The Brief

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors Tuesday approved a $700,000 settlement with LAist correspondent Josie Huang, who was arrested and injured by sheriff’s deputies while covering a 2020 protest in Lynwood. The settlement includes a requirement that the L.A. County Sheriff's Department re-train deputies on the rights of journalists.

In a legal claim against the county, Huang alleged deputies detained her without legal justification and used unjustified force because she was gathering news in a public place, according to the settlement.

Huang’s arrest drew widespread criticism from elected leaders and journalism organizations at the time. Deputies had claimed she interfered with their arrest of a protester. The district attorney’s office refused to file charges and a judge later found her factually innocent.

“This settlement upholds the rights of journalists and helps ensure that what happened to me won’t happen to other reporters,” Huang said in a statement. “My arrest was traumatic, but I hope that some good can still come of this experience.”

The settlement includes two mandated reforms at the sheriff’s department:

• A requirement that the LASD provide deputies with watch briefings on press rights before patrol assignments, like protests, in which they are likely to come into contact with members of the news media
• A requirement that the LASD issue written guidance to all employees on the law and policies governing their interactions with members of the news media.

Those laws include SB98, which protects journalists’ rights to cover demonstrations. Its passage was spurred in part by Huang’s arrest.

Supervisor Hilda Solis, who in 2021 introduced a motion in support of the state bill, said in a statement on Tuesday that she "was grateful that the bill was eventually signed into law in 2021 by Governor Gavin Newsom and that members of the press have more safeguards to continue to cover critical stories for our communities.”

Settlement 'sends a strong message'

“This settlement sends a strong message and, importantly, holds officials accountable for what happened to our client,” said Katie Townsend, deputy executive director and legal director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which represented Huang, along with the law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.

Townsend said it would help prevent unlawful arrests of journalists in the future.

Susan Seager, a UC Irvine law professor who specializes in press freedom, called the settlement “a huge win,” but was skeptical the reforms would change the behavior of deputies.

“I’m just cynical about the deputies out in the field treating reporters any differently than they have in the past,” said Seager, who has represented journalists in court. “I see settlement of lawsuits handled by the county counsel’s office and I don’t know how much the sheriff’s department really takes it to heart.”

Of the training, she said, “I’d like to see how good it is.”

The LASD issued a statement that did not directly address the settlement.

"There was a thorough internal investigation into this incident and the appropriate administrative action was taken," the department said. "We understand the role of the media during newsworthy events and make every effort to accommodate them with a designated press area and appropriate access."

County Supervisor Kathryn Barger issued a statement after she voted to approve the settlement.

“Reporters have rights that undeniably must be protected, and our County has processes in place to ensure members of the press are protected and supported," she said. "I am hopeful that this settlement brings some sense of closure to Ms. Huang and the press community at large.”

Will the settlement change police behavior?

UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz has written about how large monetary payouts in police misconduct cases don’t always lead to changes in police behavior. In her writing, she notes the amounts are often small compared to a county’s overall budget.

But she said the Huang settlement may be different.

“It's a somewhat unique case,” she said. “When it comes to using force against reporters, it seems like a pretty bright line for the department to draw that this is not the right conduct to engage in.”

At the same time, law enforcement abuse of journalists in L.A. is not uncommon, said Adam Rose, who is press rights chair at the Los Angeles Press Club.

“While most police-press interactions are pretty routine, our region's two biggest agencies (LASD and LAPD) have disturbing legacies of abusing press rights,” he said. “This is just one moment from decades of well-documented misconduct.”

Rose said he knew of at least nine lawsuits filed by L.A. journalists against LASD or LAPD for police brutality since 2020, the year George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police and street protests exploded.

Huang’s settlement is one of the largest in the nation to an individual reporter whose rights were violated while covering the 2020 protests.

In settling the case, the county admitted no wrongdoing.

“I would like to see some acknowledgement of wrongdoing — not just money,” said Christina Bellantoni, director of USC Annenberg’s Media Center. “It's so important that young journalists learning how to do this aren’t worried they are going to be violently hurt when doing their job.”

Huang echoed the sentiment in her statement, albeit for all journalists.

“Journalists in Los Angeles County should be able to record police activity in public without fear of unlawful arrest,” she said. “As the public’s eyes and ears, we must be able to cover protests and document how law enforcement responds to those protests.”

In a statement, LAist Executive Editor Megan Garvey praised Huang's focus on press freedoms.

"From the time Josie was released from jail, her top concern was doing everything she could to make sure what happened to her didn't happen to another journalist doing their job," Garvey said. "And that started in the car ride home, when we were able to start looking through what she'd recorded on her phone during the arrest."

Details of the 2020 incident

Huang, an award-winning journalist, was leaving a news conference by then-Sheriff Alex Villanueva when she started using her phone to film a group of deputies arresting a protester. A deputy ordered her to back away.

