Canary in the Mine: Protocol or politics?

Update: Invasor, the wonder from down under, has been retired due to a fractured seismoid bone in his hind ankle resulting from a breezing he did this morning in preparation for the Suburban Handicap. No surgery will be required.



Farewell, old boy.



Eighty million dollars sunk into the Riverside Plaza and it has yet to make a profit, according to the Press Enterprise.



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We're not making any money," said George Carroll, a principal with The Westminster Funds, which owns the Riverside Plaza. "We would be if it weren't for the Krikorian mess."

The almost decade-long journey to turn a blighted vacant mall into a higher-end shopping destination that surpassed industry expectations hit as many speed bumps as a shopper might while driving through the complex today.

The entire project from demolition to opening should have taken two to three years, Carroll said. It took six.

"We thought it was solvable," he said



The whole history of the mall's transformation from an indoor mall to an outside plaza is revisited, including problems with the lease of a major movie theater chain which never opened at the location and the profits lost because of Gottschalks Department store which may be sold.

Still there is hope, the interest holders claim.



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"There are some anomalies at Riverside Plaza that impact the profitability for the ownership. Had we not encountered the Montgomery Ward delay, had we not encountered the Krikorian lawsuit, chances are, it'd be very profitable today," he said. "There's no doubt in my mind that the plaza will be successful financially."

Carroll is seeking a reversal to the $22 million judgment against the company. He's fighting for a freeway sign to advertise the mall not visible from Highway 91, a sign that needs state legislative approval to exempt it from the state's Outdoor Advertising Act. And he's hoping to fill three vacancies without lowering his standards.

A 5,220-square-foot space at the mall's western end could be filled by a nationally known retailer of women's clothes, and a day spa is negotiating to fill a 4,753-square-foot space next to it, Carroll said.

"We could have filled these spaces up a long time ago but we're trying to be disciplined," he said. "We're trying to do something a little nicer here."







Community residents wonder if there's any such hope for the Community Police Review Commission in the same city. The seven-year-old panel has not thrived under its handling by the current city management.



The CPRC has yet to schedule its next special meeting to discuss the drafting of its public report on its investigation into the officer-involved shooting of Lee Deante Brown by a Riverside Police Department officer. Some believe it was that shooting that instigated the current crisis with the commission while others believe it was the commission's fateful decision to find against Officer Ryan Wilson in his shooting of Summer Marie Lane in 2005. That decision angered the police department, according to a deposition given in February by its chief, Russ Leach in relation to a law suit filed by Wilson against the CPRC and the city.

The Brown shooting first came back to the CPRC for discussion earlier this year and the creation of the report has been proceeding with fits and starts ever since. This process of drafting it comes in the middle of the ongoing drama stemming from actions taken by the city manager's office, city attorney's office and the police department involving the beleaguered panel. Not to mention even more drama which have been played out both behind the scenes at City Hall and also at more public meetings.

But few people are surprised that the Brown shooting has been anything but unusual.

First, the CPRC took a vote, 6-1, to issue a preliminary finding that Officer Terry Ellefson did not violate the department's use of force policy when he shot and killed Brown on April 3, 2006 at the Welcome Inn of America. Dissenting was Commissioner Jim Ward, who would ultimately decide to draft his own minority opinion as he had tried to do with the incustody death of Terry Rabb last year.

Just the threat of a minority report has nearly unraveled the earlier vote taken by the CPRC with commissioners saying that they might sign in at least in part with Ward's report. That's not completely surprising given the 180 degree turn that several other commissioners took on the case just several months ago.

And what of commissioners who said they might join in the minority report or at least fight for its release against City Hall if necessary? Well, City Hall is striking back with more information on that to be revealed in upcoming weeks as soon as several key summer vacations are completed.




Then the commissioners began discussing why all but one of them had reached that finding, and not long after that, is when things began to really get confusing, and also very interesting with much more to come.

Even before reaching this point, commissioners began dropping off the panel citing a variety of reasons for their resignations or refusals to be reappointed by the city council for a second term.


Few people believed their excuses, given the upheaval that was taking place around them.



In fact, the majority of these commissioners who departed reported feeling frustrated with actions taken by the city manager's office, city attorney's office and the police department to not only micromanage their operations but to change those operating procedures without receiving input from them.


As Les Davidson, who chaired the commission before his own resignation said later, he believed that during one private meeting at City Hall, he and Ward were not being asked what they wanted to do but were being told what was to be done.



Four out of five of the departures involved commissioners with no law enforcement background. Three were Latino. Candidate X who applied for the CPRC's executive manager position said that it was unusual for a civilian review board to have as many members with law enforcement backgrounds adding that 70% of the CPRC's current membership consisted of current or former law enforcement officers.

Those who departed were replaced by three commissioners with prior experience on other city boards and commissions which sent the message that you needed to be an insider at City Hall to get on it, given how few of the city's residents even have the opportunity to get interviewed for one commission let alone be asked to serve on two of them. Council members Dom Betro and Ed Adkison said that the CPRC needed to have commissioners with this prior experience to "hit the ground running" during its current situation. A situation that neither council member did anything about when it was happening, except give the direct employee of theirs who was responsible for it a very generous pay increase.


So the future of the Brown case, which in all likelihood has already been adjudicated, is up in the air. But attention has changed into an aspect of officer-involved death investigations which had been challenged earlier in the year but had received a swift response from community leaders.


Now the CPRC will be addressing the protocol of how it uses its investigators, particularly in the cases of officer-involved deaths which it is empowered to investigate by the city's charter.

