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Construction began this week on a temporary wall that’s designed to catch sliding soil and debris from a San Clemente hillside near Mariposa Point. The major coastal rail corridor has been routinely hit with hillside problems.
The San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail is closed from the North Beach parking lot to the trail’s bridge while construction continues. The Orange County Transportation Authority expects it to be completed by mid-March, with crews working 12 hours a day.They’ve started drilling 30 feet below ground to place the steel beams encased in concrete, which will work as the foundation for the wall.Freight train traffic has been stopped since the last round of rain caused significant sliding toward the bottom of the slope.Passenger rail service could resume as soon as late March or early April, but the schedule may change. The OCTA is also working to get freight trains traveling through the area again “as quickly as possible.”The San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail is closed from the North Beach parking lot to the trail’s bridge while construction continues. The Orange County Transportation Authority expects it to be completed by mid-March, with crews working 12 hours a day.They’ve started drilling 30 feet below ground to place the steel beams encased in concrete, which will work as the foundation for the wall.Freight train traffic has been stopped since the last round of rain caused significant sliding toward the bottom of the slope.Passenger rail service could resume as soon as late March or early April, but that schedule may change. The OCTA is also working to get freight trains traveling through the area again “as quickly as possible.”The aim of Pasadena Humane's"Reading Rovers" program is to create some calm for shelter dogs, by having volunteers read to them one-on-one. Turns out, there are benefits for the readers too.Shelters, no matter how nice they may be, are an inherently stressful environment for dogs. Having staffers and volunteers play with them and take them on walks definitely helps — along with foster programs that allow dogs to avoid the shelter altogether. But for the times when dogs must be in their kennels, Pasadena Humane is seeing benefits to their “Reading Rovers” program, where volunteers read to dogs one-on-one.Pasadena Humane’s president, Dia DuVernet, says that during the early years of COVID, the number of animals coming into shelters declined sharply. But the numbers have been steadily increasing since. “Housing insecurity and a lot of financial challenges… are leading people to relinquish their pets,” DuVernet says. “Especially large dogs.” Bigger dogs often end up in shelters because someone has to move and their new housing situation won’t allow pets.But could there be benefits for other species too? Specifically, for dogs in shelters? At least anecdotally, staffers and volunteers at Pasadena Humane — an L.A.-area shelter that’s been around since 1903 — say they’re seeing real benefits to pairing volunteer readers with dogs., there was music playing over loudspeakers for the dogs in their kennels. They sometimes play audiobooks too, and each week a handful of volunteers also reads to the dogs in person. The idea, spokesperson Kevin McManus says, is that it’s inherently stressful for the dogs to be in a shelter, so playing music or reading to them one-on-one helps create a “calming, more serene environment.” Volunteers with the “Reading Rovers” program read all different kinds of books — or sometimes the newspaper — to the dogs. “We have a lot of kids who do it after school,” McManus says. “It’s great for the kids, it’s great for the dogs cause it’s a nice calm environment and a soothing voice. And for a shy dog, it really helps them come out of their shell a little bit. It helps them get adopted.”On a recent Friday, third-grader Mirabel and her mom Elizabeth were at the shelter for their one-hour shift. Sitting next to each other on beach chairs, they took turns readingto two dogs — Terry, a 1-year-old Akita mix, and Logan, a Siberian Husky mix, also about a year old. “Reading is a little therapeutic and I think it's beyond species,” Elizabeth says. “They come up and they listen and they hear the kind of slow pulse of your voice and it calms them down. And consequently I calm down and calms down and we kind of cuddle up to a good book.” - a monthly story hour, where kids are paired with a dog to read to After spending some time with Terry and Logan, Elizabeth asked Kevin: “Do you know anybody who's sad back there that needs a little reading?” The answer was Bandit, and she and Mirabel headed there next. A few rows over, volunteer Stefan Bucher was seated near a 2-year-old black and white pitbull named Twizzler, a “real sweetheart” whom he checks in with every week.As for what he reads to the dogs, Bucher says it’s a wide variety. “They seem to like British society mysteries.” But his book that day was a bit more on the serious side — “Right now I'm reading to them about inclusive language. You know, because they’ve got to be ready for the world.”“Usually I pick a dog that seems to be kind of sad or agitated,” he said. After he sits with them, “they take a minute to settle in. But then it's really nice when they just kind of chill out. And that's the best, when they kind of splay out and go like, 'Volunteer Molly Litteken was making her rounds too, and had stopped to read to a dachshund for a bit. Litteken volunteers with Pasadena Humane through the AbilityFirst organization for kids and adults with disabilities.Angie Aguirre is Molly’s aide who comes to volunteer sessions with her and works with her to help her gain life skills and become more independent. She says the “Reading Rovers” program even helped Molly get her first job, handing out dog food samples at local pet stores, because of the experience and confidence she’s gained while volunteering. “It's a way for her to connect with the dogs, and it's also a way to connect with herself — her more mature self,” Aguirre says. “I kind of walk away and she doesn't need any guidance when it comes to animals. She just seems to know what to do. And she's great at sensing the dogs that maybe need a little extra attention.”Shayne Sutherland’s brothers, brothers-in-law and best friend carry his casket at his funeral on Oct. 17, 2020 — the day before his 30th birthday.Since the 1990s, law enforcement officials and medical experts have cautioned about the dangers of police-prone restraint, especially when people are high on stimulants or experiencing a mental health crisis. Some California police officers haven’t been getting the messageA new review of law enforcement data shows that, despite growing awareness of the dangers of prone restraint, in California, the problem is pervasive.in 2015, California began