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Hail to the chief (of police, that is). William Bratton's LAPD has been credited with transforming MacArthur Park from crime-ridden to nearly crime-free in just a handful of years. In this 2006 Life & Times story, correspondent James Hill looks at how they did it. Along the way he talks to Charlie Beck, the man the mayor has picked to be the new chief.

Los Angeles now has more medical marijuana clinics than it can count. These pot clubs are already pseudo-legal at best, and some of them appear to be getting around a city ordinance designed to stop their proliferation.

Correspondent Judy Muller hits the streets to find some of these clinics and drills city council members on why they have had so much trouble enforcing a moratorium on new dispensaries.

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A Superior Court judge has ruled the city's ban on medical marijuana dispensaries is invalid in a case that could make it difficult for the city to move against other pot clinics, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Dispensary Green Oasis sued the city last month, claiming the moratorium on new clinics was unconstitutionally vague. Today, Judge James C. Chalfant granted a preliminary injunction preventing the city from enforcing its own ordinance and said the council acted outside state law by extending the moratorium.

The injunction applies only to Green Oasis, but the outcome could be seen as favorable to other marijuana dispensaries across the city, which might try to follow suit.

RELATED STORY: Feds, Local Cops Do Marijuan Do-Si-Do

Dan Glickman says he's stepping head of the MPAA. This is perhaps the most sought-after lobbyist's job in the country. Maybe the world. You get to hang out with celebrities, and socialize with the Washington elite.

Now seeking Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America.

The successful candidate will:

• Have impeccable connections with members of Congress
• Have impeccable connections with Hollywood moguls
• Have the ability to extract billions in tax breaks for the entertainment industry
• Enjoy traveling on a private jet
• Help us forget how great Jack Valenti was
• Be able to survive on a salary of less than $1.5 million

No resumes or phone calls, please. We'll contact you.

It's official. The Justice Department issued a memo this morning advising federal prosecutors not to go after medical marijuana dispensaries that are operating in accordance with the legal guidelines of their respective states.

You can read the memo here.

"It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

So the announcement indicates federal authorities will not turn a blind eye to shady entrepreneurs trying to get a free ride on the marijuana bandwagon. Nor does it appear have any bearing on LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley's pledge last week to crack down on illegal pot clinics. It simply suggests the feds may be trading places with local authorities. LA County law enforcement agencies have tended to be tolerant of dispensaries. Now it appears they may be leading the crackdowns, while the feds back off.

TMZ/SplashNewsOnline.com

The Crime
Maria Shriver has been caught three times. On camera. Talking on her handset. While driving. The shame. The horror.

The Investigator
The celebrity Web mag TMZ first published a couple of still shots of the Terminatress jawboning on her hand-held yesterday. Then they followed it up with a short, extremely low-quality video.

The Response
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, via Twitter, promises "swift action" in response to the violations.

TMZ, perhaps influenced by SoCal Connected's reporting on the topic of distracted drivers, has pulled out all the stops on this story, and is expected to demand Shriver's resignation and encourage the Legislature to meet in special session and pass a measure banning her from the state.

Catch TMZ's team coverage on this important, fast-breaking story here.

SociaLiteLife.celebuzz.com

But There's More
If you love this story, you can thank your lucky stars you live in the Internet Age.

So, if you''re already bored with pictures of people who look vaguely like Maria Shriver engaging in illicit telecommunications, may we recommend:

SociaLiteLife's comprehensive collection of Celebrities on Cellphones.

This week on SoCal Connected we're reporting on the explosion in the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in the area. Here's a few items and facts about Los Angeles pot clinics:

Bay Area vs SoCal
Who has the best restaurants, baseball teams, lifestyle and art museums? Now add pot shops to the rivalry between LA and the Bay. Depending on your point of view, LA is either miles ahead, or quickly sinking into the abyss.

California NORML maintains a list of medical marijuana dispensaries. It's not all-inclusive, but it is a fairly comprehensive list of places that provide pot. The site lists about two dozen dispensaries in the bay area - about 20 in San Francisco, four in Oakland and only two in Berkeley.

For the LA area, the list runs to more than 250 establishments.

