Tim Arango

The winds, known as the Santa Anas, loom large over the collective psyche of Southern California. They have also been the defining antagonist in this season of fire, a sinister reminder that wind has the power to provoke fear and present danger in an instant.

“Devil winds,” said Peter Sanders of the Los Angeles Fire Department, referring to a popular nickname for the Santa Anas, which reached hurricane-level speeds in parts of the region Wednesday and made fighting fire almost impossible.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, firefighters and police officers stood guard near a wall of glass that protects the plane President Reagan used as Air Force One. Yards away, a ridge was lit up by bright-red encroaching flames and gray plumes of clouds, as aircraft flew low, dropping water and powerful retardant.

The blaze threatening the library was the latest to ignite in more than a week of fierce wildfires that have burned up and down the state. As it crept close, thousands of residents in the valley had to flee their homes nearby.

Firefighters spoke of the gusts with a sense of fatalism, an act of nature they cannot get ahead of, and certainly cannot control. The fire near the library, known as the Easy fire, was at 5% containment Wednesday afternoon. “We can’t get in front of it because it puts us in harm’s way,” said Brian McGrath, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

On the hillside at the library the wind was a terrible companion. To walk meant to move hunched over, slowly, both hands holding your hat. Shouts became whispers, drowned out by the hissing of flags flapping, and tree branches bending and cracking. A sign for the visitor parking lot, secured by sandbags, had easily toppled over.

The winds were pushing the smoke to the west, moving like gray mist across the blue sky — and making it possible to breathe — as firefighters and police officers watched the flames crackle through the dry, brown brush. When a helicopter appeared, buzzing low, and dropped its payload of water, a rainbow bloomed like a halo over the bruised landscape.

Up north, strong winds, known there as Diablo winds, flamed the Kincade fire, which had spread to more than 75,000 acres Wednesday.

With multiple fires burning, meteorologists and residents were looking at forecasts with a sense of foreboding: Predictions called for some of the strongest winds in a decade, and at least in Simi Valley those fears were well-founded.

Though the Santa Anas are an annual occurrence, this year they were proving to be far worse and many residents said they felt different. With the effects of climate change combined with fierce fire seasons, the winds now seem more ominous.

For Karin Feldshuh, who moved to Los Angeles from New York last year, the feel of the wind triggers an emotional reaction.

“Anxiety,” she said Tuesday. “I know with the fires brewing that embers can flow and wreak havoc.”

Seeing the wind forecast Tuesday, McGrath said the department put in place bulldozers and fire crews to be ready in case of wildfire. Helicopters, which were flying Wednesday near the library, had been on standby all night. Fixed-wing aircraft had been grounded off and on Wednesday morning, as the winds shifted.

Robert Santos, a meteorologist for Spectrum News 1, a cable channel, said big temperature drops in the mountains and high desert would create cold, heavy air that would push out like the opening of a freezer, creating strong gusts toward the ocean.

The National Weather Service issued a rare “extreme red-flag warning,” saying the winds could trigger “extreme fire behavior.”

The Santa Anas have always had a grip on the literature and pop culture of the region. Most famously, writer Joan Didion mused on the Santa Anas in her essay “Los Angeles Notebook.”

“It’s a fact of life for Angelenos, and for people who are newer to LA or Southern California it’s a favorite thing to comment on or complain about,” said Nathan Masters, a historian and writer at USC Libraries and the host of “Lost LA” on KCET, a public television station. “I think the reason is the Santa Ana winds are the dirty little secret behind the notion that LA has perfect weather.”

Masters produced a show on the history of the Santa Anas in 2012, and found that the winds — which have been blowing this way for thousands of years — were first described in print as the Santa Anas, named for a canyon southeast of Los Angeles, in a newspaper in 1880. He likened the winds to a bill that comes due every year for all those days of great weather.

“We have how many days of sunshine a year?” he said. “More than 300? And yet, from roughly October through January we can count on half the days being somewhat uncomfortable because of the dry air.”

Julien Kinori, 35, a writer in Los Angeles, brought up Didion on Tuesday, saying she talks about how “they’re these warm winds that are seemingly innocuous but there’s a certain darkness to them. Also a madness associated with them, that they make people go crazy.”

Officials with the Los Angeles Fire Department said they were monitoring the wind forecast and deploying fire crews all over the city and the San Fernando Valley, where the winds could be the strongest.

“The forecasted winds are as bad as we’ve ever seen, supposedly,” said Graham Everett, a deputy chief and chief of staff of the department.

Everett, 53, who has been with the department for 30 years, said the department had identified which canyons — the spaces where the winds can be the most furious — in Los Angeles have not burned in a long time, and could light up at any point.

In the area of the Getty fire, which erupted early Monday in a wealthy enclave of western Los Angeles — burning down several multimillion-dollar homes near the Getty Center and its priceless artworks — fire crews were patrolling neighborhoods, looking for spots that were still smoldering.

“Because we do know the winds are coming in,” Everett said.

While many Angelenos this time of year feel that pinch of anxiety when the winds kick up, for firefighters it is a different emotion, he said.

