Minority report, what minority report?
"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter. "
---Lewis Carroll, who doesn't attend civic meetings these days
The discussion of the Lee Deante Brown shooting's public report could very well continue into the next decade. Long after the city adjudicated the shooting case, the discussion continues to take place. It's like City Manager Brad Hudson told the public safety committee last November, Police Chief Russ Leach doesn't wait until the City Police Review Commission reaches a finding to make his decision.
It's not clear what the CPRC actually decided last night but the poker game between the majority of the body and Commissioner Jim Ward continued. Acting executive-something-or another, Mario Lara wasn't present at this meeting.
He wasn't missed because most of the time he just sits there, unsure of what to do or say. It's not his fault, as he never received any training for the job that he was assigned after his predecessor picked his integrity over the interests of the city and resigned late last year.
Even while an interim, his predecessor received six months of training for the job.
Chair Brian Pearcy, who was apparently given the scepter by City Manager Brad Hudson to pick the new executive manager, did his part to try to bring the case to its conclusion. Ward refused to budge, one commissioner facing off against eight of them.
And he's hanging on to his minority report and his right to issue one in a shooting that be believes is out of policy, in the face of commissioners who seriously believe they can cast a majority vote to edit his report or deny its release.
Ward has one commissioner in his corner at least when it comes to his right to issue the report alongside the majority report which is expected to back Officer Terry Ellefson's decision to shoot and kill Brown. Commissioner Steve Simpson said he disagreed with Ward's finding on the shooting but was concerned that City Attorney Gregory Priamos was advising the commission that it would either accept, modify or reject Ward's minority report.
"We should not have the right to reject it or modify it," Simpson said, "I will stand behind him and support his right to have a minority report."
Pearcy said that he's had the opportunity to discuss the minority report with Ward offline. He said that the letter submitted by Ward on June 21 didn't constitute a minority report.
Ward had words for Pearcy.
"My report is complete," Ward said, "I think we need to exchange reports when you complete your report."
Pearcy responded to that by expressing his fear that Ward was planning to spring the report on the commission when its members were already locked into their position and couldn't change it. If the commission including Pearcy is as secure in its position as it says it is, there's absolutely no need to have this concern let alone express it out loud. Why, if the commission is solid in its "straw poll" vote are they concerned about having something sprung on it?
Ward expressed his concern that once the commissioners were aware of his report that they would try to prevent its dissemination. Several commissioners said it wouldn't change the way they feel about the shooting. Ward added that there would be nothing in the minority report that hadn't been discussed during the months and months of special meetings on the Brown shooting.
"I don't know if you've been paying attention," Ward added.
Commissioner Jack Brewer said that the discussion had been going on for weeks.
"We look silly to the public," Brewer said.
Actually, they just look inaccessible to the public. And they look micromanaged to the public like most of the city's department heads do. And they don't look like the public, because for one thing, not even the police department let alone the city is 78% White.
They look more like City Hall. In fact, four of them had joined the CPRC after terming out on other boards of commissions or in one case, jumping ship from one to join the other. Most of the city's residents who apply to serve on boards and commissions aren't granted an interview let alone appointments on more than one commission.
Seven out of nine of them come from law enforcement backgrounds, which is unusual for most boards and commissions in the country. Any challenge to the assertion that only law enforcement personnel belong on the commission is viewed as being problematic. But if a civilian oversight mechanism includes only law enforcement personnel, active or retired, then that defeats the purpose of a community review board.
Current commissioners include the following:
A former political candidate for a county spot who received $300,000 from law enforcement unions including $193,000 from the Riverside Sheriff's Association and $30,000 from the Riverside Police Officers' Association. Imagine what would happen if a politician endorsed and financed by police accountability organizations tried to apply for a position on the commission. It would never happen. Allegedly she was a candidate voted in by a city council including onemember who claimed not to know that she had received donations from the RPOA and is trying to pull records about campaign contributions from the county. Here's a good place to start looking for more information on the campaign contributions. At least one other city council member knew she was backed by numerous law enforcement organizations which was why he refused to cast a vote for that commissioner position.
But as soon as a vacancy opens up on the commission and there's hard work going on in that front, one political appointment will beget another. That's why it's hard to get people in this city to even apply to be on boards and commissions. Many people see how politicized the process has become.
