 |
HOME |  |
SCHEDULE | |
PROGRAMS | |
KIDS & FAMILY | |
LOCAL | |
SUPPORT KCET | |
ABOUT US | |
SHOP KCET |  |
| About Us | Contact Us | |
 |
|
 |
          |
|
|
 |
 |
||
|
|
Life & Times Transcript
12/04/06 Coverage of Town Hall Los Angeles speakers on Life and Times is made possible by a grant from the Boeing Company. Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Gang violence has taken a sharp rise in the San Fernando Valley, but the numbers don't even begin to tell the story. Grace Zapata>> They started throwing their gang signs and calling out their gang names and then the shooter pulled out his gun and shot my son four times. Val Zavala>> And then, billions and billions and billions of stars and they're all ready for their close-up at the new Griffith Observatory. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> 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. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. Val Zavala>> Crime is down in cities across California, but in certain areas like the northeast San Fernando Valley, there's a disturbing trend. Gang violence is up, killing innocent victims and throwing families into mourning. Well, we met one man who's been working in the trenches for years to stem gang warfare. His name is "Blinky" Rodriguez and Jim Hill caught up with him at a community march against violence. Jim Hill>> Los Angeles police and paramedics raced to Birmingham High School just after classes let out for the day. They rushed a dying sixteen year old boy to the hospital. Witnesses say that Roberts had shot it out with two men who'd asked him what gang he belonged to. >> I was over there practicing and I heard two gunshots. I run over there and I thought something was going on. So I just kept on doing what I was doing, you know. Jim Hill>> The mid-September killing was part of a frightening trend in the San Fernando Valley. Gang-related murders are on the rise. [Film Clip] Jim Hill>> But the determination to do something about it is also on the rise. Hundreds of people from across the valley marched in late October to speak out against the wave of gang violence. Grace Zapata was there clutching photographs of her sons, David and Miguel. Both were shot and killed in February 2005. Grace Zapata>> Some gang members approached them and asked them where they were from. My son, Miguel, got up and said, "Temple Street". Then they started throwing their gang signs and calling out their gang names and then the shooter pulled out his gun and shot my son four times. Jim Hill>> Los Angeles police say thirty-six people have been killed in gang-related violence in the valley by the end of October, on pace to far surpass last year's total. Michael Moore>> We believe what's happening is that, with the increase in the age group of twelve to eighteen to twenty year olds, that's the demographic there, as those numbers in that group increase, the gangs at the same time are trying to add to their ranks, that there's a recycling or recharging, if you will, of our gangs. Jim Hill>> A good example festered just a few blocks away. In this neighborhood, the Langdon Avenue gang rules the narrow streets and crowded apartments. Here, people live behind double fences and barbed wire and the gang's graffiti mark fences, walls and sidewalks. The spike in gang-related homicides has made neighborhoods like this more dangerous at a time when Los Angeles as a whole appears to be getting safer. LAPD crime figures show an eight percent drop in serious felonies compared to this time last year and city-wide homicides are down by five percent. But gangs in the San Fernando Valley have grown. Five years ago, there were an estimated fifteen thousand gang members. Authorities say that now gang membership has swelled to twenty thousand. Lupe Yuhasz says her two sons died in separate shootings. She says they couldn't resist the peer pressure and the allure of gangs. Lupe Yuhasz>> They're out there. There's so much recruitment and they do it on the lure. The kids, you know, don't see the final, the outcome. They don't see that you could get killed, you could get imprisonment for years and years. It's quite evident out there, quite evident. Jim Hill>> This teenager says he joined when he was fourteen, but dropped out a year ago. >> It's a bad thing. You got to go to jail, you know. You get killed. Some of my homies got killed and some are in jail right now. Jim Hill>> Police say that it's the youngest, newest gang members who are committing most of the serious crimes now as they try to prove themselves and build a reputation. Michael Moore>> The challenge for us is that these are groups or individuals that we don't have a lot of information on because they've not been in the gang lifestyle for a terribly long time, so our intelligence gathering and our gathering of information on who they are, where they live, who do they associate with, what their activities are, our ability to curtail that earlier on is challenged. >> "Too many moms crying, too many moms kids dying!" Jim Hill>> Police say that they're working closely with valley neighborhoods