Thirty officers from the Los Angeles County Probation Department have been indicted on criminal charges following an investigation into allegations they allowed — and in some cases encouraged — fights between teens inside the county’s juvenile halls.
Judge Yvette Verastegui told the 30 probation officials that the charges included 69 counts of child abuse, one count of conspiracy to commit a crime and one count of misdemeanor battery. The staff were ordered to appear again in court on April 18.
The indictments, unsealed Monday afternoon, were the result of a California Department of Justice investigation launched after The Times published security footage last year of eight probation officers standing idly by while a group of teens attacked a 17-year-old inside Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey. The teen suffered a broken nose and a “traumatic brain injury,” according to a civil claim filed last year. Details of the criminal case were first reported by The Times last month.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said at a news conference Monday that the case involved 69 “gladiator fights” at Los Angeles juvenile halls.
The video published last year shows the 17-year-old sustaining punches and kicks from a series of youths who attack him one at a time inside a “day room” at Los Padrinos. On more than one occasion, the victim falls to the ground while officers do little to stop the violence. At one point in the video, a female probation officer steps out of the way as a youth charges the victim and delivers a running kick.
That officer was identified in court last year as Taneha Brooks. The victim’s public defender alleged she “instigated” the brawls by telling the attackers the 17-year-old was a racist and a member of a rival gang. At one point in the video, Brooks can be seen checking her watch, as if timing out each brawl.
Another officer — identified in court last year as Shawn Smyles — can be seen in the video shaking hands with one of the assailants while the 17-year-old crumples under a flurry of punches in another part of the room.
Brooks and Smyles declined to comment Monday.
In her written report on the incident, Brooks said that the 17-year-old and his attackers were engaged in mutual combat and each fight stopped when she gave a verbal warning.
Dozens of current and former probation officers could be seen milling around the 13th floor of the downtown Los Angeles criminal courthouse on Monday afternoon, many of them still unsure what they were being charged with or why.
Retired officers also appeared in support of the defendants, arguing their colleagues were victims of a chronically understaffed and mismanaged agency that put them in an impossible job.
The December 2023 incident raised questions about whether the violence was condoned by officers and the validity of probation officers’ reports on fights and other uses of force within the halls.
A supervisor who reviewed Brooks’ notes on the fighting incident captured on video said during a court hearing that he never questioned her account or reviewed the footage before entering her report into a court file.
The indictments are the latest in a string of controversies surrounding the probation department.
California’s Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Los Padrinos closed late last year after it repeatedly failed inspections and was deemed “unsuitable” to house youths. The majority of the juveniles incarcerated in Los Angeles County are housed in Los Padrinos because the board previously shuttered the county’s other two juvenile halls — Barry J. Nidorf in Sylmar and Central Juvenile Hall in L.A. — following increases in violence and instability in the halls exacerbated by a staffing crisis.
The probation department refused the state’s order to close Los Padrinos, and state board members have said they don’t know what legal recourse they have to enforce it. The California Attorney General’s office has previously declined to address the issue.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Miguel Espinoza is weighing a request from the L.A. County public defender’s office to remove all of its clients from Los Padrinos, based on the board’s finding that its unsafe for youths.
“The probation system and its underlying culture are broken,” Los Angeles County Public Defender Ricardo Garcia said in a statement Monday. “Accountability for those who have failed to protect our youth is long overdue—there is no justice in a system that abuses the very youth it is entrusted to care for.”
