The Brief

A Los Angeles County program that trains formerly incarcerated people for firefighting careers recently launched its first all-female cohort.

Seventeen women are participating in the job training program, which will certify them to work in fire service jobs while providing on-site room and board, as well as support services.

The group held an open house Monday at the Los Angeles County Training Center in Calabasas, where these cadets will live and train for the next eight months.

Laquisha Johnson, who began her training last month, said she’s grateful for the camaraderie.

“It is a male-dominated field, so it's good that it is an all-female cohort because then there's other women who are like-minded,” she told LAist.

County leaders praised the women for taking on a dangerous role.

“These 17 trailblazing Angelenos are not only breaking barriers — they’re setting a new standard for what leadership, grit and public service look like,” L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said in a statement.

Incarcerated women from Malibu's Conservation Camp No. 13 were invited to celebrate the launch of an all-female cohort of the county's firefighter training program.

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David Franco

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Los Angeles County

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What is the firefighter training program?

L.A County launched the program last year with two goals in mind: to bolster the county’s fire defenses and to give formerly incarcerated people with firefighting experience more opportunity to work in fire departments.

People held in state prison have been part of California’s firefighting force for more than a century. Over 1,800 incarcerated firefighters currently live in minimum-security conservation camps known as “fire camps” across California, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Members of those fire camps help fight wildland fires by clearing brush and cutting fire lines.

“Historically, it's not unusual for individuals to be incarcerated and to essentially fight fires, but there weren't many paths for them to careers after that,” said Songhai Armstead, director of the county’s Justice Care and Opportunities Department.

The training program allows people who have been incarcerated to take their firefighting careers to the next level, county officials said, training and certifying them to fight wildland fires, battle structure fires and perform emergency medical care.

The county helps those who complete the training apply for full-time jobs.

About a dozen cadets graduated from its inaugural, all-male cohort last fall, about half of those who began the training program. All but a few of those graduates are now working for Cal Fire, Armstead said.

The department transformed Camp David Gonzalez, a former juvenile detention facility in Calabasas, into a residential firefighter training center.

Four members of L.A. County's Justice Care and Opportunities Department's first all-female firefighter training cohort.

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David Franco

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Los Angeles County

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Who are the cadets?

The cohort of 17 cadets moved into the training site in March. Most fought fires in fire camps while in custody as adults or juveniles.

In addition to formerly incarcerated people, the program also prioritizes applicants who left foster care or the military. Applicants must be over 18, have no convictions for sex crimes or arson, and pass a physical test and drug test.

Johnson, who said she's in her early 30s, worked as a firefighter more than an decade ago when she was incarcerated as a young adult.

For more than two years, she worked alongside nine other incarcerated women at a fire station in Madera County. More recently, she’s volunteered for Sister Warriors, doing policy advocacy work for incarcerated firefighters.

“I would love to train with men, but I think it's only 9% women actually in the fire service,” said Johnson. “So to have a program like this, we get to show like, ‘Hey, we're interested too, and we want to be a part of it.”

Johnson said her goal is to work on an L.A. County fire engine crew.

Elizabeth Melendez, 45, also has experience fighting fires while incarcerated nearly a decade ago. She saw one of her fellow crew members die during a Malibu brushfire in 2016.

“It's a very dangerous job,” said Melendez. “But still, the life that I was living was dangerous. So me doing this to help and save people, I realized that I still want to do this even if it's risking my life.”

Melendez said she heard about an all-women fire center training cohort and jumped at the opportunity. Her goal is to work for Cal Fire.

“ I wanted something where I could give back to the community as opposed to in my past taking,” she said.

Get involved

The county is accepting applications for next year’s cohort, both men and women. You can find more information online.

Learn more about other resources offered by L.A. County’s Justice Care and Opportunities Department on its website.

A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups on Thursday sued five of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies to halt further development, alleging the tech giants can’t prevent their own creations from causing “catastrophic” harm.

The lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court follows a midterm election that could bring a moment of reckoning for the fast-moving AI industry, as Democrats who won back control of Congress stress the need to regulate the technology.

