04/06/04

LC040406

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

You can't park there. A city taskforce is out to catch cheaters
who pull into handicapped spaces.

Jerome Holmes>> We've had people from all walks and they always
have an excuse. They always have an excuse.

Val>> And then, going behind the yellow tape. Meet a
photographer who uses his camera as a crime-fighting tool.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> We're about to turn our cameras on some cheaters, able-
bodied people who park in those handicapped spaces, and the city
of Los Angeles is out to catch them. Philip Bruce went along
with a special taskforce who looks for individuals who misuse
their familiar blue handicapped placards. He saw firsthand just
how tough it can be to crack down on the lawbreakers.

Philip Bruce>> They're two guys you don't want to meet if you
plan to cheat and you never know where they're going to be.
Jerome Holmes and Ernest Dunton have a couple of likely targets
in view, so they watch and they wait.

Jerome Holmes>> You have to make sure that we're in pairs just
in case we get somebody who comes back and they become very
angry and, you know, two is better than one.

Philip Bruce>> Anger is just one of the things they might
encounter when they bust a driver for abusing handicapped
parking. Here in Los Angeles's flower district, they've got
their eye on a van that looks suspicious.

Ernest Dunton>> We're looking for the operator of the vehicle
to return. The owner of the placard is a male born in 1976, so
if a female enters the vehicle by herself, we will approach her
and identify ourselves.

Philip Bruce>> But while they're waiting, Holmes spots
something else that doesn't look right, a young, seemingly
healthy man getting into a car parked in a handicapped space.
The only trick is getting there in time to catch the violator
red-handed.

Ernest Dunton>> I seen him. I knew him before. In the van,
yeah.

Philip Bruce>> It's just another day in the neighborhood for
Los Angeles's small but agile disabled placard taskforce.
They're job? To ruin your day if you're cheating in a
handicapped parking space.

Jerome Holmes>> Roger. Repeat the name again.

Philip Bruce>> The flower district is a hot spot for cheaters
because it draws people from all over. A handicapped placard
allows them to park free all day long if they want just about
any place short of a fire zone. That means no feeding the meter
and no worries unless Holmes and Dunton run the placard and find
out it's a fake or belongs to someone who's not in the car, and
that's what happened here.

>> It's my dad's. I just drove him to court this morning and I
happened to be in his car. It's not mine.

Philip Bruce>> It was all a mistake, this woman claimed. She'd
just dropped her father at the courthouse and didn't realize his
handicapped placard was hanging from the mirror when she stopped
to pick up some fresh flowers. But with the bouquet, she also
got a ticket and the officers seized her dad's placard.

>> I think it's disgusting only because now he doesn't have a
placard. I didn't even think to take the placard down just to
come over here for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Jerome Holmes>> You cannot use a placard unless the owner of
the placard is being transported. He's not here, so we're going
to confiscate the placard and issue the citations.

Philip Bruce>> How big a ticket is this?

Jerome Holmes>> It's about $375, somewhere around there.

Philip Bruce>> Each year, the city of Los Angeles writes about
thirty thousand citations for handicapped parking violations,
but that's clearly just a drop in the bucket compared to the
number of cheaters who are out there. And if we doubted that,
all it took was a cruise down Santee Street to make us true
believers.

Jerome Holmes>> That one's got a temporary, that one's got a
placard, there's a placard here, there's a placard there, that
person's got a placard, that person's got a placard.

Philip Bruce>> The 800 block of Santee has about three dozen
parking meters, but on this day at least two thirds of them have
been swallowed up by cars with handicapped placards. Could it
be that all these people are really impaired and need a free
space all day long? Doubtful, say Holmes and Dunton. They call
it a major scam and believe that most of the neighborhood is in
on it.

Ernest Dunton>> When word gets out that we're here, people call
people on cell phones and it's very hard to catch the
individuals.

Philip Bruce>> If a handicapped person needed to park here,
they could cruise the block all day long and never find a space.
Why is this street so bad? Why is Santee so bad?

Ernest Dunton>> I would say it's a lot of the merchants. Most
of these cars here, they're merchants. They can park, they
work, they don't have to put any money in the meter and they can
park all day because, looking at the vehicles, most of these are
the same cars every day.

Philip Bruce>> But your chance of catching these folks?

Ernest Dunton>> The chances of catching them are pretty slim
because they know how to get around the system.

Philip Bruce>> We asked around to see what some of the local
merchants and shop workers had to say about all of those
handicapped placards on their street, and we didn't get much.
What's with all the handicapped stickers here? Are all these
people handicapped that are parking on the streets?