Another is the head of a business that contracts with the city to provide services to it. This commissioner marched lockstep to the podium at a recent city council meeting behind the police chief and the fire chief to support an item placed on the agenda by a city council member. He's also working directly with the police department representing his agency on a training issue.
A candidate who made comments praising the Los Angeles Police Department for its actions during the May Day incident during his interview and blaming the people sitting in the park who were hit with batons and shot at with less lethal munitions. One wonders if he'll do like with the police department when evaluating complaints from the department before receiving all the facts.
The commission has barely been functioning since Hudson's office, the city attorney's office and the police department decided it needed to be "fixed" after it released the controversial finding on the 2004 fatal shooting of Summer Lane.
Complaints are way down, because people have given up on the commission. However, of the 40 allegations adjudicated so far, about 22.5% of them were sustained, much higher than the national average.
However given that it's highly unlikely that the police department's internal affairs division has a sustain rate nearly that high, the city's sustain rate would match that of the police department given that in past years when there's been a large differential in sustained findings between the commission and the department, the city likely has favored the department's decisions.
When asked to provide statistics on how the city issued findings on complaint allegations which received differential findings, the city manager's office claimed they didn't keep those statistics. Hudson's predecessors however did and these annual statistics were included in one of the annual reports on the commission's progress. But then accountability was actually a word that was included in their vocabularies. Apparently, it went further than that. When the last executive director tried to keep track of those statistics himself, he was forbidden to do so by the city manager's office.
It's really hard to swallow this assertion that was in writing as a response to a CPRA request submitted last year that the city manager's office doesn't track these statistics. More likely is that it does, but it's afraid to let anyone in on what that statistical information would reveal and what it would most likely reveal is that the CPRC serves no more even in an advisory capacity on citizen complaints than it does in incustody deaths, as shown by Hudson's deposition on the issue in relation to the law suit filed by Ryan Wilson against the commission in 2006.
Speaking of which, what happened to this year's annual report?
Under the direction of former executive directors, Don Williams and Pedro Payne, the commission never failed to produce an annual report to present each March before the city council. However, interim executive manager Mario Lara, current chair, Brian Pearcy and Hudson have so far failed to both produce an annual report on the CPRC's performance this year and have not given any indication whether there will even be a written report this year.
They are having enough trouble trying to get through the Brown shooting and wringing their hands over the fact that they haven't seen Ward's minority report on the shooting.
Here's an example of the reasoning of the commission's argument. Ellefson was justified in his decision to shoot Brown because he was in fear for his safety. Yet, before shooting Brown, Ellefson stepped back out of range of taser Brown allegedly held in his hands. Then Pearcy shocked people by saying that if the officers were out of the range of Brown sitting on his butt with the taser in his hand, then the shooting was an unjustified use of force.
That created a problem when they realized that Ellefson had put himself out of the range of a taser which could only be used for a contact tasing. So then someone said that Ellefson shot Brown because he saw that Officer Michael Paul Stucker, who was currently striking Brown with his baton, was in range.
Well, here's a question for that commissioner and a chore for that person to do.
Go back and reread Ellefson's statement to investigators and point out exactly where Ellefson said that this is why he shot Brown. You won't find it. Why? Because Ellefson told investigators that just before and while he shot Brown, he not only couldn't see Stucker, but had no idea where he was at that point. In addition, Ellefson said that he had not known that Stucker was hitting Brown with his expandable baton nor had he seen him do it. He wasn't thinking of Stucker at the time.
Stucker in his statement said he had no idea where Ellefson had been standing when he was hitting Brown with his baton. He didn't know until he heard the gunshots right next to him. Stucker had responded to Brown allegedly grabbing Ellefson's taser by stepping closer towards Brown according to his statement.
Ellefson said that he shot Brown because Brown had stood up and lunged at him with the taser in his hand. A version that no witness including Stucker supported and physical evidence appeared to challenge and even dispute.
Or the commissioners will hang their assertion that Brown had grabbed the taser based on the DNA test that was run before remembering that they had tossed out the test results as unreliable because of how the police department had collected the samples from the device.
