Two-person dorm-style cells remain clean and tidy, with dark blue tables, mint green bunk beds and doors with glass windows rather than cage-like metal bars. There is clean, blue and beige carpet to muffle ambient noise and large areas where inmates can mingle, watch TV, play board games or hang out in a recreation yard.

Santa Ana’s city jail, a state-of-the art design attached to a new police headquarters at the tail end of a 1980s and 1990s crime wave that boosted demand for inmate beds, has aged well.

But the four-story facility now stands as a symbol of changing times in incarceration: it’s nearly two-thirds empty, with an uncertain future and millions in remaining construction debt.

A number of factors have helped drain away inmates. Crime rates are lower today than when the jail opened; the state is working to cut the number of non-violent criminals it incarcerates. And, most recently, Santa Ana declared itself a sanctuary city, moving to undo a roughly $11-million-a-year contract to house undocumented detainees for federal immigration agencies.

“Obviously, it’s not nearly as busy as it used to be,” said Santa Ana Jail administrator Christina Holland, as she walked by vacant jail visiting rooms on a recent weekday.

In addition to what was hailed as a cutting-edge concept for jail management, the 512-bed facility was characterized as a model of creative fiscal management. The city could market lockup space it didn’t need to other agencies and help pay off Santa Ana’s portion of borrowing for the $107.4-million construction cost of both the jail and police headquarters.

However, the inmate population hasn’t come close to the facility’s capacity for four years, Holland said. That’s partly because those arrested in Santa Ana for felony offenses are taken to county jail, operated by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and increasingly misdemeanor offenders are simply booked and released at the city jail.

With fewer inmates, jail staff also has been reduced. “There simply isn’t a need because the population has dropped,” Holland said.

But the jail facility still costs close to $16 million a year to operate and maintain, and it only generates $4.8 million in revenue, Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said.

A new low was reached last month with the removal of the last 10 detainees – all transgender women – held in Santa Ana on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

As of Tuesday’s count, only five of eight housing modules—holding 179 arestees held under contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons – are still operating, plus two dormitory units housing pay-to-stay inmates and others that must be segregated.

The sharply divided City Council is wrestling over the wisdom of past decisions, what comes next, and how to reduce the strain the jail’s ongoing costs imposes on residents and the city budget.

The city sold $80 million in bonds to help finance the jail and police headquarters, and will continue to incur $3 million annual debt expenses for the jail—one-third of the $9 million total in debt payments for the entire building—through 2024. Council members are aware the jail operation is contributing to a projected structural deficit of $14.4 million for fiscal year 2017-18 and $19.5 million for the following year, according to city staff.

A formal study of potential future uses of the jail is due to be completed in August.

“I don’t think at the start there was even an intention to convert it into anything other than a jail,” Holland said. “But it’s a different world today.”

Council member suggestions have included: creating a mental health center, the funding for which isn’t clear; cutting operating costs in half by converting the jail into a smaller-scale booking facility; or ramping up efforts to grow revenue by securing new contracts to house inmates for outside agencies.

Late Tuesday, June 6, council members were scheduled to consider a staff recommendation to convert part of the jail to a short-term holding facility in the 2017-18 fiscal year. But they decided to continue the item for two weeks.

“By transitioning to a holding facility, two of the four floors at the jail would become available for the city’s consultant to provide various use options,” Santa Ana spokeswoman Alma Flores said.

Councilman Jose Solorio said he’s optimistic “there might be additional federal or state departments that might have an interest in our facility to mitigate the losses to the city jail budget and our general fund.

“I think we need to keep all options on the table.”

But Mayor Pro Tem Michele Martinez and Councilman David Benavides have said the city erred in building the jail. Closing part of the jail and using the remainder for a booking operation is probably the better, more financially sustainable option, they have argued.

“Clearly what we’re seeing now in retrospect is that we shouldn’t have gone into the jail business,” said Benavides, who was part of the council majority that advocated for phasing out the federal ICE contract.

