter, but they&rsquo;ve been in them so long that the tents are falling apart and are no longer capable of protecting the people from the elements, as they fill with water during Haiti&rsquo;s morning rains. Eight hundred tents leak from top to bottom.

&bull; The camp dwellers are working people and they need to work. They have had only 30 days of work during the seven months they&rsquo;ve been in the camp. They are paid 90 gourdes a day for their work and charged 110 gourdes a day to stay in the camp. They were overcharged for beans and other basic foodstuffs, causing the population to go hungry for three months.

&bull; Large numbers of people, especially children, are getting sick from infections and inadequate health services are provided for them. A displaced hair dresser, whose husband worked with computers before the quake, cried as she talked of the inability to get assistance for her chronically ill 3-year-old son.

&bull; The camp lacks adequate security, as the UN forces are selective about the security needs to which they will respond.

The leaders blame their problems on the camp&rsquo;s operators' World Vision, Organization for International Migration (OIM) and the American Relief Committee (ARC). &ldquo;But World Vision in the biggest criminal inside the camp,&rdquo; Ferrel said. &ldquo;These organizations won&rsquo;t let any other nonprofits come in and try to help,&rdquo; Ferrel said. &ldquo;They humiliate us; treat us badly and threaten us and the situation will get worse when we demonstrate,&rdquo; Ferrel said. &ldquo;We want to get out of these tents and we want jobs. We want our homes and our lives back,&rdquo; he added, as tears welled in his eyes.

The Rev. Belinda Washington of Baton Rouge, La., is the regional coordinator of the AME church&rsquo;s disaster relief program in the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. She was my roommate in Haiti and she said' &ldquo;We went through the same thing with these same organizations about housing for Katrina victims. The people stayed in FEMA trailers for two years, dealing with health problems, respiratory and allergy problems from formaldehyde because those trailers were temporary and the people should not have stayed in them longer than one year,&rdquo; Washington said.

&ldquo;In the aftermath of a disaster, the number one recovery problem is going to be housing and somebody needs to prepare for that,&rdquo; Washington continued. &ldquo;The FEMA trailers were bad enough, but these people don&rsquo;t even have that &mdash; they have what is becoming long-term tents! It&rsquo;s social injustice and I&rsquo;m going to the United Nations,&rdquo; Washington said.

Later that evening, Bishop Davis met with Rachel Yu, a World Vision International official, and Paul-Emile Cesar, an official of World Vision Haiti, to discuss our meeting with the camp residents.

&ldquo;They told me the problem was not with them, but with ARC because they make the rules and manage the camp,&rdquo; Davis said. &ldquo;I told them the people are blaming World Vision and if they wanted to preserve their humanitarian reputation, they&rsquo;d better solve these problems now because this place is getting ready to explode.&rdquo;

Next week' Where have all the houses gone and when will they be back?

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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Confidential report ignores questions on  the death of Mitrice Richardson]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Confidential-report-ignores-questions-on-the-death-of-Mitrice-behavior-by-deputies-101527498.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">101527498</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:34:01 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[Now that Mitrice Richardson has been found after going missing for 11 months and laid to rest Saturday, the county of Los Angeles has gone to great lengths to prove that its Sheriff's Department is, in no way, responsible for her death. 

The county's Office of Independent Review has issued a 60-page confidential report exonerating the Sheriff's Department of any wrongdoing — and in many instances, praising it for its actions — in the Mitrice Richardson matter. But some department insiders and Mitrice's family say of the report, in the words of my grandfather' 'That dog won't hunt.'

'My attorney told me the OIR report is all garbage,' said Michael Richardson, Mitrice's father. 'The OIR is the guard dog for the Sheriff's Department. And what does a guard dog do?' Richardson asked. 'It protects its master, so of course, the OIR won't find anything wrong with its master's actions.'

Richardson firmly believes that something bad happened to his 24-year-old daughter the night she was released from the sheriff's custody on Sept. 17, 2009 and 'they don't want us to know about it,' the father said. And a careful reading of the OIR report does lend credence to such a belief.

Take the questions surrounding Mitrice's release from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station alone, without transportation, shortly after midnight in an isolated area, for example. OIR report sees nothing wrong with that in that it cites state law and department-wide policy of releasing misdemeanor arrestees from detention 'as soon as they are eligible and in a safe manner regardless of their race or gender.' 

A deputy in the Lynwood Regional Justice Center (also called the Century Station) is troubled by that statement, because he said his jail has a policy of not releasing women arrestees after 10 p.m. unless they have someone waiting for them. A bail bondsman, who has spent more than 10 years freeing men, women and sometimes juveniles from jails throughout the region, agrees with the deputy. 'I've been told not only by deputies, but by the man behind the glass that they do not release women in the middle of the night because — and I quote — 'We don't want to be liable if anything happens to them.''

'So why is that not the policy throughout the county?' The bondsman asked? He said the Century Station is in a safer place for release than the Malibu/Lost Hills Station from which Mitrice was set free. He explained that Century is located in an urban area beside the train tracks at Alameda and Imperial Highway in a neighborhood teeming with human activity. He said a busy liquor store is on the corner near the station and people are in and out of it all through the night. 

'But Lost Hills sits off the freeway in a very rugged, isolated area close to Ventura County and nobody, man or woman, can safely be released from there, day or night, without transportation,' the bondsman said. 'So why is it unsafe for women in the city, but safe for them in the boondocks?' he asked. 'There obviously is no department-wide policy,' he answered.

Richardson finds fault with the OIR report's almost overhanded insistence that deputies were unaware of any mental health problems Mitrice may have had when she was taken into custody. 'How could that be?' Richardson asked. 

'The 911 caller to the station requesting help with Mitrice said she was 'talking crazy.' The people in the restaurant told them her behavior was bizarre. But the deputies ignored them and handled things their own way,' Richardson said.
'I am a 19-year veteran in emergency rooms and I deal with law enforcement and I know the protocol as to what they must do when a suspect's mental state is in question, and they didn't do it,' Richardson said.   

The OIR report contains several entries about only one potential suspect in the disappearance and possible murder of Mitrice. And he is a sheriff's deputy. 

According to the report, a video tape of Mitrice's exit from the station shows her leaving through the front door and shows a deputy leaving through the back door just seconds after Mitrice left. An allegation was made that that deputy abducted Mitrice and subsequently killed her. The report says the Sheriff's Department and OIR investigators thoroughly scrutinized the deputy's departure and concluded that he had nothing to do with whatever happened to Mitrice.

Richardson, who said he did not know of the exiting deputy incident until I told him I'd read it in the report, said he is not surprised. He said his daughter's booking photo shows an indentation over her right eyebrow, 'like she'd been hit,' he said. Richardson also said the arrest report notes that Mitrice had no tattoos and no body piercings. 'But, she had both,' Richardson said. 'She had several tattoos and three obvious body piercings' one in her navel and one in each breast,' the father said.

As proof that Mitrice did leave the Lost Hills Station alive, contrary to the belief of many people, the report briefly mentions that she was seen in the backyard of the Calabasas home of laid-off KTLA newsman Bill Smith about six hours after she was released from the jail. Investigators report they found her footprints in the yard and they indicated she was running. From what? They don't say. To where? They don't know.

Richardson has been suspicious about everything the Sheriff's Department has done with respect to his daughter. 'From the beginning of her disappearance, [Sheriff Leroy] Baca told me that maybe I should 'just accept that she succumbed to the elements of the earth.' Where does he get off telling me that?' the father asked. 'And here recently, Baca told me 'We will never know' the cause of Mitrice's death. Why not? They just found some babies who died 70 years ago and they're determined to find the cause of their death, yet they 'will never know' about Mitrice's after 11 months?!' the father said. 'No, is this not acceptable. Nothing Baca and the OIR have done is acceptable,' he said.

Richardson is amassing financial resources to have DNA tests done on her remains and is working with his lawyer, Benjamin Schonbrun, and activist Jasmyne Cannick to draft state legislation for a Mitrice's Law to see that nothing like this happens to anyone else in this state. 

'It's going to be a custodial law that states that anybody who does not have a ride by a licensed and insured driver cannot be released from a jail, hospital or other health facility and the refusal to release will not be deemed as 'holding against one's will,'' Richardson explained, as he vowed' 'Something is very wrong here and nobody can do anything to keep me from getting to the truth about what happened to my daughter.'
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: In Compton, recall paperwork soon to land on the desks of top city officials]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-In-Compton-recall-paperwork-soon-to-land-on-the-desks-of-top-city-officials-101040384.html</link>
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			<pubDate>Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:09:38 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[Notices of intent to circulate recall petitions against four Compton city officials are expected to be filed Thursday by a group of residents who claim corruption in Compton is being ignored by the same authorities who expressed shock by the recent turn of events in the city of Bell.

Recall notices against Mayor Eric Perrodin, City Councilmember Lillie Dobson, City Attorney Craig Cornwell and City Clerk Alita Godwin are being filed for the fifth time since May, 'because the previous four filings were not accepted by the city clerk for various reasons,' said William Kemp, a leader of the recall movement. 'This time, we residents obtained a lawyer and got it right,' he added.

According to the notice, the group is seeking the recall of Perrodin for a number of alleged offenses, including the misuse of public funds to finance his personal goal of re-establishing a Compton municipal police force, and nepotism and cronyism in the awarding of lucrative city contracts to his brother and his friends. They also accuse him of awarding 'hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts to companies without bids,' of appointing an out-of-town resident to the City Council, of violating the Brown Act and they are holding him responsible for the horrendous increase in residents' water bills since he has been in office.

The recall petition against Dobson cites her offenses as being, among other things, her ineligibility to serve on the Compton City Council, since she lived in Orange County at the time Perrodin appointed her. She is charged with having supported Perrodin in every questionable action he has taken vis-a-vis the awarding of contracts, Brown Act violations and police force re-establishment. Dobson's recallers say, among other things, that the council member works against the wishes and interests of her constituents in her support of the mayor and that she 'talks too much during the council meetings to discredit the residents.'

The residents are seeking to remove Cornwell, the city attorney, because, according to the petition, he is accused of city charter manipulations akin to those leveled against Bell officials' notorious changes to that city's charter. Cornwell is charged with, first, having changed the Compton charter 'to allow himself to be seated without qualifying for the position.' He's accused of 'deceiving the citizens without being truthful about the Charter changes,' that he, together with the city clerk, withheld 'valuable information' concerning Measure 'L' in the April 21, 2009 election, that he manipulates the Brown Act and other laws to abridge the residents' constitutional rights, and that he 'continues to create laws to block the people from speaking at City Council meetings because of his personal and family obligations.'

Godwin has incurred the wrath of the recall supporters because, according to the petition against her, she committed more than 20 election violations during Compton's April 21, 2009 election. Pursuant to the city charter, she is a full-time employee who is paid a full-time salary, but, according to the petition, she only works part-time. Godwin is said to have implemented Measure L before it went on the ballot, and she 'swore in an unqualified city attorney.'

Kemp, a second generation Compton native, said residents have been fighting perceived corruption in his city years before the situation in Bell became global news, but have been ignored by the district attorney and the California attorney general.