tracking data about when people died after police use of force. Between 2016 and 2022, at least 22 people have died in the state after being restrained stomach-down by law enforcement officers, according to a new analysis of currently available state use-of-force data by theOn a Thursday morning in October 2020, less than five months after George Floyd was held on his stomach by Minneapolis police until he died, Shayne SutherlandLAist is a member of the California Newsroom, which is a collaboration between major public media newsrooms in the state.Stockton Police Officers Ronald Zalunardo and John Afanasiev arrived at the store about 15 minutes later. In the meantime, a store employee had called 911, saying Sutherland was threatening him with a wine bottle. In body camera footage that captured the officers’ response, Sutherland seems fidgety, and his speech is difficult to understand at times, but he doesn’t appear violent, and he isn’t armed. He cooperates with police, addressing Zalunardo as “sir” and sitting against a wall outside the store as instructed. The officers question Sutherland. When he tells them he can’t remember why he’s under court supervision, Afanasiev says, “The drugs probably have something to do with it.” “How long you been using meth,” Zalnunardo asks. Sutherland stutters and says he's been using cocaine. Sutherland briefly stands, then sits when ordered to do so. A minute later, he stands up again. This time, the officers tackle him to the ground and hold him belly-down — a position known as prone restraint. Thirty seconds later, his hands are cuffed behind his back. That could have been the end of the encounter. Experts say prone restraint can be a safe, effective way to subdue someone and get them into handcuffs — so long as they’re quickly placed in a “recovery position” on their side or in a seated position to allow them to breathe more easily. But Zalunardo and Afanasiev didn’t do that. The body camera footage shows them holding Sutherland belly-down for more than eight minutes. For nearly half that time, Afanasiev lays across Sutherland’s back. Sutherland panics, alternating between moaning and screaming for help as Zalunardo, who uses his baton and body weight to help keep Sutherland’s shoulder down, repeatedly tells him, “Relax!” “Please let me breathe,” Sutherland begs, his voice barely decipherable. In between shrieks and gasps, he calls out, “Mom!” He begs for help. “Please let me live.” Before the officers notice that he’s turning colors and losing consciousness, Sutherland, his mouth bloody from being slammed and scraped against the ground, sputters: “I’m f—ing dead.” Another five-and-half minutes pass before officers roll Sutherland onto his side and begin to render aid.As far back as the 1990s, medical experts and law enforcement officials have been aware of the dangers of prone restraint. A number of organizations and law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Chicago Police Department and the New Orleans Police Department, warned officers of these dangers and advised them on how to minimize risks. We really shouldn't have any of these deaths. Any time there's prolonged prone restraint, something's going wrong. It should not happen.Many training manuals have since been updated to address the risks of prone restraint and the importance of using the recovery position. Ohio State Police officers are forbidden from using prone restraint. A Nevada law forbids the practice. In California, a law that became effective in 2022, AB 490, bans any maneuvers that put people at risk of being unable to breathe due to the position of their body, or positional asphyxia, a common cause of death in prone restraint cases. But a new review of law enforcement data shows that, despite growing awareness of the dangers of prone restraint, in California, the problem is pervasive. After the passage ofin 2015, California began tracking data about when people died after police use of force. Between 2016 and 2022, at least 22 people have died in the state after being restrained stomach-down by law enforcement officers, according to a new analysis of currently available state use-of-force data by theNineteen of the 22 people who died following prone restraint tested positive for meth.Two of those people died after AB 490 went into effect. All 22 cases involved people in crisis — either struggling with addiction, mental illness or otherwise behaving erratically. Almost half of those who died were Latino, followed by white people — a trend that reflects larger use-of-force data in California. “We really shouldn't have any of these deaths,” said Seth W. Stoughton, a former police officer in Tallahassee, Florida, who teaches criminal law and procedure at the University of South Carolina’s Joseph F. Rice School of Law. “Any time there's prolonged prone restraint, something's going wrong. It should not happen.” “My general disgust that we're still having to talk about this,” he said. ”It's a little depressing that we're coming up on 30 years of making the same mistake over and over again. That's really frustrating.” “It's deeply concerning to learn about the deaths of individuals in California due to positional asphyxia, even after it was banned by AB 490,” wrote California Assemblymember Mike Gipson, who was the primary author of the bill, in an emailed response to the findings. “These incidents underscore the urgent need for comprehensive training and accountability measures within law enforcement agencies.” Others who have died following prone restraint by California police officers between 2016 and 2022 include: ● Isabel De La Torre, died on March 26, 2022, after her partner, who was five months pregnant, called 911 in Clovis, California, because she believed De La Torre was unconscious, according to official records and court documents. When De La Torre awoke, her partner hung up the phone, but Clovis police officers responded anyway. De La Torre tried to turn the officers away, hiding in a bathroom, writhing and screaming, allegedly holding a knife. When she came out of the room, officers ordered a police dog to bite her, bringing her to the ground, where officers handcuffed her and held her in the prone position for more than three minutes. She died of positional and compressional asphyxia due to prone restraint, according to the Fresno County Sheriff-Coroner. Her family sued the department for wrongful death and is set to receive a $1.9 million settlement. ● Mario Gonzalez, who died on April 19, 2021, in Alameda, California. When police responded to a call about a man sitting in a park and talking to himself, officials said they found Gonzalez so intoxicated he couldn’t. He refused to take his hands out of his pockets, according to official reports, leading two officers to hold him down on his stomach while another held his legs.footage of the incident shows officers repeatedly