Canary in the mine: The resignations
The resignations of two more commissioners from the beleaguered Community Police Review Commission sparked the interest of the Press Enterprise and it published an article about the impact both departures will have on the operations of the CPRC including its investigation into the Lee Deante Brown shooting.
Five commissioners have left the CPRC since mid-November. Soon after the departure of the first commissioner, the city launched its plan to change the operations of the CPRC. Soon after that, it let some of the commission's officers in on what it was doing. This all came several months after it had changed the role played by its then executive director, Pedro Payne.
Payne resigned at the end of the year, amid a flurry of rumors about that and the status of the CPRC.
Former police chief and commissioner Bill Howe doesn't mince words when he's expressing his views of a situation and he didn't in this morning's Press Enterprise article.
(excerpt)
Retired police chief and former commissioner Bill Howe said the city's undue influence to make sure the city is not liable for the shootings has caused the turmoil. He wants to see commissioners who are not influenced by the City Council members who appointed them, as well as having a good mix of members with and without a law enforcement background.
City spokesman Austin Carter wrote in an e-mail that he could not provide information about what city officials think of the turnover or how it might affect the board.
The official list of departures from the CPRC and the reasons given by the commissioners for those departures are the following.
Frank Arreola: Resigned in November 2006, because he wanted to do other things. "Other things" included working as a legislative aide for the councilman who had appointed him, Steve Adams. His resignation sparked concerns of conflict of interest by community members and raised some eyebrows.
Bonavita Quinto-MacCallum: January 2007, declined reappointment to a second term for work-related reasons, surprising many people who believed she had wanted to continue with the commission. At a meeting of the public outreach subcommittee meeting not long before she made her decision, Quinto-MacCullum had talked about plans she had to promote outreach in the communities.
Bob Garcia: February 2007, termed out
Les Davidson: March 2007, moved out of the city
Ric Castro: April 2007, work-related reasons.
The racial breakdown of the resignations are four Latinos and one White. Of the remaining seven commissioners, five are White, one is Latino and one is Black. There are six men and one woman serving on the commission. Of the five commissioners who have resigned, only one of them, Davidson, came from a law enforcement background.
Of the remaining seven commissioners, five of them come from either a law enforcement or corrections background and another commissioner manages a company, American Medical Response, that is contracting with the city to work with the police department and is himself working directly with the department.
Of the three newest commissioners, all three of them had prior board and commission experience, including one who was actually serving on the Human Relations Commission when he was asked to resign from that body and be sworn in to serve on the CPRC.
In fact, when interviewing the last round of candidates to serve on the CPRC, councilmen Dom Betro and Ed Adkison stressed that it was absolutely necessary to appoint new commissioners with prior board and commission experience "to hit the ground running" in the wake of the recent turmoil surrounding the CPRC.
That's a ridiculous requirement considering that whatever turmoil exists likely stems from the actions of the city manager's office, the same one whose headed by an employee who was just awarded a large pay hike by the city council while this "turmoil" was going on. The second, is that none of these commissioners have "hit the ground running" any quicker than any other new commissioners have. They are undergoing the same learning process as anyone else, because serving on the Planning Commission, the Human Relations Commission and the Board of Public Utilities helps make you more proficient at serving on those bodies but not really the CPRC, which is after all, a different commission.
As for the commissioners who have departed, they are mostly people of color, all of whom are Latino and mostly community-based rather than law enforcement based. Which according to some comments made by representatives from the city manager's office at recent meetings is just how they would like it.
It's a perfect plan for a city to create a commission that's entirely comprised of people of law enforcement background or individuals with ties to City Hall if its desire is to create a commission in its image to do what it hopes will be its bidding. It's difficult however, to get a community to trust such a mechanism unless its membership includes people that they can relate to, people with deep roots in their neighborhoods who are in professions other than law enforcement.
If there are no civilians on police review commissions, then what you have is not a community oversight mechanism. What you have is akin to an internal affairs division that has opened up its membership to other members of the law enforcement fraternity and makes appearances in public occasionally.
