Canary in the Mine: And so it all began

It's official, all four council races are heading towards runoffs in November, according to the Press Enterprise.



The incumbents, Dom Betro and Art Gage, responded differently when asked what they believed the reasons were for them having to run again in five months. Perhaps Councilman Steve Adams was too speechless to respond.



As it turns out, one politician's wake up call is another one's denial.


(excerpt)



With no incumbent receiving the simple majority of votes needed to avoid a runoff, some candidates and residents, including Gage, saw the results as a public expression of disapproval for the council.

"Obviously there's discontent with City Hall," Gage said.

Gardner, who is trying to unseat Betro, said the dissatisfaction among people he spoke with during the campaign was focused on the council's interaction with the public.

They are not upset, he said, with the Riverside Renaissance, a $1.2 billion program designed to carry out 30 years' worth of public improvements -- libraries, parks, landscaped medians and more -- in just five years.

Betro said he views the Ward 1 result as a function of four candidates on the ballot, each able to exploit an issue or two well enough to divide up the vote. "I don't see it as a rebuke," he said.



Of course not, because a rebuke would have been what took place if Betro had barely cleared the 50% of the voters plus one vote mark during the election. What happened instead was what might be called a backlash and that's why he's in the position as are Gage and Councilman Steve Adams of having to face off in the finals to determine who gets to serve on the city council.

But if one councilman is willing to examine what's in front of his face and the other wants to continue to blame the fact that he's facing a runoff on outside forces, then that's perfectly fine.

See you all in November and we'll see what the voters have to say.






Columnist Dan Bernstein at the Press Enterprise wrote about a conversation that he stated happened at a local watering hole after a very rough couple of days spent waiting for all the votes to be counted in Election 2007. It's hilarious even if it is a night to forget. In a newspaper that is looking more and more like an advertisement for the downtown tourist bureau, Dan is still the man.


(excerpt)



I don't get it."

"Me neither."

"I do."

"You do?"

"Voters are ingrates."

"They're such Middle Agers!"

"But we're middle agers."

"We're Renaissance men."

"We are the sons of Leonardo DiCaprio!"

"You mean the sons of Leonardo da Vinci."

"Not the sons of Mussolini!"

"Cultural slur!"

"Cocktail, sir?"

"To the Renaissance!"

"To the Reppaschlance!"

"To the Runoffplotz!"

"I thought I'd win going away."

"I thought I'd win and you'd go away."

"I thought we ruled the Domain!"







Writing about politics and city council elections has been interesting and fun, more so than I had anticipated when I started writing about Election 2007, round one. For the most part, I write about issues pertaining to the Riverside Police Department and so I've been catching up on doing that in the past couple of days.

And in what is often called kismet, I've found some interesting documents that were recently filed in civil court in relation to a fatal officer-involved shooting that took place several years ago. What was interesting about them was how they have ensured that the spotlight that's been on the city's recent handling of the Community Police Review Commission has just got a little bit brighter. Thanks, to Officer Ryan Wilson for filing this most interesting law suit and providing the mechanism from which many questions about the city and police department's intentions towards the CPRC and perhaps even the police department will be answered in the upcoming months.

Many people had believed that the shooting of Lee Deante Brown in April 2006 was the epicenter of the problems that the CPRC began experiencing, but a law suit filed against the CPRC and the city by Wilson clearly shows that in actuality, it might have been the Summer Marie Lane shooting that got the ball rolling at City Hall.


While perusing through court records at the Riverside County Superior Court, I caught up on the travels and travails of that litigation that was done by Wilson to push the CPRC to either throw out its own finding or change it to "clear him" of the Lane shooting.



In case you don't remember, the CPRC had voted unanimously in November 2005 that Wilson had violated the department's use of force policy when he had walked behind and up to the driver's side window of Lane's stationary vehicle and fired three shots inside it, killing her. The CPRC based its finding on its view that Wilson was not in immediate danger nor was anyone else when the shooting occurred. Earlier in the incident, several witnesses said that Lane had been trying to hit Wilson with her car while he was trying to arrest a male friend of hers.



