It’s been almost exactly a month since, on August 15, 2024, LASD Sergeant Rosa Gonzalez, challenged the demotion she received after becoming a whistleblower for the second time during her 25-years with the nation’s largest sheriff’s department. Last month, Gonzalez challenged the punitive demotion in what is...

Passed by both the California Assembly and Senate, AB 2527, the “Dignified Care of Incarcerated Pregnancy Act,” will soon face a final decision from Governor Gavin Newsom. One significant amendment in the final hours cost the bill the support of more than 60 community groups and advocacy organizations.

Trixie is a young woman in her mid-20s who recently left an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. She came to my workplace, Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center, in Santa Cruz, seeking help from our restorative justice program, Space for Change. What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability...

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. households have at least one pet, and almost all see their pet as a family member. Unfortunately, in homes where violence occurs, pets can also be victims of this harm. Research studies consistently support the link between animal cruelty and interpersonal violence. The link with intimate...

Two new reports from The Sentencing Project reveal that while the number of kids in juvenile carceral facilities in the United States has dropped exponentially over the last 20 years, there are still thousands of people serving life sentences after being convicted of crimes as minors or young adults. In...

LASD Sergeant Rosa Gonzalez wanted to be a cop ever since she was a kid. “I grew up in a bad environment,” she said when we talked about her childhood ambitions. “My dad was a heroin addict. My mom had to work two jobs to make ends meet. She worked in the strawberry fields and cleaned houses for a living,” said Gonzalez.

The case of Mark Ridley-Thomas is due to be heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in November or December of this year. In the meantime, there is a new development that could affect the outcome of the appeal. As readers may remember, in Chapter Nine of this series,...

On Tuesday, July 23, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion focused on removing barriers to family reunification for parents and their children in foster care. The insurmountable barrier of incarceration. The motion, by Supervisors Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn, focuses particularly on helping parents who...

More than three dozen men who completed San Quentin’s journalism training program were honored earlier this year. On March 15, 2014, 39 men at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center graduated from the San Quentin Journalism Guild’s training program, which teaches the skills necessary to write for San Quentin News, the leading prison news outlet in California.

On December 9, 2013, slightly more than a decade from today, the The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, filed five criminal cases for a total of 18 indictments against members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The indictments were brought by U.S. Attorney...

Volunteers for the 2024 census of unhoused people in Los Angeles County counted 3,718 youth ages 18-24 who were unhoused, including 370 transition-aged youth living unhoused with their own children. Half of the approximately 1,100 young adults who transition out of foster care in Los Angeles County each year experience...

Below, WitnessLA has lightly excerpted three essays you might want to check out as we make our collective way through these painful and deeply disturbing days. The first is a clip from an essay by New Yorker editor, David Remnick. Here’s how it begins:. A Nation Inflamed: After the...

A recent column in the Los Angeles Times presents a peculiar theory about social problems: If a solution doesn’t work, the problem doesn’t exist!. That, at least, is the claim of right-wing author Naomi Schaefer Riley. In her op-ed she argues that because an experimental attempt to reduce racial bias in LA County’s child welfare system didn’t seem to fix the problem then clearly there is no racial bias in child welfare.

Late on Friday afternoon, June 28, Los Angeles County Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa caused a great many heads to spin with his announcement that 13 people were no longer going to be working at the top tier of probation’s management. Yet, together with the head spinning there also...

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion to ensure that the county’s youth and adult carceral facilities comply with a law requiring incarcerated people have access to free tampons and pads. In 2020, California legislators passed AB 732, the “Reproductive Dignity for Incarcerated People...

We are delighted to report that, on Sunday, June 23, at the SoCal Journalism Awards put on by the LA Press Club, WitnessLA’s Assistant Editor Taylor Walker won the first prize trophy in the category of Health Reporting for her important multi-part series, “Punishing Families: The Need To Reimagine Child Welfare In LA County”

It’s SoCal Journalism Awards season at the LA Press Club. And the gala during which the winners will be announced is taking place at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, June 23. And….WitnessLA is a finalist in two categories!. First, in the category of...

I was released from the old Fresno Juvenile Hall when I was thirteen. I had no reentry plan or support for coming back to my varrio, a neighborhood that needed more programs and care for youth. There were two churches in the varrio, but they never helped us out. The members would stare at us as we walked by, and I always felt judged. So, I went back to the only social group where I felt protected, respected, seen, heard, loved, and like I belonged to something: the gang. I left my home and went back out into the streets. I went to visit my best homeboys. They were half-brothers who did not have a dad, and whose mom was an old-school gang member.

From the time his son was born until he was three years old, Gerardo Pedrosa Jr. remembers raising his son, Aidan, and being there for his milestones. But after those first three years, Pedrosa was in and out of incarceration. Now his son is 10, and Pedrosa just wants to go home and be with him.

On Thursday afternoon inside Disney Hall—one of the most beautiful buildings in Los Angeles —more than 100 students and their families had mostly finished celebrating their graduation from high school, and were filing out of their theater seats, when someone who wasn’t one of the kids graduating, reportedly leaped over the railing from a second-story balcony and slugged at least one of the graduates.