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The Hug Act in juvenile facilities, a review of the fire report, and jail force · LA County

• 0:06
  Maya: On this week's episode: the Board of Supervisors moves to put California's new Hug Act into practice in juvenile facilities, gives departments more time to review an outside report on the January 2025 fires, and hears the Sheriff's latest report on force in the downtown jails.
• 0:27
  Maya: Five supervisors, nearly ten million people. Here's your weekly debrief.
• 0:33
  Maya: Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting began with a moment of silence. Supervisor Janice Hahn asked the room to pause for three people killed in a medical helicopter crash off Catalina Island the Wednesday before: the pilot, a flight nurse, and an Avalon resident.
• 0:48
  Theo: Two survivors, the Avalon resident's son and a flight medic, were in the hospital. Catalina is one of the county's two islands, and it's part of Hahn's Fourth District.
• 0:58
  Maya: Four supervisors sat for the meeting. Supervisor Holly Mitchell, the chair pro tem, was absent, and each roll-call vote at Tuesday's meeting was four to zero.
• 1:08
  Theo: And later, a long line of speakers came forward. About twenty-seven people came in person to speak on a single item. That's where we start.
• 1:17
  Maya: This episode was produced with AI from the public recording of the meeting. Links to the source are in the show notes.
• 1:28
  Maya: Our top story: a new state law about hugs, and how the county is getting ready for it. Assembly Bill sixteen forty-six, the Hug Act, takes effect January first, 2027. It gives young people in custody a right to physical contact with their visitors.
• 1:45
  Theo: Isn't that allowed already?
• 1:47
  Maya: Not everywhere, every time. One supervisor said Probation doesn't let all youth at every facility hug their visitors on every visiting day. She said she raised it with Probation first and met resistance, so the effort went to the state instead. She also said Probation sometimes uses visitation as a reward or a punishment.
• 2:06
  Theo: So what does the law change?
• 2:08
  Maya: As it was described on the dais, contact can't be restricted as discipline, and any restriction for a specific and significant safety concern has to be documented. The motion, from Supervisors Hahn and Mitchell, tells Probation to drop its rule that contact visits need the department head's approval in advance, publish materials telling youth and parents their rights, and allow more contact visits for the rest of this year. Probation reports back in sixty days with a compliance plan, then files reports by July first, 2027 and January first, 2028 on participation, family feedback, and every restriction.
• 2:44
  Theo: Probation's own staff laid out the plan. Right now, they said, hugs are allowed on designated holidays, with the department head's approval. The revised policy drops that approval and makes contact visits a regular form of visitation by January first. They said most of the visits left in 2026 will be allowed as contact visits, contact won't be denied as discipline, and young people can say no to contact at any point without it affecting their future visits.
• 3:13
  Maya: Supervisor Hahn praised the presentation. She said she'd never heard the department talk this way in her time as a supervisor. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath called the law an example of policy built around the people most affected. And Supervisor Kathryn Barger said these young people will be released, and family contact, especially with their mothers, gives them stability.
• 3:34
  Theo: Then the public spoke, about twenty-seven people in person, all in support. They included formerly incarcerated youth who said they helped write the bill, parents of young people in custody, members of the Probation Oversight Commission, and a UCLA researcher who cited research on the health benefits of touch. Speakers said youth at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall helped write it. Two callers spoke remotely. One questioned what the board had done over past decades, and one asked for an audit comparing contraband and overdoses before and after contact visits began.
• 4:06
  Maya: The motion passed four to zero. Probation's compliance plan is due in sixty days.
• 4:14
  Theo: Our next story is about the January 2025 fires. The week before the meeting, UL Research Institutes' Fire Safety Research Institute released a report on the Southern California fires.
• 4:25
  Maya: A motion from Supervisors Barger and Horvath directs County Counsel to analyze it, working with the Fire Department, the Office of Emergency Management, the chief executive's office, the Sheriff's Department, and Public Works. The analysis is to show where the report overlaps with the McChrystal Group's after-action reports and the Citygate investigation, which recommendations are new, and what can be done in the near term. As posted, it was due in seven days.
• 4:51
  Theo: Six people spoke on it, among them Eaton fire survivors and members of an Altadena accountability group. Most said seven days was far too short. One asked for at least sixty days, and several asked that the community be part of the review. Several criticized the county's fire response in west Altadena. One objected to County Counsel leading the review, and one called for the Fire Department's leadership to be removed and for a citizen oversight board.
• 5:18
  Maya: Barger, whose Fifth District includes Altadena, said the seven days were set on purpose to signal urgency, but that thoroughness matters. She said County Counsel isn't the only evaluator and is only coordinating the departments that worked on the earlier reviews. She said county staff were interviewed for the report, but the county didn't see it until it came out. She said she and Horvath had already told the chief executive to name a point person to track every after-action recommendation and report regularly, including to the community. Then she offered to make the deadline thirty days, with extensions for departments that ask.
