If anyone needed proof that California is over-larded with do-nothing, malevolent bureaucrats, maybe the Judicial Council's Halloween party, which featured racial sensitivity bosses dressed in blackface and turning their cubicles into jail cells, is just that example.  Sure enough, it's an agency that oversees racial sensitivity programs for California's court system.

Michael Roosevelt is a 20-year employee at the Judicial Council. Its mission – to advance "the consistent, impartial, independent, and accessible administration of justice". Roosevelt was hired to develop bias education programs for court employees and judges, and he was shocked by photos of a Halloween party at the Judicial Council's Sacramento office last year.

Roosevelt told Dan Noyes in an interview, "Here you've got the image of people who work for and support the courts who are dressed in prison garb, darkening their faces, depicting a prison setting where disproportionately those people who are incarcerated are people of color."

The pictures posted on the council's intranet show employees who turned their cubicles into prison cells, a guard standing watch, someone wearing dread locks and a Hannibal Lechter [sic] mask in a padded cell, others painting their faces. Roosevelt says it all sends a dangerous message: "Bad people, black people, dark people, people with locks, they are to be feared."

So there we have it: bureaucrats who are supposed to enforce racial sensitivity training, doing their darnedest to perpetrate as many stereotypes as they can on the taxpayer dime and expecting to get away with it.  There are 740 of these bureaucrats, and, to say the least, some are pretty judgment-challenged.  Is it any wonder the judges, whose job requires that they be impartial, aren't happy about having these charmers supervising their court system?

The judges aren't happy at all, actually.  Here is the press release from the Alliance of California Judges, which looked on at this "party" with complete disgust.  Via email, here is what the judges had to say about it:

The piece, which aired on the San Francisco ABC affiliate, documents a Halloween party gone terribly wrong, at which AOC staff members in Sacramento engaged in activities that were highly offensive and antithetical to the core mission of the judicial branch.

As of last November, the AOC has a workforce of over 740 employees.  Apparently, many of them have too much time on their hands and not enough sense and sensitivity to use it wisely.

This is the same outfit entrusted with the management of a multi-billion-dollar construction fund.  This is the agency that has insisted on overseeing the education of sitting judges.  How can the AOC be trusted to administer the largest court system in the world when it can’t keep its own staff in check?

Why should this matter to every judge?  Because for far too long the controversies involving the AOC, and those tasked to supervise them, the Judicial Council, have besmirched our branch.....us.  We will not sit back in silence while unelected bureaucrats and handpicked Judicial Council members hide behind our robes.

The Judicial Council is a questionable entity among the state's 343 (at least) agencies in that it was put into place to act as an overlord of the state's constitutionally independent judges, who are elected.  They shouldn't even exist, given that judges are expected to be independent of political gamesmanship and sure as heck shouldn't be ordered around like employees, as they are by 740 Judicial Council (now known as the Administrative Office of the Courts) unelected bureaucrats, which is the current state of affairs.

With acts such as this creepy blackface party, the Judicial Council acts like lice on the independence of the judiciary in their supposed role of overseeing the operations and policymaking of the courts, badly managing the courthouse building budget so that a favored few get all the gravy and smaller courthouse operations in places like the Sierras, the Central Valley, and the Cascades get nothing.  Their bad decisions also have had the knock-on effect of creating conditions for escape for those charged with violent crimes to commit new mayhem.

Now they've got the racial sensitivity bureaucrats playing black convicts at a party because they couldn't celebrate the Black Panthers.  Kid you not.

Where is the layoff axe when it's needed?