literally marching shoulder to shoulder with residents and with huge workers like William "Blinky" Rodriguez. He's a former champion kick boxer whose son was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1990. He and his wife faced their son's killers in court and forgave them. Lily Rodriguez>> And everybody thinks, well, how do you do it? You make it look so easy. It's not easy. It's not. I cry a lot. I still miss my son today. He was only sixteen years old. I go forward, I have other sons and now I have grandkids. I just keep going forward and fight the good fight and try and save as many kids as I can. Jim Hill>> They now run youth programs, embracing the at-risk kids that others push away. William "Blinky" Rodriguez>> Instead of people running towards this population and trying to engage them and, you know, massage or cajole or persuade, convince, beg, mentor, we run from them. We deem them modern-day lepers. We demonize them, but we want to deal with them. [Film Clip] Jim Hill>> The Rodriguez' have helped organize more than a hundred athletic events like this one. Their softball tournament followed the march and drew teams from valley neighborhoods where gangs hold so much power. But on the field and in the stands, the tensions seem to melt away. [Film Clip] Jim Hill>> The fight against gangs, their violence and their influence with young people, has bedeviled Los Angeles for decades. Chief William Bratton acknowledged as much when he talked with Life and Times Val Zavala two months ago about the need for more police. Chief William Bratton>> Gang injunctions help us to control the behavior of gangs. Enough cops help us to control the behavior of gangs because we can be there to prevent a lot of their activities. So in some respects, Los Angeles has been ignoring for fifty years the most obvious solution to its crime problem, which is more police. Jim Hill>> Marches and ball games surely help too, even if the athletes have to play ball in parks where the graffiti mark gang turf just over the outfield fence. I'm James Hill for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> Recently, a couple of laptop computers went missing and they contained personal information on sixty thousand Starbucks employees, current and former. But what are the chances of that lost data actually turning into identity theft? The chances are smaller than you may think. I talked to Steven Gal, the founder of ID Analytics, whose company analyzed the VA laptop theft and devises ways to catch identity thieves. Gal was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. People get freaked out when they think that their personal information has been lost or stolen. Is the fear greater than the reality? Steven Gal>> I think so. I mean, you know, identity theft and identity fraud has been front page news for six or seven years now and you just see again and again there's always this symptom. If you went back to the news five years ago, they talked about dumpster diving here in the United States and raiding in the United Kingdom. Shred all your documents, right? Because, you know, that's how identity theft happens. Two or three years ago, it was a lot about the web, viruses and different ways that key loggers would get you. Now the last year and a half since California passed their law, it's all about data breaching and people are concerned when they hear about a data breach. A lot of studies have been done. We did a study of a set of actual breaches that happened. The reality is that your chances of being an identity theft victim aren't really any higher in general in the case of the data breach. Val Zavala>> At the same time, we've had ChoicePoint and the VA has lost tens of thousands of peoples' personal information. That's nothing to be concerned about? Steven Gal>> Well, let's look at this and take it apart. Over a hundred million identities have been breached according to the California law over the past eighteen months. Val Zavala>> Breached, meaning -- Steven Gal>> Breached, meaning somehow lost. Many of them fell off the truck, some of them just disappeared, some of them were targeted and stolen. Sometimes people, like the VA, just went after the laptop computer and got the records with it. But there's no indication that that's any more than the year before or the year before that. We don't know. Val Zavala>> Now in the case of the VA theft, it was the hard drive that was just stolen by some kids who were doing a residential burglary. They weren't ID thieves at all. Steven Gal>> Right. I mean, everything in the press indicates that this was just a target of the computer. That's all they wanted. They had absolutely no idea. The computer, we know, ended up at a pawn shop, right? And they had no idea what data was on there until well after it became publicized. I mean, you've got to separate the fear and data breaches certainly create a lot of fear from the reality of risk of identity theft. In fact, like I said, in your lifetime, you're likely to be a victim. The results will probably not be that significant, but there's a tremendous amount being done behind