CPRC commissioners who attended several private meetings at City Hall with representatives from the city manager's office, city attorney's office and police department said at later meetings that they were concerned about the protocol being changed so that the CPRC would be rendered ineffective at conducting its own investigations of officer-involved deaths.

The city had apparently planned to change the procedures so that the CPRC would not be able to initiate its own investigation and thus send out its own investigator until the department had completed its own investigation or at least three to six months after the incident.

What essentially stopped this effort in its tracks were community leaders who met with the city manager's office to protest this and other actions including the sudden resignation of former executive director, Pedro Payne. City Manager Brad Hudson's reaction was basically, so what, but the city manager's office dropped its plans to change the protocol at least for a little while.



But apparently, this item is back on the agenda again for further discussion. At past meetings, commissioners including current chair, Brian Pearcy were adamant that they wanted to dispatch the investigator as soon as the tape was put up by the department's own criminal investigators. However, attrition of the commissioners and their replacement by those with closer ties to City Hall may have changed the dynamics of the board so that they will go along with its program.

Recent appointments have included a woman who received over $200,000 in campaign contributions from the Riverside Sheriffs Association and the Riverside Police Officers Association when she ran for county board of supervisor in 2004.



Also, at a public safety committee meeting in January, Councilman Steve Adams made comments that anyone who interviewed witnesses of an officer-involved death would be arrested and prosecuted. His words were interpreted by those who attended the meeting as extending to the CPRC's own investigator if he tried to do the job he was dispatched to do. Adams' words attracted the interest of the ACLU, with local representatives saying that they would get involved in that situation with support from the Southern California Chapter. In fact, the representatives said that Adams could be sued just for making these statements at a meeting.



Adams who has been retired from the Riverside Police Department for over 15 years now, apparently thinks he's still a police officer despite the reputed football injury that ended his stint there when he also said at that meeting that the CPRC reviews shootings.



"We investigate them," Adams said about himself and the police department. Meaning not that he was planning to investigate the department but that he and his department would be in charge of investigating the officer-involved deaths. It wasn't clear by his comments who would be in charge and giving the orders.



Adams should go back and reacquaint himself with the city's charter. After all, he was an important catalyst along with others as to why the CPRC is currently under its protection. He might actually get reelected to a second term and would thus have to use the charter, the city's constitution as his compass for performing his job.









The defense in the trial of a former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department deputy rested its case without calling him to testify, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Ivory J. Webb's attorney, Michael Schwartz, closed out his case by calling another expert witness to the stand.


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William Lewinski, a psychologist and law enforcement professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, did not offer his opinions about Webb's thought process when he confronted Carrion and the Corvette's driver.

But Lewinski testified that a lone officer dividing attention between two subjects — who were not following orders or showing their hands at all times — would create a situation that is "very high stress for any officer."

Lewinski said he had studied similar situations in which officers did not have control and feared for their lives. "Their analytical process began to collapse," he testified. "They had so much to do that, literally, they were overloaded."

Lewinski cited an example of an officer who, facing a suspect with a knife, repeatedly shouted "Show me your hands!" even though both hands were visible.

The officer was trying to say "Drop the knife" but resorted to familiar commands from his training.

It became clear that Webb probably wasn't going to testify after his attorney pushed hard to get statements that he had made to other deputies into the public record, in a sense putting his version of events to the jury without having to worry about him being cross-examined by the prosecution. Still, if the state of mind is what is to determine whether Webb committed attempted manslaughter when he shot Webb or not, it's hard to determine it without the former deputy explaining what was going on inside his head himself.

Closing arguments for both sides might be given on Tuesday with the case being given to the jury for deliberation after both lawyers argue their cases.









In response to the shooting of Sean Bell by New York Police Department officers, the department's cadets are being sent to a new diversity training program according to this article in the New York Daily News.


The multi-day course which includes facing a panelist of some of the department's toughest critics has been initiated to improve the department's ability to interface with the communities it serves.



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Police-community relations are "not fully recovered from the Sean Bell shooting," said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, referring to November's fatal police shooting of an unarmed Queens man on his wedding day.

Daughtry, a civil rights activist and self-declared super critic of the NYPD, said the dialogue was "a step in the right direction."

The recruits are the first class to get an additional four days of immersion training as part of the department's new Advancing Community Trust, or ACT, program.

Many officers "behave as if they're detached, as if they don't understand that they're living in the most diverse city in the world," said another panelist, the Rev. Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

He gave current NYPD-community relations a grade of C+.




More intrigue in Seattle, Washington over the struggle between the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board which oversees the police department's internal investigations and the police department itself, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The board had determined when reviewing an investigation involving two police officers that the police chief intervened inappropriately. That ruling led to a firestorm that has come close to overwhelming the board's chair, Peter Holmes.


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Lynne Iglitzin, an original member of the board, said Holmes' methodical, detail-oriented approach has been valuable. And his ethics, she added, are above reproach.

"Peter is incredibly hardworking and very dedicated," she said. "He's got a legal mind, so he thinks very carefully. He's deeply committed to the work of the board."

But sometimes the lawyer in him can get in the way.

Sam Pailca, the former executive director of the Office of Professional Accountability, said she had enormous regard for Holmes' work but, "Pete had a very lawyerly, analytical approach to problems, and sometimes the message could get lost in the footnotes."

When someone leaked a review board report critical of police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to The Seattle Times early this week, the message wasn't lost on anyone. Kerlikowske, the report said, interfered with an investigation into two officers accused of planting drugs on an arrestee.

And thus Holmes' relationship with the chief and the mayor officially became what it is now. Public. Nasty.

Holmes said the report isn't complete. And no, as the middle child of five competitive boys who grew up in a farm in rural Virginia, he isn't giving up.

"I believe in this work," he said, grabbing a binder.