The city council strikes back, part three
Doug Haberman of the Press Enterprise wrote a brief about the city council's decision to post additional police officers at the city council meetings. He sees it as providing extra security to counter the recent incidents of people "speaking out of turn" at recent meetings.
Additional police stationed at city council meetings
Yolanda Garland, who is one of those women, called it differently at last night's city council meeting. She said that the city council had been ordering the police officers assigned to the chambers to eject elderly women.
One of those women was Marjorie Van Poule who is 90 years old. Van Poule and Garland received a second round of letters from City Attorney Gregory Priamos telling them they were "repeat offenders" of the code of conduct rules when they had disrupted the city council meeting. Only as usual, the letters didn't explain how they were disruptive.
Garland was allegedly disruptive first for trying to give a speech in a calm, even tone about how the ethics complaint process which handled the complaint recently filed against Councilman Dom Betro was a "kangaroo court". Right after she said those two words, Betro yelled out of order after Councilman Ed Adkison chimed in, the meeting was shut down so the city council could confer with Priamos in the conference room, not exactly in accordance with the Brown Act's rules about closed sessions. The meeting soon resumed and Garland was able to pick up where she left off.
During the afternoon session in question on Feb. 21, Garland walked to the podium to respond to Councilman Frank Schiavone's challenge to name a single-home property that had been seized by the city through eminent domain. She barely got one word out before Adkison who was holding the newly purchased gavel as the mayor pro tem of the moment, yelled out those trendy words, "out of order". The police were then ordered to "escort" Garland, Van Poule and two other people, but they did not arrest them and credit for that on their end was given to Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez.
So in response to all this, Councilman Steve Adams followed by Mayor Ron Loveridge decided to move the issue to the governmental affairs committee which is heavily stacked by councilmen who are most in favor of placing more restrictions on public comment. After all, Loveridge would not send it to that committee in a way that would cause him to look ineffective in public, so it's likely that the proposed changes have the votes needed to pass and be placed in effect.
More restrictions have been included in Loveridge's report for proposed Code of Conduct changes, including plans to split public comment by limiting comments at the beginning of the meeting to items on the consent calendar and placing public comment on all other topics at the end of the meeting.
His reason for doing this is clearly stated in his report. It was intended to "lessen their use to advance highly personalized and political platforms." For one thing, during an election year, it's only the incumbents who can use their positions on the dais to advance their political platforms, and it appears that they've been advancing some highly personalized platforms of their own.
Loveridge also added that public comments cut into the time of the very valued discussion calendar. Yes indeed, this calendar of items is so important, the list of items on it has gotten much, much smaller since the city council passed restrictions on July 12, 2005 to bar city residents from pulling items from the consent calendar. So that explanation doesn't hold much water although both mayors have been bumping public comment further and further down the agenda in recent weeks. Most of the items these days that wind up on the discussion calendar are actually presentations of reports and updates on earlier reports which don't foster much deliberation and discussion among the city council or mayor.
Councilman Art Gage who has voted against similar measures in the past said he planned to do so this time as well. He added that he didn't think it had the votes to pass because several council members had told the mayor not to take it back to the governmental affairs committee for review. When this came forward, it was Councilman Andrew Melendrez who stepped up to the plate and cast the sole nay vote. Afterwards, Betro and Adkison ran up to the mayor to talk to him and it would be interesting to know how that conversation went and what was said.
So once again, the conduct code is off to governmental affairs, a stacked process if there ever was one. The only reason community members should attend that meeting is to watch a discussion take place among elected officials who already have their minds up.
The mayor did helpfully add in his report that the willingness to stay for the entire meeting is a litmus test for how dedicated you are to the issues that you are speaking on, but he's a guy and he's got a car and for women, that answer may be a different one.
Speaking of which, one woman walked home from a public meeting at night having missed the last bus(which for most bus lines, leaves at about 7:30 pm) and was heading down University Avenue where a man in a car followed her which frightened her. Then the man parked his car and walked up to her and asked her if she would come off with him for $500 to do bondage. Her instincts told her that he was bad news and that he intended her harm as well as a man parked nearby in another car. What she did say, was how frightened she was and this woman doesn't scare easily.
She did report it to a police officer and from what I've heard, they thought it was a funny story and when it got back to her on the rumor mill, her feelings were hurt and she felt violated, twice. She believed it had been a waste of time to report the incident to the police, when the reality is that the officer she spoke with obviously wasn't grown up enough to take what she said and her fear about it seriously. Because the only thing that joking about these incidents reveals about a person is that they are still operating at a junior high school level, which is very unfortunate considering that police officers are entrusted to take reports on this type of behavior.
It's probably a good bet that she won't report an incident like that if it happens again. She's just been given a lesson on why it's important not to. It's hard to see that as being a good thing.
