City Hall Blues: Ethics and excuses

Vacation


All I ever wanted


Vacation


Had to get away

Vacation


Meant to be spent alone





---Go Gos





Two city councilmen who ran for election and didn't quite make it back in office are apparently on vacation for weeks, while the candidates who are running against them are planning their strategies for round two of Election 2007.

But one of them, Dom Betro, can travel happily because the latest ethics complaint against him has been tossed out by the city, according to a belated article in the Press Enterprise.

Betro as you remember, allegedly had a complaint filed against him by activist Kevin Dawson for allegedly walking up to him and his teenaged daughter across the street from the Fox Theater and yelling at him, you'd better hope I don't get elected.

City Attorney Gregory Priamos stated in a letter the day before the deadline of the first round of city council elections that the complaint would not be accepted because Betro was not operating under the capacity of a councilman. That's a laughable excuse given that Betro was on his way to serve as the Ward One councilman at a function involving a Ward One development project in where else, Ward One. But the city attorney who can count up to four had to come up with some unwritten rule.



(excerpt)


"Mr. Betro's comments were not made in his capacity or in the discharge of his duties as a member of the City Council," Priamos wrote.

Betro said the episode "was a campaign issue, not a City Council issue."

Dawson said he would still like a chance to present his case, including witnesses, to the mayor and three council members, under the code of ethics and conduct.

He believes council members should fall under the code any time they are out in public, he said.




Jennifer Vaughn-Blakely who chaired the committee that made recommendations on the ethics code to the city council said that perhaps the city should be more clear on this issue on when its code does or does not apply. It doesn't have to be as it's already quite clear. It needed an excuse, it came up with them and the next time it has to toss out a complaint against an elected official up for election, there will probably be another area that's not "clear".


There's cities which actually have ethics codes that are taken seriously, applied fairly and make sense. Then there's River City where the rules are made up as they go along.


It's a slow time in Riverside except for Councilman Frank Schiavone's pledge to hold Union Pacific Train Company at bay, as the continuing problem involving this company's use of the city streets for its personal parking lots will be discussed at the Governmental Affairs Committee later this month. Even though Betro as stated earlier, is expected to be out of town for quite a spell, Schiavone and his twin, Councilman Ed Adkison will bring this issue to the table. No word on whether Union Pacific will also have someone send someone to the meeting.



Also on the agenda, is a meeting by the Land Use committee to decide how many chickens people will be able to keep on their properties. The avian kind, not the political kind.










"Sentence first, verdict afterwards. "





---Lewis Carroll who did not sit on the CPRC's discussion of how to "approve" minority reports




"I'm going to ask you point blank. Is the CPRC having its strings pulled by the city manager's office?"

---Candidate X, earlier this week

Interviews are concluded in the first round of the screening process of the nine candidates who are vying for the very much coveted position of executive manager of the Community Police Review Commission. This process took all day, and it allowed community members on a panel to almost feel like they were part of a process, albeit a fairly staged one.


Word is that the lucky individual who lands this job will have no independence whatsoever but will be once again, hamstrung by the city manager's office particularly Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis. After all, the response to Candidate X would have to be and was, absolutely.



The CPRC is still drafting its public report on the Lee Deante Brown shooting, in what CPRC Chair Brian Pearcy diplomatically called a "work in progress". But first before its members argued with dissenting opinion, Jim Ward, they broke bread together alongside Lt. Mike Perea feasting on sandwiches, a veggie plate and bottled water, while the community sat on the sidelines licking its lips at the consumption of food its taxes paid for. Later, some attendees sampled the leftover food almost like thieves in the night.

Such is the state of affairs with the CPRC, the city, the department and the community in the past year. Whether it's an effective oversight mechanism anymore is debatable, but it is still good theater, albeit without refreshments.

By the time the smoke cleared at this meeting, there was some resolution to the ongoing discussion on whether or not there would be a minority report released and whether or not it would have to be reviewed by those approving the majority opinion. It's the third round of the same discussion which isn't helped much by Priamos changing his legal opinion on the matter with the weather at City Hall.