“I wouldn’t call it dread,” he said. “It’s anticipation. It’s what we do. It’s game day. We prep for this.”

The winds could reach 50-80 mph in the areas of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, putting them, possibly, at the “upper end of people’s historical experience,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He said he predicted more heavy winds through Thursday. “There’s still a pretty long period of winds still to come,” Swain said.

As the day wore on in Simi Valley, firefighters were confident the blaze would not threaten the Reagan library, where a helicopter peered out from the glass enclosure as the fires raged outside, and the flags of the presidents hissed in the wind.

This article originally appeared in

'Devil Winds' Drive a Fire Threatening the Reagan Library

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The downsloping gusts that begin inland and blow toward the ocean in autumn and winter bring with them warmth and dread in equal measure. They howl through the canyons of Santa Monica and whip the palm trees that line the streets of Los Angeles, driving up dust and fraying nerves.

'Devil Winds' Drive Southern California Fires

They have also been the defining antagonist in this season of fire, a sinister reminder that wind has the power to provoke fear and present danger in an instant.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, firefighters and police officers stood guard near a wall of glass that protects the plane President Reagan used as Air Force One.

The fire near the library, known as the Easy fire, was at 5% containment Wednesday afternoon. “We can’t get in front of it because it puts us in harm’s way,” said Brian McGrath, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

The winds were pushing the smoke to the west, moving like gray mist across the blue sky — and making it possible to breathe — as firefighters and police officers watched the flames crackle through the dry, brown brush.

Up north, strong winds, known there as Diablo winds, flamed the Kincade fire, which had spread to over 75,000 acres Wednesday.

With multiple fires burning, meteorologists and residents were looking at forecasts with a sense of foreboding: Predictions called for some of the strongest winds in a decade.

The winds could reach 50-80 mph in the areas of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, putting them, possibly, at the “upper end of people’s historical experience,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He said he predicted more heavy winds through Thursday.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The downsloping gusts that begin inland and blow toward the ocean in autumn and winter bring with them warmth and dread in equal measure. The winds, known as the Santa Anas, loom large over the collective psyche of Southern California.

On Monday morning, with a backdrop at the hulking Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, a symbol of the city’s place as the nation’s largest jailer, Gascon said he was finally entering the race, setting up what activists have described as the most important district attorney’s race in the United States.

Promising a “safer, more humane, more effective and far less expensive criminal justice system” for Los Angeles, Gascon, in his announcement, cited his record in reducing jail populations in San Francisco.

“The way the criminal justice system operates must change, in the face of overwhelming data and scientific evidence that shows that we have been doing things for the past 40 years that are not only inhumane but expensive and also has not made us any safer,” he said.

As cities across America, like Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, have elected progressive prosecutors promising to end mass incarceration, Los Angeles has resisted the trend, twice electing Jackie Lacey, a get-tough-on-crime prosecutor who has earned the support of much of the city’s political elite.

Gascon’s entry into the race, regardless of who wins, will surely reshape the conversation around criminal justice in Los Angeles County, a vast area of 88 cities that is home to 10.3 million people and the nation’s largest jail system and prosecutor’s office. Because of the county’s size and its relatively high incarceration rates, The Los Angeles Times wrote in a recent editorial, “There is a strong case to be made that aside from the presidential race, the most important item before voters in 2020 will be the race for L.A. County D.A.”

“There are a lot of eyes on this race and for good reason,” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that promotes reformist prosecutors. “LA hasn’t embraced new thinking that other urban areas are trying to push forward.”

She described the race as “really a test of where leaders will stand in Los Angeles.”

As district attorney in San Francisco, a post he resigned from this month to move to Los Angeles and consider a challenge to Lacey, Garcon drew national attention for diverting more young adults up to age 25 away from prison, automatically expunging past marijuana convictions and lowering incarceration rates.

“I think to some extent he was out there by himself for a number of those years doing things that were courageous, and it probably helped that he was on the left coast,” said Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia, who was elected in 2017 on a platform of reducing mass incarceration.

In Los Angeles, it has been a different story: Under Lacey, Los Angeles, which accounts for almost a third of the state’s prison population of close to 130,000 inmates, has sent people to prison or jail at more than four times the rate of San Francisco. Yet in both cities, crime is at historical lows, with the fewest murders in nearly a half century last year.

California has passed several measures in recent years to reduce prison populations and change the criminal justice system.

Gascon joins two other candidates, both prosecutors, who are also challenging Lacey from the left: Richard Ceballos, 57, a former defense lawyer who now focuses on prosecuting organized crime cases; and Joseph Iniguez, 33, who was a schoolteacher before he became a prosecutor.

Voters will have their first say March 3, when California holds its presidential primary. If one of the candidates receives more than 50% of the vote, then he or she will win. If not, the top two finishers will advance to a general election in November 2020.

“I have a tremendous amount of passion for what happens in LA, and for the last few years I have become increasingly more uneasy seeing the backwardness of the criminal justice system in LA,” Gascon said in an interview last week, before he announced his candidacy.

Gascon, a Cuban émigré, moved to Los Angeles with his family as a boy. He attended Bell High School there but dropped out and entered a three-year stint in the Army, where he earned his high school degree.