the scenes. Val Zavala>> And I was surprised to learn that, even though you have a hundred thousand people whose data has been breached, we have not seen a subsequent increase in identity theft, in the actual crime. Is that right? Steven Gal>> Yeah, they're not directly related. What our study found was a couple of things. One is that the most dangerous breaches are small, targeted breaches. So you're much more at risk if somebody goes into a doctor's office, say, and steals twenty or thirty files with personal information in them because generally that's a target. Identity thieves are going after it and they can work through twenty or thirty of these pretty easily. Val Zavala>> So how do you stay ahead of these fraudsters? Because, like you said, they're right on the cutting edge of all this. Steven Gal>> Well, you know, one facet of fraud is that fraudsters behave differently and those differences can be detected. You need to have a lot of data. You need it to be there when the transactions are happening and that's what our ID network does. Then we have teams of analytic folks constantly looking at how this data is being used and the new patterns of fraud. Every time we find a new pattern either through our system or through our people, we stop it. I think it's a constant battle. Val Zavala>> The states are also -- a lot of states have passed this new law which requires the consumer to be notified when their data has been breached. Is that helpful? Steven Gal>> Correct. I mean, the notification has created a lot of fear. It's helpful in some respects because at least consumers know, but really what do they do in the case that they get these letters? The issue also is that criminals who may have stolen a computer, having no idea -- like the VA -- what was on it will now be aware because it's widely publicized. So the question is, does that cause them to recognize the value of this data that they wouldn't even have known was there? To a large extent, there's a lot of panic about it and it's been going on now for years. The reality is that most people don't suffer. If they do suffer, they suffer once in their life, maybe twice. And when they do, it's not that significant. What banks have done is removed the liability so that you don't have financial liability when it happens to you. Val Zavala>> Steve Gal with ID Analytics, thank you for all your work and protecting us in doing what we can. Steven Gal>> Thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it. Val Zavala>> Steve Gal was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If you'd like more information on events and speakers, you can go to their website at townhall-la.org. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val>> Our next story is about something that happens every December around the holidays, but it's not your warm and fuzzy holiday story. It's about a funeral service for more than a thousand deceased individuals all at one time. As Vicki Curry tells us, it happens at a cemetery you probably never knew existed. Vicki Curry>> At a busy intersection in Boyle Heights, cars speed by an empty lot, but it's not as empty as it first appears. Every December, a little-known ritual occurs here, a funeral service for the unclaimed dead. Phil Manly>> "We here commit to this resting place one thousand six hundred six individuals and symbolically scatter these green leaves in their memory and on their behalf." Vicki Curry>> This is the Los Angeles County Cemetery, the final resting place for the city's lost and forgotten. It's a small graveyard of mostly unmarked plots. There are no headstones here and few visitors. Clyde Emerson>> We basically bury the indigents. These are people who have no known next of kin or whose next of kin cannot or will not make funeral arrangements for them, so we're kind of the cemetery of last resort for people like that. Vicki Curry>> Clyde Emerson is Director of Decedent Affairs at County USC Medical Center. He says the people buried here include newborns and elderly, immigrants and homeless, and even some John and Jane Does, bodies that were never identified. Clyde Emerson>> The unclaimed dead come here. We cremate them and we keep the remains for close to four years. We've held them until now in case there are family members who want to claim the remains. We keep them in urns -- some of them are metal, some of them are plastic -- on the shelves here at the crematory building. Vicki Curry>> But if, after a few years, no one has claimed the ashes, Emerson and two of his colleagues bury them in a common grave. Albert Gaskin is the County Morgue Supervisor and has worked at the cemetery for nearly forty years. Albert Gaskin>> We try to bury in December just before the first of the year. It's the end of the year and it's coming to the new year and we have to make room for others, so we try to do them on a yearly basis. Clyde Emerson>> It was certainly a little bit unusual, the first time that I was told that this was part of the job, to transport the ashes from the building, to put them on the back of a pickup truck, to take them down to the grave