The finding was forwarded to City Manager Brad Hudson's office and it met up with a finding released by the police department which had exonerated Wilson of that shooting. Hudson had a decision to make only he didn't and a declaration he filed as part of the city's response in the law suit, Ryan Wilson v the City of Riverside explained that further. According to it, Hudson stated the following.





(excerpt)



"In light of the finding by Internal Affairs that the shooting by Officer Wilson on Dec. 6, 2004 did not violate the department's use of force policy, the city has not and will never consider the commission's Nov. 2, 2005 report in connection with any personnel decision regarding Officer Wilson, including, evaluations, discipline and/or promotion. Moreover, the Nov. 2, 2005 report is not maintained in any personnel file regarding Officer Wilson."



What's interesting is that Hudson keeps referring to the Nov. 2 public report released by the CPRC, not the actual Nov. 9 finding issued by the CPRC against Wilson. Why this distinction is critical is an item for future discussion. But what Hudson is essentially saying is that the city opts to abide by the Internal Affairs Division's findings and disregards those provided by the CPRC.


As to Hudson's explanation for his actions or more accurately inaction surrounding the Lane case, that is stated in his declaration including the excerpt above. Monday's explanation might be different than what you hear on Tuesday.



This latest explanation is a bit different than what Hudson told the community when explaining why he acted or failed to act the way he did. When he wrote in his declaration that he did essentially act.

It's kind of like the situation where people ask him whether or not he supports independent counsel for the CPRC and half of them will say, yes he told me he does and the other half will say, no he told me he doesn't because the planning commission doesn't have its own independent attorney. Then you need another person to come forward with his or her version of the answer to the same question to break the stalemate and figure out what is the real answer.

On this particular topic involving the Lane case, Hudson had initially said that he was brand new when the decision was being made and so opted out of it. He said that if the same circumstances presented themselves again, he would act differently in a case like the Lane shooting. Though he did say at a meeting of the public safety committee in November that Chief Russ Leach didn't wait until the CPRC issued its finding to act if something "egregious" occurred. Apparently, the first sustained finding by the CPRC on an officer-involved death in its seven years didn't fall in that category, but then in most police cultures, it wouldn't cause any effect at all except to make a department upset about a decision made by people who it most definitely sees as outsiders.

And that's what happened here. An outside body issued a finding on a shooting that essentially was ignored but it still incited fury within the department's management, if how the brief accounts the situation is accurate. That's an unfortunate dynamic but as the brief states, it's now there for all to see.

That same dynamic was also clear in some of the machinations involving the Los Angeles Police Department surrounding some decisions made by the department's management under current chief, William Bratton to batten down the hatches on some of its accountability mechanisms while tossing words like "open" and "transparency" around to the city government and the public like shuttlecocks in a badminton game.

And in L.A. neither the city council nor the community members are buying that as evidenced by the city council's recent decision to have officers in the LAPD appear before that body for questioning on the May Day incident.

The city of Riverside and its police department share that same quality of talking about transparency, something the process surrounding the CPRC has seen very little of from either entity during the past year. How could it, given that it spent most of it in the midst of resignations involving its former executive director, Pedro Payne and five going on six commissioners in response to actions taken by Hudson's office involving the CPRC.

What is both so fascinating and so important about this law suit and the responses of all the involved parties included in it is how it has provided and will continue to provide an interesting look at how members of a police culture circle their wagons against outsiders. The "vanishing police culture" is as much a myth in this department as it is in the one in Los Angeles and this law suit now as it will continue to do so until its conclusion bears witness to that. It's the rosetta stone of the police culture within the Riverside Police Department, a tribute to other similar well-worded portraits about how what goes on behind closed doors can be a far different reality than what you see in public.

Apparently what Leach found egregious about the whole affair of the Lane shooting besides the finding of course, was what the members of the community including those belonging to "watch dog" groups were saying about his officer. If the brief authored by Wilson's attorney is an accurate portrayal of the deposition Leach gave in February, then a lot of questions about the difficulties faced by the CPRC are perhaps on their way towards being answered, not through what stories the city officials and police representatives have told the community about their plans for the CPRC, but through what lies in the public record of this case.

