Elections 2007: Bring on the endorsements!

It's not even mid-summer with round two of the 2007 elections four months away but endorsements are already ringing in for the finalists, according to the Press Enterprise. It's appropriate that it comes as the new fiscal year in Riverside begins. The annual budget appears balanced for now but the economy judging by the sales tax revenue is taking a downturn.

As stated here, Ward Three candidate Peter Olmos who hasn't given up on the political arena has endorsed incumbent Art Gage.


(excerpt)



He said he was naïve when he threw his hat in the ring. A trip around the ward with Gage after the election taught him that Gage has delivered for his constituents, he said.

He cited the Magnolia Avenue railroad-crossing underpass that the city is planning and assistance Gage provided the Pachappa Little League.

"Results are what matter and Art's shown results," Olmos said.




He walked around with Gage at the neighborhood conference as well and said he was impressed with Gage, not so impressed with rival candidate, William "Rusty" Bailey. Olmos was concerned about Bailey's ties to development interests which some people have claimed his campaign followers have kept under wraps as they stumped for him. It's no secret that he'd be welcomed with open arms by BASS, who after all except for Steve Adams, endorsed him before he even filed his papers with the city clerk's office.

Bailey had worked several years ago for the Riverside County Economic Development Agency which was run by City Manager Brad Hudson before he jumped ship and came to Riverside.


What's funny in the article is that it states that outgoing Ward Five councilman, Ed Adkison supports Chris MacArthur calling him the hardest working candidate he has ever seen. Why is that interesting? Because it's been said widely that Adkison himself urged MacArthur to enter into the city council race. Most people it seems have known for months that Adkison backed MacArthur before the official announcement.


Not surprisingly, candidate Derek Thesier, a really nice guy who ran in the Ward One election is backing challenger Mike Gardner.


Daniel Gressman, who ran in Ward Seven but didn't run an aggressive campaign because he was weary of the mudslinging threw in his hat for Terry Frizzel who faces off against Councilman Steve Adams.


(excerpt)


"I believe we both want to preserve our current lifestyle in Ward 7 and the city as a whole," Gressmann said. "This means not trying to become the next mega-city in Southern California."





A lot of people in the police department are moving around while Lincoln Field Operations Station undergoes what is expected to be a 90 day renovation period. Different employees will be farmed out to either the Magnolia Police Center or the Orange Street Station, but it seems with the latter, there's not that many more people that you can fit in that building which is expected to see at least four more years of operation while it is under lease with its new owners, the county of Riverside.

The department's dispatchers are still in their sensory deprivation chamber in the basement of the Orange Street Station which is a very big concern especially in the case of a major earthquake as one would guess that this building from the 1960s is not very seismically protected and since Riverside is fairly close to both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults which are both capable of easily generating quakes in the 7.0-8.0 range, this is quite a concern.




The latest serial rapist is running around in Riverside and Corona, according to the Press Enterprise and the police are looking for the public's help to find him.

Brings back memories of several close calls at apartment complexes in Riverside some years back when tenants would report a man wearing black including down to his hat and gloves who was clearly casing out women in their apartments. He used to hide behind a stairwell if anyone was looking at him so he would be out of sight but still able to see between the space between the steps. He was even given a nickname by the tenants but I can't remember what it was. He had just appeared there out of no where one day and then kept coming back, always at night.

In the laundry room, we used to share stories of who got cased the prior evening. Calls to the police at the time resulted in long delays or no response and calls to the security company resulted in 45 minute trips because one security guard did the rounds of different complexes in two different cities. So my neighbor who went to put the cat out at 2 a.m. and saw a strange man in her yard who would then ask her if she knew where so-and-so lived couldn't get police help after she slammed the door. She thought it was because she was on welfare but the staffing shortage was more acute then than it is now so that may have been a factor as well. Even the landlord reported the man in black with the black gloves and got no where.

Neighborhood Watch started and stalled in the complex as it likely does in rental complexes with high turnover rates, but we always had the laundry room.