“Without giving her time to comply, deputies aggressively tackled Huang to the ground, causing her injury,” according to a statement from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Huang suffered multiple injuries, including scrapes and bruises to her knees, ankle and face, as well as emotional distress.

In a draft complaint, her lawyers wrote that “the force used was wildly out of proportion to that needed to effectuate the arrest of Ms. Huang, who, at 5’5 and 122 lbs., was far smaller than the multiple deputies who tackled her, posed no physical threat, and had not committed any crime.”

Huang’s phone fell to the ground. Two deputies stepped on it. The phone survived and was recovered by a fellow journalist. It documented much of what happened.

“Law enforcement tried to destroy evidence rather than preserve it,” said Michael Dore of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher. “And then the former sheriff made false claims about Ms. Huang’s reporting work that the evidence refuted.”

Among other things, Villanueva said Huang never identified herself as a reporter. Huang’s video captures her shouting that she is a reporter. She was also wearing a lanyard with her press credential.

But the department continued to tweet false statements about Huang.

“LASD’s false Twitter posts were retweeted thousands of times, prompting a flood of racist and misogynistic slurs and threats directed at Ms. Huang and her family,” the draft complaint states.

A memo to the board of supervisors from the county’s litigation cost manager recommending approval of the settlement contained only the deputies’ account of what happened. The memo said the deputies involved were retrained, but makes no mention of discipline, which typically is confidential.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday accused President Donald Trump of placing him on a political “hit list” and directing federal investigators to go on a “fishing expedition” for a crime it could use to indict him.

The Democratic governor declared that the president was targeting him not for his “mean tweets,” but because Newsom is considering a run for president in 2028.

“In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” Newsom said in the video. “Not because they found a crime, but because they simply are trying to find one.”

Newsom stated that he was “proud” to join Trump’s so-called “enemies list” that has also included former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice presidential candidate.

The governor claimed that federal agents were demanding records and “abusing the grand jury process” by “digging through years and years of random documents.” Neither the governor nor first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom have received subpoenas yet, Newsom’s office said, but he “looks forward” to receiving them.

His office said federal agents have contacted friends, former employees, business associates, donors, and organizations connected to the Newsoms but did not specify further.

The accusations first came in a fiery video statement released Monday, but provided no concrete evidence that the president had orchestrated such a probe and did not identify any of the associated groups or people he said the Justice Department was looking into.

“You can subpoena my records. You can investigate me. You can harass me. Put my name on any and every enemies list that you have,” Newsom said. “But leave my wife and family out of your personal vendetta!”

The White House referred questions about Newsom’s comments to the Department of Justice. A Department of Justice spokesperson did not immediately respond.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A year ago, California officials had to report under a new state law how they used automated systems to make important decisions about people’s lives.

They said they never did — a startling answer for a number of reasons, sources told CalMatters at the time, including that there were several prominent examples to the contrary.

Now, the state has issued a more expansive answer: It is currently using six automated systems to make consequential decisions about the lives of Californians.

The systems are used to do things like:

• Predict whether incarcerated people will re-offend 
• Evaluate whether unemployment claims are fraudulent
• Remotely administer exams for California State University students 
• Detect when college students use generative AI to write assignments.

That's according to a report released Friday by the state's technology department. The report is required under a 2023 law mandating that that state agencies annually disclose their use of “high-risk automated decision systems,” which the law defines as systems “used to assist or replace human discretionary decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect, including decisions that materially impact access to, or approval for, housing or accommodations, education, employment, credit, health care, and criminal justice.”

The law was pushed by civil rights, privacy, and civil liberties groups concerned about harms from AI-like systems. Numerous such systems have been shown to produce results biased against marginalized groups, including those used for high-stakes testing, predicting recidivism, and detecting AI-generated texts.

CalMatters flagged last year’s report as surprising, noting that the state corrections department had reported using software to predict post-release behavior and that the employment department used a fraud detection system that paused benefits for 600,000 Californians between Christmas and New Years in 2020, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report.

Though the report names six high-risk systems in use today, state agencies have used some for several years now. Those include COMPAS, which has been used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to assign recidivism scores to inmates for at least a decade.

The technology department said in the report that it found more systems for its report this year because it evaluated responses from state agencies more thoroughly, including by meeting with agencies and questioning them about their systems.

In addition to the six high-risk systems, the department’s report disclosed an additional six systems initially flagged as high risk but later determined not to be. One was AI used for legislative bill analysis by the California Department of Finance.

The report also notes two high-risk systems that are not currently in use: the Department of Cannabis Control is developing artificial intelligence to analyze whether marijuana packaging violates a law against appealing to children and California State University discontinued use of a language model for reviewing job applications.