Another puzzling comment was made by Commissioner Peter Hubbard who said that the police officers were hit by "unpleasant surprises" during the incident. He used Ellefson's decision to discharge his taser at Brown as an example, believing it was reasonable for Ellefson to assume his taser would function normally.
What's wrong with that assertion is that there's another reasonable assumption to make in that situation. What had happened was that Stucker had removed the cartridge from his taser to apply a contact tase to Brown. In order to do so, he had to put himself in close proximity to Brown. If Ellefson decided at this time to fire his taser probes at Brown, it would be reasonable to assume that there was a high risk that since Stucker was in close proximity to Brown that he might get struck by a probe as well. It wasn't an "unlucky surprise", it was a serious tactical error on Ellefson's part that put his partner at risk of being incapacitated while standing next to Brown. It's a serious tactical error which the commission has yet to discuss if even just to defend Ellefson's actions.
Ironically, during the only incident, the only person who came close to being incapacitated by the taser was Stucker and it was a taser held not by Brown but by another officer.
And it was reasonable that the situation was high-risk because while an officer using a taser can anticipate that one probe will travel in alignment with the laser sight, the second probe will be traveling at an 8 degree angle to that probe and it's more difficult to anticipate its striking point, thus putting anyone close to the target of the taser in danger of feeling the effects of the taser strike as well.
It's that kind of circular logic that has plagued discussion of the Brown shooting case by the commissioners. Not the finding itself, but the thought processes behind the rationale behind that decision.
One major problem for the commission is that where in the past, they had relied on their investigators from the Baker Street Group to conduct the tactical analysis, they are no longer able to do so because the city manager's office objected to this practice by saying that it made the investigator appear biased against the officers involved in the shooting. Consequently, more of that job has fallen on the commissioners and that's where their lack of training in the policies and procedures of the police department have reared up.
For example, the CPRC has no knowledge of whether or not the police department trains or requires its officers to arrest under power or not. Arresting under power is a practice encouraged by training guidelines offered by Taser International, Inc. which require officers to handcuff individuals while they are being tased by another officer. The purpose of doing so, according to Taser International is that this allows the officers to take advantage of the time period in which the individual is incapacitated by the taser and thus can't resist efforts to handcuff him or her. Taser International, Inc. assured people in its literature that there was little risk to the officers of being shocked by the taser during this process.
This issue arose after Ward introduced concerns he had about Ellefson's decision when he first arrived at the scene to order Stucker to turn off his taser which was activated on Brown at the time. Stucker complied and Ward wanted to know if that was proper procedure.
If the commission was up to date on the department's policies and procedures regarding taser use, it would know that the police department doesn't train or encourage its officers to arrest under power. One of the lines of reasoning appears to be that the department figures that if a person is tased once, then that's enough of a negative reinforcement so that just the threat of another tasing is enough to get someone to comply with an order. The problem is with mentally ill people is the assumption that they will respond in this fashion may not be validated and the Brown shooting case is a clear example of that.
Although when asked why he had asked Stucker to turn off his taser, Ellefson didn't mention the department's policy of not arresting under power, he said he did it to avoid getting shocked. This is even though Taser International, Inc. has assured people in its training material that this isn't a concern for arresting under power in the majority of situations.
It might have been a good time as part of the discussion about the tactical analysis and policy recommendations for the commission to discuss whether or not the decision by the department not to have its officers arrest under power is the right one for every case. If the practice is a sound one, then it can survive some outside scrutiny. If not, then it needs to be evaluated to see if it's the best practice or if something else needs to be done, at least in cases involving mentally ill and incapacitated individuals.
The department could play a role in that discussion by providing the information that it has at its disposal that was shown during a taser demonstration I attended last week at the Magnolia Station to the commission especially given that there's so many new members. In addition, even the former law enforcement officers serving on it may not have worked in the profession during the time when the latest technology involving the M26 and X26 tasers was developed and put into use.
Speaking of training, when was the last time the commissioners were trained on policy 4.30 which is the department's use of force policy?
Bad question.
Beginning Monday, you can pick up applications to run for office in many cities in this county. For Riverside, that means both the Alvord and Riverside Unified School Districts' school boards.