Other Socal Locations
A number of area municipalities have successfully either banned clinics, or have placed moratoriums on new ones. San Bernadino, Redlands and Yucaipi have laws banning dispensaries. Loma Linda, Yucca Valley and Montcliar have moratoriums in place. West Hollywood's ordinance limits the number of pot shops to four, and Palm Springs will only allow two.

The Rest of the World's Watching
Australia's Brisbane Times been picking up some of the stories written by the LA Time's John Hoeffel on the clinics. He and others, including The Washington Post have reported that the Mexican cartels that control most of the marijuana trade (and finance many of the illicit pot groves inside the US) are taking notice of the legal marijuana business, and may see it as a threat.

The BBC recently reported on medical marijuana, focused on Oakland, and posited that California was moving toward legalization of pot.

And Australian reporter Henri Paget, of NineMSN News, showed his viewers down under just how easy it is to score in Los Angeles. He got a prescription, then took his camera into an LA pot shop to make a purchase.

The LA County District Attorney, Steve Cooley says virtually every marijuana clinic in the county is breaking the law, and he's vowed to prosecute them.

Cooley told reporters that it's his opinion that under California law, it is legal to cultivate marijuana, but not to sell it over-the-counter or distribute it.

Voters passed an initiative in 1996 that allowed patients to grow small amounts of marijuana for medicinal use. In 2004, the State Legislature passed the 2004 Medical Marijuana Program Act, which allowed patients to "collectively or cooperatively to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes." It also allowed a "primary caregiver" to provide marijuana for a patient.

Most of the pot clinics (or their lawyers anyway) organized under the idea that they were primary caregivers. But last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that a primary caregiver must be actively involved in providing care for an individual, beyond simply selling or supplying them with marijuana.

So the strategy changed. Now the marijuana clinics claimed to be collectives, made up of patients requiring marijuana.

Cooley believes most of these "collectives" are simply for-profit-businesses, and not collectives at all. He says that in the main, the clinics do not enlist the members of the collective in cultivation, and that the law does not sanction over-the-counter sales of marijuana.

The state Attorney General, Jerry Brown, issued guidelines after the 2004 law was passed. They specify that the collectives must operate as non-profits, but do allow them to collect fees from members to recoup expenses.

Should the DA's legal strategy prevail in the courts, his office will face a daunting task prosecuting all the operators of pot clinics in LA County. There are no reliable numbers on how many pot shops are operating in the county, but some estimates say more than 800 marijuana dispensaries are open in the city of LA alone.

Here's a dilemma. You've been at a party. You need a ride home. One friend offers, but you can tell she's had too much to drink. Another is known to do a lot of texting while driving.

Either way, you're in trouble. But as correspondent Vince Gonzales found out, the texter could be just as dangerous, or even more so, than the drunk.

We teamed up with Car and Driver magazine to find out just how dangerous it can be to text while driving. Tune in tonight at 8 PDT to watch the segment.

Hands-free cell phone devices offer no advantage over hand-held devices.

That's the conclusion of survey of studies conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, first published in 2002.

"...there are negligible differences in safety relevant behavior and perfomrance between using hand-held and hands-free communications devices while driving from the standpoint of cognitive distration."

Specifically, the study found "degradations in driver behavior" and "changes in risk-taking" in drivers using cell phones. It concluded this occured among cell phone-using drivers whether they were talking hands-free or not.

The report, which is more than 250 pages long, looked at scores of reports and scientific studies in drawing its conclusions.

But NHTSA withheld the report, and killed a proposal to follow it up with it's own long-term study. This was at a time when many states were outlawing the use of handhelds by drivers, but allowing hands-free devices. Critics say the NHTSA was fearful of alienating members of Congress who'd directed the agency to stick to collecting safety data and not lobby for changes in state traffic laws.

This summer, two consumer groups obtained the report through the Freedom of Information Act, and passed the document along to The New York Times, which published a story about it in July.

Here's a PDF version of the entire document.

You may have read about Utah's tough new law against texting while driving. It specifies long prison sentences - of up to ten years - for texting drivers who cause fatal accidents.

But the state is also leading the way with an education program called Zero Fatalities. Launched by the Utah Department of Public Safety, it's goal is to change the perception that traffic fatalities are inevitable, and the result of "accidents." In fact, the program points out, most traffic "accidents" are actually the willful act of a driver who has allowed themselves to become distracted. The distraction could be anger or alcohol or lack of sleep. Or it could be texting.

