I am the camera and other adages
Update:
As I called it, two days of deliberation by a jury and an acquittal of former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputy Ivory J. Webb. And no, I'm not psychic. The next prediction is that this is the first and last case of its kind that will ever be filed by this county.
Riverside business owners in the area near Brockton where it's nestled close to Mt. Rubidoux are nervous about whether the city will try to acquire property that they either own or are leasing. Some people have already received notification from the city that apparently they may need to find new digs.
The city officials have made a sacred vow. There will be no more fires at the recycling facility that filled the city sky with dark, toxic smoke, so thick it closed the neighboring freeway for three hours.
The Press Enterprise really is into this story, because they have video, slide shows and illustrations about every aspect of this industrial fire which is still under investigation as to what caused it. Spontaneous fires kept combusting even yesterday while the city's fire marshal was keeping a close eye on the site. Apparently, this happened because the plastic formed a hard seal over the actual fire. That's reminiscent of what happens when coal seams catch on fire and may burn for hundreds of years rendering entire towns uninhabitable.
(excerpt)
Riverside Fire Marshal Perry Halterman said fire officials inspected the plastic recycler in December 2005 and found no major issues.
"It was in compliance when we last checked," he said. He added, though, that the fire "throws up red flags and calls for increased enforcement."
Halterman said the business would be monitored and inspected once a year. Before Tuesday's fire, the recycler was on a three-year inspection plan, a rotation used for 40 percent of the city's businesses.
Unlimited Plastics owner Guillermo Rodriguez, 40, said his business was in compliance with city codes.
"The city checks to make sure things are clear," he said. "When they see stuff they don't like, we take care of it."
Assistant City Manager Tom De Santis said if the city were to find that the recycler violated the city fire code, he might have to pay for the cost of fighting the fire.
Five firefighting agencies were involved in battling the blaze, and the city has not figured out the cost, De Santis said.
Riverside and Jurupa are at conflict over a plan by the former city to run a power line under Jurupa to provide its neighbor with more electricity, according to the Press Enterprise. Residents in Jurupa, a mostly Latino town, are upset because they argue that the line will generate electro-magnetic waves where school children congregate.
(excerpt)
"He feels it is better to keep this kind of thing away from people," said John Field, Tavaglione's chief deputy.
Jurupa-area residents have collected more than 150 signatures on a petition submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission.
"They need to reroute (the line) away from homes and schools," said Pedley resident Brian Schafer, who also said he has researched the health issues related to electromagnetic fields produced by high-voltage power lines.
A 2002 study by the California Department of Health Services tied electromagnetic fields to an increased risk of childhood leukemia, adult brain cancer and miscarriage.
Schafer said guidelines published by the European Union require that high-voltage transmission lines be kept at least 200 yards from schools and neighborhoods because of concerns about the health effects, particularly on children.
Ray Hicks, Southern California Edison regional manager, said there is no conclusive proof that electromagnetic fields cause health problems.
"There is no proof either way," he said.
I would imagine that the residents of this town are no more happy to pay the price for Riverside's advancement than the residents of Bloomington, Rialto, Colton and other cities in San Bernardino County were to learn that Riverside was planning to alleviate its noise problems caused by the installation of DHL at March Air Force Reserve Base by sending the air traffic in a northern and easterly direction.
DHL and the March Joint Powers Commission have endeared themselves to the residents of Orangecrest, Mission Grove and Canyoncrest by either flying or authorizing the flying of dozens of aircraft including outdated and very noisy DC-9 airplanes over the skies. The noise keeps people awake all night, the pollution hurts children's lungs and believe it or not, air traffic ascending and descending over your house can prematurely age its roof.
A very irate San Berdoo County said no dice to any changes in flight traffic and the FAA backed it up by saying that changing a flight plan simply to export noise issues to another region was not allowable.
The Press Enterprise editorial board wrote this on the latest crisis of confidence at DHL, from those who have suffered for the past year.
(excerpt)
The heated rhetoric of the noise debate -- and several commissioners' willingness to use the issue for political gain -- has made rational discussion of solutions nearly impossible. Noise from the airport is a real concern, and commissioners along with DHL have a duty to do what they can to minimize the effects on residents. But playing politics with noise hinders that effort.
Nor should anyone on the commission think that withholding a noise study until it's politically convenient is an acceptable course. Operating as openly as possible is always good government practice, but transparency is essential for a March commission that mishandled the approval process for the DHL project. The public found out about an inaccurate flight-path map, faulty revenue projections and a suppressed noise study only after public hearings were over.
It will be interesting to see what the Joint Powers will pull out of their collective hat next.
Hopefully something besides ear plugs. Oh and ballots, because ladies and gentlemen, given that two of the commissioners are running for the same elected position next year, the DHL crisis or what some call Jet-Gate may very well be the issue of Election 2008!
Gregor McGavin of the Press Enterprise has been blogging daily on his coverage of the Ivory J. Webb trial in San Bernardino County.
(excerpt)
The prosecutor is close to wrapping it up now, but I think he's going to use all the time the judge will allow.
He urges the jurors to consider all the evidence in making their decision.
"When you look at what happened, everything that Mr. Webb did, did nothing but incite the situation and create its own emergency."
Now the prosecutor seeks to quickly bolster some of the earlier testimony of witnesses such as Jose Luis Valdes, the man who shot the video of the incident. Under questioning by Schwartz, Valdes contradicted himself several times.
Cope says that, while Valdes "may be the biggest kook around, he does have some good things to show us."
"What Mr. Valdes did have, is he had this," he says, holding the videocamera aloft.
Now Cope finishes up with one last statement about Webb's actions that night.
"He was not acting reasonably, and that is the reason, ladies and gentlemen, that you should find him guilty."
And that is it for closing statements in the Webb trial.