Results of the second annual survey come after cities like San Jose and San Francisco released their first AI inventories in recent months. They also come at a time when California-based AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are going public and seeking government contracts. Americans are split on whether they trust AI and surveys last year by TechEquity and Carnegie California found that the majority of Californians want safety over innovation. A Gallup poll to evaluate the opinions of Americans found similar results.

Senate Bill 1248, a bill that would have prohibited state employees from using automated decision systems as the sole basis for decisionmaking, was killed last month in the state’s rapid-fire appropriations process.

What’s missing

While the newly-released report shares more information than last year’s, several questions remain about the state’s use of artificial intelligence and other automated systems.

The report does not include generative AI pilot projects underway with support from the governor’s office to do things like help businesses file taxes, support state employees who work on homelessness, and an AI assistant named Poppy that uses language models like Anthropic’s Claude to do things like draft documents, research policy, or build custom AI tools, according to a state website. The website says that 67 state departments provided input during the pilot phase and statewide rollout of Poppy begins next month.

A California State University contract with OpenAI to provide a version of ChatGPT is also not mentioned, though surveys of AI use in educational settings have found that the technology can do more harm than good.

The 2023 law mandating the annual high-risk systems report excludes reporting by a number of state agencies, including the judicial branch and the University of California college system. Reporting by CalMatters last month found that a majority of the roughly 60 courts that operate statewide have adopted generative AI use policies. Courts in Los Angeles and Riverside counties have begun testing an AI tool to act as a clerk, drafting orders and producing research memos.

CalMatters is compiling an inventory of automated decisionmaking systems in use by state and local agencies throughout California in order to provide transparency into how governments are using decisionmaking systems and AI. Know about an AI system in use by a state or local agency? Email khari@calmatters.org.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

An estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees burned as the 2020 Dome Fire swept through 43,000 acres of the Cima Dome in the Mojave Desert. Scientists feared the damage extended far beyond the trees, reaching into the underground networks of fungi that help sustain desert ecosystems.

Instead, fungi are thriving underground.

That finding — published in a peer-reviewed study in the journal Fire Ecology — is important because the fungi extend the reach of Joshua trees’ root systems, helping them survive harsh desert conditions. Without the fungi, the desert plants would struggle even more than they already are to recover from the fire.

“Even though things die, there are always plants and microbes that will take advantage of the fire and will really bloom after them,” said Sydney Glassman, a fungal ecologist at UC Riverside and the lead author of the study. “So it’s not all doom and gloom."

Two weeks after the Dome Fire was contained in August 2020, Glassman and a team of researchers collected samples from burned and unburned areas around the Cima Dome volcanic structure east of Baker. The area is home to one of the densest Joshua tree forests in the world. The team collected soil samples near Eastern Joshua trees to assess the fire’s effect on fungal communities. The samples were frozen, processed for DNA extraction, and later sequenced to identify which organisms were present.

Over the next three years, researchers returned to the sites five times, focusing on measuring the amount of the symbiotic fungi and bacteria that live within Joshua tree roots.

They found a fungal system that remained largely intact.

“In this case, other plants survived — like cacti, or different kinds of desert forbs, or other yuccas — so they were maintaining the soil microbial community,” Glassman said.

Sydney Glassman of UC Riverside collects samples of fungi in the Mojave National Preserve.

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Lynn Sweet

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UC Riverside

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These fungi help plants absorb water and nutrients from the soil, while also protecting against pathogens and environmental stressors such as drought.

Experts think that the fungal networks remained resilient partly due to the sparseness of the Mojave, where Joshua trees are spread far apart.

“There’s not really a lot of ground cover in between them, so the fire moves really fast,” Glassman said, meaning the heat did little damage to the soil.

But efforts to restore Joshua trees have seen little success so far. Seedlings face a multitude of threats, including pack rats and increasing temperatures, Glassman said.

“The seedling has to get growing and survive first,” Glassman said. “And then once it’s growing, then it definitely requires these fungi, and those can help them tolerate drought and survive.”

This image shows what's known as an arbuscule, a fungal structure, from an Eastern Joshua tree's root.

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Arik Joukhajian

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UC Riverside

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By 2100, Joshua trees are projected to lose up to 80% of their habitat if greenhouse gas emissions continue increasing. Amid concerns about climate change, experts said that the new study provided insight into how Joshua trees may fare in a hotter world.

Brendan Cummings, conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Joshua trees face increasing fire and drought risk as human-caused climate change accelerates.

“If we do everything necessary to save the Joshua tree, we will also be saving the broader desert ecosystem,” said Cummings, who has worked on Joshua tree conservation.

Glassman said her research will continue. She hopes to understand the traits of bacteria and fungi that survive fires, and how they're doing it.