Boys will be boys and this is yet another reason to have more women in law enforcement because men do not get these things at all and they probably never will the same way that women understand, since most women have stories just like this one. And yes, more than a few of us have encountered male police officers who appear to think these incidents are funny.
But I always remember the words of one male police officer who did not.
He was a veteran officer with the University of California, Riverside Police Department who I filed a report with several years ago, involving a man who followed me in a car trying to get my attention. At first he did by trying to act like he was lost and needed directions, so I looked his way and he exposed himself. I reported him to UCR's police department since it happened near UCR and it's not the type of thing that women feel comfortable reporting to police officers especially when hmm, you are asked to describe certain body parts that are usually covered with clothes. But this officer put me at ease and after I had the difficult conversation involved with reporting the incident, he thanked me and said he knew it was not an easy thing to do, but that it was critical for women to report these incidents because very often, this type of behavior evolved into those which were more serious crimes. That's the type of police officer that every women should be able to report an incident like this to.
His words have been echoed by other veteran police officers, male and female, who know better. The only advice I can give women in this situation is to keep reporting it until you encounter one of these individuals, because what you report may protect a woman or even save the life of one down the line.
In Riverside if you're a pedestrian, it's hard to get through a month without running into this behavior. It's impossible to go down University Avenue without being propositioned or asked to get in a car, for "a date" or to help them out and it's been like that for years. And in the past year, that behavior has spread out to neighboring streets like Magnolia, 14th Street, Chicago and so forth. You can be propositioned on Seventh Street, across the street from Longfellow Elementary School or near Starbucks in the University area. Now, however men are driving around propositioning women on Jurupa and Magnolia and even near the new Magnolia Plaza mall.
Just being a woman walking down the street is enough. And for many women in the Eastside especially in recent months, this experience has become more common in the past year especially in different areas of the city outside of University Avenue. Several "sting" operations conducted in the area reduced the number of what were referred to as professional prostitutes in the area, but did little to address the behavior of their customers. Or maybe they did and these men are just driving around the city of Riverside in a really confused state. They've been coming down here from as far away as Oregon and Arizona, as some women have noted.
Chief Russ Leach told individuals at several forums that the police department would crack down on the johns that hung out in the University corridor. The city would paint the curbs red and they would publish names and photographs of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes. But the only photograph that ever appeared of a "john" in the Press Enterprise was photographed from the waist down and ironically, the photograph of the undercover female officer who was posing as a prostitute revealed more of whom that person might be.
When you report incidents like the above to some male police officers, they say different things like one male officer told me that there was nothing they could do, because it was a free country and men were deviant creatures who can't control themselves and I should know that. Or they do what happened to the woman above, they treat it like a joke.
Not all male police officers treat women who report these incidents this way. Some are very concerned and obviously educated on the issue so they don't need to hide their ignorance with an attitude that comes across as not taking it seriously or worse, treating it as something to laugh about with their buddies later on. Of course, you also have to examine the larger issues of how male officers view women in general. When they go out and interface with the public in their uniforms and driving their squad cars which identify the agencies they work for, do they treat women courteously and with respect, or do they tell them sexist jokes or do as one officer did to one woman working at a local business which is to ask them if they do oral sex in their home country or they tell graphic sexual jokes. It's probably a good bet that individuals who behave in this manner aren't going to take these situations seriously but it's an even better bet that a woman is going to approach or contact an officer who behaves like this to report an experience that happened to her and hope to be taken seriously.
The additional value of evaluating how police officers respond to these reports is that it gives you some insight into the department's overall culture involving women and also race, as many women who experience this are women of color.
The problem isn't that men are deviant creatures, it's that many police officers in different agencies aren't educated on how to handle these issues which combined with their own issues with sexism cause them to resort to making comments such as these ones. Sometimes people joke about what they find funny. Other times they joke about what makes them uncomfortable. Maybe both are factors in situations like these.
These officers are uncomfortable because they haven't been educated on these types of situations and how to handle them, let alone the relationships between what they may see as innocuous even funny incidents like these ones and more serious criminal offenses. Unlike their female counterparts, they might not have personal experiences to draw upon.
However, if that's the case, here's something that might be helpful.
When a woman tells you of a situation like this, just imagine that it's your mother, sister, wife, girlfriend or daughter that is telling the same story and tailor your response accordingly.
Perhaps some of these officers who are having difficulty should go to the same school that the UCR police department officer attended. Oh wait, they did so perhaps there is some other difference.
Perhaps they should hear the story of a young woman I knew who was accosted by two men in another city, including one on the street, the other inside a car. If it weren't for a female teacher who saw what was going on, she might have gotten inside that car, which would have been a bad thing given that the men were Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Bueno.