Doug Haberman of the Press Enterprise has done the job of Austin Carter, the city's public information officer who won't speak to local publications like that naughty Inland Empire Weekly, by writing more copy on the unpopular to everyone else outside City Hall and the Press Enterprise renovation of the downtown pedestrian mall, which is hardly "ugly" as Hudson says.
What's ugly is "smart park" and its impact on the local small businesses that it seems the city would like to see gone to be replaced by part of this $600 million renovation project. Community member Salvador Santana produced a petition he had circulated including signatures from hundreds of downtown people condemning "smart park". But these people and their businesses matter little, development firms matter much more. They donate thousands of dollars into campaign coffers at election time and they get properties handed to them by the city which it has acquired either through eminent domain or threat of eminent domain.
Gone after the development will be many of the historic trees on the street. Any concerns raised about the project like those given by the owner of Pacific Stix are dismissed by Hudson as saying, we can't please everyone. Instead, there will be a stream and given that it's very difficult to keep streams hygienic for public safety, it's probably not the best plan.
The debate about prosecutorial misconduct is heating up, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Naturally, prosecutors say that there's no problem. Civil rights organizations disagree.
(excerpt)
[Cookie]Ridolfi, who is the director of the Northern California Innocence Project, told the commission that judges had found prosecutorial misconduct in 443 of more than 2,100 California cases over the last 10 years. Ridolfi said that figure was just "the tip of the iceberg," because about 97% of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains.
In addition, she said "at least four major studies in recent years have identified prosecutorial misconduct as a significant factor in the conviction of innocent people."
But Michael Schwartz, a deputy district attorney in Ventura County, countered that a close look at the available data shows that prosecutorial misconduct occurs in less than 1% of all cases. "I am not sensing that we have a crisis of prosecutorial misconduct," when it is found in only one of 800 appeals, Schwartz said. Consequently, he said, "it doesn't seem like we need new rules."
Natasha Minsker of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California countered: "The question for the commission is not whether misconduct is rampant or rare, but whether there are systemic problems and do we need systemic solutions. Our answer to both questions is yes."
Not exactly news these days, but yet another Los Angeles Police Department officer has been arrested for sexual assault according to the Los Angeles Times.
---Lewis Carroll, who doesn't attend civic meetings these days
The discussion of the Lee Deante Brown shooting's public report could very well continue into the next decade. Long after the city adjudicated the shooting case, the discussion continues to take place. It's like City Manager Brad Hudson told the public safety committee last November, Police Chief Russ Leach doesn't wait until the City Police Review Commission reaches a finding to make his decision.
It's not clear what the CPRC actually decided last night but the poker game between the majority of the body and Commissioner Jim Ward continued. Acting executive-something-or another, Mario Lara wasn't present at this meeting.
He wasn't missed because most of the time he just sits there, unsure of what to do or say. It's not his fault, as he never received any training for the job that he was assigned after his predecessor picked his integrity over the interests of the city and resigned late last year.
Even while an interim, his predecessor received six months of training for the job.
Chair Brian Pearcy, who was apparently given the scepter by City Manager Brad Hudson to pick the new executive manager, did his part to try to bring the case to its conclusion. Ward refused to budge, one commissioner facing off against eight of them.
And he's hanging on to his minority report and his right to issue one in a shooting that be believes is out of policy, in the face of commissioners who seriously believe they can cast a majority vote to edit his report or deny its release.
Ward has one commissioner in his corner at least when it comes to his right to issue the report alongside the majority report which is expected to back Officer Terry Ellefson's decision to shoot and kill Brown. Commissioner Steve Simpson said he disagreed with Ward's finding on the shooting but was concerned that City Attorney Gregory Priamos was advising the commission that it would either accept, modify or reject Ward's minority report.
"We should not have the right to reject it or modify it," Simpson said, "I will stand behind him and support his right to have a minority report."
Pearcy said that he's had the opportunity to discuss the minority report with Ward offline. He said that the letter submitted by Ward on June 21 didn't constitute a minority report.
Ward had words for Pearcy.
"My report is complete," Ward said, "I think we need to exchange reports when you complete your report."
Pearcy responded to that by expressing his fear that Ward was planning to spring the report on the commission when its members were already locked into their position and couldn't change it. If the commission including Pearcy is as secure in its position as it says it is, there's absolutely no need to have this concern let alone express it out loud. Why, if the commission is solid in its "straw poll" vote are they concerned about having something sprung on it?
