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.
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.
Labels: business as usual, City elections, CPRC vs the city, Making the grade
posted by Five Before Midnight | 11:11 PM
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