For those who are unfamiliar with these two men, you can google them and what you find probably won't do much in terms of providing something to laugh about.
Additional police stationed at city council meetings
Yolanda Garland, who is one of those women, called it differently at last night's city council meeting. She said that the city council had been ordering the police officers assigned to the chambers to eject elderly women.
One of those women was Marjorie Van Poule who is 90 years old. Van Poule and Garland received a second round of letters from City Attorney Gregory Priamos telling them they were "repeat offenders" of the code of conduct rules when they had disrupted the city council meeting. Only as usual, the letters didn't explain how they were disruptive.
Garland was allegedly disruptive first for trying to give a speech in a calm, even tone about how the ethics complaint process which handled the complaint recently filed against Councilman Dom Betro was a "kangaroo court". Right after she said those two words, Betro yelled out of order after Councilman Ed Adkison chimed in, the meeting was shut down so the city council could confer with Priamos in the conference room, not exactly in accordance with the Brown Act's rules about closed sessions. The meeting soon resumed and Garland was able to pick up where she left off.
During the afternoon session in question on Feb. 21, Garland walked to the podium to respond to Councilman Frank Schiavone's challenge to name a single-home property that had been seized by the city through eminent domain. She barely got one word out before Adkison who was holding the newly purchased gavel as the mayor pro tem of the moment, yelled out those trendy words, "out of order". The police were then ordered to "escort" Garland, Van Poule and two other people, but they did not arrest them and credit for that on their end was given to Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez.
So in response to all this, Councilman Steve Adams followed by Mayor Ron Loveridge decided to move the issue to the governmental affairs committee which is heavily stacked by councilmen who are most in favor of placing more restrictions on public comment. After all, Loveridge would not send it to that committee in a way that would cause him to look ineffective in public, so it's likely that the proposed changes have the votes needed to pass and be placed in effect.
More restrictions have been included in Loveridge's report for proposed Code of Conduct changes, including plans to split public comment by limiting comments at the beginning of the meeting to items on the consent calendar and placing public comment on all other topics at the end of the meeting.
His reason for doing this is clearly stated in his report. It was intended to "lessen their use to advance highly personalized and political platforms." For one thing, during an election year, it's only the incumbents who can use their positions on the dais to advance their political platforms, and it appears that they've been advancing some highly personalized platforms of their own.
Loveridge also added that public comments cut into the time of the very valued discussion calendar. Yes indeed, this calendar of items is so important, the list of items on it has gotten much, much smaller since the city council passed restrictions on July 12, 2005 to bar city residents from pulling items from the consent calendar. So that explanation doesn't hold much water although both mayors have been bumping public comment further and further down the agenda in recent weeks. Most of the items these days that wind up on the discussion calendar are actually presentations of reports and updates on earlier reports which don't foster much deliberation and discussion among the city council or mayor.
Councilman Art Gage who has voted against similar measures in the past said he planned to do so this time as well. He added that he didn't think it had the votes to pass because several council members had told the mayor not to take it back to the governmental affairs committee for review. When this came forward, it was Councilman Andrew Melendrez who stepped up to the plate and cast the sole nay vote. Afterwards, Betro and Adkison ran up to the mayor to talk to him and it would be interesting to know how that conversation went and what was said.
So once again, the conduct code is off to governmental affairs, a stacked process if there ever was one. The only reason community members should attend that meeting is to watch a discussion take place among elected officials who already have their minds up.
The mayor did helpfully add in his report that the willingness to stay for the entire meeting is a litmus test for how dedicated you are to the issues that you are speaking on, but he's a guy and he's got a car and for women, that answer may be a different one.
Speaking of which, one woman walked home from a public meeting at night having missed the last bus(which for most bus lines, leaves at about 7:30 pm) and was heading down University Avenue where a man in a car followed her which frightened her. Then the man parked his car and walked up to her and asked her if she would come off with him for $500 to do bondage. Her instincts told her that he was bad news and that he intended her harm as well as a man parked nearby in another car. What she did say, was how frightened she was and this woman doesn't scare easily.
She did report it to a police officer and from what I've heard, they thought it was a funny story and when it got back to her on the rumor mill, her feelings were hurt and she felt violated, twice. She believed it had been a waste of time to report the incident to the police, when the reality is that the officer she spoke with obviously wasn't grown up enough to take what she said and her fear about it seriously. Because the only thing that joking about these incidents reveals about a person is that they are still operating at a junior high school level, which is very unfortunate considering that police officers are entrusted to take reports on this type of behavior.
It's probably a good bet that she won't report an incident like that if it happens again. She's just been given a lesson on why it's important not to. It's hard to see that as being a good thing.
