I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
From a cartoonist’s standpoint, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is the gift that keeps on giving. From corruption to inmate abuse, you have to wonder whether the really bad guys are the ones inside the cells or the ones guarding them.
Responding to numerous credible reports of dirty dealings by sheriff’s deputies, the FBI arrested a number of sheriff’s officials in connection with a wide-ranging probe of alleged improprieties by a department charged with — remember? — upholding the law and protecting the public. Which includes inmates.
If the charges hold up, this will turn out to be one of the biggest corruption scandals in L.A. history. If these guys are guilty, they’re guilty of some serious whoppers. “In one case, prosecutors say, an Austrian consul official trying to visit an Austrian inmate was arrested and handcuffed even though she had committed no crime and would have been immune from prosecution, the indictment said.”
A century ago, Austria would have declared war over that sort of thing.
Among the charges are that, after deputies discovered that one of their prisoners was sending evidence about their activities behind bars to the FBI — a cellphone with recent calls to the feds turned up during a search — they “disappeared” him into the byzantine L.A. jail system, both in order to find out what the feds knew about them and to prevent him from talking
My initial idea was of an Escheresque box-within-a-box where it’s hard to distinguish the prisoners from the informants from the jailers. But I thought that would be too high-concept to follow. Also, too many political cartoons do Escher analogy toons.
As my mom says, simply simplify simplify, so I boiled it down to the disappeared prisoner with his interrogator, both men trapped in their own Kafka-like hells of wondering what happens next and who will be prevail as right in the legal and public arenas.
It’s weird, and that’s what my cartoon is about, but what I hope readers will take away is what’s really weird — that the public doesn’t seem to care enough about what happens to their friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters…because, after all, that’s who winds up in jail. Fellow Angelenos, fellow Californians, fellow Americans.
Maybe you someday.
12 Comments.
I’m not convinced people don’t care, as much as they are worried about going on record at the Ministry of Lists, as caring.
What we need is a culture of revolution, where more people learn not to trust the cops. Here they encourage people to throw block parties every August (“National Night Out”) wherein the gendarmes are invited to come and educate people about the fine points of ratting out one’s neighbors.
Hate to ask for tech support in a discussion forum, but can’t figure it out meself. How’d you get the spiffy avatar Miep? I been poking buttons & following links & don’t see anywhere obvious.
It’s my image. Gravatar.com is the upload site.
thanks & rats & darn. Gravatars are tied to a hash of my email addy, which I use for several different nicks/nyms/sock puppets. Don’t want them all to show the same avatar.
It is a neat idea, though.
I don’t have much in the way of alter egos so not a problem for me. But it does bother me how the net overall is moving towards enforcing outing people (see Facebook logins). Linked avatars do the same thing, alas.
Oh, hell yeah.
Let’s see, I make a hobby of taunting heavily armed sociopaths (“Republicans”) and pointing out the inherent flaws of unregulated capitalism, even as I depend on those self-same capitalists for my salary. What could possibly go wrong?
I already get snail hate-mail for those things I do publish under my RL name. Eh, mebbe it’s time to get ‘Crazy H’ his own email addy…
Remember the proverb: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”? To correct the proverb to reflect the attitude of a majority of Americans today, it should say: When the going gets tough, the tough turn their backs and walk away from the situation.
But the main reason the situation exists in the first place is because of people turning their backs. The social costs of homelessness are much greater than those of homelessness prevention, the costs of providing supportive programs for children in marginal situations much less than those of dealing with these broken children all their adult years. The costs of failing to subsidize health care and education, the same. And in societies with extreme inequities, nobody at all is as happy as people in more egalitarian societies.
We are a culture of crazy. It’s like playing the lottery except without tickets.
> you have to wonder whether the really bad guys are the ones inside the cells or the ones guarding them.
Both. Studies show that the ‘common criminal’ and and the cops / guards / neighborhood watch wannabes have the same basic personality flaws. They’re authoritarians & sociopaths who believe they, personally, have the right to dictate right & wrong. They feel a strong need to enforce rules but feel no need to follow them themselves.
When was the last time you saw a cop doing the speed limit? Remember Clockwork Orange where Alex’s partners in crime become cops themselves & engage in the same ultraviolence they did before – only now with badges?
Disclaimer: not *all* cops are bad. There are still a few who honestly try to protect & serve. But our system exacerbates the problem. Given the poor pay most cops receive, the only people who sign up are those who see gunfights & other violent confrontations as perqs.
A cop slugs a 14 y/o girl and gets a vacation (“paid leave”) and is back on the streets a week later. A cop shoots someone in the back & is cleared of all wrong-doing. A dozen cops fire fifty rounds into a guy holding a cellphone and none of them get the death penalty.
What’s wrong with this picture? How do we fix? I see a carrot/stick approach. PAY them better for cryin’ out loud: the good one is putting himself in the line of fire to protect YOU. The other side is to reign in the bad ones. Slug a 13 y/o girl: go to jail. Shoot someone in the back: get convicted for manslaughter. A cop commits a crime on duty: triple whatever the punishment is for civilians.
We also need to prosecute the ‘thin blue line’ where good cops cover for the bad cops. That’s called ‘aiding and abetting’ Civilians go to jail for that particular crime, why not uniformed goons as well?
I’ve heard the excuse, “We can’t send a cop to jail ‘cuz there might be someone in there who doesn’t like cops.” I can live with that, and who knows – maybe it’d be an incentive for cops to keep on the good side of the law.
THREE pronged approach: get all the “victimless crimes” off the books. e.g Pot’s illegal even though nobody gets hurt – or at worst hurt only themselves. This sets up an us-against-them situation where otherwise law abiding citizens see cops as the ‘bad guy’ while the cops see everybody as bad guys.
In a perfect world, cops would be seen as the good guys, and the only bad guys would be people who hurt other people.
CrazyH: your suggestions are all excellent but I’m not holding my breath.
Meanwhile it seems like every week there’s another story of cops killing some unarmed person for absurd reasons. The cops where I live are relatively unstressed (small town without a high crime rate, probably because of the 4% unemoloyment rate) but in other places it seems like introducing the police into domestic conflicts (for example) is just a way to increase the odds of someone getting hurt.
LA Sherrifs run one of the five most rapey jails in the country. They were actually ranked.
Sherriff Lee Baca, btw, is a Scientologist.