>> I don't know. I have no idea about it because I park my car
in the parking. About these guys, I don't know.

>> Do you get fed up with this stuff?

>> (Laughter)

Philip Bruce>> But it's not just downtown Los Angeles. Ask
anyone who needs handicapped parking and they'll tell you that
cheaters often get there first and make life impossible for
those who are truly needy. This man told us he runs into the
problem just about every time he goes shopping.

>> Man, they misuse that like mad.

Philip Bruce>> We went with Holmes and Dunton to the Home Depot
on Figueroa. Lots of handicapped spaces in the parking lot
there and, according to the officers, usually lots of violators.
It surprises some that the officers come onto private property
to write tickets.

Ernest Dunton>> Can I see the placard, please?

Philip Bruce>> And it really surprised one man who got caught
in a handicapped space with his mother's placard.

Ernest Dunton>> Along with confiscating the placard, two
citations are going to be issued.

Philip Bruce>> But the real bombshell came when the man asked
how much the fines were.

Ernest Dunton>> The total is going to be $660.

Philip Bruce>> It took a while for that number to sink in.
$660. One fine for misusing the placard, the other for parking
in the handicapped space. But when it did, it hit the man like
a ton of bricks.

Ernest Dunton>> At times, we see individuals walk away from the
vehicle. When we approach the suspected violator, all of a
sudden the person has a very bad limp to try to fool us, but
we've done this enough not to fall for any of that.

Philip Bruce>> But among all the cheaters, the officers
occasionally encounter the real deal. One man in particular
sticks out for how he reacted after they stopped him for
questioning.

Jerome Holmes>> At that point, he became angry. He took his
right leg off and he began to shake it. Is this disabled enough
for you?

Philip Bruce>> There are nearly 400,000 valid placards in Los
Angeles, but authorities say there may be twice as many fakes on
the street too. Some people get them for a few bucks at flea
markets. Holmes and Dunton say they found these two impressive
forgeries inside vehicles from a major studio. The phony serial
numbers gave them away. Both were identical. You'd never see
that on two genuine placards.

Jerome Holmes>> We've had people from all walks and they always
have an excuse. They always have an excuse.

Val>> Los Angeles isn't the only place cracking down on parking
violators. Orange County is too. And in Glendale, the fine for
parking illegally in a handicapped spot is a whopping $1,200.

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Val>> College is the time for students to leave home and be
exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking, but that's not
happening according to one leading conservative thinker. David
Horowitz is head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture
and he says our campuses, colleges and universities, are
dominated by liberals. He has proposed an Academic Bill of
Rights which calls for intellectual political diversity on
college campuses. I talked with Horowitz at his home in Malibu.
David Horowitz, thank you for taking a little time out of your
busy day. You have launched a campaign on behalf of something
called the Academic Bill of Rights. Tell us what that is and
what motivated this?

David Horowitz>> Well, you might be aware of some studies that
we've done in the last couple of years that show that about
ninety percent of faculty are on the political left at some
universities. At UCLA, for example, history, sociology,
political science, you won't find a single Republican or
conservative.

Val>> Not one Republican or conservative?

David Horowitz>> I don't think so. Actually, there is one in
the Political Science Department that I'm aware of, but he
doesn't have mathematical models and international relations and
so forth. But the fact is, you can normally go to a college
education on UC campuses or USC for that matter and never
encounter a Republican or a conservative.

Val>> What does it actually call for? What do you want them to
do?

David Horowitz>> It calls for, first of all, nobody is going to
be hired or fired on the basis of politics. Nobody will be
graded on the basis of their political views. Teachers can
teach their viewpoint in class, but they have to make students
aware of the range of significance of opinion. For example, at
Brown, students were quoted as saying, "I've been made to real
Karl Marx four times in my undergraduate career, but never Adam
Smith." Frederic Hein, who's a far more important thinker than
Karl Marx, who just happens to be a libertarian, is invisible on
college campuses.

This is bad education in practice. I had lunch with the Dean of
the School of Journalism at USC, Michael Parks, who used to be
the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times. I said to him,
Michael, do you have any conservatives on your journalism
faculty? He said, I can't think of one. I said, do you think
that's a good idea from the point of view of education, let
alone training journalists? He said, no, I don't.

Val>> In the affirmative action argument, for example, they
say, well, we'd love to have more black engineers, but there
just aren't. So you could say, well, we'd love to have more
conservative journalists, but that's not who's drawn to
journalism.