When the jail and police headquarters were unveiled in January 1997, top Santa Ana officials said it represented a smart investment in public safety and a commitment to the peace of mind for residents. At the time, violent crime rates were high. Just a few years earlier, the city hit a peak of nearly 90 homicides.

“This is, I believe, the best possible investment we could make as a community to ensure our long-term future,” Mayor Miguel Pulido said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “The beauty of this is that we did it right.”

In the two decades since, crime has fallen—there were less than 25 homicides last year—along with the inmate population.

The political makeup of the City Council also has shifted.

In May 2016, the council majority voted to phase out the federal ICE contract that financially covered close to 40 percent of the jail’s beds. On the way out of office after an election setback, members of that same majority voted late last year to declare Santa Ana the first sanctuary city in Orange County. They also put federal immigration officials on notice that the city was reducing the jail beds available to ICE. In February, ICE notified the city it was terminating its contract.

The current council is split on a number of key issues, including whether to pursue new law enforcement contracts to help fill the jail.

Pulido, who has remained Santa Ana mayor, hasn’t wavered from the decisions he and his then-colleagues made two decades ago. The city should try to increase the inmate population, including restarting talks with federal immigration officials about housing undocumented detainees, he said.

“When you go back look at some of those early years and look at the (millions) … that used to go into the general fund, why?” he said. “Because we had 500 beds” occupied, he added. “Take 500 beds, multiply times $80 a day, whatever number you want. When you have that many beds and they’re full, then everything works.”

Pulido said he believes there’s potential to put the jail back in the black—housing inmates.

“We can try. We won’t know until we try,” he said, before acknowledging the political challenge for council members. “We’re deadlocked.”

Whether past contracting opportunities with immigration officials can be revived is an open question. To offset the loss of Santa Ana jail beds, ICE recently moved to expand its contract for jail space with Orange County officials.

“Right now, what have we done?” said Pulido. “We said no to ICE, they moved across the street” and they are offering Orange County government what amounts to a multi-million dollar windfall, he said. “Meanwhile, we have empty beds and we’re spending money on a reuse study. It was never intended to be empty – and that’s the real problem.”

But Martinez reiterated that the city should not be in the jail business because “it’s not a core service” for residents.

“I understand a holding facility, but am not sure how we ended up” running a longer-term, full-service jail operation. “That makes no sense when the county jail is next door,” she said. “As for the ICE going across the street, that is a policy decision on the county side” where the sheriff’s department must maintain a much higher-level, more costly jail operation.

The Santa Ana jail doesn’t have that obligation, she said.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/06/06/santa-ana-ponders-new-future-for-its-futuristic-jail/

Over the next 24 hours, two more men were killed in gun violence a mile apart in a gang-plagued area already targeted for special enforcement by police and prosecutors.

The four shootings in the first five days of 2016 grew to 55 over the next 45 days, a spike in violence not seen in decades in the city that dubs itself Orange County’s downtown. As broken families held vigils for the dead and wounded, investigators pored over near-daily shooting scenes and residents peered warily from their homes, law enforcement leaders, elected officials and researchers struggled to pinpoint the cause and determine if a new era of bloodshed was dawning.

And then, according to Police Chief Carlos Rojas, the spasm of violence receded. How much isn’t completely clear because the Police Department stopped releasing shooting totals, which had helped fuel headlines in the first weeks of the year. Instead, Rojas noted that in February, major violent crimes reported to the FBI dropped 24 percent from the previous month and remained at roughly that level through the remainder of the year.

But community concern and the political repercussions of the surge of shootings became a central focus of the November City Council campaign, which highlighted public safety and reset the balance of power at City Hall.

POLICE UNION’S ROLE?

One political winner was the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, which criticized the leadership of Rojas and the city manager and spent nearly $300,000 supporting a slate of candidates that included the longtime mayor, Miguel Pulido. Three of the four candidates backed by the union, including Pulido, were elected, unseating an incumbent council member for the first time in decades.