First, the CPRC couldn't release a minority report relating to the incustody death of Terry Rabb because the CPRC had to vote on whether or not to allow that, according to Priamos. The CPRC voted no and no minority report was officially released although one written by Commissioner Jim Ward was circulated and discussed here. What was amazing is how Priamos could have said that such a vote was necessary. A minority report by nature is a dissenting opinion and thus doesn't need prior approval by the majority of a body making a decision on an issue. That's something that most people learn in American Civics 101 but apparently that doesn't necessarily include people at City Hall. If the process works for the United States Supreme Court, it should work for the CPRC.

Commissioner Steve Simpson said that he supported the inclusion of a minority report. He's an interesting guy, advocating one side one moment, then coming from the opposite side, the next but at least he's expressing an opinion in a room that spends an awful lot of time in silence. The only time you hear from some commissioners is when they raise their hands to try to vote a motion down that they haven't even said anything against during the discussion.

Simpson did go out on a limb for Ward, albeit for a while.

"I will fight for Jim Ward's right to publish it," Simpson said, "Any vote against him publishing it would be derelict."

Simpson continued to try to drive this point home, even asking Priamos what he was smoking when he found his legal interpretation of minority reports hard to follow or hard to swallow. Priamos was pretty ticked off about that, as Pearcy chastised Simpson for his comments and Priamos reminded the commissioners that staff members like himself had the right to be treated respectfully. It almost looked like he was going to tear up but he sat there like a trooper and responded to several inquiries by Simpson who did apologize to the legal eagle whose designer feathers got ruffled.

Simpson then said that Priamos was speaking in "circular logic" and Priamos leaned back in his chair and sighed some more, obviously miffed. Mario Lara played the statue in a stony silence while Pearcy tried to delicately explain to him that no offense but, the commission was denied a trained person to help them through the process.

Ouch.

Pearcy revisited the issue of how you can't see a black taser on Black skin and complained against those who made it a "racial issue" including Woodie Rucker-Hughes, who chairs the local NAACP and Jennifer Vaughn-Blakely who heads the Group.

In his own defense or perhaps just to clarify his position, he simply restated his same position again on how you can't see a black taser on Black skin which at parts was difficult to follow. That was just as well, because watching a White man rail mightily against a straw man that he's erected that someone's called him a racist is always painful to watch. But then many White people have difficulty grasping the difference between being called on a racist statement or action and actually being called a racist, which Pearcy and other commissioners beholden to the Black Taser/Black skin theory were not by anyone.

Those silly Black leaders, they don't know anything about race, racism and that it's White people who determine what's racist and what's not because Black people clearly do not know what to be offended by. Watching himself dig a deeper hole on the issue of race and tasers was interesting, but on a commission that's mostly White and where most of the people of color have resigned in frustration this behavior is hardly surprising. But then again, most of the members of the CPRC have resigned in the past six months. As Candidate X said, you don't see that kind of turnover on a board or commission unless there are serious problems with it.

Maybe it's an LAPD thing with black objects disappearing in the hands of dark-skinned people, though the Riverside County Sheriff's Department once defended a shooting of an unarmed Black man in a case which was very similar to the Elio Carrion shooting minus a camcorder, by saying that because he was Black, he could have had a dark object in his hands that was not visible even to the deputy who shot him. A Riverside County District Attorney's office prosecutor who found that incident egregious once asked me to explain that to him but I told him I didn't even know where to start.

Though with Pearcy, maybe he should have dropped the Black taser/Black skin argument while he was still behind.

Unlike the Riverside Police Department, the Sheriff's Department apparently doesn't even make a stab at cultural sensitivity training for its deputies. But then no one has told them they had to do so. Which is why at one of their cultural diversity training programs at the County Board of Education building, you had deputies cracking inappropriate jokes and laughing at a presentation given by a presentation from the Anti-Defamation League several years back.

After watching the behavior of this mostly White commission, I'm wondering if the Sheriff's Department doesn't have one up on it.

