Accord Reached on Spending Justice Funds

A year after a new criminal justice block grant program took effect, city and county officials have finally agreed how to spend the $43 million in federal funds.

With much fanfare, the local officials announced Monday what they called a historic arrangement allowing them to overcome years of often bitter political and law enforcement rivalries and work together in spending the money.

Critics, however, questioned why the leaders spent so much time boasting about the new spending plan at a news conference outside the county courthouse.

“It should never have taken us this long [to agree on how to spend the money],” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, chairwoman of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “It’s kind of amazing for us to be doing so much touting about working together when the taxpayers should have been able to count on us doing that all along, especially when it comes to delivering public safety.”

The federal and state governments, which required the city and county to work together to get the new two-year block grant, had deemed for it to be put in place as early as Oct. 1, 1996, county officials conceded Monday.

But county and city officials won’t lose any of the money because they have until Sept. 30, 1998, to spend it all, said Robert Mimura, executive director of the Countywide Criminal Justice Coordination Committee.

Some of the money will be used to repay other city and county funding sources that were used to pay for anti-gang efforts this year, in anticipation of the federal grant.

The so-called federal Local Law Enforcement Block Grant is being used to expand a host of existing city and county anti-gang programs, many of them aimed at stopping young children from joining gangs or weaning them from gangs’ deadly influence before they become hardened criminals.

One of them, the Community Law Enforcement and Recovery project, will receive $2.5 million. A pilot project championed by Mayor Richard Riordan, the program is a joint cooperative effort between city and county police agencies, probation officers, prosecutors and community representatives, aimed at targeting gang-related problems at the street level.

The city’s Bridges program will get about $5 million to address crime and gang involvement in junior high schools.

The block grant money will also be used to add beds to the county’s overcrowded jail system, to add metal detectors and other security improvements at county courthouses and to create what authorities describe as the first Superior Court drug court program.

The county already has seven drug courts, but all of them are in Municipal Court for first-time nonserious offenders.

The new program will seek to rehabilitate more serious drug offenders who already have been convicted of felonies in Superior Court and sentenced to County Jail. Participants will undergo rigorous treatment programs while in a special therapeutic wing of the jail system and continue such treatments afterward, while they are on parole, Mimura said.

Some of the block grant funds will also be spent on assigning probation officers to work with Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang units, and to expand efforts to curb gang activity through court injunctions, city and county officials said.

At the news conference, more than a dozen city and county officials, judges and law enforcement authorities hailed the new arrangement as far more than just an agreement on how to spend the federal money.

“There is no reason in the world why the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department, or the City Council and the Board of Supervisors, or the district attorney and the city attorney shouldn’t be pooling their resources,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky, a former city councilman. “There is certainly enough work to go around in this county for all of these agencies not to be hogs about it and I think we all realize that.”

In past years, local officials acknowledged, city and county officials fought separately for as much federal law enforcement money as possible.

But two years ago, the federal government decided to administer some additional money in block grants to the states. Forcing smaller municipalities to submit joint spending plans might be a good idea, said Mimura and others. But they said trying to get Los Angeles County and the city to agree proved nearly impossible at first.

“There is no jurisdiction like ours in the nation, with two huge and complicated entities . . . [with] such different priorities and responsibilities,” said Mimura, whose own criminal justice coordinating committee is only advisory in nature.