Three weeks ago, in one of the new City Council’s first actions, a majority that included three lawmakers supported by the police union placed City Manager David Cavazos on paid administrative leave, citing performance evaluations and concerns about a City Hall personnel matter involving him. The allegations harked back to a Pulido-initiated investigation of Cavazos’ relationship with a subordinate female city employee that resulted in his censure by the International City/County Management Association.

The move against Cavazos signaled a partial reversal of the 2012 election results. In that so-called Santa Ana Spring election, voters installed a slate of candidates that promised greater City Hall transparency and responsiveness and unseated a majority allied with the mayor. That group fired the previous city manager, who was supported by Pulido, and hired Cavazos. Rojas was hired under the new administration.

In the runup to the election, officers union President Gerry Serrano attacked Rojas’ management and policing strategies, which in part emphasized assigning officers to neighborhood beats where they would get to know residents, in lieu of beefing up specialized enforcement units.

In an email to the news media and city elected officials last summer, Serrano released figures showing a more than 550 percent increase in shootings for the first half of the year compared with the same period four years earlier, when Rojas became chief.

Specifically, Serrano criticized Rojas for reassigning officers to the neighborhood beats, cutting back on resources allocated for gang suppression, and failing to reinstate a police strike force that had been used to respond to crime hot spots.

“Violent crime continues to rise at an unbelievable rate, yet patrol staffing remains below minimum staffing levels,” Serrano wrote. “What is Rojas doing to address this? Nothing. What is Cavazos doing to address this? Nothing.”

Since Rojas took over, Serrano added, officer morale is down and many are retiring early.

CRIME STATISTICS

Pulido said in an interview that the realignment of the City Council will help ensure a return to successful policing strategies.

Violent crime prevention in the city “kind of went backward,” he said. “We need to continue to make progress. Going backward and even holding our own is not acceptable.”

Responding to the police union’s portrayal of rising crime, Cavazos released a report showing Santa Ana had a 74 percent reduction in murders, aggravated assaults, forcible rapes, robberies, arsons and property crimes from 1987 to 2012, based on moving three-year averages.

Rojas cited 2016 overall crime data, reported to the FBI, which showed violent and property crimes peaked at 871 incidents in January and dipped into the 600s and 700s thereafter.

“It does appear to be slowing down a little bit,” Rojas said, “which is good.”

POLICE UNION MAILERS

In the months leading up to the election, records show the police union provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund mailers and television advertisements endorsing its slate of candidates and attacking council incumbents. The expenditures included the majority of contributions to an independent political action committee, California Homeowners Association, which spent nearly $100,000 opposing council members Roman Reyna and Vicente Sarmiento, a Register analysis found.

One of the PAC’s mailers carried a headline asking: “Want to know who to blame for Santa Ana’s rising crime? It’s Reyna and Sarmiento!” The mailer also included a reproduction of a Register article on Cavazos, the city manager, which noted that he received a bonus amid allegations of misconduct and highlighted a reference to “a romantic relationship with a subordinate city employee.”

The police officers association’s independent spending far exceeded that by a police union-endorsed candidate, Orange County sheriff’s officer Juan Villegas, who unseated Reyna.

Council supporters of the police chief and Cavazos, who clashed with Pulido over various City Hall projects, see the election results not as referendum on the city’s public safety programs but as a power grab by the police union, which among other things is seeking raises for members and more officer hiring for patrol shifts.

Reyna, who grew up in a gang-infested community near El Salvador Park, said at a recent council meeting that the spike in shootings early in 2016 appeared to be tied to a struggle involving the role of a top gang leader and not deficient city policing tactics.

“The other gang members all wanted to sit in that leadership position so they fought literally with guns to see who could get that position,” Reyna said.

