Jeffrey Anderson

Dan Carvin may be out of a job, and he may have a nasty lawsuit to resolve, but state lawmakers are becoming interested in what got him fired in the first place. On Wednesday, state Senator Richard Alarcon called for the state Joint Legislative Audit Committee to examine the City......

Photo by Max S. Gerber Responding to the L.A. Weekly’s recent exposé of rampant discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation against minority and women employees at the Department of Water and Power, City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski called last week for a review of working conditions at the DWP and an end to......

Rejecting calls for an inspector general to help as the city’s watchdog, City Controller Laura Chick said Los Angeles does not need more people to identify problems — just strong leadership. As fired investigator and would-be whistleblower Dan Carvin has found out, Chick means what she says. Carvin was hired......

Photo by Max S. Gerber Like many black men of his generation, Milton Crawford never had room to make mistakes. Growing up in a family of 20 children in the South during the Great Depression, in a home where he was taught to give respect and demand it, Crawford learned......

In announcing the $2 billion lawsuit he filed against Enron last week, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer showed that it’s never too late to get tough on fraud. Lockyer’s timing is peculiar. The Enron scandal broke three years ago. It’s been a year since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took......

Pressure on Patricia Surjue to settle her brutality lawsuit against the city of Inglewood and former police Officer Jeremy Morse has intensified. Renowned civil rights attorney Angela Oh, who agreed to represent Surjue in May after a federal-court settlement fell apart and Surjue’s former lawyers were removed on April 5,......

Steering clear of the trouble that looms for the California Coastal Commission, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stuck to soundbite-sized rhetoric last week when he replaced three commissioners from Gray Davis’ Democratic machine with three Republicans. In stating his commitment to preserving the coast, the governor tiptoed around environmentalists on the left......

Photos by Anthony Allen As hundreds of thousands of refugees fled famine and oppression in East Africa, Nikki Tesfai arrived in Los Angeles on a righteous mission: to help those who had been tortured and abused, and who, like her, escaped to the United States. From the beginning Tesfai’s story......

The Los Angeles civil rights community can be small, and for Patricia Surjue, who this winter backed out of a federal-court settlement in a police-brutality case against the city of Inglewood and former police Officer Jeremy Morse, that community was becoming smaller. But this week it just got a little......

Patricia Surjue is finding out just how lonely it feels to take on a city, its police force, a federal judge and her own lawyers — all at the same time. Surjue walked unaccompanied out of the courtroom of U.S. District Judge James Otero last month after Otero voided a......