The filing, first reported on by The Associated Press, asks a judge to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing or deploying new AI models, pointing to documented examples of cyberattacks and other harmful actions by AI systems and the companies’ own alarming acknowledgments that their technology has the potential to someday destroy humanity.

“No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products — much less ones that could kill us all — as inevitable,” reads the complaint from the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and the Alliance for Secure AI. “Plaintiffs bring this suit to stop Defendants from continuing their unlawful path to disaster.”

The AI industry has generated excitement and stock market gains, but also deep fears that the technology could go rogue and escape human control. Recent incidents of AI agents hacking government websites and companies — including when OpenAI’s ChatGPT hacked into another AI company on its own in July — have accelerated those concerns.

President Donald Trump, a proponent of rapid AI development to keep the U.S. ahead of foreign competitors like China, has so far encouraged the companies to police themselves on matters of safety, though he has expressed openness to more guardrails. Congress also has stopped short of regulating the technology, but that may change with its Democratic takeover.

Some CEOs of major AI companies, meanwhile, have voiced support for slowing development of the technology to give safety measures a chance to catch up. They also haven’t held back in recognizing the risks. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, for example, last year said he thinks there’s a 1 in 4 chance AI’s future goes “really, really badly,” compared with a 3 in 4 chance it goes well. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, told Fox News in 2023 that AI could lead to “civilization destruction.”

The plaintiffs, all nonprofits, allege that the companies named in the lawsuit have violated a California unfair competition law by endangering public health and interfering with the use of property such as computer systems. They claim they’ve had to divert resources away from other planned work to address the acute harms threatened by each of the companies’ advancing AI models.

They also warn that the companies’ goals of creating AI systems that are broadly as smart as humans and can increasingly manage tasks and learn things autonomously could result in a permanent loss of control of the technology and heighten existential risks to humanity.

The companies named in Thursday’s lawsuit didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

What does it mean to rebuild your life, friendships and community after a disaster?

For Palisades Fire survivors, it means everything.

Many people had to leave their neighborhoods, where 6,837 structures were destroyed, while they work to rebuild their homes.

They’ve also had to work at forging new friendships and connections.

Friends in unexpected places

Workers gather near the foundation where the Zetlin home stood after it was destroyed in the Palisades Fire.

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Barry Zetlin

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Who is considered a friend?

For Barry Zetlin, it’s not only the people he’s known his whole life or who were his neighbors. It’s also the people who have helped him and his wife, Andrea Zetlin, after the Palisades Fire.

“They are my architects, my contractor,” he said. “Maybe I spent an hour with them a week, a couple of hours a month. Yet, when I'm with them, they feel like friends because we're working together and we feel for each other.”

The Zetlins had been living in Playa Vista as they rebuilt their home in the Palisades. By the end of October, Zetlin and his wife are one step closer to moving in. Their new home is surrounded by empty lots and homes under construction. They will be the first house on their block to be completed.

The Zetlin home before the Palisades Fire.

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Courtesy of Barry and Andrea Zetlin

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Barry Zetlin is excited to return to the Palisades in a newly rebuilt home.

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David Rodriguez

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LAist

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The avid readers and book collectors are excited to return to the area and move into their new home with custom bookshelves.

Zetlin shared with LAist a short story he wrote in a writing group with other fire survivors about what new friends meant to him as they were rebuilding their home.

Share your story

With the second anniversary of the L.A. fires approaching, we still want to hear from survivors because we know everyone who was affected has a story to tell. So: What does it look and feel like rebuilding your life after the disaster?

Some of you have shared how you felt a deep connection with gardens or trees that survived on your lots. We’ve heard from current and former renters who want to return home.

Share your story and photos using the form below, and we may include them in an upcoming article. (We won’t publish anything you share without your permission.)

Building a community

Kathy Katims and her family lived in the Pacific Palisades for about three decades, most recently in a blufftop house they bought in 2023.

After the fire destroyed the house and displaced the Katimses and their neighbors, the community's dispersal was the hardest thing for Kathy Katims. Longtime friends moved to other parts of Southern California or out of state. The Katimses have moved a couple of times too.

