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).

Evidence of bias against people with criminal history

You may be familiar with the story of Mr. Beasley, a former X-ray technician at King Drew who was fired last year when the County discovered that he had an old rape conviction. Here is a story from Florida that is eerily similar to what happened to Mr. Beasley here in Los Angeles.

In both, we have a person convicted of a serious crime (a murder in the Florida story), who applies to a job with full disclosure of his criminal history. Then comes a long period of non-event. ("The custodian was never accused of doing anything inappropriate while he worked at the Palm Beach Gardens school.") Boring stuff, really. Just a guy doing his job, providing for his family, and living a life. Then comes the revelation that he has a conviction on his record.

At this point, both the LA Times (along with the County Board of Supervisors) and the Palm Beach Post.com saw a lucky break. "Oh, how lucky are we that this rapist/murdere didn't rape/kill again?" And "we shouldn't have let them work at the hospital/school in the first place!"

So they ignore the long period of non-event, where the guy just, you know, lived his life. That he did not kill or rape anyone isn't some luck or a coincidence or a mircale. It was his damn life for the past decade or two.

And this is the bias we have that eclipses everything else, including decades of a person's good life. The guy has moved on, but we are stuck in his past, judging him by it, from it. It's almost as if we want him to stay in it too.

UPDATE: A similar story from Oregon.

Update: Expansion of the LA County's background check

I previously discussed the proposal to expand the LA County's background checks to include a search of the FBI national database. Today, at the request of Supervisor Ridley-Thomas, the item was continued until August 4th. A little more information about the motive behind the proposal came out today during our side-bar discussion with the Supervisor Ridley-Thomas' office. And (surprise!) it was in response to the fiasco that was the negligent medical care provided at the MLK Hospital, as reported extensively by the LA Times.

In short, the proposed expansion of checking into the criminal history of current county employees and 3rd-party contractors working for the County is a response to the issue of preventing negligent medical care at a county hospital. How?

It only makes sense if we assume that the negligent medical care was delivered by people with criminal records. But you know it's just not true if you followed the story since 2004. What happened, however, is that the LA Times did another expose last year accusing the County of endangering public safety by hiring people with criminal history. Ever since, the blame for the negligence of the hospital has been retroactively shifted to County employees with criminal history. It's an old story, isn't it? If there's a problem that's too complicated for us to fix, find a scapegoat.

By the way, in 2007, the City of Los Angeles did a preliminary study to find out how much it'd cost to do an FBI background check for all new hires. $353,268.24. (I can't find this online any more, but the cite is: Report from the Personnel Department, Council File 06-1187, dated 3/28/2007, page 2.) This cost includes both the cost of the checks themselves and the cost of hiring additional staffing necessary to interpret the reports and to ensure their accuracy.

What if the County doesn't spend this money to check the accuracy of the records they receive? Then, given the US Attorney-General's own admission that 50% of records in the FBI dabatase are either incomplete or out-of-date, we are looking at a substantial number of people being denied employment due to an error. Even if we spend the money and hire people to vet these reports, we're looking at the possibility of adding weeks, if not months, of additional processing time to the hiring of minority candidates, as recently discussed in a NYTimes editorial.

So what's the likely bottomline impact of this proposal that will end up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars? Well, the County will fail to address the underlying problem of negligent medical care at its hospitals. And it will further disproportionately disadvantages minority candidates applying for jobs and promotions either directly or through 3rd-party contractors.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the little addition they snuck in there over the weekend about denying employment to people convicted of crimes of "moral turpitude." WTH?

Expansion of the LA County's background check

At the end of the last month, the LA County CEO William Fujioka asked the Board of Supervisors to exercise the authority required to expand the County's check of its employees' criminal history and include the FBI national database. The request was placed on the agenda (Item 11) for this morning but was continued until next week.

Although the applicable law, California Penal Code § 11105(b), states that the provided FBI records must be vetted by the California DOJ to comply with the requirements of California Labor Code 432.7, several problems remain.