Boys will be boys and this is yet another reason to have more women in law enforcement because men do not get these things at all and they probably never will the same way that women understand, since most women have stories just like this one. And yes, more than a few of us have encountered male police officers who appear to think these incidents are funny.
But I always remember the words of one male police officer who did not.
He was a veteran officer with the University of California, Riverside Police Department who I filed a report with several years ago, involving a man who followed me in a car trying to get my attention. At first he did by trying to act like he was lost and needed directions, so I looked his way and he exposed himself. I reported him to UCR's police department since it happened near UCR and it's not the type of thing that women feel comfortable reporting to police officers especially when hmm, you are asked to describe certain body parts that are usually covered with clothes. But this officer put me at ease and after I had the difficult conversation involved with reporting the incident, he thanked me and said he knew it was not an easy thing to do, but that it was critical for women to report these incidents because very often, this type of behavior evolved into those which were more serious crimes. That's the type of police officer that every women should be able to report an incident like this to.
His words have been echoed by other veteran police officers, male and female, who know better. The only advice I can give women in this situation is to keep reporting it until you encounter one of these individuals, because what you report may protect a woman or even save the life of one down the line.
In Riverside if you're a pedestrian, it's hard to get through a month without running into this behavior. It's impossible to go down University Avenue without being propositioned or asked to get in a car, for "a date" or to help them out and it's been like that for years. And in the past year, that behavior has spread out to neighboring streets like Magnolia, 14th Street, Chicago and so forth. You can be propositioned on Seventh Street, across the street from Longfellow Elementary School or near Starbucks in the University area. Now, however men are driving around propositioning women on Jurupa and Magnolia and even near the new Magnolia Plaza mall.
Just being a woman walking down the street is enough. And for many women in the Eastside especially in recent months, this experience has become more common in the past year especially in different areas of the city outside of University Avenue. Several "sting" operations conducted in the area reduced the number of what were referred to as professional prostitutes in the area, but did little to address the behavior of their customers. Or maybe they did and these men are just driving around the city of Riverside in a really confused state. They've been coming down here from as far away as Oregon and Arizona, as some women have noted.
Chief Russ Leach told individuals at several forums that the police department would crack down on the johns that hung out in the University corridor. The city would paint the curbs red and they would publish names and photographs of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes. But the only photograph that ever appeared of a "john" in the Press Enterprise was photographed from the waist down and ironically, the photograph of the undercover female officer who was posing as a prostitute revealed more of whom that person might be.
When you report incidents like the above to some male police officers, they say different things like one male officer told me that there was nothing they could do, because it was a free country and men were deviant creatures who can't control themselves and I should know that. Or they do what happened to the woman above, they treat it like a joke.
Not all male police officers treat women who report these incidents this way. Some are very concerned and obviously educated on the issue so they don't need to hide their ignorance with an attitude that comes across as not taking it seriously or worse, treating it as something to laugh about with their buddies later on. Of course, you also have to examine the larger issues of how male officers view women in general. When they go out and interface with the public in their uniforms and driving their squad cars which identify the agencies they work for, do they treat women courteously and with respect, or do they tell them sexist jokes or do as one officer did to one woman working at a local business which is to ask them if they do oral sex in their home country or they tell graphic sexual jokes. It's probably a good bet that individuals who behave in this manner aren't going to take these situations seriously but it's an even better bet that a woman is going to approach or contact an officer who behaves like this to report an experience that happened to her and hope to be taken seriously.
The additional value of evaluating how police officers respond to these reports is that it gives you some insight into the department's overall culture involving women and also race, as many women who experience this are women of color.
The problem isn't that men are deviant creatures, it's that many police officers in different agencies aren't educated on how to handle these issues which combined with their own issues with sexism cause them to resort to making comments such as these ones. Sometimes people joke about what they find funny. Other times they joke about what makes them uncomfortable. Maybe both are factors in situations like these.
These officers are uncomfortable because they haven't been educated on these types of situations and how to handle them, let alone the relationships between what they may see as innocuous even funny incidents like these ones and more serious criminal offenses. Unlike their female counterparts, they might not have personal experiences to draw upon.
However, if that's the case, here's something that might be helpful.
When a woman tells you of a situation like this, just imagine that it's your mother, sister, wife, girlfriend or daughter that is telling the same story and tailor your response accordingly.
Perhaps some of these officers who are having difficulty should go to the same school that the UCR police department officer attended. Oh wait, they did so perhaps there is some other difference.
Perhaps they should hear the story of a young woman I knew who was accosted by two men in another city, including one on the street, the other inside a car. If it weren't for a female teacher who saw what was going on, she might have gotten inside that car, which would have been a bad thing given that the men were Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Bueno.
For those who are unfamiliar with these two men, you can google them and what you find probably won't do much in terms of providing something to laugh about.
posted by Five Before Midnight | 7:13 AM
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