The tiny office—three investigators, a legislative aide and a director—wrote 27 reports in its first five years. They examined a broad range of subjects and they did it with former journalists, instead of more traditional government investigators. The results were very readable, well-documented reports that showed more than a little heart.   read more

California is going to have to find another way to steer convicted criminals into drug treatment programs following the passage last month of Proposition 47, the measure reducing sentences of some lesser crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Without the threat of felony hard time, drug offenders are already opting to take the misdemeanor and skip the rehab, the Los Angeles Times reported last week.   read more

Almost one year ago to the day, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns put a lump of coal in the stockings of Christian activists when he ruled the 43-foot-tall white cross sitting on federal property atop Mt. Soledad near San Diego had to come down. On Friday, the U.S. Senate passed the $585-billion defense bill, which includes a provision that might keep it on the mount where it has existed in some form for more than 100 years.   read more

The Monterey police say they arrived at the scene and found the unarmed student dangerously belligerent. They say to campus cop froze, but he has a different recollection. He said the student was calm when the Monterey police arrived, but they were overly aggressive and blew up the situation. He refused to participate in Tasering the student into submission.   read more

The county Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to have attorneys draft a plan for publicizing at least the names of men convicted of soliciting a prostitute. Supervisor Don Knabe envisioned posting pictures of Johns on the Internet and billboards, and newly-elected Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said public shaming was probably as effective now as it was 1,000 years ago. Maybe more so. They didn’t have the Internet in 1014 A.D.   read more

Mallach ruled that locking the gate at Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay was considered property development under a broad definition used in the 1976 Coastal Act and that billionaire Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc., needed a coastal permit to do that. The law prohibits developments from blocking access to beaches.   read more

The Environmental Defense Center lawsuit alleges that 51 applications to drill and make permit modifications for the purpose of using well stimulation were approved in the last 18 months without any public participation or adequate environmental review. The center wants two Interior Department bureaus to conduct the environmental reviews and permit oversight that lawmakers intended when they created them in 2011 after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico the year before.   read more

Between 200 and 300 people were peacefully cleared out of the sprawling 68-acre shantytown. Many will end up on the street. They will join the estimated 7,630 homeless people in San Jose and Santa Clara County who camp out wherever they can. It’s said to be the largest percentage of nonsheltered homeless people in a big city.   read more

Instead of asking, in a public venue, for county general funds and a U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant, he unilaterally took the entire $96,000 out of a separate source, the county’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. It was a surprise to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), privacy advocates that were active in stopping the purchase in February 2013.   read more

The California Fish and Game Commission didn’t ban hunters from bagging as many coyotes as they please during the year, but made it illegal to turn the hunts into contests with prizes. The ban covers “nongame species and fur-bearing animals,” including beavers and bobcats. “Awarding prizes for wildlife killing contests is both unethical and inconsistent with our modern understanding of natural systems,” Commission President Michael Sutton said.   read more

The suit contends that the law only allows medical marijuana patients or their caregivers to secure pot by picking it up themselves. Nestdrop provides a one-stop shopping site for customers by contracting with a number of area dispensaries and delivery services. Just click on the site, scan in your prescription and place the order.   read more

On Friday, after a firestorm of protest, the district had second thoughts. Officials said they would allow Vivian to remain in the school district if the family that employs the mom agrees to become the kid’s official caregiver. Miriam Storch, the nanny's employer, thinks she knows why Vivian was told to leave in the first place. “I don't play the race card lightly, but it's painfully obvious (her school is) all Caucasians," she said.   read more

From 2002 to 2012, 5,600 cyclists were hit and 36 died. The increase was not totally unexpected. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) closed just one in five hit-and-run cases between 2008 and 2012, according to the Times. Less than half the closed cases were concluded because of an arrest.   read more

Chief Michael Bostic, a 34-year law enforcement veteran who retired as assistant chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, said at a tearful press conference he reached out to the FBI ostensibly because three members of the city council and the Calixico Police Officers Association (POA) were interfering for political reasons in his investigation of a gang kidnapping and assault of a juvenile. But there was much more at stake.   read more

Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group, published a study it did of 555 charter schools, nearly half of the 1,300 in the state, and found 168 of them had an explicit parent work quota. The group suspects that the actual number is higher, but information from many of the schools was incomplete. “Such policies discriminate against poor families, single-parent families, non-traditional households and working parents,” the report says.   read more

The court agreed with the U.S. District Court that registered sex offenders regain their rights after completing probation or parole and that the law chilled those rights in at least three ways. “(1) it does not make clear what sex offenders are required to report; (2) it provides insufficient safeguards preventing the public release of the information sex offenders do report; and (3) the 24-hour reporting requirement is onerous and overbroad.”   read more