Ohio State University evolutionary ecologist Alison Bennett said future research could investigate whether soil fungi play a role in improving the germination and growth of Joshua tree seedlings. However, Bennett noted that challenges in procuring Joshua tree seedlings and waiting for them to reach maturity over decades could make such research difficult.

“There are other aspects of restoration and looking at soil microbiology that need to be built more, and I feel like this paper lays a good foundation for a lot of that future work,” said Andrew Kaiser, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who was not involved in the study.

California lawmakers are expected to adopt a $356 billion state budget today that would largely avoid or delay billions of dollars in social service cuts Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed last month.

Then, the (real) budget negotiations can begin.

Today’s vote is only a formality, because lawmakers are constitutionally required to pass a balanced budget by June 15 each year to continue collecting their pay. They have until the end of the month to strike a deal with Newsom before the new fiscal year starts July 1.

In the next two weeks, legislators will have to settle their differences with Newsom on health care cuts, funding for schools and homelessness and more.

Here are five takeaways from the Legislature’s spending plan:

Punt and soften healthcare cuts

Faced with federal funding cuts under the tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed last year, Newsom proposed several measures to limit healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants as well as refugees, asylees and human trafficking survivors.

Top legislative Democrats want to delay those cuts by a year while looking for alternatives to soften the impact.

Newsom also wants to raise the monthly Medi-Cal premium undocumented immigrants pay from $30 to $50. But lawmakers prefer waiting him out, proposing to leave the decision to the next governor.

“I don’t think it’s about Gavin Newsom,” said Sen. John Laird, a Santa Cruz Democrat who chairs the budget committee. “It’s really about trying to stretch as far as we can in the hope that we don’t have to make those cuts.”

The Legislature rebuked Newsom’s proposal to reinstate stringent Medi-Cal asset tests for seniors and adults with disabilities by July, instead pitching a less restrictive limit to take effect in fiscal year 2027-28. With bipartisan support, the lawmakers also rejected Newsom’s proposed cuts to the In-Home Supportive Services program.

They did, however, agree to Newsom’s plan to spend $300 million to subsidize private healthcare for low-income Californians.

Restoring some child care, TK-12 money

Democratic lawmakers want to add 22,000 state-funded child care slots over the next few years. They also rejected Newsom’s proposed reduction of 6,800 state-supported spaces due to declining federal and state funding.

The new slots would prioritize children ages 3 and under. Advocates who applauded the proposal say it would address a gap left unfilled by Newsom’s transitional kindergarten expansion to reach 4-year-olds.

Banking on a rosier revenue forecast, state lawmakers proposed $2.7 billion more in funding for TK-12 schools and community colleges than Newsom did in May.

Schools and educators were hoping for more. They wanted the Legislature to reject Newsom’s proposal to withhold $3.9 billion in constitutionally guaranteed school money — an accounting mechanism to prevent overpaying schools in case the projected revenue doesn’t materialize.

“We demand that the Legislature and the governor follow the law, stop with the gimmicks and the shell games, and fully fund our schools,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association. “Our union is prepared to do whatever it takes to hold them accountable if they don’t. Our students deserve no less.”

More generous with counties

The Legislature’s spending plan would give counties more money to step up eligibility checks for Californians applying for food stamps and health care benefits, reviews that are now required under Trump’s spending bill.

It would also allocate $125 million to help counties reestablish indigent care — a program serving low-income Californians that largely went away under Obamacare.

State lawmakers also want to set aside $900 million for the state’s homelessness fund, whereas Newsom included just $500 million in his proposal.

More revenue, please

Newsom proposed three new tax measures and lawmakers are on board with them:

• Applying a sales tax on most company software, like Slack and Microsoft Suites
• Capping tax credits big corporations claim
• Extending a tax on Medi-Cal health providers, which the state has relied on to qualify for more federal funding.  

The proposals come at a time when California voters have rejected most local tax initiatives during the June primary. But Newsom’s proposals require no voter approval — just the support of two-thirds of each legislative chamber.

There’s still an appetite among lawmakers to make corporations pay up. Senate Democrats had proposed a monthly charge on big employers for having employees enrolled in Medi-Cal, but have now backed away from the plan, instead asking the next governor to pitch “fully viable options” next year.

Save more money for rainy days

There’s a consensus between the Legislature and the governor to raise the ceiling on the revenue the state can deposit into its rainy day fund. The question is how much. State leaders are constitutionally required to make deposits into the account each year, but the balance cannot exceed 10% of the state’s general fund tax revenue under current law.

Changing that amount would require voter approval. Lawmakers are considering placing a measure on the November ballot that would allow them to sock away more money for lean years. They have a tight deadline of June 25 to settle on what they want to put before voters.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.