Dude, where's my park: The task forces

I ran into an interesting critique of one of my postings at Inlandempire.craigslist.org which actually could have been written by myself a few years ago when I was new to everything at City Hall and actually believed in the task force process before I saw how things really worked in regards to the city's utilization of task forces and community input.


I also used to be really excited at public forums like this too and was even ready to release the doves a couple times by their end except for the one case where doves actually were released. However, experience and admittedly, cynicism developed after I saw so few really good recommendations provided by community task forces bear fruition. I even served on one in 1996 where after a long discussion process, good recommendations on addressing race relations in the city of Riverside were presented to the city which responded by not responding at all. In fact, the city told us that it wasn't responding because it didn't want us to bite off more than we could chew because then we might become disheartened. The city's excuse was that they were afraid we would become undone if it showed too much enthusiasm for the recommendations.

But many people who attended the final meeting felt disheartened because lack of action can also foster a sense of discouragement among participants in a process.

This was an important lesson. It's been repeated many times since.


My participation in that process was a good gateway to become involved in civic issues but it wasn't because the city lay out the welcome wagon. It's still exciting to see the ideas brought to the table by city residents on what they would like to see with their parks but that's usually the best part of the program. Not all of them can be implemented in one project but if more of them were for more projects then this city would in a better place.

But the current administration is not really all that into public participation as shown when it passed restrictions on public participation at city council meetings in July 2005 soon after it hired a city management team that really appears to dislike public participation as shown by its attempts to manipulate and micromanage the Human Relations Commission, the Human Resources Board and the Community Police Review Commission. While compiling information on the latter in order to implement further changes for it, the city manager's office excluded from its list of "stake holders" in the CPRC, the 300,000 residents of this city.

So no, the city manager's team is not really all that community friendly nor do they really care what the community has to say, which became clear albeit behind closed doors at a meeting with community leaders that took place earlier this year regarding the CPRC. And again, the city government, all eight of its members, knew this when it hired the current team.

Four of those city council members fired a city manager who was known for working with and listening to city residents from different communities. It was a quality that didn't exactly ensure career longevity in Riverside. At about the time that George Carvalho was terminated by the short-lived GASS quartet, the city council was apparently taking a look in another direction.

After all, several city council members commented after the hiring of his successor, Brad Hudson that they'd been interested in hiring Hudson for at least a year but never thought they had a chance to bring him on board.

It also appears that all this concern about whether or not the public has the right to contribute input to what's going on in the city seems to peak during election cycles. And it's interesting to see how elected officials and their most fervent supporters play with language and the definitions of certain words in terms of how they shape their political agendas whether or not it's actually an election year. In the future, there will be postings on exactly how this is done and what key words are often used and why to either prop up political agendas or marginalize those who even question them and their actions.

Interestingly enough, the city's management uses these same tactics on its workforce, especially outspoken critics of its practices within its workforce. But then how much experience did the city management team bring to Riverside when it came to addressing labor issues?


Not that it's not still enlightening to read articles written by individuals who still get excited every time a politician listens to his or her constituents for about 30 minutes. After all, compared to some city council meetings lately, that's actually quite a long time.



The individuals who I spoke with who attended that meeting on Tequesquite Park were as concerned when they arrived about the use of the park land or more so than when they left. They did not attempt to derail the meeting nor were they engaging in the use of propaganda. In fact, they didn't provide public comment and some in fact, had to leave early because they had other responsibilities to address in their lives.

But if simple disagreement with a city council member's agenda during an election year is going to lead to accusations of derailment and propaganda spouting, then it's no wonder more people who have concerns and questions about how the city spends their money or utilizes their resources don't speak up or speak out.

The input given by the city's residents was easily the highpoint of the evening but not everyone there spoke publicly. The problem is, that the public when given the opportunity always provides great input, but most of the time, the city government ignores that after the forums are done and does what it wants anyway.

The public input was easily the high point of the meeting held to discuss the future of Fairmount Park. Ideas included installing a children's museum, a historical center and preserving areas as bird watching zones, whether they be bluebirds, ducks or other species. Fred and Ginger, the two egrets who reside in the lake might agree to this recommendation.

It would have been nice to see a more diverse cross-section of the city of Riverside represented on the task force. Of course, it would be nice to see that on most task forces.


The task forces involving both city parks included only White individuals and most of these were men. Not that this is exactly unique to task forces put together by the city's elected officials. For Whites, it's difficult to see how that practice excludes other people. One Latina at the meeting on Tequesquite Park spoke up early asking for the residency of the task force members as she found it hard to believe that drawing from the city pool especially from the downtown area(where actually few task force members were from) would only draw White men and women.

It's perplexing that there were no Black men or women on the task forces given that one of the largest and longest running family gatherings at Fairmount Park is one involving members of some of the earliest Black families in Riverside. One of the best histories I've read on Fairmount Park came from the perspective of these early families and their reunions held there.

There are many different ways to look at the same meeting, depending on where you are coming from.

The membership of a task force itself can show this and elicit different opinions from different people. To my critic, there was no mention of the ethnic and racial makeup of the task force but if he or she is White, there probably wouldn't be, because Whites often take it for granted that they will always be represented or even dominate the city's task forces and other ad hoc committees.

To me, it was noticeable and showed a common thread found in the composition of many of the city's task forces that is disturbing in a city that some day will be majority minority even with the incoming "White flight" from neighboring Orange County.

To the Latina, it led to her feeling excluded from the process because she felt that Latinas and other men and women of color had been excluded from the task force and for whatever reason, they were. She asked questions about the neighborhoods which those on it represented and was pretty much brushed off by Betro saying that this information wouldn't be provided to the public.

Interestingly enough, this woman and I had first met on the same committee in 1996.


Not everyone interested in this project even attended the meeting nor could everyone. As stated, the summer's months are a terrible time to hold community forums but our politicians are fully aware of this. I talked to many people interested in the fate of Tequesquite Park who can't attend the forum meetings but still have opinions on the issues surrounding its use.


Still, given that the original intention of Councilman Dom Betro was to sell off portions of Tequesquite Park and parts of Fairmount Park are still on the chopping block to be sold to private developers in order to finance other Riverside Renaissance projects, I'll err on the side of caution. After all, this status didn't begin to change until it became a major campaign issue in Betro's ward. In addition, after watching the outcome of task force reports when it comes to the city's record of turning recommendations into actions, I'll hold onto my skepticism for a while longer.

The two task forces would have more credibility if it was being chaired by a member of the Park and Recreation Commission rather than a sitting city council member who will be reporting back to that group. The decision to have a council member chair it just makes it clear that the current administration doesn't trust having a mere city resident perform this job. But then after seeing how the city government and its employees have treated the city's boards and commissions as of late, this development wasn't all that surprising.

Besides, it's difficult to put much faith in a city department where anonymous threats are sent to its own employees right before they are to be interviewed in an inhouse investigation involving alleged misconduct by other employees and no protective or investigative action is taken to find the perpetrators or protect the rights of these city employees during an investigation from harassment, retaliation and threats of the most cowardly kind, being the ones which of course don't come with names attached to them.

If the city cares so little about the well-being of employees in this department, then it's difficult to believe it cares how city residents feel about the city's parks.

I've always believed that you can look at the city of Riverside and watch how it treats its own workforce because often that's a reflection of how it views and treats the public at large and it's disturbing that the above behavior towards employees is being done at all, let alone that it's apparently not an uncommon occurrence.





Mayor's Night Out will be held in La Sierra South today, at 6:30 pm at Orrenmaa Elementary School. Bring your questions. Maybe some of them will even receive answers.





Former Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputy, John Wayne Leseberg received two years in county jail in relation to convictions for burglary and indecent exposure. However, since he was credited for over 730 days in jail, he was soon released, according to the Press Enterprise.

Leseberg had originally faced charges including elder abuse, assault by a police officer and sexual abuse that could have led to him spending 20 years in state prison but he took a plea bargain.

His victims protested his light sentence at the hearing.


(excerpt)


Two of Leseberg's victims spoke at the sentencing, along with the daughter of one victim, who referred to the sentence as "just a slap on the hand."

Choking back tears as she addressed the courtroom, one victim spoke of her profound shame over what happened and how she feared for her life that night. The fact that a law enforcement officer took advantage of her only deepened her sense of betrayal, the woman said.

"The nightmare you have given me will never go away," she said. Both victims said they now fear any police officers they encounter.

"I called for assistance...and I ended up being victimized," the other tearful victim said, explaining that she was so traumatized by the experience that she has been suicidal.

"I hate you," she said directly to Leseberg, who stood in the courtroom in shackles and showed no emotion as the victims spoke.



Leseberg is one of a group of sheriff deputies facing criminal charges for sexual assault under the color of authority both out in the field and inside the county's jails. He's the first in the group to be given a slap on the wrist for his crimes, but he probably won't be the last.

You wonder how common this odious misconduct is inside any law enforcement agencies and whether law enforcement officers know about it when it is going on and whether or not they report it or look the other way. It certainly seems to be an issue in the Sheriff's Department, but what about other agencies?

Is it really nonexistent, or simply hiding behind the blue wall? After all, if you are a victim of this crime, what's the point of reporting it especially to the same police agency that employs the officer(s) involved?







Fake badges given out by police agencies to supporters may be illegal according to an opinion drafted by State Attorney General Jerry Brown, according to this article in the Press Enterprise. Though not mentioned in the legal opinion, one of the targets involved in this practice for further scrutiny was Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle.


(excerpt)


Doyle said Tuesday that every badge issued by him has been to someone who served a function within the Sheriff's Department, including volunteers and members of his executive council.

Many state and local officials who are not peace officers carry badges, including Riverside County supervisors and some non-law enforcement members of the county district attorney's office, Doyle said.

"If you take the attorney general's interpretation, there is a whole lot of badges that need to be collected," Doyle said. He added he is thinking about asking county supervisors to relinquish their badges.

Doyle said state lawmakers need to consider how far they want to go to rein in the use of badges by those who are not peace officers in light of Brown's opinion.




And why do they give out law enforcement badges to politicians again? This has got to be one of the most stupid examples of political cronyism between law enforcement agencies and politicians ever. It's nice to hear Brown put his foot down on it, so to speak.

Canary in the mine: Minority rule

The city has planned back to back meetings at Fairmount Park on what's going on with both parks that were to be involved in a bait and switch plan under the umbrella of Riverside Renaissance. It was almost to be as noteworthy as the bait and switch involving the Ag park that was done earlier to benefit Friends of the Airport and developer, Chuck Cox who has apparently worked as an engineer for Adkans Engineering which is Councilman Ed Adkison's construction company. However, in this latest case, it was thwarted by some very committed community residents who stood up and let themselves be heard both at civic meetings and through a very impressive letter campaign in the Press Enterprise.