Ward expressed his concern that once the commissioners were aware of his report that they would try to prevent its dissemination. Several commissioners said it wouldn't change the way they feel about the shooting. Ward added that there would be nothing in the minority report that hadn't been discussed during the months and months of special meetings on the Brown shooting.
"I don't know if you've been paying attention," Ward added.
Commissioner Jack Brewer said that the discussion had been going on for weeks.
"We look silly to the public," Brewer said.
Actually, they just look inaccessible to the public. And they look micromanaged to the public like most of the city's department heads do. And they don't look like the public, because for one thing, not even the police department let alone the city is 78% White.
They look more like City Hall. In fact, four of them had joined the CPRC after terming out on other boards of commissions or in one case, jumping ship from one to join the other. Most of the city's residents who apply to serve on boards and commissions aren't granted an interview let alone appointments on more than one commission.
Seven out of nine of them come from law enforcement backgrounds, which is unusual for most boards and commissions in the country. Any challenge to the assertion that only law enforcement personnel belong on the commission is viewed as being problematic. But if a civilian oversight mechanism includes only law enforcement personnel, active or retired, then that defeats the purpose of a community review board.
Current commissioners include the following:
A former political candidate for a county spot who received $300,000 from law enforcement unions including $193,000 from the Riverside Sheriff's Association and $30,000 from the Riverside Police Officers' Association. Imagine what would happen if a politician endorsed and financed by police accountability organizations tried to apply for a position on the commission. It would never happen. Allegedly she was a candidate voted in by a city council including onemember who claimed not to know that she had received donations from the RPOA and is trying to pull records about campaign contributions from the county. Here's a good place to start looking for more information on the campaign contributions. At least one other city council member knew she was backed by numerous law enforcement organizations which was why he refused to cast a vote for that commissioner position.
But as soon as a vacancy opens up on the commission and there's hard work going on in that front, one political appointment will beget another. That's why it's hard to get people in this city to even apply to be on boards and commissions. Many people see how politicized the process has become.
Another is the head of a business that contracts with the city to provide services to it. This commissioner marched lockstep to the podium at a recent city council meeting behind the police chief and the fire chief to support an item placed on the agenda by a city council member. He's also working directly with the police department representing his agency on a training issue.
A candidate who made comments praising the Los Angeles Police Department for its actions during the May Day incident during his interview and blaming the people sitting in the park who were hit with batons and shot at with less lethal munitions. One wonders if he'll do like with the police department when evaluating complaints from the department before receiving all the facts.
The commission has barely been functioning since Hudson's office, the city attorney's office and the police department decided it needed to be "fixed" after it released the controversial finding on the 2004 fatal shooting of Summer Lane.
Complaints are way down, because people have given up on the commission. However, of the 40 allegations adjudicated so far, about 22.5% of them were sustained, much higher than the national average.
However given that it's highly unlikely that the police department's internal affairs division has a sustain rate nearly that high, the city's sustain rate would match that of the police department given that in past years when there's been a large differential in sustained findings between the commission and the department, the city likely has favored the department's decisions.
When asked to provide statistics on how the city issued findings on complaint allegations which received differential findings, the city manager's office claimed they didn't keep those statistics. Hudson's predecessors however did and these annual statistics were included in one of the annual reports on the commission's progress. But then accountability was actually a word that was included in their vocabularies. Apparently, it went further than that. When the last executive director tried to keep track of those statistics himself, he was forbidden to do so by the city manager's office.
It's really hard to swallow this assertion that was in writing as a response to a CPRA request submitted last year that the city manager's office doesn't track these statistics. More likely is that it does, but it's afraid to let anyone in on what that statistical information would reveal and what it would most likely reveal is that the CPRC serves no more even in an advisory capacity on citizen complaints than it does in incustody deaths, as shown by Hudson's deposition on the issue in relation to the law suit filed by Ryan Wilson against the commission in 2006.
Speaking of which, what happened to this year's annual report?
Under the direction of former executive directors, Don Williams and Pedro Payne, the commission never failed to produce an annual report to present each March before the city council. However, interim executive manager Mario Lara, current chair, Brian Pearcy and Hudson have so far failed to both produce an annual report on the CPRC's performance this year and have not given any indication whether there will even be a written report this year.
