The Los Angeles Times strikes back
The Los Angeles Times did an interesting exploration of the reasons given by the state's law enforcement unions for shutting down S.B. 1019 at the state assembly last week. What it discovered was even more interesting.
(excerpt)
"Keep our families safe," speaker after speaker said.
The argument resonated with lawmakers and essentially killed a bill that would have provided access to disciplinary records, such as when officers use excessive force, lie in court or make racial slurs.
Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana), the Public Safety Committee chairman, said he was convinced that identifying officers involved in misconduct was "a real threat" to their safety. In an interview with The Times, he said he had been told of "numerous examples" where the release of an officer's identity in a discipline case directly led to officers and their families being harmed.
When asked to cite one such case, however, Solorio could not.
"It's one of the things where you hear so many you can't remember any," he said as he hurried to get off the phone.
Solorio wasn't alone.
The same police unions that raised the safety issue also were unable to identify a case in which the release of such information was used by a criminal or disgruntled citizen to hunt down, confront or hurt an officer or his loved ones.
Civil rights organizations and their leaders said they were shocked that this tactic has been used but they shouldn't have been if they've been paying attention to past debates on this issue. They weren't as surprised when law enforcement unions turned the tables and tried to intimidate the same elected officials they tried to sway with arguments about their safety involving legislation addressing term limits.
(excerpt)
"It's really an effective tactic," said Thomas W. Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. "When you don't have good arguments on the policy, you have to resort to fear, intimidation and in this case threats."
Maybe it's a good idea to perform a research study on this issue. But there's another side to it as well.
As someone who once had a police officer apparently "pray" for harm for me and my family and whose family had to spend its Christmas holidays in 2005 reading or hearing about it in newspapers all over the western part of the United States, I can understand the importance of both privacy and safety for one's family, albeit from a different perspective. And it's doubtful that if a civilian said this to an officer, he'd be receiving an award a year later from the local city government as occurred to one officer late last year. And what did his supervising captain call him? Part of the "great", "new" and "exciting blood" of the police department.
Someone high up clearly has a dim view of the police force if that's his measuring stick for a standard of excellence. That's a shame because there are many better examples in the department to put front and center instead. But the police culture which is as pervasive at the top of the hierarchy as it is at its bottom apparently won out again.
For people who value privacy for their families, even in casual conversation it seems to be one of the first questions on more than a few of their lips. Where do you live? Or, do you live [insert one of Riverside's 26 or so neighborhoods]? It's an odd question for people to ask who are sensitive about their own privacy if it's in a nonprofessional capacity.
Questions like that take on a different tone when being asked by police officers and if you want to understand why, read the department's policy #4.30 which governs its use of force. Level one in the use of force continuum is what is known as a uniformed presence. Meaning that in a sense, the uniform is intended to encourage or even intimidate an individual into compliance without the use of further force. That's important for law enforcement officers to do their job, but in a sense, it's sometimes a detriment to communication. And some of them may not even be aware that the uniform sometimes sends that message even in nonprofessional contacts, because it's a strong part of the professional identity that they may sometimes take for granted.
Also, as a person who had two officers I didn't know gesture me over to just talk to them and then asked me where I lived in the past week, I find it ironic that members of a profession who value their own privacy are so curious about probing into that of other people. One officer even called me over at the Orange Street Station parking lot and asked me if I was homeless even though he clearly knew who I was and said he was a regular reader of the newspaper. That was an odd experience.
However, it didn't surprise me. It's not the first time I've had officers ask me strange questions like that usually based on stories they hear from the ones that don't like me. Most of the time the ones who ask don't seem to mean any harm but obviously have been tapped into some sort of database of the grapevine kind.
Stories that I was abused as a child, stories that I burned flags, and I was evil personified, responsible for all the crime in the city and so forth. At one local business where officers used to congregate before their management discouraged that activity, several employees there asked me for copies of the newspaper at the same time. Why, because apparently some patrol officers in both swing shift and graveyard shift held informal gatherings of some type of reading circle involving the publication at that business several years ago. That wasn't long after the same employees asked me if I was that Mary and seemed surprise when they didn't see horns sprouting or at the least that I didn't share a similarity to a name originally given to a female creature with floppy ears and a wagging tail.
Obviously, someone hadn't sent these ahem, reading groups copies of Oprah Winfrey's book club reading list.
