California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta asked a judge Wednesday to place a court-appointed official in control of L.A. County’s juvenile halls, following years of violence, riots, drug overdoses, allegations of abuse and the death of a teenager.
“We must act,” Bonta said at a news conference Wednesday morning. “Receivership is the only path forward that ensures [youth] their rights, their safety and their futures are no longer subject to institutional failure.”
Bonta said receivership means a court-appointed official would take over “management and operations of the juvenile halls” from the L.A. County Probation Department, including setting budgets and hiring and firing staff.
Bonta said he had given the county more than four years to fix the problems rampant in the halls. He called the county’s failure “repeated, constant and chronic.”
In a court filing made public Wednesday, Bonta said that L.A. County’s repeated failure to adhere to a 2021 settlement has led juveniles to suffer “severe harms during the life of the Judgment — including overdoses on narcotics allowed to enter the facility, youth-on-youth violence facilitated by staff, and significant unmet medical need.”
Bonta said he also will ask for a court order requiring the county to establish a compensation fund for young people harmed in county custody, which they could use to pay for medical treatment and educational services, among other benefits. He emphasized the county will also be paying for all the changes made by a monitor.
Late Wednesday, the probation department issued a statement contending, without evidence, that Bonta included “misleading information” in his court filing. The agency said Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa has been working tirelessly to improve conditions in the halls, taking steps to “stabilize staffing, improve safety protocols including to curb the introduction of dangerous contraband into facilities [and] increase accountability for staff misconduct.”
“Our hope is that a receivership structure, should it be approved, be used as a collaborative tool to help remove obstacles — not as an isolating mechanism that sidelines the people and systems committed to improvements and reform,” the statement read.
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The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper programming, and detaining youths in solitary confinement in their rooms for far too long. A 2021 court settlement between L.A. County and the state attorney general’s office was aimed at improving conditions for youth and tamping down on use-of-force.
Bonta said Wednesday the department has failed to improve “75%” of what they were mandated to change in the settlement.
Two of the county’s juvenile facilities were shut down in 2023 after repeatedly failing to meet basic standards to house youth under California law. That same year, 18-year-old Bryan Diaz died of a drug overdose at the Secure Youth Treatment Facility. Reports of Xanax and opiate overdoses among youths in the halls have become a regular occurrence in recent months.
Nearly three dozen probation officers have been charged with crimes related to on-duty conduct in the past few years, including 30 indicted in March by Bonta for staging or allowing so-called “gladiator fights” between juveniles in custody. Officers also routinely refuse to come to work, leaving each hall critically short-staffed.
“This drastic step to divest Los Angeles County of control over its juvenile halls is a last resort,” Bonta said Wednesday in a statement. “Enough is enough. These young people deserve better, and my office will not stop until they get it.”
Bonta has faced criticism in the past for failing to rein in the probation department. The department has failed to adhere to the settlement for years and has openly shunned state oversight, like when it ignored an order to close Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey late last year.
“I share the frustration, the sense of urgency, the belief that what is happening and has happened in L.A.’s juvenile halls is unacceptable. We also have a legal process we are required to follow,” he said. “There’s a set of legal processes that lead to receivership. They require taking steps that are less drastic.”
Aerial view of Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
All five L.A. County supervisors either supported or appeared neutral about giving up control of their juvenile halls.
Supervisor Janice Hahn, whose district includes Los Padrinos, said she “wholeheartedly” supported receivership. Hahn, who initially cheered the reopening of the juvenile hall in her district, had become increasingly frustrated at routine crises inside the facility.
“We have spent years trying to improve conditions, exhausted every tool at the County level, and still, we are failing these young people,” said Hahn.
Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Barry J. Nidorf Hall in Sylmar, appeared slightly more skeptical that receivership would be the silver bullet to shatter decades of dysfunction. She said much of the problem was rooted in probation officers’ union contracts, which she said shielded employees accused of misconduct.