After a month of testimony, the case now goes to the jury for deliberations. What will they decide? Who knows.
But we'll be there when the verdict comes back.
It's interesting with all the criticism that blogging gets by the mainstream media that they themselves are taking a hand at it. But McGavin does a pretty good job at providing gavel to gavel coverage of the Webb trial.
The Press Enterprise did an article about how difficult it is to get convictions in cases where officers are being tried on criminal charges for onduty shootings.
(excerpt)
"Rodney King really opened prosecutors' eyes, and the community's eyes, about how difficult these cases are," Levenson said.
Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Lane Liroff prosecuted that county's first homicide case against a peace officer in 35 years. He said Wednesday that prosecutors face an uphill battle in winning a conviction.
"Jurors when faced with a law enforcement officer involved in a shooting in the line of duty find it very difficult to convict," said Liroff, who lost a 2005 case against Mike Walker, an officer with the state's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.
"They don't want to second-guess them, and fear that blood of future officers will be on them."
But the fear of a loss in court should not deter prosecutors from pursuing police misconduct cases, Liroff said.
"It is terribly important that DAs don't use that as an excuse to not hold law enforcement officers accountable," he said. "That means some cases just have to be tried. It is a tough thing to do. I know that personally."
The Riverside County District Attorney's office hasn't filed any such cases against law enforcement agencies in its jurisdiction. It did convene a grand jury in a case involving one of its own employees, former investigator Daniel Riter who was indicted on murder charges and ultimately convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
District Attorney Rod Pacheco did say that he had changed the procedure for "investigating" such cases but the explanation given by supervising prosecutor, Sara Danville at a public forum in January sounded a lot like the previous practice of reviewing the involved law enforcement agency's own criminal investigation and adding an extra layer of review over it.
So far there has never been a police officer or sheriff deputy facing criminal charges for an onduty shooting and it's most likely there never will be in this county.
In Los Angeles, an investigation has been initiated to determine exactly how a Los Angeles Police Department officer was shot by an experienced firearm instructor, according to the Los Angeles Times.
(excerpt)
"Unfortunately what occurred violated protocols," said Capt. Bill Murphy, head of the Los Angeles Police Department's Training Division. "When an officer picks up the [non-firing] weapons they are supposed to secure their live firearms. But one officer here didn't secure his live firearm and confused it. When he went to test the [mock] weapon he instead fired his real Glock and hit his fellow instructor."
"This is a bad thing," Murphy said, "but it could have been a lot worse."
Sources involved in the investigation said there was no animus between the officers and it seems to purely be, as one person said, a "boneheaded" mistake.
The agency said that if the allegations involving the officer are sustained, he will be sent to receive some counseling. What's disturbing is how you have an experienced and one would assume, highly trained firearms instructor who doesn't exercise the basic caution required to handle a deadly weapon at all times. One moment of carelessness and lapsed judgement can harm or kill someone and the police officer who got shot by one of his own is lucky to still be alive. But statistics show, that police officers are more likely to be wounded or killed by their own guns in their own hands than by someone else. The suicide rate and accidental discharge rates among police officers are fairly high.
What's interesting is that the article emphasized that the fake gun was brightly marked to enable an officer to distinguish it from the real thing, only this highly trained and experienced officer did not. One of the recommendations coming out of the Community Police Review Commission in relation to the Lee Deante Brown shooting case is to mark the tasers in a similar fashion so that officers who arrive can distinguish them from handguns.
This is how the two major models carried by Taser International, Inc. appear right now.
X26 Taser
M26 Advanced Taser
As can be seen, these taser models are marked in fluorescent yellow probably for that very reason. Some of the cartridges sold for both models are also brightly marked in yellow and black stripes while others aren't and instead are a solid shade of silver.
The Riverside Police Department is currently trying to equip its field operations division with X26 tasers, which are a considerably lighter-weighted model compared to the M26. Currently, about 58.8% of the field operations division is equipped with tasers and just under half of the patrol division's officers. The distribution is closely matched in terms of which model is used in the field.
A police officer in Little Rock, Arkansas was apparently caught on video choking a young man and then placing two others in a headlock. The incident has led to an investigation being conducted by the department, according to AOL News.
(excerpt)
Hot Springs Mayor Mike Bush said Tuesday that investigators have talked with witnesses who saw the officer, Joey Williams, stop the skateboarders on a downtown city sidewalk last Thursday. Skateboarding is banned in the area.
The video shows Williams apparently choking one of the skateboarders after forcing him to the ground, then later chasing and wrestling two others while holding them in a headlock.
"Unfortunately, the video shows it pretty good," Bush said.
Bush said he won't be sure of the city's next step until the investigation is complete. The video, taken by Matthew Jon McCormack and another unidentified skater, was posted Monday on YouTube, a popular Internet site.
Another video has surfaced in the case of a Portage Police Department officer who was shown on it slamming the head of a handcuffed woman several times into a squad car, according to nwi.com. Porter County Deputy Prosecutor Adam Burroughs said he was concerned about what he saw on the tape but that it doesn't warrant criminal charges. Maybe the next time this officer does this, it will or maybe it's the prosecutors themselves that aren't paying attention to it or his own department for that matter.
Photographs later showed the woman with a black eye and a large cut on her head.
Maybe the ACLU should take the program it's using in St. Louis, Missouri involving distributing camcorders to people to record police interactions and spread it nationwide.
Oh wait, it looks like it already is spreading.
During the pre-consent decree period of the Riverside Police Department, there were never a shortage of accounts of people including those visiting the city saying that they would get off the 91 freeway for example and watch as a police officer or two would slam a person's, who most often was Black or Latino, head against the car.