For being so skeptical about the rest of the human race, some police officers certainly appear to take anything anyone in their own crowd says at face value without second guessing it or the motives of those saying it. Part and parcel of the police culture that just exists inside every law enforcement agency to some degree. Trust your own without questioning what they say or do and distrust all outsiders.
I overheard that patrol officer make those comments about blaming my existence for the entire crime wave in the city's history probably going back into the early 1900s to a woman who told me the rest of what he said after he left.
Several years ago, I even had one plain-clothed bald officer walk alongside me from a short distance away at the Orange Street Station parking lot, glaring at me after a much shorter officer dressed in a long-sleeved navy blue tee-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a dark blue baseball cap saw me and spoke to him. The angry, pacing officer wasn't one I knew or even recognized and the tinier officer kept his face down, perhaps due to bashfulness. It was a bit intimidating at the time, but it may have been my first experience of actually seeing the rumor mill at work. The littler officer of course was gone by then, dashing off to the courthouse.
Hopefully, the taller officer counted to 10 or maybe 100, advice given by former president Thomas Jefferson back in his day, before interacting with the public in a professional capacity because he went from calm to quite irate in a nanosecond. If he was a car with that kind of acceleration, he'd be a Corvette.
I was reminded of that incident because recently, a woman I know told me another woman she knew had seen it and she had wondered if the taller bald officer had said anything to me. He hadn't, at least not through using words.
About a month or so after that in July 2005, I was walking by the station again and heard a door slam hard from a green vehicle. Then a plain clothed bald officer with a struggling goatee and a stocky build glared at me before walking towards the back entrance of the Orange Street Station, turning his head to glare back at me again several times for good measure. Bad day? Maybe next time rethink the color scheme of the shorts?
He kind of resembled the patrol officer who was telling people I was responsible for all the crime several years earlier, only older, heavier and balder. Hopefully, he counted to 10, as advised by Jefferson, before he entered the building. Most people come out of a Fourth of July weekend in a good mood, not scowling and slamming doors. I kind of felt sorry for him.
Also as a person who spoke before the Community Police Review Commission and played exhibit A before the body which initiated a policy recommendation to try and keep the addresses and phone numbers that are included on police complaints from being accessible of officers whom are the subjects of these complaints.
It makes no sense for an officer who has a complaint filed against him or her to have access to personal information on the complainant. The only purpose it would have would be to use against the complainant to retaliate or to exercise much better judgment and simply not use it at all. The sole purpose of providing it should be to provide a means for the person in charge of the investigation of a citizen complaint to contact the involved parties for interviewing purposes. So why is it so widely distributed to other people in the department who receive copies of the complaint form?
In most cases, it's probably ignored by the officer who is the subject of the complaint. But again, as incidents across the nation have shown, not all police officers are good officers and because of the efforts to keep information secret, the public has no way of telling the good officers from the bad ones so in situations like this, it's just more sensible to be cautious, prudent and keep that information from being seen by the subjects of the complaints. Unfortunately, there will be no legislation to address this issue either.
The police department still does it anyway, even when taking complaints over the phone. Some people don't file complaints because they are wary of providing that information. When you've been harassed by a police officer, the last thing you want to do is hand your personal information over to him or her on a platter. Police departments don't get that and still insist on putting it on copies of complaint forms given to the officers who are the subject of the complaints. There's no reason that they should see anything wrong with doing this because they are coming from the perspective of police officers not the complainants and that's how they conduct their investigations as well. Entirely from their own perspective which works well for the agencies and it works very well for the future of civilian review boards and commissions as well, because people want to see different perspectives examining the same things.
There was likely, scant discussion of that problem in Sacramento and it's unlikely if there had been, that emotion or even money in the form of campaign contributions to those who served on it would have been enough to sway the entire committee on this side of the issue.
When it comes to complaints, the only personal information that is readily available to outside parties, is that of the complainant and the witnesses to the alleged misconduct. After all, if a Pitchess motion is granted in a criminal or civil case, the personal information of everyone who filed a complaint against the involved officer will be given by a presiding judge to an attorney or attorneys for contact purposes. Most of the individuals who file complaints are never informed about this when they file them.
The policy recommendation sent by the CPRC was approved by the commission and sent to the city attorney's office where it was rejected because City Attorney Gregory Priamos saw no compelling reason to implement it. The department also said that most of that information was included in police reports written by those police officers. However, here's some information, not every complaint against a police officer results from a negative contact or even a professional contact with a police officer.
