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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting was temporarily halted Tuesday as protesters called for officials to shut down the newly reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall.
“Free our youth and shut it down,” a cluster of protesters yelled in the board room as the meeting was beginning around 9:45 a.m.
“Shut down Los Padrinos,” chanted another group, sitting a few rows away.
Tauheedah Shakur, organizing director with the Youth Justice Coalition, said she was tired of coming to board meetings every week to demand the county shut down its juvenile halls while conditions continued to deteriorate inside.
The protest, she said, was born out of that frustration.
“We kept coming. We kept coming every Tuesday religiously. Nonstop,” she said. “And they would not listen. And so any organizer knows that after you play nice, it’s time to make them uncomfortable.”
Protesters said they also wanted the county to cut Probation Department funding.
Los Padrinos, located in Downey, was reopened this month after a state oversight board ordered the county to move most youths out of its troubled juvenile halls in Boyle Heights and Sylmar. The order followed a worsening staffing crisis, rising incidents of violence and the overdose death of 18-year-old Bryan Diaz.
”Nine kids have overdosed since Bryan Diaz,” one man chanted Tuesday, standing a few feet from the meeting room entrance. “What more will it take?”
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 following years of dysfunction.
But Adreena Rochall, whose son was moved last week to Los Padrinos from the Barry J. Nidorf facility in Sylmar, said he had found the conditions deplorable and she’d heard from those inside that the air conditioning had broken.
“We’ve got a whole community of kids just being destroyed,” she said. “It’s not rehabilitation and recovery. It’s an insane asylum.”
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