telling each other not to put too much force on him, but they continued to hold him prone after he was handcuffed. He died of the “toxic effects of methamphetamine” after suffering a cardiopulmonary arrest, according to the Alameda County Coroner's Bureau. His family sued the city of Alameda, the officers involved in Gonzalez’s death and the police chief at the time and won a settlement of $11 million. In 2023, the Alameda County district attorney● Edward Bronstein, who died on March 31, 2020, in Altadena, near Los Angeles. California Highway Patrol officers had detained Bronstein in an L.A. County station on suspicion of driving under the influence. When Bronstein declined to give a blood sample, officers forced him face down onto a mat, at which point he said, “I’ll do it willingly,”. An officer can be heard saying, “It’s too late.” Five officers continued to pin Bronstein to the ground. As they drew blood, Bronstein screamed, “I can’t breathe” and"Let me breathe" multiple times before his breathing and pulse stopped. Officers performed CPR to no avail. In 2023, thea CHP sergeant, six officers and a nurse with involuntary manslaughter and assault under the color of authority. His family was awarded a $24 million settlement in a civil wrongful death suit. And there may be more deaths beyond the 22 we found. While the state receives data from law enforcement agencies for deaths that occur after police use of force, it isn't necessarily complete. That’s because agencies don't always submit data to the state as they're required to do, or data is otherwise excluded from the. For example, Angelo Quinto died in 2020 after Antioch police officers held him prone, but his case is not in the database. Gipson, the assemblymember, said Quinto's death was the impetus for the new legislation.Karen Sutherland sits by her son Shayne's gravesite at the Park View Cemetery in Manteca, Calif., on Feb. 24, 2024.When a person is lying prone on a hard surface, their chest cavity is compressed and breathing becomes difficult, especially when their hands are cuffed behind their backs. Add the body weight of one or more police officers, and compression increases, restricting the movement of the ribcage and diaphragm, which are vital for the inhalation of oxygen and exhalation of carbon dioxide. The lack of proper ventilation puts stress on many parts of the body, including the heart, as noted in a, the U.S. Department of Justice cautioned law enforcement officers about the deadliness of positional asphyxia. “As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach,” it reads. The bulletin outlines how subjects on drugs are at higher risk of death in the position, noting that “cocaine-induced bizarre or frenzied behavior… may increase a subject’s susceptibility to sudden death by effecting an increase of the heart rate to a critical level.” It also said that “drugs and/or alcohol” pose a “major risk factor” because “subjects may not realize they are suffocating.” The bulletin explains that suspects restrained in a prone position often appear to be resisting officers when, in fact, they’re fighting, perhaps involuntarily, to get oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of their bodies as their chest is squeezed. As the memo reads: “The individual experiences increased difficulty breathing. The natural reaction to oxygen deficiency occurs — the person struggles more violently. The officer applies more compression to subdue the individual.” “It's horrible because you're just watching a preventable death, and you know the person's suffering,” said Dr. Alon Steinberg, a California cardiologist who studies prone restraint and has viewed hours of footage of people being held stomach-down by police. Steinberg, who serves as an expert witness, believes that cardiac arrests following prone restraint might be caused by more than just a lack of oxygen in the heart muscle. When someone can adequately breathe, the expulsion of carbon dioxide regulates the level of acid in the blood. But when breathing and blood flow are restricted, acid can build and cause cardiac arrest, as Steinberg and forensic pathologists Dr. Victor Weedn and Dr. Peter Speth proposed in a Dr. Daniel Wohlgelernter, a cardiologist who has also testified in a number of prone-restraint cases, agrees. He pointed out that putting someone in prone restraint when they are in a hyperactive state — as people often are when on stimulants or in crisis — can exacerbate acidosis and cause a “double whammy.” “We have carbon dioxide accumulation, development of lethal or potentially lethal metabolic acidosis at the same time that we have deprivation of oxygen,” he said. Despite widespread agreement about the dangers of positional asphyxia caused by prone restraint, some studies have argued that the restriction of airflow caused by prone restraint is not, in most cases, enough to kill. Medical and legal experts have pointed out flaws in the studies, which have been done on healthy, sober individuals in police-free environments and don’t duplicate a real-life prone-restraint scenario. “Studies like that, if they actually had the potential to kill anyone, would never be approved by an institutional review board,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, an attorney with Physicians for Human Rights. “So it's not something that's actually possible to model in the real world in a safe way.”Of the 22 deaths we found where people died after being held stomach-down, coroners and medical examiners attributed acute methamphetamine toxicity to 10 deaths. Coroners are usually elected, and few places require them to have a medical background. Wohlgelernter and Steinberg are skeptical of those determinations. Both were adamant that in the prone restraint cases they’ve reviewed, methamphetamine, on its own, was not to blame for deaths. “In no cases did I see that the individuals were destined to die on that day, if not for the interaction with law enforcement and the prone restraint compressive asphyxia,” Wohlgelernter said. Steinberg pointed out that while people can overdose on meth, those who wind up dead after being restrained face down were “alive and fine” before they had a run-in with police. “They're alive beforehand. They're alive for a few minutes in the prone position, and then after a prolonged episode of restraint, people die,” he said. Dr. Odey Ukpo, chief medical examiner-coroner for Los Angeles County, where seven deaths following prone restraint were attributed to meth use or toxicity, said it’s more complicated. “What some people don’t realize is that a cause-of-death is a medical opinion,” he said. “It’s based on deductive reasoning.” I think they fundamentally don't respect people they view as addicts or tweakers or whatever the pejorative might be, and treat them accordingly without respect for their lives.For instance, Ukpo said he looks for signs