David Horowitz>> Well, nobody can seriously -- what about law
school? Nobody can seriously claim that there's going to be a
lack of people of conservative views and particularly such a
lack that there's not one on the faculty. I can tell you it's
almost impossible for conservatives to get hired today. Most
professors are scholars still, but there is a large minority and
a very powerful one in the liberal arts colleges which is
ideological and political and sees the universities as a
political arena where it's okay to recruit people for political
agendas and it's okay to treat conservative students as second-
class citizens. By this, I mean that students are made to feel
pariahs in their own classrooms, which is very, very wrong.

I was a Marxist at Columbia in the McCarthy 1950's and I'm very
grateful for the fact that my teachers did not harass me. I
mean, I was a young person. I should have been treated like
everybody else and I was and it was very beneficial to my
education. In the course of our academic freedom campaign, for
example, in Colorado, we have legislative hearings and it turned
out that a question on a mid-term at the University of Northern
Colorado was to explain why George Bush is a war criminal. The
student wrote a paper of why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal
and got an "F". Well, it shouldn't be a question in the first
place like that. It indicates there's really only one answer.
Not in America, at least. I know there are other countries
which do this.

Unfortunately, you can't just depend on universities to reform
themselves, so I have moved to the legislative arena. There is
actually a bill in California. I've only had this campaign
going about six months. I have 133 campus organizations and I
have legislation going in seven states. By the end of next
year, it should be about thirty. I don't like the idea. I
don't want there to be a faculty which has to have one Democrat,
one Republican, one Green, half a Green --

Val>> -- I don't think that's practical.

David Horowitz>> No, it isn't practical. It's not really
rocket science to understand the university. You know, you can
turn on the tube or you can watch Life and Times probably and
see different viewpoints. You can't see those viewpoints on
college faculties these days.

Val>> Do you think you're talking about a certain cluster of
campuses? Are you saying the vast majority of college campuses?

David Horowitz>> Absolutely vast majority. I've been on 250
campuses myself. I've seen the range. I was just at Utah
State. Here's an example. Utah State is in Logan, Utah, eighty
percent Mormon, a Republican state by far.

Val>> If anyone should have a conservative campus, it was
there.

David Horowitz>> They have a speakers program at Utah State.
They have $120,000 in their program. Five hundred dollars went
to the conservative students to bring in their speakers and
$119,500 went to the left. That is normal in colleges.

Val>> Is that divided according to the number of students?
There were fewer conservative students?

David Horowitz>> Not at Utah State. This is a state school in
a Republican state. You know, I just came back from -- I spoke
at Brandeis. The kids could not name any conservative
professors. When I went to Brandeis, for example, three
professors in their classes advised their students not to listen
to me speak, which is a very odd attitude for an educator. You
should say you'll probably disagree with him or may disagree
with him. You know, learn how to develop a response and I'll
help you.

Val>> So what do you hope to accomplish in Sacramento with the
state legislature?

David Horowitz>> Well, the idea of the legislature is just to
wake up the administrators. What happened in Colorado was that
our bill was passed by the Education Committee of the House and
immediately the presidents of all the Colorado universities
wrote a letter and contacted the legislator who's sponsoring my
bill, or the bill that's based on my bill, and asked if they
would withdraw the bill if the universities would simply put
regulations in place. To me, that's the ideal solution. I
really don't want the legislators having to look at the
universities. I want the universities to do the right thing.

Val>> David Horowitz, thank you very much for your time and
your thoughts.

David Horowitz>> Thank you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Val>> How do you love a city that only shows you its gruesome
and gritty side? Well, Frank Giles has learned to. He was a
forensic photographer for the Los Angeles Police Department and,
for years, he turned his camera on crime scenes and murder
victims. It's an especially fascinating job, so we thought we'd
open up the Life and Times vault and show you again Frank Giles
in his own words and what it's like behind the yellow tape.

Frank Giles>> This job, you'll see just about everything that
mankind can do to each other. We can see violent crime. We can
see crimes against children. We can see innocent people
involved in crime. We can just see about everything. Sometimes
when you see things through your camera, it's being that step
away. You can look at the most violent, gruesome thing through
your lens and, as long as you don't touch it, feel it, have to
grab it, it almost remains part of the camera.

"Okay. Giles. Can I help you? What do you have, buddy?"

I go through my normal life. Go ahead and pick up the children
from school, drop them off with mom. I trudge my way down the
hill and come into work and, when I enter that door, anything
can be waiting for me.

"Okay, and what do you have? An attempt? Okay, and what
division is that?"

We roll out to all the homicide scenes. We roll out to all
officer-involved shootings. We'll roll out to any other scene
that our services are requested.

>> "Bad guy's running southbound? Okay, the victims run out
here? Through the gate, there's an open gate here. Victim goes
down here, one victim."