It's probably not the only case where neighbors have met and while folding laundry or loaning each other quarters for the machines, talked about how so-and-so's car got shot at while driving down the street or about the new tenant who had moved in on what was called the "drug dealer's special" which is what happens when landlords who are desperate to lower vacancy rates offer huge discounts for rent or even free months to new tenants, i.e. move in and get the second month free. People often didn't call the police to report these things either out of fear or because of lack of followup. I did report once to my elected official about drug dealers in the complex, and came home to find a business card from the Riverside Police Department on my door for everyone including the drug dealers to see and one thing drug dealers don't like is when their neighbors tell on them. It's bad for their businesses I imagine, and getting harassed by drug dealers who are upset at you for reporting then like getting harassed by police officers who are upset with you for criticizing them is not fun.


Police officers often complain that people in a neighborhood won't report anything and often that's true, but they won't until they trust the police officers in their neighborhood, they see these officers and talk to them and the officers make the effort to talk with them. And just as important, the people feel that it's safe to report things without physical harm to themselves or their families.

John Campbell, the keynote speaker at the neighborhood conference last weekend talked about this type of thing where the first steps taken by people witnessing criminal behavior in their neighborhood is to discuss it with each other, one by one until everyone's talking about it. It can be over someone's fence, inside someone's living room or in a laundry room with a broken lock on the door and a vending machine with a cage around it. A lot of my neighbors would have been nodding their head at a lot of what he said about his own efforts at neighborhood organization in Portland, Oregon.

The laundry room did provide a good place for discussion on what was going on in the complex. It was one way for people to build relationships in a transitory setting like an apartment complex where tenants came and went. Enough so that people felt that people were looking out for one another, especially the women. Also, it's always good to have someone to remind you not to mix colors and whites unless you wanted pink socks.

One of the topics for a while was the guy who kept hanging around in people's yards, asking for so-and-so who never seemed to be someone who actually lived there. It was the biggest topic since the guy who habitually showed up at the complex and always seemed to leave his pants at home.

Every female neighbor had a story and they all sounded similar. The guy intimidated everyone during his stint at the complex.

When it was my turn to be cased, I was up all night because my cat was delivering kittens and at one time, I went outside between kittens and he was standing behind the stairwell, and the light reflected his face between the steps. The next night, fortunately I got up and saw that he was trying to open my window. Fortunately, when he saw me, he first hid to the side of the window then set a record probably, the 200 meter sprint to the gate, which of course was broken that night as it had been for several months. My first encounter with him was when he approached me three evenings in a row and asked me if a cat sitting nearby was my cat. Maybe if the cat hadn't been there, I would have been asked if I knew so-and-so unless he saved that as an excuse to be loitering in people's yards in the middle of the night.

Then he disappeared for a while and people wondered about that too. But it turned out, he had just changed apartment complexes.

One morning, good news in the laundry room! Some UCR Police Department officers had picked him up at one of the complexes owned by the university where I suppose he made his rounds as well. He had done the same routine, asking people if they knew so-and-so, who was never anyone who actually lived in the complex he was scouting apparently. And he had a sex offender background that went back quite a few years.

Everyone slept much more soundly that night. Thank goodness no one wanted to mess around with university students many of whom have concerned parents or families who might pressure the university administrators if their children told them the university area was unsafe. University administrators are notorious for not wanting parents of their students to even know that crimes take place on the campus, often releasing statistics that are misleading or less than accurate.

One year, UCR stated that it had zero rapes reported when the Women's Resource Center had at least 60 women come in for counseling who were rape victims. Some had occurred in other cities and were reported there but many were in Riverside and many apparently weren't reported. If they had been reported to UCR, would they have been tabulated and reported accurately in statistical form for the public?

The Riverside Police Department has improved a lot in handling these things in the past few years. A lot of awareness and training in this area in law enforcement in general in the last 20 years benefiting some women more than others. Were university students seen as a greater priority than women at another complex who were mostly Black and Latino and with some living on public assistance?

There was some discussion about that in the laundry room after the man who always seemed to be looking for so-and-so was finally caught. And women were actually giving thanks that he had chosen to target White university students, not because they wished harm on any women but because they felt that had to happen for it and him to be taken seriously.

