River City: Thank God it's Friday

According to the Press Enterprise, the governor has designated Riverside County a disaster area because of the ongoing drought and a year that only produced about 1.92 inches of rain. Housing values are going down in the Inland Empire and a truck crashed into a residence in Riverside.


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"The whole house shook," said resident William Salcedo. "It felt like an earthquake."

William, 16, was getting ready for school shortly before 9 a.m. when the truck plowed into the home near Riverside City College.

The truck that smashed into a living room also damaged two cars in front of the home in Riverside.
Grandfather James Fuller was asleep at the time.

"I just heard a big kaboom," he said. Then he saw powder from the debris.






Some people have responded to the poll at the Press Enterprise asking them for their complaints, concerns and thoughts about what goes on at City Hall.


The publication's editorial board also tackled the issue of whether or not withholding judicial appointments in the interest of promoting ethic and racial diversity is a wise choice.

The editorial board thinks not and believes that it's more important to push for racial diversity in the law schools. That's an argument that's been going on for quite a while.

The issue of the current judge shortage in both Riverside and San Bernardino Counties was raised as one of the reasons why the judicial appointments should be allowed to continue. It correctly stated that there's about one judge per 6,000 cases each year. What it doesn't state is that while Riverside has shut down its civil trials and accumulated a huge backlog in felony trials, its sister county has not experienced these same difficulties in maintaining its operations. What's the difference in circumstances here?




I came back to all of this after a family reunion which was marred somewhat by one of my big brothers suffering a stroke while at work last week. He felt the symptoms of numbness, tingling and soon after, paralysis of the right side of his body. Fortunately, his co-workers saw what was happening to him even after he tried to keep working through it. He told one of them that it would soon pass and he'd be fine but he wasn't.

It wasn't known until an MRI was done five days later, that it wasn't his first stroke. His first stroke had been what is known as a transient ischemic attack while driving nearly 10 years ago. Below are the symptoms of this precursor to strokes. If you experience them, go immediately to a nearby hospital.


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A transient ischemic attack (TIA) is a transient stroke that lasts only a few minutes. It occurs when the blood supply to part of the brain is briefly interrupted. TIA symptoms, which usually occur suddenly, are similar to those of stroke but do not last as long. Most symptoms of a TIA disappear within an hour, although they may persist for up to 24 hours. Symptoms can include: numbness or weakness in the face, arm, or leg, especially on one side of the body; confusion or difficulty in talking or understanding speech; trouble seeing in one or both eyes; and difficulty with walking, dizziness, or loss of balance and coordination.

My brother was extremely lucky. He was quickly taken to a hospital unit that specializes in strokes and given life-saving anti-clotting medication in less than 30 minutes, inside the window of when this action can significantly reduce the permanent brain damage caused by a stroke. The medical profession has made great strides in treating strokes even as that term is disappearing from the lexicon to be replaced by the more apt, "brain attacks" which recognizes their similarity to heart attacks.

That early treatment and medicines to increase his blood pressure enabled him to regain feeling and full strength in his hand within 24 hours although he still is experiencing speech and memory problems including word aphasia which are common in stroke patients.

Still, he was very lucky. My sister-in-law believes it was people's prayers and thoughts to God that has greatly helped him in his recovery. By the time I spoke with him over the weekend, he sounded tired but obviously feeling better. He doesn't remember much of what happened just before and during the stroke. He doesn't remember a lot of things including the rules of games he plays with his children. He can't recall names of certain cities but can pick the correct names off of a list.

Currently, he's recovering at home under the care of his family and undergoing physical therapy and tests to determine why a man so young, healthy and with arteries which didn't have an ounce of plaque inside them suffered two embolic strokes a decade apart. So far, the theory is that the problem is cardiac based but more tests have to be done.

My family, which is quite large, was recovering from that and enjoying the good news and the reunion of family members from different places in the world. Then I went to check my email and that was when I found the harassing email written to myself by an address claiming to be myself. The one that apparently originated from the IP address registered to the city of Riverside, according to the email header.

I was shaken by having an email come like that out of the blue and shared it with family members. My mother, who constantly tells me that she wishes I would move out of "that city" took it much better than she took the news articles that were written in the Press Enterprise about the blog investigation nearly two years ago. I've been seriously thinking in the past year of taking her advice and just moving out of this city. There's a lot to like about it, but the abuse, harassment and intimidation just gets old after years and years of it. The movement to change things for the better in this city is up against a much stronger one to leave things in their current status quo position.

But I'm stubborn and I get that from my mother and many community members have asked me to stay here.

It's hard addressing issues in a police department where its own police chief appears micromanaged to the point where it appears he's spending more and more time teaching at local universities, perhaps because it serves as an outlet to get away from it.If that's true, I can't say that I blame him. And ironically, like former Community Police Review Commission Executive Director Pedro Payne, he doesn't appear to make as many public appearances in the communities where his department polices. But if you're an "at will" employee in this city, it doesn't seem like you can do very much.