Pearcy's suggestion to fix this situation involving the invisible taser will be made into a policy recommendation, that being that all tasers will be marked in a way so that officers can be able to tell them apart from handguns and apparently Black people as well, through the use of bright coloring to the base of tasers. At first, I wasn't really clear on whether Pearcy was advocating the application of bright fluorescent colors to black tasers or Black people, but then he had lost me and most everyone else with his prior remarks. His followup analysis on this subject made one thing clearer about Pearcy, but that observation has nothing to do with his updated explanation that he provided yesterday which was rife with problems that if the commissioners had fully researched this case, they would have seen.

Watching the commissioners stumble over the "drop the gun" statement that they apparently believed was still said by Ellefson was a bit troubling too. Neither officer mentioned saying it or hearing it in their statements with investigators and even the police department appears to doubt that either officer said it, hence its attribution to "unidentified speaker" on the transcript of Ellefson's belt recording. Pearcy's defense of Ellefson here as elsewhere would have done Ellefson's own attorney proud.

Pearcy used the example of the M26 taser which is solid black as an exhibit in his explanation as to how it could have been difficult to tell it apart from a gun. I guess that's supposed to explain the mysterious statement, drop the gun, that was reported by members of the Riverside Police Department Officer-Involved Death Team to the FBI when that agency did its inquiry, according to information provided by the CPRC Butch Warnberg when he made an inquiry about that statement.

One problem is, that factually speaking, the only M26 at the scene was carried by Officer Michael Paul Stucker and at the time of the shooting, was stashed in the small of his back above his belt because he had decided it wasn't working effectively and he wasn't equipped with a holster to carry it. The taser in question in this shooting, was an X26 assigned to Officer Terry Ellefson and is clearly marked in fluorescent yellow. Pearcy did not show a picture of the more colorful X26 taser in his presentation to the other commissioners.

What's almost funny about this situation is that first Pearcy and several other commissioners said that the civilian witnesses failed to see the taser in Brown's hand because they were far away, not to mention the Black taser/Black man theory. Yet, apparently officers arriving onscene would still be able to see the taser well enough from a distance in a Black man's hand so that Pearcy fretted that they might shoot someone like Brown after mistaking the taser for a handgun. Hence, the need for adding color to the tasers in the future. It's kind of a moot point given that Brown had pretty much already been shot to death before additional officers arrived at the scene.

Then, a policy recommendation was that the officers should in the future if they lose their tasers disengage from the situation by taking three steps backward from the situation, because after all that's what Ellefson and Stucker tried to do by taking two steps backward, well except for the minor details that Stucker was hitting Brown with the baton and Ellefson was shooting him at the time. However, Ellefson took one step from behind Brown to in front of him and then one step backward, according to his statement that he provided for investigators. Stucker had actually moved closer to Brown with his baton after having dealt with being shocked by an errant taser probe, according to his own statement. Besides being factually incorrect, the rest of the relevant discussion among several commissioners was confusing and difficult to follow.

There are at least 10 agencies, mostly smaller ones in this country with officers who dealt with situations similar to what Stucker and Ellefson allegedly faced yet in none of these cases did an officer use lethal force against a person who had taken their taser(s). Perhaps it might be useful for the police department to contact some of these agencies and find out what training they had implemented either before or as a result of critical incident evaluations of these incidents.

So then did all this mean that the majority of the commission believed that Ellefson had used excessive force, but as one of them said, they didn't want to hang an officer out to dry? Even though according to Pearcy's recollection of events, Ellefson stepped backward to put him out of the reach of being contact tased by Brown who was on the ground. Yet, he still did shoot Brown.

But that led to another exposition by Pearcy on his latest theory which was that when Ellefson had said that Brown stood up and lunged towards him, he didn't mean that he was on his feet at the time.

This is what Ellefson said in his statement.

(excerpt)

"And as I moved away, the suspect stood-kind of pushed forward and lunged toward directly at me with the Taser."

That's without mentioning that neither the trajectory analysis nor the autopsy report support Pearcy's latest contention. Nor does the statements provided by Stucker and five out of six of the civilian witnesses. Like has been stated, Pearcy would make an excellent attorney if Ellefson needed one but Ellefson's already got one.

Most of the commissioners during the meeting listened as Simpson and Pearcy did most of the talking.

Peter Hubbard cast several dissenting votes then spent most of the rest of the meeting playing the role of the class clown.

