Day 1 for deputies: Go to jail
There have been two videos showing what looks like police brutality reported this month in LA:
The first showed an officer repeatedly punching a suspect in the face after a foot chase in Hollywood. View video here.
The second showed Police taser an unarmed student at least four times inside the UCLA library. View video here.
And here is where it all seems to get its start:.
Day 1 for deputies: Go to jail
By Robin Fields and Stuart Pfeifer, Times Staff Writers
November 25, 2006
DEPUTY Norma Silva leads a line of inmates down a long corridor.
The air smells stale. Sunlight slants through the window slits above her head, drawing hash marks on the concrete floor in front of her.
Silva has put in almost two years at North County Correctional Facility, a massive 3,400-bed jail in Castaic. She barely needs a backward glance to catch her charges flashing gang hand signals.
"Keep looking forward, gentlemen," she says, not breaking stride. "No talking. Hands in your pockets."
Like almost everyone else who joins the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Silva aspires to be a cop, not a jailer. But so far, jailer is her role.
All new L.A. County deputies start their careers this way. Plunged into a strange, predatory world, they endure conditions most of them never conceived of before joining the force.
Deputies have been punched, slashed, spit on and "gassed" — doused with urine, feces or blood — by inmates. They are exposed to squalor and disease. In recent years, they have had to work so much overtime that a miniature trailer park has sprung up in the jail's parking lot, where about a dozen officers sleep on any given day.
Sheriff's executives say this harsh initiation gives rookies a graduate education in criminal behavior, molding them into streetwise, poised police.
"It is truly the foundation of being a good cop," Assistant Sheriff Paul Tanaka said. "When you get out on the street, you are far better prepared than if you just graduated from the academy."
Yet agency watchdogs have long feared that the jail environment is so corrosive that it is liable, as county special counsel James G. Kolts wrote in a 1992 report, to "turn any young, inexperienced man or woman into a cynical authoritarian ready to harass, intimidate, bully and physically punish any person who does not immediately follow orders."Read entire article online at: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-deputies25nov25,1,1384671.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage
For a more in depth look at police brutality see my essay here.
Another good article from The Christian Science Monitor can be found here.