Gascon was a beat cop in South Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s — he eventually rose to assistant chief of the department — a time of soaring crime rates, gang violence and the crack epidemic, and a time when Los Angeles and the nation were locking up more and more people, particularly black men.

Gascon, who was appointed district attorney in San Francisco in 2011, replacing Kamala Harris, and then was elected twice, referred to himself as having been a “lock-’em-up guy in the ’80s and ’90s.”

He said, “I am not proud of some of the things I did in the past and I want to figure out a way to do it differently.”

Lacey, who prefers to portray herself as a crime fighter, a more traditional approach for a prosecutor, has lately moved to divert more mentally ill people from Los Angeles’ jails, which have been described as the nation’s largest mental health system.

Lacey spent her formative years in turbulent South Los Angeles, where she grew up and saw her neighborhood become consumed by drugs and crime. And, like many in law enforcement, she said there was no easy answer to why crime rates have fallen so sharply: Have they dropped because of mass incarceration, or in spite of it?

“Things did get better, and I wish I knew the secret,” she said in an interview earlier this year, pointing out the importance of keeping crime low as Los Angeles prepares to host the Olympics in 2028.

“I really want to keep it that way. I want to keep people safe. I want businesses to come here. If the city wants to host the Olympics, I don’t want there to be a discussion about what we do about crime,” she said.

“On the other hand, I realize, probably because of my own personal experience, is that a lot of people did get caught up in the drug trade and they can reform and they can come out. And there does need to be a shift in our thinking about addiction and mental health.”

George Gascon Enters Race for District Attorney in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES — For months, George Gascon, a former beat cop, police chief and then district attorney of San Francisco, has weighed a run for the same job in Los Angeles.

The suspect is accused of stalking his victims, ingratiating himself as a repairman and then killing them in a spasm of violence. One victim was nearly decapitated; another’s breasts slashed off. One of the women, a former girlfriend of actor Ashton Kutcher, was found in a pool of blood on the stairs. The gruesomeness of the killings and the celebrity connection have earned the perpetrator the tabloid-style moniker of The Hollywood Ripper. Prosecutors are asking jurors to deliver a death sentence.

Nearly 400 miles to the north, in Sacramento, prosecutors have come together to seek a death sentence for Joseph James DeAngelo, the man accused of being the so-called Golden State Killer, who terrorized communities up and down the state in the 1970s and 1980s before an arrest was made last year with the help of a genealogy website.

And there are several other capital cases underway in California, including the trial of a man accused of killing an officer in Sacramento and a suspect described as a serial killer in Los Angeles County. A prosecutor may also seek a death sentence for the man charged in the recent synagogue shooting near San Diego.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, issued a moratorium in March on executions in the state, which has more death row inmates than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. But that decision has not stopped local prosecutors from seeking new death sentences, underscoring the divide in the state between conservative prosecutors and liberal reformers like the governor who see ending capital punishment as an urgent moral issue.

And as liberal as California voters are generally, as recently as 2016 they rejected a ballot measure that would have abolished capital punishment and approved another one to fast-track executions.

These divisions, experts say, are setting the backdrop for what could be a contentious fight as Newsom takes new steps beyond the moratorium to abolish capital punishment.

For now, the moratorium amounts to temporary reprieves for each of the 737 men and women on California’s death row, which will last for the duration of his time as governor.

“It’s got to be really confusing for the average citizen who sees both things going on and doesn’t understand how all of the above can be occurring,” said Michele Hanisee, the president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles County. She is seeking a death sentence in one of her cases: the man accused of being a serial killer, Alexander Hernandez, who is charged with killing five people in a shooting rampage in the San Fernando Valley in 2014.

“The simple answer is this: The district attorneys of the state of California took an oath to uphold and follow the law,” Hanisee said. “I think the governor probably did too, but he doesn’t care.” The governor, she added, does “not have the legal authority to tell them not to seek death or not to follow the law.”

New death sentences in California have declined in recent years — 2018 was a record low, with five new sentences. The drop aligns with a national trend, as public support for capital punishment has waned and juries have been reluctant to impose death sentences in the face of evidence of racial disparities and high-profile exonerations. Before Newsom’s moratorium, 20 other states, including most recently Washington and Delaware, had abolished the practice.

Public support for capital punishment across the country has dropped substantially since the 1990s, according to polling data from Gallup.

California, while maintaining a large death row, has not executed anyone since 2006. There were long-standing legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol that had halted executions even before Newsom’s moratorium.

Many supporters of capital punishment say that while the system can be reformed to reduce racial disparities, and thus produce fewer death sentences, the penalty should remain an option for prosecutors and juries in the most heinous of crimes, including some of the cases underway in California.

“The case for the death penalty is the moral part of it,” said Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, an organization in Sacramento that favors the death penalty and supported a ballot initiative in 2016 in which voters approved fast-tracking executions. “For the very worst murderers, nothing short of execution is adequate.”

