Probation Dept. Biased, Suit Charges : Courts: Plaintiffs say agency shortchanges low-income residents in five urban areas.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Wednesday charging that the Los Angeles County Probation Department provides inadequate service to low-income neighborhoods and discriminates against African American probation officers through segregated job assignments and denial of promotions.

The shortage of services means that more young people are turning to lives of long-term crime that will come back to haunt the entire community, according to Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, a plaintiff in the suit.

“These young people can’t be thrown away. They’ll come back to haunt you,” Hicks said.

In five urban core areas, where the level of crime and the need for probation officers are high, the department provides fewer services than it does in less-troubled neighborhoods, according to the suit, filed on behalf of a coalition of African American community groups, churches and probation officers.

“The department’s way of allocating resources forces its urban core field offices to handle more complex and demanding cases without appropriate levels of staff and resources that are available to the outlying offices,” Legal Defense Fund attorney Constance Rice said.

The suit says that of 56 anti-gang specialists, only four are assigned to the five offices in question. Other than that, however, it contains few numbers to back its contention that some neighborhoods are being shortchanged. Rice acknowledged that much of the suit’s information on that issue is based on interviews with probation officers and their clients.

The suit contends that the department has a policy of “failing to refer for diversion (a non-penal treatment and counseling program) urban core juveniles who commit offenses for which juveniles in outlying communities receive diversion.”

Fred Williams, director of the Common Ground Foundation, an advocacy group for Watts-area juveniles that is also a plaintiff, said the department is effectively denying minority juveniles a wide range of services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, crisis resolution and vocational training.

The suit also contends that because of procedures designed to relieve overworked probation officers, the department is in effect “releasing disproportionately large numbers of essentially unsupervised persons convicted of serious felonies into urban core communities.”

Barry J. Nidorf, chief county probation officer, made a general denial of the charges, but said he could not comment in detail because he had not read the lawsuit.

“Our resources are allocated by formula,” Nidorf said, contending that the deputies in the five offices may actually benefit from special programs designed to reduce workloads.

“The reality is the department is terribly understaffed,” Nidorf said. “Three-fourths of our caseload is supervised by deputies who have 1,000 cases each.” He said the department’s current budget is about $300 million, $25 million less than needed to maintain the same level of service provided last year.

But Adam Green, a spokesman for Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, another plaintiff, charged that the Probation Department, like other government agencies, is divesting itself of responsibilities in Los Angeles’ low-income neighborhoods.

The five offices in question--Centinela, Crenshaw, Firestone, the Kenyon Justice Center and South-Central--serve the part of Los Angeles County described by demographers as the “inner urban poverty core.”

The area consists of 105 square miles and has a population of 1.6 million, 92% of whom are minority--62% Latino, 22% African American and 8% Asian American. Although the area includes only 18% of the county’s residents, it includes 38% of the county’s poor.

The suit employs the novel tactic of bringing in two South-Central Los Angeles churches as plaintiffs. The churches contend that their members are being unlawfully denied an equal opportunity for probationary services and that the churches are thus forced to divert resources “in order to counsel and comfort affected families and individuals.” The plaintiff churches are Holman United Methodist and Faith United Methodist.

The suit seeks to compel the county to operate its field office programs in a more equitable manner and to institute an affirmative program with goals and timetables designed to eliminate “the effect of past discrimination” in work assignments and promotions.

On the job discrimination issue, Legal Defense Fund attorney Bill Lann Lee said, “African American probation officers are locked into more stressful and underfunded detention facilities and urban core field offices.”

Although African Americans make up 50% of the department’s officers, they constitute 88% of the officers in the five urban core offices that have the heaviest and most demanding caseloads, according to the suit. Only 38% of the department’s managers and supervisors are African American, while whites, who make up 28% of the department, have 44% of the managerial and supervisorial jobs, the suit alleges.