Fire L.A. County’s bad probation chief

“Stop resisting, stop resisting” Los Angeles County probation officers keep saying to a skinny teen they have in custody in a room at a Malibu juvenile facility.

They say this over and over to the 120-pound 17-year-old, even after the brutal leg twist they have applied to him has him screaming in pain and completely immobilized.

Four burly officers have him pinned.

Others drift around the room as back-up.

One officer keeps saying “stop resisting” even as the inert youth is being dragged across the floor of a room, seemingly unable to even stand up, much less “resist.”

It's as if the officers think that they are merely being recorded on audiotape and that if they incessantly keep saying that the prisoner is “resisting,” then anyone listening to the recording later will believe that they are correct in how they are handling the situation.

But the recording that was released last week of the October 2020 incident at Camp Kilpatrick is videotape, with both sounds and a very clear image of the fracas, and no one viewing it could possibly say that the officers are doing their (extremely trying, never easy, fraught with tough situations on a daily basis) work in an appropriate professional manner.

After Supervisor Oscar Cross bends the young prisoner's feet toward his head, “Mamá, mamá” he screams.

After the Los Angeles Times obtained the video and showed it to other probation officers, several of them described what they saw as “child abuse.” A Probation Department “roundtable” of Cross's peers determined that he should be fired over the incident.

But Cross is still a supervisor in Malibu because Chief Probation Officer Adolfo Gonzales, who also has seen the video, refused to fire him, the Times reports.

The county's Office of the Inspector General late last year said it believes the Probation Department is withholding details of other such incidents from oversight agencies.

That's why a majority of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and members of an oversight panel argued for the ouster of department boss Gonzales last week. He should resign immediately. If he doesn't, all five supervisors should vote to fire him.