of petechiae, a dot-like pattern of blood in the eyes or on the gums, before ruling whether someone died of asphyxia.about the dangers of positional asphyxia that was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, causes of death are beside the point. Prone restraint, he argues, is so easy to perform safely that it should never lead to deaths in the first place, no matter who’s being restrained. “Whether they're dying of oxygen deprivation or metabolic acidosis is irrelevant,” he said. “People are still dying! And if you flip them over to their side, they don’t!” Stoughton served as an expert witness in the case against Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. He says that if officers take the proper precautions to manage the scene and protect themselves, someone in handcuffs on their side is not a great danger. “We're talking about literally the difference between taking someone from their stomach and rolling them 90 degrees onto their side,” he said. “If there is any increase in risk at all , it is so marginal that it is vastly outweighed by the potential of saving that person's life.” In addition to training officers to use the recovery position as a matter of routine, experts say officers can keep an eye out for warning signs when restraining people prone.Steinberg argues that the use of prone restraint should be limited.“I think they fundamentally don't respect people they view as addicts or tweakers or whatever the pejorative might be, and treat them accordingly without respect for their lives,” Feldman said. For Peter Moskos, a criminologist with John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Baltimore police officer, there should be a greater focus on preventing the events that lead people into the hands of police by getting them the help they need, such as jobs, housing, drug treatment and mental health care. “At some point, it would have been nice if someone could have pulled a switch track and diverted that person, whether it's community, family, other government agencies, anything,” he said. “But once you get to that point , it's kind of too late to offer an ideal solution.” The San Joaquin County medical examiner’s office determined that Shayne Sutherland’s cause of death was cardiac arrest due to “acute methamphetamine toxicity” with a contributing factor of “physical restraint by law enforcement.” In other words, meth, not police, was primarily responsible for Sutherland’s death. Sutherland’s family wasn’t satisfied with the medical examiner’s findings or with the Stockton Police Department’s response to his death. In October 2021, they filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Stockton, Officers Zalunardo and Afanasiev and former Stockton Police Chief Eric Jones. The suit alleges wrongful death, excessive force and interfering with Sutherland’s constitutional rights by force. “They did not have that right to judge him that morning,” his mother, Karen Sutherland, said. “They did not have that right to do what they did.” Families of people in California who have died following prone restraint have won at least $41 million in civil suits across the state, according to court documents and press reports. In the year leading up to her son’s death, Karen managed to get Shayne into rehab for a stint, but finding mental health care and ongoing treatment was a struggle. When people like Shayne reach out for help, she said, “They're turned away, or they're told they have to wait.”Last December, Karen pulled into Park View Cemetery in Manteca — about 20 minutes south of Stockton — and walked to her son’s grave. Sitting on a blanket, she talked about Shayne’s life: his “teddy bear” lovability; the fishing and camping trips with his two kids, Shayne Jr., 8, and Demi, 7; coaching the Manteca Chargers youth football team. She talked about the hard times, too: the cocaine and meth addiction; the split with the mother of his children; the “little, petty, stupid, whatever crimes” that, she said, “are in no way in any comparison of any type of magnitude of the crime that those two police officers committed that day when they killed my son.” “I've always been able to handle things,” she said. “I'm a very strong person, but not when this happened. This broke me — completely shattered me.” After Shayne’s death, Stockton PD determined that Zalunardo and Afanasiev acted within policy. The only issue the investigation raised was that Zalunardo left his baton “unsecured on the ground near the suspect” when administering aid. The Stockton Police Department did not respond to our requests for comments and interviews with the officers. Karen has watched the footage of Shayne's final encounter with police. But she says she’ll never turn on the sound, because others have told her what she’d have to hear. “He knew he was dying,” she said. “He was being tortured. And knowing that tortures me every second, man. Every second.” Karen chose this particular grave site because of the morning sun that hits it each day. She’s come to believe that God reached down to stop Shayne’s suffering — not just at the hands of police, but in life.Since the 1990s, experts have warned that restraining someone prone, or on their stomach, can kill them. When someone is agitated, on stimulants or acting erratically, they are also more likely to die if officers use prone restraint, according to medical experts. Former police officers and criminologists say that putting someone on their side or seated after they’re handcuffed saves lives. In 2020, Antioch police officers held Angelo Quinto down on his stomach after responding to a call from his family. His death inspired California legislation, which went into effect in 2022, that prohibits officers from using techniques such as prone restraint that “involve a substantial risk of positional asphyxia.”to the state Department of Justice’s Use of Force Incident Reporting database when officers seriously injure or kill people. That data contains information listing the types of force officers used and whether someone died. Currently, the data includes incidents that occurred from 2016 to 2022. Although people can die from prone restraint after being otherwise injured, we wanted to focus on cases where the cause of death was more clear. We filtered the data to incidents where someone died and officers used a control hold but did not use a gun, Taser or carotid restraint. Outside of carotid holds, the data does not distinguish between specific types of restraint. To better identify the decedents, reporters then combined the use-of-force data with data fromdatabase. To ascertain whether officers specifically used prone restraint on those decedents, we used public record requests to obtain records and body camera footage from law enforcement agencies, district attorneys, medical examiner/coroners and oversight agencies about the incidents. We also obtained