L.A.’s problematic Probation Department

One of the melancholy truths about Los Angeles’ local government is that some of our most consequential problems are allowed to fester for year upon year — and, when they are resolved, it’s too often because Washington or a federal judge has stepped in to force the issue.

For decades, the Los Angeles Police Department’s engrained culture of abusive misconduct made it a focal point of civic division and shame. Ten years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice threatened to sue the city unless it agreed to reforms specified in a consent decree supervised by a federal judge. Many of the most crucial of those changes had been identified by the Christopher Commission nine years before, but it took Washington’s intervention to compel City Hall to act.

Year after dreary year, the county Board of Supervisors wrung its collective hands and did nothing of substance while King-Drew, the South L.A. public hospital on which our neediest communities depend, became a kleptocratic monument to cronyism and identity politics. People died. Finally, federal authorities, citing the hospital’s abysmal standards and unchecked incompetence, withdrew their funding, which forced the county to close it.

Now it’s time for the Department of Justice to step in directly and compel the supervisors to straighten out another of the county’s inexplicable and indefensible bureaucratic nightmares — the Probation Department, which thinks it employs about 5,800 people to operate more than 50 facilities at an annual cost of $630 million.

Over the last 10 years, the Justice Department has pushed the county to provide minimally decent care for the more than 2,000 young people it detains in 19 camps. As The Times reported last month, the Justice Department’s most recent report on the situation found that the county continues to imperil those children with “broken systems for mental health services, use of force, internal affairs, suicide prevention and transition services upon release.” Meanwhile, county authorities are desperately negotiating with the American Civil Liberties Union to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that the camps’ schools are so inadequate and incompetently run that high school diplomas are awarded to illiterates.

You might be able to do the math on the social cost of such malfeasance, but the human toll is incalculable.

So too, we now learn, is the number of people the Probation Department actually employs.

This week, the county’s normally unflappable CEO, Bill Fujioka, told the supervisors that “the problems of this department are shocking.” The board had asked the chief executive and his staff to report to them on how the department spent $79.5 million it was given to hire 901 additional employees, as required under a 2004 agreement with the Justice Department. The supervisors’ curiosity was prompted by Probation’s request for a further $27.8 million. Fujioka, however, told them that because the department’s records are so inadequate, he “cannot report with certainty which positions were hired or where those staff were deployed.”

Neither can the newly hired chief probation officer, Donald Blevins, nor his chief deputy, Cal Remington. They admit they don’t have a clue where as many as 2,000 of the department’s employees are working, let alone what they’re doing. (Blevins and Remington have been on the job only since April, but their inability to get answers to those fundamental questions speaks to the magnitude of the problem they confront.)

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky called the situation a “colossal mess”; Supervisor Gloria Molina wondered whether the department might be carrying “ghost employees.” She “hopes” that isn’t the case. Both, like the rest of the board, declined to order an audit and told the new chief that they understand he needs more time to find out how many people he actually has working for him, and to discover what these mystery employees working in unknown places have done with the taxpayers’ missing $79.5 million.

That’s intolerable. Clearly this is one of those recurring problems that never will be resolved until the supervisors have their attention focused and their agenda set by a federal consent decree. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who knows this area’s politics well from his dealings with the LAPD, should have his staff prepare a suit to vindicate the rights of the young people to whose neglect and abuse the county is apparently indifferent.

The rest of us, meanwhile, should ask ourselves why outsiders so often have to intervene to make our elected officials do the right thing.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com