The issues of parks and available open space for parks has been a hot issue in this city especially during election cycles. Two major parcels of land designated to be parks were the focus of intense attention during this past year.



These two parcels of land would be Tequesquite Park and Fairmount Park, both of which had parcels among the acreage allotted to them that were supposed to be divided off and sold off to private development firms to finance other renaissance projects. However, so far that hasn't happened due to efforts by people in this city who are committed to keeping their parks.


The Tequesquite Park Task Force was to meet Monday, July 30 at 6pm while the Fairmount Park Task Force was to meet Tuesday, July 31 also at 6pm.

Of course, during the summer many people interested in the fate of two major city parks will be out of town on vacation, but it's an election year and that's when these things are usually done. Still, at the first meeting of the Tesquesquite Park Task Force, dozens of people braved the summer heat and appeared to voice their opinions on what should be done with that park.

Few of them wanted to surrender every acre of Tequesquite Park to little league sports programs and ball fields. Many felt that there wasn't enough consideration given to seniors and families who might want a place in the park to spend time without being involved in competitive sports. Betro told them that the inclusion of ball fields had been part of the motion approved by the city council but after seeing how loud the applause was for one individual who expressed concern about the entire park being used for ball fields, he said that perhaps two ball fields would be included in the plans for the park.

Resident Eloisa Zermeno didn't believe Betro but anyone who knows her knows that she's tough to fool and asks lots of questions.



People were also confused that there were two separate task forces manned to take public input on what to do with the twin parks and how they were set up in terms of assigning representatives to serve on them. Incumbent Councilman Dom Betro was set to chair the Tequesquite Park Task Force and the item allowing them to do this passed as part of the consent calendar several council meetings ago.



Earlier this year, Betro was all for keeping part of Tequesquite Park, a park and developing the rest of it. But Betro went retro and changed his mind as the battle over the parkland promised to be a hot campaign issue in Election 2007.



Fairmount Park is set to have a strip of parkland adjacent to Market Street sold off for private development. Not too many people are fans of that plan in a city that already has less park land proportionately than the state's average, but that's where it appears the city is going.

After all, it had expected at least $10 million from the sale of part of Tequesquite to go back into its budget for Riverside Renaissance projects. That sale of course was thwarted by an effort to save that park so where's the funding to come from now?



Some people have asked with city coffers running a bit on the dry side and with a recession looming, if the city is going to sell off its park land to developers to finance Riverside Renaissance. Consequently, these developments(pun, intended) in the situation involving city parks have created quite a bit of concern. The issue of selling off Ab Brown Sports Center was taken off the meeting agenda, for now but that recreational facility remains a special area of concern.

Press Enterprise reporter, Doug Haberman weighed in on the meeting here.


(excerpt)


Novelist Gayle Brandeis suggested a skate park for youths but Nuñez and Councilman Dom Betro, who represents the ward that includes Tequesquite Park, said some other location would be better.

Jean Wong, who lives nearby on Braemar Place, recommended a "vita trail" made of rubber or some other material easy on the knees, with exercise stations along the course that people of all ages can use.

Keith Alex, who lives near the park at the base of Mount Rubidoux, garnered the night's loudest applause when he said he was concerned about noise from ball fields and does not favor a "mega sports complex."

Roger Nahas called on the task force and parks officials to be innovative and not fill the acreage with chain-link fences to delineate fields. Some grassy areas can be used for sports without being turned into formal sports fields, he said.





Tonight, it's Fairmount Park's turn at 6pm inside the boathouse at the park.




Dan Bernstein, columnist for the Press Enterprise wrote an interesting column featuring both the "strike team" as it is called over at Riverside County Superior Courthouse and the mayor's annual birthday party, which is also a fundraiser.

The "strike team" are about a dozen judges who will be arriving to try to make a dent in the 1,200 or so criminal trial load until about mid-November. The mayor's bash doesn't mean he's planning to run again, but apparently everyone thinks that Mayor Ron Loveridge is planning to go for a fifth term.




Chuck Washington, the mayor of Temecula participated in an interesting question and answer session in the Press Enterprise on the role of the mayor and city council in terms of how both relate to their constituents.





Meanwhile, some community members are scratching their heads at news that according to City Hall, they apparently are not considered "stake holders" in the Community Police Review Commission. Questions have been asked in terms of who are the stake holders in the process after a statement made by Interim Executive something-or-another Mario Lara concerning the status of a report being conducted on the seven-year-old body by a consultant hired by the city manager's office.



If anyone has any questions about this, direct them to Lara if you can finding him at City Hall in some cubicle some place, far away from the CPRC's small cubicle on the sixth floor.

It's hard for me to address his words without going into a long explanation of the tumultuous history of civilian review in this city and the current relationship between it and a city government which is either indifferent to it or hostile. That current city government has the city manager's office and city attorney's office doing its bidding in terms of what has happened to the CPRC during the several years since it delivered its first(and likely, last) sustained finding on an officer-involved death, in this case that of Summer Marie Lane in 2004.



The law suits filed in the wake of the Lane shooting and the incustody deaths of Terry Rabb, Lee Deante Brown and Douglas Steven Cloud in the past two years presented more of a quandary for the direct employees of the city council and they've acted accordingly. The current poker match by commissioners in regards to the issuance of its public reports, both majority and minority, on the Brown shooting reflect what the CPRC has become in the wake of actions taken by the city manager's office, the city attorney's office and the police department since the secret meetings began allegedly in January 2006 between these agencies and two CPRC commissioners.

The first one took place before the ink on the finding issued on the Lane case had enough time to dry. The Lane case served as a backdrop for the Brown case which is currently being hashed out by the commission.

If the majority of the commissioners on this body were so sure about their conclusions on the Brown case and the rationale used to reach them, that report would have been completed and distributed for public consumption months ago. Instead, they are balking because they can't or won't release their report until lone holdout, Jim Ward releases his minority report stating that in his opinion, the shooting violated the department's use of force policy.



Ward told the other eight commissioners that he would provide copies of his minority report after they provided a completed copy of their majority report. All eight of them blanched at his words. But that's usually how it's done. If there is an em passe between members of the commissioner in terms of issuing a report on an incustody death, then after the discussion is completed, both parties submit their respective reports containing their position on the incident and the rationale that brought them to that point preferably backed up by evidence provided by both the CPRC and police department's investigations.

After the reports are released, those who have signed onto the majority report are given the opportunity to provide a response to the minority report.

But what commissioners on the majority side have said is that they want to read the minority report and go back and change their majority report or they want in several cases, to suggest changes to or concur on some portions of the minority report even as they swear that its content will not change their contention that the shooting was justified.


Why are they so concerned, so concerned that they refuse to issue their public report on a shooting that most likely has already been adjudicated by the police department?

Because unlike the majority of them, Ward clearly read the entire collection of evidence gathered by both the CPRC's own investigator, Butch Warnberg of the Baker Street Group and the police department's own investigative team. Unlike Ward, the other commissioners have not read anything but their own investigator's report, which consequently puts them in an unenviable position of having to concern themselves that Ward has evaluated a piece of important evidence that they and Warnberg may have missed.


After all, how many commissioners who are evaluating the state of mind held by both officers involved in the Brown shooting have even read or listened to the interviews given by both to investigators? How many of them have listened to the belt recordings provided by both officers?



After all, they apparently believed that both officers knew what the other was doing at the time of the shooting when statements by the officers' said otherwise. Several also believe that Officer Michael Paul Stucker had performed a mental evaluation on Brown when there's no evidence that he either did or said that he did so presented by anyone.



So it's clear they didn't evaluate the officers' statements in their own words and likely, didn't listen to the recordings either. So what is their basis for evaluating the officers' state of mind then?


These two pieces of evidence are the best place to look for the officers' state of minds yet there's all this talk of what their states of mind were from commissioners who when asked if they have reviewed this material answer with a blank stare or a comment about Monday morning quarterbacking, which by the way, is the task assigned to them in these situations.

So this game continues. The public is denied the majority report because the majority of the commissioners fears the minority report. The city manager's office is doing its thing with the police commission because it doesn't fear the commission so much, but the police department and the financial liability it might cost the city in wrongful death civil litigation.

After all, why else would the city manager's office be so interested in micromanaging the department as some have claimed to the point where allegations were made by those inside the department that this office was interfering in the promotional process? Why do this?

Why indeed?


At any rate, given the current pace of discussion, expect the CPRC to release its report on the Brown shooting by oh, about 2010.



An interesting footnote is that once Chair Brian Pearcy began taking the lead on the commission towards exonerating the officers, the city manager's office stopped sending representatives to the meetings on this case to sit in.

This is all very interesting but how much did the Brown case really impact the decision at City Hall to hollow out the commission?

What some further research will show is that what really brought around the campaign to weaken the CPRC and render it less effective was the Lane shooting and its aftermath.

This became clear after Officer Ryan Wilson, who shot Lane, began submitting briefs and deposition excerpts as part of his law suit filed in Riverside County Superior Court to either be granted an administrative appeal hearing by the city or to have it compel the CPRC to change its finding. If it weren't for Wilson and his supporters in his law suit, much about what lie behind the flurry of activity in the past 18 months would remain unknown.

The public was left pretty much in the dark while all this was going on, much the same as it's been left out of the current plan to improve the commission. But just like the Wizard of Oz had trouble keeping attention away from what was going on behind the curtain, so did City Hall have in keeping all of its actions involving the CPRC covered in a shroud of secrecy.

The controversy over the secret meetings behind closed doors at City Hall spilled out during CPRC meetings despite efforts by the city manager's office and the city attorney's office to thwart Ward's attempts to put a discussion of it on the meeting agenda. It took months for City Hall to even allow the CPRC commissioners to hold discussions regarding the changes taking place in their midst and to keep the community at bay with promises to improve the panel that it likely will never keep.

In the midst of all this, is Champaign, Illinois, a city hundreds of miles away from Riverside where a battle is going on over whether or not civilian review should be implemented in that city with per usual, the politicians wanting no part of it and the communities particularly those which are Black and Latino saying some sort of outside oversight is necessary. That's a divide that's been seen in many cities and counties that have grappled with the issue of implementing civilian review.

That included Riverside, California.

To say that the city officials in this city had to be dragged kicking and screaming into even considering civilian oversight would not be an exaggeration. In fact, discussions involving civilian review go back even before the era of the 1990s where the communities pushed and the city officials pulled away, a dynamic that mirrors that which has taken place in nearly every jurisdiction that has created and implemented mechanisms of civilian oversight.

