The Brief

Sixty-six probation officers have been put on administrative leave for internal affairs investigations into allegations of misconduct since the beginning of the year, the L.A. County Probation Department announced Monday.

Of those officers, more than half were put on leave for general misconduct, which includes a suspected use of excessive force, child endangerment or abuse, possession of contraband, and negligent supervision, the department added.

“We are releasing this information in the spirit of greater transparency and to assure our stakeholders — especially the families of youths in our juvenile facilities — that we will not tolerate anything that impedes our mission to provide a safe, nurturing and structured environment for those entrusted to our care,” chief Guillermo Viera Rosa said in a statement.

What we know so far

The people placed on leave were assigned to both adult and juvenile facilities, and some of the allegations of official misconduct were at county juvenile facilities.

Eighteen were put on leave for suspected sexual misconduct, and nine were for arrests unrelated to their employment, according to the department.

Another 39 were for general misconduct issues, including 14 officers related to youth-on-youth violence at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. Those cases are being investigated by the California attorney general while the department’s Internal Affairs unit is restructured.

Viera Rosa said in a statement that the officers on leave represent a small minority of the department’s nearly 2,800 sworn staff.

“It is out of respect for the majority of our officers, who perform their duties each day with integrity, that we moved quickly on these cases,” he said in a statement. “It’s not right that the majority should be tarnished by the misconduct of a few. We will not tolerate anything that is an affront to our mission and a disgrace to the important work we do.”

Last year, L.A. County transferred nearly 300 incarcerated youths to Los Padrinos after a state agency found that juvenile detention facilities in Sylmar and near downtown L.A. were unsuitable. The board voted in April to keep Los Padrinos open.

Some of the facilities, including Los Padrinos, have been troubled with lockdowns, escapes, and other issues over the past year. It has also come under scrutiny based on accusations that the county failed to meet safety, staffing and other requirements imposed by the state. In January, eight officers were placed on leave for allegedly allowing fighting among the young detainees.

The department in a statement to LAist said "The Department has no further comment as these matters are under investigation."

Bad Bunny has fans the world over. One of them apparently is Gov. Gavin Newsom.

On Saturday, Newsom posted on social media proclaiming today, Super Bowl Sunday, as "Bad Bunny Day" in California in a rather tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top tweet written in all caps.

"AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF 'THE SPANISH'... THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS 'BAD BUNNY DAY' WHEN BAD BUNNY PERFORMS AT THE BIG GAME IN THE GOLDEN STATE WITH HIS SOOTHING, BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND HIS VERY NICE LOOKS," reads the message tweeted out through Newsom's office.

For months, the governor's social media team has been adopting the manners and tone of President Trump's signature style.

 "Obviously in this case, the governor is making light of the President's criticisms of  Bad Bunny performing during today's Super Bowl halftime show," said Chris Micheli, an adjunct professor of law at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, as well as the author of a number of textbooks on California state government.

So, is the proclamation for real?

To answer that question, let's take a detour into the state proclamation process.

"The governor has a wide authority on proclamations," said Micheli, who also works as a lobbyist for groups like the California Manufacturers & Technology Association.

Proclamations generally fall into two categories, he said. One is official actions, such as states of emergency in the case of disasters, to direct resources for relief. The second is proclamations that are ceremonial and commemorative in nature, where the governor may designate a specific day, week or a period of time to recognize a person or an event — like Black History Month or Ronald Reagan Day.

The Bad Bunny Day proclamation, Micheli said, falls in the second category. But, he added, proclamations are signed by the governor and attested by the Secretary of State in written declarations. As such, it's easy to interpret the Bad Bunny Day tweet as done in jest.

Here's what the Governor told LAist

"The Governor declared Bad Bunny Day via tweet. Enjoy!" The governor's office told us in an email seeking confirmation on Sunday.

Micheli said that means the governor would likely follow up with an official written declaration.

Here's the thing with ceremonial proclamations, though. Micheli said they need to be re-upped every year by the governor — they don't automatically renew.