What these experiences and others teach is the importance of civilian oversight over police agencies. And ironically or not, it's often the most staunch opponents to this oversight who end up doing the teaching again and again, here and everywhere else. Are they aware that they are providing this opportunity for civilian oversight to grow?
Many police officers are hard-working and decent people doing a difficult job. Most of the police officers who come up to me who seem to know me even though I don't recognize or have never met them are friendly and pleasant. They appear to enjoy what they do and take pride in it and themselves. That is a healthy sign in an organization that has struggled in previous years.
But just like the rest of the human population, there are representatives of this group who are not nice and because the not so nice ones share the same badge, uniform and title of being a Riverside Police Department officer or a representative of another law enforcement agency. The people who are in the best position to keep the not so nice officers in line are the ones who are there to do their job, not engage in these activities because they seem most able to listen to others in their same social group.
Do they do this?
It's hard to say, given how insulated law enforcement agencies are from the public and how much it's clear that top to bottom, they would love to keep things that way. They tell the public to trust in their ability to hold their own accountable whether it's the rank and file officer telling another officer to knock it off with something he's done or the supervisor who reports misconduct in one of his subordinates, up to the chief who dictates policy in that agency. However, at the same time, they are lobbying their elected officials up in Sacramento or filing law suits to keep the process secret, even increasing it as if that were possible in states like California.
Actions like these actually protect the bad behaving officers more than the good ones. Is that really the point here?
That's one of the major reasons the public doubts their ability and even their interest in keeping their own accountable when misconduct takes place in their ranks.
Still, privacy for police officers and their families is very important just as it is for members of the public if they are not breaking laws for harming others. But what about the use of databases by law enforcement officers for reasons that are not professional? Will governmental agencies be addressing this issue anytime soon? Who are the ones most likely to be impacted by these abuses?
From coast to coast, there have been not anecdotes but documented cases of law enforcement officers abusing and misusing computer databases that are supposed to be used by them for professional reasons, for personal reasons. Most often, these database abuses are associated with inhouse domestic violence towards spouses of police officers which is very high in law enforcement agencies, even though barely more than half of all departments have policies set up specifically to deal with this problem. In some departments, the abuse was so rampant they had to do a wide-scale investigation.
So is it true that in some cases, it's the privacy of families of law enforcement officers that has to be protected from those law enforcement officers in domestic violence situations where improperly accessing databases is a part of the picture? Is it more likely for family members of law enforcement officers to have to fear that a violation of their privacy will be committed by an officer in their family unit?
Top 10 List of Database Abuses
Michigan officers use database to harass, stalk
Unfortunately database abuse isn't a problem limited to the United States.
How about Australia? Victoria, Australia's problem was so serious there was a recommendation to scrap the database.
Diana Wetendorf, a national expert on domestic violence committed by police officers discusses how abusive officers use professional databases to access information here and here on spouses or significant others.
But what do police officers do if one of their own is committing the violations? Do they do anything or do they do nothing calling it a "family matter"? Because since they are so closed off from everyone else by their culture, often they are in the best positions to address situations like that in each other before they become major problems.
Does their culture even allow them to admit such problems exist? Does their problem allow other officers to bring them to their attention that something needs to be done? Do the privacy rights of spouse and families trying to escape domestic violence by law enforcement officers matter as much as it appears to when those families are intact?
The other side of the issue is seldom discussed because those who are affected by it lack the lobbying power and the political influence of those trying to slam the door on civilian oversight in different venues. As more people become aware of the efforts to close the door, that balance might change.
The representative of PORAC was just as stymied at trying to address the topic, as was a union attorney.
(excerpt)
Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, said afterward that he was aware of anecdotal evidence of officers being threatened or harmed by people who learned their names through disciplinary procedures. But he was unable to cite a case in which it had happened.
The person who would have such detail, he said, was police union attorney Everett L. Bobbitt. But, when contacted by The Times, Bobbitt didn't have the information either.
"If you want me to tell you that an officer got killed because of that information, I can't," said Bobbitt, who argued the Copley case before the state's high court.
Nor could Bobbitt point to a case in which an officer had been harmed or threatened.
"Does that mean the threat isn't there?" Bobbitt said. "Of course not."