Research that shows racial disparities in the capital punishment system — that black and Latino men are disproportionately sent to death row — has led to an acknowledgment that the system is flawed and is at the heart of calls for abolition. But in California, supporters of the death penalty argue that white men are charged with committing some of the most egregious crimes, including Michael Gargiulo, the Hollywood Ripper suspect, or DeAngelo, who was once a police officer.

“Gargiulo is a white dude,” Hanisee said. “Golden State Killer, he’s a white guy who was a cop.” She also noted that many of the 24 death row inmates who have exhausted all of their appeals — and would be next in line for executions if they were proceeding — were white men.

“Of the 24 or so who are presently eligible for execution, half of them are white men,” she said. “So let’s execute them.”

In an interview, Newsom said that his administration was considering several new steps to dismantle the state’s capital punishment system and that his moratorium was a first step on what he hoped was a path that ended with abolition. He said his advisers were studying how he could commute the sentences of current death row inmates to life without parole. Newsom has the power to commute sentences in which the inmate has only one felony, but more than half of the death row population has at least two felonies; to commute those sentences would require approval from the state Supreme Court.

Newsom’s advisers are focusing on the Supreme Court’s decision to block several pardons or commutations — although not for death row inmates — issued by former Gov. Jerry Brown before he left office in January. Those rejections were the first time in decades the court had blocked a governor’s commutations, and Newsom has asked the court for an explanation.

He hopes the explanation will offer some guidance “that will allow us to form better judgment on next steps if we want to look to commutations on the capital punishment side.”

“Life without the possibility of parole. We are not releasing anybody. We are by no means pursuing that,” Newsom said.

He also said he was discussing with the attorney general’s office what role the state could play in blocking prosecutions of new death sentences. But legal experts say this power is limited: The state could decline to defend capital cases on appeal, but it does not have the power to order district attorneys, who are elected at the county level, to not seek death.

“He does not have the authority to tell prosecutors or even the attorney general what the policy is going to be with respect to individual prosecutions,” said Shilpi Agarwal, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco. “As long as the death penalty is on the books they are free to seek it in any individual prosecution.”

One possibility is that the attorney general could take cases away from local prosecutors. But experts say that is unlikely and would be unprecedented.

“I have not seen any indication from our attorney general that they want to impose the governor’s view and take cases away from us so that we cannot seek capital punishment,” said Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney, who is part of the prosecution in the Golden State Killer case.

Schubert added that, “Capital punishment is the law in California, and just because Gavin Newsom has a personal opposition to it doesn’t mean that we as prosecutors abandon our obligation to enforce the law in the appropriate cases. I’m not this zealot about the death penalty, but it is the law.”

Those who oppose capital punishment, like Newsom and Agarwal, say that no matter how gruesome a particular case is, it does not justify perpetrating a system they see as biased, with the possibility of wrongful convictions. Almost immediately, Newsom’s moratorium had an impact nationally, with candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 coming out against capital punishment.

“When you are putting a moratorium on the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere, it’s going to have an impact, we believe, on the national debate,” Newsom said. “This was not just about California. It’s not just about the situational nature of prosecutions in this state. It’s about a deeper question about our values and who we are.”

All of this appears to be heading to a new ballot initiative in California, perhaps as soon as 2020, about whether to keep capital punishment.

“The deeper question is, when is this ripe for reconsideration at the ballot?” Newsom said.

If there were to be another fight at the ballot over capital punishment, Californians would most likely hear a lot about the Golden State Killer and other terrible crimes.

“We will talk about the facts of these cases and what these people did,” Hanisee said. “And if the California voters vote to get rid of the death penalty, so be it. But it needs to be an honest debate.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/california-death-penalty.html" id="fc9e53de-0763-3fd2-a394-ee0a75b83a2a">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — In Courtroom 106 in downtown Los Angeles, a jury has begun hearing testimony in the long-awaited trial of a man accused of stabbing to death two women in their homes at night.

California Has a Moratorium on Executions. Prosecutors Want New Death Sentences Anyway.

“Periwinkle is the color Gwyneth wanted,” he said.

The property, called the Miramar, opened in February and is his first hotel. It is vintage Caruso: nostalgic and shiny, and, like his multimillion-dollar developments in Los Angeles, every detail has been obsessed over. It builds on his earlier successes. The Palisades Village, a small-scale shopping center modeled in part on Nantucket, Massachusetts, opened in October. The Grove, a retail enclave that opened in 2002, counts a number of annual visitors on par with Disneyland.

As the chairman of the board of trustees at the University of Southern California, Caruso has also taken on a role of prominence as the school struggles to handle a series of scandals. These are the latest signs that Caruso seems intent on broadening his stamp on the city of Los Angeles, where he is a figure of increasing influence.

At 60, he seems poised to take a greater role in the city’s affairs, at a time when older leaders, like Eli Broad, the octogenarian-billionaire arts patron, are stepping back.

Now eyes are on Caruso — who has said he might run for mayor — and a handful of others to see where they will try to take the city in the next several years. His rise to prominence has been welcomed by his peers, but it has also raised questions for many in Los Angeles about who should take on the mantle of benefactor, power broker and possible political leader for an increasingly diverse city where inequality is visible everywhere.