“In order for a receivership to have a chance at successful restructuring, the state must take on the challenge L.A. County has faced for decades — employment agreements and civil service procedures that have protected the rights of those who have harmed our young people, instead of the young people themselves,” said Horvath.
The threat of receivership has lurked over the county for months.
Supervisor Holly Mitchell called it the “elephant in the room” in July, as politicians discussed ways to try and stop the flow of drugs into the halls. Bonta first suggested he might seek receivership in May, in response to questions for a Times investigation.
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Footage obtained by the L.A. Times shows a December 2023 incident in which staffers can be seen allowing at least six youths to hit and kick a 17-year-old.
The unions representing probation deputies, supervisors, and managers said in a joint statement they were “cautiously optimistic.”
“For years, the Board of Supervisors has ignored our warnings and failed to invest in the sworn officers who serve on the front lines,” said Stacy Ford, president of the union for deputy probation officers. “The result has been a manufactured crisis — one that the county itself has perpetuated through chronic hiring freezes, hostile working conditions, and the outsourcing of public safety responsibilities to untrained civilians.”
Conditions at the halls have only gotten worse since the imposition of the 2021 settlement with the attorney general’s office. Bonta on Wednesday said it was “regression, not progression.”
Incidents in which staff use force against youths have increased over the life of the settlement, records show. The L.A. County inspector general’s office has published six reports showing the department has failed to meet the terms of the state oversight agreement. Oversight officials have caught several probation officers lying about violent incidents in the halls after reviewing video footage that contradicted written reports.
After the state shut down the county’s other two major detention centers, Los Padrinos was reopened but quickly became a haven for chaos. In its first month of operation, there was a riot and an escape attempt and someone brought a gun inside the youth hall.
Bonta asked the court to appoint Michael Dempsey — who has served as the monitor over the halls during the settlement — as the receiver. A hearing on Bonta’s motion is slated for Aug. 15. In his filing, Bonta cited multiple instances in which Dempsey sounded alarm bells in his reports, which are not public but were made available to the Board of Supervisors.
In a report filed shortly after Los Padrinos was reopened in 2023, Dempsey described conditions at the halls as “abusive and punitive,” noting the Downey facility had an infestation of roaches, non-working phones and “inhospitable” temperatures. Los Padrinos also lacked “operable cold-water decontamination showers” meant to dampen the effects of pepper spray after it is used to suppress a threat.
Eduardo Mundo, head of the county’s probation oversight commission, said he couldn’t tell whether the receivership would be a net positive for the department.
It was unclear, he said, how a receiver could solve the seemingly intractable issues such as persistent staff callouts that bedeviled chief after chief. Many staff have said the conditions are too dangerous to work in and repeatedly miss their shifts, creating havoc inside the facilities.
“I can’t even say if it’s good or bad,” said Mundo. “Quite frankly, I don’t know how much more receivership does to fix the staffing issue … Do all these people decide they’re going to come back? Probably not.”
He said he suspected it would be years before anyone found out, as he believed the county would likely fight the receivership, even though some supervisors had professed support.
“I can’t imagine the county isn’t going to appeal this even if some in their chambers think it’s a good idea,” said Mundo. “You want to preserve your autonomy.”
But most of the supervisors seem to be on board. Mitchell said, for the idea to work, the receiver would need to have real “power and authority” over all aspects of the halls — including the staff.
Former longtime supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the threat of outside intervention had hung over the county for decades as the probation department careened from one crisis to the next. Every chief — of which there had been many — ran into the same issue, he said: labor contracts and civil service constraints that he said acted as a “straitjacket” for reform.
He said it was possible the receiver may have the power to change these rules. If not, he said he was skeptical anyone appointed by the court, no matter how experienced, would be able to course-correct a department that had churned through six chiefs in 10 years.
“There’s been some better ones and worse ones, but I think if you brought in Albert Einstein as a chief probation officer, if you saddled him with the same constraints, I don’t think he could solve the problems that the institution has,” he said. “It’s in the bricks and mortar of the place.”