Then the city manager's office and police unions are battling over the fate of the police department and its employees which spilled out into the public arena of the city council twice in the past year. This mirrors similar battles in the early 1990s between former City Manager John Holmes and the Riverside Police Officers' Association, according to a research paper written by former Urban Institute fellow, David Thatcher.

The last thing you want to see in the 21st century is patterns from the last century repeat themselves.

This city is being torn apart from its inside as multiple investigations including those involving outside agencies and the county grand jury are allegedly being conducted involving various issues in its midst including a huge one inside of of the city's departments. Riverside Renaissance is what the city is fronting as its success story before it's been realized, even as off the dais, city council members are calling each other liars and one quartet is replacing another.

On the dais, they're calling city residents liars and threatening to have the police officers expel them. Out of three ethics complaints filed against city council members since the implementation of that process that was approved by the city's voters in 2004, only one of them has even been accepted for processing.

The attitude about the latest city council elections is that it will put more people on the dais who are "bought and paid for" and that is from people who have been following the political scene in Riverside for many years. The most pessimism appears to be aimed at the councilman who many predict will win the Ward Three runoff in November, William "Rusty" Bailey, in part because of his lack of political experience and the fact that he worked at the same county agency that City Manager Brad Hudson once headed. People are leery of him because several city council members and Mayor Ron Loveridge had endorsed him before he had even filed papers to run for office.

I heard yesterday, that the assistant city manager, Tom DeSantis tried at some point to dismantle the Human Resources Board but that board said no, you can't because we're not under the city manager's office but report to the city council. It's puzzling that a board that's so watered down both in structure and in reality would be threatened with being disbanded, even though it's included in the city's charter. But the city's issues with its workforce are its most contentious they've ever been in recent years and have allegedly included retaliation against city employees who participate in union activities.

It's only natural that those problems would be masked by City Hall by silencing or weakening the canary in that mine, which is the Human Resources Board, which had already had one of its chairs resign in protest. After all, that's what many people think is happening to the CPRC.

The Human Relations Commission used to be umbrellaed under the city manager's office, when it decided to look into the issues affecting city employees including allegations of racism. It asked the city for more information on the city's employees in terms of statistics kept by the city. The city didn't respond directly to that request but soon after, two staff members who worked on the HRC were suddenly reduced to part-time status and reassigned to other departments.

Not long after that, the HRC was moved to Mayor Ron Loveridge's office.

My mother recovered enough after hearing about the harassing email so that she and one of my older sisters wanted to charge down to Riverside and demand that something be done. Her one negative experience with police officers was when she witnessed a fatal car accident involving a police department vehicle while walking the dog and the investigators didn't like her eyewitness account.

I don't think the city's quite ready for my mother. She's pretty formidable when she gets determined and she's from formidable stock. She was a bit taken aback by the mention of her in the email. I haven't told her that earlier on my blogger, individuals had written much crueler things about her simply because she birthed me.

My sister moved thousands of miles away to a new country when she was much younger to marry and raise a family. She was the one who told me to check the headers on the email.

I had expressed my concerns to the city as to why its IP address was on the email header and it has opted to respond by not responding. At least it was in writing.

The best thing to do in cases like this is just to keep doing whatever it is that I've been doing, because as others have reminded me, that if you're eliciting this kind of reaction after writing about issues pertaining to the city of Riverside and law enforcement, then you must be doing something right.

Personally, I think that's a pretty sad commentary. There's good things about Riverside and there are bad things. And one of the bad things is that the city allows its computers and its internet service to be used to harass other people. I call it being harassed with equipment that my sales tax dollars pay to purchase and operate no matter who is doing it and whether or not they actually work for the city.

But the city has produced a wall between me and this harasser and I can't breach it to see who this person is and why was this person apparently allowed to do this on the city's network. And worst of all, whether or not this harasser constitues a threat to my personal safety.

I've probably written enough on this matter. I wouldn't want a department head to say later on that I never let him or her hear the end of it.

On that note, both parties in the ongoing law suit, Ryan Wilson vs the City of Riverside conducted their writ hearing today on whether or not Wilson will be granted an administrative hearing to appeal the sustained finding handed to him by the Community Police Review Commission.

In a nut shell, Wilson's attorney blamed the CPRC report for Wilson's lack of career advancement in the police department. The city said that there had been no punitive actions against Wilson and said it was the media and this blogger's fault.

Wilson's attorney was by far the best orator out of the Riverside Police Officers' Association's law firm so far. He did his best and his verbiage was stellar in word choice, but Holmes still stuck with his tentative ruling and the CPRC's finding stands.

A more detailed posting on this contentious court hearing next time.