For example, an RCC professor's first impression of Riverside was when he got off the 91 freeway onto 14th street in the mid-1990s on his way to a job interview and witnessed a Latino man getting his head slammed against his car by an officer into a state of being unconscious. The professor thought for a minute about calling 9-11 to seek help for the man but thought it might make the situation worse.
A nurse who once worked at a local hospital said she had seen police officers during that same era bring in people they arrested with similar head injuries.
What happened during the 1980s through 1990s particularly concerning incidents involving excessive force or allegations of excessive force and the resultant civil litigation which attracted the attention of federal and state agencies towards the department. Some said in this area, the department was going into a gradual decline, while some call the 1990s, a free fall from grace. Several former employees who worked in the city's human resources department during that decade talked about its loose hiring policies surrounding the police department at recent rallies held in the past several years involving problems in the city's employment ranks.
David Thatcher, who was a research associate with the Urban Institute wrote the most thorough analysis of the police department's journey through the 1990s which was published about six months before the shooting of Tyisha Miller in 1998. Thatcher ended his analysis on a somewhat hopeful note, never realizing how close, chronologically speaking, the department was into plunging itself and the city into the deepest crisis in the city's history.
Here, Thatcher explores the relationships the department had with both the city and the communities during the 1990s as well as fallout from a tumultuous episode involving the creation of the 4-10 working schedule.
(excerpt)
There was little the City Manager’s office could do at that point. As Paulsen puts it, “After he has done it, you weren’t going to put that horse back in the barn. It was just gone.” Paulsen admits that the city probably would have conceded to the union on the 4-10 plan at some point, but he says that it would have insisted on some negotiation: “At the negotiating table we would have put some sort of value on that, and hopefully received something in return for giving that very huge, or perceived huge benefit.”
The episode reflected an uncomfortable lack of communication between city government and the RPD. To be sure, Paulsen and other government officials maintain that their relationship with the police was not necessarily adversarial: When they did get together, police managers and city officials were able to work together amicably. But the two groups often didn’t get together on many issues in the first place, and city hall apparently became increasingly uncomfortable with the way police were making decisions on their own. The basic problem seems to have been that Riverside police—like many of their counterparts in other cities at the time—simply did not want to talk much about departmental strategies and operations, choosing to keep such decisions within the family, as it were: Paulsen and others report that past administrations were not very forthcoming about departmental problems, even though some of them impacted city government directly (for example, the RPD reportedly generated an average of $600,000 annually in claims and lawsuit payments); and elected officials maintain that they had almost no communication with anyone in the police department except the Chief and a single overburdened “liaison” who had been designated to handle their inquiries. Police did, of course, usually confer with city government on decisions about things like budgeting and labor contracts, but the 4-10 episode—and there were reportedly others like it—suggested that even that link was a little bit weak.
The RPD’s relationship to the community was similar, in the sense that the department had a relatively good public image with most of the community, but little direct dialogue outside of individual calls for service and newspaper reports on specific crimes (the department did operate a neighborhood watch program during this period, but it was reportedly not very active). On the positive side, many department members felt that they had “a pretty good relationship with the community” (in the words of one RPD veteran), and a 1992 community survey seemed to bear that impression out, as it found that 66% of its sample rated the department’s overall job performance as “excellent” or “good.”
On the other hand, some groups of Riverside residents apparently had serious concerns about their police department: Most notably, while only 25% of whites rated the RPD’s performance as “only fair” or “poor” in the 1992 survey, 54% of blacks did. Moreover, although the same statistics suggested that the city’s Latino community was only slightly less supportive of the RPD than whites (with 31% rating the department’s performance as “only fair” or “poor”), there was clearly tension between police at least a significant minority of Latinos. This was particularly true in the vocal Casa Blanca neighborhood, where resident groups maintained that the department ignored crime and even emergency calls and accused police of heavy-handed tactics when they did take action. For their part, many police felt threatened by increasingly violent gangs in Casa Blanca, and they denied the charges of both harassment and under-enforcement. Many of these disagreements crystallized in a series of high-profile confrontations between police and Latino community members.1 This sort of high-profile tension with the community was apparently the exception rather than the rule, but even RPD supporters admit that the department tended to weaken its relationships with the community by closing itself off from outside opinion (though they rightly point out that many of their counterparts in the law enforcement world were doing the same thing): “Like many police departments,” one RPD veteran explains, “our attitude pretty much was like ‘We’re the police, and we go to school for this and train, and we’re the experts in this area.’”
Thatcher interviewed city officials and police officers for his analysis. Some of them used their names. Others did not. Most of the thesis paper centers on the brief and turbulent tenure of former chief, Ken Fortier who was brought in from the outside along with his deputy chief, Michael Blakely to run a department which had just kicked out its previous chief.
Current Chief Russ Leach often called Fortier an excellent administrator with poor people skills. His assessment appears to be fairly on mark in some areas outlined by Thatcher. Meaning that Fortier had a vision in terms of how he wanted to reform the agency and bring it out of the 1950s(and the current location and state of the adminstration headquarters still attests to that) and into the modern era, but he didn't have the specialized social skills and patience to pull it off in terms of implementing it in a way that didn't alienate his entire department, an admittedly difficult task.
(excerpt)
Fortier’s community policing reforms centered on the decentralization of the patrol force into the five new policing areas that Smith and his fellow lieutenants had agreed upon, with the goal of creating new units of accountability based on geography that would replace the old ones based on time. Lieutenants would stand at the helm of each of these five miniature police departments, and their role would be transformed completely. As then-Deputy Chief Mike Blakely explains it:
It’s changing from a watch mentality to the area mentality. I’m not responsible just on my eight or ten hour watch when I’m responsible for this part of the town. [I’m responsible for it] seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. And [it’s] giving people personal ownership, so it wasn’t just a matter of holding the fort till my watch gets off: Your watch never got off. So you had a vested interest in looking for long term solutions and not short-term solutions.