The debate is expected to continue as the bill is expected to return to the assembly floor again in some form. Senator Gloria Romero said she's not giving up or giving in on the issue.
All this is coming as the case of another Riverside Police Department officer who may have been fired in connection with a criminal case and then won in arbitration comes before the city council for further discussions on his future.
In the olden days, it used to be police chiefs who hired and fired officers. Police chiefs used to be entrusted with promoting them as well, except apparently on two occasions seven years apart. What if any of these three powers does the police chief still employ in River City? Which one is left to the city manager's office? Which to the city council?
The city of Los Angeles is being told by juries to empty its pockets to pay out several law suits involving racial discrimination, gender discrimination, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, harassment and retaliation, according to the Associated Press.
A jury in that county has issued a preliminary verdict of $6.2 million in the case of Brenda Lee, who is a Black lesbian and there's still the next phase which involves punitive damages which usually are much higher in cost.
The taxpayers of the city of Los Angeles will be required to pay out for behavior against Lee which included placing pet urine in her mouthwash, making derogatory comments and putting her through harsh drills based solely on her race and sexual orientation.
This verdict follows a $1.9 million decision by a jury in the case involving Lewis Bressler who was retaliated against for backing Lee's efforts to get justice. Expect more to come until the fire department deals with its clearly obvious racist, sexist and homophobic culture.
One city leader said the obvious.
(excerpt)
Councilman Jack Weiss, who heads the City Council's public safety committee, said the verdict was "very alarming to anyone who has a fiduciary responsibility over the city budget."
"The most important thing is to reform the Fire Department," he said. "There's new leadership. ... Hopefully that will prevent these sorts of lawsuits."
White straight men in some of these professions need to really get over themselves before they drain a city's litigation coffer dry. Hopefully the latest fire chief entrusted by the city to fix this department can do the job.
More on the situation involving the litigation against the city regarding its fire department here.
San Bernardino County's Board of Supervisors has officially been declared "dysfunctional" by the county grand jury according to the Press Enterprise. And it was all former chairman, Bill Postmus's fault, it decided.
(excerpt)
The grand jury reviewed the sudden retirement of the former county counsel, a settlement with a politically connected developer, media leaks, partisan politics and the "dysfunctional relationships between supervisors."
"When the available information is viewed in totality the blame for allowing the dysfunctional operation of the Board of Supervisors lies squarely on the shoulder of the former chairman of the board who was, at the time, the elected leader," the grand jury report said. "The failure to resolve these long-standing differences further added to the dysfunctional perception of the board."
As of yet, there has been no similar investigation by Riverside's own grand jury to determine whether the current city council in that city is also dysfunctional and apparently no plans to conduct one. However, it's easy to lose count of how many investigations involving some aspect of Riverside's city government or infrastructure have been initiated(and subsequently quieted according to rumors) since the current city management team has been in place.
Some said, could there be something equivalent to the consent decree that former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer put on the Riverside Police Department?
Actually, some housecleaning during the election season works just as well. As more rumors of federal probes into City Hall continue to circulate.
Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee are meeting to discuss recommendations to send to the city government in wake of the latest officer involved shooting in that city according to WMCTV. That was the fatal shooting of DeAunta Farrow, 12 who pointed a toy gun at a police officer.
To no one's surprise, civilian oversight was at the top of the wish list. As was the case in dozens of other cities and counties. As will likely be the case in dozens and hundreds more from coast to coast.
(excerpt)
The first request on the list asks for a complete a thorough investigation into the shooting.
The second, and the biggest item, was a request to create something called a "citizen review board" for the police department; something community leaders insist would help ease tensions and begin the healing process.
The West Memphis Community is still searching for answers to improve relations between police and concerned citizens. They're upset by last month's deadly shooting that killed 12-year-old DeAunta Farrow.
"Right now, there is no oversight. There is no one to hold police accountable," said Hubert Bass a former city councilman.
Bass pushed for a citizen committee group years ago to answer civil rights complaints and now he's pushing for it again.
Bass added, "the commission has to have power to investigate and if they don't have that power then it means nothing."
The sentiment of that last sentence is held by many people and thousands of miles away from Memphis in Riverside, the investigation of officer-involved deaths by the Community Police Review Commission has been the target of the city's latest challenge against the seven-year-old body.
Also in political news, will Councilman Steve Adams be gaining a supporter and Councilman Dom Betro, losing a major one?