'In June of 2004, we wrote a letter to D.A. Steve Cooley — to his Bureau of Fraud and Corruption Prosecutions — requesting an investigation of Mayor Perrodin and we included a large packet of documents that caused us to question Perrodin's motives,' Kemp said. 'We wanted action, but since Perrodin is a deputy D.A. who works for Cooley, the D.A. sent us a letter back telling us he could not investigate his own guy,' Kemp continued. 'Cooley went on to say he would forward our materials to the California Attorney General's Office so they could take whatever action they deem appropriate.'

Kemp said his group checked with the attorney general's office and learned Cooley had not forwarded the package to the state, so they prepared another one and sent it themselves. 'It became clear to us that Cooley had no interest in launching a corruption investigation of one of his own, which is another form of his practice of 'selective prosecution,'' Kemp said. 'So we began sending all of our 'proof' to the CAG,' Kemp said.

Kemp, et al., sent me their package of proof and two particular items are eye-grabbers — documents showing the Perrodin-controlled city council consistently awarded lucrative non-bid contracts to Perrodin's brother, Percy, for his company, called 'Joseph and Paul Inc.' (Joseph is Percy's birth name and Paul is Mayor Perrodin's middle name). The Joseph and Paul contract was recently increased and extended for two more years.

The other telling document shows the Perrodin-controlled city council took the city's $25 million capital improvement bonds to use for Mayor Perrodin's pet project — the re-establishment of the Compton Police Department, not to repair the city's streets and other infrastructures, as they were intended.

'Eighty to 90 percent of the people want the Sheriff's Department to stay in Compton,' Kemp said. 'They voice that everywhere and all the time — we even voted overwhelmingly [67.8 percent] in 2004 to keep them here. But Perrodin doesn't care. He's actually said that,' Kemp continued. 'The only reason he wants to bring back the Compton Police is so his brother can have a job. (Percy Perrodin was a high-ranking official with the Compton Police when that entity existed. The Compton force was disbanded 10 years ago.)

'Things are much better here with the sheriffs,' Kemp said. 'We have outdoor restaurants now. People can jog in the mornings and at night; the parks are full of children — it's safe now. It's not like it was in the 1980s and '90s when we had running gun battles in the street and our police officers were missing in action and ineffective when they were. Is Perrodin willing to sacrifice our safety to bring the police back and get his brother a job?' Kemp asked.

This, and other questions will be discussed Saturday at a town hall meeting on the recall scheduled at noon at Robert Kennedy Elementary School, 1305 Oleander St. in Compton.

Telephone calls to Perrodin, Dobson, Cornwell and Godwin for comment were not returned.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Black employees moving to confront racism at City Hall]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Black-employees-confront-racism-at-City-Hall-100496739.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">100496739</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:03:20 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[After more than a year of anguish among the city's African-American employees, they have forged a united front, acquired powerful allies and moved aggressively to fight what they say is the systemic, institutionalized racism of the city of Los Angeles against its Black workforce.
 
Black employees of the city's Transportation, Planning, Public Works, and General Services departments and the Department of Water and Power established the Los Angeles Black City Employees for Fairness in December, fought unsuccessfully since then to get their concerns heard — never mind, addressed — by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Joined by the NAACP, civil rights leaders union officials and community activists, the Black employees group held a press conference on the steps of City Hall last week and denounced the mayor for turning a blind eye on the discrimination in city employment and for 'ignoring the retaliation by department managers against Black employees who speak out against discrimination.'

'Villaraigosa has repeatedly refused to meet the aggrieved Black city employees to discuss ways and means to end discrimination,' Bernard Hicks, a prime mover of the employees group, said during the press conference.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, announced that his group, together with the NAACP, 'will formally call upon the U.S. Justice Department to conduct a fast-track pattern and practice probe into racial discrimination and retaliation against Black Los Angeles city employees.'

Let us back up to Aug. 3, one day before the Black folks' City Hall press conference. For almost a year, the mayor had ignored the group's request for a meeting about its concerns. The mayor's office got wind of the scheduled Aug. 4 press conference and hastily called for a meeting of interested parties on Aug. 3, in an attempt to stop the forthcoming public display of the city's dirty linen.

The Black workers attended the 'mayor's meeting,' and were accompanied by Leon Jenkins, president of the NAACP; Adrian Dove, head of California CORE; the Rev. Eric Lee, president of SCLC; Michael Davies, president of the Engineers and Architects Association, and Benetta Johnson of the Alameda Job Coalition.

The mayor, of course, was not present at the 'mayor's meeting.' Instead he was represented by the Rev. Leonard Jackson, Villaraigosa's special assistant in charge of Black people; Rita Robinson, Department of Transportation manager; Valerie Shaw of Public Works, Michael LeGrande, city planning director and an assortment of minor city officials.

The Black employees expressed their anger about being relegated to the lowest levels of employment within city departments — often for 20, 25, 30 years — and given no opportunities for promotion and, if so, being denied promotion because of rigged, anti-Black procedures and/or flagrantly biased preferences. 

For the most part, the mayor's side expressed 'understanding' and suggested that as the result of large-scale early retirement looming among city employees, 'a lot' of promotions among the remaining workforce would be forthcoming. 

The mayor's folks also talked about improving employee training and mentoring programs. The Black workers countered' 'People are not getting promoted because they are not qualified but because they are discriminated against, and if we are not dealing with this, we are wasting our time.'

The mayor's side said' 'OK. There is a problem. We'll meet again on Aug. 25 and you can submit recommendations toward solving it.'

Let us back up to June 16 when NAACP President Jenkins wrote Mayor Villaraigosa a 2-1/2 page single-spaced letter detailing the width and breath of the discrimination Blacks face in the Department of Transportation. He requested a meeting with the mayor about the contents of his letter. Jenkins' letter was ignored by Villarigosa, Deputy Mayor Larry Frank and Jackson — until they heard about the scheduled press conference.

Let us go back to Dec. 12, 2009 when the Bottom Line reported on employment racism and workplace sexual assaults and harassment in the city's General Services Department. That did get Frank's attention, but he implemented a weak-kneed one-agency-at-a-time approach to the big problem that went nowhere primarily because that department did not have a deputy mayor permanently assigned to oversee it.

Let us go back to Sept. 17, 2009 when the Bottom Line began reporting on racism in the Department of Transportation and how the mayor fired former short-term director Gloria Jeff because she tried to correct it and replaced her with Rita Robinson, who offered excuses for it. Some Black transportation workers sued the city over their mistreatment, and their union, the EAA, met with Robinson and presented her a detailed list of about 12 recommendations to reduce racism in her department. She ignored them. So, when the two sides meet on Aug. 25, Robinson can dust those recommendations off and put them back on the table.

And finally, let us go back to five years ago, when I wrote a multi-part series on the blatant and pervasive institutionalized racism in the city's Planning Department. People sued and Con Howe, the department's patrician general manager, suddenly retired after 12 years on the job. Villaraigosa appointed Gail Goldberg of San Diego to replace Howe, and they tell me the situation with respect to Blacks and Latinos in the Planning Department have never been worse. After 4-1/2 years on the job, Goldberg retired on July 1, to the deep sigh of relief by the Los Angeles Black City Employees for Fairness.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Unbowed, a credential-laden candidate eyes a return to voters]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line--99996809.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">99996809</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 4 Aug 2010 18:49:46 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[Who is James T. Butts Jr.? What makes him want to be mayor of Inglewood and why are entrenched Inglewood officials risking the city's solvency to stop him?

Butts, who turned 57 last Sunday, ran for a public office for the first time in his life when he sought the truncated Inglewood mayorship in the June primary. At the end of a campaign of less than 58 days, Butts came in second among eight candidates for mayor. He beat out four Inglewood elected officials with a combined tenure of close to 50 years and came within 200 votes of being the outright winner of the contest. If he had another week to campaign, Butts could have easily been the number one vote-getter.

The Inglewood city clerk and city council invalidated Butts' candidacy after the election, removed him from the race that had already been run and assigned his 2,471 votes and second place finish to another candidate, Councilwoman Judy Dunlap.

Why? The city clerk maintained after the voting that, because of some kind of paperwork dating controversy, Butts was not qualified to run for mayor, yet, in reality, Butts has a dizzying array of professional qualifications that, frankly, outshines President Barack Obama.

Butts, who has a wife and three children, was born and raised in Los Angeles' Crenshaw District. He attended 59th Street Elementary, Horace Mann Middle and Crenshaw High schools. From the age of 18, he was firmly embedded in Inglewood, from which he launched a career that is, frankly, phenomenal.

During the period when Inglewood was White and endemic racism was rife, 19-year-old Butts became an Inglewood police cadet and, while obtaining his bachelor's and master's degrees in business administration, he became either the fifth or sixth Black police officer hired by the IPD in 1974. 

'I had a difficult probation,' Butts said, with a wry smile. 'There was a lot of racism in the city to the point that I almost lost my life. I was shot at three times while chasing suspects and was never nominated for an award of valor, and neither was my White partner. But then my partner was shot at during a time when I was not with him, and he was given a valor award.

'That always bothered me, but then, that was what I was dealing with,' he added.

In 1980, the IPD was looking to promote officers into six sergeant positions and Butts applied, aced the written exam and the 'outside' oral exam, and his 'inside' oral exam was sabotaged by his fellow officers, yet he still scored high enough to be among the six promoted. 

'They picked five and when they got to me, they said they had budgetary problems and could not afford to hire six new sergeants,' Butts said.

Annoyed, but undaunted, Butts applied for sergeant the next year and achieved the highest written exam score ever recorded in the IPD, which had eliminated the 'inside' oral test, and he and one other brother became the first two Black sergeants in the department. From there, Butts went on to become the first Black lieutenant, first Black motorcycle cop, first Black SWAT team member, first Black captain and only Black deputy chief in the history of the Inglewood Police Department.

When Butts was a lieutenant running special operations for the IPD, he launched a four-month operation to clean up three high crime areas in Inglewood, pursuant to a request of the city's administrator, so the city would be more amenable to a Raiders football stadium city leaders wanted to lure to Inglewood. 

'We had 57 murders in Darby-Dixon (now known as The Bottoms) and we were right in the middle of a violent crack cocaine and gang epidemic,' Butts said. 'We sent specialized teams into those communities which acted as ombudsmen for city services and in three months we had arrested 969 people and violent crime had dropped 29 percent in the next quarter. 

'Community-based policing kind of resonated after that. The task force and I got an award for that; then I was promoted to captain,' Butts added. In fact, between 1980 and 1990, Butts was promoted five times.

In 1990, Butts was promoted to deputy chief of the IPD and a year later the cities of Santa Monica and Pasadena came calling for him to head their police departments. 

'I had never thought of leaving Inglewood,' Butts said. 'I had always believed — hoped — I'd be chief of the IPD some day, but I took the test for Santa Monica believing I would never get it because it was a nationwide recruitment for a very sought-after position.' 

He took the test. The same week Santa Monica called and told him he was that city's number one selection, Pasadena called and arranged his final interview for its top cop position.