Here is one example of what was revealed about the dynamics involving the CPRC, the department and Leach.

(excerpt)

"Chief Leach fully supports petitioner[Wilson] and is clearly furious and outraged with CPRC as evidenced in his deposition testimony. Although he personally has no doubt of petitioner's qualification as a "fine officer", he is fully aware his name has been tainted."



So now are Wilson and Leach facing off against the law suit's defendants including the city and the beleaguered CPRC? A window has just been opened into a complex series of events that transpired since this finding was released in late 2005 and the fuzziness around the dynamics of the various players involved in the "hollowing out" of the CPRC is clearing. With more paperwork anticipated to be filed in this case including volumes by the city's legal team, that clarity will probably increase in upcoming months as the storyline to what led to the current state of the CPRC is available for all to see and read.

This initial brief is probably just a taste of what lies ahead waiting to be revealed through upcoming declarations, motions and briefs filed by both parties who may be on opposite sides here with a police chief being pushed to choose sides, but ultimately share one thing in common, animosity towards and fear of a truly independent CPRC.

Leach apparently said that promoting Wilson would be a difficult task because doing so, "they would make his life and the officer's life a bit miserable.'" Just finding Wilson an assignment after the CPRC issued its finding wasn't easy given that there was one incident when a NBC reporter wanted to ride along with officers and Wilson and his partner were not chosen because of the Lane shooting and how that would look if anyone got wind of it.

Leach and the other members of the command staff had to apparently consider their next placement of Wilson carefully after the controversy that was stirred. But the most interesting detail not included in the law suit is that interest in this shooting didn't begin when the CPRC released its finding but before that.

How is that known? Because the shooting began receiving attention in late September long before the CPRC reached its finding, not just from the public but the department as well.

People didn't start protesting, questioning or even writing about the Lane shooting simply because the CPRC issued a sustained finding against Wilson. People began talking about it in the communities and speaking out on it after the CPRC's investigator Norm Wight delivered a briefing on his investigation of the shooting at the end of September 2005 and it might have happened sooner if the public had known the truth about the final seconds before the shooting took place. As it was, commissioners and community members' jaws dropped in shock when Wight provided a version of the shooting that was much different than what had been related before.

On Dec. 22, 2004, the department had given an initial briefing to the CPRC and the public which turned out to have included erroneous facts. The department's representative had said that Wilson had shot Lane through her car's back window while he was down on the ground and it was backing towards him. This version was related to the CPRC despite the fact that the department knew the true version of events at that point, according to departmental memos circulated the day after the shooting and several days before the CPRC briefing took place. The department clearly knew what had happened at the point the briefing took place and blamed the "minor" errors resulting from miscommunication within the General Investigations Bureau.

When the community heard the truth, not from the department as it should have but from the CPRC investigator, that's when the concerns about this shooting in the communities began.

And it wasn't just those in the community that started becoming involved in following the process.

The police department itself began sending representatives from its Internal Affairs Division including Commander Richard Dana to meetings that took place after Wight's briefing, an action which was unprecedented but has been repeated since with the shooting of Lee Deante Brown. Why did the police department send representatives from the department to these meetings if they believed that the problem with the shooting was truly the finding that could come later from the CPRC? Did they already realize there were problems which necessitated them keeping tabs on the discussion being conducted by the CPRC as it prepared to draft its public report? After all, the department's representatives attended CPRC meetings in October 2005 and the finding against Wilson wasn't issued until weeks later on Nov. 9.

At no time in the preceding five years have representatives from the Officer Involved Death Team and/or the Internal Affairs Division attended a CPRC meeting addressing an incustody death unless it was either the initial briefing on that death or a training session on how either conducted their investigations or administrative reviews. Why did that protocol change with Summer Marie Lane's case at least one month before that commission sustained a finding against Wilson?

