Staffing cuts here, there and everywhere
The Press Enterprise in an editorial praised Riverside County Public Defender Gary Windom for his candor about the ongoing investigations being conducted into the department that he heads.
If you've been following the saga of Windom's office, then you know that the three inquiries that are being conducted stemmed from complaints made by former and current employees both to the County Board of Supervisors and through opinion pieces written to the Press Enterprise's Readers' Forum.
The newspaper's editorial board gave the following advice and stated that transparency facilitated action taken to fix problems.
(excerpt)
Giving the public access to the report allows taxpayers greater insight into the agency's performance. And that choice also hands the public the tools to hold Windom accountable for correcting deficiencies the review uncovered.
The report suggested that Windom spend more time at branch offices in the desert and Southwest county, handle job interviews more promptly and improve morale, among other recommendations.
The county initially deemed the review confidential, but Windom asked officials to make the document public. That decision took courage -- and set a good policy course.
Hiding bad news behind a veil of confidentiality makes inaction easier. But openness about flaws and plans for improvement bolsters public confidence in the department.
That's a lesson that the city of Riverside could learn. It appears loathe at times to even admit that everything's not perfect in any one of its departments and there may be a problem or problems. When any of the department heads give their presentations on the performance of their department, they'll tell you about what's going right, and what's going well, but not so much about challenges or problems that they face in the meantime.
A strategy that often proves useful is to listen carefully to the presentation being given. But what's more important at times is to look for the areas of a department's operations that aren't mentioned at all during the presentation. Those areas are the ones which most often need to be examined more closely to determine if all is truly going well.
Another example of where transparency will prove to be important is during the report that is scheduled to be given Tuesday by Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton on his officers' actions during the May Day incident at MacArthur Park. The Los Angeles Times wrote an article providing some details about the much anticipated presentation before the city council.
(excerpt)
"There are significant concerns about the events of that day, and a lot of things we will be focusing on," Bratton told The Times on Friday.
"The update will bring into much clearer perspective what we believe happened that day: what worked for us, what didn't work for us and what changes that we're making as a result."
After the incident, Bratton promised to release the required "after-action" report in 30 days, but he and his command staff said that report would not be done by Tuesday, so an oral presentation with Power Point backup will have to do.
Part of the reason for the delay is that not all the police and civilians have been interviewed.
There is some question about whether the oral report will satisfy the demands of political leaders to get to the bottom of what happened.
Bratton is said to be focusing among other things problems with training, communication and what he called a "lax command". The top two commanders at the scene that day have been replaced. One of them Deputy Chief Cayler "Lee" Carter was demoted and is in the process of retiring from the department. The other, Commander Louis Gray was reassigned and at least one civil rights attorney recalled that it was Gray who had ordered less lethal munitions to be fired at protesters during another botched response by the LAPD to a demonstration in October 2000 which resulted in the city paying out over $700,000 to resolve civil litigation filed as a result.
In addition, one sergeant and two Metro officers are being investigated further for their conduct during the incident.
Bratton talked a lot about problems with the orders to disperse being given only in English and problems with media liaisons who may or may not have informed the Metro officers where the journalists were located. But there were issues raised by others that pertained to exactly how well trained and how experienced the members of the Metro Division's Platoon B were the day of the incident.
Bratton and others had discussed how these officers were the most highly trained, and experienced officers working in a division where they were supposed to deal with crises and other situations. But that may not have been the truth.
It was already known that an hour before the May Day incident, the department had pulled away some of its more experienced Metro officers to reassign them to other locations in the city but apparently problems began with the division months earlier according to the news article. Problems that some of its members felt led to the incident that now once again has the LAPD under a microscope. But it's been there many times before and it better get used to it.
(excerpt)
Traditionally, the division's officers have been highly trained for crises, including crowd control, but that training has been cut at least in half for many officers as the department seeks to have them spend more time on the streets.
In addition, a decision was made to bring in supervisors from outside Metropolitan Division.
