For months, the Review Board investigating the alleged misconduct by the agents of the County Law cannot investigate the cases of young people who are seriously killed in the county custody.
Last week, the Review Board of the Citizens Law, or Clerb, closed six cases of thesis. All minors, none of Wham are identified by their name, have turned 18 and have sealed their records.
California’s law allows youth criminal records to be sealed by a judge when a person turns 18. The objective is to provide a clean board when they then request work, loans or homes.
But the defenders of young people, involved in justice, question whether confidentiality laws created to protect them should also supervise the monitoring investigations of the hamstrings.
“Too often, the laws of confidentiality, the only time I hear them invoked by the probation departments is when used to protect the probation departments of the accusations,” said Dan Macallair, executive director of the center on youth and criminal justice.
In January 2021, the San Diego County Supervisors Board gave Clerb the authority to investigate every time a person in custody suffers a great body injury. Before that, a complaint was required.
The Sheriff’s office complied with the new rule, said Paul Parker, Clerb executive officer at that time. But Parker, who resigned in March 2024, told San Diego Union Tribune that he fought to obtain reports from the department of probation.
Last October, the department provided the Clerb basic information on 28 major cases of body lesions that date back to 2021: the date of the incident, the location and a description of the letter of the injury that young people suffered.
Of the 28 cases, six worried injuries that occurred at the County Youth Transition Center in Kearny Mesa and 22 at the East Table Youth Detention Center at Otay Mesa.
The probation department defined “great bodily injury” such as “a significant or substantial physical injury that includes, among others, a body injury that implies a substantial risk of death, unconscious, prolonged and obvious disfiguration, member or organ,” said spokesman Chuck Westerheide to the tribune of La Unión.
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Westerheide said that cases did not necessarily imply an inappropriate use of force. Most likely, the injury occurred when a probation or officers officer tried to break a fight.
But without access to records, there is no way for the Supervision Board or the public to know.
Clerb ruled every “not sustained” complaint due to lack of evidence.
“According to the current law, there is no way for Clerb to obtain sealed youth records for use in their investigations,” the Board wrote. “
Clerb complaints about Mistconduct that involve probation officers are rare, but Clerb helmet load in the last two years shows an increase in complaints that vote for incidents in youth detention centers.
In March 2023, Clerb discovered that probation officers at the Youth Transition campus failed to perform appropriate security controls on which Alan Arguelles, 16, died of fentanyl overdose.
Last August, San Diego County agreed to pay $ 1.1 million to resolve a lawsuit for unfair death filed by his mother, Brenda.
The findings of the June 2023 Clerb show that a woman identified as “Veronica B” filed a complaint on behalf of his son, claiming that, although he was arrested at East Mesa, a probation office used blasphemies against him, he challenged the child to hit the blow hit the energetic blow.
The Board voted to maintain the discovery of blasphemies, but determined that there was not enough evidence to prove or demovize the other accusations.
Last May, the Board found that two probation officers used excessive force against a child with disability of the development housed on the youth transition campus.
An officer grabbed the child’s head and “broke it on the concrete floor,” said the summary of Clerb’s case. The summary mentioned that the officer no longer worked for the county.
Sharon Kalish, the child’s mother, filed the complaint with the Review Board. She testified that her son could not process what the officers told him.
“I don’t know any circumstance in which someone is good to do that to anyone, much less a minor of custody,” Kalish said.
And in October, the Board dismissed a case that involved another incident in East Mesa in part because the officials of the probation office refused to turn on the records.
A summary of the complaint claimed that a probation officer repeatedly wore word N and showed explicit films to children. He said that another officer had considered to document the violations, but not for fear of reprisals.
Until last year, Clerb had a permanent order, renewed every three years, with the Court of Children that allowed the Department of Probation to release records to the investigators.
“Because this court order existed, we could get what we wanted,” said Parker. He does not remember having any of the sealed cases.
At the beginning of last year, the county lawyer determined that the permanent order was not valid and, in the future, Clerb would need to present a request before the court for any case that involves a minor under probation supervision.
Executive officer Brett Kalina said that without the permanent court order, Clerb has had to present requests before the Court for records in each case. Until now, probation has not provided any, he said at the April 3 meeting.
“There has been a significant amount of time and effort on the part of the lawyer (legal) to reach this point, and we still don’t have a single page,” he said.
Even for cases where records house sealed, Clerb cannot obtain information.
Clerb’s legal advisor Ellen Gross, said at the month meeting that County lawyers “have presented numerous objections to requests for everything that has been required.”
“So we are children at a disadvantage, because we have no facts to better articulate the types of documents we will need,” he said. “So it is a long process. We are working very diligently.”
Because probation took more than three years to notify Clerb about the big cases of body injuries, the researchers are working against the clock, Gross said.
“One of the other greatest obstacles we have had, because the cases did not come from probation to two, sometimes three years after the (great body injury) … many of the cases have been sealed under youth law.”
Parker said that the duration of his mandate had advocated that the Board considered making evidence -based findings. He described the actions of the department of probation as “obstructive.”
“If probation does not provide the investigation of the duration of Clerb information, on many occasions that would result in the preponderance of evidence that supports the ‘sustained’ findings in opposition to the ‘non -substant’ findings that it has been doing.
Meredith Desutels, lawyer of the Youth Law Center, said that state regulations require probation departments to review and track the use of force in youth facilities. These records must exist separated from the records of the youth court and be available to Clerb, he said.
“If the probation department is compliant with state regulation, it would have songs, independence of the Youth’s Case File Records, for tracking and investigating uses of force, and tose records could not be with with hero’s Have Sealed Bone, Smvenile,” Suppl LENILE, “LENILE,” LY
Kalina said that Clerb was “exhausting all the roads” to obtain records, but did not respond when White was asked that the legal advisor of the review joints had asked a judge to review the relevant records.
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