According to the brief, Leach also fretted about the "watch dog groups" and one reporter, yours truly, who was of "particular concern" apparently for mentioning Wilson's name continually on this blog. Leach also mentioned the "health and welfare" issues with people labeling Wilson a "killer" or an "executioner". Him mentioning me in particular didn't surprise me. I know I'm not one of his favorite persons and never have been. Seeing it in writing doesn't add anything to that nor does it change anything. Part and parcel of being concerned about police oversight and reform means you're not going to make many if any friends in uniform. That's just the way it works and you accept it if you believe in the importance of the process or you go home.

Few people operate under the illusion in any city that employees of a police agency from top to bottom tolerate let alone support civilian oversight of their departments. Those who do live in a dream world and those who believe it when law enforcement officers say they do, live there as well. They will speak positively about it in public forums until it comes back with a decision on a case that they don't like or disagree with. Then the negative comments and outright "fury" as described in this brief is what results, albeit behind the closed doors of a deposition when they are questioned after taking an oath of honesty to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

But the true test in whether or not a police department at any level supports or welcomes civilian oversight is how willing they are to consider the input of those commissions when it disagrees with its own. And that's the stumbling block for most police departments when it comes to the implementation of civilian oversight in their midst. They can pretend to like it until it upsets them through its actions or its decisions and then they want their marbles back.

So what is the public to think when confronted with the reality months later that their police departments don't really like civilian review? It's interesting how much more upfront the police unions are about how repulsive they find civilian oversight with the Riverside Police Officers' Association being no exception to that rule, yet those in higher positions often talk and nod their heads about how useful it is for them again, until it comes back with a finding that contradicts their own on something as public as an incustody death and the truth emerges in a way that's not pretty, but necessary. Why is it that police unions can openly attack civilian review legally or politically yet the management can't do anything but make it appear as if they are embracing it?

Facing this dichotomy both between the rank and file unions and their management as well as the members of management and themselves is a very educational experience though it doesn't leave much illusions that law enforcement has really changed as much locally, let alone in general, as many people believe that it has.

Community members look to civilian review for accountability. Police departments top to bottom see it as anything from a nuisance to a nightmare. City officials look at it, and think immediately, civil liability exposure and the CPRC might have fallen victim to that line of thinking given that litigation has been filed involving at least four of the last six incustody deaths involving Riverside Police Department officers.

People who speak about police accountability and push for it or are "watch dogs" as Leach referred to them, are complimented by police management personnel in public, but it's obvious through law suits like these that once closed-door depositions come to light, what they may really believe and say is often far different. What's the truth and what is not? Only they know, the community is left guessing, like it is with many similar issues and trust is a word that gets tossed around a lot but few people amid the relationships between law enforcement and communities actually hold onto it.

That reality is what makes partnerships between police departments and community members so difficult and it offers proof to what many experts say, in that it takes at least 20 years to change a culture inside a police department. And that's if enough people in the departments even want it to be changed. Does the RPD really want to change? Do the unpleasant truths which are emerging and no doubt will continue to emerge during this litigative process courtesy of a police officer who wants to erase history in a department that tried that and failed, change that process?

The truth as they say will become history and the upcoming chapters haven't been written yet. At least not this time around.

In San Bernardino, the trial continues involving a former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department deputy, Ivory J. Webb who faces attempted voluntary manslaughter and other related charges stemming from the onduty shooting of Elio Carrion in 2006.

Other accounts of the shooting provided by Webb to others are coming to light in the ongoing testimony.


(excerpt)



The first backup officer to arrive that night, Chino police Detective Brian Cauble, testified Thursday he came upon the scene to find the deputy, Ivory J. Webb Jr., standing above a wounded Elio Carrion with his gun drawn.

Cauble said he immediately asked Webb what was going on.

"He told me the subject had tried to attack him," Cauble said.

Richard Swigart, a San Bernardino County sheriff's sergeant who also went to the scene, testified Webb told him a similar story.

"He said the guy lunged at him and he shot three times," Swigart testified.

Webb's statements from that night were the central issue Thursday as his trial continued in San Bernardino Superior Court.

Prosecutors contend the statements are contradicted by a videotape of the shooting that appears to show Webb shoot Carrion just after ordering him to get up.

They also claim that after the video of the shooting surfaced, Webb changed his story to say he shot Carrion because he believed Carrion reached into his jacket for a weapon.