1. The FBI records are incomplete and inaccurate, as admitted by the US Attorney General's Office in its 2006 report to the Congress. See page 3.
2. The California DOJ has had a track record of releasing inaccurate reports, including those from the FBI, which is understandable, given the volume of requests they receive each day.
3. In the last 2 years or so, the California DOJ has been trying to comply with the requirements of the California Labor Code, but this too often results in a significant delay in the release of a report to the requesting agency, which in turn results in a negative consequence for the individual whose background is checked. For example, after waiting for a month or two, the agency would simply go ahead and hire the next person.

Obviously, my hope is that the County delay giving a go-ahead to this request by the CEO until and unless these problems are adequately addressed--either by the DOJ or the County. Meanwhile, though, one wonders why prompted the request in the first place?

It's hard to tell from the CEO's letter to the Board, but I infer that it's because the County is concerned about hiring people with criminal records through the South Bay WIB's ARRA implementation, because (initially, at least) the expanded background search will include only volunteers and non-union employees. If so, it wouldn't be surprising. The County is made of people, most of whom share an irrational fear and bias against people with criminal records. And why would it be surprising when their collective bias shows through at a time of change like this?

Update: Spending ARRA money in LA County

After weeks of playing phone tag with the person in charge of implementing the 10,000 jobs program, my executive director and I went down to the Board of Supervisors meeting this morning to ask for an active discussion. We didn't get it, but the aforementioned person came down from her meeting upstairs and gave me her cell phone number to call. We set a date for a meeting involving major stake holders for the 3rd week of July. I find this whole process of working with a local government slow and infuriating, but it teaches me patience, which I sorely lack, so that's good, I suppose.

Now, the newsworthy items that I learned during our impromptu side-bar meeting are that (1) the South Bay WIB has already found employment for 417 people, mostly in non-profit orgs; (2) the governor's threat to cut CalWORKs has stalled a full implementation of the program; (3) the ARRA money has not been disbursed yet; and (4) the interim solution is to run the program on a borrowed money with the hope of getting reimbursed once the ARRA money comes down.

I applaud the County's effort to find employment, even if temporary, for the unemployed. But I'm afraid that this well-meaning effort will end up amplifying existing barriers to employment for those with criminal records, rather than help alleviate it.

Spending ARRA money in LA County

Supervisor Knabe's motion to direct American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) money into LA County in the form of an expanded CalWORKs program ("Plan") was just passed by the LA County Board of Supervisors. I am not opposed to the idea of adding 10,000 new jobs in the County, even if they last only until June 2010. Many LA residents can use the job and the money.

The problem is that CalWORKs is run through local WorkSource and One Stop agencies (under the Workforce Investment Board of that local jurisdiction), and most, if not all, of them suffer from a performance-based requirement that a certain percentage of their clients be employed each year. I don't know where this requirement comes from, but it is institutionalized in every single WorkSource I talked to.

This pressure from the performance mandate creates an incentive for intake specialists to avoid taking on difficult cases, e.g. people with recent and/or extensive criminal history. And it leads also to the agencies turning a blind eye to employers that flagrantly violate existing laws against criminal history discrimination. This is why One-Stop in Alameda County is one of the organizations against whom National Employment Law Project (NELP), along with its allies (including A New Way of Life Reentry Project), asked Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) to investigate and file a commissioner's charge.

At today's LA County Board of Supervisors' meeting, I asked the Board to continue Supervisor Knabe's motion so that we can revise the language of the form contract between the County and employers participating in the program to reflect the Title VII requirement for finding a job-nexus to use an applican't criminal record. The Board declined to continue the motion, but the County has asked us to participate from now on in bringing the Plan in line with Title VII. This will most likely include staff and employer training, revised contracts, and additional tracking. Also important is that, through the hectic, last-minute negotiation with Supervisor Ridley-Thomas' office (via Richard Fajardo, a fellow UCLAW alum), we finally established a working relationship with the supervisor that replaced our erstwhile staunch ally, Supervisor Yvonne Burke.