But the Riverside Police Department's sexual assault and child abuse division has faced staffing issues of its own, according to a memo submitted by former Lt. Jay Theuer that somehow ended up being included in the arbitration case involving former Det. Al Kennedy who was fired for sexual misconduct but later reinstated by an arbitrator. It's not clear how much damage was done by Kennedy's appalling behavior to the sexual assault unit and how it impacted public trust in it, given how few women report sexual assault to police departments even under the best of circumstances.

The memo said that more detectives were needed to ease the caseload on those assigned to that division and just as importantly, they were needed for assignment when the current detectives in that unit felt that they had to leave it and work in another assignment. According to the memo, detectives had to wait at least six months to a year to be reassigned which is too long for a detective who may be burned out.

Have these problems been fixed? After all, staffing problems continue to plague the field operations division, which led to the creation of 35 positions in the past several years.

A lot of it is education of law enforcement officers and the public, a UCR detective once told me. He, for example, said that he hoped and always told women to report even men who exposed themselves in public because they could be helping in the prevention of more major crimes by that person in the future. Reporting these incidents and never feeling you needed to apologize for wasting someone else's time were two factors to keep in mind. That attitude does help women a lot in these situations and it helps the profession that officers especially male officers are telling women these things.

Hopefully, gone are the days when you try to report a man exposing himself and the police say, " men are deviant creatures and it's a free country" and "was he your boyfriend and is this about you having a fight with him?" before adding at the end that this is the 10th report that they had received about the man in the white car exposing himself to female students near a local high school that week.

It's difficult enough for many women to report this type of behavior particularly to male police officers and face it, over 90% of them in patrol are still male officers. And it's not always clear what they've been taught on these types of reports because it's probably not easy for them either. And if they don't receive enough training, then that makes it that much harder.

So the police department is asking the press to ask the public to help them find the latest serial rapist which is good. But what will make the difference is how well the Riverside Police Department(and its counterpart in Corona)relates to the neighborhoods where this rapist has struck and how people in those neighborhoods relate to them, as well as the relationships based on reality and not on image that they've build in other neighborhoods in this city.

Because more often than not, that is what does make the difference.







As the Riverside Police Department prepares to conduct its second 40-hour training session on mental health training for its police officers, the county's grand jury has come back with a report highly critical of the county's main mental health facility, according to the Press Enterprise.

A lot of administrative problems at the facility which is housed in the Riverside County Regional Medical Center as well as patient care. But will the grand jury's recommendations included in its reports help change things or will the report be cast on the shelf to gather dust like other reports have?

One individual interviewed in the article said it best.


(excerpt)



"I will be disappointed if nothing gets done," said Dr. Hanaa Fam, a psychiatrist at the facility. "If it means nothing will happen, it will be even worse than if the investigation never happened."


This is the truth about just about any investigation involving a public agency or facility. The county grand jury can be a very valuable tool, but if its recommendations are ignored, that's almost worse than if it never existed at all.





Moving the main branch of Riverside's public library isn't happening any time soon according to columnist Dan Bernstein.


(excerpt)


"I suggested it," Riverside Councilman Andy Melendrez told me a few days ago. "It fell like a lead balloon."

Seems Melendrez and Tackaberry were on the same page. The councilman's ward includes the notorious and historically snubbed University Avenue. A library on this drag, wrote Tackaberry, "would revitalize this neglected area and serve as a community center for the Eastside. Make it a showplace entrance to our downtown and a bridge to the University Village developments."

Melendrez floated his balloon as a newish councilman. "Unfortunately, people had already committed to see it (Old Main) developed in its current spot."

The commitment solidified in April when the City Council inked a $2.2 million contract with reputable LA architects to design and manage construction of a $25 million expansion that would create more library space, swallow the muni museum (now across the street) and maybe include a 200-seat lecture hall. The addition could reach 40K square feet. The existing library (60K square feet) would be remodeled. No word about parking.

If the city goes through with this plan, it won't be the best Riverside can do. The old library is a tear-down, and it's time to tear it down.


Maybe a better idea is just to rebuild the dais at city council. How a vibrant library facility was excluded from the Riverside Renaissance frenzy is just unimaginable.