A constitutional crisis?

What’s worse — a bunch of people losing their jobs or a bunch of people who can’t get justice?

I don’t have an answer. Maybe you can figure it out.

There seems to be a “constitutional crisis,” at least according to a news release issued by the Los Angeles Superior Court, caused by a “court reporter shortage combined with statutory restrictions on electronic recording.”

To prove it, the court has posted a “Court Reporter Crisis Dashboard” filled with a delightfully colorful bar chart, pie chart, graph and an oddly disjointed inverted pyramid that you can check to keep you up to date on the crisis — if it is a crisis. There are even some cute emojis for court “types of funding” that don’t get used anywhere.

I know I’ll be checking the dashboard regularly to keep up to date.

Actually, it’s kind of hard to tell how crisisy this situation is. The news release says there are thousands of litigants who can’t file appeals because they have no transcripts, and the colorful charts show almost 200,000 non-reported hearings in the first half of this year — but we have no idea how many actual cases that represents and how many of those would have been appealed.

Maybe there should have been a chart for that.

But let’s assume this is a real emergency. How did this happen? After all, the court is offering a $50,000 signing bonus, a six-figure salary and benefits for court reporters. And the news release says that electronic recording is “an accurate means of providing verbatim records.”

Shouldn’t the money and/or machines solve this problem?

I know the answer to that one: They should but they don’t.

The weird pyramid chart explains the human problem. Between Jan. 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, 681 people applied for the job.

That doesn’t sound so bad — until you see that all of 58 of them “met minimum qualifications.” I don’t know what those qualifications were, but I assume they had something to do with understanding at least one language and being able to type.

Maybe they shouldn’t have been pulling passersby off the street to apply.

Of those, 38 were offered a job and only 20 of those accepted. So the court is either being really fussy or this is a really hard (and probably extremely boring) job.

Meanwhile, veteran court reporters keep quitting. This might have something to do with time passing and people getting old.

The ban on electronic recording can be traced to “Good News!” that may not be all that good. The Service Employees International Union 721 last January reported the “Good News!” that Union Court Reporters defeated a proposed law that would “expand faulty electronic recording in Superior courthouses.”

I could be wrong but I’m guessing the authors of that bill weren’t insisting that the recording be faulty.

The union also blamed the understaffing problem on “management indifference.” I don’t know if they’ll be able to keep saying that now that there’s a dashboard online.

The cynic in me (which is most of me) thinks the union really just wanted to protect jobs, and who can blame them for that? But there is the unreported hearing problem and the mystery of whether recordings are accurate or faulty.

I don’t have answers, but there is a way all of you can help: Pull as many people as you can off the street and see if they can type.

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