• 5:55
  Theo: The item passed with the consent calendar, four to zero. The vote itself didn't restate the change, so the board's written record should confirm the final wording.
• 6:08
  Maya: Our third story: use of force in the county jails. Rosas is a federal settlement that grew out of allegations of excessive force in the downtown jails: Men's Central Jail, the Inmate Reception Center, and Twin Towers. An assistant sheriff presented the department's progress, and the outside monitors took questions.
• 6:26
  Theo: What did the numbers show?
• 6:28
  Maya: The department reported about seventy-eight percent compliance, down from eighty-two in the last report. It said that's because nineteen provisions it had met for years were taken off monitoring by court order. Counting them, it said, compliance would be about eighty-three percent. It said it met the ninety percent bar on head strikes for the first time, and that head strikes fell sixty-five percent since 2021, from eighty-two to twenty-nine. It also expects body cameras in all custody facilities by the end of the year.
• 7:02
  Theo: Supervisors pressed on one case. Supervisor Hahn described deputies throwing a handcuffed man into a window frame after he refused insulin. He broke his neck and was left paralyzed, and he later died. The department found that force within policy, and the monitors found it out of compliance. Hahn said the department's review committee didn't acknowledge inaccurate or dishonest statements in the deputies' reports, which the video contradicted.
• 7:26
  Maya: Was anyone disciplined?
• 7:27
  Theo: The accounts differ. The assistant sheriff said discipline was imposed in the case, including on a supervisor, and that he's limited in what he can say because the case is in litigation. An ACLU representative said no one was disciplined for the force or the false reports. A second said that, as far as the ACLU knew, the deputy is still employed. By the end, Hahn said she'd understood the department was still investigating, but that now it appeared it wasn't.
• 7:57
  Maya: Supervisor Hilda Solis, the board's chair, raised timelines. She said policy calls for a watch commander's review within twenty-one days, but reviews take up to five hundred sixty-seven days and discipline averages four hundred seventy-one, and she asked for targets. The department pointed to a web-based case tracker launched last October to find bottlenecks. The monitors said it should help, but they haven't seen results from it yet.
• 8:23
  Theo: The board received and filed the report without objection. The department said a phone contract, including tablets for people in custody, comes to the board in about two months.
• 8:37
  Maya: Now some shorter items from Tuesday.
• 8:39
  Theo: Supervisors Barger and Horvath introduced a motion for October twentieth on case management for Eaton and Palisades fire survivors. Barger said the state told providers the program would end September thirtieth because federal money hadn't arrived, then extended that to October thirty-first. She said California asked for twenty-six million dollars, FEMA approved thirteen million, and only about three million has been paid out. FEMA has since announced a partial payment, but Barger said announcements aren't enough until the money arrives. More than one hundred jobs at five organizations are at risk. The motion looks for bridge funding and asks for a letter urging FEMA and the state to release the approved money.
• 9:21
  Maya: Supervisor Horvath, with Supervisor Solis as co-author, introduced a package on gender-based and intimate partner violence. Horvath said county courts got almost fifteen thousand restraining order petitions in 2025 and dismissed almost sixty percent of them because of procedural delays by the person asking. The motion seeks five point one million dollars a year, starting in the 2027-28 fiscal year, to fully fund the self-help centers that help people apply. It goes to the board November tenth.
• 9:53
  Theo: About seventy items passed in one consent vote, four to zero. They included forty point three million dollars for fire engines, four lawsuit settlements totaling about nine point six million, the sale of surplus county land in La Habra Heights to the city and a habitat authority, an ordinance requiring closed captioning on televisions in places of public accommodation, and nearly eighty-three million dollars in housing funds for the Development Authority.
• 10:20
  Maya: In a separate vote, also four to zero, the board authorized up to one point four billion dollars in Los Angeles Unified School District bonds.
• 10:29
  Theo: The Governance Reform Task Force's recommendations, which set up the new county structure under Measure G, including an elected County Executive, were pushed to October twentieth at Supervisor Mitchell's request. And Supervisor Solis's motion to ban large-scale data centers in unincorporated zoning went back to her office, with no reason given on the record.
• 10:49
  Maya: The board's October thirteenth meeting is canceled. Its next regular meeting is Tuesday, October twentieth.
• 10:58
  Theo: Before we go, a look ahead.
• 11:00
  Maya: The Regional Planning Commission meets next Wednesday, October fourteenth, at nine. It's scheduled to hear a presentation on updating the county's Renewable Energy Ordinance, and a request to allow outdoor truck storage on Medford Street in East Los Angeles, within five hundred feet of a sensitive use. A proposal for twenty-one townhouse-style condominiums in South Whittier is recommended to be taken off calendar without a hearing.
• 11:28
  Theo: If you hear something we got wrong, there's a link on this episode's page to tell us. We read corrections on air.
• 11:34
  Maya: That's the news from the county. See you next Thursday.