lawsuits in cases where loved ones sued local authorities. Two people reviewed those records, and an editor checked that work. We were unable to obtain enough records on four people’s deaths and excluded them from our analysis. Through our reporting, we determined five were incorrectly marked as not having been tased and removed them from our analysis. We also found that two people did not clearly die after a prone restraint and cut them from our analysis.However, we know that this data was incomplete because it did not include Angelo Quinto. We had records showing that officers used prone restraint, so we included him in our analysis despite his not appearing in the state’s use-of-force data.more than half the cases when police kill someone, it’s not documented on the death certificate Feldman said the “number one predictor” of misreported deaths was when officers didn’t shoot someone, such as when they used prone restraint or a Taser.Additional reporting by Bella Arnold, Hanisha Harjani, Simmerdeep Kaur, Grace Marion, Adam Solorzano and Krissy Waite of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program; Leila Barghouty, Jacqueline Munis and Camryn Pak of Stanford University's Big Local News; and Brian Krans of The California Newsroom. The California Newsroom is a collaboration of public media outlets throughout the state, with NPR as its national partner. TheDo you have questions or know of something we should look into? We are here to investigate abuse of power, misconduct and negligence in government, business, and any venue where the public is affected.Look back at January satellite images of California's mountains and you can see that the rainy season started off a bit slow. However, satellite images from over the past month show just how much things have changed.We can look at numbers from weather gauges all year round , but satellite images offer a unique perspective on what's going on on the ground.While a greater than average amount of rain has fallen on Southern California, we're still lagging behind when it comes to snow on our mountains. That's in part due to warm storm systems, which dropped a larger amount of precipitation as rain instead of snow.There's a sizable storm heading for the Sierra Nevada and it could potentially bring more than 6 feet of snow to some areas.It's always fun to see how dramatically California changes throughout the rainy season, which runs from November to April. And while much of the Golden State had a slow start, precipitation's really picked up over the past month or so, as you can see in these satellite images. Any shortage of snowfall gives us a bit of anxiety because snow is one of our greatest stores of water and our dry months are quickly coming up. First up is Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains at 6,759 feet. It was largely snow free in December, but from January through February, 25.2 inches of snow fell. The average annual snowfall for the mountain is typically around 54 inches, so they're still quite far behind.About 70 miles to the north there's Mt. Baldy, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains at 10,064 feet.The mountains around the L.A. Basin have changed as well, greening with the heavy rains.Topanga Canyon, along the bottom left side of the image, averages 23.68 inches. This year they've been drenched with 32.80 inches. Much of that came in late January and early February.Homes along Scenic Drive last week following heavy rains in Dana Point after a landslide brought tons of rock and soil crashing into the sea.Compare these two images of L.A.'s coast and you can see how much sediment the recent rains sent out into the ocean, and where the stormwater drains are.It's great that Yosemite and Mono Lake are blanketed in snow, however, the central Sierra Nevada is still only at 67% of normal for April 1. That means there's a bit of catching up to do. Lake Tahoe in the northern part of the Sierra Nevada is looking a bit better, sitting at 81% of normal for April 1.The good news is that a big storm this week will likely boost those numbers. More than 6 feet of snow could fall on some parts of the Sierra Nevada.Jacob Margolis helps Southern Californians understand the science shaping our imperfect paradise and gets us prepared for what’s next.Good morning SoCal and happy Wednesday. Bask in the sun while you can, another storm system is moving in starting tomorrow which will drop temperatures into the low 60s.Along the coast, average temperatures will reach 66 degrees and it will become increasingly cloudy, so bring a jacket if you plan on heading to the beach. In downtown Los Angeles, expect a high of 70 degrees. The valleys and inland areas will see highs in the low 70s, including inland Orange County. The high desert will be a couple of degrees cooler with highs in the mid 60s but over in the low desert, Coachella Valley will reach 79 degrees.The National Weather Service forecasts light showers to come to the southland Friday night into Saturday morning. The good news is that this system won't bring as much precipitation as the previous storms, meaning we'll see light scattered showers all day Saturday and by Sunday afternoon the storm should be moving out.This will be a much cooler system with daytime highs in the upper 50s to low 60s, so make sure to bundle up. Snow levels will reach 6,000 feet Saturday and drop to 4,000 feet Sunday.Boost your serotonin levels by going out for a hike, and you don't have to go alone on this one:Attention outdoor lovers and makeup lovers! Want free skincare goodies from ONE/SIZE while meeting new people during a free group hike? Then you don’t want to miss this!Notable Campaign Spending In Senate District 25 Race, LAPD Counters Critical Chopper Audit & A Hatching Awaits In SoCal Mountains — The A.M. EditionThe Los Angeles Police Department says an audit of its helicopter fleet is flawed.According to Onyx Black, most strippers don't want to be employees and lose the flexibility of being an independent contractor., the dancers of Star Garden take their union campaign public and get pushback from a group they didn’t expect: other strippers. The episode follows the campaign for one whole turbulent year, from their victory in getting Actors Equity union representation to the bankruptcy of Star Garden.The episode delves into the criticisms Star Garden dancers faced for being a mostly white group using the term “stripper strike,” which was previously a term used by Black strippers in response to discriminatory practices in strip clubs. The Star Garden dancers also received blowback for pushing for unionization as the primary strategy for improving dancers’ experiences, highlighting an ongoing debate over who actually benefits from unionizing this industry. We meet dancers who are pushing for alternate solutions to common industry inequalities, including Cat Hollis of PDX