In addition to Caruso, others in the city seen as filling the gap left by Broad and others of his ilk are Austin Beutner, a philanthropist and superintendent of Los Angeles schools; Magic Johnson, with his investment company and philanthropy work; Casey Wasserman, an entertainment executive who led efforts to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028; and Antonia Hernandez, who as president of the California Community Foundation funnels a large amount of philanthropy toward immigration and housing programs.

Notably absent are Hollywood moguls, like billionaire David Geffen, who have historically supported the arts but shied away from involvement in broader civic affairs.

“I wish there were more people who took a leadership role in civic activities,” said Caruso, who added that he would be hard pressed to put together a dinner party of civic leaders if he wanted to rally support for a big initiative. “We don’t have that long list of go-to people to get things done that we used to have.”

Part of the reason that widespread civic engagement is difficult in Los Angeles is because the city can feel so fragmented. This was highlighted with the recent killing of rapper Nipsey Hussle, whose death was felt deeply in his black and Latino South Los Angeles neighborhood, even as many in other mostly white sections had barely heard of him.

Mike Feuer, the Los Angeles city attorney who has known Caruso for years, said, “There was historically an echelon of LA leaders with a very deep stake in the future of the city and a passion, a sense of philanthropy, people who were civically engaged.” He added, “Eli is of that generation. But there are very few people like that anymore in Los Angeles.” Caruso, he believes, is one of them.

Caruso’s curated worlds, though, are a world away from the concerns of everyday citizens of Los Angeles, and many dismiss the idea that a multibillionaire developer should take on a bigger leadership role.

His real estate career has not been without controversy. In 2016, he had to walk away from plans for a retail development on a lagoon near the coast in Carlsbad amid opposition from the community. Caruso spent millions to fund a ballot initiative to bypass state environmental planning laws, but a citizen-backed measure opposing the development eventually prevailed.

The grandson of Italian immigrants, Caruso grew up in Beverly Hills. His father started Dollar Rent A Car. He worked as an attorney before getting into real estate by buying property and leasing it to his father’s business. That began his rise as a developer, with periodic forays into public life, with the Department of Water and Power in the 1980s and later as president of the Police Commission. He eventually amassed a fortune of $4 billion, good for No. 504 on Forbes’ billionaires list.

Then last year, he was thrust again into the spotlight as chairman of USC’s board of trustees at a time when the university was thrown into crisis.

After decades in which USC leaders worked to transform the university into a world-class institution, the school, Los Angeles County’s largest private employer, was waylaid by several scandals. It has been at the center of the Justice Department’s investigation into the college admissions scam. And last year, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed accusations that a former gynecologist at the school had sexually abused students for years. This came on the heels of the medical school dean being ousted after allegations of drug use and prostitution.

Last summer, Caruso became chairman of the board and installed Wanda Austin, a former aerospace executive, as interim president, forcing out C.L. Max Nikias, who still had many loyalists among the board who opposed Caruso’s efforts to install new leadership.

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com and a fellow board member who is close to Caruso, said it “was one of the most politically charged situations I have ever witnessed.”

“These were probably some of the darkest days I have ever seen for USC,” he said.

For Caruso, the politically fraught drama at USC drew parallels to his role in an earlier episode in Los Angeles: as president of the Police Commission in 2002, when the Los Angeles Police Department was reeling from the Rampart corruption scandal. The department, still shaken from the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and the ensuing riots, was led by Bernard Parks, who was an icon in the black community but who many city leaders wanted gone. Caruso pushed Parks out and helped bring in William Bratton to reform the department.

“Rick was the one who had to manage the commission’s vote to oust Parks,” said Connie Rice, a prominent African American civil rights attorney who was on the commission. “And I can’t tell you the kind of courage that that took. And my part was, I was their racial shield. They couldn’t remove an icon like that, unless you had the leading civil rights lawyer in the city, who is African American, saying he needs to go.”

The USC drama has attracted a great deal of public scrutiny, some intensely personal. After USC was implicated in the bribery scandal, news emerged that one of the students who was allegedly admitted to the school after her parents paid a bribe was vacationing on Caruso’s yacht with his daughter.

The scrutiny is sure to intensify as Caruso takes a bigger role in the city’s affairs, and there is sure to be renewed talk of a possible run for mayor — something he planned to do in 2012 before opting out, after he had already cut campaign commercials. It is speculation that Caruso welcomes.

“If there is a chance down the road, I will consider it,” he said.

For all his successes, even those who admire his business acumen question whether he could break through in politics in Los Angeles.

Some of the most important debates underway in the city are about gentrification of minority neighborhoods and the future of urban spaces. Caruso, whose developments tend to be privileged enclaves set apart from the city, has mostly shied away from those debates, although much of his philanthropy is directed toward South Los Angeles.

“I think one of the biggest weaknesses of this city is we have not figured out how to reinvent and bring up the whole Los Angeles,” he said. “I think it’s devastating to this city.”

