Harassment

Los Angeles Police Sgt. Mitchell Grobeson, who won a landmark legal settlement from the city in 1993, is again going to court, charging that police officials have failed to enact the reforms they agreed to. Intended to end anti-gay discrimination and harassment within the department, the settlement called for a number of changes in the LAPD's hiring and personnel practices. In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S.

It didn't take a federal appeals court opinion to tell Myron Walker that police commonly stop motorists because of their race. News reports about the ruling of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court last week were not surprising but still left him shaking with anger. Three days earlier Walker had been stopped by El Segundo police while riding as a passenger in a friend's car.

With activists voicing fears that new immigrant voters could face intimidation on election day, the Justice Department said Friday that it is closely monitoring reports of potential harassment, but is contemplating no special enforcement action. "We are talking to the groups and we are monitoring the situation," said Carole Florman, a Justice Department spokeswoman, who noted that U.S. attorney's offices nationwide routinely set up election day units, with FBI agents on call.

A witness in the Vincent Foster case is suing the government for $1.5 million, alleging two FBI agents and 26 other people conspired to discourage him from testifying about what he saw on the day the deputy White House counsel died. Patrick Knowlton says the FBI falsified information he gave them and that he was harassed by people who followed him after his account in the Foster case became public. The lawsuit, filed Oct. 25 in U.S.

A gay man who was beaten and tormented in school for years in Eau Claire, Wis., won a $900,000 out-of-court settlement, ending the first federal trial of a school district for not protecting a gay student from harassment. Jamie Nabozny had been regularly spat on and beaten up, subjected to a mock rape and kicked in the belly, court testimony showed.

A Latino civil rights group charged Thursday that large numbers of voters, including many new citizens, were intimidated or turned away from the polls on election day. Vera Marquez, state president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said her office received dozens of calls from people who said they had registered to vote but were turned away at the polls because their names didn't appear on the list of registered voters. "They were scared.

A jury has awarded $500,000 to a girl who was harassed for almost a year by a sixth-grade classmate. The Antioch Unified School District, northeast of San Francisco, may appeal the decision or seek a new trial even though "it's certainly possible" the boy harassed the girl, then 11, Supt. Alan Newell said Wednesday. The Contra Costa County jury said the district failed to stop the harassment and ordered it to pay 93.4% of the $500,000; the boy's family must pay 5.

Decrying what it called an example of common police practice, a federal appeals court on Monday upheld a judgment against a Santa Monica police officer who arrested two black men at gunpoint because they bore a resemblance to armed robbery suspects. The lack of probable cause illustrated how police throughout the Los Angeles area routinely violate the constitutional rights of blacks, the three-judge panel said in a unanimous ruling.

After confronting three men he believed had harassed his niece, a Canoga Park man was stabbed to death Wednesday in a liquor store parking lot, West Valley police detectives said. The man, Antonio Canez, 35, was pronounced dead at 1 a.m. at Columbia West Hills Medical Center. Canez, an unemployed laborer, was stabbed numerous times in the torso, police said. The three men, all Latinos in their 20s, fled the scene in a brown 1983 or 1984 two-door Oldsmobile Cutlass, police said.

Denise Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, has been awarded a restraining order against her boyfriend's ex-wife, alleging she was harassed. Judge Myron S. Brown granted Denise Brown a three-year restraining order against Rebecca Pappas Schreiber Tuesday in family court, the same court where Denise Brown has been attending hearings over the past few weeks on the custody of O.J. Simpson's and her slain sister's children.