(excerpt)
"Keep our families safe," speaker after speaker said.
The argument resonated with lawmakers and essentially killed a bill that would have provided access to disciplinary records, such as when officers use excessive force, lie in court or make racial slurs.
Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana), the Public Safety Committee chairman, said he was convinced that identifying officers involved in misconduct was "a real threat" to their safety. In an interview with The Times, he said he had been told of "numerous examples" where the release of an officer's identity in a discipline case directly led to officers and their families being harmed.
When asked to cite one such case, however, Solorio could not.
"It's one of the things where you hear so many you can't remember any," he said as he hurried to get off the phone.
Solorio wasn't alone.
The same police unions that raised the safety issue also were unable to identify a case in which the release of such information was used by a criminal or disgruntled citizen to hunt down, confront or hurt an officer or his loved ones.
Civil rights organizations and their leaders said they were shocked that this tactic has been used but they shouldn't have been if they've been paying attention to past debates on this issue. They weren't as surprised when law enforcement unions turned the tables and tried to intimidate the same elected officials they tried to sway with arguments about their safety involving legislation addressing term limits.
(excerpt)
"It's really an effective tactic," said Thomas W. Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. "When you don't have good arguments on the policy, you have to resort to fear, intimidation and in this case threats."
Maybe it's a good idea to perform a research study on this issue. But there's another side to it as well.
As someone who once had a police officer apparently "pray" for harm for me and my family and whose family had to spend its Christmas holidays in 2005 reading or hearing about it in newspapers all over the western part of the United States, I can understand the importance of both privacy and safety for one's family, albeit from a different perspective. And it's doubtful that if a civilian said this to an officer, he'd be receiving an award a year later from the local city government as occurred to one officer late last year. And what did his supervising captain call him? Part of the "great", "new" and "exciting blood" of the police department.
Someone high up clearly has a dim view of the police force if that's his measuring stick for a standard of excellence. That's a shame because there are many better examples in the department to put front and center instead. But the police culture which is as pervasive at the top of the hierarchy as it is at its bottom apparently won out again.
For people who value privacy for their families, even in casual conversation it seems to be one of the first questions on more than a few of their lips. Where do you live? Or, do you live [insert one of Riverside's 26 or so neighborhoods]? It's an odd question for people to ask who are sensitive about their own privacy if it's in a nonprofessional capacity.
Questions like that take on a different tone when being asked by police officers and if you want to understand why, read the department's policy #4.30 which governs its use of force. Level one in the use of force continuum is what is known as a uniformed presence. Meaning that in a sense, the uniform is intended to encourage or even intimidate an individual into compliance without the use of further force. That's important for law enforcement officers to do their job, but in a sense, it's sometimes a detriment to communication. And some of them may not even be aware that the uniform sometimes sends that message even in nonprofessional contacts, because it's a strong part of the professional identity that they may sometimes take for granted.
Also, as a person who had two officers I didn't know gesture me over to just talk to them and then asked me where I lived in the past week, I find it ironic that members of a profession who value their own privacy are so curious about probing into that of other people. One officer even called me over at the Orange Street Station parking lot and asked me if I was homeless even though he clearly knew who I was and said he was a regular reader of the newspaper. That was an odd experience.
However, it didn't surprise me. It's not the first time I've had officers ask me strange questions like that usually based on stories they hear from the ones that don't like me. Most of the time the ones who ask don't seem to mean any harm but obviously have been tapped into some sort of database of the grapevine kind.
Stories that I was abused as a child, stories that I burned flags, and I was evil personified, responsible for all the crime in the city and so forth. At one local business where officers used to congregate before their management discouraged that activity, several employees there asked me for copies of the newspaper at the same time. Why, because apparently some patrol officers in both swing shift and graveyard shift held informal gatherings of some type of reading circle involving the publication at that business several years ago. That wasn't long after the same employees asked me if I was that Mary and seemed surprise when they didn't see horns sprouting or at the least that I didn't share a similarity to a name originally given to a female creature with floppy ears and a wagging tail.
Obviously, someone hadn't sent these ahem, reading groups copies of Oprah Winfrey's book club reading list.
For being so skeptical about the rest of the human race, some police officers certainly appear to take anything anyone in their own crowd says at face value without second guessing it or the motives of those saying it. Part and parcel of the police culture that just exists inside every law enforcement agency to some degree. Trust your own without questioning what they say or do and distrust all outsiders.
