Introduction On Monday, the Ad Hoc Committee for City Governance Reform conducted its first meeting of the year. The committee was convened in the wake of last year's racism scandal on council, which centered around backroom dealings by the council's power bloc - namely, those allied with former Council President Nury Martinez - to interfere…

The Board of Supervisors has been making halting progress in a campaign to impose some limits on the authority of the sheriff for a decade or more. Los Angeles is the most populous county in the country, and the sheriff, with his jurisdiction over the local jail system and a police force the size of an army division under his command, is among the most powerful local elected officials anywhere. For a long time, that power has been associated with cultures of corruption and violence within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. It is important to note that neither the reform process nor the appalling conduct of the Sheriff's Department have their roots in the current administration of Sheriff Villanueva (though he does typify the threat posed to the public when so much power is concentrated in the hands of one reckless individual).

The War on Drugs has always justified itself as a crusade to save children from moral evil, and yet it has been a failure, utter and without mitigation. Where the War on Drugs has succeeded is only in wreaking titanic moral evils of its own: grinding lives and entire communities into dust, sowing seeds of chaos in countries near and far. This may seem a small front in that war, but, as the question has been put to me (and all Californian voters), I cannot cosign the legislature's action.