Crossroad at Los Angeles County

At the Southern California Sober Living Coalition meeting last night, Supervisor Ridley-Thomas' office sent a senior staff to advocate for the Supervisor's plan to reopen the MLK Hospital in partnership with the University of California. See the County CEO's latest report to the County.

Before he got the opportunity to advocate for his agenda, we spent about half an hour explaining to Coalition members the significance of the recent County move to expand their employment screening to include an FBI check, even showing a clip of some of us testifying at the Board meeting last week.

Afterward, the senior staff member and I had a little heart-to-heart that ended up confirming my lingering fear, i.e. that Supervisor Ridley-Thomas will not champion our cause at the Board. The senior staff member had sound political reasons for not taking up our cause, and I understand that Supervisor Ridley-Thomas doesn't want to sacrifice his other causes for the sake of this one. Still, it hurt.

So where do we go from here? Litigation against the County to bring its policy in compliance with Title VII? Coalition building with MALDEF, APALC, EJS, ACLU, and LAFLA? Or take to the street in protest?

Update II: Expansion of the LA County's background check

On Tuesday, by unanimous vote, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution authorizing the County to perform an FBI background check for employment purposes, potentially for everyone working for and through the County. (See my previous posts about the resolution here and here.) A couple of year ago, I did an extensive survey and found that Las Vegas, Indianapolis, and Jacksonville are the only cities among the U.S. cities with population over 500,000 that do this.

So what did the County decide to do? Immediately, they will start doing an FBI check for everyone in the top 3 level positions, including directors, deputy directors, and their assistants. And they will also start looking into how to expand this check for everyone, including current employees. According to what I heard from Supervisor Ridley-Thomas' office, the only hold-up there seems to be the union's consent. Judging by the union's lukewarm support for the King Drew employees that were disciplined post facto for their criminal past, I am not hopeful that the union will stick up for its members that have a criminal history this time around either.

Stay tuned. We lost a battle, but the war goes on. And the next battleground will be the actual implementation of this background check. My goal is to get the County to conduct a comprehensive overview of its hiring policy regarding people with criminal records to find whether the policy is reasonably implemented (it isn't, in case you're wondering) and whether it unduly deters people with criminal records from applying for a position at the County (it does).