Many of the B Platoon officers in MacArthur Park that day have been with the unit for less than a year and without the weeks-long Metro Academy training that officers went through when they joined the unit.
The officers were led into the park by a lieutenant who had been transferred to Metropolitan Division on Feb. 4.
"You cannot slap a patch on the shoulder of a person and suddenly they are a Metro guy," said one command staff officer. "Many of these guys never went to the Metro school…. You have a guy in charge who spent months on the desk, and it was his first big crowd incident."
This news shouldn't surprise anyone but it's anyone's guess whether it will be included in the report given by Bratton this week. That will take some of the transparency that the Press Enterprise was talking about given that the Metro Division was supposed to be renovated after its response to several demonstrations in 2000 led to the city forking out quite a bit of money in legal settlements including one to a female activist who lost one of her eyes after being struck in the face with a rubber bullet that was supposed to have been shot at the ground, not point-blank at head level.
The days still remain tough and uncertain for Bratton who before the firing of the rubber bullets that were heard around the world, appeared a shoe in for a second term as police chief. Now, that process has essentially been put on hold until the investigations into the incident are completed. The Police Commission said it wants a better sense of what the LAPD did that day as well as what the problems were and apparently so does the federal monitor who was assigned to oversee the department's consent decree which next month enters into its seventh year.
A woman is suing the Riverside County Sheriff's Department over the death of her autistic son who died in the custody of sheriff deputies last year, according to an article in the Press Enterprise.
The Sheriff's Department said that Raymond Lee Miller's autism led to him suffering from what is often called "excited delirium". His mother's attorney, Carl Douglas, believed that Mitchell died from positional asphyxia after several deputies piled on top of him to restrain him.
The coroner's office, which is also headed by Sheriff Bob Doyle, is not releasing the results of the autopsy including the toxicology for unspecified reasons.
Different experts argued in the article about whether or not "excited delirium" even existed at all. It is defined as what was once a very rare condition caused when too much adrenalin was produced, causing a heart attack. It's been linked by some medical professionals to methamphetamine use and/or mental illness. But as much as some professionals argue that it is an actual medical conditions, others say that in every recent case, contact with police officers has been added to the equation.
(excerpt)
Although "excited delirium" sudden deaths are not a new phenomenon, the term is.
Studies of cases resembling excited delirium exist back to the 19th century, Cohen said, but doctors really began to take note of it in the 1980s when cocaine use skyrocketed. Cohen said the phrase "excited delirium syndrome" evolved in recent years to describe deaths during or after struggles with police in which there is no evidence of significant physical injury. Before, he said, these deaths had been inaccurately attributed to positional or restraint asphyxia.
Dr. Gary Vilke, a professor of clinical medicine at UC San Diego, said both excited delirium and so-called positional or restraint asphyxia are real, but no definitive test exists for either.
"It's not very satisfying," Vilke said, but medical examiners have to judge each case based on limited information about the overall circumstances.
"Some people like to say, 'They're all this.' Others like to say, 'It's excited delirium,' " Vilke said. "The truth is somewhere in the middle."
'Caused by Police'
Dr. Werner Spitz, a well-known forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner in Michigan, said it makes no sense that police are a necessary part of the excited delirium equation.
Spitz said the kind of adrenaline-induced cardiac arrest described by proponents of excited delirium exists, but is exceedingly rare. Most of the so-called excited delirium cases with which he is familiar involve someone high on drugs whose breathing was compromised by a police restraint.
"Some people have made a condition out of this," he said, adding that it seems far more likely they were asphyxiated.
"Strep throat is caused by streptococcus," Spitz said. "Excited delirium is caused by police."
Most of the deaths from taser use have been attributed to "excited delirium" by coroners, even as the controversy over this condition continues.
In Houston, city officials, community activists and mental health professionals are examining the use of tasers by officers on mentally ill individuals, according to a series of articles in that newspaper including this one.
