Breaking News: Jerry Brown's 2009 Juvenile Injustice Report is out

Posted By CotoBlogzz

The good news is that California Attorney General Jerry Brown has just release d the Juvenile Justice in California 2009.  The bad news is that the report, while an interesting read, is produced at taxpayers expense, and not one politician will do anything different as a result of this report – an artifact of parasitic bureaucracies.

The report is intended to provide  insight into the juvenile justice process by reporting the number of arrests, referrals to probation departments, petitions filed, and dispositions for juveniles tried in juvenile and adult courts. Law enforcement agencies provides information on the number of arrests, and probation departments provided information on the types of offenses and administrative actions taken by juvenile and adult courts.

 And that is part of the problem.  The union has made it a point to make sure that management does not keep track of key operations indicators that would immediately show whether officers are doing their job or not. 

Not unlike the Los Angeles Central Jail where officers scanned fake bar codes to document that they were doing their job, when they were not.  Or the LAX PD officers being elsewhere, other than the airport, the Orange County Sheriff Investigator who filed false reports, or the numerous complaints about the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, systemic issues (major discrepancies in OCSD’s data traced to a system changeover) and 2q2010 data traced to a management changeover!

Consider that by statue, the state is supposed to audit the work performed by the OCSD to make sure the department complies with requirements outlined in contract between cities and the Orange County Board of Supervisors and contracted cities – so far, the county has no records of any audits!

Assuming that the data sent to the California Department of Justice is somewhat reliable, and that would be a stretch, some of the findings include:

In 2009, of the 151,274 arrests of males:

• Felony arrests accounted for 32.2 percent (48,693).
• Misdemeanor arrests accounted for 54.6 percent (82,537).
• Status arrests accounted for 13.3 percent (20,044).

In 2009, of the 53,422 arrests of females:

• Felony arrests accounted for 18.5 percent (9,862).
• Misdemeanor arrests accounted for 62.5 percent (33,414).
• Status arrests

In 2009:

• A greater percentage of whites were arrested for a misdemeanor (62.7 percent).
• A greater percentage of blacks were
• A greater percentage of whites were arrested for a felony drug offense (13.7 percent).
• A greater percentage of blacks were arrested for a felony violent offense (38.1 percent).Regardless of race/ethnic group, the smallest proportion of felony arrests were for drug offenses.

As interesting as the data may be, as mentioned before, not one politician will do anything different as a result of this report – an artifact of parasitic bureaucracies.  Compare this to a dictum in the business world about data:  If you are not going to do anything about it, do not even collect the data.  If you collect data, you better do something about!   When local communities have no idea of the reliability of the data under their own collective nose, how can you rely on the data published by the DOJ, for instance?