Zero Fatalities produced this powerful video about the impact of one texting-while-driving accident.

The Utah program has already caught the attention of other states. Arizona is developing its own Zero Fatalities program, and Utah officials hope their idea will serve as a model for safe driving programs nationwide.

For more information, visit the Zero Fatalities Web site.

Technology may be killing us. There seems to be no doubt that the mixture of cell phones and driving is dangerous. And texting while driving appears to be the most dangerous mobile activity of all.

Various studies show anywhere between half and three-quarters of teen drivers admit they often text while driving. Other studies show huge support for banning such activity, including a recent CBS News/New York Times poll.

So can technology help prevent what technology hath wrought? Some entrepreneurs think so, and they hope to convince parents, if not teens, that they have systems that can keep a kids hands on the wheel, and off the keypad.

Some, like a system from Aegis Mobility, use GPS to detect if a phone is moving at driving speed. It simply intercepts calls and texts if it detects movement. Aegis has a dramatic - maybe over-dramatic - presentation of its system online. It charges a monthly fee, and is trying to set up deals with insurance companies to give young drivers who employ the system a break on their rates.

But GPS-based schemes have obvious downsides. They may block phones when users are in cabs, riding with others, or maybe, even while skateboarding (that might not be a bad thing.)

Others take a different approach. Safe Driving Systems, of Salt Lake City, uses bluetooth and an electronic key that determines when a car is running. The bluetooth sends out a signal that locks the keypad during driving. The company hasn't yet brought the product to market, but expects it to be available soon, for a one-time fee of about $100.

There are firms developing monitors that can alert parents when their children are sending texts on their phone while driving - often by sending a text to the parents phone. (Hope the old folks aren't driving when they get that alert.)

As you may have noticed, high technology sometimes totally misses the irony in its pursuits. So, there are also systems that attempt to translate text messages to voice, and allow users to respond by voice, which is then translated back to text. Wouldn't it just be easier to actually use the phone, and talk in it?

So far the big cell phone carriers have not announced any major initiatives to limit or restrict calls and texts in automobiles, though one could see the marketing advantages of such a service, especially since so many parents are footing the bill for their kid's cell phones.

Many experts think at the end of the day, it will take years, and a massive amount of education and enforcement to wean drivers from the distraction of their mobile devices. Parents may have to do the unthinkable - pry the phones from their children's texting fingers. And kids who've gotten the message may have to become enforcers, too - shaming Mommy and Daddy when they reach for the phone while they're behind the wheel.

Images from flickr.com members poka0059, Colin Purrington and bsimser. Used under Creative Commons license.

As the hustle and bustle of the downtown renaissance claims most of the spotlight, an often forgotten and neglected corner of Los Angeles shines on. The 50 block area of Skid Row is home to some 9,000 men, women, and children. Join Officer Deon Joseph as he patrols one square block of this vast community.

KCET, public television for Southern and Central California, earned a total of 11 nominations for the 61st Los Angeles Area Emmy® Awards.  The station’s award-winning weekly news program, SoCal Connected, received 10 nominations. An additional nomination went to KCET’s 49th Annual Los Angeles County Holiday Celebration.

The winners will be announced at the 61st Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards presentation on Saturday evening, August 29, 2009 at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre in North Hollywood.

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KPCC's John Rabe, from the award-winning radio show Off-Ramp, stopped by the Locke High graduation to interview producer Angela Shelley and all three Locke High students. 

Talk about a guy who likes a tough challenge. Steve Barr, the founder and chairman of Green Dot Public Schools says he can take the worst-performing campuses in Los Angeles and put them on the path toward academic excellence. We talk to Barr about taming L.A.’s blackboard jungle.

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Community members in South L.A. are trying to get a local liquor store to stop selling alcohol. Century Liquor is across the street from a new library and some neighbors say it’s dangerous to sell alcohol near a facility that caters to youth. The store owners say they’re being blamed for violence in the neighborhood that has little to do with their business. Let us know what you think, by commenting below.

The numbers are alarming. One in seven female service members will be a victim of military sexual trauma, or MST. And many of those women will never report their attacks. Once stateside, female vets may have trouble finding the expert care they need to treat the trauma.

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