DIFFERING VIEWS

At the first meeting of the new City Council last month, Councilman Sal Tinajero, Cavazos’ most vocal supporter, complained about what he portrayed as political strong-arm tactics by the police union. He alleged that Serrano, the group’s president, “met with different folks, saying: ‘If you fire the chief of police, we will support you. The only way to get to the chief of police is to fire the city manager. We are going to raise over $400,000 and those who support this, we will support, and those who don’t, we are going to run someone against you,’”

“He asked me … ‘So Sal, are we going to throw a body out the window?’” Tinajero continued. “This (police union) is who’s just taken over our city.”

Tinajero also defended Rojas’ leadership, saying: “You see for the first time in our city, officers are being held accountable. … We need to help our community be safe and being safe means that we need community policing. We need a relationship with our police officers.”

Serrano said evaluating the city manager is the job of the City Council, not the police union.

“It’s not our issue,” he said. “Why Councilman Tinajero wants to include me in it, I have no idea.”

And his union’s involvement in this Santa Ana election was “nothing out of the ordinary,” Serrano said.

“All unions invest when it comes to election – that’s what we do, we look out and try to support elected officials that are supportive of labor unions,” he said. “I look forward to working with our entire City Council and being part of moving the city forward.”

CHANGES COMING?

Pulido said he expects that the new City Council will revive a gang suppression unit.

“Part of it is we have to go back to basics. … We need to work closely with the community and do many of the things we’ve done in the past,” Pulido said. “We know what works, and it’ll work again.”

Similarly, Jose Solorio, another police union-endorsed candidate elected in November, said bringing down gang violence and shootings will require restoring gang unit officers and more transparency of crime statistics.

“It’s time for the city to step up and do something about it,” Solorio said. “I think with the addition of myself and council member Juan Villegas, we both have very strong pro-public safety backgrounds.”

Councilwoman Michele Martinez was the swing vote, siding with Pulido and his two newly elected allies to place Cavazos on leave. The councilwoman supported Cavazos’ hiring, but her opinion shifted after he alleged Martinez sexually harassed and made romantic advances toward him. A city-ordered external investigation found that his allegation was without merit.

Martinez said she’s not aligned with either City Council camp and doesn’t vote based on their agendas.

“I’m very independent. I think in both sides, it’s all political and the city manager is right in the middle,” she said. “I will be working with anyone who is willing to set good policy.”

Pulido has said talk of an alliance between him and the police union is irrelevant, and the election results are what counts.

“Do people who work harder sometimes gain more votes? Yes,” Pulido said.

FIRE THE CITY MANAGER?

While the shooting-per-day average from the beginning of 2016 hasn’t been the case for the first weeks of this year, last Saturday night was the most violent in recent memory, with six people shot, according to Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna.

On the political front, it appears the reverberations of the November election are just beginning. Cavazos supporters say they are committed to checking the political power of the mayor and police officers association at City Hall.

“We have a strong, solid team in the council” that among other things supports the current police chief, Councilman David Benavides said.

Five votes are needed to fire a city manager, who has the authority to appoint and remove the police chief.

The sharply divided council is expected to revisit Cavazos’ employment in closed session before today’s council meeting.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/01/18/how-a-violent-month-in-santa-ana-set-the-stage-for-council-infighting-election-angst-and-jobs-possibly-lost/

“His work was his life,” she said. “That’s what he stood for. He wanted peace.”

On Oct. 11, 1985, the morning after he appeared on local and national television praising Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat as “a man of peace,” Alex Odeh went to his office. As he unlocked and opened the door, a pipe bomb detonated, blowing off his legs.

“The ceiling has dropped. All the windows on the second floor are blown out. There is glass clear across the street. It looked like a tornado hit it,” Greg Lee, an attorney who witnessed the explosion from a building nearby, said in an Orange County Register article published the next day.

Alex Odeh died in surgery 2 1/2 hours after the blast at the age of 41.

Three decades later, one of Orange County’s earliest acts of terrorism remains unsolved. A reward of up to $1 million the FBI announced in 1996 for information leading to any arrests or convictions remains, and Odeh’s family and Anti-Discrimination Committee members are using the anniversary this year to fuel a national movement seeking answers.