Ranks beneath Lieutenant would undergo changes as well: The watch commander duties that Lieutenants previously had—the nuts and bolts of things like staffing, equipment, and notifications—would be devolved to the Sergeant level, adding to that rank’s existing supervisory duties. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy, officers would be encouraged to look behind incidents to identify the problems that underlay them, and they would be empowered to use whatever legal and ethical means were necessary to deal with those problems. The end result of all this restructuring would be the creation of coherent teams of officers and managers who felt responsible for Riverside’s neighborhoods.
To put these ideas into practice, Fortier focused his attention on management, an emphasis that he describes as a matter of personal philosophy:
My background was [in] using my management and supervisory personnel. I tried to get them on board and then rely on them to really work. I mean, I made my own appearances in front of troops and roll-calls, and so on. But the reality is they don’t want to question the chief. They want to, but they really won’t. And I thought, “Well, let’s work through all these management people and we’ll get them on board.”
What's noteworthy is that today, the five areas set up by Fortier, who was credited with bringing community policing to the Riverside Police Department including the POPs program no longer exist, having been replaced by the four regional precincts currently in use. And even more significantly, neither do the sergeant watch commanders thanks to the consent decree that existed between the city and then State Attorney General Bill Lockyer which quickly did away with that system.
In that document, it stated that there had to be lieutenant watch commanders on all shifts except in certain circumstances as authorized by the police chief.
One reason why this came to be was how the roll call sessions were being run by particular sergeant including former Sgt. Al Brown who received several sustained findings against him on investigations launched for making inappropriate comments in roll call, according to complaints filed by former officer, Rene Rodriguez and current officer, Roger Sutton. That situation also led to the installation of close circuit television and video in the roll call room.
The use of promotions to change police culture
There was disagreement about whether the following process helped or hindered the situation, and it depended on who Thatcher interviewed.
(excerpt)
In any case, many around the department recall a general sense that promotions sped up during this period, particularly from the officer level to Sergeant. One RPD veteran recalls: “Fortier came here and then he made fifty-two promotions in like three years, which is incredible because we were averaging like one promotion every three or four months before.” Another elaborates:
It was Fortier’s goal to change the culture of this agency, and one of the ways that he was going to do that was by literally removing all the top layers of management, all of the people. There is only one person here . . . who was a lieutenant when Fortier came. There were only two [people here] who were captains when Fortier came. All the rest of those positions have been changed. There are only three or four sergeants left out of . . . maybe 35 or 40 who were sergeants when Fortier came. You talk about some sweeping, dramatic changes: Ninety percent of our sergeants have less than two years as a sergeant. So, the idea was to change the culture of this agency by changing, literally completely changing the management of the organization.
More important, as the sheer pace of promotions sped up, the criteria used to decide who got them changed dramatically. Fortier embarked on a complete overhaul of the promotions process, assigning a laterally-hired lieutenant to review “best practices” in the field, help develop new written tests, and assemble three panels that would have input into each promotion decision. Finally, officer evaluations began to incorporate problem-solving as a central component, and these evaluations in turn fed into promotion decisions.
Fortier called it a success. Others said it backfired because officers would distrust the process if outside laterals or others viewed as pandering to Fortier, known as "Ken dolls" were promoted instead of inhouse officers. And most of the people who were promoted, it turned out, weren't loyal to the Fortier regime.
That and changes in the process of promoting sergeants which is the entry level for supervisory positions caused a lot of controversy in the ranks, according to Thatcher.
(excerpt)
We’ve got a lot of officers that went straight to Sergeant, and there are the exceptions—there are certain guys that can make that step and adjust to it. But we do have quite a few that have never been a detective, or an officer on a special assignment to the detective bureau, who know the paper flow or know what the DA’s function is, or [the function of] these other allied agencies that we call upon to assist on certain type of things. And they just blindly at times will sign off police reports where a validation for that investigation wasn’t started properly. It’s always detectives who have to come back and try to clean things up.
The birth of the RPAA
(excerpt)
As Smith suggests, Sergeants were partly infuriated at the move because they felt the Chief had bypassed the existing collective bargaining arrangement by awarding a raise to one group within a single bargaining unit. Indeed, the pay issue ultimately led the Lieutenants to break off with the Captains into their own bargaining unit, institutionalizing the growing wedge between Sergeants and upper management. To be sure, Smith explains that break had other sources as well:
There are more Sergeants on the department than Lieutenants and Captains combined, and as a management group we would vote to see who our representative was. Well, there was always a voting block of sergeants: If all the Lieutenants voted and all the Captains voted for the person they wanted, if all the Sergeants voted for the Sergeant they wanted, it was always a win for the Sergeants. The Sergeants put in place a couple of people who had some run ins with Fortier, . . . . and it just got to be very difficult to try to support the chief of police and have all of the Sergeants angry at him.
More concretely, as reform brought issues of compliance and discipline more and more to the fore, the Association focused more and more attention on defending members accused of wrongdoing and filing grievances about unwanted changes. As a result, Smith explains, Lieutenants and Captains found themselves in an increasingly awkward position in the old bargaining group:
[It was a problem] when we got involved in either matters of discipline, or less than discipline: Just simply matters of having some Sergeants—not all of them—do the right thing, follow the policies, implement [programs]. . . . If there was discipline involving a supervisor [i.e., a Sergeant], that comes from a Lieutenant or a Captain. And so when you got into issues of discipline, you were all part of the same management group, yet you were involved in discipline of people within that same group, and it was cumbersome and it was inappropriate.
Nevertheless, even if the flare-up over the pay raise was not the only reason behind the bargaining group’s split, it apparently served as the catalyst.
Really interesting reading. Check Thatcher's report out.
