Governmental Affairs: Personal to political and back again
In the wake of the latest resignation from the Community Police Review Commission, some eyes are on who will replace Steve Simpson. In this city, it's nearly impossible to keep up with which elected official owes which other elected official a favor and whose turn it is to get one of their peeps on a board or commission. It wouldn't be all that surprising if a selection has already at least been informally made. After all, in my discussion with the council member who had expressed concerns about Simpson's mental competency in June, another candidate's name was mentioned even at that time.
Only in Riverside, would independent thinking be called being mentally incompetent but there you have it. If you ask too many questions or challenge seventh floor politics too loudly, you too might be treated to some coffee or a meal and an admonition to play by the politics or face expulsion. I'm sure the rest of the CPRC commissioners heard that one loud and clear. The story related by Simpson at the last CPRC meeting was very disturbing but appears reflective of what's been going on with that commission during the past 18 months.
When you apply for a board and commission, the city reveals some information about what that body does and its estimate of the time that will be required by those who sit on boards and commissions. However, for the CPRC, the estimate is between 18-20 hours of service time but in reality, most commissioners have served at least 30-40 hours each month, going to meetings, studying police complaints and doing some outreach. The city needs to provide its applicants with a more realistic estimate of the time commitment to serve on all of its boards and commissions most certainly including the CPRC.
The passage of Measure GG which mandates ward representation and changes to the selection process for three of this city's boards and commissions have increasingly politicized the appointment process to the point where most of the people who are picked know next to nothing about the panel they have been chosen to sit on. Many of them can't even answer the questions that they are asked during the interviews, because they have done so little research on the body in question. Of course, there's no need to do so unless you're interested in it.
But one often wonders whether an applicant is cognizant of what a board or commission is about if the people who are ultimately found favorable by the city council and Mayor Ron Loveridge are using it as a stepping stone to get elsewhere, including elected office. The perils involved with these individuals that they usually know full well that their decision making options are limited by whether or not their decisions as commissioners are going to impact their ability to find favor a nd remain in favor with the political structure at City Hall.
Unwritten rules appear to have been added such as requiring prior board and commission experience in applicants appointed to serve on this "special" commission or to "hit the ground running" given its "current situation". Councilmen Ed Adkison and Dom Betro made these statements during the selection process in March even though no such requirements had been outlined at the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee two months earlier. This was why three out of four of the commission candidates who made it to the final interviews had prior board and commission experience even though one of them knew little about the commission and said he had applied because after serving 10 years on the Board of Public Utilities, he felt a "hole" in his life. Still, he received the most votes from elected officials during the two-meeting process last March.
Yet, the commissioners with prior board and commission experience which until recently included five of them struggled the most because they applied their prior experiences served on very different commissions from the Human Relations Commission to the Planning Commission to a very differently run commission such as the CPRC. Several of them even struggled with certain portions of the Brown Act.
When people apply to serve on boards and commissioners to freely give their time and energy, they are not informed of these unwritten requirements that are used for selection purposes. They assume that all the requirements for the position that are necessary are included in the instructions. But the brochures are quite small and lack the space to fit all the back room politics that appear to go into selections involving certain boards and commissions.
Which is why you have certain council members who abstain in votes involving who will represent a particular ward on a commission because even though it's a secret ballot until the votes are tallied by Mayor Ron Loveridge and recorded by city clerk Colleen Nichol and there is often no prior discussion, these individuals already know what the final vote will be.
One example of that occurred several months ago when Councilman Art Gage abstained from voting during the process that appointed current commissioner, Linda Soubirous on the CPRC despite the fact that she had received financial contributions from several law enforcement unions including the Riverside Police Officers' Association when she ran for county supervisor in 2004.
Gage explained afterward that he wasn't going to vote for her because of that reason. One other councilman said that it didn't matter if she had gotten funding from law enforcement unions because he had while running for city council, apparently confusing the difference between being an elected official and being an appointed commissioner on a board designed to review police complaints involving officers who were members of one union she had accepted financial contributions from while seeing higher office.
Speaking of appointing people to serve on boards and commissions, the Governmental Affairs is discussing the appointment process next week. As you can see from the report, several dozen people including individuals from all seven wards have applied to serve on the CPRC. It's unlikely that Simpson's replacement will be drawn from this list of city residents who applied in good faith for a commission they believed they would actually have a chance to be screened and interviewed for.
The new commissioner will most likely be a candidate who is not on that list to be screened but who simply receives votes. That may be one way to do things and it has been done, but it's definitely not included in the recruitment brochure.
In the Governmental Affairs report, the city includes pages and pages of material on how it recruits candidates to apply for its boards and commissions, yet at least in the case of CPRC, last minute substitutions on those lists usually after the screening process has been completed by the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee have received higher favor and consideration from the city council than those who apply through the channels that were set up for applicants.
Another problem, is when last minutes substitutions were added as occurred during the last two rounds of selections including that where a person was selected to serve on the commission, there's no application or resume provided for these applicants as there were for other candidates. That means less transparency.