In the early 1980s, the Human Relations Commission created a subcommittee called LEPAC, which in longer terms was the Law Enforcement Policy Advisory Committee. A controversial incident involving the attack of one of the department's canine officers against a woman with Parkinson's Disease in her own home led to community protests which led to among other things, LEPAC.

This committee produced policy recommendations for the police department, most of which were ignored. At one point, Chair Mary Figueroa tried to push the committee further by trying to obtain subpoena power for it, but the city council nixed that proposal. This sent a loud message back to the community that LEPAC was just what Mayor Ron Loveridge would later call civilian review boards, a "symbolic gesture".

It was essentially a toothless tiger and it was called such at several meetings that took place in the community regarding the issue of civilian review in Riverside that took place after a controversial police shooting in 1998.


After the shooting of Tyisha Miller, then Chief Jerry Carroll attended a LEPAC meeting where community members also attended. The agenda as was, quickly flew out the window and Carroll was left to answer tough questions from community members outraged about the shooting.

When the resolution was approved by the city council to create the CPRC in early 2000, the plan was to phase LEPAC out.

LEPAC in its final months was also the forum for an examination of the department's oft-amended use of force policy(#4.30) and the development of the Early Warning System which was one of the recommendations submitted by the Mayor's Use of Force Panel and one that later would be mandated by the state attorney general's office through its consent decree with the city.

Years later, we have a city government in place that doesn't believe its current mechanism is a "symbolic gesture", more like a downright nuisance that might wind up costing the city money lost in civil litigation if it sustains allegations of excessive force in connection with incustody deaths committed by Riverside Police Department officers. The city has acted accordingly.

The community, which apparently are not considered "stake holders" in the process by those at City Hall was shunted to the sidelines where it remains today outside the gates waiting to see what the city will do next without any voice in the process. By design.




Did NBC Dateline bribe a lieutenant with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department to participate in its television show that conducted stings on alleged sex offenders? A law suit filed against the show by the estate of a former deputy district attorney in Texas who committed suicide raises that question, according to the Press Enterprise.


Working police radios are in short supply for the Los Angeles Police Department according to the Los Angeles Times.

DHL and other noise makers

Next up on the chopping block during the city's express train called Riverside Renaissance is another piece of its history, the Dairy Queen located on California Square which will soon be nothing more than just a fond memory for many who frequented the walk-up business.

The Press Enterprise published an article about its proposed destruction.

Why does the historic ice cream stand have to go?

Probably because it's not the happening spot in Orange County. Dairy Queen will still exist inside the mall area somewhere but the stand will be demolished.


(excerpt)


Although Dairy Queen will be housed in one of the new retail spaces, it won't be the same, Lewandowski said.

"I have memories of coming here on summer nights when other families would gather here," she said. "Children would play by the building while people sat on the benches enjoying their ice cream. It was wonderful."

Roy Sanchez said he was trying to organize a group of customers to lobby for the building to be listed as a landmark when he was felled by a stroke. He is now recovering.

"Everybody goes to that Dairy Queen. Everybody connects to it," Sanchez said. "Every Friday and Saturday night, it's packed."

Owners Robert and Terry Reinhardt said they can understand the emotional ties the community has to the building, but there is little they can do.

"We fought long and hard to save the building, but it was futile," Robert Reinhardt said on a recent morning, as he took a break from preparing to open for business. "It's not something the city wants."




It probably wouldn't work to try to have it listed as a historic building. After all, the city had just pushed the owners of another historic business, the Kawa market, to sell their digs. And an ice cream stand certainly isn't upscale enough for this Orange County wannabe city.

And it's not like the city has never demolished old buildings which were part of its heritage. It's not like the city hasn't even tried to either demolish or manhandle the Cultural Heritage Board which is the volunteer body which provides input in the issues of older buildings.





Columnist Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise wrote about the recent raids of medical marijuana dispensaries in Riverside County. He compared them to the picking of low hanging fruit in trees.


(excerpt)


"Ever hear of medical marijuana dispensaries?"

"Who hasn't?"

"Low-hanging fruit. Everyone knows where these places are. Everybody knows what they do. They operate in broad daylight. In shopping centers! They might as well set up a booth in the DEA lobby. Oh, and the 'customers' aren't exactly armed and dangerous."

"So busting dispensaries is kind of a working holiday for the DEA?"

"You know how miserable it gets here in the summer. This is not the time to be rooting around in some ship hold, sniffing out Afghan opium."

"This is the time to be picking low-hanging fruit?"

"Now you're getting it. They make the busts. They make the headlines. And they get paid. Nobody gets hurt."

"Except maybe the people who can't get their marijuana."

"We're in a drug war. When you're in a war, there's always collateral damage."

"I've never thought of cancer patients that way before."





In Los Angeles County, it's been the DEA. Out in the Inland Empire, it's been the local law enforcement agencies working with federal agencies including one raid that took place in Riverside last May. So now the Inland Empire is known for its medical marijuana raids, not its methamphetamine.

When I was visiting my family and some guests of one of my sisters realized I was living in Riverside, they said that you could never be too careful of the people in that city because they were all using methamphetamine. That's probably not true, but that's the image of this city.


It's always interesting to read columns like this and think back to having to wait three months for the police department to even check out a suspected meth house hopefully before it blew everything and everybody in the vicinity sky high as meth labs often do as incidents have shown.

Of course by the time two officers dressed in 1970s outfits and wearing shaggy beards and even shaggier hair came out to take a look, the lab apparently had packed up and left. When gentrification came to the neighborhood in the late 1990s, the men in 1970s clothing and wearing shaggy hair moved in and stayed for about a year. They were polite and mostly kept to themselves.

Back then, the federal government declared marijuana as its drug of choice to launch a war against, when methamphetamine was spreading across the country like wildfire. It's too bad the federal government can't launch a war on methamphetamine production and sales like it has on medical marijuana dispensaries. But then maybe there's a point to what Bernstein is saying.

Whether you agree with medical marijuana use or not and I'm on the fence because I abhor marijuana, illegal drugs and more than a few legal drugs but am not convinced that this is a practical or viable use of federal and local resources, this subject will probably get much more debate in the months and years ahead as more and more states pass medical marijuana initiatives. Especially as people consider their feelings about the idea of terminally ill and other patients getting guns stuck in their faces by law enforcement officers, including one who allegedly told a woman later on the phone in Riverside.


"I am the judge and jury."


A couple of constitutional amendments be damned. The judicial process might be slow and in some cases ground to a standstill in Riverside County but last I checked, it still existed.


In Riverside, people protested the recent raids in the Inland Empire. The Press Enterprise has a survey on this issue as well.






In San Bernardino County, information about political candidates and their campaign contributions will soon be appearing online according to this article in the Press Enterprise.


(excerpt)



Residents will be able to search by candidate, donor or date and see who is giving to whom and how much. And they'll be able to see where each candidate is spending those campaign funds.

"We want to be as transparent as possible," Supervisor Gary Ovitt said.





Hopefully, Riverside will not be the last city to provide this valuable service and will be next in line but unfortunately, accountability and transparency aren't two of its most esteemed qualities as recent changes at City Hall particularly those governing city council meetings have shown. Not to mention being on the receiving end of a harassing email in my name which apparently originated from an IP address registered to the city of Riverside with its address at City Hall. Inquiries into this matter were met with condescension and an army of strawmen arguments from the city's head public information officer.

So no, accountability is not one of this city's strongholds. But this might change at least a little bit with the publication of campaign contribution statements submitted by the city's political candidates.

As of now, you have to go to the city clerk's office to request the hard copies of the candidates' campaign disclosure records which include this same information. If you have time to do so during business hours, it is a recommended practice to help make an informed vote.

Of course if this information were available online, then it would be accessible to more people. City Hall's motto has been, anything San Bernardino County can do, we can do better. Well, San Bernardino County has gone off and done this so Riverside needs to implement the same program as well. Whether it does so remains to be seen.






DHL's plan to ground two of its worst offenders in terms of aircraft that keep several neighborhoods up all night is being discussed at the Press Enterprise's latest poll. Actually it will be if someone actually starts it off with a comment.

The majority of the noise makers in the DHL fleet are ancient DC-9 airplanes which aren't even in production anymore.

That newspaper's editorial board takes the city council particularly councilman and aspiring county supervisor, Frank Schiavone to task for political ploys it stated were being used against DHL including civil litigation.


(excerpt)


But Wednesday's announcement was less about noise than politics, which undermines any public celebration of DHL's commendable steps. Airport noise has become a battleground issue in a county supervisor's race, which has made rational discussion of the issue nearly impossible.

The carrier's proposal, for example, comes as Riverside city officials threaten to sue the cargo operator over aircraft noise -- at the behest of a Riverside councilman trying to keep noise complaints from derailing his supervisorial campaign.

But the city's threat rests on bald hypocrisy. DHL, after all, is merely following the operating agreement approved in 2005 by the March Joint Powers Commission, which oversees civilian use of the airfield. Two Riverside City Council members sit on the commission; both backed the DHL project. And the commissioners understood that the DHL operation would involve night flights and airplane noise when they approved the cargo project, regardless of erroneous flight maps or any other information that emerged later.

So now the city would consider spending taxpayers' money in a court battle over cargo operations that city officials approved? Riverside officials say the city's legal threat brought DHL's concessions last week. But the city's bullying of the cargo company also directly serves a city councilman's supervisorial campaign.



The litigation against nightly noise-making flights comes from a city council member which includes members who voted to bring DHL to Riverside and Moreno Valley knowing full well that DHL was going to fly its planes out 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just like nothing stops the U.S. Postal Service, nothing stops DHL. If the bosses at DHL are very confused at what has been threatened against them after having received the welcome wagon to come to Riverside, I wouldn't blame them.



First the carte blanche welcome mat, then the threatened law suit. In between was a game of hot potato over proposed flight paths between Riverside, Murrieta and an attempted round involving several cities in San Bernardino County that predictably failed after those cities looked at what Riverside was trying to do with its noise problem and said loudly the following very loudly.



Hell no!


So Riverside was stuck having to deal with its own noise problem and many city residents were forced to go out and purchase ear plugs to get through the night while people including politicians told them that the noisy nights were apparently all in their heads. But the noise is real, because the airplanes that produce it are real. DHL is not only real, but really here in Riverside County.

And the politicians in this county should know this because they fought the cities of Ontario and San Bernardino to get it here. And is bringing business in the area a bad thing? Is DHL a bad thing?

No, although politicians told city residents living in the flight path that they were being party poopers by protesting against the company's arrival and installation at MAFRB.

What was bad was the process, including deception and outright lying over the proposed flight path and then the double talk when this deception came to light in an embarrassing fashion.




Why mention the election next year for county supervisor?