As I called it, two days of deliberation by a jury and an acquittal of former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputy Ivory J. Webb. And no, I'm not psychic. The next prediction is that this is the first and last case of its kind that will ever be filed by this county.
Riverside business owners in the area near Brockton where it's nestled close to Mt. Rubidoux are nervous about whether the city will try to acquire property that they either own or are leasing. Some people have already received notification from the city that apparently they may need to find new digs.
The city officials have made a sacred vow. There will be no more fires at the recycling facility that filled the city sky with dark, toxic smoke, so thick it closed the neighboring freeway for three hours.
The Press Enterprise really is into this story, because they have video, slide shows and illustrations about every aspect of this industrial fire which is still under investigation as to what caused it. Spontaneous fires kept combusting even yesterday while the city's fire marshal was keeping a close eye on the site. Apparently, this happened because the plastic formed a hard seal over the actual fire. That's reminiscent of what happens when coal seams catch on fire and may burn for hundreds of years rendering entire towns uninhabitable.
(excerpt)
Riverside Fire Marshal Perry Halterman said fire officials inspected the plastic recycler in December 2005 and found no major issues.
"It was in compliance when we last checked," he said. He added, though, that the fire "throws up red flags and calls for increased enforcement."
Halterman said the business would be monitored and inspected once a year. Before Tuesday's fire, the recycler was on a three-year inspection plan, a rotation used for 40 percent of the city's businesses.
Unlimited Plastics owner Guillermo Rodriguez, 40, said his business was in compliance with city codes.
"The city checks to make sure things are clear," he said. "When they see stuff they don't like, we take care of it."
Assistant City Manager Tom De Santis said if the city were to find that the recycler violated the city fire code, he might have to pay for the cost of fighting the fire.
Five firefighting agencies were involved in battling the blaze, and the city has not figured out the cost, De Santis said.
Riverside and Jurupa are at conflict over a plan by the former city to run a power line under Jurupa to provide its neighbor with more electricity, according to the Press Enterprise. Residents in Jurupa, a mostly Latino town, are upset because they argue that the line will generate electro-magnetic waves where school children congregate.
(excerpt)
"He feels it is better to keep this kind of thing away from people," said John Field, Tavaglione's chief deputy.
Jurupa-area residents have collected more than 150 signatures on a petition submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission.
"They need to reroute (the line) away from homes and schools," said Pedley resident Brian Schafer, who also said he has researched the health issues related to electromagnetic fields produced by high-voltage power lines.
A 2002 study by the California Department of Health Services tied electromagnetic fields to an increased risk of childhood leukemia, adult brain cancer and miscarriage.
Schafer said guidelines published by the European Union require that high-voltage transmission lines be kept at least 200 yards from schools and neighborhoods because of concerns about the health effects, particularly on children.
Ray Hicks, Southern California Edison regional manager, said there is no conclusive proof that electromagnetic fields cause health problems.
"There is no proof either way," he said.
I would imagine that the residents of this town are no more happy to pay the price for Riverside's advancement than the residents of Bloomington, Rialto, Colton and other cities in San Bernardino County were to learn that Riverside was planning to alleviate its noise problems caused by the installation of DHL at March Air Force Reserve Base by sending the air traffic in a northern and easterly direction.
DHL and the March Joint Powers Commission have endeared themselves to the residents of Orangecrest, Mission Grove and Canyoncrest by either flying or authorizing the flying of dozens of aircraft including outdated and very noisy DC-9 airplanes over the skies. The noise keeps people awake all night, the pollution hurts children's lungs and believe it or not, air traffic ascending and descending over your house can prematurely age its roof.
A very irate San Berdoo County said no dice to any changes in flight traffic and the FAA backed it up by saying that changing a flight plan simply to export noise issues to another region was not allowable.
The Press Enterprise editorial board wrote this on the latest crisis of confidence at DHL, from those who have suffered for the past year.
(excerpt)
The heated rhetoric of the noise debate -- and several commissioners' willingness to use the issue for political gain -- has made rational discussion of solutions nearly impossible. Noise from the airport is a real concern, and commissioners along with DHL have a duty to do what they can to minimize the effects on residents. But playing politics with noise hinders that effort.
Nor should anyone on the commission think that withholding a noise study until it's politically convenient is an acceptable course. Operating as openly as possible is always good government practice, but transparency is essential for a March commission that mishandled the approval process for the DHL project. The public found out about an inaccurate flight-path map, faulty revenue projections and a suppressed noise study only after public hearings were over.
It will be interesting to see what the Joint Powers will pull out of their collective hat next.
Hopefully something besides ear plugs. Oh and ballots, because ladies and gentlemen, given that two of the commissioners are running for the same elected position next year, the DHL crisis or what some call Jet-Gate may very well be the issue of Election 2008!
Gregor McGavin of the Press Enterprise has been blogging daily on his coverage of the Ivory J. Webb trial in San Bernardino County.
(excerpt)
The prosecutor is close to wrapping it up now, but I think he's going to use all the time the judge will allow.
He urges the jurors to consider all the evidence in making their decision.
"When you look at what happened, everything that Mr. Webb did, did nothing but incite the situation and create its own emergency."
Now the prosecutor seeks to quickly bolster some of the earlier testimony of witnesses such as Jose Luis Valdes, the man who shot the video of the incident. Under questioning by Schwartz, Valdes contradicted himself several times.
Cope says that, while Valdes "may be the biggest kook around, he does have some good things to show us."
"What Mr. Valdes did have, is he had this," he says, holding the videocamera aloft.
Now Cope finishes up with one last statement about Webb's actions that night.
"He was not acting reasonably, and that is the reason, ladies and gentlemen, that you should find him guilty."
And that is it for closing statements in the Webb trial.
After a month of testimony, the case now goes to the jury for deliberations. What will they decide? Who knows.