I overheard that patrol officer make those comments about blaming my existence for the entire crime wave in the city's history probably going back into the early 1900s to a woman who told me the rest of what he said after he left.
Several years ago, I even had one plain-clothed bald officer walk alongside me from a short distance away at the Orange Street Station parking lot, glaring at me after a much shorter officer dressed in a long-sleeved navy blue tee-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a dark blue baseball cap saw me and spoke to him. The angry, pacing officer wasn't one I knew or even recognized and the tinier officer kept his face down, perhaps due to bashfulness. It was a bit intimidating at the time, but it may have been my first experience of actually seeing the rumor mill at work. The littler officer of course was gone by then, dashing off to the courthouse.
Hopefully, the taller officer counted to 10 or maybe 100, advice given by former president Thomas Jefferson back in his day, before interacting with the public in a professional capacity because he went from calm to quite irate in a nanosecond. If he was a car with that kind of acceleration, he'd be a Corvette.
I was reminded of that incident because recently, a woman I know told me another woman she knew had seen it and she had wondered if the taller bald officer had said anything to me. He hadn't, at least not through using words.
About a month or so after that in July 2005, I was walking by the station again and heard a door slam hard from a green vehicle. Then a plain clothed bald officer with a struggling goatee and a stocky build glared at me before walking towards the back entrance of the Orange Street Station, turning his head to glare back at me again several times for good measure. Bad day? Maybe next time rethink the color scheme of the shorts?
He kind of resembled the patrol officer who was telling people I was responsible for all the crime several years earlier, only older, heavier and balder. Hopefully, he counted to 10, as advised by Jefferson, before he entered the building. Most people come out of a Fourth of July weekend in a good mood, not scowling and slamming doors. I kind of felt sorry for him.
Also as a person who spoke before the Community Police Review Commission and played exhibit A before the body which initiated a policy recommendation to try and keep the addresses and phone numbers that are included on police complaints from being accessible of officers whom are the subjects of these complaints.
It makes no sense for an officer who has a complaint filed against him or her to have access to personal information on the complainant. The only purpose it would have would be to use against the complainant to retaliate or to exercise much better judgment and simply not use it at all. The sole purpose of providing it should be to provide a means for the person in charge of the investigation of a citizen complaint to contact the involved parties for interviewing purposes. So why is it so widely distributed to other people in the department who receive copies of the complaint form?
In most cases, it's probably ignored by the officer who is the subject of the complaint. But again, as incidents across the nation have shown, not all police officers are good officers and because of the efforts to keep information secret, the public has no way of telling the good officers from the bad ones so in situations like this, it's just more sensible to be cautious, prudent and keep that information from being seen by the subjects of the complaints. Unfortunately, there will be no legislation to address this issue either.
The police department still does it anyway, even when taking complaints over the phone. Some people don't file complaints because they are wary of providing that information. When you've been harassed by a police officer, the last thing you want to do is hand your personal information over to him or her on a platter. Police departments don't get that and still insist on putting it on copies of complaint forms given to the officers who are the subject of the complaints. There's no reason that they should see anything wrong with doing this because they are coming from the perspective of police officers not the complainants and that's how they conduct their investigations as well. Entirely from their own perspective which works well for the agencies and it works very well for the future of civilian review boards and commissions as well, because people want to see different perspectives examining the same things.
There was likely, scant discussion of that problem in Sacramento and it's unlikely if there had been, that emotion or even money in the form of campaign contributions to those who served on it would have been enough to sway the entire committee on this side of the issue.
When it comes to complaints, the only personal information that is readily available to outside parties, is that of the complainant and the witnesses to the alleged misconduct. After all, if a Pitchess motion is granted in a criminal or civil case, the personal information of everyone who filed a complaint against the involved officer will be given by a presiding judge to an attorney or attorneys for contact purposes. Most of the individuals who file complaints are never informed about this when they file them.
The policy recommendation sent by the CPRC was approved by the commission and sent to the city attorney's office where it was rejected because City Attorney Gregory Priamos saw no compelling reason to implement it. The department also said that most of that information was included in police reports written by those police officers. However, here's some information, not every complaint against a police officer results from a negative contact or even a professional contact with a police officer.