'I told Santa Monica I would have to think about their offer,' Butts said. 'I'd been in Inglewood since I was a 19-year-old cadet and I didn't want to leave. Inglewood was all I wanted; it was all I knew and I just couldn't see myself leaving Inglewood.' 

After being counseled on his quandary by several friends, including actor Truman Jacques, Butts left Inglewood and started his job as Santa Monica's first and only African-American chief of police just days after his 30th birthday — which was very young for a police chief.

Santa Monica was a city at a crossroads' it had development projects going and was seeking to sop up some of the cachet and money of Hollywood, yet it had a fierce homelessness problem (to which it turned a blind eye), a murderous cocaine den in its midst called Palisades Park, violent street gangs and a property crime rate that was off the chart — even higher than Inglewood's.

Butts applied the tactics he used in Inglewood to Santa Monica and 120 days after he got there, his cops arrested 800 people with more than a 90 percent conviction rate and cut the aggregate crime rate by 64 percent to its lowest level since 1954.

Butts was two years past retirement when he left the Santa Monica PD and the city of Los Angeles came knocking at his door. L.A. was shocked about a series of news stories that poked fun at the security of the city's airports. Los Angeles went to him and said 'Please, please, please. Come and beef up the security at our four airports.' Butts said' 'OK.'

In less than 3-1/2 years under Butts, the airports went from being a laughingstock in the news to being rated number one in aviation security by the Transportation Security Administration by the time he left at the end of 2009. 

In his airports position, Butts handled a $116 million budget, compared to the $88 million general fund budget adopted this fiscal year in Inglewood. He had 1,100 employees on his payroll, compared to the 733 Inglewood has now. As chair of the Airport Security Advisory Committee and as airport security coordinator, Butts had functional control of more than 4,000 security counter terrorism and security assets that protected the airports — customs border protection, Highway Patrol, LAPD, TSA, LAX police, Secret Service, Coast Guard.

Butts' supporters noted that he was the only person running for mayor who actually ran anything, let alone three complex multimillion dollar organizations in three different cities — two of which are international cities.

'That is why city officials are working so frantically to keep him from running for mayor,' said Charles Gyden, an active 30-year Inglewood resident and president of the 78th Place Block Club. 'They know that he is much better qualified then they and they are afraid he will do a much better job then they. They are afraid of his exposing their lack of good administrative skills.

'Because, at this point, the city is going to hell in a hand basket,' said Gyden, who has been in private practice as a physical therapist in Inglewood for 25 years. 'No definitive work projects have been initiated by the current city council since Mayor's Dorn's forced resignation. They are afraid Butts will change that.'

And that's why Butts says he wants to become mayor — to change that by giving his hometown the benefits of his vast and proven administrative skills.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: With no Butts about the ballot, state senator says voters take the loss]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-With-no-Butts-about-the-ballot-state-senator-says-voters-take-the-loss-99514129.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">99514129</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:32:55 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[

The city of Inglewood&rsquo;s June 8 mayoral primary election took an &ldquo;only in Inglewood&rdquo; turn last week when 23.63 percent of the votes cast were discarded and the election results were reordered to the horror of, not only 2,471 voters, but to the extreme dismay of the city&rsquo;s state Senator, Roderick Wright.

In an interview Tuesday, Wright excoriated the Inglewood City Council for having egregiously tampered with the will of the people by removing from the lineup James Butts, the second-place finisher in the election, and discarding his votes. 

The election was held to determine who will fill the six weeks remaining on the unexpired term of former Mayor Roosevelt Dorn. Eight candidates vied for the election and the top two finishers are slated to meet in a head-to-head contest for the truncated mayoral term on Aug. 31. Another election will be held in November to fill the first full four-year mayoral term since Dorn&rsquo;s departure.

Wright, an Inglewood resident and admitted supporter of Councilman Danny Tabor, who finished first in the election with 2,744 votes, took intense umbrage at the actions of the council, which he envisions will lead to devastating lawsuits of various kinds against the city, as well as an embarrassing blot on Inglewood&rsquo;s concept of democracy.

&ldquo;They disenfranchised almost 2,500 people,&rdquo; Wright said. &ldquo;They put Butts&rsquo; name on the ballot, conducted an election in which he received the second highest number of citizens&rsquo; votes, after which the city clerk decides he shouldn&rsquo;t have been on the ballot. Then the city council removes him from the election results and declares Councilwoman Judy Dunlap the second-place finisher! I am unaware of any law in America that would allow them to do that,&rdquo; Wright said.

&ldquo;I told Danny that this was wrong,&rdquo; the senator continued. &ldquo;Imagine not only the injustice done to Butts, but to all those people who voted for him. Suppose I had voted for Butts and my vote was thrown out. What makes the city council think that if Butts was never on the ballot I would have voted for Dunlap? I may have voted for Ralph Franklin or any of the other candidates or I may not have voted at all. The council had no business shoving Dunlap into Butts&rsquo; place and making up a runoff between her and Danny.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Every person who voted for Butts can sue the city of Inglewood for disenfranchisement, and how will the city defend itself against such lawsuits?&rdquo; Wright asked. &ldquo;It can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he answered.

Wright said that in America &mdash; as opposed to some of those troubled African or Middle Eastern countries &mdash; if anything is deemed wrong with an election, all the results are thrown out and the entire election is held again, from scratch. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t have people throwing out votes and rearranging the order of finish,&rdquo; Wright said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s bizarre.&rdquo; 

&ldquo;The issues in this mess are quite clear,&rdquo; Wright continued. &ldquo;Butts presented himself at the city clerk&rsquo;s office as a potential candidate for mayor. Is he eligible to run? The city clerk said, &lsquo;Yes.&rsquo; She took his filing fee, signed him up and put his name on the ballot. Then she comes back weeks later and says, &lsquo;Oops, I made a mistake. He&rsquo;s not eligible to run.&lsquo; Whose fault is that? Not Butts&rsquo; and certainly not the citizens who voted for him, whose rights the city ultimately trampled. No. This was wrong &mdash; really wrong.&rdquo;

I reminded the senator that city clerks in other cities are low-key, unobtrusive officials who run elections that come off smoothly year after year, yet Inglewood&rsquo;s city clerk, Yvonne Horton, never fails to be the hub of controversy whenever residents take to the polls where she works. Particularly galling to many residents is the fact that Horton runs the election in which she is running. I asked Wright if there is anything the state Legislature can do to stop that practice.

Having previously researched the problem, Wright said' &ldquo;She should not be doing that. Inglewood is a charter city and as such, operates around many state laws. All the other cities in the state who have elected city clerks have their own ordinances that require the city clerk to turn over the election function of the office to someone else when he or she is running for re-election. Inglewood has no such ordinance.

&ldquo;It is important that whoever is running our elections be not only innocent of any wrongdoing, but even be beyond the perception of any wrongdoing and that&rsquo;s why other cities do not allow their city clerks to be anywhere near elections when their names are on the ballot.

&ldquo;If Yvonne Horton is to stop running her own elections, the Inglewood City Council must enact an ordinance forbidding her to do so,&rdquo; Wright said. &ldquo;The same city council that disenfranchised the people?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered.

Apart from the overriding disenfranchisement issue that troubles the senator, legal observers of this latest round of Inglewood madness foresee other lawsuits the city could face. They say the citizens can sue the city council for conflict of interest because three of the four members who stripped Butts of his second place runoff slot were on the ballot against him' Tabor, Dunlap and Franklin. That troika gives the perception of acting to keep an &ldquo;outsider&rdquo; from among its midst. 

Observers concede that Butts, himself, can sue the city now or he can sue it later. He can sue now to resolve the matter of whether he was or was not eligible to be on the June 8 ballot in the first place, or he can sue after the November election for the full term mayorship. If Butts loses the November election, in which he intends to run, he can sue Inglewood, contending that he lost in November because of what the city council did to him in July.

But in an interview with me Monday, an unbelievably serene and &ldquo;not bitter&rdquo; Butts took the high road about the events surrounding him and is choosing not to sue &mdash; at this time. 

&ldquo;My main objective is to serve the city in the capacity of mayor for the full four-year term, and to litigate this matter would have been a distraction in terms of cost, time and effort,&rdquo; Butts said. &ldquo;Also, it would drag the city into court and cause them to spend money that they don&rsquo;t have on me and on fighting this ligation. So, my objective is to do what&rsquo;s best for the community.&rdquo;

(Next week' Who is James Butts and why are city officials making such perilous moves to keep him out?)]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Through Wesson’s tireless advocacy, Crenshaw Corridor gets a Square deal]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Wesson-advocacy-Crenshaw-Corridor-98982194.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">98982194</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:42:25 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[Major economic development projects are finally coming to South Los Angeles. They have been popping up continuously — and contentiously — in West Los Angeles, Hollywood, Downtown and the West Valley and now the first one in 63 years has been approved for South L.A.

I'm not talking about those little strip mall establishments that come and go in minority communities, but rather something huge and exciting in the offing that will change the face of the Crenshaw Corridor, in particular, and the 10th Council District, in general.

After four years of work by Councilman Herb Wesson, the City Council approved last week the construction of District Square, the $93 million centerpiece of a new wave of economic development projects that will put the Crenshaw area on the same footing as the heretofore more favored parts of the city.

'This will be the first time we'll be able to look at development in our own neighborhood,' said Michael Jones, president of the Crenshaw Chamber of Commerce. 'It's been a long time coming and we're excited about it,' he added.

District Square, set to occupy six acres in the 10th District near the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Rodeo Road, is being developed by the Charles Company. It will feature a three-level 300,000 square feet retail center in which will be housed a Target, Marshall's, Ralphs, Ross Dress for Less and other popular retail outlets, as well as several full service restaurants.

Nothing of this magnitude has been built in South L.A. since the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Shopping Plaza went up in 1947, and then enlarged by Mayor Tom Bradley in 1988. 

And that is just the beginning for the Crenshaw Corridor, as in the queue behind District Square's creation, is a $12 million retail project called West Angeles Plaza, which will feature a Fresh & Easy market and a new Union Bank building. As the name implies, West Angeles Plaza is being developed by West Angeles Church's Community Development Corp. and CIM and will be located on the corner of Crenshaw and Jefferson boulevards. Developer Ron Smothers is redesigning the site where that Burger King presently sits into a retail center that will abut the West Angeles Plaza.

Wesson, as chairman of the Housing, Community and Economic Development Committee, has used his position to aggressively pursue economic development opportunities for his district, bringing to it things it has never had, such as the Midtown Crossings development at Pico and San Vicente, Rosa Park Villas near the Santa Monica Freeway and about seven other projects still on the drawing board.

Under Wesson leadership, the city of Los Angeles is providing funding for the project through a federal HUD loan and with additional assistance from the Community Redevelopment Agency.

'Together, the Midtown Crossings and District Square projects represent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in capital investment that will create 4,000 construction jobs and 1,800 permanent jobs,' Wesson said.