They are having enough trouble trying to get through the Brown shooting and wringing their hands over the fact that they haven't seen Ward's minority report on the shooting.
Here's an example of the reasoning of the commission's argument. Ellefson was justified in his decision to shoot Brown because he was in fear for his safety. Yet, before shooting Brown, Ellefson stepped back out of range of taser Brown allegedly held in his hands. Then Pearcy shocked people by saying that if the officers were out of the range of Brown sitting on his butt with the taser in his hand, then the shooting was an unjustified use of force.
That created a problem when they realized that Ellefson had put himself out of the range of a taser which could only be used for a contact tasing. So then someone said that Ellefson shot Brown because he saw that Officer Michael Paul Stucker, who was currently striking Brown with his baton, was in range.
Well, here's a question for that commissioner and a chore for that person to do.
Go back and reread Ellefson's statement to investigators and point out exactly where Ellefson said that this is why he shot Brown. You won't find it. Why? Because Ellefson told investigators that just before and while he shot Brown, he not only couldn't see Stucker, but had no idea where he was at that point. In addition, Ellefson said that he had not known that Stucker was hitting Brown with his expandable baton nor had he seen him do it. He wasn't thinking of Stucker at the time.
Stucker in his statement said he had no idea where Ellefson had been standing when he was hitting Brown with his baton. He didn't know until he heard the gunshots right next to him. Stucker had responded to Brown allegedly grabbing Ellefson's taser by stepping closer towards Brown according to his statement.
Ellefson said that he shot Brown because Brown had stood up and lunged at him with the taser in his hand. A version that no witness including Stucker supported and physical evidence appeared to challenge and even dispute.
Or the commissioners will hang their assertion that Brown had grabbed the taser based on the DNA test that was run before remembering that they had tossed out the test results as unreliable because of how the police department had collected the samples from the device.
Another puzzling comment was made by Commissioner Peter Hubbard who said that the police officers were hit by "unpleasant surprises" during the incident. He used Ellefson's decision to discharge his taser at Brown as an example, believing it was reasonable for Ellefson to assume his taser would function normally.
What's wrong with that assertion is that there's another reasonable assumption to make in that situation. What had happened was that Stucker had removed the cartridge from his taser to apply a contact tase to Brown. In order to do so, he had to put himself in close proximity to Brown. If Ellefson decided at this time to fire his taser probes at Brown, it would be reasonable to assume that there was a high risk that since Stucker was in close proximity to Brown that he might get struck by a probe as well. It wasn't an "unlucky surprise", it was a serious tactical error on Ellefson's part that put his partner at risk of being incapacitated while standing next to Brown. It's a serious tactical error which the commission has yet to discuss if even just to defend Ellefson's actions.
Ironically, during the only incident, the only person who came close to being incapacitated by the taser was Stucker and it was a taser held not by Brown but by another officer.
And it was reasonable that the situation was high-risk because while an officer using a taser can anticipate that one probe will travel in alignment with the laser sight, the second probe will be traveling at an 8 degree angle to that probe and it's more difficult to anticipate its striking point, thus putting anyone close to the target of the taser in danger of feeling the effects of the taser strike as well.
It's that kind of circular logic that has plagued discussion of the Brown shooting case by the commissioners. Not the finding itself, but the thought processes behind the rationale behind that decision.
One major problem for the commission is that where in the past, they had relied on their investigators from the Baker Street Group to conduct the tactical analysis, they are no longer able to do so because the city manager's office objected to this practice by saying that it made the investigator appear biased against the officers involved in the shooting. Consequently, more of that job has fallen on the commissioners and that's where their lack of training in the policies and procedures of the police department have reared up.
For example, the CPRC has no knowledge of whether or not the police department trains or requires its officers to arrest under power or not. Arresting under power is a practice encouraged by training guidelines offered by Taser International, Inc. which require officers to handcuff individuals while they are being tased by another officer. The purpose of doing so, according to Taser International is that this allows the officers to take advantage of the time period in which the individual is incapacitated by the taser and thus can't resist efforts to handcuff him or her. Taser International, Inc. assured people in its literature that there was little risk to the officers of being shocked by the taser during this process.
