By Margaret Winter, National Prison Project Director and Peter Eliasberg, ACLU of Southern California Legal Director
Gang-like cliques of sheriff’s deputies operating with impunity inside L.A. County jails. Department top brass encouraging a culture of violence and brutality against inmates. And a sheriff with his head in the sand.
We at the ACLU have been calling attention to the medieval conditions inside L.A. County jails for years. But on September 7, 2012, the blue-ribbon Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence held its penultimate hearing on deputy violence in the L.A. County jails. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors created the Citizens' Commission last October, shortly after we released a report detailing dozens of sworn statements by victims of brutal deputy-on-inmate violence in L.A. County jails.
Our report that prompted the creation of the commission was titled “Cruel and Usual Punishment: How a Savage Gang of Deputies Controls Men’s Central Jail”. The report -- which includes blood-chilling, eyewitness accounts of sadistic deputy-on-inmate violence by jail chaplains, monitors, and other civilian volunteers -- triggered a fire-storm of media attention and public criticism of L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca.
The commission held a series of public hearings, calling witnesses including victims of deputy abuse, nationally-recognized corrections experts, and ACLU jails monitors and counsel. In addition, the staff of the commission, made up of pro bono lawyers from some of the most prestigious law firms in the country, interviewed more than a hundred other witnesses and reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents.
At the September 7 hearing, a panel of the commission’s attorney investigators issued a preliminary report of their findings. The findings are devastating: investigators confirmed that LASD personnel “have used force against inmates disproportionate to the threat posed, or when there was no threat at all”; LASD’s process for investigating use of force incidents contains “multiple deficiencies”; dangerous, gang-like cliques have been operating inside the jails; Undersheriff Paul Tanaka not only discouraged investigations into alleged deputy abuses but also actually actively encouraged a culture a violence, urging deputies to act aggressively against inmates; Sheriff Baca, in turn, failed to discipline Tanaka or other top managers; and that top jails managers insulated Baca from information about the gang-like deputy cliques operating in the jails.
These findings come as no surprise to the ACLU: for the past four years, we’ve been intensively monitoring, carefully documenting, and vigorously denouncing the escalating pattern of deputy violence in the jails. In January 2012, the ACLU and the law firm of Paul Hastings filed a class-action lawsuit against Sheriff Baca and Undersheriff Tanaka on behalf of all detainees in the jails, seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief from the violence.
Although not unexpected the Citizens’ Commission findings are extraordinarily important. They strongly corroborate the ACLU’s allegations against Sheriff Baca, Undersheriff Tanaka, and other top jail management -- who continue to minimize the pervasiveness of deputy violence, to suppress the evidence of deputy violence, and to malign the deputies’ accusers, even as the reign of terror in the jails continues. We look forward to the release next month of the commission’s final report; with findings by a blue-ribbon panel staffed by many of the finest law firms in the country, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for the sheriff to dismiss the deputies’ accusers as lacking in credibility.
Margaret Winter and Peter Eliasberg are two of the lead counsel for Plaintiffs in Rosas v. Baca; Ms. Winter testified in front of the Jail Commission.

By Allie Bohm, ACLU Nationwide
It’s been over a year since 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 public records requests with state and local law enforcement agencies seeking information about their policies, procedures, and practices for tracking cell phones. And 13 months later (and in the wake of this front page article in the New York Times), we’re still handling responses. We’ve posted the latest batch of documents received on our interactive webmap; here are highlights:
Some law enforcement agencies are trying to avoid letting the public know what they’re doing. The law enforcement guide for police in Irvine, CA specifically states, “Do not disclose this information in court any more than is absolutely necessary to make your case. Never disclose to the media these techniques—especially cell tower tracking.” We saw the same attitude in training materials from the Iowa Fusion Center, which instructs law enforcement, “Do not mention to the public or media the use of cell phone technology or equipment to locate the targeted subject.” Read: “We would hate for the public to know how easy it is for us to obtain their personal information. It would be inconvenient if they asked for privacy protections.” Law enforcement could most likely solve more crimes more expediently if they could break down a suspect’s front door or open his/her postal mail without a warrant, but as my colleague Catherine Crump points out, while that may be convenient, it is not okay. Warrantless cell phone location tracking shouldn’t be either.
Fortunately, Irvine’s isn’t the only word on advice to law enforcement agents. Santa Ana, CA provides its agents with much more civil liberties-friendly training than its neighbor to the south, and its warnings should serve any law enforcement agency: “Without a warrant . . . cell phone location data are released only in exigent situations. Exigent circumstances are best described as immediate danger of death or serious bodily injury to any person. Keep in mind that even if you convince a provider that the circumstances warrant release of the information, a district attorney and defense attorney will at some point be reviewing the case.”
More importantly, some of the law enforcement agencies in California, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, reported that, like their counterparts in parts of Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, and New Jersey, they always obtain probable cause warrants in order to track cell phone location information. And then there’s the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, which does not currently track cell phone location information, but which promised that if it starts sometime in the future, it will definitely require probable cause warrants in order to do so. We hope other law enforcement agencies will make similar commitments. Location information is too sensitive for law enforcement agencies to be accessing it in criminal investigations without a warrant, and these agencies show that in every geographic region in the country, a warrant requirement is a completely reasonable and workable policy. And by the way, the law enforcement agency in Nevada that reports obtaining warrants? Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. If Sin City police get warrants, can’t everyone?
The new documents also touch on one of the most common questions we’ve been asked about cell phone location tracking: in what sorts of investigations are law enforcement agencies using cell phone location tracking? It’s a question that 5,509 pages later we still wish we had a better answer to and that, despite our records requests, the public is still largely in the dark about. San Bernadino County, CA sent us a ton of invoices from a one year period. (Any number-crunchers out there want to figure out how much money they spent to track cell phones that year? The documents are here.) “Okay to pay narcotics” was scrawled on some of the invoices. Others were marked “Okay to pay [redacted].” From this, we can surmise that cell phone location tracking is used in drug cases (no surprise to anyone who has been following the few location tracking cases to make it to the courts). Either they redacted “narcotics” on some invoices and not others, or they redacted other types of investigations where cell phone tracking was used, and someone out there does not want us to know what all they’re using cell phone location tracking for.
Overall, these new documents provide even more reason for Congress to pass the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act, which would require law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant in order to access location information and, in the interim, for state legislatures to pass similar legislation at the state level. That way, we’ll know that law enforcement is only tracking cell phone location in legitimate investigations and with proper court oversight. And, you can help! Head to our action center and tell your members of Congress to support the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act right now.