But we'll be there when the verdict comes back.
It's interesting with all the criticism that blogging gets by the mainstream media that they themselves are taking a hand at it. But McGavin does a pretty good job at providing gavel to gavel coverage of the Webb trial.
The Press Enterprise did an article about how difficult it is to get convictions in cases where officers are being tried on criminal charges for onduty shootings.
(excerpt)
"Rodney King really opened prosecutors' eyes, and the community's eyes, about how difficult these cases are," Levenson said.
Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Lane Liroff prosecuted that county's first homicide case against a peace officer in 35 years. He said Wednesday that prosecutors face an uphill battle in winning a conviction.
"Jurors when faced with a law enforcement officer involved in a shooting in the line of duty find it very difficult to convict," said Liroff, who lost a 2005 case against Mike Walker, an officer with the state's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.
"They don't want to second-guess them, and fear that blood of future officers will be on them."
But the fear of a loss in court should not deter prosecutors from pursuing police misconduct cases, Liroff said.
"It is terribly important that DAs don't use that as an excuse to not hold law enforcement officers accountable," he said. "That means some cases just have to be tried. It is a tough thing to do. I know that personally."
The Riverside County District Attorney's office hasn't filed any such cases against law enforcement agencies in its jurisdiction. It did convene a grand jury in a case involving one of its own employees, former investigator Daniel Riter who was indicted on murder charges and ultimately convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
District Attorney Rod Pacheco did say that he had changed the procedure for "investigating" such cases but the explanation given by supervising prosecutor, Sara Danville at a public forum in January sounded a lot like the previous practice of reviewing the involved law enforcement agency's own criminal investigation and adding an extra layer of review over it.
So far there has never been a police officer or sheriff deputy facing criminal charges for an onduty shooting and it's most likely there never will be in this county.
In Los Angeles, an investigation has been initiated to determine exactly how a Los Angeles Police Department officer was shot by an experienced firearm instructor, according to the Los Angeles Times.
(excerpt)
"Unfortunately what occurred violated protocols," said Capt. Bill Murphy, head of the Los Angeles Police Department's Training Division. "When an officer picks up the [non-firing] weapons they are supposed to secure their live firearms. But one officer here didn't secure his live firearm and confused it. When he went to test the [mock] weapon he instead fired his real Glock and hit his fellow instructor."
"This is a bad thing," Murphy said, "but it could have been a lot worse."
Sources involved in the investigation said there was no animus between the officers and it seems to purely be, as one person said, a "boneheaded" mistake.
The agency said that if the allegations involving the officer are sustained, he will be sent to receive some counseling. What's disturbing is how you have an experienced and one would assume, highly trained firearms instructor who doesn't exercise the basic caution required to handle a deadly weapon at all times. One moment of carelessness and lapsed judgement can harm or kill someone and the police officer who got shot by one of his own is lucky to still be alive. But statistics show, that police officers are more likely to be wounded or killed by their own guns in their own hands than by someone else. The suicide rate and accidental discharge rates among police officers are fairly high.
What's interesting is that the article emphasized that the fake gun was brightly marked to enable an officer to distinguish it from the real thing, only this highly trained and experienced officer did not. One of the recommendations coming out of the Community Police Review Commission in relation to the Lee Deante Brown shooting case is to mark the tasers in a similar fashion so that officers who arrive can distinguish them from handguns.
This is how the two major models carried by Taser International, Inc. appear right now.
X26 Taser
M26 Advanced Taser
As can be seen, these taser models are marked in fluorescent yellow probably for that very reason. Some of the cartridges sold for both models are also brightly marked in yellow and black stripes while others aren't and instead are a solid shade of silver.
The Riverside Police Department is currently trying to equip its field operations division with X26 tasers, which are a considerably lighter-weighted model compared to the M26. Currently, about 58.8% of the field operations division is equipped with tasers and just under half of the patrol division's officers. The distribution is closely matched in terms of which model is used in the field.
A police officer in Little Rock, Arkansas was apparently caught on video choking a young man and then placing two others in a headlock. The incident has led to an investigation being conducted by the department, according to AOL News.
(excerpt)
Hot Springs Mayor Mike Bush said Tuesday that investigators have talked with witnesses who saw the officer, Joey Williams, stop the skateboarders on a downtown city sidewalk last Thursday. Skateboarding is banned in the area.
The video shows Williams apparently choking one of the skateboarders after forcing him to the ground, then later chasing and wrestling two others while holding them in a headlock.
"Unfortunately, the video shows it pretty good," Bush said.
Bush said he won't be sure of the city's next step until the investigation is complete. The video, taken by Matthew Jon McCormack and another unidentified skater, was posted Monday on YouTube, a popular Internet site.
Another video has surfaced in the case of a Portage Police Department officer who was shown on it slamming the head of a handcuffed woman several times into a squad car, according to nwi.com. Porter County Deputy Prosecutor Adam Burroughs said he was concerned about what he saw on the tape but that it doesn't warrant criminal charges. Maybe the next time this officer does this, it will or maybe it's the prosecutors themselves that aren't paying attention to it or his own department for that matter.
Photographs later showed the woman with a black eye and a large cut on her head.
Maybe the ACLU should take the program it's using in St. Louis, Missouri involving distributing camcorders to people to record police interactions and spread it nationwide.
Oh wait, it looks like it already is spreading.
During the pre-consent decree period of the Riverside Police Department, there were never a shortage of accounts of people including those visiting the city saying that they would get off the 91 freeway for example and watch as a police officer or two would slam a person's, who most often was Black or Latino, head against the car.
For example, an RCC professor's first impression of Riverside was when he got off the 91 freeway onto 14th street in the mid-1990s on his way to a job interview and witnessed a Latino man getting his head slammed against his car by an officer into a state of being unconscious. The professor thought for a minute about calling 9-11 to seek help for the man but thought it might make the situation worse.
