Global Courant
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting was temporarily halted Tuesday as protesters called on officials to close the newly reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall.
“Free our youth and shut it down,” a group of protesters shouted in the boardroom as the meeting began around 9:45 am.
“Close Los Padrinos,” another group, seated a few rows away, chanted.
Tauheedah Shakur, organizer of the Youth Justice Coalition, said she was tired of coming to board meetings every week to demand that the county close its youth halls as conditions inside continued to deteriorate.
The protest, she said, was born out of that frustration.
“We kept coming. We continued to come religiously every Tuesday. Nonstop,” she said. And they wouldn’t listen. And so every organizer knows that after you’ve played nice, it’s time to make them uncomfortable.
Protesters said they also wanted the county to cut probation funding.
Los Padrinos, located in Downey, reopened this month after a state board of trustees directed the county to remove most youth from troubled youth halls in Boyle Heights and Sylmar. The order followed a worsening personnel crisis, escalating violence and the overdose death of 18-year-old Bryan Diaz.
“Nine kids have overdosed since Bryan Diaz,” a man chanted Tuesday as he stood a few feet from the conference room entrance. “What else is needed?”
After about 15 minutes of chanting, the protest moved outside and the meeting resumed soon after.
County leaders have said Los Padrinos represents a fresh start for the probation department after years of dysfunction.
But Adreena Rochall, whose son moved to Los Padrinos from the Barry J. Nidorf facility in Sylmar last week, said he had found the conditions dire and heard from those inside that the air conditioning was broken.
“We have an entire community of children that is just being destroyed,” she said. “It is not rehabilitation and recovery. It’s an insane asylum.”