'I'm very excited about what we're doing,' Wesson said. 'Our greatest asset in this endeavor has been the community. Whenever a development is planned, there are always some people fighting it. But not here,' Wesson continued, 

'Everybody supports our plans because they know how badly we've been ignored by the city and developers. We're proving that our communities are viable and can support retail operations,' Wesson said. 'Nobody opposed this because our community is eager for smart development,' Wesson added.

The councilman said every politician who had or has any sway over the 10th District supported him in his development activities. 'Mark Ridley-Thomas, Karen Bass, Curren Price, Diane Watson, Nate Holden  — they all wrote letters of support and stood by me on this, and I'm very grateful for that,' Wesson said. 'This is why I've stayed in the city council — so I could have the opportunity to change the community for the better.'
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Police cadet program lacking Black participants]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-Police-cadet-program-98474894.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">98474894</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:23:55 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[I attended the third annual LAPD Youth Leadership Day celebration Tuesday, which honored the 1,200 youngsters participating in the department's Cadet Program, and came away with some insights and concerns which lend themselves to future in-depth reportage on my part.

I was aware that the LAPD has youth cadets, but I was unaware of exactly who they are, where they come from and what they do. About 500 of them gathered on the grassy field of the Police Academy Tuesday morning at which the entire force — from Chief Charlie Beck to the patrol officers and all the various chiefs and scouts and warriors in between — treated these cadet children like little gods.

With former Los Angeles City Councilman Martin Ludlow serving as master of ceremonies, the cadets were served breakfast and then showered with more than $10,000 in scholarships, computers and other prizes as rewards for their efforts in leading a fruitful life. These rewards were made possible by contributions from several corporations, community and civic organizations and the LAPD Association.

The cadets, who are male and female and range in age from 14 to 20, are the community's 'good kids,' and they were reminded of this by Beck and Michael Josephson, the event's keynote speaker. Josephson is one of the nation's most respected and sought-after speakers and consultants in the field of ethics and character and is the founder of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. His award-winning 'Character Counts!' radio commentaries are broadcast in Southern California and around the world each day.

Following his encouraging words to the cadets, Josephson joined me in a private observation that gave us both pause' The cadets are overwhelmingly Latino. 

'This program has no Black children in it. That is strange for Los Angeles, don't you think?' Josephson asked me. 'Indeed,' I responded.

'Do you think the Blacks are staying away from it because they view it as a strictly Latino thing?' Josephson asked. 'I dunno,' I answered. 

'It could be that, like me, Blacks don't know much about this program because the LAPD is not making any special efforts to outreach the Black community and bring Black kids into it,' I surmised.

'Well, the Latino community certainly knows the benefits of this and they have flocked to it. It would be a wonderful thing if our Black youths — and other ethnicities — would do so as well,' Josephson said.

This exchange led me to seek out one of the handful of Black cadets I saw' 17-year-old Quamonte Carr, who has been a cadet from the Wilshire Division for almost a year. He graduated from Hamilton High School last month and he has his sights set on becoming a poet. (Yes, a poet.)

Carr is absolutely delighted with the Cadet program. 'It's a very good program that motivates everybody to do whatever they want to do in life,' Carr said. 'I plan to use in the future, everything I learn here. Yes, you learn how to be a police officer, but you don't have to want to be a police officer to benefit because what you learn here can be applied to whatever you want to be. 

'I want to be a poet first and being a cop is my second choice,' Carr continued. 
'So, if you don't make it as the next Langston Hughes, you'll become a poetic cop?' I asked. 'Yes. I'll be a poetic cop,' Carr answered.

The next batch of cadets are being recruited for the training cycle that begins in September. To be a cadet, the applicant must be between the ages of 14 and 20, have a decent (2.0) grade point average, and have a letter of recommendation from somebody who is not related to him or her. Kids wanting to become cadets can apply at any police station or they can stop a cop on the street.

OK. Spurred by my conversation with Josephson and Carr, I now have a new journalistic advocacy issue' To increase the number of Black youths in the LAPD's Cadet Program.

Asst. Chief Earl Paysinger, head of operations, has been the director of the Cadet Program for the past three years and Beck calls the program 'Paysinger's Passion.' I'm going to be all over Paysinger about what intense efforts he is making to promote this program in the Black community. I'm going to want names and dates and data. Contacts, events and statistics. I'm going to want to know each of the extraordinary measures he's using to attract my Black children into a taxpayer-supported program that is a virtual guarantee to them of a crime-free, purposeful, altruistic life. Now, I like Paysinger; I really do. But I hope we won't fall out.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: New drug war breaks out over pot initiative]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/Bottom-Line-New-drug-war-97998609.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">97998609</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 7 Jul 2010 20:54:30 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[The war of words over weed broke out Wednesday morning when two dozen Black religious leaders called for the resignation of the president of the California state NAACP, and Alice Huffman, the president, fired back at the preachers with challenges of their leadership and their motives.

The ministers and Huffman squared off in dueling Sacramento press conferences at which, first, Bishop Ron Allen, head of the International Faith-Based Coalition, denounced the state NAACP's unconditional support of Proposition 19, which is a measure slated for the November ballot that seeks to legalize and decriminalize marijuana in California.

Allen, pastor of Sacramento's Greater Solomon Community Church, was surrounded on the steps of the state Capitol by like-minded ministers when he accused Huffman of working against the interest of African-Americans, rather than for them. He accused her of being 'in cahoots' with marijuana entrepreneurs and drug dealers, namely with the Drug Policy Alliance, which Allen said wants all drugs legalized, not just marijuana. 

The minister also accused Huffman of having 'sold out' to George Soros and his Open Society Institute and his Soros Foundation Network, whom Allen described as a major contributor to the NAACP and a primary funding source for the legalization of marijuana worldwide.

Allen called for the immediate resignation of Huffman, whom he accused of 'selling out the very people that the NAACP has a history of protecting.' He said Huffman's position on legalization of marijuana 'is destroying the good work the NAACP has done for African-American people, and she is discrediting the good name of the NAACP.'

'Why would the NAACP advocate for Blacks to stay high?' Allen asked. 'It's   not the NAACP, it's her. This is not an indictment against the state or the national NAACP; it's an indictment against Alice. She has sold us out for her personal financial gain and I call for her immediate resignation.'

Huffman convened a news teleconference in Sacramento a couple of hours after Allen's media presentation ended where she came out swinging, calling Allen's coalition part of a conservative religious faction that has no solutions to any problems, just criticism.

Huffman denied being in 'cahoots' with any drug purveyors, and said' 'I will not resign and I will not falter in my efforts to free African-American youth from the onerous punishment they suffer by the criminal justice system's imposition of draconian marijuana laws.'

Like Allen, Huffman, too, had religious leaders in her corner, as well as public officials, social justice workers, families of marijuana law victims, NAACP chapter presidents from various parts of the state.

'There is a strong racial component that must be considered when we investigate how marijuana laws are applied to people of color,' Huffman said. 'The burden has fallen disproportionately on people of color and on young Black men in particular,' she added. 'This is not about me, but about saving the next generation of Black children whose lives are being ruined by laws that are enforced much more severely upon them than on whites,' Huffman said. 

'Allen's ministers need to become more proactive, come up with solutions and look at the data, not at me,' Huffman added.

Huffman spoke of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's acknowledged use of marijuana during their youth as an indication of the weed's prevalence among the young and how, absent the country's proffered 'war on drugs' mentality at the time, such social and/or experimental use of the drug did not lead to these young men's loss of their futures. 

'They're calling it a 'war on drugs,' but it's a war on my community and I cannot just sit by and lose another generation,' Huffman said.

The NAACP president was backed up in her sentiments and supported in her stance by former legislators, Mervyn Dymally and Gwen Moore; former NAACP national president Julian Bond, and several religious leaders, community leaders and NAACP chapter presidents. One neighborhood priest praised Huffman, saying 'her leadership on this issue shows real courage. The criminalization of marijuana ends up creating a society that is more hurtful than helpful. These laws are acts of cruelty against our children and the only issue here is keeping them out of jail.'
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Explain yourselves, Compton school board]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/97540379.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">97540379</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:09:03 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[Emotions are mixed this week among members of the Compton Unified School District Board of Education over their treatment of Superintendent Kaye Burnside, while public opinion appears to be solidly against the board, as expressed by the large number of community comments posted on Compton's Hub City Livin' website.

The seven-member, all-Black Compton Board of Education voted in May to put Burnside on administrative leave while they investigate allegations that she violated a board policy by using her school district-issued credit card for personal transactions.

I was in error last week when I wrote that Burnside was put on administrative leave without pay, for she is, in fact, being paid while on her mandatory, board-imposed leave. I was told that her leave was without pay by representatives of the National Alliance of Black School Educators and the California Assn. of African American Superintendents and Administrators when they approached me and asked me to write about Burnside's troubles with the school district. 

The pay or non-pay status of the leave never came up during my discussions with Burnside, and it was she who told me she was on paid leave after she read the error in last week's story.

I need to clear up this matter early in this piece because it loomed large in my discussions this week with the board members, particularly with board member Marjorie Shipp, who voted against putting Burnside on administrative leave.

'I believe it to be an injustice to Dr. Burnside, and I voted against putting her on administrative leave,' Shipp said. 'So, now we're paying the salary for two superintendents — that of Dr. Burnside and the one taking her place — as well as $450 an hour to a lawyer to investigate her credit card use, which could have been done without forcing her to take leave.'

Board member Emma Sharif said she voted against putting Burnside on leave, but declined to elaborate as to her reasons, saying' 'It is inappropriate for me to discuss this, as it is a 'personnel matter' and I don't have all my facts right now.'

Board member Fred Easter also voted to keep Burnside on the job. 'I did not support putting Dr. Burnside on leave because I believe everyone deserves the opportunity to be treated fairly. I have deep respect for her. From the day she came to Compton, I've always regarded her as an outstanding educator who moved this district forward in the direction we wanted it to go. She was improving our children's education and doing what needed to be done to meet those goals.

'I hope we are not violating her rights,' Easter continued. 'We all make judgmental mistakes and we don't have to destroy each other over them. I just hope this is over real soon so we can get back to the business of educating our kids.'

Board member Sarita Zurita, who voted in favor of putting Burnside on administrative leave, said' 'I'm not trying to hurt anybody.' Zurita is the daughter of former Compton City Council member Delores Zurita, who was arrested, indicted, tried and exonerated in 2004 for credit card misuse crimes, for which former Mayor Omar Bradley was sent to prison.

Sarita Zurita said' 'I've lived through this. I know what it's like and I assure you I wouldn't do to a Black woman what they did to my mother. I feel sorry about what's happening to Dr. Burnside.' When asked if her vote was influenced by fellow board member Micah Ali's rumored anti-Burnside leadership role on the board, Zurita said' 'I don't trust anybody! I've learned better. It was my mother's trust in 'a leader' that got her in trouble. I've been through it and I'm more objective about people, especially people who claim to lead.'

Ali, who by most accounts is considered to be the villain in this story, said he voted to put Burnside on leave 'to give way to an investigation of this matter.' He denied being the ringleader against Burnside, as many in the community have labeled him, and pointed out that Mae Thomas was the board member who made the motion to sideline Burnside.

