how do I initiate a lawsuit against the city of Inglewood, California?

Question

My child's mother violated california child abduction law by moving with my son and I subsequently lost my scheduled visitation. I indicated to the police that once she was located I wanted to press charges. They located her and stated that they felt my child was not in any danger and despite the fact she was in direct violation of the law, they told me I should settle the matter in family court. They would not give me her address so I had to get the child abduction unit to find her and serve her with papers to appear in court. She failed to appear and this prolonged the situation. It took eight months for me to finally get her in family court. This could have been avoided if the city attorney had not ignored the fact that she had broken the law and allowed her to continue this behavior for 8 months. I live in New York, so I had to fly back to california on several occassions in the interest of locating my child. I missed his birthday & graduation from pre-school a a result of this

Answer 1

If you are the non-custodial parent and your visitation rights are being interfered with you should take action in court. Possible that you could file complaint against the state for or the police for emotional distress, etc., but not for interference of your visitation rights. You have to file a Motion for Contempt against the child's mother. In most instances, the Court will seek to enforce visitation orders. Where the custodial parent consistently interferes with the non-custodial parent's visitation, the Court may choose from a number of possible remedies. For example, the Court may hold the custodial parent in contempt for such violation. Contempt penalties may range from a chastisement, to fines, jail time, a change of custody or a change of future maintenance or child support.

If you are being denied visitation as an Non Custodial Parent (or even as a Custodial Parent), you must file a police report EVERY TIME that the decree is violated. Often, especially if you are the NCP, the police will be very reluctant to file any paperwork. You must be persistent. If the lower level officers refuse to file paperwork, don't get mad. Just insist on speaking with the supervisors about documenting the violation of the decree. If you do not document the denial of visitation with police reports, then your judge will not take you very seriously. Get a stack of those police reports, then ask the judge for a contempt citation. Repeat the process until you have several contempt citations, then ask the judge for modification of custody based on the repeated contempt. Documentation is very important, so don't let the police convince you that there is nothing they can do. Insist that they file some kind of paperwork, and keep a copy for yourself.

Your decree must be substantially specific for the police to help you. If your decree contains the phrases "reasonable visitation" or "liberal visitation," then that is rather vague, and the police will not be able to help you. If this is your situation, then you will have to take the necessary steps to modify your decree, so that your decree includes specific times, dates, and locations, for the exchange of your child.

In some cases, if you have kept meticulous records, you may be able to recoup some of your lost expenses due to denial of visitation in small claims court. For example, if you had purchased tickets for transportation, or another event, for the child to use specifically while he was to visit with you, and your X denied you the visitation (thereby causing you financial loss of the price of the tickets), you may consider trying to get satisfaction from small claims court. This avenue won't help you see your kid directly, or recoup the time lost with the child (that is an issue for family court), but it does help to make the denial of visitation more expensive for your X. Hopefully, this might discourage denial of visitation in the future.

Go to these links:
California Child Visitation Law & Procedure - Child Visitation ...
http://www.kinseylaw.com/clientserv2/famlawservices/childvisitation/childvisitation.html

http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/ResourceServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=877

Answer 2

Although I can certainly sympathize with your frustration and anger at the city of Inglewood there is definitely a possibility you might not be able to sue it all due to sovereign immunity. It does really seem like you have much of the case but you you could check with an attorney just don't spend a lot of money investigating this as it probably is not worth the trouble.

Here is more on S.I. : "governmental immunity: also called sovereign immunity; an individual or institution cannot sue the government for negligence or certain other torts, unless the government consents to be sued or waives its immunity"

Answer 3

I'm an attorney in California. While the treatment you received from the law enforcement officials in California was shameful, they are immune from liability. Your remedy is with family law court, which can punish your child's mother for contempt for violating a valid order. Focus you energy on her, not the City of Inglewood.

Answer 4

You could hire an attorney to do it, BUT good luck doing that! It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to get very far suing ANY governmental agency. Unless you plan to spend the rest of your life in California trying to "make them pay" just move on with your life and realize big government is not the answer .. there are too many incompetent bureaucrats in the government at all levels protecting their little territory ... look at the recent debacle with John Carr, the guy who claimed he had murdered Jonbenet Ramesy .. Mary Lacy the DA in Boulder had him shipped from Thailand at taxpayer expense ...only to release him ...DUMB government officials!!

Answer 5

I'm not sure ,but I hope everything works out for you. Us Grandparents have rights too. It's not our fault the relationship
between your own flesh in blood and their girl-friend/boy-friend
doesn't work out. You go Grandma, I would do the same thing if that ever happen to me.

Answer 6

Bill O'Reilly is going to be on Leno tonight