stripper strike, who led a campaign to put pressure on multiple clubs and target issues of racism across Portland, Oregon, strip clubs; and Onyx Black, who thinks strippers shouldn’t be unionized employees, but rather independent contractors.Onyx Black advocates for a repeal of AB5 or a carve out of the law for strip clubs so dancers can be classified as independent contractorsOnyx Black started stripping at the age of 37 after spending many years working in the corporate world. “It's one of the most toxic places I've ever worked,” Onyx says. “Having all of these white men looking down on you … And at the strip club, all of those white men are giving me money and I'm looking down at them.” Onyx says she made good money as a stripper and liked the scheduling flexibility she got as an independent contractor. Then, everything changed in 2020, when California passed AB5, a controversial labor law that caused many strip clubs to re-classify their dancers as employees, and as a result, let many of them go. Onyx now advocates for a return to independent contractor status for strippers through her organization Artists Revolt. Star Garden management opposed their dancers’ unionization campaign — halting the ballot count by claiming the strippers were independent contractors, not employees, and later filing for bankruptcy, which led the dancers to believe they might have a shot at buying the club themselves.Part 2: When the Star Garden strippers go public with their union campaign, they get pushback from the club’s management and a group they didn’t anticipate - other strippers. LAist Producer Emma Alabaster reports.opens a new art show in Boyle Heights. The works reflect different periods of his life and include references to surfing culture, modern society, his writing practice and, of course,marks Carter’s first art show ever, and it’s only on view for the next two Saturdays and by appointment only. The works range from ceramic plates with saucy language to imposing 13-foot mixed media works titled,. Carter’s art is for sale at the gallery, ranging from a $20 signed exhibition flier to “Inquire for Price” works.can see a different side of creator Chris Carter’s creative mind, with art that’s peppered with black humor. In a second room, there are two small cases of collectibles and keepsakes from the series, including casting notes for actors interviewed for the roles of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. On the walls surrounding the show ephemera are artworks that are inspired by UFOs,A new contemporary art show tucked away in a sprawling warehouse gallery space in Boyle Heights is sure to draw in a diverse mix of art enthusiasts — and possibly ufologists, cryptozoologists and X-Philes. Opening this week at the Legacy West Media gallery isan exhibition of mixed media art from producer, director and writer Chris Carter, best known as the creator of the seminal sci-fi TV seriesDuring a private preview on Saturday, Carter viewed the mounted show for the first time, chatting with guests and reporters throughout the afternoon. The artworks range from large panels and abstracts to mixed media on custom surfboards, all of which reflect different periods of his life and career. “My artistic background goes back 50 years,” he said, calling attention to a number of ceramic plates painted with spicy words and phrases around the gallery. “I put myself through college as a production potter. I have literally made tens of thousands of pieces of pottery. “I sat at a potter's wheel with eight other potters making about 10 different things over and over and over again. And it was fantastic. People say, ‘Why would you do that?’ It was my first experience having to some great degree mastered something.”on FOX, which first aired from 1993-2002, left little time for Carter to work on his art. He instead poured his energy into building memorable characters and alternative worlds and theories — borrowing inspiration from the short-lived 1974 series, fans still have questions about Fox Mulder’s father, Dana Scully’s seeming immortality, the Smoking Man, the Lone Gunmen and whether the controversial episode “Home” should be banned in perpetuity.His television work both directly and indirectly inspires Carter’s art on view at the gallery. There are dark underpinnings and black humor found throughout the show, which includes the titles of the two 13-foot works —: The exhibition is open Feb. 27 through March 10, 2024, on Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m. or by appointment.he said."A great deal of it came between the end of season 9 and the beginning of season 10, which was the reboot.”includes Carter’s director’s chair, a clapboard from the series, magazines and the casting interview schedule.He showed the pilot to Rick Carter , the famed production designer and a frequent collaborator of both Robert Zemekis and Steven Spielberg. Rick Carter had just finished Spielberg’s TV series“He said to me, ‘You're not going to have any time or any money,’ which I learned,” Chris Carter said. “And also, if you want to scare people, make sure that the scares are in the shadows in the dark; that the scare is what you imagined, not what you see. And that was one of the most, if not the most, valuable bit of advice that I got because it actually made the show literally what is was.” There’s also notes for the roles of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder. , founder and CEO of Legacy West Media, convinced the artist to show his work in the space. The Chris Carter Collection marks the fourth show in the newish gallery, which opened last fall. “I never did to sell them,” Chris Carter said during the artist talk. “I only did them because they came from my head and my heart. And that I'm sitting here today talking to you, amongst these pieces, is completely unexpected.”ephemera are three black-and-white abstract images named UFO #1, #2 and #3. Viewed side-by-side, the UFO series unveils a figure emerging from, or possibly fading into, the blackness. Is it an alien? Is it related to the black oil alien virus story arc of the show? Art aficionados will say that interpretation is left to the viewer. But as any diehard X-Files fan will tell you: The truth is out there.Volunteers arrive for the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count on Feb. 24, 2022 in Los Angeles. The annual count in a city with one of the largest homeless communities in the country is done to obtain an accurate count of unhoused people across Los Angeles County.The departures are prompting questions about why people are leaving and whether there’s now a leadership vacuum that affects oversight of homeless services, according to interviews with city and county officials.