'There are a lot of rumors going around that I do not support the Black administrators and that I am disrespectful to Black women, and that just is not true. I have always supported Black women,' Ali said. 'I'm not getting any joy out of what is happening to Dr. Burnside.'

Ali is probably not getting any joy out of wildfire-like rumors that he made an offensive comment to Burnside, that he has a friend or associate waiting in the wings to replace her as superintendent and that he is in cahoots with a reportedly resurgent Omar Bradley. His lengthy denials to all of this can be summed up, thus' 'There is no truth to any of these rumors.'

Thomas, the board member who made the motion against Burnside, did not return calls for an interview, and Margie Garrett, another member who voted against Burnside, did not respond to interview requests either.

Burnside maintains that the maligned manner in which she used her district-issued credit card was a well-known common practice among superintendents and board members long before she arrived two and a half years ago. Her attorney submitted a public records request last week for all credit card and expense reports of Compton school superintendents and board members, going back 10 years.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line Extra: Police called in power struggle at L.A. Second Baptist Church]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/97539909.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">97539909</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:03:44 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



															<enclosure url="http://media.wavenewspapers.com/images/2nd+Baptist+Church-0001.jpg" length="53185" type="image/jpeg" />
																																																			<description><![CDATA[

The Rev. William Epps, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church, called the police on 66 members of his church when they gathered in the sanctuary Sunday for a meeting to discuss serious and worsening financial and administrative problems plaguing the 125-year-old landmark house of worship.

Not only did he summon three White uniformed, armed and nightstick-toting LAPD officers into the church, Epps padlocked the church doors, effectively locking his members inside, thus creating a potentially violent situation from which his members &mdash; some elderly and some disabled &mdash; could not easily escape.

Why? Because in response to a petition from the required minimum of 50 church members, LaVon Gilmore, president of the Board of Trustees and president of the Second Baptist Church Corporation, convened a church members&rsquo; meeting at the close of Sunday&rsquo;s 11 a.m. service and Epps did not want the members to meet.

At first, Epps engaged an off-duty LAPD officer to make the members leave the church. The officer stood in the pulpit and ordered the members out, stating' &ldquo;This church belongs to Pastor Epps and he does not want you in here holding any meeting.&rdquo; The members argued and shouted with the off-duty officer and made it clear that they had no intentions of leaving. The officer said' &ldquo;I can make a call and have 50 LAPD officers down here to make you leave.&rdquo; The members yelled' &rdquo;Do it!,&rdquo; as they hunkered down in the pews.

The off-duty cop exited the sanctuary and went into one of the back rooms where other church members watched and listened as Epps personally called the LAPD and demanded that they send officers to his church &ldquo;to break up an unlawful assembly of people in my church who are trespassing.&rdquo; Witnesses said that, based on what was heard of Epps&rsquo; side of the conversation, the LAPD official to whom he was speaking must have been resisting the demand for cops in the church, as Epps was heard saying' &ldquo;I own this church and I don&rsquo;t want these people in it.&rdquo;

Three White uniformed LAPD officers did come into the church and confronted the members, but after about a half-hour, they left, having concluded that whatever was going on in the church was a civil matter and of no concern to the LAPD.

An LAPD investigation of the incident ensued Sunday afternoon after it was reported to Chief Charlie Beck. Asst. Chief Earl Paysinger reported Monday that the off-duty officer who kept ordering the members out of the church is, himself, a member of Second Baptist and his actions do give the department pause.

&ldquo;The department is conducting an inquiry into the appropriateness of this officer&rsquo;s actions,&rdquo; Paysinger said. &ldquo;He does have a right to an off-duty life, but the rights of the people are not to be abridged while he is exercising his.

&ldquo;We are concerned that the officer took the side of the pastor and we are still trying to determine exactly what was said to the dispatcher that would make three officers intervene in a civil matter inside a church,&rdquo; the assistant chief added. &ldquo;Chief Beck is concerned about having all his officers committed to working well with members of the various religious congregations throughout the city.&rdquo;

When all the tension and histrionics ended, the 66 members turned their attention to the business at hand &mdash; the business Epps did not want them dealing with, to wit'

&bull; Epps&rsquo; removal of the previous chairman of the trustees and Epps&rsquo; designation of an attorney named Benjamin Robinson as the new chairman.

&bull; Epps&rsquo; letter to the bank designating Robinson as the new signer of all Second Baptist-issued checks.

&bull; The church&rsquo;s accounting firm reports that thousands and thousands of Second Baptist&rsquo;s money is missing and never arrived into designated accounts.

&bull; And the 2010 budget allocations for the church&rsquo;s operations are almost gone and this is only July.

The members have a problem with Robinson, Epps&rsquo; hand-picked new man in charge of the church&rsquo;s finances. According a State Bar Court of California document dated Nov. 19, 2009, Robinson, an attorney, was found culpable by that court of committing acts of moral turpitude, of violating rules of professional conduct and of numerous counts of failing to maintain client funds in trust accounts.

Epps and Second Baptist Church are specifically named in three lawsuits relating to the disappearance of thousands and thousands of dollars from the Second Baptist Church Credit Union when it was declared insolvent last year. The church retained the law firm of Stone and Stone to represent it in the matter.

On April 29, Robinson went to that law firm and took all the paperwork relating to those suits and he has kept them &mdash; all the documents, cancelled checks, statements, deposits relating to the Canaan Housing Corp., the credit union and the minutes of the Second Baptist Church Board of Trustees. Stone and Stone have been left with nothing with which to fight the lawsuits.

The members were enraged and horrified by these discoveries and they voted Sunday to remove Robinson as chairman of the trustee board and deny him the privilege of serving as any kind of officer on that body. The members also voted to instruct the church&rsquo;s accountants to thoroughly audit the books and find out where all that missing money went. Most of the members seemed ready to vote on removing Epps, but Gilmore didn&rsquo;t feel they were ready for that &mdash; yet, as there is still a lot of missing information and missing money.

This was the business Epps was so bent on stopping his members from meeting about, that he called the cops to rough them up.

Editor&rsquo;s note' After deadline, the Rev. Wliliam Epps returned Betty Pleasant&rsquo;s phone call and the following interview took place' 

Question' Rev. Epps, why did you call the police on your members?

Answer' &ldquo;I wanted to ensure order among the members. I wanted them to be safe. There was a lot of yelling and shouting going on in the church and I wanted there to be peace.&rdquo;

Q' Why did you padlock the main church doors, leaving the 66 locked-in members only one small exit, which was located in the basement, way in the back of the church and far removed from the sanctuary where they were?

A' &ldquo;We always lock the doors when the services are over. The Sunday morning service had ended, so we locked the doors.&rdquo;

Q' Why did you not want your members to meet?

A' &ldquo;Because it was not a legal meeting. Only I, as pastor, can call a meeting of the members and I did not call for a meeting. If they wanted to hold a meeting, they needed to request one of me, fill out the proper papers detailing what it would be about, how many are expected to attend and how long it is expected to last. They did not do that.&rdquo;]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: On school boards, Black-on-Black crime is becoming status quo]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/97032199.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">97032199</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:23:49 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[

As usual, there&rsquo;s trouble in Compton. But this time, it&rsquo;s the kind of trouble that is race-based, insidious and sweeping the state to the point that African-American educators have had to band together to save their lives.

I&rsquo;m talking about an assault on Black educators, especially on African-American superintendents of school districts, which started 25 years ago with the ouster of Charlie Mae Knight from the Lynwood School District and continued with the removal of Kaye Burnside from the Compton Unified School District last month.

Between those two, increasing numbers of Black heads of school districts have been shown the door for all kinds of non and/or nebulous reasons. They include Adm. David Brewer III, Los Angeles; Rex Fortune, Lynwood; Pamela Short-Powell, Inglewood; Edna Herring, Rialto; Ernesto Martinez Johnson, West Fresno; Gary McKnight, Mt. Diablo near San Francisco and several others in smaller districts.

The problem has become so acute that the National Alliance of Black School Educators and the California Assn. of African-American Superintendents and Administrators are fighting back to preserve the dignity, reputations and careers of African-Americans&rsquo; most prized, most intellectual, most revered professionals. These people hold doctorates. They stand on the pinnacle of Blackdom. And who keeps shoving them off? In most cases, their predominately Black school boards, that&rsquo;s who.

Consider the trials and tribulations of Kaye Burnside, Ed.D., who is the current target of the seven-member all-black Compton School Board. Burnside was the deputy superintendent of the West Contra Costa Unified School District when she was selected to head the Compton District almost two-and-a-half years ago. Last month, the Compton School Board voted to put her on administrative leave because they said she violated the board&rsquo;s policy forbidding the personal use of her school district-issued credit card.

Burnside said she was unaware of the board&rsquo;s policy against such use as it had been used in the same manner as she did during the previous 26 years! This alleged board policy suddenly became enforceable two years after she arrived.

Furthermore, meticulously kept records show that Burnside&rsquo;s credit card purchases for all things were extrapolated from the monthly billing documents by her secretary and the district fiscal staff and categorized into those purchases that were work-related and those that were personal. The school district paid the entire bills, but she wrote checks to the school district for the portions of her credit card bills deemed personal. This occurred every month and Burnside has not ever and does not now owe the Compton Unified School District a dime.

They&rsquo;ve got her on leave without pay for nothing! And the leave is pending what outcome? Her five black sisters and two black brothers &mdash; one of whom is an obvious piece of work &mdash; are so mean that they threatened to call the district attorney on her. For what?! She stole no money; she committed no crime. All she did was violate a board policy which they knew was being violated long before she got there, and didn&rsquo;t bother to tell her about when she arrived!

Not only is Burnside dealing with this debilitating assault upon her career, she is dealing with a personal problem you wouldn&rsquo;t wish on these school board members' Her son, who was born with epilepsy, received a transplanted kidney on Easter Sunday and he&rsquo;s fighting to survive tissue rejection. Has she received any compassion or understanding from her board of Black mamas? Naw. But she doesn&rsquo;t really want any. She wants her name.

&ldquo;I want the board to know that I am not going to stand by while they ruin my reputation,&rdquo; Burnside said. &ldquo;It is essential that I clear my name as I wish to continue to work, and most important, it is my family name and it has history and meaning.

&ldquo;I know that they will probably not bring me back to work, but they cannot have my name, and thereby my future as it relates to working again,&rdquo; Burnside continued. &ldquo;I have to be in a position to help my son, and I sincerely believe that I am meant to do something great in education before I leave this earth. If they do not want me, I will go somewhere else, as there are plenty of Black, Brown and poor children needing someone to advocate and bring change on their behalf. People told me not to come here, but I came anyway. I thought this would be the place, as there is so much that needs to be done.&rdquo;

(Next week' Compton School Board members Micah Ali, Fred Easter, Margie Garrett, Emma Sharif, Marjorie Shipp, Mae Thomas and Satra Zurita answer the question' &ldquo;What is wrong with you?!!&rdquo;)]]></description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Curious stance by California NAACP president]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/96527879.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">96527879</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:06:12 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[The trial of the Bay Area cop who killed Oscar Grant has, in itself, created quite a stir in Los Angeles when it began last week, but not as much a furor as the fact that the white officer's jury contains no African-Americans, and not nearly as much as the outrage expressed over the California NAACP's position that, in effect, 'that's OK.'