Over 130 mentally ill people have been tased by Houston Police Department officers and most of those were tased for failing to understand and follow commands issued by these officers. And less than 25% of them were ever convicted of criminal behavior.
The mental health experts believe this is too often especially in a city where a crisis intervention training program exists to assist police officers with mentally ill people.
(excerpt)
Often, police knew they were responding to calls involving people with mental health issues but rarely called officers who are specially trained to deal with the mentally ill, according to police records.
"Using a Taser is easy," said Arlene Kelly, who became an outspoken advocate for the mentally ill after her daughter was shot and killed by a Houston police officer in 1999. "There's no waiting. There's no need to be patient with someone who may not understand orders. The Taser has represented a step backward in how police deal with the mentally ill."
The police chief disagrees, saying that his officers are using the minimum use of force in these situations.
(excerpt)
Police Chief Harold Hurtt said the use of Tasers has prevented dangerous situations from becoming deadly.
"Crisis-intervention training is a critical part of our approach to the mentally ill, and our officers are well aware of the necessity to use the minimum force necessary," Hurtt said.
Actually, this specialized form of training is so critical to the department that in recent years, it watched as the number of officers who had received this training drop from 600 to 400.
The review by the Houston Chronicle here is what led to many of the concerns expressed by mental health advocates. That study showed that while officers deployed tasers at a growing rate against mentally ill individuals, the department dispatched fewer of its crisis intervention team trained officers to calls involving mentally ill individuals.
(excerpt)
Among the 127 Taser incidents examined by the Chronicle are five cases in which officers noted in their reports that they called on crisis-intervention officers or other mental health experts.
Lt. Michael Lee, a 17-year HPD veteran who was among the first officers trained to deal with the mentally ill and who last year took charge of the crisis-intervention team, said some circumstances do not allow officers to wait for support.
"Most officers are using Tasers to prevent a situation from escalating, and that can happen very quickly," Lee said. "Sometimes de-escalation techniques just don't work."
Lee also cites shortcomings in the emergency-call process that result in dispatchers failing to identify people experiencing mental problems and sending untrained officers to those calls.
But even when officers responded to calls that clearly presented mental health issues, specialized officers were not summoned before people were stunned with a Taser.
Officers shocked one man, 33-year-old, Rafael Adame, twice in the span of 35 days. In one instance in September 2005, he ignored officers' orders to get out of a car parked in front of his house and "waved an ink pen" before he was shocked, according to police reports.
The next month, he was shocked after he was "found to be in the bathroom breaking things and refusing to come out."
In neither case do records indicate the crisis-intervention team was called.
Anthony Bailey, a gangly schizophrenic man of 45, whose conversation weaves between recent events and those from decades ago in a single thought, twice encountered officers in 2006 after being accused of trespassing at different stores. In each case, he was shocked with a Taser.
Bailey says he was simply trying to find his family.
"I tried to explain why I was there, but no one would listen," Bailey said recently from the Harris County Jail, where he landed after another scuffle with officers. "It all happened so fast. I had no idea what was going on."
The Riverside Police Department was set to begin training its first class of patrol officers for 40 hours in order to prepare them to be able to better handle situations involving mentally ill or medically incapacitated individuals, according to presentations given by both Asst. City Manager Tom De Santis and Capt. Michael Blakely, who heads the department's personnel and training division.
Within the next 18 months, all of the department's patrol officers, detectives, supervisors and key civilian employees including dispatchers were to receive similar training. The money allocated both for the training as well as the staffing assignments to replace officers while they are in the week-long case comes out of the department's training fund.
Like in Houston and other cities nationwide, the department implemented this training after several fatal shootings including that of Lee Deante Brown in April 2006.
Brown had been tased up to 10 times including seven discharges from one taser over a 41 second period, according to records provided from both officers' tasers that were included in a report provided to the Community Police Review Commission by its investigator, Butch Warnberg.