What these experiences and others teach is the importance of civilian oversight over police agencies. And ironically or not, it's often the most staunch opponents to this oversight who end up doing the teaching again and again, here and everywhere else. Are they aware that they are providing this opportunity for civilian oversight to grow?
Many police officers are hard-working and decent people doing a difficult job. Most of the police officers who come up to me who seem to know me even though I don't recognize or have never met them are friendly and pleasant. They appear to enjoy what they do and take pride in it and themselves. That is a healthy sign in an organization that has struggled in previous years.
But just like the rest of the human population, there are representatives of this group who are not nice and because the not so nice ones share the same badge, uniform and title of being a Riverside Police Department officer or a representative of another law enforcement agency. The people who are in the best position to keep the not so nice officers in line are the ones who are there to do their job, not engage in these activities because they seem most able to listen to others in their same social group.
Do they do this?
It's hard to say, given how insulated law enforcement agencies are from the public and how much it's clear that top to bottom, they would love to keep things that way. They tell the public to trust in their ability to hold their own accountable whether it's the rank and file officer telling another officer to knock it off with something he's done or the supervisor who reports misconduct in one of his subordinates, up to the chief who dictates policy in that agency. However, at the same time, they are lobbying their elected officials up in Sacramento or filing law suits to keep the process secret, even increasing it as if that were possible in states like California.
Actions like these actually protect the bad behaving officers more than the good ones. Is that really the point here?
That's one of the major reasons the public doubts their ability and even their interest in keeping their own accountable when misconduct takes place in their ranks.
Still, privacy for police officers and their families is very important just as it is for members of the public if they are not breaking laws for harming others. But what about the use of databases by law enforcement officers for reasons that are not professional? Will governmental agencies be addressing this issue anytime soon? Who are the ones most likely to be impacted by these abuses?
From coast to coast, there have been not anecdotes but documented cases of law enforcement officers abusing and misusing computer databases that are supposed to be used by them for professional reasons, for personal reasons. Most often, these database abuses are associated with inhouse domestic violence towards spouses of police officers which is very high in law enforcement agencies, even though barely more than half of all departments have policies set up specifically to deal with this problem. In some departments, the abuse was so rampant they had to do a wide-scale investigation.
So is it true that in some cases, it's the privacy of families of law enforcement officers that has to be protected from those law enforcement officers in domestic violence situations where improperly accessing databases is a part of the picture? Is it more likely for family members of law enforcement officers to have to fear that a violation of their privacy will be committed by an officer in their family unit?
Top 10 List of Database Abuses
Michigan officers use database to harass, stalk
Unfortunately database abuse isn't a problem limited to the United States.
How about Australia? Victoria, Australia's problem was so serious there was a recommendation to scrap the database.
Diana Wetendorf, a national expert on domestic violence committed by police officers discusses how abusive officers use professional databases to access information here and here on spouses or significant others.
But what do police officers do if one of their own is committing the violations? Do they do anything or do they do nothing calling it a "family matter"? Because since they are so closed off from everyone else by their culture, often they are in the best positions to address situations like that in each other before they become major problems.
Does their culture even allow them to admit such problems exist? Does their problem allow other officers to bring them to their attention that something needs to be done? Do the privacy rights of spouse and families trying to escape domestic violence by law enforcement officers matter as much as it appears to when those families are intact?
The other side of the issue is seldom discussed because those who are affected by it lack the lobbying power and the political influence of those trying to slam the door on civilian oversight in different venues. As more people become aware of the efforts to close the door, that balance might change.
The representative of PORAC was just as stymied at trying to address the topic, as was a union attorney.
(excerpt)
Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, said afterward that he was aware of anecdotal evidence of officers being threatened or harmed by people who learned their names through disciplinary procedures. But he was unable to cite a case in which it had happened.
The person who would have such detail, he said, was police union attorney Everett L. Bobbitt. But, when contacted by The Times, Bobbitt didn't have the information either.
"If you want me to tell you that an officer got killed because of that information, I can't," said Bobbitt, who argued the Copley case before the state's high court.
Nor could Bobbitt point to a case in which an officer had been harmed or threatened.
"Does that mean the threat isn't there?" Bobbitt said. "Of course not."
The debate is expected to continue as the bill is expected to return to the assembly floor again in some form. Senator Gloria Romero said she's not giving up or giving in on the issue.
