April 22, 2010
SERVING LOS ANGELES COUNTY WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE
Vol. XXX, No. 1176
FACE OFF — (AP) An unidentified man is surrounded by a crowd during white supremacist group National Socialist Movement’s rally in downtown Los Angeles April 17. Hundreds of counter-protesters assembled to quash their message. The 500 counter-protesters held signs that read “Nazis: Get Out of Los Angeles” and “Racists Are Ignorant.” Five of the counterprotesters were arrested on suspicion of throwing items, police said. A shirtless man was seen being escorted to safety behind police lines by a plainclothes officer as counterprotesters punched him. Police Commander David Doan said a second man who crowd members believed was sympathetic with the white supremacists was also assaulted during the rally. Both received medical attention and were released.
FIRST COLUMN
L.A.’s Ex-Gangsters Trained to Go Against Gang Life BY CHRISTINA HOAG AP WRITER
(AP) — The phone rang around 2 a.m., waking Teeida Townsend. “My homie got killed,” the caller said. Townsend knew how the cycle plays out here in the gang heartland of South Los Angeles: a killing, a revenge shooting, and then another. He rushed to the crime scene. Gang members were growing agitated. Beyond the yellow police tape, the bullet-riddled body of their teenage homeboy lay beneath a white sheet. “ ‘We have to keep calm, we don’t want no retaliation, don’t pick up those guns,’ ” he remembered telling them. Townsend’s no cop. He’s an exCrip, and one of the ranks of former gang bangers known as “gang interventionists” who police have come to
rely on to ease tensions. But the recent felony convictions of several of them, and the case of another accused of ordering a hit on a detective, have undermined their credibility and proven an embarrassment to the city’s anti-gang office that has funded them. To bolster the program, officials are offering them training to help them walk the hazardous line between gangs and the police, without endangering themselves or others and without falling back into gang life. “It’s very difficult work to do and it takes a toll on the person,” said Guillermo Cespedes, director of the Mayor’s Office on Gang Reduction and Youth Development. “How to train professionals in that field is a challenge.”
See EX-GANGSTERS, page 8
AP Photo by REED SAXON
GANG INTERVENTION — In this photo taken Feb. 26, Aquil Basheer, left, of the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute greets a pedestrian, as he gives a tour, outside The Cottage bar where one of his intervention workers, Ronnie “Looney” Barron, was killed in a drive-by shooting on Feb. 7 in Los Angeles.
Photo by RICHARD VOGEL
Census Bureau Concerned About Head Count Problems BY HOPE YEN AP WRITER
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the U.S. Census nears its final stages, the government is preparing for possible debacles that could derail its $15 billion head count, from mass identity theft and lawsuits to homeowners who refuse to answer their doors. Census Bureau documents, obtained by The Associated Press, underscore the highly fragile nature of the high-stakes population count before the government dispatches some 700,000 temporary workers to visit homes, beginning in May. The preparedness efforts are not entirely new. Previous censuses had contingency plans in place, at least conceptually, and the Census Bureau has never failed to meet its constitutional mandate of delivering
population counts by Dec. 31 each decennial year. But this is the first time the Census has detailed — in 300 pages of internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act — specific risks to the once-adecade government count. It’s part of the bureau’s approach to handling threats that could undermine accuracy, omit large segments of the public, or add to already-ballooning costs. Many of the documents proved telling, even with portions redacted or withheld for security reasons. “Considering the volume of data that the Bureau of Census gathers during the census, some loss of confidential data is bound to occur,” one document bluntly states. Citing past missteps, such as the loss of work laptops by Census employees
in 2006, it details a rapid-response effort that includes notification of authorities, if appropriate, as well as free credit monitoring for potential identity theft victims. One document says the “No. 1 concern” could be a refusal by immigrants to participate. Placing a cap on costs if immigrants try to evade the count, the response plan notes that a Census worker will attempt to visit a home six times at most — or fewer, if a resident makes clear he won’t cooperate — before the worker questions neighbors to get the information. If that fails, the Census Bureau will statistically impute data based on characteristics of neighboring households. In 2000, imputation, a statistical method that was not part of See CENSUS, page 9
Benjamin Hooks, Legend, Dorothy Height, Civil Rights Boosted NAACP, Dead at 85 Activist, Dies at Age 98 BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Civil rights leader Benjamin L. Hooks, who shrugged off courtroom slurs as a young lawyer before earning a pioneering judgeship and reviving a flagging NAACP, died April 15 in Memphis, Tenn. He was 85. State Rep. Ulysses Jones, a member of the church where Hooks was pastor, said Hooks died at his home following a long illness. Hooks took over as the NAACP’s executive director at a time when the organization’s stature had diminished in 1977. Years removed from the civil rights battles of the 1960s, the group was $1 million in debt and its membership had shrunk to 200,000 members from nearly a half-million a decade earlier. By the time he left as executive director in 1992, the group had rebounded. Hooks’ inspiration to fight social injustice and bigotry stemmed from his experience guarding Italian prisoners of war while serving over-
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dorothy Height, who as longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women was the leading female voice of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, died April 20. She was 98. Height, who continued actively speaking out into her 90s, had been at Howard University Hospital for some time. As a teenager, Height marched in New York’s Times Square shouting, “Stop the lynching.” In the 1950s and ’60s, she was the leading woman helping Martin Luther King Jr. and other leading activists orchestrate the Civil Rights Movement. The late activist C. DeLores Tucker once called Height an icon to all African American women. “I call Rosa Parks the mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” Tucker said in 1997. “Dorothy Height is the queen.” Height became president of the National Council of Negro Women in
Benjamin Hooks
seas in the Army during World War II. Foreign prisoners were allowed to eat in “for whites only” restaurants while he was barred from them. When no law school in the South would admit him, he used the GI bill to attend DePaul University in Chicago, where he earned a law degree in 1948. He later opened his own law practice in his hometown of Memphis. See HOOKS, page 8
Dorothy Height
1957 and held the post until 1997, when she was 85. She remained chairman of the group. “I hope not to work this hard all the rest of my life,” she said at the time. “But whether it is the council, whether it is somewhere else, for the rest of my life, I will be working for equality, for justice, to eliminate racism, to build a better life for our families and our children.” See HEIGHT, page 8
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NEWS IN BRIEF THE SOUTHLAND Gates, L.A. Police Chief During 1992 Riot, Dies (AP) — Daryl F. Gates, the former Los Angeles police chief, died April 16 of bladder cancer at his Dana Point home. He was 83. Gates served as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department for 14 years beginning in 1978, an era of tumultuous change as America’s second-largest city faced a surge in well-armed gangs, a burgeoning illegal drug trade, and growing racial conflict. In 1982, Gates apologized for saying more blacks died than whites during the use of carotid chokeholds because “the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” He told a congressional committee chaired by then-Sen. Joseph Biden in 1990 that casual drug users should be shot. Gates’ career began to unravel with the March 3, 1991, See BRIEFS, page 4