“It was devastating,” said Emily Vaughn Henry, who oversaw LAHSA’s data operations. “I did not expect this.” The other recently departed executives — Kristina Dixon and Brittnee Hill — could not immediately be reached for comment.Three top L.A. homelessness officials have left their jobs in recent weeks, LAist has learned. The exits at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority include the executives who oversaw finance and data. Public announcements were not made about most of the changes. The departures are prompting questions about why people are leaving and whether there’s now a leadership vacuum that affects oversight of homeless services, according to interviews with city and county officials. LAHSA’s leadership “parted ways” with two of the three executives “after careful consideration,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to LAist. The staffing shakeup comes as homelessness continues to dominate as a key issue for the public, including in the March 5 election. The city council hasto try and address the problems, and has acknowledged major data gaps that hinder the city’s ability to track its progress. About 33,000 people live outdoors in the city of L.A. as of the latest count that’s available — a number that has spiked sharply in recent years, and that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has pledged to reduce.A few days later, on Feb. 1, came the exit of the agency’s data chief, Emily Vaughn Henry. She had a key leadership role over the agency’s crucial point in time counts.“These are high-level, important positions,” said L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who’s on the council’s homelessness committee. She said she’s sorry to see these executives go, including Hill, whom Rodriguez said was working closely with her staff to connect people to housing.“I have no indication or information that would help inform me what the circumstances or the impacts are going to be,” she said. “There's always a lag when you have new people starting,” she added. “I have no clear insight on that.”“It was devastating,” she said. “I did not expect this.” The other recently departed executives — Dixon and Hill — could not immediately be reached for comment. “ Adams Kellum is committed to building a new LAHSA and looks forward to continuing to work with all of our partners to achieve our shared vision of bringing our unhoused neighbors home,” LAHSA leadership said in a statement provided by spokesperson Ahmad Chapman, regarding Dixon and Vaughn Henry’s departures.A nationwide search is underway for the top finance position, with Deputy Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Samson filling in on an acting basis in the meantime, according to the statement. Data management will temporarily be overseen by Bevin Kuhn, a senior advisor for IT and data, while the agency looks for a permanent replacement, the statement added. The departures come as the county is preparing to audit LAHSA’s finances and its annual point in time count of people experiencing homelessness, with an eye toward possibly restructuring the often-criticized agency. LAist also reached out to spokespeople for the top local officials overseeing homelessness and LAHSA: L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, county Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, and Supervisor Kathryn Barger, all of whom sit on LAHSA’s governing commission; as well as the five L.A. city council members on the council’s homelessness committee: Nithya Raman, Bob Blumenfield, Rodriguez, Marqueece Harris-Dawson and John Lee.Two areas that were under the purview of the recently-departed officials — finance and the annual point in time count — are set to be the focus of outside audits recently approved by county supervisors. “As Los Angeles County continues to combat the humanitarian crisis that is homelessness, every entity that plays a role in ending the crisis must be challenged, evaluated, and supported to ensure optimal performance,” statesHorvath and Barger noted that the agency will be getting new financial leadership, and said the audit is meant to be helpful. “The intention of this audit is to provide a clear and accurate picture of the financial health and practices of LAHSA to best inform incoming financial leadership and staff,” the motion states. “Especially as executive financial leadership at LAHSA is changing, this audit will give incoming officers a head start on where to focus. We must dig into the details to expedite the homelessness solutions our communities deserve,” Horvath added in a statement Tuesday.“LAHSA is proactively making adjustments, including in key leadership positions, that will transform LAHSA’s financial infrastructure,” she said in a statement to LAist, adding they look forward to “working collaboratively and in partnership with the Auditor-Controller’s Office to improve our financial practices to serve our unsheltered neighbors better.”Problems with getting accurate data from LAHSA have long frustrated L.A. council members. Vaughn Henry, as the agency’s former data chief, fielded questions from council members at a heated discussion about it in August., council members learned the city may be paying for services that were never used, such as motel rooms that sat empty under a program they approved for $300 million. “It’s just insanity,” Councilmember Rodriguez said at the time. “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.” Council members were particularly frustrated by missing data points about people who leave Inside Safe, a signature motel shelter program launched by Bass shortly after she took office in December 2022. The nonprofits that serve unhoused people are supposed to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program. But that requirement was not enforced by LAHSA, which contracts with the providers and manages the data system. The agency’s system allows staff to “bypass” disclosing whether a person has left the program, Vaughn Henry told council members. That means the city might not know if it’s paying for empty motel rooms after people leave, council members were told by Mercedes Marquez, who at the time was the mayor’s top homelessness advisor.“So we could be paying for weeks for an empty room, when somebody left two weeks earlier, and we could be using that room to house somebody?” he asked.