Food bounties and gang brawls: Behind the ‘gladiator fights’ in L.A. juvenile halls
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The teenager didn’t always have to eat the drab grits and sausage at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall.
For kids like him — kids willing to fight — there was another breakfast option.
The teenager said a few L.A. County probation officers often approached him about kids they were struggling to control.
“There’s a meal on his head,” an officer would tell him.
“It’s basically a bounty,” recounted the teenager, now 18, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation. “We stomp on the kid, and then we get our food.”
If the teenager dished out a beating to a misbehaving kid — someone who cursed at officers or defied orders — he was rewarded with his pick from a fast-food smorgasbord of In-N-Out, Jack in the Box, McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A, he said.
Concerns about probation officers encouraging fights inside L.A. County’s beleaguered juvenile halls gained a spotlight last year after The Times published video footage showing officers standing by as at least six youths took turns pummeling a teenager inside Los Padrinos.
The video sparked an investigation by the California Department of Justice, ending with 30 officers indicted on criminal charges this month. Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said officers either coordinated or allowed 69 brawls, which he referred to as “gladiator fights,” between July and December 2023.
While the indictment was met with shock in some corners, those familiar with L.A. County’s dysfunctional juvenile justice system said bounties and orchestrated brawls are nothing new.
Jerod Gunsberg, a veteran defense attorney who often represents teenage defendants, said he has used the term “gladiator fights” for years, long before Bonta did. He called it an “open secret” and said his clients have long told him about youths receiving “food rewards” from officers for attacking other youths, which he likened to “prize money” doled out after professional boxing matches.
While concerns about staff-incited violence are commonplace among juvenile defense attorneys, Gunsberg said that officers are not punished because youths are rarely willing to speak out against their jailers. Youths felt forced to comply with orders to attack other youths because they risked angering the officers, he said.
“Expecting kids and families who are in a severe crisis to step up and speak out against the people who have all the power over them, it’s too much to ask,” he said. “It’s not realistic.”
An L.A. County official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal investigations, said concerns have been expressed “for years” about probation officers allowing or encouraging fights in the juvenile halls. But the complaints were never “actionable,” according to the official, since youths would not make allegations directly or name specific officers.
The L.A. County Probation Department said in a statement that the staffers charged in the indictment have all been suspended without pay. A spokesperson declined to address the conduct described by the teen and Gunsberg.
“The status quo and the old way of doing things is just simply not an option. We have to gain the people’s trust back and we are trying to do so by rooting out dysfunction and holding people accountable,” the department said in the statement. “We also have to recognize that there are many good and solid officers who are here to make a difference. Their job is hard, yet many come in every day ready to work and hold our values high.”
Thirty Los Angeles probation officers have been indicted on charges of child endangerment stemming from allegations that they allowed — and in some cases encouraged — fights between teenagers inside the county’s juvenile halls.
Soon after arriving at Los Padrinos in July 2023, the teenager who spoke to The Times said he noticed a kid feasting on a fast-food breakfast.
“I’m just like, ‘Damn, you’re doing a whole lot of fighting. How are you eating this nice a breakfast and I’m not?’” he recalled asking.
Soon, probation officers started pointing out youths to him who were cursing at staffers, acting out or, in one case, refusing to get out of the shower.
If he beat up a kid, a bag of fast food would be delivered by a staff member the next morning.
“It’s control. They wanna run the unit, have a smooth day,” said the teen, who has been in and out of the county’s juvenile halls about five times since he turned 14. “I was like, I’m gonna just start hopping on this wagon, too. I started taking meals, doing what I do, the next morning I’m eating good at 7 in the morning with the other kids.”
The teen, who reviewed the list of indicted guards with his mother at their dining room table in East Los Angeles, said a few of those now charged with felony child abuse had offered him fast-food “bounties.”
Some of the indicted guards he hadn’t heard of, while others were known to organize fights between kids with different gang affiliations, he said.
The security video published by The Times last year shows five probation officers standing idly by while the teens took turns attacking a 17-year-old inside Los Padrinos on Dec. 22, 2023.
Two other officers, Taneha Brooks and Shawn Smyles, who were both charged in the indictment, can be seen laughing and at one point shaking an assailant’s hand.
Smyles and Brooks told the five officers — who were all new to the agency — that “they were not to say anything, write down anything, and just watch when youth fights occurred,” according to the indictment.
The five officers were not charged in connection with the Dec. 22 incident. One other officer, Nancy Sostre, was charged, along with Brooks and Smyles. Sostre’s attorney declined to comment for the article.
An attorney for the 17-year-old accused Brooks in court last year of instigating the fight because of the victim’s gang affiliations.
All of the assailants were Black, and the victim is Latino. He suffered a broken nose and a “traumatic brain injury,” according to a lawsuit he filed last year. He had only been at Los Padrinos for a few days when the beatdown occurred, according to his attorney, Jamal Tooson, who declined to let The Times speak to his client.
The teenager The Times interviewed, who had previously been housed in the same unit where the videotaped brawl occurred, said staffers would organize fights when a new youth arrived who was considered affiliated with a gang that didn’t get along with the kids inside.