Frank Schiavone who was one of those councilmen is running against incumbent supervisor Bob Buster who cast the sole dissenting vote against the nighttime flights, which have essentially doomed residents of Orangecrest, Mission Grove and Canyoncrest to sleepless nights for months. To decide to file a law suit now against something that Riverside knew was coming and was in fact anticipating seems somewhat self-serving for the city council. After all, several of its members including at least one running for political office decided to push forward on despite protests from community members and organizations from these three neighborhoods and others on the always changing flightpath used by DHL out of March Air Force Reserve Base. I remember how those community members were ridiculed and treated by elected officials as standing in the way of progress when all along, they were right to be concerned from the beginning.

To bring a 24/7 air freight company into the area and then sue it for making too much noise at night, is just, well there are really no words to adequately describe what it is.

Many people including Cindy Roth, president of the Riverside Greater Chambers of Commerce oppose the proposed litigation.


(excerpt)


Decisions that brought DHL to March and efforts to address the noise problem are expected to be a polarizing issue in that race. Many of the March commissioners have said they will support Schiavone's run against Buster.

But they showed no support Wednesday for Riverside's threat to take DHL to court if the company does not abate its early-morning airplane noise.

Richard Stewart, a Moreno Valley councilman and March commissioner, said DHL had done nothing wrong and the commission is responsible for finding solutions to the noise.

Local business leaders also urged Riverside's elected officials to drop their threats of a lawsuit, saying such a stance casts a pall over business activities across the region.

"DHL is a victim here, too," said Cindy Roth, president of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce.






It's too bad Roth doesn't advocate nearly as strongly for the somewhat smaller businesses that the chamber purportedly represents who were pretty much forced out of the downtown in Riverside through threats of eminent domain.


They were victims too.



It's not clear who all is running in the supervisory race next year. Former candidate Linda Soubirous had expressed interest in this race before she hit the express highway to a spot on the Community Police Review Commission which will probably keep her too busy to think about running again for political office for a while at least. Soubirous was a candidate heavily backed by many law enforcement unions which belong to CLEAR, including the Riverside Sheriff's Association and the Riverside Police Officers' Association.



Now I suppose if the unions want to face off against Buster's apparent support of current Sheriff, Bob Doyle again, they will probably take a combined war chest which is at the six-figure level elsewhere. But if it's going to be a repeat of 2004, we'll have to wait and see, who's "elsewhere".



At any rate, it looks like before there will even be a conclusion to this year's civic election, Election 2008 has already begun in earnest. Hot dogs, cold drinks and popcorn will be on sale soon.




The Press Enterprise still has that ongoing poll on the DHL plan to ground two DC-9 airplanes in its fleet. You can visit it here.






I saw the film, Zodiac which was a film that came out last year about the Zodiac killings of the 1960s and the impact it had on three men, either journalists or police detectives, involved in the case.

One segment of the movie dealt with the 1966 unsolved killing of Cheri Jo Bates, at Riverside Community College. More about the Bates case is here. Two of the characters played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Mark Ruffalo were fighting outside the police station in a location that didn't actually look much like Riverside about whether or not the Zodiac Killer murdered Bates, a question that remains unanswered over 40 years later. But the Riverside Police Department investigating the Bates case at the time believed it was a local individual who committed the crime though the Riverside County District Attorney's office wouldn't file charges against that individual.

Elections 2007 and beyond

It's official but I think the Press Enterprise is really the last to find out about this, but political candidate Mike Gardner has changed his mind about eminent domain in terms of taking people's properties and turning them over to private development firms.


(excerpt)


"I've talked to lots of people about this including small business owners and I've done some reading on it," Gardner said. "I guess I just think it's wrong to take anyone's private property unless they need it for a legitimate government use."



In response, incumbent Dom Betro goes into full snark mode saying the following in response.


(excerpt)


"I don't think Mike Gardner has defined or clear stands on any issues," Betro said. "He's just willing to say anything or do anything to try to get elected."


Actually, Gardner does have strong stands on issues. He believes in public input in the city government, he believes in keeping the city's parks as parks and he believes in the rights of small business owners in this city. That's a sensible platform unlike one which supports the expulsion through threat of eminent domain of entire blocks of local businesses, many of which are owned by people of color. This is done by blaming them for "blight" when many of these businesses contributed their shares of the downtown business tax annually to their representative body, the Downtown Neighborhood Partnership, which spent all of their money beautifying the pedestrian mall while promising their turn would come but it never did. Instead, the contrast between the renovated mall and their own business strips was later used to take their properties away from them.

When these business owners showed up, many upset and in tears about what was going on, Betro's attitude at meetings is to wave his hand and say, we've negotiated enough, let's just do it already, like he did with the owners of the Fox Theater as their young children wept later in front of a reporter outside the chambers.

The irony is, several of the city council members themselves are business owners and see no problem with this situation, as long as it's someone else's business. One wonders how they would handle it if it were their own businesses on the chopping block.

They probably would hire the most expensive attorneys they could afford and fight it.

But if you don't understand how Gardner stands on issues at this point in the game, you haven't been paying attention and listening just isn't one of Betro's strongest skills.

And you know what about Gardner? People know his stances on issues because not only does he get out there, but he manages to stick around for entire public forums, something Betro struggled to do during round one of Election 2007.

When it comes to saying anything to get elected, one of the issues that Betro ran on for both elections is his alleged support of the Community Police Review Commission but in actuality, Betro sat by the past year and watched the CPRC get as columnist Dan Bernstein put it, hollowed out from the inside and his response to City Manager Brad Hudson's actions was to vote him a generous pay hike.

Gardner also doesn't have a bad temper when he's out in public, but Betro does and many people have seen that side of him and it isn't pretty. So if he gets elected, hopefully the tantrums from the dais will be reduced. I've watched him serve on the CPRC for seven years including three as chair and why I didn't always agree with him, he was very even tempered and unflappable.

My turn to receive the brunt of the famous Betro temper took place when he told community members at a meeting around Oct. 5 last year that the city was finalizing the paperwork on a contract it had made with an independent contractor who was to be hired to do consulting. In fact, he seemed optimistic that said contractor would be providing input on a report that was to be given to the city council meeting the next week.

In actuality, negotiations between that contractor and the city manager's office had been at a stand still for several months. I had simply challenged Betro's assertion by asking for an offer of proof that what he said was true.

What I got in return from saying one sentence was a yelling diatribe, first in the third person and then directly at me in front of a group of his supporters who later said I read him wrong. It's very difficult to read Betro wrong when he's yelling in your face or storming out of public forums and meetings. The only words I remember is that he told me I had done some good and was losing credibility, which was interesting because I wasn't the one yelling in the room.

I'm sure it's hard to read him wrong when he's crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it in your face as well.

Maybe the people who read him wrong were those who initially backed his grass-roots campaign including the people who now support his opponents, but that's nothing to be embarrassed about because everybody wants to believe that the candidate they support is genuine on the issues that are important to them. No politician is going to do your bidding and none should or else they would be puppets.

However, they should be honest about who they are and what they stand for and deliver through actions on promises they make to the best of their abilities. They shouldn't run under one image and then become someone else when they are elected to the dais.

When I watched Betro run the first time, I didn't exactly see the tool of the development firms that unfortunately he has become, including those who donated generously to his election campaign this time around.

The truth is with Betro and also with Gardner and everyone else who is running is that none of them is a proven product until they get elected and have the opportunity to serve(and yes, politicians are supposed to serve the public, not the other way around) and transparency is maintained in terms of what they are doing as an elected official. It's up to the people to hold their elected officials accountable through their voices and through the vote.











Columnist Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise is asking for help to save the Jurupa Community Services District, which was under investigation by the Riverside County Grand Jury and ultimately pushed to pay back over $1 million used in a controversial land sale.

Also in Bernstein's column was some sort of verbal slip made by a Riverside County supervisor about a current Riverside councilman.


(excerpt)


RivCo Supe Marion Ashley has solved the touch-screen voting problem! During a meeting of the March Joint Clown Act Authority, Ashley called fellow commission member "Supervisor Schiavone." Frank Schiavone is merely a Riverside councilman, who is running for supervisor. But if everyone kept calling him "supervisor," it'd eventually stick and we could forget about an election.








Schiavone is running to be a county supervisor but the election is still off in the distance of 2008. Also taking place next year is the mayoral election and the picture's changed on that race so much in the past several months that the situation is completely different than it was earlier this year.



Remember several months ago, when both Dom Betro and Art Gage were interviewed by the Inland Empire Magazine about their mayoral aspirations? Both men were giving it serious thought.



But that was back when both councilmen expected to win their reelection bids outright, sail into their seats and hopefully have enough money in their respective coffers to launch a second election bid for the mayor's seat in 2008.



Today, both men are fighting to hold on to their seats caught up in a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment which has swept the city's voters.



Betro was forced into a runoff against Mike Gardner in the Ward One election where votes were split between four candidates. Gage lost the first round and neophyte, William "Rusty" Bailey's attempt to avoid a runoff was thwarted by a relatively small number of votes. So there's a hotly contested runoff in Ward Three as well.

Both candidates are planning fundraisers to try to refill their depleted campaign chests to get them through the final round of Election 2007.

And what of the current mayor?

Well, everyone is always so sure that the current term is the one where he really does step down and return back to academia, but there's speculation that he might remain in the hunt next year because it's his aspiration to leave a mark in municipal politics by serving as the president of the League of California Cities and it seems you have to be mayor to do that.

Some people say that he will be joined in the race by outgoing Ward Five Councilman Ed Adkison, who will throw his hat and perhaps his new gavel into the mayor's race so that he can preside over city council meetings and ribbon cutting ceremonies in true style.

Some people said that former Interim City Manager Tom Evans should run, but he's having fun on the local water board which is apparently a happening place for both aspiring and veteran politicians to hang out these days.

But what if were Loveridge versus Adkison? Would people turn out to vote?

That would be a hotly contested contest for a position which doesn't really do all that much except pull in a fairly nice salary and allow for the person to preside over the weekly meetings of both the city council and the redevelopment agency, which are pretty much the same people in both groups.

Would Loveridge get support from the dais if he ran again?

Some veteran political watch dogs said if so, do not expect it to come easily or quickly.

It seems that his style of running public meetings has brought on some ire from the BASS quartet, which prefers the style of somebody like Adkison who is not shy at ordering police officers to expel elderly women from the council chambers.

After all, 100% of the calls of order, ordered expulsions and letters written by City Attorney Gregory Priamos threatening arrest in the future that are carbon copied to the police department have been done by members of the latest quartet that began its rise after the untimely deflation of its predecessor, GASS after one-time grass roots candidate, Betro apparently decided rather than taking on GASS, he would take a seat in it.