John Wister Haines, born in 1912 and died on Oct. 24, 1944 during the bombing and sinking of the Arisan Maru.
If you've been following the saga of Windom's office, then you know that the three inquiries that are being conducted stemmed from complaints made by former and current employees both to the County Board of Supervisors and through opinion pieces written to the Press Enterprise's Readers' Forum.
The newspaper's editorial board gave the following advice and stated that transparency facilitated action taken to fix problems.
(excerpt)
Giving the public access to the report allows taxpayers greater insight into the agency's performance. And that choice also hands the public the tools to hold Windom accountable for correcting deficiencies the review uncovered.
The report suggested that Windom spend more time at branch offices in the desert and Southwest county, handle job interviews more promptly and improve morale, among other recommendations.
The county initially deemed the review confidential, but Windom asked officials to make the document public. That decision took courage -- and set a good policy course.
Hiding bad news behind a veil of confidentiality makes inaction easier. But openness about flaws and plans for improvement bolsters public confidence in the department.
That's a lesson that the city of Riverside could learn. It appears loathe at times to even admit that everything's not perfect in any one of its departments and there may be a problem or problems. When any of the department heads give their presentations on the performance of their department, they'll tell you about what's going right, and what's going well, but not so much about challenges or problems that they face in the meantime.
A strategy that often proves useful is to listen carefully to the presentation being given. But what's more important at times is to look for the areas of a department's operations that aren't mentioned at all during the presentation. Those areas are the ones which most often need to be examined more closely to determine if all is truly going well.
Another example of where transparency will prove to be important is during the report that is scheduled to be given Tuesday by Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton on his officers' actions during the May Day incident at MacArthur Park. The Los Angeles Times wrote an article providing some details about the much anticipated presentation before the city council.
(excerpt)
"There are significant concerns about the events of that day, and a lot of things we will be focusing on," Bratton told The Times on Friday.
"The update will bring into much clearer perspective what we believe happened that day: what worked for us, what didn't work for us and what changes that we're making as a result."
After the incident, Bratton promised to release the required "after-action" report in 30 days, but he and his command staff said that report would not be done by Tuesday, so an oral presentation with Power Point backup will have to do.
Part of the reason for the delay is that not all the police and civilians have been interviewed.
There is some question about whether the oral report will satisfy the demands of political leaders to get to the bottom of what happened.
Bratton is said to be focusing among other things problems with training, communication and what he called a "lax command". The top two commanders at the scene that day have been replaced. One of them Deputy Chief Cayler "Lee" Carter was demoted and is in the process of retiring from the department. The other, Commander Louis Gray was reassigned and at least one civil rights attorney recalled that it was Gray who had ordered less lethal munitions to be fired at protesters during another botched response by the LAPD to a demonstration in October 2000 which resulted in the city paying out over $700,000 to resolve civil litigation filed as a result.
In addition, one sergeant and two Metro officers are being investigated further for their conduct during the incident.
Bratton talked a lot about problems with the orders to disperse being given only in English and problems with media liaisons who may or may not have informed the Metro officers where the journalists were located. But there were issues raised by others that pertained to exactly how well trained and how experienced the members of the Metro Division's Platoon B were the day of the incident.
Bratton and others had discussed how these officers were the most highly trained, and experienced officers working in a division where they were supposed to deal with crises and other situations. But that may not have been the truth.
It was already known that an hour before the May Day incident, the department had pulled away some of its more experienced Metro officers to reassign them to other locations in the city but apparently problems began with the division months earlier according to the news article. Problems that some of its members felt led to the incident that now once again has the LAPD under a microscope. But it's been there many times before and it better get used to it.
(excerpt)
Traditionally, the division's officers have been highly trained for crises, including crowd control, but that training has been cut at least in half for many officers as the department seeks to have them spend more time on the streets.
In addition, a decision was made to bring in supervisors from outside Metropolitan Division.
