Tattoos and tendencies

Columnist Dan Bernstein, from the Press Enterprise wrote a second column on the issue of the decision by members of the Riverside Police Department's Metro Team to wear tattoos on their upper arms depicting a skull and bandanna insignia.

For this article, he included responses to questions he had asked local attorney, Andrew Roth who had representated families whose loved ones had been killed by police officers, when they filed law suits against the city.



(excerpt)


Those skull-n-bandana tattoos, he says, "are one more step that mimics what gangs do."

What do gang members do? Experts -- including the RPD -- will likely tell you they dress alike, hang together, have special signals, protect one another, carry weapons, use force. And have tattoos.

"What I'm saying," said Roth, "is police have all these things in common with gangs. Adding the tattoo is the wrong step."

Roth isn't saying cops are gang bangers. The fact that the Mets conceal their skulls makes a huge difference. But cop tats still trouble him.

"If officers are involved in a bad shooting incident, the plaintiff (would argue) the fact they have these tattoos are an indication they are backing up each other in their stories about what happened -- like a gang being true to each other."

Roth conceded such testimony probably wouldn't be admitted in a court of law.

But a court of public opinion? Looser rules. Much looser.




Sometimes a tattoo is just a tattoo but Bernstein is right, even if the city could skirt by this issue in a court of law, what about the court of public opinion?

The scandal involving the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart CRASH unit and civil rights violations its members committed in a neighborhood, a large portion which is predominantly comprised of El Salvadorean immigrants, many of whom fled a country where the national police "arrested" people at their homes and they were never seen alive again during oppressive regimes.

Or the Lynwood station Vikings and the Lennox Grim Reapers out of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the subject of several police misconduct law suits and an investigation of the agency by a special commission?

And what of the alleged Lake Town Bad Boys from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department's Lake Elsinore station, who may have counted former deputy, Tracy Watson as a member?


Three reasons why a police unit whose members choose to adopt a particular insignia as a tattoo to as Bernstein wrote, bind them together might get some second looks by members of the public. Was it their decision to make under the current tattoo policy in the police department? Probably. Was it a good decision they made? Definitely not.





The Los Angeles Police Department is once again under scrutiny, this time for its recruitment and hiring practices, particularly those involving how applicants are screened, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. In recent years, the LAPD has been struggling to fill its ranks and reach its staffing goal of 10,000 police officers. In addition, it's been locked into a competitive battle for candidates with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for similar pools of candidates.

So what did the LAPD do? It changed some of its screening criteria despite quite a bit of criticism. Not that it mattered in the case of at least 16 officers hired last year who weren't screened at all, in terms of checking their background references. Instead, the screener employed by the city's personnel division simply signed them off.

It's not like they didn't need new officers. After the Rampart scandal and the resultant court-endorced mandate for reforms, the floodgates opened and officers fled the agency in droves to seek jobs in other agencies including the Riverside Police Department just as they had while the Christoper Commission had been doing its own investigation in the 1990s.

But why skirt the background reference checks or disregard what comes up? Maywood Police Department, anyone?

Now the city council wants some answers as to not only why this happened but why there was a delay in informing its members about the problem. And why a department seven years into a five-year consent decree with the federal government is still stumbling badly as happened in this case.


(excerpt)


"There is a concern of public safety," said Councilman Dennis Zine. "A lot of people are disqualified by background checks, so my fear is there are people who are somewhere in the process who have backgrounds who could pose a jeopardy to the city of Los Angeles."

Zine introduced a motion with Councilman Greig Smith calling for a review, which would include finding out why the LAPD was not warned about the problem for more than a week.Zine said the unidentified employee — who has since resigned under pressure — worked for the personnel department as a background checker for a year.

A personnel department executive said it was likely that 16 recruits were affected by the incomplete checking. Most of those recruits are still in the Police Academy and will have their references rechecked.



The LAPD too often is a comedy of errors when news like this comes to the public's attention and count on it, next week it will be something else. It is always something else.

Or it would be a comedy, if the impact of poor decision making, poor judgement and diminished accountability by both the department and the city which runs it weren't such a serious problem which too often is manifested with tragic results.



Overtime or Outta time?