In contrast, Loveridge has not expelled any person and has probably not ordered Priamos to slap any hands with verbose prose written on city stationary. He raises his hand when people speak past the three-minute limit but allows them to wrap up their speeches, though he does seem to allow the male speakers more leeway than the women at the podium.

But at this point, Loveridge's leaving the gavel and perhaps in the future, a powered wig to Adkison.








I've received some positive responses on the posting on what's been going on with the Community Police Review Commission including by people who had questions about the dynamics played out by the various "stake holders" as they have been called by those at City Hall in connection with a report scheduled to be presented next month on more recommended changes to the CPRC.

Hopefully, these changes will be helpful to the CPRC. Hopefully, they will strengthen it and help it to be more independent and won't just be window dressing.

However, I've been asked questions about this process since I addressed it in the previous posting, because very few people even know what's going on with the CPRC.

Some were dismayed that City Hall's not the least bit interested in their suggestions on how to improve the operations of the CPRC. You see, City Hall came out with this term at the latest meeting of the beleaguered commission that it has already received input from all of the CPRC's stake holders. That was a statement made by Mario Lara who's the administrative analyst working under Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis who's been running the CPRC for the past seven months.

If you've never heard of him, that shouldn't be surprising. Even though he holds an important position, Lara's never been formally introduced to the community. The city manager's office didn't find that necessary to do so.

The several of us who regularly attend CPRC meetings turned our heads around looking for these designated stake holders that Lara mentioned, then we shook our heads and laughed ruefully. All of the designated stake holders are perhaps a few people in a city this big? What is this, a homecoming dance and they're picking the royal court? Then we shrugged and the meeting continued.

Business as usual, River City style.

To take a model that was created for the people, by the people and say, well it needs to be fixed and we'll fix it for you whether you like it or not, but we're sorry that we're limiting input to its stake holders whoever they are because no one can seem to figure out who they are. Who are these stake holders that Lara mentioned as being exclusively referred to in this fashion as being all of them?

There's nothing wrong with admitting that the city's taken input or is even only interested in receiving input from some of the stake holders of the CPRC, because most likely, that's the truth. I and other people who attended the last CPRC meeting found what was said instead to be pretty insulting, given how hard many people in this city had worked to turn civilian oversight into a reality in this city and the backlash that was faced. To have a lot of people rendered invisible by one tossed out phrase by an interim employee most of the city's residents have never seen is just not right. And it's not even an accurate assessment of the situation.

I've talked to people I believe to be included in the group of 300,000 stake holders for several days now since that meeting and none of them were even asked by City Hall for what they think about this important process, let alone any suggestions they would have to improve the CPRC. And it was a shame because they offered up some pretty good ideas to help it run more effectively. Ideas that hopefully those who were permitted to participate in this process held as well because whoever they are, they're speaking for a lot of people including individuals who may or may not have chosen them to represent them if they were even asked by the city.

The CPRC needs some rehauling, not the least of which is to decrease the politicization of its selection process, more training especially involving incustody death investigations and review, a more representative balance of members and independence including from the city attorney's office. That's just to start.

Maybe that's too radical an opinion to be counted as a stake holder in the process. It's probably way too radical for City Hall which has its own plans for the commission as we've all seen.


None of the people who have spoken to me about the CPRC in the past several days or months would be considered in this group of people who are deemed qualified enough to provide input on the future of this panel, but they are stake holders in a body that was created by city ordinance in April 2000 in response to a community push for civilian review over the Riverside Police Department's complaint system, which was found by an investigation conducted by the state attorney general's office to be in violation of state law. There's also a lot to be said by the hundreds of individuals who have utilized the CPRC's complaint system since it began receiving complaints in January 2001. But the city doesn't care what they think. It just wants what it wants which is to follow a list of actions that one think tank group who alas, aren't considered stake holders either said would all be included in the perfect plan to weaken the effectiveness of the CPRC.

These include the following.




Marginalizing the executive director by prohibiting him from performing his job responsibilities in an effective manner or even at all.

Pushing the executive director out.

Create an environment of chaos and uncertainty that causes many commissioners to resign. "Help" the ones who are slow to do so.

Reduce outreach in many communities by claiming that it's biased against police. Spread this message to the executive manager first, then the commissioners second.

Put the location of the CPRC in a place where few can access it or even find it.

Try to radically change or reduce its ability to perform its duties under the city's charter and ordinance.

Deny the commission its own legal counsel and use the city's legal counsel to obstruct the commission's ability to perform its functions under the city's charter. This includes offering multiple legal opinions on the same legal issue.

Politicize the selection process to replace outgoing community members with candidates who comprise the desired demographics of the city.

Use the selection process of commissioners to make political appointments.

Do not produce an annual report in a timely manner.

Do not have subcommittees meet in a timely manner or even at all.

Conduct the election process of the chair and vice chair in private and in such a manner that few commissioners even understand what's going on.

Cloud the issue of public comment by either changing its location on the agenda or postponing it on agenda items until after the vote's taken.

Stick a police officer in closed sessions. Candidate X who interviewed for the executive manager position was amazed that the CPRC actually followed this practice.

Deny or restrict public input in the process except for carefully designated individuals who won't challenge what City Hall is doing, in this case "stake holders". Render everyone else invisible by omitting them from this classification.





What the city cares about is civic liability and the five law suits traveling through the federal and state court systems in relation to incustody deaths. It consists of a majority of elected officials who oppose the CPRC sitting in the midst of a city of people who on the majority side, support it. It's got a city manager's office that micromanages any entity within reach and a city attorney's office who spends more time telling commissioners what they can't do than what they can do. And now the number of stake holders in the CPRC, all of them, just got a lot smaller.


How many of people have ever been asked by anyone through City Hall about what they think the process should be like? How many times has City Hall or its representatives ever promised that the community would have a voice in the process and then rescinded that promise, by saying that we have to stick to the "stake holders" which I guess is their idea of a focus group?

It's too bad that none of the individuals involved in the current process to rehaul the CPRC are cognizant of the history that led to its creation.

The communities of this city pushed for this form of civilian oversight long before the current city manager, assistant city manager, city attorney, interim executive manager, police chief and members of the current city council were holding their positions. They pushed for this board before the state imposed its stipulated judgment on the city in order to reform the police department. In fact, during a CPRC workshop conducted in 2004, former councilwoman Maureen Kane said the creation of the CPRC was one element in the city's favor while it was negotiating with the state over the consent decree that would change the police department from the inside out.

Kane was no real supporter of civilian review. In fact, she and her fellow councilwoman, Laura Pearson had opposed the Berkeley model that had narrowly passed the muster of the research committee set up by the city council to address the issue of civilian review in the summer of 1999. But by 2004, she appeared to be in some sense, a convert. After all, it's likely that her support and votes towards both civilian review and the stipulated judgment narrowly cost her the election.

Now, the current leadership at City Hall and the police department which is under the city manager's office have been pushing their own changes on a panel that belongs to the city residents while keeping the vast majority of residents including those in the communities most impacted by the existence of civilian oversight out of the process.

But it's been like that for over a year now, since the new city management team came to Riverside. This latest installment of this ongoing saga is more of the same with more to come. Interestingly enough, readers have said that they see parallels in the struggles faced by the CPRC with what's going on in other areas of the city including the fight involving eminent domain, the selling off of park land and public participation in city council meetings. And labor unions trying to be heard by a management that claims to be pro-union but through its actions is anything but. After all, it's hard to be convincingly "pro-union" when anonymous threats of retaliation are being mailed out to city employees before they are interviewed for a very sensitive city investigation.

Of course that could be a gross misinterpretation of the circumstances. Titling a written notice, with the words "Be Prepared for the Consequences" could mean something else entirely.

Some said they had no idea that a commission consisting of dedicated volunteers was being treated this way and being thwarted in its efforts to fulfill its mission for the communities of Riverside.

A bit of good news is on the horizon.

The CPRC may have an annual report by the end of the year, as current executive-something-or-another, Mario Lara is finishing up the first draft which formerly had been written by the CPRC's chair. He asked the commissioners for input and they were pretty quiet. The community wasn't asked, but since state law requires that city residents be allowed to speak publicly on agenda items, that opened the door for suggestions from the public.

A suggestion was raised that the CPRC annual report include a statistical breakdown on the handling of differential findings on complaints. For example, if a complaint is sustained by the police department but determined to be unfounded by the CPRC or vice versa, what finding is reached by the final arbiter of complaints, the city manager's office?

In the past, the city manager's office said it didn't keep track of these statistics even though previous administrations had done so. In fact, in at least one annual report, these statistics were included. The interesting thing is that according to Lara, there appears to be some efforts by the city manager's office to keep records of these statistics even as it apparently forbade former executive director, Pedro Payne from doing this last year.

Commissioners Steve Simpson and Jack Brewer pushed for these statistics. Lt. Mike Perea, the department's liaison to the CPRC seemed to think the topic and its discussion was humorous. I guess he knows something that the commissioners and the public do not. Lara looked a bit peaked as Brewer and Simpson pushed him on the issue but he recovered. He'll probably be glad to step down as CPRC executive-something-or-another as soon as City Manager Brad Hudson decides which one of the two police attorneys he wants to hire as the new executive manager of the CPRC.

There is no reason that these statistics should be kept secret and there's been no reason for two responses to come out of the city manager's office in terms of whether or not this office is even keeping them. And you don't even have to be a designated stake holder to push for them. In fact, it's probably easier to do so if you're not.

Not everyone can be a tool of the city manager's office. Not everyone wants to be. If that's what it takes to have a voice in this city, then it's probably better perhaps not to be counted.




The police chief and police union are clashing in Rochester, New York over the handling of an investigation into gay bashing, according to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

The police union president, Ron Evangelista called for action to be taken. They are the words which make it clear who or what really runs law enforcement agencies.


(excerpt)


"Let's have a vote of confidence on Chief Moore," Evangelista said in a news conference today, barely veiling his anger.







The department launched an investigation of its handling of an incident of gay bashing which caught the ire of the police union which said that the administrative investigation was contaminating the work done in the criminal investigation of the hate crime.




Conflict has arisen in Seattle, Washington between the mayor and the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The board demanded that Mayor Gary Nickels take back some accusations that he made against the office. Nickels doesn't want to do so. They've been fighting back and forth since a report from the board criticized Chief Gil Kerlikowske for interfering with an internal investigation involving two offices in his department.



(excerpt)


Review board members believe that on the July 11 program, Nickels accused the board of leaking to the media a draft of one of its reports that was critical of Chief Gil Kerlikowske.

"It is irresponsible for anyone -- let alone Seattle's mayor -- to make such false charges," board Chairman Peter Holmes wrote in his July 18 letter.