Johannes Mehserle, 28, a White former police officer with the Bay Area Rapid Transit, shot and killed the Black 22-year-old Grant in the back as he lay face down, handcuffed and unarmed on a BART station platform in Oakland on New Year's Day 2009. The killing was videotaped by bystanders and shown repeatedly on television and the Internet.

Mehserle was charged for Grant's killing shortly thereafter, but his trial was moved from Oakland to Los Angeles because of the racial tensions the case caused in that area. The killing occurred and the trial was originally set in a community with a high concentration of African-Americans but it was moved to the more ethnically diverse Los Angeles County. Yet, when the jury was impaneled last week, it ended up being composed of five Latinas, three White women, two White men and two Latinos, with one of these jurors rumored to be a Pacific Islander — but not a single Black person. This exclusion gave Black folks pause as visions of a history of 'White folks justice' replayed in their heads.

Alice Huffman, president of the California State Conference of the NAACP, issued a press release last weekend admonishing Blacks 'to be calm and trust the justice system.' She called the jury 'diverse,' and said it 'can render a just verdict.'

'The NAACP has always depended on the justice system to render fair and just decisions in the cause of civil rights for African-American citizens,' Huffman said in her press release. 'We choose to take a positive outlook on the Oscar Grant case…The Los Angeles community has been involved with and well informed regarding police brutality cases,' Huffman said.

'How can any Black person or civil rights organization trust the justice system?' asked the Rev. Eric Lee, president of SCLC. 'That's a Republican mindset! The justice system has never been about justice,' he continued. 'Any time a justice system requires you to prove intent to determine guilt allows for the perpetrator to claim he made a 'mistake.' Mistakes for White folks equate to acquittals, while mistakes for Black folks equate to persecution.'

Imprisoned community activist Najee Ali said' 'Alice's comments are delusional. History has shown us that whenever a Black victim has an all-White jury, Blacks never get justice — from the murders of Emmett Till and Medger Evers to the police beatings of Rodney King and Donovan Jackson. Whenever the jury is stacked with Whites, their bias against Black victims comes out. Alice needs to stop being politically correct and buck dancing for White folks.'

The Rev. Lewis Logan is co-founder of the Reach Christian Community Outreach. He has been a longtime community activist and was deeply involved in quelling the turbulent aftermath of the 2005 LAPD killing of the child, Devin Brown. Logan is questioning what state he's in. 'Is this Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia?' he asked. Logan, too, reflected on the trial of Emmett Till's killers in Mississippi, which had no Blacks on that jury.

'If Oscar Grant, whom Mr. Mehserle is accused of killing, represents a significant BART customer base, and if African-Americans were among the actual witnesses of this tragic incident, why then is there not one person representative of Mr. Grant's community considered a peer of Officer Mehserle on the jury? Logan asked. 'Justice will never come to us freely,' Logan continued. 'We can only expect to achieve in the suites what we are organized and determined to take in the streets.'

Royce Esters, president of NAEJA, who has been working with the Justice for Oscar Grant Committee in conducting courthouse protests of the trial, is urging the community not to trust the justice system in this case. 'How can you trust the system in this or any other case when they've excluded African-Americans from the system, itself?' Esters asked.

Anthony Samad, a college professor, author, political commentator and former president of the Los Angeles NAACP, said' 'The NAACP statement is peculiar in that it suggests the Black community's distrust of the justice system is somehow illegitimate. Los Angeles is haunted by its highly racialized police abuse cases. Yes, L.A. is familiar with police abuse cases, but we are also a community that has been victimized by police abuses cases and Los Angeles isn't a place where justice can be found against police officers.

'Huffman's statement should have said that the NAACP is monitoring the case in the interest of justice and fairness, not be an apologist for the exclusion of Black jurors,' Samad continued. 'Blacks in Los Angeles have very legitimate reasons for distrusting the justice system today. The court system today is very different from the ones in which the NAACP tried cases in 1954. Judicial temperament is much more conservative and the racial intent to subvert justice is a lot more refined.'

Samad continued' 'Huffman's position is more a 'calm the natives' message that chooses to deal with fiction rather than the reality we know. This is not exactly what you would expect from a civil rights group which also knows the violation is coming and the disappointment is likely. If the NAACP wants to be optimistic, then it should advocate for the conviction, not the process.'

Refusing to be regarded as an apologist for Huffman and the NAACP, attorney Carl Douglas pointed out that the lamentable absence of a Black face among the jurors could have resulted from the dearth of Blacks in the jury pool.

'I am informed that the attorney for the defendant chose to excuse four African-American jurors who were being considered for the trial, Douglas said. 'I am also informed that there were only about 12 prospective African-Americans out of the 90 potential jurors who were called for service on this case,' Douglas continued. 'That small number speaks volumes about the need for African-Americans to register to vote and to honor their jury service commitments when they receive notices in the mail for jury service. Far too often, such notices are trashed or ignored by many in our community, leaving our voices muted when it comes to serving on criminal and civil juries in Los Angeles County.'

Huffman did not respond to my written memo questioning her position on this matter, nor did she return my follow-up call for an interview.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Parks’ residency is target of DA’s probe]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/96016434.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">96016434</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 9 Jun 2010 18:05:19 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[District Attorney Steve Cooley has launched a preliminary investigation to determine exactly where City Councilman Bernard Parks lives and whether he committed perjury when he ran for 2nd District County Supervisor in 2008, it was learned this week.

The investigation, recorded as PID Case No. 10-0120, began on Feb. 24 and is being conducted by Deputy District Attorney Juliet Schmidt. Head deputy of the Public Integrity Division, David Demerjian, said Wednesday this lengthy preliminary investigation 'is still open.' He would make no further comments.

However, people close to the probe sent me copies of some of the documents the DA is working with, including the Declaration of Candidacy for supervisor that Parks signed on Feb. 29, 2008, on which he gives his residence as being on Don Ibarra Place in the city of Los Angeles. This is the document about which the DA is pondering perjury.

This is so because the DA is examining Parks' Annual Property Tax Information Statements for 2007 and 2008 which show that the councilman took a $7,000 and $7,981 property tax exemption, respectively, on a house on Onacrest Drive in tony Windsor Hills, in L.A. County territory and outside the city of Los Angeles.

The property tax documents are said to be giving investigators pause because, by law, a property owner can claim a tax exemption on a house only if he lives in it and secondly, as a city councilman, Parks is required by law to live in the city of Los Angeles and within the boundaries of his 8th Council District. So, if Parks lived on Onacrest when he signed his candidacy papers, he may have violated two laws; and if he didn't live there, he may have violated two other laws.

The DA is also said to be combing the certified County Registrar voting records posted Oct. 17, 2008 to determine whether Parks re-registered to vote, as required by law, when he left his Ibarra Place rental and moved into a house on Don Milagro Drive in February of 2008. At the time, accusations did fly in the community that Parks had cast a fraudulent vote — presumably for himself — in the June 3, 2008 primary election because he voted at a polling place that had not been his since February.

Parks declined to comment about the Cooley/Dermerjian/Schmidt investigation. But his wife, Bobbie, with whom I discussed this investigation and who aided me in contacting the councilman about it, made several comments, including the fact that neither she nor her husband knew anything of Cooley's concerns about their residences and had not been contacted by the DA to prove or disprove anything.

After receiving from me a copy of Cooley's letter announcing the investigation, Bobbie Parks expressed surprise and disbelief. 'And this was back in February and they didn't say a word to us?' she asked. 'This [Cooley's letter] doesn't say what we've done wrong, and yet they want to determine whether a full criminal investigation is warranted?' Bobbie Parks continued. 'We have lived in several houses and we have lots of documents, too, that show we have done nothing wrong.'
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Consultant doubts move to restore Compton Police Department]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/95472614.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">95472614</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 2 Jun 2010 17:55:04 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



															<enclosure url="http://media.wavenewspapers.com/images/compton+police+patch.jpeg" length="16171" type="image/jpeg" />
																																																			<description><![CDATA[Despite the fact that the Compton City Council voted Tuesday to break ties with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and re-establish its own municipal police force, the law enforcement and administrative expert hired to shepherd the city toward such a move has serious misgivings about the council's action.

By a 3-2 vote, the city council ended the controversy Tuesday night that has been raging in Compton for 10 years — ever since officials disbanded their own troubled-plagued Compton Police Department and replaced it with contracted services from the Sheriff's Department. Some city residents, officials, and particularly Mayor Eric Perrodin, have been straining at the bit to dump the sheriff's deputies and return their own Compton cops to the streets. But most of the people of Compton are opposed to the proposition, as noted by the defeat in 2004 of Measure D, a ballot initiative calling for the revival of the CPD. The measure was overwhelmingly rejected by voters, with 67.8 percent voting against it.

Perrodin and the persistent minority pressed on and hired Joseph Rouzan Jr. in 2008 to conduct a study as to the feasibility of restoring the Compton Police Department. Rouzan is no sleaze when it comes to this kind of work. A New Orleans native who grew up in Los Angeles, Rouzan was an LAPD officer of many years whom then-Chief Ed Davis appointed to supervise the recruitment of minorities and women to the force, and he was also made the commanding officer of the Police Commission. Mayor Tom Bradley pegged Rouzan to succeed then-Chief Darryl Gates and when Gates wouldn't leave, Bradley appointed Rouzan the first executive director of the Police Commission.

Rouzan subsequently served as chief of police for Compton and for Inglewood. He was Compton's city manager and later Inglewood's city administrator, and he became the first head of the Citizen Police Complaint Commission created by Long Beach voters in the wake of a highly publicized incident of alleged police misconduct. In 2001, Gov. Gray Davis appointed Rouzan to the State Bar Board of Governors. Rouzan had a consulting firm which won a contract to reorganize the Police Bureau of the Los Angeles Department of Airports.

This is the man Perrodin et al. hired to study and advise them on their quest for a police force of their own. In Rouzan's considered opinion, the council's action Tuesday was at least two years premature. 'The council had a lot of work to do before they could reach a point of actually voting the issue up or down. They needed to be voting on a plan,' Rouzan said.

'They hired me to answer three questions,' Rouzan continued. 'One' Is the re-establishment of the CPD feasible? I found that it was feasible in terms of the availability of officers they could recruit since so many other police departments are cutting back and making more available to them to choose from.

'Two' Do you have the money to it? I don't believe they do. They keep talking about having $18 to $20 million for the project and that is not enough, especially when they have not considered what kind of police force they want. Do they want a full-service department with a narcotics unit and gang unit and such? Compton certainly needs one. But from day one or year five? Is the amount of money they say they have enough to buy the policing they need? I think not. In comparison, the Inglewood PD costs $100 million.'