All this is coming as the case of another Riverside Police Department officer who may have been fired in connection with a criminal case and then won in arbitration comes before the city council for further discussions on his future.
In the olden days, it used to be police chiefs who hired and fired officers. Police chiefs used to be entrusted with promoting them as well, except apparently on two occasions seven years apart. What if any of these three powers does the police chief still employ in River City? Which one is left to the city manager's office? Which to the city council?
The city of Los Angeles is being told by juries to empty its pockets to pay out several law suits involving racial discrimination, gender discrimination, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, harassment and retaliation, according to the Associated Press.
A jury in that county has issued a preliminary verdict of $6.2 million in the case of Brenda Lee, who is a Black lesbian and there's still the next phase which involves punitive damages which usually are much higher in cost.
The taxpayers of the city of Los Angeles will be required to pay out for behavior against Lee which included placing pet urine in her mouthwash, making derogatory comments and putting her through harsh drills based solely on her race and sexual orientation.
This verdict follows a $1.9 million decision by a jury in the case involving Lewis Bressler who was retaliated against for backing Lee's efforts to get justice. Expect more to come until the fire department deals with its clearly obvious racist, sexist and homophobic culture.
One city leader said the obvious.
(excerpt)
Councilman Jack Weiss, who heads the City Council's public safety committee, said the verdict was "very alarming to anyone who has a fiduciary responsibility over the city budget."
"The most important thing is to reform the Fire Department," he said. "There's new leadership. ... Hopefully that will prevent these sorts of lawsuits."
White straight men in some of these professions need to really get over themselves before they drain a city's litigation coffer dry. Hopefully the latest fire chief entrusted by the city to fix this department can do the job.
More on the situation involving the litigation against the city regarding its fire department here.
San Bernardino County's Board of Supervisors has officially been declared "dysfunctional" by the county grand jury according to the Press Enterprise. And it was all former chairman, Bill Postmus's fault, it decided.
(excerpt)
The grand jury reviewed the sudden retirement of the former county counsel, a settlement with a politically connected developer, media leaks, partisan politics and the "dysfunctional relationships between supervisors."
"When the available information is viewed in totality the blame for allowing the dysfunctional operation of the Board of Supervisors lies squarely on the shoulder of the former chairman of the board who was, at the time, the elected leader," the grand jury report said. "The failure to resolve these long-standing differences further added to the dysfunctional perception of the board."
As of yet, there has been no similar investigation by Riverside's own grand jury to determine whether the current city council in that city is also dysfunctional and apparently no plans to conduct one. However, it's easy to lose count of how many investigations involving some aspect of Riverside's city government or infrastructure have been initiated(and subsequently quieted according to rumors) since the current city management team has been in place.
Some said, could there be something equivalent to the consent decree that former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer put on the Riverside Police Department?
Actually, some housecleaning during the election season works just as well. As more rumors of federal probes into City Hall continue to circulate.
Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee are meeting to discuss recommendations to send to the city government in wake of the latest officer involved shooting in that city according to WMCTV. That was the fatal shooting of DeAunta Farrow, 12 who pointed a toy gun at a police officer.
To no one's surprise, civilian oversight was at the top of the wish list. As was the case in dozens of other cities and counties. As will likely be the case in dozens and hundreds more from coast to coast.
(excerpt)
The first request on the list asks for a complete a thorough investigation into the shooting.
The second, and the biggest item, was a request to create something called a "citizen review board" for the police department; something community leaders insist would help ease tensions and begin the healing process.
The West Memphis Community is still searching for answers to improve relations between police and concerned citizens. They're upset by last month's deadly shooting that killed 12-year-old DeAunta Farrow.
"Right now, there is no oversight. There is no one to hold police accountable," said Hubert Bass a former city councilman.
Bass pushed for a citizen committee group years ago to answer civil rights complaints and now he's pushing for it again.
Bass added, "the commission has to have power to investigate and if they don't have that power then it means nothing."
The sentiment of that last sentence is held by many people and thousands of miles away from Memphis in Riverside, the investigation of officer-involved deaths by the Community Police Review Commission has been the target of the city's latest challenge against the seven-year-old body.
Also in political news, will Councilman Steve Adams be gaining a supporter and Councilman Dom Betro, losing a major one?
Labels: business as usual, civilian review spreads, culture 101, discrimination costs
posted by Five Before Midnight | 10:23 AM
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