The children playing and laughing in the backyard next door couldn't see it, but police officers had forced open a safe in their Woodland Hills neighbor's garage and found a collection of guns and rifles.

The team led by LAPD Sgt. Jeff Nuttall had gone to the home to check on Byrone London, who had recently served a prison sentence for obstructing and resisting arrest.

London was supposed to stay away from weapons and drugs or risk ending up back behind bars. But here he was, living in a relative's house where firearms were stored and, officers believe, facing a risk of abusing drugs again...

Do Los Angeles County prosecutors too often or too seldom use their power under 2000's Proposition 21 to charge an accused juvenile as an adult, without first submitting the question to a judge? Does "direct filing" against juveniles, as it is known, make residents safer? Is it a good escape valve for the justice system now that fewer juveniles can be sent to state youth camps, and now that prison realignment is making county jail space more difficult to come by?

Los Angeles voters need to know how well the six candidates for district attorney grasp the facts of direct filing and whether and how often — and why — they would exercise that option. It may be interesting to know how much money each candidate has raised, who has endorsed them and what they say about each other, but before making their decisions voters must extract from the candidates more fundamental information about their knowledge, their attitudes, their values and their abilities. The attitude toward charging youths as adults is one of severalkey areas in which the candidates must be probed and prodded...

The number of parolees arrested for new crimes in Los Angeles County has dropped since Gov. Jerry Brown's realignment plan took effect six months ago, drawing cautious optimism from some state and local officials.

The county Probation Department is currently supervising about 6,200 parolees - officially known as post-release supervised persons or PSPs - who were released from state prisons after Oct. 1.

As a group, PSPs have been involved in 1,600 arrests through mid-March, though only about 700 felony cases have been presented to the District Attorney's Office for prosecution...

He described the suspect as an African American in his 30s, about 5 feet 9, with a mustache or goatee. He was wearing a dark gray hooded sweatshirt and dark shorts.

The assailant is believed to have fled in a white 1970s Chevrolet El Camino. Anyone with information is asked to call police at (310) 412-8771.

Authorities say an off-duty parole agent was shot and wounded during an attempted robbery at a barber shop in South Los Angeles.

Inglewood police Lt. Oscar Serrano said the department received a call of shots fired at about 5 p.m. from the Morningside Park Barber Shop on Crenshaw Boulevard...

The Los Angeles County Probation Department has not fulfilled seven federally ordered reforms at its youth camps.

A report released late last week by federal monitors found that the agency still needs to improve staffing levels at some of its 14 camps, improve how it identifies youths who have mental problems and do a better job of evaluating and treating youths with medical problems, among other issues.

The probation department, which houses and works to rehabilitate about 2,200 of the area's most troubled youths, has been under federal oversight for almost a decade. As part of a 2008 deal, federal officials threatened to take over the department unless it complied with 41 reforms...

Los Angeles County supervisors are balking at a proposal from the county sheriff’s department to issue $1.4 billion of bonds to rebuild the 5,000-bed Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

The sheriff’s department describes the jail project as a means to address California’s ongoing corrections “realignment” that is shifting 30,000 prisoners to county jails from the state prison system over the next two years, while also alleviating security issues at the Men’s Central Jail.

The facility has been the subject of allegations involving sheriff’s deputies beating prisoners over the past year...

Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley's office handles about one-third of California's felony convictions, making this single county critical to the success of Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to reduce prison overcrowding by sentencing nonviolent felony offenders to county jails.

Cooley, however, is a Republican who adamantly opposes the Democratic governor's plan and is training his staffers to do everything they can to work around it - including pushing for the most serious charges to ensure that as many offenders as possible are sentenced to state prison. In a recent interview, Cooley said he is trying to mitigate the "public safety nightmare" that realignment will bring - particularly in a county like Los Angeles, where the jails are overcrowded and the sheriff regularly releases offenders early...

The Probation Department, not the Sheriff's Department, will supervise the thousands of parolees to be released in Los Angeles County, the Board of Supervisors has decided.

The agencies had presented competing plans to oversee the parolees, while the county's chief executive had proposed a compromise that would divide authority for the former prison inmates.

The supervisors this week decided that the Probation Department had the experience and expertise to handle the expected influx of some 8,000 parolees...

Two new reports out this week bring troubling news from Los Angeles County’s beleaguered juvenile halls. According to the Crime Report, Los Angeles is not taking court-ordered reforms serious enough to accomplish them by a Fall 2011 deadline. The county has been under federal and state supervision since 2008, when regulators discovered abusive and unprofessional conditions in the juvenile halls. Since then, we’ve seen regular reports of misconduct emerge from LA:

For instance, on pp: 7-9 of the monitors’ report, one finds a section titled, “Abusive Institutional Practices,” that outlines “abusive and/or threatening behaviors” toward kids that staff are ordered to avoid. The behaviors include:

….“slamming” youth into hard surfaces such as walls, floors, doors or any other hard surface/object; or placing youth into uncomfortable positions for long periods of time that may be viewed by a reasonable person as inappropriate…. denial or limiting of restroom access….taking punishing or restricting the programming opportunities, including limiting outdoor recreation, for large groups of youth when one or two youth act out…”

Sheriff Lee Baca not only wants his deputies to arrest and jail suspects, he thinks they should supervise the offenders' parole.