Today's Press Enterprise ran an article on the disappearance of the man who had broken into a house in Arlanza not too long ago. The department's public information officer, Steve Frasher attributed it to an officer not being assigned to monitor Francisco Torres because the department believed that he was going to be hospitalized for a period of time with medical conditions.


Several days ago, I received an interesting message about this situation from an unknown party that raised the issue of the department's allocation of overtime for its police officers to perform a variety of assignments. Police officers in patrol division get overtime to patrol if a shift is short. Officers in the investigations division get overtime to do investigations. A lot of this overtime is due to staffing issues in the department which is falling behind in terms of positions the pace set by the city's population growth.

Police officers also get overtime for what are known as security assignments including at city council meetings at City Hall.

The situation at city council meetings has become of public interest because of the practice of elected officials ordering police officers to "escort", arrest or even carry out members of the public who say things that these politicians do not like. Even Marjorie Von Pohle who is nearly 90 was ordered out of the chambers and when she told the police officers she would have to be carried out, the city officials let her remain. But according to representatives of the police department, it didn't end there. The city manager and several of the city council members called around town trying to find a police officer to arrest four individuals expelled from one meeting on Feb. 27. Even Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco's office was allegedly called for assistance, but like with the police department, it declined to send out the paddy wagons.

Police officers at a community meeting who explained what had happened credited Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez for not ordering any arrests for political reasons but instead coming up with a compromise. You remember Dominguez, the management employee who is well-liked by the community but apparently not the city manager's office?

In the past, I had talked to Chief Russ Leach about concerns that the city council was not using police officers for safety purposes(which is important) but as glorified bouncers especially after another elderly woman was "escorted" from the podium to her seat by a very embarrassed police officer after she exceeded the three-minute time limit while she was speaking about how a water pipe on city property had broken and flooded her property.

A police officer who worked at the meetings explained the overtime process for me involving assignments at city council meetings, which is fine. It's not about whether police officers should be assigned at the meetings, but in recent weeks, there's been more than the usual assignment as the increasingly thin-skinned city council members have been using them to try to stifle dissent.

However, the message I received alleged that the police department's supervisor of a particular work shift had pulled officers off of an assignment in order to not pay them overtime. That assignment was apparently guarding Francisco Torres who had been arrested as a 51/50 for breaking into the home of an elderly couple in Arlanza while naked, trying to harm them and causing property damage. According to the message, the man was released on his own recognizance by the hospital and now is wandering around with a felony arrest warrant.

If he's mentally ill and not on medication for example, he could harm himself, harm others or be shot by police officers as happened to Lee Deante Brown last year. If someone's so out of their mind for whatever reason enough to break into a house and cause physical harm and/or damage to people and property, then that person should be given supervised assessment and treatment. If he's got a drug addiction, then that should be addressed as well, though in a county where the waiting lists for residential drug programs particularly those in the jails is high especially for men, that's much easier said than done.

If he had been suffering from medical conditions, then should he have been released? Was he released early because he was of limited income or for some other reason?

Last year, in the downtown office building, there were people who would break into the building during the night to sleep in it, in one case even breaking through the glass door. One morning, a woman showing up to work in her office did encounter a naked man who had caused some destruction to the upper floor. She was startled by the man who didn't try to hurt her, but called the police who came out and 51/50ed him to take him to a hospital for a 72 hour psychiatric evaluation.

For the most part, people working in the building felt really sorry for the man and hoped that he would receive treatment. But whether it is for mental illness or drug addiction, that is much easier said than done. There's a shortage of affordable residential drug rehabilitation centers as was recently noted in news articles about the application of Proposition 36 in this state. There's also a shortage of resources including hospital beds for the mentally ill who fill many of them. In fact, one out of every nine hospital beds goes to someone who has schizophrenia and one out of every five encounters by police officers with the public involve individuals who are mentally ill.

But if what this commenter wrote is what had happened, there should also be an examination of the issue of overtime in the police department and how it's allocated for particular assignments and who makes that decision, if problems like the above exist. However, the greater issue here with the point that this individual made isn't as much about overtime as it is about the staffing issues involving the police department in terms of creating more positions that have yet to be addressed by the city council.