A nurse who once worked at a local hospital said she had seen police officers during that same era bring in people they arrested with similar head injuries.
What happened during the 1980s through 1990s particularly concerning incidents involving excessive force or allegations of excessive force and the resultant civil litigation which attracted the attention of federal and state agencies towards the department. Some said in this area, the department was going into a gradual decline, while some call the 1990s, a free fall from grace. Several former employees who worked in the city's human resources department during that decade talked about its loose hiring policies surrounding the police department at recent rallies held in the past several years involving problems in the city's employment ranks.
David Thatcher, who was a research associate with the Urban Institute wrote the most thorough analysis of the police department's journey through the 1990s which was published about six months before the shooting of Tyisha Miller in 1998. Thatcher ended his analysis on a somewhat hopeful note, never realizing how close, chronologically speaking, the department was into plunging itself and the city into the deepest crisis in the city's history.
Here, Thatcher explores the relationships the department had with both the city and the communities during the 1990s as well as fallout from a tumultuous episode involving the creation of the 4-10 working schedule.
(excerpt)
There was little the City Manager’s office could do at that point. As Paulsen puts it, “After he has done it, you weren’t going to put that horse back in the barn. It was just gone.” Paulsen admits that the city probably would have conceded to the union on the 4-10 plan at some point, but he says that it would have insisted on some negotiation: “At the negotiating table we would have put some sort of value on that, and hopefully received something in return for giving that very huge, or perceived huge benefit.”
The episode reflected an uncomfortable lack of communication between city government and the RPD. To be sure, Paulsen and other government officials maintain that their relationship with the police was not necessarily adversarial: When they did get together, police managers and city officials were able to work together amicably. But the two groups often didn’t get together on many issues in the first place, and city hall apparently became increasingly uncomfortable with the way police were making decisions on their own. The basic problem seems to have been that Riverside police—like many of their counterparts in other cities at the time—simply did not want to talk much about departmental strategies and operations, choosing to keep such decisions within the family, as it were: Paulsen and others report that past administrations were not very forthcoming about departmental problems, even though some of them impacted city government directly (for example, the RPD reportedly generated an average of $600,000 annually in claims and lawsuit payments); and elected officials maintain that they had almost no communication with anyone in the police department except the Chief and a single overburdened “liaison” who had been designated to handle their inquiries. Police did, of course, usually confer with city government on decisions about things like budgeting and labor contracts, but the 4-10 episode—and there were reportedly others like it—suggested that even that link was a little bit weak.
The RPD’s relationship to the community was similar, in the sense that the department had a relatively good public image with most of the community, but little direct dialogue outside of individual calls for service and newspaper reports on specific crimes (the department did operate a neighborhood watch program during this period, but it was reportedly not very active). On the positive side, many department members felt that they had “a pretty good relationship with the community” (in the words of one RPD veteran), and a 1992 community survey seemed to bear that impression out, as it found that 66% of its sample rated the department’s overall job performance as “excellent” or “good.”
On the other hand, some groups of Riverside residents apparently had serious concerns about their police department: Most notably, while only 25% of whites rated the RPD’s performance as “only fair” or “poor” in the 1992 survey, 54% of blacks did. Moreover, although the same statistics suggested that the city’s Latino community was only slightly less supportive of the RPD than whites (with 31% rating the department’s performance as “only fair” or “poor”), there was clearly tension between police at least a significant minority of Latinos. This was particularly true in the vocal Casa Blanca neighborhood, where resident groups maintained that the department ignored crime and even emergency calls and accused police of heavy-handed tactics when they did take action. For their part, many police felt threatened by increasingly violent gangs in Casa Blanca, and they denied the charges of both harassment and under-enforcement. Many of these disagreements crystallized in a series of high-profile confrontations between police and Latino community members.1 This sort of high-profile tension with the community was apparently the exception rather than the rule, but even RPD supporters admit that the department tended to weaken its relationships with the community by closing itself off from outside opinion (though they rightly point out that many of their counterparts in the law enforcement world were doing the same thing): “Like many police departments,” one RPD veteran explains, “our attitude pretty much was like ‘We’re the police, and we go to school for this and train, and we’re the experts in this area.’”
Thatcher interviewed city officials and police officers for his analysis. Some of them used their names. Others did not. Most of the thesis paper centers on the brief and turbulent tenure of former chief, Ken Fortier who was brought in from the outside along with his deputy chief, Michael Blakely to run a department which had just kicked out its previous chief.
Current Chief Russ Leach often called Fortier an excellent administrator with poor people skills. His assessment appears to be fairly on mark in some areas outlined by Thatcher. Meaning that Fortier had a vision in terms of how he wanted to reform the agency and bring it out of the 1950s(and the current location and state of the adminstration headquarters still attests to that) and into the modern era, but he didn't have the specialized social skills and patience to pull it off in terms of implementing it in a way that didn't alienate his entire department, an admittedly difficult task.
(excerpt)
Fortier’s community policing reforms centered on the decentralization of the patrol force into the five new policing areas that Smith and his fellow lieutenants had agreed upon, with the goal of creating new units of accountability based on geography that would replace the old ones based on time. Lieutenants would stand at the helm of each of these five miniature police departments, and their role would be transformed completely. As then-Deputy Chief Mike Blakely explains it:
It’s changing from a watch mentality to the area mentality. I’m not responsible just on my eight or ten hour watch when I’m responsible for this part of the town. [I’m responsible for it] seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. And [it’s] giving people personal ownership, so it wasn’t just a matter of holding the fort till my watch gets off: Your watch never got off. So you had a vested interest in looking for long term solutions and not short-term solutions.