Still, Jill Stewart, executive director of the Coalition to Preserve LA, a group that focuses on urban planning and promotes transparency in government, said of Caruso: “His heart isn’t in the zeitgeist of Los Angeles. And the zeitgeist of Los Angeles to me is, it’s a working-class city. It’s a small business city filled with mom and pop places. It’s really not his vision of gigantic things. And I think that will always push back against him.”

The issues at USC, Caruso said, have forced him to think harder about a political future. “I have to be more thoughtful about it,” he said. “It can’t just be about me. It’s got to be about the impact on my wife, the impact on the kids.”

If he has a future in the politics of the city — the next mayoral election is not until 2022 — Caruso, who supported Republican John Kasich for president in 2016 and has also supported Democrats, said if he were to run for office, he would do so as an independent and would focus on development.

California is in the throes of a housing crisis and Caruso believes that to solve it, Los Angeles needs to grow vertically — his next project is a luxury apartment tower — and move away from its past as a city centered on single-family homes. He is a big promoter of aboveground rail and believes the city’s investments in the subway system are misguided.

“I don’t know why we don’t have a rail line that’s going down the middle of the 10 freeway and the 405 that’s connecting the West Side to downtown,” he said. “You have the right of way all the way through it. But what are we going to do? We’re going to spend billions and dig a tunnel and just screw up the whole city.”

For all his attributes, though, Caruso strikes many as from another era — in the mold of Richard Riordan, a wealthy businessman who served as mayor in the 1990s.

“Whether LA, which is clearly a multicultural city, would welcome his candidacy, I don’t know,” said Jane Harman, a former congresswoman from California who is close to Caruso. “It depends on who else is running.”

“I’ll campaign for him,” said Paltrow, in an interview. “I’ll make the T-shirts.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/los-angeles-rick-caruso-usc.html" id="cea845d6-3c14-3264-a120-7e99e713394f">The New York Times</a>.

A Real Estate Mogul Seeks to Expand His Influence Over Los Angeles

MONTECITO, Calif. — Rick J. Caruso was getting excited. In a few weeks, the real estate mogul’s beachside resort in Montecito would open its doors and the project, more so than his others in Los Angeles, was a personal one. The family crest is etched above the outdoor fireplace. The booths in one of the restaurants are inspired by Perino’s, a long-shuttered Hollywood eatery where Caruso hung out. The sundries shop is run by his friend Gwyneth Paltrow.

As the chairman of the board of trustees at the University of Southern California, Caruso has also taken on a role of prominence as the school struggles to handle a series of scandals. These are the latest signs that Caruso seems intent on broadening his stamp on the city of Los Angeles, where he is a figure of increasing influence and where a new class of power players is starting to emerge.

Caruso’s many curated worlds, though, are a world away from the concerns of everyday citizens of Los Angeles, and many dismiss the idea that a multibillionaire developer should take on a bigger leadership role.

Caruso grew up in Beverly Hills, the grandson of Italian immigrants; his father started Dollar Rent A Car. He worked as an attorney before getting into real estate by buying property and leasing it to his father’s business. That began his rise as a developer, with periodic forays into public life, with the Department of Water and Power in the 1980s and later as president of the Police Commission. He eventually amassed a fortune of $4 billion, good for No. 504 on Forbes’ billionaires list.

California is in the throes of a housing crises and Caruso believes that to solve it, Los Angeles needs to grow vertically — his next project is a luxury apartment tower — and move away from its past as a city centered on single-family homes. He is a big promoter of aboveground rail and believes the city’s investments in the subway system are misguided.

Days later, Lathan, using a wheelchair while he recovered from his wound, was arrested and held in the Men’s Central Jail — not because he had committed a crime, but because he had violated parole by associating with a known gang member: Nipsey Hussle.

Never mind that Hussle had been lauded as a businessman and a philanthropist, mourned with a 25-mile procession through the streets of South Los Angeles, and celebrated by former President Barack Obama. Or that he had been killed one day before he was set to sit down with the city’s police chief to talk about reducing gang violence.

Lathan’s reimprisonment stirred outrage in the city’s black community, where memories of aggressive gang policing in the 1980s and 1990s are still raw. It also brought renewed attention to a system of parole and probation that can land people back behind bars for violating lengthy sets of conditions that can include curfews, random searches and control over where people can live and whom they can see.

After Lathan, 56, spent 10 days in jail, apparently even parole officials could no longer reconcile Nipsey Hussle the local hero with Nipsey Hussle the gang member. On Thursday, after appeals to Gov. Gavin Newsom by family members and calls to the governor’s office by reporters, the head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Ralph M. Diaz, intervened, and the charges against Lathan were dropped.

“Although there was a technical violation of the terms and conditions of Mr. Lathan’s parole, after reviewing the circumstances in more detail, CDCR requested the petition to be dismissed,” a department spokesman wrote.

More than 4.5 million people in the United States are on parole or probation — nearly twice as many as are incarcerated — and in some states people whose parole or probation was revoked account for more than half the prison population. According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, about 20 percent of people released from state prisons are sent back for technical violations, meaning they did not commit a new crime but rather violated conditions, like a ban on entering places that serve alcohol or having any contact with the police — or, in the protracted case of rapper Meek Mill, an order to take etiquette classes.