'Three' Do they have the political will to do this?' Rouzan said, 'My answer would be, based on what they did last night, even that is questionable. They got the votes, but they got no consensus among them.' (The three 'yes' votes for a CPD were cast by Perrodin, and council members Lillie Dobson and Barbara Calhoun. Council members Willie Jones and Yvonne Arceneaux voted against it.)

Rouzan said he submitted his report on these three questions and his study findings to the council in January and it has never been discussed. 'Oh, individual council members have come up to me and said, 'Yeah, I think we should do it' or 'No, I don't think we should do it,' but the whole body has not dissected the document and shown any insight into exactly what it is they are doing,' Rouzan said.

'What they should have been voting on Tuesday night were elements of staffing, budget, planning, deployment, time lines,' Rouzan said. 'They needed to be voting on the question, 'What do we really want?'

Charles Evans, the city manager, is the person directed by the city council Tuesday to actually create a new Compton PD. Rouzan said he got a call from the city manager Wednesday morning asking if he'd be available to meet Monday to talk about strategy, time lines, budget, and personnel — the crucial fine points the council ignored. 'I told him, yeah, I'd meet with him,' a rueful Rouzan responded.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Dissenting juror says man’s panel of peers was asleep at the wheel]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/94978069.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">94978069</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 26 May 2010 17:44:39 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	


																																						<description><![CDATA[A San Luis Obispo woman who served on the jury that tried Hollywood private detective Anthony Pellicano and three others has gone out of her way and to great lengths to attack the process that resulted in the conviction of retired telephone company technician Rayford Earl Turner.

Elaine Jordison was part of the jury in the 2008 federal court trial that convicted Pellicano, former LAPD Sgt. Mark Arneson, Kevin Kachikian, Abner Nicherie and Turner on wiretapping and racketeering charges and she has been troubled about the experience ever since --- troubled so much, that she has publicly decried the jury's actions in the case and has given two depositions to attorneys describing wrongdoing on the part of her fellow jurors.

Jordison, who is employed as a medical records keeper for the county of San Luis Obispo, spent 10 weeks in a local hotel while the Pellicano case was being tried in federal court in downtown Los Angeles.

'The jurors had made up their minds that the defendants were guilty after the prosecutor finished presenting his case and before the defense had started his,' Jordison said. 'I know, because that's all they talked about — how 'guilty' they were,' Jordison continued. 'They told us not to talk about the case until it was time to deliberate, but the jurors talked about it constantly. One juror said' 'I wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw them.' And the foreperson, an African-American woman from Los Angeles, said of Turner, 'Just because he's Black doesn't mean I won't convict him. I would have convicted Michael Vick!' (The dog-fighting football player). These are the kinds of things the jurors were saying among themselves, especially at lunch.

 'I expressed my disapproval of their comments and told them they were violating the rules,' Jordison said. 'I tried to get off the jury. I complained about their closed minds to the foreperson and as things got worse, I tried to talk to the judge about the things that were not right, but that only pissed people off,' Jordison said.

And what were the other things that were not right? 'Lots of things,' the juror replied. 'For example, the foreperson slept throughout the defense's case. Not only did she sleep, she snored! She had to be poked whenever her snoring became too loud. She would fall so deeply asleep in the jury box that she would fall over or drop her note pad. Everybody saw her! She never heard a word the defense had to say.

'They told us not to have any computers with us — nothing, except the notepad — but one guy had a computer and worked on it all the time for several days before somebody official finally took it from him,' Jordison said.

According to Jordison, the deliberations, the time when the jurors were allowed to talk to each other about the case, were a fiasco. 'They hadn't listened to all the testimony and when told to sit down and deliberate, they didn't want to focus on the task because they were too busy talking on their cell phones and texting and getting on with their lives,' Jordison continued. 'Three of us had a really hard time believing Turner was guilty of anything, but we were pressured by the others to go along with their guilty verdicts for all of them. According to the testimony I heard, four of them were guilty, and Turner was not.

'I did not know that when they polled the jury I could have spoken up and expressed my true opinion about the case, so I was compelled to do it as soon as I left the courtroom,' Jordison continued. 'I attended Turner's sentencing. I wrote to him in prison about the injustice done to him. I've been deposed by lawyers seeking justice and I'm cooperating with the attorney handling his appeal,' Jordison said.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Justice denied to Black man caught up in the Hollywood spying scandal]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/94355189.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">94355189</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 18:25:01 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[Remember how five years ago federal agents made a big production of arresting the 'Private Eye to the Stars,' Anthony Pellicano, and 11 of his associates for an assortment of racketeering charges? Remember how on Feb. 6, 2006, Pellicano and six of his associates were charged in a 110-count indictment alleging racketeering, wiretapping and privacy breaches? 

Remember how on March 3 last year Pellicano and three of his associates were tried, found guilty and sent to prison for those charges?

Well, today Pellicano and one 'associate' is in prison' Rayford Earl Turner, a retired telephone company service technician from Van Nuys and the only African-American caught up in the prosecution of Pellicano's lily-White gang, is the only defendant serving time in prison with Pellicano, the organization's boss. Why? Because the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders, seems to hate Black people with money. At least that is the perception of both Black and white observers of this case.

Today (May 20) is Turner's 54th birthday and he is observing it in the Taft Correctional Institution for a crime his family and friends insist he knows nothing about, while prosecutor Saunders is convinced within his bones that Turner knows everything about Pellicano's crimes but refuses, out of 'Negro' stubbornness, to spill his guts to the cops. So, Turner's supporters regard the lone Black man in this massive case as being the scapegoat and the target of judicial abuse and excessive punishment in an attempt to 'break' him and force him to tell something he does not know.

Turner's older brother, Alex Turner, and the inmate's oldest and dearest friend and business partner, Vince Santoro, have stood with Turner (or 'Ray,' as they call him) through his troubles with the criminal justice system, rallied his lifelong supporters to his cause and aided him in every way they could, including contacting me.

According to Alex and Vince, Turner was never part of Pellicano's operation  and was simply a retired telephone man hired on occasion to go to Pellicano's clients' homes and check them for listening devices. They say he never installed any wiretaps or anything else for Pellicano and was unaware that he even did such things.

Turner, who was born and raised in San Diego, took a job with Pacific Telephone (now AT&T) right after he graduated from high school. While there, he met Santoro and the two men have remained best friends for more than 30 years. They participated in each other's weddings. 

While working for the telephone company, Turner and Santoro began buying deteriorated houses for cheap and refurbishing them and renting and/or selling them. They began making money in excess of their telephone company salaries. Turner and Santoro remained with the telephone company until they retired together in December 2001 and they rolled over their IRAs and made even more money.

'Yes, we made money. Ray and I worked hard for it,' Santoro said. 'Ray did not meet Pellicano until after we retired and he already had money, but the prosecutor believes that since he's Black, he could not possibly have money and property unless he had acquired it from an unlawful association with Pellicano,' Santoro said. 'Saunders absolutely hates Ray,' he added.

Turner spent the first three years after his retirement working on his house-buying business and then he met Pellicano and accepted a part-time job checking for listening devices for Pellicano's clients. Years later, the cops raided Pellicano's Beverly Hills office and found a ledger in his desk that showed that the boss had paid Turner $37,000 for his occasional work over a period of six or seven years. And they said' 'Aha! A major player!' But that ledger also showed Pellicano paid former LAPD Sgt. Mark Arneson more than $200,000 over the same period for whatever it was he was doing for Pellicano.

Alex Turner said Saunders was visibly livid every time he'd ask Turner for details as to Pellicano's wiretapping operation and he would respond that he did not know. 'Saunders believed that because Ray was a telephone company technician, he was the wiretapper, but even Pellicano said in court that only he, himself, was responsible for the wiretaps, and Ray had nothing to do with it, but they ignored that,' Alex Turner said.

Even though Saunders was convinced Turner was a major figure in the case — working side-by-side with Pellicano — he offered him a deal for leniency if he would tell the feds how the wiretaps worked (which is something they still don't know), but Turner could not accept the deal because he did not know.

So, Turner had the book thrown at him in ways you would not believe.

'Saunders could not stand the fact that Ray was Black and had money, so he went after everything he had,' Alex Turner said. 'He was out to break him. He coupled him directly to Pellicano. Of all the people convicted, he argued for the harshest sentence — 12 years for Ray — and the judge gave him 10 years, the same as for that cop, Arneson, but Pellicano got 15 years.

'Then, because he still had assets [the bad guys had turned their assets over to other people but Turner, knowing he had done nothing wrong, naively kept his] they fined him about $50,000 which I helped him pay 10 days before he went to prison. Then the judge ordered Ray to pay $2 million for illegal wiretapping and put a lien on his property. And even while they were doing all of that to him, Saunders kept mumbling in his ear, 'Tell me about the wiretaps'' Turner said. 

The case has been appealed and all the guys are out on bail pending the appeal, except Turner, and, of course, Pellicano, who they say will never get out. Bail for Turner has been denied because Saunders has convinced that court that Turner is 'a danger to society,' (Unless, of course, he tells him about the wiretaps.)

Not only that, all those convicted in this case have been assigned a federal  public defender to handle their appeals — except Turner. The other convicts have no assets, you see, and therefore cannot afford attorneys, but Saunders made it clear to the court that Turner has money and, therefore, must hire his own. He did. He hired Attorney Karen Landau of San Francisco to handle his appeal. Stay tuned.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Loyalty defined the legacy of William Elkins]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/93642419.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">93642419</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 12 May 2010 18:05:55 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[Funeral services for William 'Bill' Elkins Jr. will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at Second Baptist Church, during which the old and the new guard of Los Angeles political activism are expected to come together and praise a man who brought new meaning to the term loyalty.

Elkins, who was Tonto to Mayor Tom Bradley's Lone Ranger, died of congestive heart failure on May 5. He was 90 years old.

Officially, Elkins was the late Mayor Bradley's special assistant during his historic 20-year mayoral tenure, but in reality Elkins was more than that title connoted. Elkins was Bradley's oldest friend, confidant, advisor in all things political and social. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder making decisions bursting the mold that contained a racist-leaning backwater town and transforming Los Angeles into the more racially inclusive, socially progressive world class city it is today.

Elkins and Bradley became friends when they were students at Lafayette Junior High School. They went to UCLA together, joined the Kappas together, attended Southwestern University School of Law together and set out upon public service careers in tandem — Bradley in the LAPD and Elkins in the Probation Department. Bradley was Elkins' best man when he married Eleanor, and Elkins was the first staff member Bradley hired when he became mayor.

Lorraine Bradley, the late mayor's daughter, recalled Tuesday that her mother, the late Ethel Bradley, went over to Elkins' house as soon as the first mayoral election results were final and ordered Elkins to quit his job and 'go down there and help my husband run this city now!'

Adrian Dove, vice president of the Tom Bradley Legacy Foundation (of which Elkins was president) and a former Bradley mayoral assistant who worked with Elkins, noted that 'everyone who was close to Elkins was amazed at how well he was able to intervene and force through actions that were desperately needed without taking any credit. He was perhaps more effective because he loved the low profile.'