So yes, let's celebrate Bad Bunny Day on this Super Bowl Sunday. Let's hope to do it again next year, and the years after.

Puerto Rican superstar, Bad Bunny, made history at the 2026 Grammy Awards when he became the first artist to win album of the year for a Spanish-language project, with him winning for his album Debí Tirar Más Fotos. In addition to the top prize, Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took home the award for the best música urbana album and best global music performance for his song "EoO".

In his acceptance remarks, and not unlike other moments throughout his career, the artist used the spotlight to express his political views.

"Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out," Bad Bunny said during his acceptance speech for best música urbana album. "We're not savages, we're not animals, we're not aliens — we're humans and we are Americans," he added in response to the ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the country.

The crowd in Los Angeles, largely met his statements with applause and ovation.

But this Sunday, Bad Bunny will meet a larger and potentially more politically divided audience at the Super Bowl, where he is set to headline this year's halftime show. Since late September when the NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced their invitation to Bad Bunny, many took to social media to voice their indignation at the choice to platform an artist who has only released music in Spanish.

To learn more about Bad Bunny's political history and what we might expect at the Super Bowl, Morning Edition host A Martinez spoke with Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, who chairs the American Studies Department at Wellesley College and the co-author, alongside Vanessa Díaz, of the new book, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. The two academics are also behind the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an online teaching resource based on Puerto Rican history and Bad Bunny's meteoric rise since 2016.

Below are three takeaways from the conversation.

Students come for Bad Bunny and stay for the history 

Rivera-Rideau teaches "Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón" at Wellesley and said the course uses Bad Bunny's work as a hook to get students into the seminar.

"But we really actually spend most of our time talking about Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican history is part of U.S. history," she said. "And Bad Bunny music has consistently made references to this history."

Rivera-Rideau pointed to an example from 2018 when Bad Bunny debuted on a U.S. mainstream English language television show, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The artist opened with a critique of the Trump administration's handling of Hurricane Maria, which had devastated his island in 2017.

"After one year of the hurricane, there's still people without electricity in their homes. More than 3,000 people died and Trump is still in denial," Martínez Ocasio said.

Latinos remain "perpetually foreign" to some

Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens — but this has not always protected them from being caught in recent ICE operations.

"I think part of that has to do with the kind of racialization of Spanish and the racialization of Latino communities of which Puerto Ricans are a part," she said. "And I think what it indicates is that, to me, Latinos in the United States, many of whom have been here for generations, are often understood to be perpetually foreign as a group of people that just does not belong."

The Party is the Protest 

Rivera-Rideau said if Apple Music's trailer for the Super Bowl halftime show — which features Bad Bunny dancing with a group representing a smattering of ages, faces and abilities — is any indication of what audiences can expect on Sunday's stage, the theme might be joy in the face of a difficult moment for immigrants and Latinos in the U.S.

"One of the things we talk about in our book is that Bad Bunny is part of resistance, he does engage in protests but it's often through joy," she said. "We have a chapter in our book called 'The Party is the Protest' and I actually feel like that's what I expect at the Superbowl, a party and a protest.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The Super Bowl, to someone who a) grew up in the UK, and b) doesn’t really get football, is a strange experience.

Of course, I’m talking American football, not English football, by the way. If England gets into the World Cup quarter final you might find me at 7 a.m. in a pub in Santa Monica drinking a nice cup of tea and cheering the TV.

The Super Bowl is a national cultural event, and there’s so much excitement running up to it, yet when it happens, the thing that everyone is fixated on is the thing you’re least interested in. As in, the football — the men with padded shoulders who pile into a heap. I mean, I get the ones in the middle are doing something, but the ones at the edges are just for show, right?

All the running and the throwing and the tackling … well that just gets in the way of all the entertainment.

OK, OK, I’m kidding. I do get excited when a halfback grabs the ball and starts up the field, elbowing people out of the way, but even that can get a bit wearing when it happens over and over again. Just let the guy get to where he wants to go already!