Ranks beneath Lieutenant would undergo changes as well: The watch commander duties that Lieutenants previously had—the nuts and bolts of things like staffing, equipment, and notifications—would be devolved to the Sergeant level, adding to that rank’s existing supervisory duties. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy, officers would be encouraged to look behind incidents to identify the problems that underlay them, and they would be empowered to use whatever legal and ethical means were necessary to deal with those problems. The end result of all this restructuring would be the creation of coherent teams of officers and managers who felt responsible for Riverside’s neighborhoods.
To put these ideas into practice, Fortier focused his attention on management, an emphasis that he describes as a matter of personal philosophy:
My background was [in] using my management and supervisory personnel. I tried to get them on board and then rely on them to really work. I mean, I made my own appearances in front of troops and roll-calls, and so on. But the reality is they don’t want to question the chief. They want to, but they really won’t. And I thought, “Well, let’s work through all these management people and we’ll get them on board.”
What's noteworthy is that today, the five areas set up by Fortier, who was credited with bringing community policing to the Riverside Police Department including the POPs program no longer exist, having been replaced by the four regional precincts currently in use. And even more significantly, neither do the sergeant watch commanders thanks to the consent decree that existed between the city and then State Attorney General Bill Lockyer which quickly did away with that system.
In that document, it stated that there had to be lieutenant watch commanders on all shifts except in certain circumstances as authorized by the police chief.
One reason why this came to be was how the roll call sessions were being run by particular sergeant including former Sgt. Al Brown who received several sustained findings against him on investigations launched for making inappropriate comments in roll call, according to complaints filed by former officer, Rene Rodriguez and current officer, Roger Sutton. That situation also led to the installation of close circuit television and video in the roll call room.
The use of promotions to change police culture
There was disagreement about whether the following process helped or hindered the situation, and it depended on who Thatcher interviewed.
(excerpt)
In any case, many around the department recall a general sense that promotions sped up during this period, particularly from the officer level to Sergeant. One RPD veteran recalls: “Fortier came here and then he made fifty-two promotions in like three years, which is incredible because we were averaging like one promotion every three or four months before.” Another elaborates:
It was Fortier’s goal to change the culture of this agency, and one of the ways that he was going to do that was by literally removing all the top layers of management, all of the people. There is only one person here . . . who was a lieutenant when Fortier came. There were only two [people here] who were captains when Fortier came. All the rest of those positions have been changed. There are only three or four sergeants left out of . . . maybe 35 or 40 who were sergeants when Fortier came. You talk about some sweeping, dramatic changes: Ninety percent of our sergeants have less than two years as a sergeant. So, the idea was to change the culture of this agency by changing, literally completely changing the management of the organization.
More important, as the sheer pace of promotions sped up, the criteria used to decide who got them changed dramatically. Fortier embarked on a complete overhaul of the promotions process, assigning a laterally-hired lieutenant to review “best practices” in the field, help develop new written tests, and assemble three panels that would have input into each promotion decision. Finally, officer evaluations began to incorporate problem-solving as a central component, and these evaluations in turn fed into promotion decisions.
Fortier called it a success. Others said it backfired because officers would distrust the process if outside laterals or others viewed as pandering to Fortier, known as "Ken dolls" were promoted instead of inhouse officers. And most of the people who were promoted, it turned out, weren't loyal to the Fortier regime.
That and changes in the process of promoting sergeants which is the entry level for supervisory positions caused a lot of controversy in the ranks, according to Thatcher.
(excerpt)
We’ve got a lot of officers that went straight to Sergeant, and there are the exceptions—there are certain guys that can make that step and adjust to it. But we do have quite a few that have never been a detective, or an officer on a special assignment to the detective bureau, who know the paper flow or know what the DA’s function is, or [the function of] these other allied agencies that we call upon to assist on certain type of things. And they just blindly at times will sign off police reports where a validation for that investigation wasn’t started properly. It’s always detectives who have to come back and try to clean things up.
The birth of the RPAA
(excerpt)
As Smith suggests, Sergeants were partly infuriated at the move because they felt the Chief had bypassed the existing collective bargaining arrangement by awarding a raise to one group within a single bargaining unit. Indeed, the pay issue ultimately led the Lieutenants to break off with the Captains into their own bargaining unit, institutionalizing the growing wedge between Sergeants and upper management. To be sure, Smith explains that break had other sources as well:
There are more Sergeants on the department than Lieutenants and Captains combined, and as a management group we would vote to see who our representative was. Well, there was always a voting block of sergeants: If all the Lieutenants voted and all the Captains voted for the person they wanted, if all the Sergeants voted for the Sergeant they wanted, it was always a win for the Sergeants. The Sergeants put in place a couple of people who had some run ins with Fortier, . . . . and it just got to be very difficult to try to support the chief of police and have all of the Sergeants angry at him.
More concretely, as reform brought issues of compliance and discipline more and more to the fore, the Association focused more and more attention on defending members accused of wrongdoing and filing grievances about unwanted changes. As a result, Smith explains, Lieutenants and Captains found themselves in an increasingly awkward position in the old bargaining group:
[It was a problem] when we got involved in either matters of discipline, or less than discipline: Just simply matters of having some Sergeants—not all of them—do the right thing, follow the policies, implement [programs]. . . . If there was discipline involving a supervisor [i.e., a Sergeant], that comes from a Lieutenant or a Captain. And so when you got into issues of discipline, you were all part of the same management group, yet you were involved in discipline of people within that same group, and it was cumbersome and it was inappropriate.
Nevertheless, even if the flare-up over the pay raise was not the only reason behind the bargaining group’s split, it apparently served as the catalyst.
Really interesting reading. Check Thatcher's report out.
Labels: City elections, officer-involved shootings, public forums in all places, Riverside goes NIMBY
posted by Five Before Midnight | 4:24 PM
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