Probation Department Announces Reforms

Acknowledging that his department’s supervision of troubled youths placed in group homes has failed at nearly every level, Los Angeles County’s probation director unveiled a host of reforms Thursday that he said were needed to ensure the safety of the youths and the communities in which they are placed.

Acting Probation Director Walter J. Kelly outlined the long list of improvements in a detailed report Thursday, saying many of them should have been initiated years, even decades, ago.

But, Kelly conceded, it took two “equally tragic incidents” before the department launched a systemic review of how it places youths in group homes.

One, he said, was the slaying of 12-year-old Rodney Haynes on Aug. 27, one week after the Probation Department placed him in the Passageway group home in Calabasas. The other was an incident less than a week later in which a youth sent to the Mid-Valley group home in Van Nuys was allowed to leave on a weekend pass, when he allegedly killed his teenage girlfriend.

Shortcomings in the system helped make both incidents possible and are being fixed, Kelly said Thursday at an impromptu news conference called by Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky.

“We frankly were not looking quickly enough at changes that were needed,” Kelly said. “This report signals that we are not going to be doing business as usual.”

Haynes’ death especially highlighted significant shortcomings in the system, according to the review. Some of those problems may have inadvertently contributed to Haynes’ death, Kelly conceded.

Haynes snuck out of the Passageway home for troubled teenagers on the night of Aug. 26 with two boys, ages 16 and 17. Several hours later, he was found in a trash bin, apparently beaten to death with a rock.

The two boys--much larger and stronger than Haynes--have told authorities they killed Haynes because he was annoying them--a statement confirmed by the Probation Department report. The accused have pleaded innocent, and prosecutors are seeking to have them tried as adults because of the brutality of the crime and other factors.

Haynes was put in danger, Kelly said, because a probation placement officer did not have the proper information about the backgrounds of the other five youths already living at the home.

Although Kelly would not discuss the criminal histories of the other youths at the home, citing confidentiality issues, he said that had a probation placement officer known all the facts, the officer “probably would have” not allowed Haynes to be sent there.

“We had no system at that time where he could get information about the other kids in that home . . . that that minor would not have fit into that group home,” Kelly said.

The report Kelly released Thursday said Haynes died a “brutal” death; he was punched in the face 10 to 15 times, kicked 34 times and hit with a rock seven times.

The report also said Passageway had no “night supervision,” which allowed Haynes and the two older youths to sneak out “unnoticed and unreported” so they could steal alcohol and cigarettes from a local liquor store.

Passageway Administrator Paul Arnold said Thursday that none of the other five youths in the home had anything in their backgrounds that would have precluded the Probation Department from sending Haynes there. He also said the group that operates Passageway and four other group homes had a roving night person that went from facility to facility, even though the county required no nighttime supervision.

The Probation Department is responsible for overseeing more than 6,000 troubled youths with criminal histories. It places them in detention centers, youth camps and group home facilities like Passageway, which are designed to provide teens with more normal, and even family-like, settings.

Some of the major changes include:

* A computerized database that will allow probation officials to access profiles of each youth and each residential facility, to make sure the home has the appropriate services and residents of roughly the same age and background. Kelly said the department uses the same bulky, inefficient and potentially dangerous assessment and placement process it did when the concept of probation was introduced in California in 1903--paper files that must be passed from one place to another and cannot be shared.

* Much more oversight of the youths, including requirements that probation officers take them to the residential homes and inspect them personally. The department will be spending an additional $945,000 this year to ensure that each juvenile probation officer has a caseload of no more than 50 youths, half of what they would have handled under the current budget.

It will also require that the homes post someone around the clock to prevent nighttime escapes such as the one that allegedly led to Haynes’ slaying.

* The department will make every effort not to send violent offenders to group homes that also accept more vulnerable abused and neglected children sent there by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

Probation officials also will significantly clamp down on issuing weekend passes like the one that allegedly allowed a 17-year-old with a long criminal history to kill his girlfriend during a fight, Kelly said. That youth has been charged with murder, but has pleaded innocent.

In addition, the department will create a hotline that people can call with complaints about group homes and youths living in them, and will establish an ombudsman to bring complaints and problems directly to Kelly, the report said.

And in an effort to defuse a potentially explosive controversy, the department said it will hold a series of community meetings in areas that currently have group homes, and when it is considering allowing such a home to operate in a particular area.

In the wake of the Haynes case, county officials were accosted by irate neighbors, who said the often undisclosed existence of such homes in residential areas threatened the safety of them and their children.

At the news conference, Yaroslavsky acknowledged that the county needs to do a far better job of involving communities in such decisions, even if it is the state government that is responsible for licensing and certifying such homes.

Kelly, who recently took over when longtime Director Barry J. Nidorf retired, said he had planned to initiate some reforms over the next 18 months. But, he added, public and political pressure necessitated getting them launched within the next few weeks and months.

He said in the report that many more changes could be proposed. “We do not take lightly the tragic events which led to the issues detailed in this report,” it concludes, “and this is only the start of a continuing process.”