“I believe it is the oldest open counter-terrorism investigation we have,” said David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office overseeing seven counties. “I’m not aware of anything on this scale that has occurred in Orange County since.”

Helena Odeh was 7 years old when her father died; her sisters, Samya and Susan, were 5 and 1, respectively. Sunday, the 30th anniversary of Alex Odeh’s assassination, his widow, Norma, and Samya will visit his grave – but Helena Odeh will stay home.

“I haven’t gone in years, just because it’s too painful for me,” Helena Odeh, 37, said. “I am the only one of my sisters who remembers my father. His touch, his voice – I’m the only one who remembers that, and when I see his face on the gravestone, it just kills me. It tears me up inside.”

Most of the family still lives in Orange County but didn’t want their city of residence published because of safety concerns.

Alex Odeh was born in the Palestinian village of Jifna and studied engineering at Cairo University in Egypt, but was unable to return home after the Six-Day War. The experience prompted him to pursue a political science degree instead.

He moved to the U.S. in 1972, and when he returned to Jifna three years later, he met and married Norma. They settled in Orange, and he served as a part-time professor of Middle East history and Arabic at Cal State Fullerton and Coastline Community College, while making peaceful relations in the Middle East his life goal.

That goal remains elusive today, and so too does closure in the Odeh case.

Thirty years with no information from the FBI except, “It’s an ongoing investigation,” is a long time for the Odeh family and the Arab-American community, said Lana Kreidie, president of the committee’s Orange County chapter and a criminal defense attorney.

Investigators within a few years of the attack named three Jewish Defense League members as persons of interest, “and then you have crickets,” she said. One of those men, Robert Manning, was later sentenced to prison for the 1980 bombing of a computer company in Manhattan Beach.

“We want transparency from the FBI, we want to know what they’ve done to follow up on these leads,” said Kreidie, who encouraged Helena Odeh to join the local chapter’s board. “We’re not getting any closure.”

Abed Ayoub, legal and policy director for the committee’s national office in Washington, D.C., added: “Sadly, many feel that the life of a Palestinian American is not as valuable as another life. That’s the perception that’s being given, that an Arab life is not worth investigating and not worth taking action on.”

But Bowdich said the FBI has not backed off on its efforts.

“Absolutely it’s a cold case – it’s 30 years old – but that doesn’t mean it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere in a box,” he said on Friday. “As an organization we are very committed to hopefully bringing this case to a solution, apprehending those individuals that were involved.”

Bowdich acknowledged that a working theory is a Jewish extremist group targeted Alex Odeh and “we’re continuing down that path; we’re just looking for that critical link to solve the case.”

In 1997, vandals splattered red paint on a statue honoring Odeh outside of Santa Ana Public Library. That case, considered a hate crime, remains unsolved, too.

The FBI continues to reexamine evidence on the explosion and is looking at “new techniques” to determine if any more evidence can be generated to solve the case, Bowdich said.

“And the reward is out there,” he said. “That has not been rescinded at all.”

Meanwhile, ADC committee members continue pushing for justice for Alex Odeh with new efforts.

Out of Washington, D.C., the national committee and a diverse group of 25 civil and human rights organizations including the NAACP on Friday sent letters urging the U.S. Department of Justice and Congress to rededicate resources to the investigation. On the anniversary Sunday at 9 a.m. they are fronting a #Justice4AlexOdeh Twitter storm.

The committee’s Orange County chapter is holding its annual memorial banquet, themed “Promoting Peace, Defeating Terrorism” this year, on Saturday at the Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort. Guests will participate in a letter-writing drive to defense leaders.

Knowing the FBI continues to pursue her father’s case is important to Helena Odeh.

“It’s been 30 years, and if I have to wait another 30 years to get a little answer, that’s fine,” she said. “I just want some kind of answer. I just want to know why, what was the reason?”

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/odeh-686976-years-alex.html