Critics say probation and parole often go on far longer than necessary and keep people enmeshed in the criminal justice system, and that those accused of violations have limited due process.

California, once a leader in get-tough-on-crime policies that swelled prison populations, is now seen as at the forefront of national efforts to address mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. In recent years, the state has reduced some drug crimes and thefts to misdemeanors, passed a bill to outlaw cash bail and allowed more inmates to be released for good behavior.

But many parole violations involve alleged links to gang members.

“Gangs are the great exception” to the trend away from incarceration, said Jorja Leap, a gang expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even with significant questions about how gangs, gang membership and gang-related crimes are defined, such crimes carry enhanced punishments and a person tagged as having gang affiliations can find the label impossible to shake.

“If someone like Nipsey Hussle is viewed as always a gang member,” Leap said, “what is happening to the average guy who has a low-level job, who’s trying to make it, and that’s his past? Or the average gal, because it’s men and women alike.”

California has long maintained a database of gang members called CalGang, and apparently Hussle, who had spoken publicly about his past experience as a member of the Crips, was still listed, despite the turn in his life. The arresting document for Latham called Hussle a “documented ‘Rolling 60’s Crip’ gang member.”

The database, which is available only to law enforcement, has long been seen in minority communities as a way for the state to criminalize young black and Latino men, with little oversight or due process. The database has also, academics and activists say, made it nearly impossible for those on parole to avoid contact with gang members, because so many names are on the list and no one really knows who.

Though law enforcement has defended the list as necessary to fight gang violence, a state audit in 2016 found that it was misused and rife with errors, including dozens of people listed as being less than 1 year old and hundreds who were not set to be purged from the list for more than a century — far longer than the law allowed.

“It’s really wrong to be permanently putting people on these lists,” said Vincent Schiraldi, an expert on probation at Columbia University. “It’s very racially divisive. It makes people in communities of color feel like they never have a chance to be viewed as equals.”

Lathan was released in September for serving almost 25 years on a murder conviction, and like countless men coming out of prison whom Hussle was trying to help, he was loosely in the rapper’s orbit. Hussle had known his sister, Ellisa McKnight, and had given her a car full of clothes for her brother when he was released.

But Lathan barely knew Hussle, even though he had hopes of working with him in his programs to reduce gang violence.

“At the time of his death he was an icon of the community,” McKnight said of Hussle. “The whole city shut down to mourn this man. Even Congress recognized him. So how is it that Mr. Lathan was going to have a meeting with a person affiliated with a gang?”

Lathan, in a recent interview from jail that was recorded by a friend and uploaded to VladTV, said he had taken a selfie with Hussle. “He’s a celebrity,” he said. “Everybody’s taking selfies, let me take one. That’s on my phone, in front of the Marathon store.”

Lathan, who said he was feeling “bad as hell” without his pain medication, related his conversation with his parole officer at the time of his arrest: “The parole officer was like, ‘Well you have gang affiliations.’ I said, ‘Look man, I know Nipsey about as much as I know you. You’re my parole officer. I’ve met you. We’ve talked a few times. That’s as far as I know him.’”

In a statement, the Los Angeles Police Department, trying to blunt criticism and put down rumors in the city’s black community that police were behind Lathan’s arrest, said this week that Lathan was “being treated as a victim and a witness in this investigation.”

The statement noted it was the Department of Corrections that had arrested Lathan.

Steve Soboroff, president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, who was planning to meet with Hussle to talk about combating gang violence, said in an interview: “We don’t think he’s a gang member. If someone said, ‘Could Nipsey baby-sit my grandkids?’ I’d say ‘yes.’”

Lathan had turned his life around in prison by participating in numerous programs and working closely with older inmates, his lawyer, Lauren Noriega, said.

“This area of the law is so flawed,” Noriega said of parole policies and gang databases. “It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t give these guys or these women any chance to prove that they have been rehabilitated and actually get a second chance.”

Even as a gang expert who has testified in court, Leap said she had no access to the CalGang database: “Law enforcement controls it. And here’s the critical thing: No one ever makes it off that list. No one.”

On April 9, as Lathan sat in jail for associating with Hussle, the city renamed a street intersection in Hussle’s honor.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/us/nipsey-hussle-death-california-gangs.html" id="35b69f7f-341f-39a5-a02e-353c9794b9c3">The New York Times</a>.

Nipsey Hussle Was Hailed as a Hero. But to California Officials, He Was Still a Gangster.

LOS ANGELES — When a gunman rolled up to Nipsey Hussle’s Marathon Clothing store late last month, the first person to be shot was Kerry Lathan, recently released from prison and there to pick up a T-shirt. Lathan was shot in the back, before Hussle, the renowned rap artist, was killed.

She wanted, she recently wrote in a court filing, to “understand what really happened, and to advocate for change so that officers do not kill civilians, and are held accountable when they do, so that other families do not have to suffer as mine has.”

Her efforts paid off. Under a new state law, Rivera and other members of the public can now request to see the investigative records, prying open for the first time California’s strict secrecy laws regarding police shootings and serious misconduct by officers.