Baca is making an unprecedented bid to expand the powers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, saying it would improve community safety because his force has more resources and law enforcement know-how than probation officers.

But the idea, expected to be heard today by the Board of Supervisors, doesn't sit well with the Los Angeles County Probation Department, whose employees have been monitoring offenders since 1903...

Los Angeles police today announced the arrest of a 57-year-old parolee believed to have committed more than a dozen robberies in Los Angeles and Kern counties attributed to the "fake mustache bandit."

James Brammer, who was paroled last April after serving time for robbery, was taken into custody without incident Sunday near Quakertown Avenue and Vanowen Street in Winnetka by the LAPD's Topanga Division gang unit.

His bail was set at $250,000.

Evidence seized from the suspect's Reseda home allegedly links him to 14 robberies committed since November, according to the LAPD…

A parolee who allegedly stole a BMW at gunpoint was arrested after officers picked up the LoJack signal coming from the car.

The suspect's name and age weren't available Tuesday night. The Los Angeles resident was taken into custody by Los Angeles police and booked on suspicion of carjacking.

The carjacking happened about 2 p.m. in the 300 block of Pasadena Avenue.

A Pasadena resident was dropping off real estate fliers when an armed man got into his 2008 BMW and said he was taking the car, according to South Pasadena Police Sgt. Tony Abdalla…

Local officials have vowed to fight a proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shave $1 billion from the state budget by shifting 23,000 state prisoners to overcrowded local jails during the next three years.

"This presents a serious danger to public safety," said Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley. "We are putting in jeopardy gains that have resulted in crime plunging in L.A. to its lowest level in 50 years."

The state's 33 prisons house about 155,000 inmates and are under a federal court order to relieve overcrowding. If state officials do not address the problem soon, a panel of three federal judges could set a cap on new prisoners and order thousands released…

The program seemed a model of corrections reform in tight fiscal times: The mostly white-collar criminals who were enrolled saved taxpayers moneyby living in group homes instead of in state prison and held jobs that helped cover rent and restitution to victims.

Among the graduates of the state's two restitution centers, both in Los Angeles, is former Compton Mayor Omar Bradley, who provided job training for the disabled in Carson while serving time for using his city-issued credit card for personal expenses.

But on Thanksgiving Eve, state officials shut down the program and sent the 74 enrolled offenders to prisons, not even giving them time to tell their employers. Corrections department officials, ordered to cut their budget by $800 million this year, said California could no longer afford the program….

SACRAMENTO — With jails, drug-rehab centers and probation offices already swamped, Los Angeles County officials are bracing to take on thousands of additional low-risk convicts who could come their way as part of a proposed legal settlement to reduce state prison overcrowding.

The idea of reducing the state prison population by shifting offenders to county programs and facilities is causing anxiety among those who would be expected to take on the additional responsibilities.

"I'm pretty worried," said Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, whose jail system is under a court order to ease overcrowded facilities. "The impact is substantial because we have the largest percentage of the prison population coming out of our county. If you don't plan it carefully and with success in mind, what you get is catastrophe"…

Los Angeles County sheriff's officials are investigating a riot that broke out Tuesday involving hundreds of immigration detainees at a county-run facility in Lancaster, where guards had to use tear gas grenades to restore order, authorities said today.

The Sheriff's Department contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to house about 900 detainees awaiting deportation at the Mira Loma Detention Center, according to sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.

Sheriff's and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel spent much of the night interviewing detainee witnesses, and some who instigated the riot may be prosecuted on criminal charges, authorities said…

A freeway overpass in the San Fernando Valley may seem an unlikely place to discover buried treasure, but that's exactly where authorities struck pay dirt this week when police received a handwritten map that led them to a cache of stolen valuables by the 118 Freeway.

Police say the hot goods — mainly expensive jewelry — may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The suspect, Roberto Caveda, is well known to West Valley police, who arrested him in 2006 for stealing about $15 million in fine art, jewelry and other items. That haul included a $10-million Edgar Degas painting and $2 million in jewelry. Caveda was convicted of those thefts and preliminarily sentenced to eight to 10 years in state prison.

A parolee accused of kidnapping a 14-year-old girl off a Hawthorne street and sexually assaulting her was sentenced Wednesday to four years in state prison.

After prosecutors agreed to drop the kidnapping charge against him, Jamaal Todd Davenport, 20, pleaded no contest to one count of oral copulation with a minor, according to his defense attorney, Mark Haushalter. Davenport accepted the plea deal Wednesday before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Cho at the Airport Courthouse.

He will also be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life…