If the public had faith in the internal affairs divisions that already exist in police agencies, then civilian review would have never been created, would have never been implemented and wouldn't be spreading across the country with new auditors, boards and commissions being created each year. Internal affairs divisions were set up for police officers. Civilian oversight was set up for the public because it didn't trust the mechanism of self-investigation and it's spreading for that same reason.
The healthiest step in implementing a form of civilian oversight is to allow both of them to serve on a police oversight mechanism as long as no profession is overrepresented, but the city doesn't exactly have a history of making healthy decisions in a variety of areas.
All the resignations have created concern, speculation and rumors that at least several of them were actually in connection with the decision made by the city manager's office with the assistance of both the police department and the city attorney's office to change the operating procedures of the seven-year-old police oversight mechanism.
Davidson had referred to several meetings between himself and representatives of these agencies that took place behind closed doors at the end of last year, but shed little light on what exactly took place. Questions were raised about Davidson's resignation and the reason given for it, among the lines that if Davidson knew he was moving out of the city and thus could no longer serve on the CPRC, why did he allow himself to nominated for the chair position? And why especially when the tally taken was a tie vote, did he keep himself in the running?
As a result of his resignation, there was never actually a chair of the commission elected, because the vice-chair who had been elected to serve in that capacity moved up to chair the commission and declined to call for another election.
Interestingly, in the article the current chair, Brian Pearcy said that the resignations that have hit the CPRC were one reason why the process of drafting a public report on the fatal officer involved shooting of Lee Deante Brown was being delayed. However, his account contradicted what was happening at a special meeting the commission held on April 23, where there was already a call for a vote among seven commissioners on whether or not Officer Terry Ellefson had violated the department's use of force policy when he shot and killed Brown.
And the new commissioners who have joined the body, John Brandiff, Steve Simpson and Peter Hubbard have not received much guidance from anyone in terms of how to handle the process or procedures of handling officer-involved deaths as commissioners assigned the responsibility to deliberate and decide on these issues. At least not in public, which is a sore spot with many, considering that a fair degree of maneuvering involving the CPRC apparently was done behind closed doors at City Hall, the degree to which will probably never be fully known.
Not that private meetings with the city's staff are not a part of serving as a commissioner but one assessment made by Davidson during a private meeting at City Hall that he apparently attended was not that they were being asked what to do but that they were being told what to do by the city manager's office in conjunction with the city attorney's office and the police department. That assessment made by Davidson by itself framed the discussion of the series of events that had transpired during the holiday season, at several public meetings earlier this year.
A sad reality of what has likely transpired is that the city manager's office and the city attorney's office might as well hire an airplane and fly it around the city, with a banner behind it stating that City Hall has zero confidence in our police department and its officers, particularly when it comes to the use of lethal force in the field. Because Howe is right, that's basically what these city departments are saying through their actions surrounding the department and the CPRC whether it's trying to push "at will" contracts on upper management employees in the department to micromanaging the CPRC. That's how many people are reading the situation in the communities.
It's kind of hard to miss it when it's flashing in neon. The department no doubt has its problems as an audit last week clearly showed, but is it as bad as the city manager's office seems to be saying through the series of actions that have brought crowds to city council meetings lately and also caused a lot of talk throughout the city surrounding the CPRC?
The discussion on the Brown shooting is expected to resume again. And it's a commission that is now mostly White, mostly male and mostly tied with law enforcement that is going to hear the case, which hits the points that Howe made, right on the money.
Applications are being accepted by the city clerk's office until May 1 and interviews will be conducted by the entire city council due to a rules change involving mid-term appointments involving the CPRC, the Planning Commission and the Board of Utilities.
Davidson's replacement will have to come from the fourth ward in order to comply with a charter amendment that states that each ward is required to have at least one of its residents serving on every board and commission. Councilman Frank Schiavone said last week that he's already received a stack of applications from his ward to fill Davidson's position.
Ward three candidates met up at a forum sponsored by the League of Women's Voters and the American Association of University Women yesterday. Candidates included Councilman Art Gage, high school teacher, Rusty Bailey and truck driver Peter Olmos.
