Without those cameras, inmates — and the ACLU — are in a position of weakness. "After a beating, deputies often claim that the prisoners were the attackers, even though many were handcuffed ... cowering from incoming blows," the ACLU wrote in a report.
Carrillo, the laborer who was beaten while visiting his brother, says he was handcuffed during the entire beating and that the officers were trying to teach him a lesson for his smart-aleck remarks.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Sheriff's deputies outside jail
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Peter Eliasberg and Esther Lim of the ACLU
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The deputies, however, state in their reports that Carrillo was not in cuffs and fought wildly, punching and kicking officers as they tried to book him for illegally possessing a phone. They claim the use of force was necessary to subdue him.
After the incident, Carrillo was charged with battery on a custodial officer, resisting an executive official and attempted escape during lawful detention.
"When I read the police report," Carrillo says, "I was blown away how they created such a convenient story for themselves."
Nearly all of those making allegations of abuse at Men's Central Jail face the same fundamental problem as Carrillo: It's their word versus the cops', and the cops rarely lose.
The ACLU's Eliasberg says, "At best you get witness corroboration from other inmates, but by and large it's almost always the inmate against a number of deputies, and juries are very sympathetic to officers."
On Jan. 24 of this year, the current ACLU jail monitor, Esther Lim, reported that she saw a pair of deputies savagely beat inmate James Parker at the county's Twin Towers jail, next door to Men's Central Jail. In a federal court declaration, Lim said the officers continued to beat Parker even though he seemed unconscious and was not fighting back. Parker "looked like a mannequin that was being used as a punching bag," she said.
The sheriff's log, according to news reports, said Parker attacked the deputies and would not stop until he was hit with a stun gun.
Lim, who is relatively new to her job, had never personally filed a declaration against the Sheriff's Department, Eliasberg says. After she did so, the department fired back. Instead of treating Lim as a witness to a potential crime, Sheriff's Department spokesman Whitmore questioned Lim, asking in a widely distributed Associated Press report why she waited several weeks to file a declaration in court and did not report the abuse right away.
Eliasberg has said Lim did not report the abuse immediately because she was scared and because more than a dozen other incidents of abuse reported by the ACLU in the last year had gone nowhere at the department.
Shortly after the Parker incident, the ACLU asked Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, to comment on Whitmore's remarks. Richman issued a stern statement, saying, "It is odd, and indeed troubling, when a law enforcement spokesman publicly disparages the credibility of a potential prosecution witness."
Whitmore has said that both Internal Affairs and the Office of Independent Review are examining the case, and Eliasberg says he has asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to investigate and is optimistic that the feds are looking into it.
Winter, of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says she recently took an informal survey of prison litigators across the country and discovered that most are aware of incidents similar to what Lim witnessed, "in that the inmate claimed they were subjected to a severe beating while the jailers were calling out to an unresisting inmate, 'Stop resisting, stop resisting,' using the typical script as a cue that the victim will be made the criminal.
"What was unique, which no one around the country had ever heard of, was the boldness and brazenness for an attack like this to happen in essentially a public area of the jail," Winter says. "I think this clearly indicates that the violence has been so deeply rooted and has for so long been accepted by the top brass that there's no sense of shame or fear of being punished. There is a boldness that is breathtaking here and that doesn't exist anywhere else."
The ACLU began its journey toward eradicating cruel and unusual punishment from the L.A. County jails in 1975, when it sued the county and the sheriff in federal court. The county lost, reforms were made and conditions slowly began to improve. But when jail populations started to explode in the 1980s, those improvements vanished, and conditions went south. In 1985, the county agreed to allow an ACLU member inside the jails to monitor conditions as a compromise and alternative to the ACLU hauling the county back into court for contempt.
Now, more than 25 years later, the ACLU says its Prison Project team receives an average of 4,500 inmate complaints a year, on issues that include violence, retaliation, mental health care and unsanitary conditions. From March through August of 2010, the ACLU fielded more than 70 complaints about excessive force or retaliation by deputies from inmates inside Men's Central Jail. The organization has received hundreds of like complaints over the past two years from inmates at the jail. The ongoing federal court case file is bursting with declarations from inmates telling stories of bone-rattling abuse.