and put them in the grave. Vicki Curry>> Each urn contains a plastic bag of ashes and the only individual item included in this mass burial is a tag marked with an identification number assigned to the body. Clyde Emerson>> Handling so many of them is certainly a pause for thought. We have sixteen hundred this year and, in some years, we have two thousand or more. Vicki Curry>> It's a grim part of the job. A few days after the burial, the staff voluntarily gathers again for the funeral service. It's not part of their jobs, but they feel a sense of obligation to unclaimed souls. Phil Manly>> "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." Vicki Curry>> Phil Manly is a hospital chaplain at County USC Medical Center, as his father was before him. He's been performing this annual service for more than thirty years. Phil Manly>> I think that we should honor our dead and that they should be buried or some recognition should be given for a life that was lived. Vicki Curry>> The funeral service was already a tradition by the time Manly and Gaskin became involved with it over three decades ago. No one knows how it got started, but this small group continues to observe it every December. Albert Gaskin>> Oh, I think it's nice, very nice, for the amount of people that we have. It's sad sometimes. Phil Manly>> It's always very special to me and one cannot help but think about those folks. I mean, one thousand six hundred six people. What were they like, what was their life like, how did they die? Each day that we remain here in this life is a gift from God. I was very pleased with the county when I found out that they were doing these things for the homeless and people that would not have been buried properly even and decently and in order. Clyde Emerson>> Most other counties, at least in California that I know of, have contracts with private mortuaries to handle indigent and unclaimed dead and they don't have actual county crematories and cemeteries, so it's kind of unique in that respect. Vicki Curry>> The Los Angeles County Cemetery dates back to the late 1800's. Here and there, you can even spot a gravestone from that time. The crematory was built on the grounds in the 1920's when the county began having mass burials. There's a chapel inside. It isn't used anymore, but perhaps it was many years ago. Clyde Emerson>> Yes, we have a chapel here. I'm not quite sure why it was built originally and maybe in the past they did have services. There's a little foot-pump organ in there that actually works to some extent. Vicki Curry>> Some of the cemetery's history is hard to determine. The earliest common graves are marked only with identification numbers on crude stones. Clyde Emerson>> The further back you go, the harder it is to find out exactly where they are buried, although the written records are quite good and quite complete for the whole period. Vicki Curry>> Starting around 1960, Los Angeles County began placing a year marker on the common graves. A few of the more recent ones get the occasional visit from a family who knew the relative had died, but couldn't afford a funeral. Clyde Emerson>> So as we've seen, there are some graves that are decorated by family members when they have loved ones buried here. Albert Gaskin>> There are some graves that we have where we buried the deceased and the family want to come back and decide they want to put a little plot. We have about three families come about three or four times a year. Vicki Curry>> But most of those buried here will never be mourned by family or friends, only by a few county workers who feel obliged to acknowledge these people whose death went unnoticed. Phil Manly>> A lot of these people were homeless, had no family that they knew about or they had alienated themselves from their families, so when they passed away, nobody really knew that they even had left this life and that's why we do this is to maintain the balance between life and death. "I am the resurrection and the life. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die." Vicki Curry>> I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> It's the biggest astronomical image ever, a cosmic panorama more than a hundred fifty feet long, and it's just one of many new exhibits at the Griffith Observatory, the new and improved Griffith Observatory. Paul Vercammen went to check out the big picture. Paul Vercammen>> Outside the new and improved Griffith Observatory, the star of our solar system, the sun. And inside -- George Djorgovski>> I believe it is physically the largest astronomical image ever produced. Paul Vercammen>> More than one and a half million celestial objects, stars, galaxies, a comet and more in a permanent exhibit called "The Big Picture". George Djorgovski>> We are thrilled that people in Los Angeles will be able to come and see us. Paul Vercammen>> It's a small piece of our nighttime sky blown up to a one hundred fifty two foot long, twenty foot high wall of wonder. George Djorgovski>> It's actually a real scientific data set which is still being analyzed. It is not an artist's impression. It is the real