Development and traffic and the conflict between the two was a major discussion item.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Olmos said the city has grown far too much and pondered how citrus industry founder Eliza Tibbets would react to it.
"Tibbets would be rolling in her grave if she saw all the orange trees that have been destroyed," he said.
The city needs to stop eradicating its history, Olmos said.
"We have enough restaurants, ladies and gentlemen," he said.
Bailey said growth would have less of an impact if development, especially condominiums and apartments, went in near transportation, like Metrolink stations, and near shopping. That would allow people to walk more and drive less, he said.
Gage said much of the growth affecting the city is outside its limits, so the city needs to do a better job of making Riverside County understand the growth's effects on the city.
To improve the flow of traffic in Riverside, Gage said, the city must continue to build train crossing overpasses and underpasses, which are collectively called grade separations. Because they can cost $45 million to $50 million in some cases, he said, "We need help from the federal government."
The situation involving the Kawa market that was purchased by the city's redevelopment agency attracted a letter in the Press Enterprise's Readers' Forum.
(excerpt)
Shame on us for not trying to help this family by exhausting every possible option. They are our neighbors, and their son attends school with our children.
I suppose that while we have preserved the security of the residents of Bandini Avenue, we should be thankful that we have destroyed only one family. Is that truly the greater good?
Given that in this case like in others, it's a business owned by a nonwhite family, it appears that the city really believes that it is improving the neighborhood for residents in the Wood Streets, who are mostly White so that they don't have to be subjected to residents from Olivewood Apartments who are mostly Black walking down their street to the location where the businesses that are not located on Olivewood can be found on Magnolia Avenue.
A ward one candidate forum will be held this evening, somewhere.
Colton's former city council member, Ramon Hernandez who was busted for misappropriation of city funds waived his right to a preliminary hearing in relation to criminal charges related to that incident.
Hernandez's name was raised during an investigation into Colton's former police chief Kenneth Rulon, who alleged that he was being retaliated against by the city manager for reporting Hernandez's alleged misconduct to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
The city of Colton denied that allegation.
Five commissioners have left the CPRC since mid-November. Soon after the departure of the first commissioner, the city launched its plan to change the operations of the CPRC. Soon after that, it let some of the commission's officers in on what it was doing. This all came several months after it had changed the role played by its then executive director, Pedro Payne.
Payne resigned at the end of the year, amid a flurry of rumors about that and the status of the CPRC.
Former police chief and commissioner Bill Howe doesn't mince words when he's expressing his views of a situation and he didn't in this morning's Press Enterprise article.
(excerpt)
Retired police chief and former commissioner Bill Howe said the city's undue influence to make sure the city is not liable for the shootings has caused the turmoil. He wants to see commissioners who are not influenced by the City Council members who appointed them, as well as having a good mix of members with and without a law enforcement background.
City spokesman Austin Carter wrote in an e-mail that he could not provide information about what city officials think of the turnover or how it might affect the board.
The official list of departures from the CPRC and the reasons given by the commissioners for those departures are the following.
Frank Arreola: Resigned in November 2006, because he wanted to do other things. "Other things" included working as a legislative aide for the councilman who had appointed him, Steve Adams. His resignation sparked concerns of conflict of interest by community members and raised some eyebrows.
Bonavita Quinto-MacCallum: January 2007, declined reappointment to a second term for work-related reasons, surprising many people who believed she had wanted to continue with the commission. At a meeting of the public outreach subcommittee meeting not long before she made her decision, Quinto-MacCullum had talked about plans she had to promote outreach in the communities.
Bob Garcia: February 2007, termed out
Les Davidson: March 2007, moved out of the city
Ric Castro: April 2007, work-related reasons.
The racial breakdown of the resignations are four Latinos and one White. Of the remaining seven commissioners, five are White, one is Latino and one is Black. There are six men and one woman serving on the commission. Of the five commissioners who have resigned, only one of them, Davidson, came from a law enforcement background.