Today they’re living in Venice while the home on the bluff is rebuilt.

They’re also rebuilding community.

“A lot of our community is not here,” said Katims, who invited neighbors over for a game night. “We wanted to really reach out and try to make some community.”

Kathy Katims, bottom left, joined a group of neighbors in Venice to play Paddle Tennis.

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Kathy Katims

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She also found a community playing paddle tennis. That experience was a relief from the rebuilding process, which many survivors say feels like a second job.

“I was focused on the ball and movement, and I let go of a lot of things like worrying,” she said.

Katims also runs writing groups through Saved By a Story, including groups specifically for fire survivors, where Barry Zetlin is also a participant.

She has a word of advice for fire survivors that has brought her joy.

“Be bold,” she said.

The attorney who uncovered the Orange County jailhouse informant scandal is arguing in new court filings that an investigation into the Long Beach Police Department shows “shocking deficiencies” with the oversight of paid civilian jailhouse informants that could implicate hundreds of criminal cases in Los Angeles County.

The internal investigation found a veteran homicide detective allowed a civilian jailhouse informant to remove his GPS tracking ankle monitor, in violation of a court order, during the 2015 Christmas holiday and then lied about it to authorities. According to internal investigators, that raised questions about why he was allowed to remove the monitor. And defense attorney Scott Sanders says the decision to not follow through with a wider inquiry casts doubt on the informant system as a whole.

Sanders would know; he’s the attorney who uncovered the Orange County jailhouse informant scandal in 2014. A subsequent Department of Justice investigation into the practice found the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department violated the 14th Amendment by not disclosing information that could have benefited criminal defendants.

If that’s the case in L.A. County, it’s unclear how many criminal cases could be affected. In Orange County, more than 60 cases were compromised as a result of the informant evidence.

Sanders has argued in previous court motions that the Long Beach Police Department hid information about an officer who arrested his client, Lonnie Jacobs, and, in doing so, violated his rights to a fair trial established by the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland.

In a Nov. 10 filing supporting his motion to dismiss the drug charges against Jacobs, Sanders argues the internal investigation further demonstrates that the Long Beach Police Department cannot be trusted to turn over damaging information about its officers.

The investigation exposed “shocking deficiencies” with the oversight of paid civilian jailhouse informants operating throughout Los Angeles County, “including the absence of standardized operational guidelines, inadequate coordination and recordkeeping among participating law enforcement agencies, and insufficient supervision of informants,” Sanders wrote.

Rather than fully investigate the scope of these problems, Sanders argues the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and Long Beach Police Department limited their investigation to the narrow misconduct of a single officer and informant and downplayed the findings to avoid compromising prosecutions.

The Long Beach Police Department did not respond to emailed questions from LAist in time for publication. A statement from the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office said, "District Attorney Hochman has full confidence in the lawful use of Perkins operations based on the policies we have put in place."

The Long Beach Police North Station in March 2025.

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Megan Garvey

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LAist

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What are Perkins agents?

The use of what’s known as Perkins informants has faced growing questions in California recently. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in the 1990 case Illinois v. Perkins that undercover law enforcement officers don’t need to give Miranda warnings to incarcerated suspects before questioning them in a jail cell. Perkins operations can also use civilians working for law enforcement, as was the case in Long Beach.

Some judges and defense attorneys call the practice coercive — citing threats and other tactics — and say it could be used to solicit inaccurate information. They also criticize the practice for disproportionately targeting Black and Latino defendants.

Earlier this year, the California 4th District Court of Appeal overturned a conviction after finding a Perkins informant violated the defendant’s rights by essentially staging a surreptitious, coercive interrogation after he had asked for an attorney.

Several counts of misconduct were filed by the Long Beach Police Department — including one violation of state penal code for violating a court order — against veteran homicide detective Hugo Cortes in 2016 over his handling of jailhouse informants. He retired before discipline was finalized, but the department found his conduct so egregious it recommended he be terminated. No criminal charges were ever brought against Cortes.

Cortes could not be reached for comment.

According to court documents and other records, the informant at the center of the internal affairs investigation, Cortes and other officers told investigators about several gaps in the oversight and supervision of civilian jailhouse informants.

