CommentsMY TURN-In looking at the primary race on March 3 for the office of Los Angeles District Attorney between incumbent Jackie Lacey and her challengers George Gascon and Rachel Rossi, I find it astounding that none of them are willing to deal with the critically important underlying causes for the disproportionate targeting of minorities by the DA and the LAPD.
The systematic deprivation of black and Latino students of their right to an excellent public education in the still segregated (90% minority) Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools (in derogation of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education) has created a “cultivated” inferiority among this population that leads to clashes with law enforcement.
If you turn these students loose on society without giving them the fundamental skills needed to make an honest living, why is it so surprising to the district attorney candidates that too many minority students without skills are ultimately winding up on the wrong side of the law?
It doesn't take a great intellect to make the connection between failure to educate minority students and their subsequent, disproportionate, and costly negative interactions with police, the rest of the criminal “justice” system, and society. Yet none of the candidates for LA District Attorney have dared to even mention segregation and the premeditated failure to educate all our students as a factor leading to criminal behavior when these students leave school.
More importantly, none of the candidates seem willing to use the office of LA District Attorney to go after the endemic corruption that LAUSD leadership makes no attempt to hide in its never ending pursuit of higher administrative salaries and benefits – all while seeking greater profits for their “agreed” vendors that continue to charge them more than you or I would pay for the same goods and services. So much for the economics of scale.
Within the LAUSD, there is no expectation that black and Latino students will do well. The reality of not educating and expecting success from minority students has existed for so long that it even infects the minority communities, whose adult leadership is for the most part a product of this same inferior LAUSD “education.”
It costs approximately $126,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile, while a good public academic or trade education costs a whole lot less and, in the end, produces new taxpayers.
Sadly, the LA District attorney's race is not the only political contest in which all the candidates continue to avoid addressing what's really at issue in seeking their respective offices.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles, observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