Of the remaining seven commissioners, five of them come from either a law enforcement or corrections background and another commissioner manages a company, American Medical Response, that is contracting with the city to work with the police department and is himself working directly with the department.
Of the three newest commissioners, all three of them had prior board and commission experience, including one who was actually serving on the Human Relations Commission when he was asked to resign from that body and be sworn in to serve on the CPRC.
In fact, when interviewing the last round of candidates to serve on the CPRC, councilmen Dom Betro and Ed Adkison stressed that it was absolutely necessary to appoint new commissioners with prior board and commission experience "to hit the ground running" in the wake of the recent turmoil surrounding the CPRC.
That's a ridiculous requirement considering that whatever turmoil exists likely stems from the actions of the city manager's office, the same one whose headed by an employee who was just awarded a large pay hike by the city council while this "turmoil" was going on. The second, is that none of these commissioners have "hit the ground running" any quicker than any other new commissioners have. They are undergoing the same learning process as anyone else, because serving on the Planning Commission, the Human Relations Commission and the Board of Public Utilities helps make you more proficient at serving on those bodies but not really the CPRC, which is after all, a different commission.
As for the commissioners who have departed, they are mostly people of color, all of whom are Latino and mostly community-based rather than law enforcement based. Which according to some comments made by representatives from the city manager's office at recent meetings is just how they would like it.
It's a perfect plan for a city to create a commission that's entirely comprised of people of law enforcement background or individuals with ties to City Hall if its desire is to create a commission in its image to do what it hopes will be its bidding. It's difficult however, to get a community to trust such a mechanism unless its membership includes people that they can relate to, people with deep roots in their neighborhoods who are in professions other than law enforcement.
If there are no civilians on police review commissions, then what you have is not a community oversight mechanism. What you have is akin to an internal affairs division that has opened up its membership to other members of the law enforcement fraternity and makes appearances in public occasionally.
If the public had faith in the internal affairs divisions that already exist in police agencies, then civilian review would have never been created, would have never been implemented and wouldn't be spreading across the country with new auditors, boards and commissions being created each year. Internal affairs divisions were set up for police officers. Civilian oversight was set up for the public because it didn't trust the mechanism of self-investigation and it's spreading for that same reason.
The healthiest step in implementing a form of civilian oversight is to allow both of them to serve on a police oversight mechanism as long as no profession is overrepresented, but the city doesn't exactly have a history of making healthy decisions in a variety of areas.
All the resignations have created concern, speculation and rumors that at least several of them were actually in connection with the decision made by the city manager's office with the assistance of both the police department and the city attorney's office to change the operating procedures of the seven-year-old police oversight mechanism.
Davidson had referred to several meetings between himself and representatives of these agencies that took place behind closed doors at the end of last year, but shed little light on what exactly took place. Questions were raised about Davidson's resignation and the reason given for it, among the lines that if Davidson knew he was moving out of the city and thus could no longer serve on the CPRC, why did he allow himself to nominated for the chair position? And why especially when the tally taken was a tie vote, did he keep himself in the running?
As a result of his resignation, there was never actually a chair of the commission elected, because the vice-chair who had been elected to serve in that capacity moved up to chair the commission and declined to call for another election.
Interestingly, in the article the current chair, Brian Pearcy said that the resignations that have hit the CPRC were one reason why the process of drafting a public report on the fatal officer involved shooting of Lee Deante Brown was being delayed. However, his account contradicted what was happening at a special meeting the commission held on April 23, where there was already a call for a vote among seven commissioners on whether or not Officer Terry Ellefson had violated the department's use of force policy when he shot and killed Brown.
And the new commissioners who have joined the body, John Brandiff, Steve Simpson and Peter Hubbard have not received much guidance from anyone in terms of how to handle the process or procedures of handling officer-involved deaths as commissioners assigned the responsibility to deliberate and decide on these issues. At least not in public, which is a sore spot with many, considering that a fair degree of maneuvering involving the CPRC apparently was done behind closed doors at City Hall, the degree to which will probably never be fully known.