But, just as activists and state lawmakers have sought to bring decades-old investigative records to light, police unions have tried to jam the door shut. While police departments have said they would comply, police unions up and down the state, including in Los Angeles, have filed lawsuits challenging the law, arguing that it should not be applied retroactively. The union lawsuits have succeeded in some jurisdictions in getting temporary stays from the court.

The debate has opened up old wounds in a state that has been plagued by a high rate of killings by police officers, and it has showed how contentious and complex criminal justice reform can be, even after reform measures are passed.

California may be one of the most liberal states in the nation — its politics have shifted substantially in recent decades amid sweeping demographic changes — but paradoxes abound, especially when it comes to police matters and criminal justice. The state has the largest death row in the country, and voters, in a ballot measure, have demanded that the state speed up executions.

It also has one of the highest rates of police shootings in the country. Though there is no central database to track police shootings nationally, an analysis of data from 2013 to 2017 by Mapping Police Violence, an advocacy group that maintains a database of police killings, ranked the Bakersfield Police Department as the fifth deadliest in the country.

Now, at least on paper, California has gone from one of the most secretive states on police shootings to one of the most open. New York, by contrast, strictly limits the amount of information on police shootings that is made public.

Some other states, including Alabama, Georgia and Florida, are more transparent than California, according to research by the American Civil Liberties Union. These states allow open access to a broad range of police files, including disciplinary records of individual officers, and not just those concerned with police shootings.

Other states are more limited. In places like Texas, Kentucky and Utah, police disciplinary records are available only after the department has determined that an officer violated policies, according to the ACLU.

In California, many people are hoping that the new records release law — which applies to videos, investigative reports and disciplinary records of officers involved in shootings — will help stop more killings and provide some comfort for victims’ families.

“It’s part of the healing process,” said Cephus Johnson, the uncle of Oscar Grant, who was killed by police on a train platform in 2009 in Oakland. He said he is seeking the records in his nephew’s case, which led to wide-scale protests and, later, a Hollywood movie, so that he can see the disciplinary records of the officers involved.

“This is ultimately about healing,” he added.

Still, police unions have argued that the law should be applied only to shootings that take place after it was enacted. They say that making all past records public would overwhelm the police with work.

And in a letter to state Sen. Nancy Skinner, the author of the law, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Michel Moore, wrote that if the law were retroactive, “the workload on the men and women of the LAPD could prove to be well beyond any reasonable expectation given the sheer volume of personnel complaints and uses of force maintained in antiquated or archaic formats.”

In addition to officer-involved shootings, the law covers records related to allegations of sexual misconduct and instances of lying by police officers. Unions have argued that it is unfair to now make public disciplinary records from the past, when officers were guaranteed confidentiality.

“Here’s the deal,” said Jacob Kalinski, a lawyer whose firm is representing many police unions in California that are challenging the law. “When you have employment decisions that you are making, that are based on one sort of set of circumstances, the idea is, if you change the circumstances, you’re going to be in a position where you might have made different decisions.”

Kalinski added, “We think this is unfair from a labor perspective.”

Even as the union lawsuits proceed, some departments have complied with records requests, revealing instances of alleged sexual misconduct by officers that in the past were not publicly reported.

In one case, a police officer in the Bay Area was fired last year for allegedly offering to help a woman who had been charged with DUI in exchange for sex. In another, records revealed that two officers in Watsonville, in the Central Coast, had been fired for having sex with civilians while on duty.

Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed last year by police officers in Sacramento who mistook his cellphone for a gun. The case touched off days of protests in California’s capital and captured the attention of the nation, becoming another touchpoint in the country’s emotional reckoning with issues of police of race.

“For us, my brother is gone,” said Stevante Clark, Stephon’s older brother. “Knowing anything new isn’t going to bring him back.”

Still, he said, the law is important to him, “to prevent this from happening again — the cops have been lying since day one.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an activist in Los Angeles, was outraged when he learned that the city of Inglewood had begun destroying old records before the law takes effect, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times. “The records tell a story,” Hutchinson said.

He said the new law underscored the distance between California’s image as a liberal bastion and the reality in the state when it comes to police issues.

“Why did California feel the need to pass a law like this in the first place?” Hutchinson said. “Why was secrecy in police records such a big deal for so long in California? Why, in such a liberal place?”

Inglewood has faced scrutiny for a number of police shootings, including a series in 2008, and Hutchinson has worked with families to try to get answers about them.

(The mayor of Inglewood, James T. Butts Jr., did not respond to a request for comment for this article. He told The Los Angeles Times that the destruction of the records was routine and unrelated to the new law.)

One of the people killed in Inglewood in 2008 was Kevin Wicks, an African-American postal worker. Police officers responded to a domestic disturbance at his home and found Wicks with a gun. The officer who shot and killed him had been involved in another shooting just two months before.

LOS ANGELES — After her son, Eric, was killed by police in Los Angeles two years ago when officers mistook a water pistol he was holding for a real gun, Valerie Rivera channeled her grief into activism. She joined Black Lives Matter and lobbied the state Legislature to open to the public California’s records on police shootings, which have long been hidden.

Tim Arango

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