“If there was nothing else that was being done, you would be absolutely correct,” Marquez said in response to Blumenfield’s question.In an interview with LAist on Tuesday, Rodriguez said the same type of data problems remain unresolved. “I'm still on the merry-go-round from hell,” she said, repeating a term she used at the August meeting. “I think there's still a lack of really clear, measurable outcomes that we can concretely say, in terms of measuring the costs associated with it,” Rodriguez added. “That has been a really big challenge and frustration of mine, to just get very clear data points, on what we're paying for.”Rubicon Landscape Group, which has a community beautification program in the city of Richmond, hires California Volunteers' Youth Job Corps service members., provides employment opportunities for Californians ages 16 to 30. Job placements for service members range from a few months to about a year, a timeline that’s set by each participating city or county depending on the region’s needs. The idea is to create a pathway to careers that may have been previously out of reach for them.Priority consideration is offered to youth who are in, or transitioning from, foster care, or have been justice system-involved, or in the mental health or substance abuse system. Participants must also be low-income, unemployed and not enrolled in school. They must also not have participated in an AmeriCorps program.One of Kaelyn Carter’s ongoing challenges these days is working early hours as a landscaper through the cold, often rainy San Francisco Bay Area weather — a world away from the stagnation he remembers feeling when he first arrived in California less than two years ago. Then, Carter had just been released from prison after three years of incarceration in Virginia, where he was born. He had made his way to California, which he heard might have more job opportunities. He’d tried working, but he’d run into more trouble and once again had a warrant out for his arrest. So he turned himself in. That decision led to significant changes in his life, he said, because his probation officer connected him with his current workplace, which is part job and part rehabilitation program.Working at Rubicon, Carter said, offered him a community and the means to provide for himself and rebuild his life. “It feels comfortable to be able to provide, to buy stuff that you need, hygiene products. You don’t have to go and ask someone to do it for you. You can just go and get it yourself,” he said, and “being able to go to work every day and see a check or some kind of payment at the end of the week, it’s comfortable.” Job placements for service members range from a few months to about a year, a timeline that’s set by each participating city or county depending on the region’s needs. The idea is to create a pathway to careers that may have been previously out of reach for them. Priority consideration is offered to youth who are in, or transitioning from, foster care, or have been justice system-involved, or in the mental health or substance abuse system. Participants must also be low-income, unemployed and not enrolled in school. They must also not have participated in an AmeriCorps program. Out of over 8,000 total service members to date, about 400 were either in foster care or transitioning out of it, and 702 have identified as justice-involved.While the Youth Job Corps prioritizes young people who may not be on a college track, it encourages them to pursue higher education. “That’s a goal of the program, and it’s why we focused on those populations,” said Josh Fryday, chief service officer of. “The idea here is creating an opportunity for our young people to serve their community, to make a difference, stabilize them, and then get them on the path to a successful career, which we hope higher education is part of for many of them.” Kaelyn Carter, right, works is part of a community beautification program in the city of Richmond as a service member with California Volunteers’ Youth Job Corps.Service members are paid at least the state hourly minimum wage, now $16, but their city or county of residence can increase their wages. The corps launched in 2022 with $185 million in state funding, with $78.1 million in ongoing funding approved in the 2023-24 state budget., which range from Nevada County to the city of South Gate in Los Angeles County to the city of San Bernardino and more in between. Each location either hires the service member directly or works with local community-based organizations that provide connections to careers in city government, climate efforts such as fire mitigation, community beautification by way of landscaping, and more. “We really wanted to provide a lot of flexibility for local communities to decide how they were going to engage young people, depending on the needs of the community and what was appropriate for that area,” said Fryday. For example, most of the service members in the Los Angeles County city of Maywood were high school seniors or in their early college years, and one was a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in political science. These participants were given the flexibility to choose placement in a career they were interested in pursuing. Their interests ranged from working at City Hall — which is where the college graduate was placed — to the local YMCA. Even some neighboring cities benefited from this flexibility: a service member worked atMaywood, one of the most densely populated cities in the state, is home to a predominantly low-income and immigrant population that most often commutes to work in other regions of Los Angeles County. But at the end of their Youth Job Corps service time, many of the city’s service members were offered full-time jobs in their community. “The pay is helpful, the exposure they appreciate, but what I hear that, just to me, is so incredible and inspiring is when they say, ‘I just never thought I had something positive to contribute to my community. I never thought that I had something of value where I could give back, and I could lift up the community I love while also supporting my family at the same time,’” Fryday said. “I remember hearing that specifically in Maywood.”“It might sound crazy, but Rubicon has been basically a safe haven for me because it helped me with dealing with … I want to say poverty, if that makes sense,” said Carter, now 29. His job also helps him address his depression. Rubicon’s wraparound services — such as mental health support, resume workshops — help with housing and transportation, and working with plants helps him feel more grounded, Carter said. All Youth Job Corps service members at Carter’s job with Rubicon are justice-impacted, which has given him a community of others with similar life experiences. “This cohort, they just really lean on each other a lot,” said Ebony Richardson, a reentry coach with Rubicon. “I feel like they look out for each other as a whole, and it shows in the work they are doing.” This community and support is part of what has kept Carter working at Rubicon, rather than returning to the life that led to his incarceration. “It helped me build structure as far as my character, as far as my work skills,” he said. “It’s really a rehabilitation program basically for those who need a second chance.”is an independent nonprofit organization that provides analysis on key education issues facing California and the nation. LAist republishes articles from EdSource with permission.
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