After an informant helped solve a 2012 quintuple homicide, the department started using them with greater frequency, according to a memo from the Long Beach police leadership included in the investigative files. Cortes told investigators that no one trained him on the tactic and the department used existing policy on confidential informants as guidance, according to the memo.

“We learned as we go,” Cortes said.

Cortes told investigators he paid informants in cash with no reliable paper trail.

“Every time you put (an informant) in a jail cell with somebody, you owe him a thousand dollars. If I put him in with two defendants, I owe him two thousand dollars,” another officer, whose name is redacted in the files, said. The officer was unable to locate payment records for certain periods.

Cortes became the department go-to for jailhouse informants. “There is no doubt that Detective Cortes has brought this agency to the forefront of Perkins Operations usage,” the statement added.

How the Long Beach informant case unfolded

Sometime in late December 2015, someone from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office called a Long Beach officer to report that “a Perkins agent who was on special release by the court and supposed to be under 24-hour monitoring via GPS bracelet, was out of custody and had committed a crime in another city and was being investigated.”

That call kicked off the internal affairs investigation, the files for which were posted on the Long Beach Police Department website in 2022.

The informant at the center of the investigation had been living in the jail at the Long Beach Police Station for a year when, in October 2015, he struck a plea deal to be released home on a GPS monitor under 24-hour surveillance.

The plea deal states the informant “will plead guilty” to shooting at an occupied vehicle and will “admit the truth of two prior burglary convictions.”

The agreement carried a sentence of nine years in state prison, but gave the option to serve that sentence out under house arrest while under 24/7 electronic monitoring. The agreement required the informant to cooperate with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, Long Beach and “any other law enforcement agency”.

During the course of the internal affairs investigation, the informant said he had worked cases with police departments in Hawthorne, Inglewood and National City in San Diego County.

The terms of the deal are clear: The informant “may only leave his residence under the direct supervision and monitoring of law enforcement.” He was only allowed to leave to assist law enforcement with criminal investigations, to attend court for his own case or for medical appointments or a “bona fide emergency situation.” He was supposed to be in “the custody and control” of law enforcement while assisting in criminal investigations.

The internal affairs investigation would show the informant was without his monitor and unsupervised for several days in December 2015 “for no lawful purpose, in violation of the confidential informant’s court-ordered residential arrest plea agreement.”

According to a summary of the investigation, the informant was not wearing the GPS monitor when he went to a midnight movie on Christmas Day and got into a fight.

“Witnesses to the incident said (the informant) was intoxicated and started the fight with two subjects then fled,” according to the investigation summary.

The District Attorney’s Office called Long Beach police days later to ask about the incident. Initially, prosecutors were planning to investigate on their own, but later told Long Beach they could start their own investigation.

Long Beach police investigators wanted to know if Cortes had given the informant Christmas off, or permission to stop wearing the GPS monitor while he wasn’t actively working for law enforcement.

Internal affairs investigators found Cortes had sent misleading emails to the company that monitored the GPS devices for Long Beach about the informant’s whereabouts.

When investigators questioned Cortes about the emails, he said they did not reflect what he had meant to say, according to a summary of those interviews.

The informant told investigators neither Cortes nor anybody else had given him permission to go off the monitor.

When investigators told him his handlers were supposed to pick him up from home and drive him to and from the police station for operations so that he remained under supervision, he said that never happened.

The informant “said he has done 200 operations since 2013 and since the beginning; there has been nothing in writing governing the way the operations were conducted,” according to a summary of his interview.

The informant said he was “held to a different standard” because his work with law enforcement showed he could be trusted.

The informant told investigators that he sometimes had to explain the process to detectives that he worked with.

“This is all new to everyone. Not Perkins per se, but the fact that you have a confidential informant who does the volume of work that I do and the type of work that I do,” he said.

Cortes told investigators he at one point knew the informant was off his monitor because he was on “stand by” and needed to be ready to be placed in a jail cell on short notice.

Cortes also told investigators it was not his responsibility to make sure the informant got his monitor reattached, according to transcripts.