“We get a new kid, he’s from the hood. We have other hoods in here. We’re going to get all the fights out of the way,” he said. “They were just setting it up to control the situation.”
If a kid was injured in a fight and sent to the nurse’s office, staffers told them to say they just didn’t like the kid, he said.
According to the indictment, Smyles told youths to refuse medical treatment after the Dec. 22 brawl.
“It’s just inexcusable that they were using that as a technique,” said Eduardo Mundo, head of the L.A. County Probation Oversight Commission and a former county probation officer. “You can’t stop all fights, but it’s different than trying to guarantee all fights.”
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Footage obtained by the L.A. Times shows a December 2023 incident in which staffers can be seen allowing at least six youths to hit and kick a 17-year-old.
Gunsberg said “gladiator fights” have gone on in L.A. juvenile halls for at least the 15 years he has been representing youths. Clients have told him of officers allowing youths to fight to quash a beef, sometimes even telling other youths when and where a fight would happen.
“It’s almost as if the probation officer is one of the kids,” Gunsberg said. “It’s a terrifying version of ‘We’re gonna meet outside at the bike racks after school.’”
The county reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in July 2023 after a state oversight body ordered the county’s two other halls — Central and Barry J. Nidorf — closed due to violent conditions and chronic understaffing. Staffers regularly stayed home from work out of fear for their safety. Dozens remain on limited duty or on leave, because of injuries they said they received breaking up fights.
The county moved roughly 300 youths into a hastily remodeled Los Padrinos, framing it as a new chapter for an agency careening from one crisis to the next.
But the teenager who spoke to The Times said the violence continued after he was transferred from Central to Los Padrinos. He had seen food bounties offered at Central too, he said.
When he was new at Central, he said, he cursed at an officer, who then told another kid to beat him up in return for some Jack in the Box. The two of them got along, so they split the food.
“It was the Jack in the Box bacon double cheeseburger with the sourdough,” the teenager said. “We shared it with some curly fries and a Sprite, ice cold.”
The 30 staffers charged in the indictment ran the gamut from rookies to veterans of the halls.
Some, like Brooks and Smyles, were longtime detention officers. Both had worked at Central before moving to Los Padrinos.
Brooks faces 14 counts of child abuse and one count of conspiracy. She was allowed to retire March 10, a week after the indictment was unsealed, while she also faced an internal investigation, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak with the media. A probation department spokesperson said she couldn’t comment on personnel matters.
Smyles faces 10 counts of child abuse, one count of conspiracy and one count of misdemeanor battery. An attorney for Smyles declined to comment. Brooks’ attorney, Robert Grant, declined to comment on the conduct in the video, but said that the charges stemmed from a years-long staffing crisis and that his client had not committed any crimes.
Smyles, Brooks and Sostre were charged with conspiracy to commit child abuse for arranging the Dec. 22 fight. Smyles and Brooks were also accused of arranging additional fights. All 30 officers were charged with child abuse.
“Those charged with their care are abusing them,” Bonta said at a news conference this month, noting that his team has reviewed videos of officers standing by as teens fought “without any intervention, without any attempts to keep them safe.”
Attorneys for many of the officers, however, said Bonta’s office cast too wide of a net, ensnaring officers who did little more than show up for work.
“Obviously, there were fights that were happening inside, whether it was orchestrated by staff, or whether the kids fought and the staff watched them fight. I think those are two very different things,” said Tarek Shawky, who represents Kenneth Haywood, a 51-year-old officer charged with two counts of child abuse. “It seems like they all just got kind of lumped together.”
An attorney for the probation officers union, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a criminal case, said 27 of the officers were charged under the theory that they “failed to act” to stop violence between youths.
The California attorney general’s office declined to comment, citing the active criminal case.
Some attorneys said their clients were not used to the halls and had been deployed to Los Padrinos from other positions because of the staffing crisis. At least five were field officers, according to the county’s employee database, some of whom said they had little training on breaking up fights. At least one indicted officer was a supervisor who was not in the room for any of the fights, and another was on “light duty” because of an injury and could not physically intervene in brawls, according to their attorneys.
Another field officer who spoke with The Times on the condition of anonymity said the charge against him stemmed from a fight with five teens on his first morning in the unit. With no equipment, no training and no uniform, he said he kept yelling, “Stop fighting” until another staff member broke up the brawl with pepper spray.
Nine officers had been with the agency for less than a year when the fights took place. One of them, who was 23 when he joined in April 2023, faces 19 counts of child abuse from his first year on the job.
John Myers, a visiting law professor at University of California College of The Law in San Francisco, said the officers who didn’t act may still be criminally culpable because they have a “duty to care” for the youths.
The teenager’s mother said she hadn’t known about the staff-incited fights inside Los Padrinos. But she had noticed that her son came home with a new willingness to brawl.
“It’s like, ‘Yeah, I can fight, I’ll fight anyone,’ right?” she said, looking at him across the dining room table. “Isn’t that your attitude now?”
He nodded.
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