Not that private meetings with the city's staff are not a part of serving as a commissioner but one assessment made by Davidson during a private meeting at City Hall that he apparently attended was not that they were being asked what to do but that they were being told what to do by the city manager's office in conjunction with the city attorney's office and the police department. That assessment made by Davidson by itself framed the discussion of the series of events that had transpired during the holiday season, at several public meetings earlier this year.
A sad reality of what has likely transpired is that the city manager's office and the city attorney's office might as well hire an airplane and fly it around the city, with a banner behind it stating that City Hall has zero confidence in our police department and its officers, particularly when it comes to the use of lethal force in the field. Because Howe is right, that's basically what these city departments are saying through their actions surrounding the department and the CPRC whether it's trying to push "at will" contracts on upper management employees in the department to micromanaging the CPRC. That's how many people are reading the situation in the communities.
It's kind of hard to miss it when it's flashing in neon. The department no doubt has its problems as an audit last week clearly showed, but is it as bad as the city manager's office seems to be saying through the series of actions that have brought crowds to city council meetings lately and also caused a lot of talk throughout the city surrounding the CPRC?
The discussion on the Brown shooting is expected to resume again. And it's a commission that is now mostly White, mostly male and mostly tied with law enforcement that is going to hear the case, which hits the points that Howe made, right on the money.
Applications are being accepted by the city clerk's office until May 1 and interviews will be conducted by the entire city council due to a rules change involving mid-term appointments involving the CPRC, the Planning Commission and the Board of Utilities.
Davidson's replacement will have to come from the fourth ward in order to comply with a charter amendment that states that each ward is required to have at least one of its residents serving on every board and commission. Councilman Frank Schiavone said last week that he's already received a stack of applications from his ward to fill Davidson's position.
Ward three candidates met up at a forum sponsored by the League of Women's Voters and the American Association of University Women yesterday. Candidates included Councilman Art Gage, high school teacher, Rusty Bailey and truck driver Peter Olmos.
Development and traffic and the conflict between the two was a major discussion item.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Olmos said the city has grown far too much and pondered how citrus industry founder Eliza Tibbets would react to it.
"Tibbets would be rolling in her grave if she saw all the orange trees that have been destroyed," he said.
The city needs to stop eradicating its history, Olmos said.
"We have enough restaurants, ladies and gentlemen," he said.
Bailey said growth would have less of an impact if development, especially condominiums and apartments, went in near transportation, like Metrolink stations, and near shopping. That would allow people to walk more and drive less, he said.
Gage said much of the growth affecting the city is outside its limits, so the city needs to do a better job of making Riverside County understand the growth's effects on the city.
To improve the flow of traffic in Riverside, Gage said, the city must continue to build train crossing overpasses and underpasses, which are collectively called grade separations. Because they can cost $45 million to $50 million in some cases, he said, "We need help from the federal government."
The situation involving the Kawa market that was purchased by the city's redevelopment agency attracted a letter in the Press Enterprise's Readers' Forum.
(excerpt)
Shame on us for not trying to help this family by exhausting every possible option. They are our neighbors, and their son attends school with our children.
I suppose that while we have preserved the security of the residents of Bandini Avenue, we should be thankful that we have destroyed only one family. Is that truly the greater good?
Given that in this case like in others, it's a business owned by a nonwhite family, it appears that the city really believes that it is improving the neighborhood for residents in the Wood Streets, who are mostly White so that they don't have to be subjected to residents from Olivewood Apartments who are mostly Black walking down their street to the location where the businesses that are not located on Olivewood can be found on Magnolia Avenue.
A ward one candidate forum will be held this evening, somewhere.
Colton's former city council member, Ramon Hernandez who was busted for misappropriation of city funds waived his right to a preliminary hearing in relation to criminal charges related to that incident.
Hernandez's name was raised during an investigation into Colton's former police chief Kenneth Rulon, who alleged that he was being retaliated against by the city manager for reporting Hernandez's alleged misconduct to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
The city of Colton denied that allegation.
Labels: Backlash against civilian oversight, business as usual, City elections
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