thing. Paul Vercammen>> Caltech Professor of Astronomy, George Djorgovski, helps identify the area of sky on display. George Djorgovski>> What probably strikes your eye most is this nice chain of galaxies. It's called the Markarian's Chain. Paul Vercammen>> Featuring a cluster of galaxies close to earth in the constellation Virgo. If you want to get a sense for just how big the slice of the sky is that The Big Picture represents, let's do a little interactive television old-school style. Take your index finger and put it about a foot from your face. Now consider everything that you cannot see behind your index finger. That's what's represented here in The Big Picture. So The Big Picture is reproduced from just one one-thousandth of the sky. We'd only see a few stars with our naked eye, but with each object magnified for us to see, The Big Picture offers spectacular close-ups of galaxies. George Djorgovski>> This one here is probably the biggest one. It's called M-87 and it's what known as a giant elliptical galaxy. Now you can see that there is something funny going on in the middle. There is a big black hole in there which is shooting out a jet of particles and energy. Look in here. It also emits radio waves and x-rays. This is one of the best studied cases of giant black holes. Paul Vercammen>> M-87 catches children right at their eye level. George Djorgovski>> Something else interesting about those galaxies. You see all these little colored dots surrounded which might look like faint stars or fainter galaxies. Many of them are star clusters, each of them containing up to maybe a million stars and they're circling this big outer galaxy. It's a very unusual situation. Paul Vercammen>> Djorgovski led a team of scientists at the Palomar Observatory that captured the images for The Big Picture over twenty nights on a Quest camera. George Djorgovski>> So we take pictures which are really long ribbons that could be all night long and they're all taken in different filters and they're combined in computers to make all the pictures like you see. Paul Vercammen>> The Big Picture is distilled from two hundred gigabytes of raw data. George Djorgovski>> And to put this in perspective, a gigabyte is roughly the amount of information in two thousand books. We started with over two hundred gigabytes of data to create The Big Picture, ending up with only seven and a half gigabytes. But in any case, this one picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words. Paul Vercammen>> It's open mouth, jaw-dropping images of spiral galaxies. Here are two galaxies on a collision course. George Djorgovski>> Here are a pair of galaxies that look a little disturbed and that's because they're about to merge in another billion years or so. These two galaxies will blend together and will become one of those elliptical galaxies. Paul Vercammen>> As we look at The Big Picture, pick an object sixty-five million light years away, we're gazing back in time. When we talk about sixty-five million light years away, when would that have been on earth? When would this light have been created? George Djorgovski>> Each and every one of these lights started when dinosaurs were still walking on the earth and humans didn't exist. So this is an eye-blink in the history of the universe. Paul Vercammen>> To preserve history, The Big Picture was produced under one hundred fourteen panels of porcelain enamel. Tell us about why you put the galaxies and the stars and the other objects on porcelain. George Djorgovski>> That was a choice made by the Griffith Observatory. They wanted something that will be permanent and lasting. Indeed, this photograph is printed, if you will, using a very special process on porcelain enamel. It will not fade for many decades, maybe in centuries. So when we're all gone and long forgotten and all of the science we have done is forgotten, they'll still be out there and children will admire it. Paul Vercammen>> And to think about the limitless universe. George Djorgovski>> Many people ask, "Do you think there are other creatures out there?" I'll say, "Probably, yes." They may have their own big picture in which there is a Milky Way Galaxy and looking at the pictures just like they're from their planet and asking the same questions. Our sun is a star in the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred or two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way and most of them now we know have planets. There are about a hundred billion galaxies in all of these variable universes. That's a fairly large number of planets. I would say chances are pretty good that there is life out there. Paul Vercammen>> That's The Big Picture's star quality, to make us wonder about the evolving past, present and future. I'm Paul Vercammen for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> 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. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. Sponsored in part by:  | |
|
Home | Features | Arts | Health/Science | OC Edition | L&T Blog | Archives | About Us | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use |