New member, Arthur Santore, cast a vote or two until he figured out that he hadn't been officially sworn in yet(as he's awaiting the clearance from his Live Scan) and wasn't even supposed to vote.

The CPRC moved onward to discussing subpoenas and whether or not either Ellefson or Stucker or both of them should be compelled to appear before the commission to answer questions. When the issue first came up as to how officers could be asked to clarify points in their version of the shooting, Pearcy appeared to forget about the fact that the CPRC had been given the power to issue subpoenas first by the city council, then through the public vote to place it in the city's charter.

"They do not have the power to bring the officer in," Pearcy said.

Then apparently, it dawned on him and several other commissioners that they did have the power to compel the officers to appear before them. Simpson kept asking Pearcy and other commissioners if the subpoena power had any teeth to it, or was a toothless tiger. The other commissioners just smiled grimly as history was revisited.

In 2004, the CPRC had voted 8-0 with one abstention to subpoena former Officer Tina Banfill Gould to ask her questions about her state of mind when she and former officer, Adam Brown shot and killed Volne Lamont Stokes in May 2003. The rationale behind this decision was that Banfill Gould had not given a voluntary statement to the Officer-Involved Death Team, but had given a compelled statement to the Internal Affairs Division for its own administrative review. So Banfill Gould initially refused to even be sworn in when subpoenaed by the CPRC, but after Chief Russ Leach threatened to terminate her for insubordination, she finally appeared with attorney, Michael Lackie but exercised the Fifth Amendment right to not answer questions.

The commission faces an uphill battle this time, given how hostile the political climate is, in that Leach is not likely to compel either officer to appear this time again, given that it's likely that the department has firmly closed the book on the Brown shooting case and Leach has come out with his strong anger and dislike of a commission that disagreed with him on another shooting case. His employers want a commission that is a bright, shiny public relations tool with little power and an executive manager who most likely will be kept tightly under the thumb of Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis although it's probably getting a bit crowded under it because he's got to share that space with police management personnel, head librarians, the human resources director and other key city employees if half of the stories about his micromanagement tendacies are true.

What's interesting is that even though the commissioners took what Simpson called a "straw poll" to exonerate Ellefson in his second shooting, they can still be completely undone by Commissioner Jim Ward's "Where's the beef" questions. And that's not related to a discussion on barbecue which made absolutely no sense whatsoever except to show that they think an officer-involved death of a Black mentally ill man is something to joke about among their own company. They just said we've already explained the how and why of our position and by the way, we get to critique your minority report before it's released.

Which made it clear that what Ward has to bring to the process in writing should be very interesting indeed especially to a community which while being painted as ignorant and unreasonable during an atypical complaint session that took place in an earlier subcommittee meeting is becoming increasingly frustrated with a process it sees as toothless and a tool of both City Hall and the police department.

Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.









Concern is in the Eastside, or what was erroneously called downtown that a recent DUI check point set up in three locations which serve as entrances into that neighborhood mostly apprehended Latino drivers and many of them had their vehicles impounded. Eyewitness accounts said that Black and White motorists sailed through the check points but Latino motorists were pulled over by police officers and apparently not asked about their alcohol consumption but simply for their licenses. Several said they believed that the check points were really set up to apprehend undocumented immigrants who were Latino.









The San Bernardino Sun newspaper has been publishing regular articles on the Ivory J. Webb trial. Webb is the former San Bernardino County Department deputy who is being tried on attempted voluntary manslaughter charges in connection with the onduty shooting of Elio Carrion in January 2006.





This shooting attracted international attention after a video tape of it circulated around the world.





Joe Callanan, the prosecution's expert witness on police tactics, was back on the stand, this time being cross-examined by Webb's attorney, Michael Schwartz.








(excerpt)








But during cross-examination Tuesday, Webb's lawyers portrayed Callanan as a Monday-morning quarterback of sorts, who - unlike Webb - had the luxuries of hindsight and unlimited time in forming his opinions.



"You didn't have two drunks trying to divert your attention, did you?" defense attorney William Hadden asked him.



"No," Callanan said.





"Didn't have to worry about anyone taking your gun?" Hadden asked.



"That's true," Callanan said.