When David meets Goliath: the CPRC vs City Hall

In Riverside, one of the city's managers pleaded guilty to a violation of conflict of interest, according to the Press Enterprise.

George Benard Griffin, who once worked for the city, was all set to begin his preliminary hearing but instead pleaded guilty.

Griffen had tried to persuade a contractor working on the construction of the new Magnolia Police Center to do some yard landscaping for him to the tune of $12,000 which he planned to pay for by money allocated to the station.


Griffen's prosecution and now conviction just highlight the ongoing problems at City Hall which has been the target of at least two Riverside County Grand Jury investigations. Probably won't be the last of them.





In New Haven, Connecticut, a task force has assembled and is, according to an article in the New Haven Independent, assigned the responsibility of investigating issues surrounding the use of deadly force.

New Haven task force calls for more oversight


Some of its recommendations are to seek better ways to communicate information on incidents to both the community and the media, as well as evaluating the use of tasers. But there's another recommendation as well.


(excerpt)


Among those recommendations, presented Wednesday night to the Board of Aldermen's Public Safety Committee, was a proposal to make the Civilian Review Board a permanent entity with the ability to monitor internal police investigations, such as those involving a suspect who has been killed by the police.



The city of Riverside has the power to both investigate and review officer-involved deaths, a power that the city's voters included among others placed in the city's charter. Voters in every precinct in every ward ensured the passage of the initiative that was to have removed the Community Police Review Commission from the political arena known as the city council to a relative place of safety.

However, it wasn't until after the voters had spoken on this issue at the polls that the city manager's office, city attorney's office and police department became concerned with its operations, particularly those involving its investigation of incustody deaths. And with three fatal shootings involving unarmed individuals in a six-month period and five law suits against the city, who could blame them?

So City Hall went after the CPRC, with the intent of trying to hollow it out from the inside after it came back with a sustained finding of excessive force on the Summer Lane shooting case in 2005. And it's working, with four commissioners resigning just in the past six months.

The interesting thing is that city officials are behaving as if they're doing something new, that they've thought up themselves. Hardly, all they're doing is picking up a very old playbook and doing what's already been done before to the CPRC's predecessor, LEPAC.


Since its inception in the mid-1980s, the much weaker LEPAC, which was an offspring of the Human Relations Commission faced similar problems which heightened in the 1990s.

What happened next became history.

But what has happened to LEPAC is nothing compared with what was in store for its stronger cousin, the CPRC. This form of civilian oversight is approaching a time in its history when most civilian boards and commissions began to achieve acceptance from the same parties that so arduously fought them in the beginning. This happens because these parties realize that their police agencies are functioning well and as they should be functioning. They have confidence in their police agencies and the officers who employ them to understand that civilian scrutiny is most of the time going to back up both. Usually about 92% of the time or higher. Their attitude is, come in and look at us because we're confident in the job that we're doing and our city government is too.

In a healthy functioning city or county with healthy and functioning police departments, you will find a gradual lessening of hostilities towards civilian review boards by police unions, police management, city employees and city governments. In situations like these, these entities actually welcome civilian oversight because civilian oversight usually winds up telling them what they believe all along, that most of the time they're doing their jobs right.

Which isn't what you're seeing in Riverside seven years after the creation of its civilian review mechanism. What you're seeing instead is the canary in the mine phenomenon.

In Riverside, it's different in ways that usually attract sociologists and other social scientists to perform research studies and write papers on what's going on. David Thatcher, anyone?

You have a police department which came out of a stipulated judgment and skidded on the ice. It's struggling to internally drive its own progression through the Strategic Plan and has been for a year now. It faces a city manager's office that for whatever reason is trying to micromanage its operations including its upper management. Add to that a city attorney who is doing what he does best, which is to shield a city department and thus the city itself from financial harm through civil litigation filed against it, which in the long run could be detrimental to it. Put all this together, and there's your mine.

It's clear that the department still has a lot of work to do and that the city's climate is not only not helpful to it doing that work, it's been a hindrance. It's also clear that all the parties who are concerned about what's going on need to continue the efforts to promote the work in the department that still needs to continue. But that's not what is currently happening, because of all the energy being spent just about everywhere else. For one thing, some of that attention and energy should be focused on the budget hearings which begin on Tuesday, which will ultimately determine the city's fiscal budget for the new year which begins July 1.

So you have a situation that is very different than what's taking place in cities where civilian review is thriving. Again, the canary in the mine phenomenon.

And the CPRC is an ailing canary. So what of the mine?

The battles against it are only beginning to intensify as it's become clear that along with every other mandate given to City Hall by the city's residents, the one protecting the CPRC is being challenged. It's become too much of a threat to exist, except as an empty shell that will be there only on paper and the reason why is because there are problems elsewhere, so the city is doing just as it did in the past, trying to weaken its form of civilian oversight.

And this dynamic is really not an old one. In fact, it's been seen so often in Riverside that its sequence of events is often predictable. And what is next in line to serve as proof positive that this dynamic has returned, is if the Riverside Police Officers' Association will launch some sort of counter-offensive at the CPRC or the department through the court system. If this happens and this model of behavior of Riverside's behavior states that it likely will in the near future, then Riverside will have returned to approximately the mid-1990s.


Toss in a probable future police chief who is working his way very quickly up the ranks, much as former chief Jerry Carroll did, and that may put you there as well.

If the RPOA does what some expect of it, it will have shown that despite the city manager's effective campaign to hollow out the CPRC, its animosity towards the city manager's office is clearly such that it either can't see how much at least in this arena he has done what it has wanted or there's once again, problems occurring between it and the management structure of the RPD. And in recent weeks, there's been definite signs of that. Actually in recent months. It's hard to miss the crowds at city council lately.

Crowds that haven't been seen since 1999.

However, the most interesting thing is that historically whenever the RPOA has acted against the CPRC , the only one in the long run that is negatively impacted by these actions is the RPOA. It will truly be a turning point in Riverside's history when its leadership will look at this history and say, enough and it will extend an olive branch to the entity that exonerates its officers about 96% of the time and has exonerated its officers in every single officer-involved death except one. This leadership may be the closest to realizing that in history but close only matters in horse shoes.

In contrast, the CPRC in the long run has done very well in these situations. The passage of the amendment that placed it in the charter is one good example of that. Every single time, it's prevailed and any action by the RPOA might be the shot in the arm that it needs, because the actions taken against it will be removed from the shadows of City Hall and finally out in the open where they belong, so the public can have a close eye view of what's transpired in the last year behind closed doors at City Hall.

One thing is for sure, that if the RPOA acts out against the CPRC, there will be some very happy city employees in management positions at City Hall who will very much welcome the attention being drawn elsewhere and off of them which is what would happen. After all, they've been waiting for this to happen, waiting for the RPOA to take a misstep and prodding it in that direction, because history has stated that most of the time in these situations, it has. And with the attention off of them and what they're doing, that means they can continue their micromanagement campaign from one city department to the next.

And why this is and why it will likely come to pass, shouldn't be too hard to figure out if you know how to play chess, which they do at City Hall. You don't even have to know how to do that, if you're a student of local history.



"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."


---Lewis Carroll


To be continued...