Dove said Elkins' leadership abilities shone particularly bright after Bradley suffered a stroke. 'Bill was so adept in reading the intentions of Tom that he, on many occasions, was able to get up and deliver speeches that the post-stroke ailing mayor would have given himself if he had been able to speak,' Dove said. 'It would be impossible for any chief executive to find a more loyal, low profile, behind-the-scenes, back-up man than this resource Tom Bradley had in Bill Elkins.'

Kerman Maddox worked with Elkins in the mayor's office from 1985 to 1989 and he echoes Dove's assessment that no one was more loyal to Bradley than Elkins, whom Maddox described as 'the godfather of African-American staffers.' Maddox, whom Elkins always called 'Kermit,' said' 'Even though we came from different generations, I respected Elkins tremendously for what he and his generation accomplished.'

Before joining Bradley's staff, Elkins directed the city's Teen Post, which was an essential program in the national War on Poverty effort during the Lyndon Johnson era. Bradley tapped Elkins to develop and implement similar city-based programs for youth, including the L.A.City Youth Council, to which Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas was named some 35 years ago. 

'That was when I first met Mr. Elkins,' the supervisor said. 'I remember his fierce loyalty to the mayor and his longstanding devotion to his church,' he added. Elkins had been a member of Second Baptist Church for 70 years.
Elkins' gifts as an advisor, activist administrator and strategist were hailed by former City Councilman Bob Farrell, as well as Rep. Diane Watson, state Sen. Currin Price and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Elkins was definitely Bradley's Kemo Sabe, as he either chaired or co-chaired every advisory committee when Bradley ran for city council, mayor, and governor. Elkins helped Bradley succeed in everything he did' passing affirmative action, aging and youth programs, securing federal funding and recognition, bringing Black and Jewish communities together and making peace between Black and Hispanic communities.

In his own words, Elkins said in a Bradley documentary' 'We were caught up in a movement that involved the emotions, the sensitivities, the sensibilities of many  people — white, Black, brown, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic. And we were so very pleased with the support Tom Bradley was able to generate to bring people together and have them understand that we had a better shot at improving our lives and getting to where we wanted to get if we committed to work together.'

Elkins is survived by his wife, Eleanor; sons, William III and Larry; grandchildren, Elana and William IV (Chip); many nieces and nephews, and Expo Line activist Damien Goodmon, his grandnephew.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Shot dead by officers armed with submachine guns, victim’s name is revealed in Culver City]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/92926484.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">92926484</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 5 May 2010 18:21:57 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[A great deal has occurred since Culver City police officers shot dead an African-American robbery suspect on April 25 in front of a donut shop before a witness who, for all intents and purposes, is being told not to believe her lying eyes.

According to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Dave Dolson, who is leading the investigation into the broad daylight shooting, Lejoy Grissom, 27, was killed when he was shot three times in the chest with an MP5 submachine gun by a Culver City cop. There are now two versions of how Grissom met such a gruesome death in a strip mall on the corner of Venice Boulevard and Motor Avenue.

Dolson explained it thus' 'An armed robbery had occurred at a nearby Radio Shack, after which a car was spotted leaving the scene. Culver City officers saw the car and saw that Grissom resembled the description of the suspected robber. The officers followed the car and executed a felony stop. Grissom, who was a passenger in the car, was told to show his hands and to exit the vehicle with his hands raised. He did that.

'But, according to the Culver City officers' statements, at some point the suspect dropped his hands to his waist as if going for a weapon,' Dolson continued. 'He was facing four to six officers lined up with guns pointed at him and he was shot three times in the chest with a MP5 submachine gun, which is a weapon the Culver City officers are authorized to carry,' Dolson said.

Criminal defense attorney Frances Prizzia, who was in the donut shop with a friend and witnessed the shooting and its aftermath, told her story of it last week, and she's sticking to it. 'The man had his hands up the whole time with all his fingers open. There was no way he was reaching for anything, except the sky,' Prizzia said this week. 'He absolutely did not move his hands,' she reiterated. 'The only time he moved was when he reverberated from the bullets.'

'We have independent witnesses who corroborate the officers' version,' Dolson said. 'And so do I,' Prizzia countered. Dolson is quoted in other published reports that the Culver City police found a gun on Grissom, but he declined to say whereabouts or what kind. Prizzia said that right after the shooting — and before Dolson arrived on the scene — the Culver City cops bragged to her about having found a gun in the backseat of Grissom's car.

'No one is making a judgment on her statements,' Dolson said of Prizzia, who is a private attorney who formerly worked for the Orange County Public Defender's Office, 'We are not calling her a liar. We're just 'facts gatherers' here. We gather the facts and present them to the district attorney and leave it to him to determine what will be done,' the sheriff's lieutenant said.

Officials would not identify the young Latino officer Prizzia said she saw shoot Grissom, nor would they identify the older burly cop said to have removed the shooter's weapon, tossed it in the backseat of his patrol car and then argued with Prizzia about proper police procedures.

Dolson did confirm that the driver of the car in which Grissom was riding had been arrested and booked for murder after the cops killed him. That woman was Grissom's 20-year-old sister, Layla Grissom. She watched the cops cut down her brother with a submachine gun and she was arrested for murder. 

Dolson said the murder charge may ultimately be reduced to robbery. He was not certain.

Another point' Officials withheld the identity of Grissom for three days after he was killed, stating they were unable to notify his next of kin. But they killed him in front of and then arrested his sister. Couldn't his sister have given them their mama's phone number the minute he stopped breathing?

While the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is gathering facts and leaving their use in the hands of the district attorney, the National Association of Equality and Justice in America (NAEJA) is taking Grissom's killing directly to the FBI. 'We're not waiting for the DA to make his usual determination that his young man's slaughter by the police was justified,' said Royce Esters, president of NAEJA. 'We have an appointment with Steven Martinez, assistant director of the FBI on Tuesday at his Wilshire Boulevard headquarters where we intend to distribute copies of last week's Wave story and demand federal intervention into this matter,' Esters said.

In addition to dealing with the specifics of Grissom's killing, Esters said his organization, which is growing in influence throughout Southern California, will press for an investigation of the Culver City Police Department, which he says is notorious for violating the rights of African-American males. 'We want police brutality stopped in Culver City,' Esters said.

NAEJA has a close relationship with the FBI, as the group meets frequently with that agency's officials. Last month, NAEJA made the headlines in a Long Beach newspaper for taking on the Santa Ana Superior Court for applying unequal justice. NAEJA contends young black men are routinely meted out harsh penalties for minor offenses by the Orange County court, and it wants it stopped.

In other developments, funeral services for Grissom will be held Saturday at 2'30 p.m. at Solomon's Mortuary, 10625 S. Broadway, in Los Angeles.
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			<title><![CDATA[Bottom Line: Witness to killing fears a ‘cover-up’ in the ‘execution’ of African-American suspect]]></title>
															<link>http://www.wavenewspapers.com/opinion/bottom-line/92374609.html</link>
				<guid isPermaLink="false">92374609</guid>		
			<pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:21:01 PST</pubDate>
			<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>																	

	
											
																														
													



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																																																			<description><![CDATA[A young criminal defense attorney on her way to a party Sunday night witnessed what she said was the worst thing she's ever seen in her life — the execution of a surrendering suspect by a Culver City Police officer.

The killing of the African-American suspect, who was shot dead by a cop in the busy strip mall at Venice Boulevard and Motor Avenue, is being investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and his identity had still not been released Tuesday because 'we're still trying to notify his next of kin,' stated Assistant Chief Ed Winter of the Coroner's Office.

Frances Prizzia does not know the dead suspect's name, but she knows exactly how he came to die, because she witnessed his killing from beginning to end.

Prizzia said it happened between 10'30 and 11'30 p.m. Sunday. 'I was sitting in the Donut King at the corner of Venice and Motor with my girlfriend when suddenly we saw a bunch of cop cars enter the parking lot,' Prizzia said. 'We were sitting in front of the window and had a clear view of everything,' she continued. 'I saw a greenish car with a black female driver pull up in front of us. Then I saw a Black male passenger get out of the car, with both his hands raised and all 10 of his fingers spread out — with absolutely nothing in his hands. 

'He stood there like that for a few seconds, and suddenly they just shot him for no reason! He had nothing in his hands and he did not make a single move — until he was shot. Then he twitched and fell down. There was blood all over the place; lots of blood and his girlfriend began screaming and crying, 'You killed him! You killed him! Why did you kill him?!'' Prizzia said.

'He was shot by [what appeared to be] a young Latino cop and an older, burly cop took the Latino cop's weapon from him and put it in the back of his patrol car,' Prizzia continued. 'Then I went over to the burly cop and told him he couldn't do that with the evidence of a crime and that the killer cop's gun was evidence. He told me, 'Get away, little girl.' I became really upset, and I told him 'I am not a little girl. I am a criminal defense attorney and have been one for five years and I am a witness to the fact that everything you've done here tonight was wrong.' Then they started trying to shut me down. They had an officer named Lopez take my statement, and all he did was try to justify to me why they killed the man when, in fact, there was no justification.'

Prizzia said she ended up lecturing and arguing with the Culver City cops on the scene as to what their proper procedures should have been. 'They told me have was a person who had committed crimes in the past and was suspect in others,' Prizzia said. 'I told them that if he is a suspect, he is to be arrested and tried in a court of law and not gunned down in a parking lot. Then they told me the man had a gun in the backseat of the car. Then I said, 'But he didn't have a gun in his hand when you shot him!' Then I questioned them as to how they knew he had gun in the backseat until they examined the backseat — after they shot him!' They were doing everything they could to shut me up and make me go away. But I wouldn't because it was so very wrong.'

Prizzia said she was not the only eyewitness. She said five people in the donut shop saw it and she said the shooting occurred beside a car containing three children, whose grandmother was buying sweets for them in the donut shop. 

'The grandmother was hysterical when she realized her grand babies were in the line of fire,' Prizzia said. 'The kids saw the whole thing and the police interviewed the oldest boy, whom I believe to have been between 7 and 9 years old. 

'But as bad as all this was, even after he was shot, the man didn't have to die,' the attorney continued. 'The Culver City Police officers took forever to get the man medical attention. He was bleeding profusely, and they just ignored him. He was still alive when the ambulance finally arrived and he could have been saved if they wanted to save him.'

Prizzia reached out to me Tuesday morning through my attorney, Anthony Willoughby, because she wanted to learn the identity of the slain man so she could contact his family and give them her account of his killing. 'I knew when they shot him that they would cover it up and I couldn't let that happen. After all, I am an officer of the court,' Prizzia said.

In pursuit of the slain man's identity, I was sent through four county referrals before finally getting the call from Winter in the Coroner's office about his trying to contact the man's next of kin before releasing his name. Prizzia scoffed at that.

'They arrested the woman who was with him Sunday night. Couldn't she have told them who his relatives are?' the attorney asked. 'After his bullet-ridden body was removed, a group of people began lighting candles and writing notes at the killing site. Couldn't one of them — if asked — tell the police about his family? No. This is not about the cops' inability to contact relatives three days after the killing. This is about needing time to engineer a cover up of an execution,' the witness said.
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