Many of the B Platoon officers in MacArthur Park that day have been with the unit for less than a year and without the weeks-long Metro Academy training that officers went through when they joined the unit.
The officers were led into the park by a lieutenant who had been transferred to Metropolitan Division on Feb. 4.
"You cannot slap a patch on the shoulder of a person and suddenly they are a Metro guy," said one command staff officer. "Many of these guys never went to the Metro school…. You have a guy in charge who spent months on the desk, and it was his first big crowd incident."
This news shouldn't surprise anyone but it's anyone's guess whether it will be included in the report given by Bratton this week. That will take some of the transparency that the Press Enterprise was talking about given that the Metro Division was supposed to be renovated after its response to several demonstrations in 2000 led to the city forking out quite a bit of money in legal settlements including one to a female activist who lost one of her eyes after being struck in the face with a rubber bullet that was supposed to have been shot at the ground, not point-blank at head level.
The days still remain tough and uncertain for Bratton who before the firing of the rubber bullets that were heard around the world, appeared a shoe in for a second term as police chief. Now, that process has essentially been put on hold until the investigations into the incident are completed. The Police Commission said it wants a better sense of what the LAPD did that day as well as what the problems were and apparently so does the federal monitor who was assigned to oversee the department's consent decree which next month enters into its seventh year.
A woman is suing the Riverside County Sheriff's Department over the death of her autistic son who died in the custody of sheriff deputies last year, according to an article in the Press Enterprise.
The Sheriff's Department said that Raymond Lee Miller's autism led to him suffering from what is often called "excited delirium". His mother's attorney, Carl Douglas, believed that Mitchell died from positional asphyxia after several deputies piled on top of him to restrain him.
The coroner's office, which is also headed by Sheriff Bob Doyle, is not releasing the results of the autopsy including the toxicology for unspecified reasons.
Different experts argued in the article about whether or not "excited delirium" even existed at all. It is defined as what was once a very rare condition caused when too much adrenalin was produced, causing a heart attack. It's been linked by some medical professionals to methamphetamine use and/or mental illness. But as much as some professionals argue that it is an actual medical conditions, others say that in every recent case, contact with police officers has been added to the equation.
(excerpt)
Although "excited delirium" sudden deaths are not a new phenomenon, the term is.
Studies of cases resembling excited delirium exist back to the 19th century, Cohen said, but doctors really began to take note of it in the 1980s when cocaine use skyrocketed. Cohen said the phrase "excited delirium syndrome" evolved in recent years to describe deaths during or after struggles with police in which there is no evidence of significant physical injury. Before, he said, these deaths had been inaccurately attributed to positional or restraint asphyxia.
Dr. Gary Vilke, a professor of clinical medicine at UC San Diego, said both excited delirium and so-called positional or restraint asphyxia are real, but no definitive test exists for either.
"It's not very satisfying," Vilke said, but medical examiners have to judge each case based on limited information about the overall circumstances.
"Some people like to say, 'They're all this.' Others like to say, 'It's excited delirium,' " Vilke said. "The truth is somewhere in the middle."
'Caused by Police'
Dr. Werner Spitz, a well-known forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner in Michigan, said it makes no sense that police are a necessary part of the excited delirium equation.
Spitz said the kind of adrenaline-induced cardiac arrest described by proponents of excited delirium exists, but is exceedingly rare. Most of the so-called excited delirium cases with which he is familiar involve someone high on drugs whose breathing was compromised by a police restraint.
"Some people have made a condition out of this," he said, adding that it seems far more likely they were asphyxiated.
"Strep throat is caused by streptococcus," Spitz said. "Excited delirium is caused by police."
Most of the deaths from taser use have been attributed to "excited delirium" by coroners, even as the controversy over this condition continues.
In Houston, city officials, community activists and mental health professionals are examining the use of tasers by officers on mentally ill individuals, according to a series of articles in that newspaper including this one.