The review board's report was an examination of the internal investigation of two officers accused of misconduct related to a Jan. 2 drug arrest. The officers were cleared of wrongdoing, but the report argued that the chief was too involved in the OPA's internal investigation.







And in Denver, Colorado, clashing is the police monitor and Denver CopWatch, according to this article in the Rocky Mountain News.



(excerpt)


CopWatch's Stephen Nash struck a nerve with Denver Independent Monitor Richard Rosenthal when he wrote that the monitor's office has been "notably absent" on the Rice case.

The release implied that Rosenthal was part of "the city's failure to take steps to improve (jail) conditions after Ms. Rice's death and the long delays in even releasing the most basic information on the case indicate a failure in the reforms instituted by Mayor Hickenlooper which were supposed to increase government transparency in death while in custody cases."

Rosenthal fired off an e-mail reply expressing disappointment with the "incorrect assertions" in the news release that was inadvertently sent to news organizations on CopWatch's e-mail list.

"My office has been anything but 'absent' in the case of Emily Rice," Rosenthal wrote.





The two sides traded responses, regarding an investigation into the incustody death of Emily Rice, who died from fatal injuries she suffered in a car accident. Instead of being taken to a hospital, Rice was taken to jail where she complained of her injuries. A correctional deputy allegedly told her to sleep it off.



Rice didn't sleep it off. She died soon after.

Canary in the mine: Stakes and those who hold them

The city council meeting didn't go nearly as long yesterday as it went two weeks ago, lasting less than three hours.



A huge crowd showed up to celebrate Maxine Frost receiving an award. Frost has been serving on the Riverside Unified School District Board since the 1960s when Riverside was one of the first cities to voluntarily desegregate its public school system. Of course soon after, at least one school building was set on fire.



Perusual, the huge crowd vacated the building after the award was given.





About 41 consent calendar items and three discussion items were up for votes during the evening session. Councilman Ed Adkison was still missing in action so he didn't have to disqualify himself from any of the items this week.



Since the city council barred members of the public from pulling items from the consent calendar in July 2005, more and more items spending more and more of the city's money have appeared on the consent calendar. Although the city council has prided itself including in public on its political diversity on issues, very few items are ever pulled from the consent calendar.



The majority of items put on the discussion calendar are departmental reports and council members especially those up for election make the most of those items as opportunities to stump for office.



Marjorie Von Poule returned to speaking out on the actions taken in a motion proposed by Councilman Dom Betro and seconded by Councilman Steve Adams to impose further restrictions on public expression at city council meetings. She's been fearless at doing this for over a year on a weekly basis, even though she's nearly 90 and had asked two police officers to carry her out of the chambers when the city council ordered the police officers to expel four city residents.



That conduct has toned down a bit. There had been individuals quoted in the media as saying that they were concerned about it so the elderly women watch at city council meetings has been suspended for the moment. However, given that the city council in its infinite wisdom has decided to give Councilman Ed Adkison another six months as mayor pro tem, that status could change at any moment.

Still, it was Mayor Ron Loveridge who presided over the most recent city council meeting and do you know what was missing from the dais?


The gavel. Yes, the gavel.


The gavel that made its debut in a meeting chaired by Adkison. What has Loveridge done with the gavel? Does Adkison carry it in a portable briefcase wherever he goes, just in case he has to preside over a meeting?

So the gavel wasn't used on Marjorie or any other speaker this week.



Marjorie who heads the Friday Morning Group which is held at the Janet Goeske YWCA center leaped out of her designated seat and walked up to the podium talking about how she had a promise to keep and that was to fight to restore the consent calendar to the people.

I told the city council that I realized that there weren't enough votes to do that for Marjorie and others. It would take a dais filled with leaders who remembered that they too were just like the people that they now consider almost like a plague at their weekly meetings. I wish Marjorie good health and she would actually live to see it at the ripe age of about 112. But even if she never sees the day when the consent calendar is returned to the people by a more enlightened city council, Marjorie keeps fighting for the people who will.

Go Marjorie!

The discussion calendar was as always, the most thrilling part of the evening's agenda. About 10 people showed up for one item so Loveridge per usual moved it ahead of public comment, mostly to thwart Ward Seven candidate Terry Frizzel. So about 15 people who showed up to talk on an issue during public comment had to wait also.


Parks Department Director Ralph Nunez gave a presentation on parks which gave the city council members who were running for elected office this autumn a chance to stump for themselves without any controversy. Others reaped praise on Nunez and the many parks that have been renovated.



Community residents asked about the fates of several parks that the city has been trying to sell or trade to private developers including Tequisquite Park, Fairmont Park, the Ag park and the Ab Brown Sports Center according to fact and rumor. One community member said as a city council member gave her a dirty look after the meeting had ended, that they're going to sell park land.


What wasn't discussed and certainly wasn't mentioned in the parks report was the current turmoil afflicting this important department behind the scenes of its operations. And that's not the only city department facing serious problems, the kind of problems that don't get discussed at evening city council meetings. It's not even the only department under Asst. City Manager Michael Beck to fall in that category from what I've heard.







I've been inquiring as to whether those financial audits I mentioned involving the construction of the Magnolia Police Center or any of the development projects handled by former development manager Gregory Griffin were ever done. Griffin, if you remember was caught trying to siphon off about $12,000 from the fund designated for the new police station to pay for landscaping done at his house. People seem noncommittal in response. I'm assuming it's been done as a matter of sound practice and that better people than me have already asked by now.








The judges are coming to Riverside County, according to the Press Enterprise. At least 12 of them will be coming to town for the next four months to handle a caseload of over 1,200 criminal trials which must be tried before the civil court system can be reopened.

The Riverside County Public Defender's office is also being told to have its attorneys ready to go to trial. Attorneys who had left that agency are being brought back to handle the cases. And old forgotten courtrooms at different facilities are being dusted off and put back into use.

Why this caseload accumulated to this point is a point of much debate among different agencies and players in the Riverside County Superior Court system.


(excerpt)



Riverside County has 76 judicial positions, including judges and commissioners, to serve about 2 million people. An analysis of court workloads concluded the county should have 133 judicial positions.

Legislation was passed last year to fund 50 new judgeships statewide, with Riverside County getting seven of those and San Bernardino County, eight. A bill currently before the Legislature would add another 50 judgeships this fiscal year, and plans are for another bill to add another 50 next year.

If those bills succeed, Riverside County would get 13 additional judges and San Bernardino County would receive 14.

The state Judicial Council's most recent report for fiscal 2005-06 showed Riverside County had the second-highest judge-to-case ratio for large-population counties in the state, with an average of 6,500 filings for each judicial position. San Bernardino County had the highest, an average of 6,704 filings per judicial position. The state average is 4,795 filings per judge.

San Bernardino County has not experienced the same sort of backlog as Riverside County because it has more judges and fewer criminal cases actually go to trial for a variety of reasons.





In the midst of the current judicial crunch in the Inland Empire, the state's governor and the State's Bar Association are in a battle over the appointment of Judge Elia Pirozzi. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger supports his appointment but the bar association representative said that the Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission had issued a not qualified rating to Pirozzi.





The presidential race came to Riverside when Rudy Giuliani, who is running in the Republican primary dropped by the Coffee Depot to conduct a meet and greet with city residents. Currently, his support among Republicans here is about 25% which isn't bad, I guess.

The race is still early.





The Community Police Review Commission has been the subject of a report by consultant, Joe Brann for the past several months. The report has been completed according to interim something-or-another, Mario Lara and it will be presented in some meeting next month. It's based on contributions by the "stake holders" of the CPRC as Lara referred to them and it will be interesting to see what's included in the report as to where the CPRC shall go next in its odyssey under city micromanagement. It will also be interesting to see if any of these individuals ever actually attend CPRC meetings, that is those who aren't already attending on the city's dime including representatives from the city attorney's office, city manager's office and the police department.

The recommendations hopefully will be very good and helpful, but will they be implemented in any meaningful way that impacts people's lives? That remains to be seen but I wouldn't bet the farm on that, at least not for the tougher ones that hopefully at least one designated "stake holder" had the guts to suggest for the rest of us they purportedly represent and are speaking for or on behalf of in this process. In terms of the lives of the stake holders as defined by Lara and others at City Hall, it really doesn't make any difference if they are or aren't. For those who it does, City Hall has never asked or even really listened to what they want. There's no reason why that should change.

The problem is, anything remotely beneficial to the communities will likely be applauded initially and accepted, then after a period of time passes, buried with other similar reports addressing other issues that have been presented at City Hall. Why, because if you are a designated stake holder by the city, then in all likelihood, the CPRC will never be a tool that you may actually have to use. Consequently, will these stake holders have the persistence to push for the recommendations? Maybe, for a while, but then some other issue will come along and they'll move on.

Those who may need the CPRC or may have family members who do, aren't considered stake holders in the same sense. They may view the CPRC and what it needs in order to function better, somewhat differently than the stake holders do. The designated stake holders may tell them to support the process of fixing it and those who aren't considered stake holders in the same way may say, nobody asked us what was needed. That's a dynamic that is manifested in different organizational structures that often needs to be addressed.

The problem is also that it's hard to implement recommendations that will stick unless you deal with the underlying dynamics of the agency in question that got you where you are when you've begun and unless you've got people willing to commit to the very lengthy evolution that must take place over the long haul. It's possible but it's a struggle to keep progress internally generated by those who have been empowered to undergo it.

That's what the five-year stipulated judgment imposed by former State Attorney General Bill Locker involving the police department has taught me. That's most definitely what the post-decree period has taught me during the climate shift that took place.

And that's what it's still teaching me even while reminding the city government for the umpteenth time that the department even has a strategic plan in place to guide its future development.

If this sounds pessimistic, I've been in the trenches of both these processes for years, and after the backlash that I received from elected officials after having to remind them that they even made promises to ensure the implementation of the strategic plan, I was pretty much ready to divorce myself from that entire process, albeit the feeling did pass with some time.


But City Hall doesn't want a better, more effective CPRC because it's spent the past couple of years trying to do anything but create and nurture that.

After all, the powers that be in City Hall and the police department already have the CPRC they want. And if the communities want something different than that vision that's become reality in the past year, that hardly matters in the wake of five law suits filed involving four officer-involved deaths filed in the past two years and the aftermath of The Finding. That hardly matters when you have individuals in City Hall who want to micromanage every department in sight as the "at will" employee situation involving the police department showed earlier this year.

The city manager has said himself at a meeting that the CPRC did put the city potentially at financial risk. That says a lot about the past year and a half. If that's truly his philosophy, then that says everything.