Frank Giles>> On the homicide scenes, we're under the direction
of the officer in charge of that scene. They will generally
indicate what they want photographed.

"We have another scene down there?"

>> "Yeah. It runs all the way down."

Frank Giles>> "Okay."

>> "Our number one starts here."

Frank Giles>> "Okay."

In this type of work, there's not much artistic latitude. You
do a lot of concrete type photography. A lot of it we've done
over and over and over again, so it becomes kind of procedural.

"Well, some of these rounds are in great shape, huh?"

When crimes happen to people, they, of course, feel them on a
very personal level, which is very human nature. We should all
feel that way. Yes, there is a body there. Yes, there is
someone outside weeping hysterically who'd like to come in and
see their loved one. But yet you know that what you're doing
from that minute on is helping the situation. The investigating
officer, his job is to find out who did this and you're
supporting whatever he needs.

"You think it's the arm and the legs, huh?"

I remember the first victim that I ever shot involved in a
homicide. I looked at him closely and I'll forever remember
their face. As the victims came in one after another, the first
three or four I remembered, the fifth I remembered and then, as
it went on to fifty, the group started to fade more and more
away. But I'll always remember those first five.

"This guy's lucky."

I remember back once it was on a Sunday and I believe I was
working by myself. I got a call to Hollywood. I rolled out
there and it just seemed like a normal department day on a
routine call, if any of our calls could be called routine.
There was a D-3 from Hollywood that I hadn't worked with in
years. He met me and he said, "You know, this is going to be a
hard scene" and I said, "Why?" and he said it involved children.
I said okay, so we walked in there.

What had happened is a mother and father had been involved in
some kind of domestic turmoil and he ended up taking her life.
Then in a letter, he wrote that he believed no one on this earth
could take care of his children. So in the next room as they
slept on the floor, he walked up to them and, one by one, he
killed them. He shot them.

So we covered the scene in our nervous glances at each other and
in our short sentences and once in a while we'd say how terrible
it was. But you could see the D-3 with so much experience was
having just as much difficulty as I was, staying in the room.
As they carted them away, these little bodies bundled up, you
know? It's just hard to ever forget. The irony to all of this
is, when we left, I remember him saying that it was a hard case.

A couple of months later, I get another call late at night and I
roll out to this restaurant and there he is. The same detective
3, who was such a compassionate man, such a hard-working man, he
was killed and he was killed simply because he was a police
officer. He was identified in a restaurant and some deranged
person in there decided that he would take his life. And the
only good thing to come out of this is they killed each other.

My interest in photography first developed in high school. I
was introduced to it by a friend of mine who had taken a
photography class in the high school we attended. We ran all
over Echo Park, a very unique area in Los Angeles. It has a
lake and statues and a baseball diamond and friends. I think,
the first day, we must have shot eighty shots, three rolls of
film. I was just astounded that everything that I had taken a
photograph of was there on film and, from that minute on, I was
hooked.

As a kid, I remember going down into various stores and seeing
some of the Mexican newspapers that would show different
pictures of crime scenes and accidents that American papers
didn't. And I remember looking at them and wondering, wow, why
do they do this and American papers don't? So that kind of
brought it all back when they offered me this position.
Somewhere in the back of me, I think we've all had a desire to
be inside the yellow tape.

>> "We got one casing inside the sink here. We got a weapon
underneath the sink here. We got a drawer full of rock
cocaine."

Frank Giles>> "Okay."

No matter what kind of scene I'm at, I can relate to the fact
that my kids are at home having a great time with their mom and
that helps you get through all this. There is a sense of
normalcy. It hasn't enhanced my insecurities about mankind or
made me paranoid in any way. You realize that, a lot of times,
crime, and especially violent crime, interacts against people
who deal with that type of thing. Gang members harm gang
members and drug dealers deal with drug dealers.

So the normalcy to me is that your kids are home in a normal
atmosphere and they're being raised by normal people and,
chances are, they're going to live a normal life. With all that
I've seen that's happened in this city, I still have a very good
feeling for it. I realize that this city is a very vibrant city
and that I'm a little street-wiser of areas I would go, but yet
I love this city and I feel like I'm helping everybody out
there. If I can help solve the crime, I'm helping the next
possible victim of this crime.

Val>> Since that story first aired about seven years ago, Frank
Giles has moved on to a different aspect of crime-solving. He
now develops fingerprints instead of film. And that's our
program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times,
thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, a story you won't find in
many history books, the roundup and deportation of thousands of
U.S. citizens.

>> We thought maybe they were going to give us a better job and
they said we decided to send you to Mexico, so line up one by
one and get your ticket.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.