Over 130 mentally ill people have been tased by Houston Police Department officers and most of those were tased for failing to understand and follow commands issued by these officers. And less than 25% of them were ever convicted of criminal behavior.
The mental health experts believe this is too often especially in a city where a crisis intervention training program exists to assist police officers with mentally ill people.
(excerpt)
Often, police knew they were responding to calls involving people with mental health issues but rarely called officers who are specially trained to deal with the mentally ill, according to police records.
"Using a Taser is easy," said Arlene Kelly, who became an outspoken advocate for the mentally ill after her daughter was shot and killed by a Houston police officer in 1999. "There's no waiting. There's no need to be patient with someone who may not understand orders. The Taser has represented a step backward in how police deal with the mentally ill."
The police chief disagrees, saying that his officers are using the minimum use of force in these situations.
(excerpt)
Police Chief Harold Hurtt said the use of Tasers has prevented dangerous situations from becoming deadly.
"Crisis-intervention training is a critical part of our approach to the mentally ill, and our officers are well aware of the necessity to use the minimum force necessary," Hurtt said.
Actually, this specialized form of training is so critical to the department that in recent years, it watched as the number of officers who had received this training drop from 600 to 400.
The review by the Houston Chronicle here is what led to many of the concerns expressed by mental health advocates. That study showed that while officers deployed tasers at a growing rate against mentally ill individuals, the department dispatched fewer of its crisis intervention team trained officers to calls involving mentally ill individuals.
(excerpt)
Among the 127 Taser incidents examined by the Chronicle are five cases in which officers noted in their reports that they called on crisis-intervention officers or other mental health experts.
Lt. Michael Lee, a 17-year HPD veteran who was among the first officers trained to deal with the mentally ill and who last year took charge of the crisis-intervention team, said some circumstances do not allow officers to wait for support.
"Most officers are using Tasers to prevent a situation from escalating, and that can happen very quickly," Lee said. "Sometimes de-escalation techniques just don't work."
Lee also cites shortcomings in the emergency-call process that result in dispatchers failing to identify people experiencing mental problems and sending untrained officers to those calls.
But even when officers responded to calls that clearly presented mental health issues, specialized officers were not summoned before people were stunned with a Taser.
Officers shocked one man, 33-year-old, Rafael Adame, twice in the span of 35 days. In one instance in September 2005, he ignored officers' orders to get out of a car parked in front of his house and "waved an ink pen" before he was shocked, according to police reports.
The next month, he was shocked after he was "found to be in the bathroom breaking things and refusing to come out."
In neither case do records indicate the crisis-intervention team was called.
Anthony Bailey, a gangly schizophrenic man of 45, whose conversation weaves between recent events and those from decades ago in a single thought, twice encountered officers in 2006 after being accused of trespassing at different stores. In each case, he was shocked with a Taser.
Bailey says he was simply trying to find his family.
"I tried to explain why I was there, but no one would listen," Bailey said recently from the Harris County Jail, where he landed after another scuffle with officers. "It all happened so fast. I had no idea what was going on."
The Riverside Police Department was set to begin training its first class of patrol officers for 40 hours in order to prepare them to be able to better handle situations involving mentally ill or medically incapacitated individuals, according to presentations given by both Asst. City Manager Tom De Santis and Capt. Michael Blakely, who heads the department's personnel and training division.
Within the next 18 months, all of the department's patrol officers, detectives, supervisors and key civilian employees including dispatchers were to receive similar training. The money allocated both for the training as well as the staffing assignments to replace officers while they are in the week-long case comes out of the department's training fund.
Like in Houston and other cities nationwide, the department implemented this training after several fatal shootings including that of Lee Deante Brown in April 2006.
Brown had been tased up to 10 times including seven discharges from one taser over a 41 second period, according to records provided from both officers' tasers that were included in a report provided to the Community Police Review Commission by its investigator, Butch Warnberg.
John Wister Haines, born in 1912 and died on Oct. 24, 1944 during the bombing and sinking of the Arisan Maru.
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