The funny thing is that the changes that would most benefit the CPRC are too politically charged in City Hall to even consider seriously. Independence from the city manager. Independent legal counsel of its choosing. Even a different facility to call home. Except possibly for the latter step, that will be the day!

And the strange thing is, you could almost say the same thing about the police department. There are more parallels between the two entities than almost anyone will admit.

But they say a dog can't have two masters and in this case, the executive manager is the "dog" serving both the commission who can only ask him to do something and the city manager's office which can fire him. If there is a conflict between the two and there has been, it's the commission's loss.

Not to mention that two dogs have difficulty sharing the same master. In this case, there is a conflict of interest situation when executive managers of police review boards share the same boss as a police chief. That conflict has played itself out too with predictable results. The commission lost that round too, and its director.


Stake holders is a word that gets tossed around a bit at City Hall lately and it's a very important one. But who are they? Who decides? After hearing Lara bring up the fact that all the stakeholders in the CPRC had provided feedback on the process, it got me to thinking about exactly what that means both in general and in terms of the CPRC which exists in a city of nearly 300,000 stake holders including tens of thousands who never are able to provide a voice in hardly any city project. But no offense to Lara, he looks lost every time he's sitting on the dais running a commission without an iota of training in this area. After all, his predecessor received six months of training to serve as executive director while Lara simply had to have had prior work experience working for his boss.

It's hard to find a definition of the term, "stake holders" that fits because most definitions make references to banks and other financial institutions and the commission hardly fits that category. At least on most days.


It's because I talk to stake holders almost each day and I've followed the CPRC for seven years that I ask those questions and more. That's a lot of time for conversations on Riverside's form of civilian oversight that was born after the shots fired in 1998 into a young Black woman's body that were heard around the world. Riverside's government in power at the time didn't want any part of it as it was kind of forced on them by a crisis that was in actuality, simply the cusp of all the earlier crises that preceded it including the one in the early 1980s that birthed its weaker predecessor, LEPAC, a subcommittee which served under the Human Relations Commission.

And when the commission was born, the first thing its parents, the city council, did via what some called a serial meeting among four of them was to weaken it by converting Model A which resembled Berkeley's to Model C, which was more like Long Beach's despite the fact that the research committee set up to review different models of oversight had picked Model A. Which actually makes the CPRC, some would say, born by a violation of the Brown Act. Of course such a violation could never be proven, but it was the talk of the city for several weeks after the city council voted the ordinance which would create the CPRC into law. That turn of events set the entire tone for the commission's existence up to date.

Hundreds of stake holders balked at the city council's actions leading to the approval of Model C, but per usual, stakeholders in the community even those who are counted as such don't do well when pitted against those at City Hall. Even after tens of thousands of stake holders let their voices be heard through their votes, City Hall still didn't listen. Many say that the campaign against the CPRC by those who were entrusted by the city's voters to support it, began in earnest after it was put in the city's charter.

I was reminded of the considerable divide between the two that remains today on this issue when Schiavone scolded me at a governmental affairs committee for once again reminding me that the CPRC was voted by the people into the charter. The odd thing, was I hadn't mentioned that at all. Schiavone did later gracefully apologize for his comments. Still, the city council doesn't like the CPRC, as even its supporters don't seem to be ready for it except in a conceptual form(and Loveridge did once refer to civilian review as being a "symbolic gesture"). Yet, the majority of its constituents clearly do. That conflict underlies a big part of the crisis that has hit the CPRC in the past year, but it's pretty much been ignored maybe because on its face, it seems too obvious and people ignore the obvious while looking for meanings behind the upheaval of the CPRC that are more hidden beneath the surface.

Maybe because in City Hall, it's very difficult to ask the really difficult questions? Many ask them in private, concerned that if they do so out loud, they will lose their status as stake holders. Foolish people like me who don't worry so much about gaining or losing status at City Hall ask these questions for them out loud and take the risks that come with that. But that's what you do, when you're a trouble maker or an even lower form of civic life form on the City Hall measuring chart, a gadfly, even if you haven't graduated to the rank of stake holder.

That's what many community people do on civic issues outside of civilian review, including the elderly women who get threatened with expulsion from city council meetings while the stake holders never really ask questions at all and the man who just like Councilmen Frank Schiavone and Ed Adkison wants to take a critical issue to the ballot and let the people decide. Only problem? His issue isn't about choo choo trains and crowing roosters, it's about eminent domain.

So the city rather than abiding by Schiavone's rallying cry the other night of letting the people decide, is suing him to stop him and this process in its tracks then trying to get him to pay its attorney fees which are at least $150,000. And Schiavone and Adkison probably voted to pursue this law suit behind closed doors unless of course Adkison had to excuse himself due to conflict of interest.

People ask if the CPRC still exists and why its executive director doesn't do outreach or go into the communities anymore. People ask if they will be safe from harassment or retaliation if they file complaints on alleged misconduct. People ask for an explanation of the entire process beyond simply filling out a complaint form and submitting it. There's very little information provided by anyone about that.


They ask if they will ever see representatives from the CPRC in their communities again or if they have to go to the rotary club and chamber of commerce to see them, because that's the type of "community" outreach that commissioners can feel comfortable doing without being perceived as "soliciting complaints" by parties who are never actually named by these commissioners. That sentiment originated from the city manager's office and spread like a bad rash to the commission in the wake of everything that's happened in the past several months.

But the impression in the city is that if commissioners are visiting people in those that are primarily Black and/or Latino, they are favoring the communities at the police department's expense even though outreach programs started by the former executive director towards the police department including meetings with newly hired police officers and roll call presentations were essentially nixed by the department itself.

Those were excellent outreach opportunities which should have been allowed to continue. Of course they don't exist anymore.

There are definitely stake holders in the future of the CPRC at City Hall and inside the police department in the process. No doubt about that. They are the stake holders. And they should be, but they aren't the only ones who matter. Yet, it's their voices which have been heard in the past year by everyone and anyone out to "fix" the commission, not the communities' voices who have been trying to be heard during the past year or so about what has been going on with the CPRC and why. But as some community leaders learned when they met with City Manager Brad Hudson earlier this year, the city manager's office is going to do what it's going to do. What was Hudson's response to the leaders' concerns?

He told them, look you will have 35 or so people show up at city council meeting and then what? And the problem with community leaders, is that even though they allegedly represent so many individuals, they don't tell their constituents they are even holding meetings at all so community members who are concerned think that nothing is being done. Then they promise to meet on the issue again, but when the leaders try to hold them to that, their professional calendars are suddenly too busy.


Those at City Hall have spent the last year and a half proving that point to the communities of this city in the wake of the Summer Marie Lane shooting which led to the finding that the city didn't like much. The commissioners could be considered stake holders as well, but most of them don't act like it, especially in comparison to commissioners in other cities(i.e. Boston) facing the same challenges that the CPRC has faced this past year. Those commissioners stood up and acted like they had a stake in both their communities and the process and they were counted. That's sorely lacking in Riverside, where they retreat then resign, citing professional or personal reasons including one who allegedly received some help in making their decision. More resignations are possibly on the horizon.

The more community oriented commissioners resigned rather than act as stake holders. They were replaced by individuals including one who ran for political office and received most of her political contributions from the law enforcement labor unions including the Riverside Police Officers' Association PAC in 2004. That individual was designated to run by the Riverside Sheriffs' Association who were upset with Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle and were trying to oust County Supervisor Bob Buster who they believed was a supporter of Doyle. The funding that she received for her campaign reflected this effort.

The city council members who voted for the former political candidate claimed to know nothing about it or they claimed that another city council member failed to inform them. The only one who apparently knew refused to cast a vote in favor of this candidate and was called an unflattering term by another one who should have known because the commissioner lives and now represents his ward.

Another new commissioner is a manager of a company that independently contracts with the city and he joined representatives from the fire department and the police department(which he worked closely with on a mental health training program) to speak out in favor of Councilman Frank Schiavone's proposed ballot initiative addressing freight train blockages.

What would be interesting is trying to see what would happen to a former political candidate who received a dime in campaign contributions from any PAC with a police reform background and tried to apply for the police commission. Despite their qualifications, they would probably not even be granted an interview.

"Too political," Adkison, who currently serves on the screening committee for prospective commissioners, might say.

The appropriate action would not to have either candidate serve. If one is too political, so is the other. The commission should be spared from politics and politicians.

But the politicization of the selection process was greatly aided by the city council's decision to conduct interviews and vote on commissioner appointments as a body rather than relying on Loveridge to do it. The CPRC was tossed into this process to join two other heavily politicized bodies, which are the Planning Commission and the Board of Public Utilities.

One question I've often asked by people is how and why the CPRC has become so politicized at City Hall.

That's a difficult one to answer. It can't be answered in a few words. But a good place to start is look at the selection and screening process and the changes it's undergone in the past six months. I'll give you yours if you give me mine when the next vacancy opens up and so forth. And the really sad thing, is that there was actually allegedly an attempt to create a vacancy for a political appointment. Hopefully, that plan was nipped in the bud.


Then there's an unwritten rule brought up during one selection process that CPRC commissioners needed prior board and commissioner experience to "hit the ground running" during this "ongoing situation" as it was diplomatically called. This encourages candidates who are already "in" with the political structure at City Hall to be appointed.

The majority of city residents are lucky and sometimes it's luck, personal contacts or even a good block party, to even be interviewed to serve on one board and commission never mind their qualifications, let alone being selected to serve on any two. Hubbard, for example wanted to serve the CPRC because he had just been termed out of the Board of Public Utilities and felt a "hole" in his life.

That passed the muster of the city council because he had no idea what the CPRC is, what it did and didn't seem really all that interested in it. Even so, he received the most votes of all the candidates who were interviewed during that cycle.

However, the commissioners with this experience, which are four of them, have "hit the ground running" by making as many mistakes in protocol as any other commissioner has. One of these former and current city commissioners honestly believes that the executive director has the power to vote on motions and said that yesterday. Prior board and commission experience may endear you to politicians at City Hall but it's no substitute for training on how to serve on a particular board and commission.

And none of these new commissioners were trained in anything before being on the commission. None of them have been trained as of yet, except in terms of the Brown Act and the city's ethics code.

Other boards and commissions train commissioners by sending them to citizen academies, doing ride alongs(long impacted by legal issues) and other classes in a training curricula. The city doesn't even provide them with an honest or accurate estimate of the time they will need to invest as commissioners to perform their responsibilities in a good fashion.

Another who formerly served on the Human Relations Commission asked for an explanation of what happens to complaints after the CPRC issues its own finding. I might not be a stake holder in the CPRC and is instead, probably its biggest trouble maker but I provided the explanation for him. Why didn't he receive this information on an important part of what the CPRC does when he was first appointed? Why haven't the stake holders passed along this and other pertinent information? Where are they, anyway?

