Mayor Villaraigosa puts prop 13 on the table. Bill aims to overturn California Supreme Court decision and require cops to get warrants before searching arrestees’ cell phones. Policing 2.0. Pelican Bay Prison (re)visited. Could you have a missing twin?
Mayor Villaraigosa puts Proposition 13 on the table
On Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa embraced the third rail issue of Proposition 13. Prop. 13 was introduced in 1978, with the original intention to serve as tax protection for homeowners. However, due to loopholes and exceptions, commercial property owners ended up benefitting most from the legislation. Villaraigosa said, “Prop. 13 was never intended to be a corporate tax give-away, but that is what it has become.” The Mayor states that increasing taxes on commercial properties could bring in up to $8 billion, and that such capital should be split evenly to fund public schools and decrease property taxes for homeowners. He also floated the ideas of decreasing or doing away with some business taxes to combat the anticipated backlash from anti-tax groups and business owners, as well as introducing a service tax to level the playing field for all businesses. But is this sound and fury signifying nothing? Is this simply a political stunt from an unpopular mayor? Will Governor Jerry Brown in Sacramento rally behind the issue, or hope it fades away?
Guests:
Lenny Goldberg, Executive Director, California Tax Reform Association
Jon Coupal, President of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
Kirk Stark, Professor of Law at UCLA; expert on tax policy and public finance who has written extensively on Proposition 13
Bill would allow cops to search cell phones
As technology continues to play a larger role in making our daily lives easier, so too can it be used against us. Recently, the California Supreme Court ruled it legal for police to search someone’s phone upon arrest, including texts and e-mails, without a warrant. Up until this decision, warrantless searches only applied to clothing and miscellaneous items such as cigarette packs, as both are routinely used to hide drugs. Law enforcement cite the need to gather evidence as a reason for the searches; in the case that led to the Supreme Court decision, an arrestee pleaded guilty after police showed him an incriminating text on his own phone. Sen. Mark Leno, an opponent of this practice, has introduced SB 914 which would require a warrant before cell phones could be searched. The bill has passed the Senate and is now being finalized by committee before facing a vote in the Assembly. Could obtaining a warrant negatively affect law enforcement’s handling of a crime? Is perusing a person’s cell phone an invasion of privacy? If the bill passes, is Governor Jerry Brown likely to sign it into law?
Guests:
Peter Scheer, Executive Director, First Amendment Coalition, one of the primary sponsor’s of Sen. Mark Leno’s Mobile Device Privacy bill SB 914
Jacqueline Lacey, Chief Deputy for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office
LAPD eyes data-driven ‘predictive’ policing strategy
Santa Cruz police spend an average of 40 minutes of every hour on emergency calls, leaving them with 20 minutes to patrol the streets. For the past few weeks, some have been using computer mapping systems to help them determine where to best spend the little time they have left. The program’s success has drawn notice from the LAPD, whose officers hope the technology will save time and money in scheduling patrols and preventing crime.
In law enforcement circles, the catchphrase for the futuristic tool is “predictive policing.“ Police departments have been providing years of historic crime data to mathematicians, who've created algorithms to analyze and determine crime patterns. The results are predictions of where and when similar crimes are likely to occur.
Zach Friend, a crime analyst for the Santa Cruz Police Department, says the crime-fighting system is modeled on methods for predicting earthquake aftershocks. The tool comes from Santa Clara University Professor George Mohler who believes crimes follow similar patterns. Friend, who helped to launch the program in Santa Cruz, says the system works because crimes tend to occur in time and place-based patterns. Santa Cruz officials became interested in the program after the success of a similar pilot by the LAPD.
“You have a crime and there will be after-crimes that occur after that,” said Friend. The technology, he says, has helped Santa Cruz prevent crimes before they happen. Thus far his department has focused on burglaries and vehicle theft.
In L.A., LAPD Captain Sean Malinowski says he'd like to push the envelope further; and next year use the technology to predict violent crimes. Each morning officers using the program enter crime reports into the system, which is already packed with eight years worth of data. The program then predicts 10 potential crime hot spots.
Malinowski says the technology represents a vast improvement to what the department currently uses.
“The instruments we are using seem blunt now, in terms of the kind of specificity we can get with data analysis,” he says. Malinowski says he believes the computer model helps to remove biases.
Police in Santa Cruz say they have seen real results from the program’s predictions, which often result in arrests or crime prevention. However, Marjorie Cohn, professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, says she is concerned about the consequences of predictive policing.
“It's very worrisome to me. By directing police patrols towards these locations, [police] can harass, detain or arrest people more efficiently,” she says. “In certain neighborhoods people run from police even if they've done nothing wrong, and that's because of past harassments."
Malinowski says they are addressing such concerns. His plan includes consultations with civil rights groups to ensure communities will not be targeted unfairly. He also says L.A.’s predictive crime pilot program will be highly scientific, and include a controlled environment and test site to measure the program's success.
Stanford Law professor Robert Weisberg says there's still work to be done, “We are we are a zillion miles way from having enough data and analysis to evaluate just how well it works.”
Even so, the results have already convinced Friend. He is adamant predictive policing is the future, or at least part of it.
“It will be [the future] for a number of reasons. [Police] staffing is down, yet we still need to patrol the same amount of ground. This costs us nothing. And there is no huge downside,” he says.
Guests:
Zach Friend, Crime Analyst, Santa Cruz Police Department
Sean Malinowski, Police Captain, Commanding Officer, Foothill Patrol Division, Los Angeles Police Department; Principal Investigator on the National Institute of Justice funded “Los Angeles Predictive Policing Planning Project”
Marjorie Cohn, Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of law; Co-Author, "Cameras in the Courtroom: Television & the Pursuit of Justice"
George Tita, Criminologist, University of California at Irvine
Calif. prison officials let reporters tour Pelican Bay supermax prison
On Wednesday KPCC’s Julie Small goes on an unprecedented media tour of Pelican Bay State Prison near the Oregon border.
The SuperMax prison holds the “worst of the worst” of California’s inmates. Last month, some of those prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest conditions in isolation units.
Inmates in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Units, known as “the SHU,” spend 23 hours a day in their cells and one hour in a concrete exercise yard with a small opening to the sky. Inmates say the only thing worse than the isolation is that prison officials can keep inmates in the SHU indefinitely.
To protest that practice, Pelican Bay inmates last month launched what became the largest hunger strike in California prisons in a decade. The inmates ended the hunger strike after three weeks when prison officials said they’d review policies on putting inmates in solitary confinement. Corrections also agreed to give inmates in the SHU wall calendars, warmer winter caps and access to some educational courses.
During the hunger strike, KPCC filed three requests to visit Pelican Bay inmates. Corrections officials said no at first, but have since agreed to a visit to the toughest prison in California.
Guest:
Julie Small, KPCC's State Capital Reporter
Could you have a missing twin...or be someone else's?
Stories of babies being switched at birth are typically confined to tabloids or fairy tales, but it is very real for identical twins Anna and Bella, who were separated after being born. In Dr. Nancy L. Segal’s book Someone Else’s Twin: The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth, she explores the accounts of Anna and Bella, who were reunited after twenty eight years apart. Segal, a twin herself and an expert in twin psychology, brings her own personal and scientific knowledge to Anna and Bella’s experience, as well as several other cases of twins and non-twins switched at birth. How does a twin’s presence or absence affect the other? Can a biological mother tell if a child is really her own? What are the legal ramifications of babies being switched in the hospital ward?
Guest:
Dr. Nancy L. Segal, Ph.D., author of Someone Else’s Twin: The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth and professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University, Fullerton