This issue arose after Ward introduced concerns he had about Ellefson's decision when he first arrived at the scene to order Stucker to turn off his taser which was activated on Brown at the time. Stucker complied and Ward wanted to know if that was proper procedure.
If the commission was up to date on the department's policies and procedures regarding taser use, it would know that the police department doesn't train or encourage its officers to arrest under power. One of the lines of reasoning appears to be that the department figures that if a person is tased once, then that's enough of a negative reinforcement so that just the threat of another tasing is enough to get someone to comply with an order. The problem is with mentally ill people is the assumption that they will respond in this fashion may not be validated and the Brown shooting case is a clear example of that.
Although when asked why he had asked Stucker to turn off his taser, Ellefson didn't mention the department's policy of not arresting under power, he said he did it to avoid getting shocked. This is even though Taser International, Inc. has assured people in its training material that this isn't a concern for arresting under power in the majority of situations.
It might have been a good time as part of the discussion about the tactical analysis and policy recommendations for the commission to discuss whether or not the decision by the department not to have its officers arrest under power is the right one for every case. If the practice is a sound one, then it can survive some outside scrutiny. If not, then it needs to be evaluated to see if it's the best practice or if something else needs to be done, at least in cases involving mentally ill and incapacitated individuals.
The department could play a role in that discussion by providing the information that it has at its disposal that was shown during a taser demonstration I attended last week at the Magnolia Station to the commission especially given that there's so many new members. In addition, even the former law enforcement officers serving on it may not have worked in the profession during the time when the latest technology involving the M26 and X26 tasers was developed and put into use.
Speaking of training, when was the last time the commissioners were trained on policy 4.30 which is the department's use of force policy?
Bad question.
Beginning Monday, you can pick up applications to run for office in many cities in this county. For Riverside, that means both the Alvord and Riverside Unified School Districts' school boards.
Doug Haberman of the Press Enterprise has done the job of Austin Carter, the city's public information officer who won't speak to local publications like that naughty Inland Empire Weekly, by writing more copy on the unpopular to everyone else outside City Hall and the Press Enterprise renovation of the downtown pedestrian mall, which is hardly "ugly" as Hudson says.
What's ugly is "smart park" and its impact on the local small businesses that it seems the city would like to see gone to be replaced by part of this $600 million renovation project. Community member Salvador Santana produced a petition he had circulated including signatures from hundreds of downtown people condemning "smart park". But these people and their businesses matter little, development firms matter much more. They donate thousands of dollars into campaign coffers at election time and they get properties handed to them by the city which it has acquired either through eminent domain or threat of eminent domain.
Gone after the development will be many of the historic trees on the street. Any concerns raised about the project like those given by the owner of Pacific Stix are dismissed by Hudson as saying, we can't please everyone. Instead, there will be a stream and given that it's very difficult to keep streams hygienic for public safety, it's probably not the best plan.
The debate about prosecutorial misconduct is heating up, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Naturally, prosecutors say that there's no problem. Civil rights organizations disagree.
(excerpt)
[Cookie]Ridolfi, who is the director of the Northern California Innocence Project, told the commission that judges had found prosecutorial misconduct in 443 of more than 2,100 California cases over the last 10 years. Ridolfi said that figure was just "the tip of the iceberg," because about 97% of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains.
In addition, she said "at least four major studies in recent years have identified prosecutorial misconduct as a significant factor in the conviction of innocent people."
But Michael Schwartz, a deputy district attorney in Ventura County, countered that a close look at the available data shows that prosecutorial misconduct occurs in less than 1% of all cases. "I am not sensing that we have a crisis of prosecutorial misconduct," when it is found in only one of 800 appeals, Schwartz said. Consequently, he said, "it doesn't seem like we need new rules."
Natasha Minsker of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California countered: "The question for the commission is not whether misconduct is rampant or rare, but whether there are systemic problems and do we need systemic solutions. Our answer to both questions is yes."
Not exactly news these days, but yet another Los Angeles Police Department officer has been arrested for sexual assault according to the Los Angeles Times.
Labels: business as usual, CPRC vs the city, officer-involved shootings, public forums in all places
posted by Five Before Midnight | 7:49 PM
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