Which goes to one of the biggest issues which is training on just about everything from the Brown Act(which was finally done) and more specifically, with the performance of tactical analyses on officer-involved deaths including shootings. In the past, the investigators retained by the CPRC did most of the tactical analysis of events leading up to and including the fatal critical incident, according to written reports on these deaths submitted by the CPRC.

However, the city manager's office deemed that this made the investigators appear, you guessed it, biased against the police department so the CPRC is left with that job and its members have stumbled with the Lee Deante Brown shooting case in that area including the ones with the law enforcement backgrounds those at City Hall apparently believe are so necessary to serve. Of course, it would have helped if the commissioners had read the entire facts of that case before participating in its deliberation and it's unlikely that any of the four newer ones have done this, based on the discussion which has been taking place.

Of course, if you ask them if they've even read the officers' statements to investigators which is probably the biggest clue to what their states of mind were during the incident, expect a sea of blank faces minus maybe one or two of them.

As for membership, there should be a balance between a law enforcement presence and those from other professions. Filling a civilian board or commission with only people from law enforcement backgrounds kind of defeats the purpose of a civilian review board. Many other jurisdictions that have them know this. Of course, Riverside does too.

One of the biggest complaints from stake holders out in the community is that there's too many people with law enforcement backgrounds on the CPRC and that the commission itself, doesn't reflect or come close to representing the ethnic, racial and gender breakdown of Riverside. In fact, being 77% White, it doesn't even match the racial diversity of the Riverside Police Department.

People who are White and especially those who are male look at this and say, what's the problem. People who are Black and Latino look at it and see a White people's club and these two racial groups provide a lot of the complaints that are filed with the CPRC.

Even candidate X who applied for the executive manager position and who worked over 25 years as a police officer said after tracking my nothing but troublemaking self down that the CPRC had an unusually high percentage of individuals with law enforcement backgrounds in comparison to other models of civilian oversight. Candidate X asked if the city manager's office was pulling the strings on the CPRC and I told him the truth.

I think he also mentioned that the high number of defections indicated some sort of serious problems with the body. He had some good recommendations but if he mentioned any of them during his oral interviews, he was probably toast.

That said, my conversation with Candidate X was one of my favorites in most recent memory about the CPRC. It's nice to have a conversation with someone who's seriously interested in a process in general and the CPRC in particular and isn't afraid to listen to the truth and speak it. There's not much opportunity to do that with the CPRC at City Hall. I think he would have been a good executive manager but he made it clear that he wasn't applying for the job to be ordered around even at the miniscule level by the city manager's office.

Not everyone wants to be its tool for any amount of money.

Not everyone wants to be a rubber stamp of City Hall, but since that requirement was some how left off of the recruitment announcements for the position, apparently some good candidates had applied, thinking they would be assets because they were creative and independent thinkers.

The two remaining in the running as of now are both police attorneys.

Attending a meeting shouldn't be a requirement to be a stakeholder because few people in the communities feel any reason to do so. They attend once and they see topics that they can't relate to on the agenda and they don't feel that there's a receptive environment to community members. Two people who attended a recent special meeting earlier this month left with the impression of the CPRC that its members were "rude" and "unfriendly" because there's really no efforts made to welcome new people and encourage their attendance by the commission. The commissioners on a one-to-one basis are very nice and approachable but as a body, they just seem too reluctant to appear unsympathetic to the police department and often the community members leave the meeting asking, who do these commissioners really represent? And why when anyone of them says something slightly critical about the police department, they look at the designated police representative in the room, as someone asked at a recent meeting and then hedge what they are saying.

These people who attended the meeting for the first time who felt excluded are stake holders of the CPRC. They planned to file complaints stemming from an incident last May. The ones who have attended once or several times but left in frustration feeling as the process was irrelevant to them are stake holders too.

The two Black teenagers who were stopped by the Riverside Police Department's officers about a dozen times in several weeks despite having no criminal records are stake holders. The individuals who spoke on complaints at CPRC meetings while the officer they filed against was standing in the back of the room providing security for the meeting are stake holders. The families of individuals who died in police custody are stake holders. What would they suggest for the CPRC if asked?

One suggestion from several relatives of people who died in police custody was improved notification of families when a shooting happened. That and how a deceased person's personal property is handled and returned to family members are two concerns raised by individuals in this situation who have attended meetings.


As for issues to discuss at its meetings, the CPRC could address topics of community interest as part of the role assigned to it in the ordinance and the city charter, which is to advise the mayor and city council on all issues pertaining to community/police relations. How can commissioners understand what these issues are if they don't engage in fact finding with community members?


The CPRC chooses the topics that it wishes to address and at the moment, has to have each agenda item vetted by both the city attorney's office and the city manager's office and let's just say, some politically sensitive items didn't pass muster with either or both departments. In at least one case, there was a conflict of interest involved between the subject matter that wished to be discussed and the city department that nixed the agenda item. Here's a hint, it has to do with one of two single most important "fixes" to this CPRC that I'll be surprised if anyone touches among the crowd of official stake holders. The party that nixed it obviously would not like this "fix" to come to pass for reasons that would of course, be obvious.

But it might happen. The city will also ignore this "fix", by the way as it will ignore any good ideas coming from any outside report. The truly independent and visionary individuals know this and remain true to these standards anyway.

Other areas have issues as well.

Subcommittee meetings are held in the afternoon and regular meetings are held in the early evening when most people can't attend. This is in part because of the large number of people on the CPRC who own their own businesses and can set their own schedules or they are retired. The subcommittees do important work and the Policy and Procedures committee has always been underutilized in terms of issuing policy recommendations to the police department.

The plan to tailor the commission's meetings after those of the city council which is already being done, courtesy of Chair Brian Pearcy is not a great one. When you have an audience that's quite small, more should be done to encourage public participation, not restrict it which is the city council's latest bent with its own meetings.

And where are the policy recommendations? The CPRC has the power to make recommendations but it hardly does this anymore, as Chief Russ Leach duly noted in several public appearances.

If Leach keeps saying he wants more policy recommendations, then bring them on, give him some and see how his approval statistics on policy recommendations stack up against the CPRC's predecessor, LEPAC.

Even commissioners had problems attending their own subcommittee meetings. As stated, they hardly ever met due to lack of quorums. The already mentioned Policy and Procedures subcommittee met twice in a nearly two year period mostly due to lack of quorum. The committees were essentially suspended after the resignation of Payne and the hemorrhage of commissioners that took place from November 2006 to May 2007. A recent Outreach Committee meeting consisted mostly of criticisms against a group of community members who came to a meeting with concerns about the Brown shooting case because people including community leaders only showed up to complain. Any new visitor to that meeting would have definitely left feeling the commission didn't care about them after listening to what was essentially a "bitch" session.

But if they have difficulty reaching across the divide to community leaders who are upset about a situation involving them, how will these commissioners react if there's a crisis and dozens or even hundreds of people show up at a meeting to vent about it, which could and has happened in the past? Part of that problem is due to the tremendous drop off in public outreach by the commission to the communities it serves in the past year.

Outreach keeps commissioners connected with communities to build rapports with them so their faces are known. This helps people feel that the complaint process is a safe one to use for them and their families. It also helps during times of tension and even crisis surrounding critical incidents.

But if you look at the monthly reports, outreach to communities is pretty much off the map. Except for a law enforcement event here and there, that's pretty much it for outreach. People read reports and think, oh, the commission only attends law enforcement events when in reality, a mixture of many different kind of outreach activities like was seen in the past that are done by commissioners and the executive manager is the best thing to see.

The executive manager plays a crucial role and it's important for the community and the department to know who he or she is and that this person is visible. Yet despite putting community outreach as a job responsibility for the position, the city manager's office likes to keep this key personnel locked in City Hall where no one knows who he is. It's very telling that the current interim manager has an office on the same floor as the city manager's office and not the same location as the office he heads.


Outreach was once a strong area for the CPRC which did outreach both to the police department and the communities, both business and residential, in Riverside, which was no small feat given that many boards and commissions hire staff members to do a lot of the outreach into neighboring communities.

However, outreach was the city manager office's first target because it was a strength and it acted by barring Payne from doing outreach the autumn before his resignation. A disproportionate number of resignations by commissioners involved those either serving on the Outreach committee or particularly active in outreach including those of Bonavita Quinto, Ric Castro and Frank Arroela.

Also, the commissioners have never asked members of different communities what items they wished to discuss or have placed on the agenda. People have a more vested interest in the topics under the CPRC's jurisdiction which interest them and these topics of interest may differ from neighborhood to neighborhood and even within different communities in each neighborhood or different neighborhoods within communities.


As for the community? Many of these stake holders aren't even willing to file complaints with the seven-year-old panel. They don't see a panel of mostly White people who are mostly from law enforcement backgrounds as being representative of them. They fear retaliation, perceived or real if they file complaints. One complainant dealt with an area commander in one precinct who allegedly kept telling him how unhappy he was that he was filing a complaint against one of his officers. He allegedly told other complainants he would handle it personally instead and then they never heard back from him.

The commission has come a long way and has done great things. But then its direction collided with the interests of the city and well, what you have seen happen in the past two years is what you've seen.

An interesting thing happens to boards and commissions that are overseen by the city manager's office which is they get micromanaged to do what that office wants, or else. The Human Relations Commission attempts to address a controversial employment issue and in response, the city manager's office guts its staffing, so the HRC winds up under the protective embrace of Loveridge's office.

The Human Resources Board also tries to tackle controversial issues and although even more structurally weak than the CPRC, this board has been fearless lately tackling issues ranging from the "at will" positions in the police department to racial discrimination issues in various city departments.

Recently, someone told me that Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis tried to tell the HR board what it was going to do which is what he wanted or his boss wanted, and its chair told him that we don't have to do what you want. We don't report to you. We report to the city council and that was that. And then it went back to doing its business just as it should.

Some where in that experience involving the only volunteer run panel to stand up to the city manager's office, there's a lesson to be learned.

But nothing sort of a charter initiative will really help the CPRC, because that's the only way to make the structural changes that address the underlying issues with this panel that even with charter protection is still too dependent on the whims of the city manager's office, city attorney's office(which in contrast to Berkely's own Manuela Albuquerque) serves mainly to be obstructive and the city council. It's still every bit as much the political football today as it was before November 2004. Even more so.

Until then? Hopefully some good recommendations through our designated stake holders that at least improve access to the complaint process by those who actually use it who are left to trust the input of those who likely never will need it.



Next installment: The CPRC: When past becomes prologue.

Perhaps to be published in a book titled, The Gadfly's Guide to City Hall.