And that’s where the Super Bowl is ideal. It comes with ready prepared breaks in the action, so there’s no chance to get bored. There’s the commercials. Over the years, some of them have been so great, like that one with the kid and the Force, and that Eminem Detroit one.

Some, not so much. That’s where I do my armchair critiquing. “Well I hoped they paid him a whole boatload of money for that one, his credibility’s down the toilet,” or, “Oh come on, ad agency, for a million dollars per millisecond, that’s all you can come up with?”

But it’s the hope, the desire, that this moment you’ll be blown out of your chair. Wait, that sounds a lot like watching football. Hmm.

Then there’s the half time show, which I always watch. “Call me when it starts!” I yell at my family as I walk out to do some very important laundry folding. As the music begins, I rush back in. Lady Gaga, Beyonce and now … Bad Bunny. As I watch pure perfection, I keep telling myself, they’re doing it live, in front of a billion people. They are not missing a damn note. Or step. Except that left shark. Hell, even the Weeknd won me over eventually.

And then there’s the last quarter. I make sure I watch that. It’s the psychodrama of it all. The looks on the coach’s faces as they chew their gum, serious, determined. The fans, holding their breath. The commentators asking Tom Brady what it was like when he was doing it. And then.. the whistle blows. And one half of the stadium is ecstatic, giddy with delight, while the other half stares into the abyss. It's a Shakespearean tragedy come to life. For all the commercials and the music, this really is the can’t miss part, which brings me back year after year. Go Patriots! Go Seahawks! Let the game begin.

Super Bowl halftime shows are always a big deal. But to many in Los Angeles and beyond, Bad Bunny's performance marks a particularly important cultural — and political — moment.

On Sunday, fans are gathering at bars and house parties to bear witness to the event at so-called Benito Bowl viewing parties all across the Southland.

"We're going through a lot of heaviness here in our community with ICE [and] people disappearing. It's sad, we're angry," said Bianca Ramirez, LAist's director of operations and a longtime fan of the Puerto Rican superstar.

In the face of continual crackdown, she said, resistance will take the form of pride and joy on Sunday. It'd be the first time the halftime show will be performed entirely in Spanish by a headliner.

 " This is definitely unprecedented," Ramirez said.

Just a week before taking the Super Bowl stage, Bad Bunny notched another first, winning album of the year at the Grammys for the Spanish-language DeBí Tirar Más Fotos.

LAist's Bianca Ramirez with her Bad Bunny plushie.

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Bianca Ramirez

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LAist

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"[It]  was such a proud moment for our Latino community, not [just] here in Los Angeles, but around the world," Ramirez said, characterizing the album as one of the artist's most political to date. "He dives into gentrification and making sure that we protect Puerto Rico and its roots. He does criticize the Trump administration a lot in that album."

DeBí Tirar Más Fotos also won Best Música Urbana album.

"Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out," the artist, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, said as he accepted that award.

Later today, Ramirez is heading to a Benito Bowl — one of many gatherings held by Bad Bunny fans across the Southland. In her case, it's a backyard hang with childhood friends to celebrate a history-making concert "where these two other football teams so happen to be playing at the same time."

Ramirez has her fingers crossed that the performance includes the song that first got her hooked.

"Hopefully he surprises us with Cardi B [and] he plays I like it," she said. "Bring it full circle for me as a fan."

No matter what, it's an iconic day.

"It's just gonna be a moment for us to hang out and celebrate Latinidad and just [the] proudness that Bad Bunny brings to our communities and beyond," she said.

Benito Bowls happening on Sunday

• Boyle Heights

  Brooklyn Ave Pizza Co.
  2706 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave., Los Angeles
  

• Costa Mesa

  Sevilla Nightclub
  1870 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa
  Doors open at 2 p.m.

• Downtown L.A. historic core

  Hide Tide
  605 E. 4th St., Los Angeles
  Doors open at 2 p.m.

• Long Beach

  The Q
  5321 Long Beach Blvd., Long Beach
  Doors open at 3:30 p.m.

• Mid City

  Sueños Social Club
  5259 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles
  Doors open at 4 p.m.