James Trott, an attorney representing Cortes in the investigative process, raised similar concerns with the Perkins system and stated there are no rules or regulations in place for handling informants.

“My pet peeve is the departments love these guys,” Trott said. “I’ll just deal with this guy, they love this guy. He gets all kinds of good juice for them. Look who you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with the devil.”

Before he retired, Cortes was removed from all criminal investigations, records show.

The findings letter sent to Cortes informed him the investigation determined he violated California Penal Code by disobeying a court order.

Cortes waived his right to a hearing to challenge the findings, but told the department he would write a letter responding to the case. The department had not received a response letter as of Jan. 11, 2017, and no such letter is included in the internal investigations file.

It appears no charges were ever filed against Cortes, and a deputy L.A. County district attorney said their office had not received a request to open a criminal investigation, according to the investigative summary.

The informant was put back into custody.

Then-Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna, now in his second term as Los Angeles County sheriff, signed the investigative report and, in a handwritten note at the bottom, instructed the department to look into the case and “identify any/all gaps in these kinds of operations to prevent them in the future.”

LAist emailed questions to Luna and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Luna didn’t respond, but in an unsigned statement, the sheriff’s department said that in March 2018, it incorporated policies and guidelines for the use of confidential sources during law enforcement operations. The statement added that the department “conducts such operations in accordance with applicable laws and legal standards.”

Far-reaching consequences

In 2014, Sanders, the defense attorney, began requesting evidentiary hearings about the jailhouse informant program in Orange County, including the use of Perkins informants.

The evidence that surfaced over three years and several hearings led the court to remove the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from the case and to take the death penalty off the table for Scott Dekraai, the Seal Beach shooter whom Sanders was representing at the time.

A lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed.

In the Nov. 10 court filing, Sanders argues the Orange County scandal should have prompted the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and local police departments to take a hard look at their own jailhouse informant programs.

According to Sanders, the Cortes investigation, which began in 2015, shows that didn’t happen.

An April 6, 2016, letter from the District Attorney’s Office informed Cortes he would be added to the office’s Brady alert system — which is meant to track potentially damaging information about officers who testify in court — because he was the subject of an internal affairs investigation.

The District Attorney’s Office also sent Brady notices to two defendants who had been convicted in a murder case investigated by Cortes in May 2016.

Sanders argues both descriptions by the District Attorney’s Office vastly understate what really happened.

The investigation revealed major, systemic problems with Perkins operations throughout L.A. County, Sanders wrote in his most recent filing, but the notifications don’t mention those findings at all. Instead, they focus narrowly on Cortes’ misconduct, Sanders added.

He argues those findings should have prompted significant investigations and disclosures, not just about conduct by Cortes and this specific informant, but about the countywide Perkins system in general.

It’s unclear if any of these steps were taken.

Authorities have identified two of the three women killed when the driver of a minivan crashed outside a Los Angeles metro station this week.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner identified the women as Teodora Villalobos, 57, and Maria Peck, 73. Both were killed on the sidewalk Tuesday by blunt force injuries, the medical examiner’s office said.

Authorities did not immediately release the identity of the third victim, pending the notification of family, the medical examiner’s office said in an email on Thursday.

Peck and Villalobos were food vendors in Los Angeles’ North Hollywood neighborhood who were killed when the minivan plowed into a busy intersection during the height of the evening commute. Friends and family members built a memorial to the women, who were widely known for selling hot dogs and other street food, by leaving flower bouquets, notes, photos and candles on the sidewalk where they were struck.

Police arrested the driver, 61-year-old Ihor Demianenko, for investigation of driving under the influence and three counts of murder. His bail was set at $6 million. It was not immediately known when he would appear in court.

Melissa Villalobos told KABC-TV that her mother worked hard and tried to help those in her community.

“When she sold here, if people didn’t have money to pay for the food, she would still give food to those who didn’t have anything,” she said.

Peck worked as a vendor for more than a decade six days a week, even on holidays, according to a GoFundMe page set up to support her family. The page said Peck found joy in being part of the community and didn’t want to scale back her hours even as she aged.