The selections should be submitted through the application process. Members of the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee can add names at that meeting with information available about them so they are treated on an equal basis as other applicants. Council members not on the committee should submit the same information on applicants that they might add to the pool to the city clerk's office well before the screening process begins by the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee.
Candidates should be welcome from a variety of backgrounds for the CPRC rather than just selecting people with only law enforcement and/or legal backgrounds. Underutilized backgrounds include educational for example as several excellent candidates who were professors in behavioral sciences, humanities and other fields have applied and were denied interviews, except for one woman who gave a really good interview during the original selection process in 2000. There were also people from medical backgrounds including former commissioner, Gloria Huerta who can also bring many skills to the process utilized in those professions.
For the interview process, applicants should be given some questions to think about ahead of time and then asked further questions during the actual interviews. There's not much information provided to prospective applicants selected for interview on what that process entails. Generally, the quality of interviews has gone down in recent years, particularly after the passage of Measure GG which politicized the selection process and prioritized politics over the commission though the quality of the questions asked by elected officials has improved.
There should be a larger pool of selected candidates for interviews by the city council than there has been. One council member did express that opinion during the last selection process.
Still, it's likely that politics will rule the day during the upcoming selection process as surely as they ruled the day that led to Simpson's resignation. It's likely that the person who's ultimately chosen has already in fact been chosen precisely because of the discussions that clearly took place at City Hall regarding Simpson's presence on the commission beginning several months ago.
That has nothing to do with the limitations of the city's charter or ordinance when it comes to the CPRC and the challenges of implementing its powers, but has to do with what's going on among the halls of power at City Hall.
Press Enterprise columnist, Dan Bernstein reported on the scintillating golf match that took place among district attorneys in this state. Who won? Sources said representatives from the Riverside County office.
What's interesting is that if you went on the Riverside County District Attorney's Web site, you would find on its recruitment page, the boast that this county had more golf courses than any other one nearby.
(excerpt)
Soon, I was speaking to DA Mike Ramos.
Had he heard anything sub-par about Napa Pacheco? Heard? He saw! "I called him on it!" chuckled Ramos, who praised RivCo's team as "very good" but "sneaky." Ramos can't recall what Team Sneaky did -- maybe slipped a great golfer onto the squad at the last minute. "My partner noticed." They made sure Pacheco knew they noticed. "It was all in fun."
I headed back to my umbrella drink, ears still ringing from Pacheco's silence, which was louder than a Sunday gallery welcoming Tiger to the 18th.
But golf's a funny game. As we talked, Mike Ramos confided, "My golf score is more like my conviction rate. It's way up there." Imagine. A DA who takes pokes at himself! He makes golf writing a snap.
Remember the University Lodge, you know the motel where the city council paid its slumlord, the notorious Menlo Park, over $400,000 to vacate the premises several years back? It's back in the news again as the Press Enterprise published this article detailing the plans that the city has for its future including one that was passed by the city's planning commission.
(excerpt)
The plan calls for building a 41,000-square-foot center with a mix of stores and restaurants that would attract UC Riverside students, said Michael Stock, who has overseen the project for the owner, the Menlo Trust. It would also include office spaces.
The buildings would come right to the sidewalk, although some of the restaurant spaces would have setbacks to allow for outdoor tables.
Parking would be in the rear. A metal fence and landscaping would provide a buffer for neighboring houses on Ninth Street.
If the council approves the plans, construction would begin at the end of the year. The $5 million project should take about a year to build, Stock said.
"I have tried to create the nicest building I could," he told commissioners.
Facing future eviction near that parcel will be a Latino-owned car wash which has been on the strip for years.
In local election news, Riverside Ward Four Councilman Frank Schiavone announced that he plans to endorse Donna Doty-Michalka in the Ward Five race. This must irk his former BFF, Ed Adkison, who had thrown his support behind her opponent, Chris MacArthur since pretty much the beginning although he only publicly endorsed him several months ago.
Love SmartPark or hate it? Go here to fill out the poll.
More letters on the city council's decision to revoke the electric rate hikes it had approved in December 2006.
A humorous look at the city of Riverside's battle to keep the issue of eminent domain from coming to the city's voters even as it pushes its own initiatives on choo choo trains and crowing roosters in the interest of democracy and "allowing the people to decide". Humor is often the best way to get a message across of what's broken and what there is to be said about this travesty of a law suit which has been foisted on the people because the city doesn't want them to have a voice at the polls on the issue of the use of eminent domain in this city just continues.
I certainly do not wish the legal expenses that were spent by the city fighting this law suit to be paid for by those who launched the petition drive to put eminent domain on the ballot in 2005. The money spent fighting this law suit is already wasted money that could have been spent on something that would truly benefit this city and the people living in it.
Why not celebrate the democratic process and take all three ballot initiatives to the voters to decide what they want to do with trains, roosters and eminent domain? Just something to consider in the name of democracy for those elected officials who wrap themselves around it to block criticism of their own proposed ballot initiatives.
At least, Councilman Art Gage apparently voted against continuing the appeal, but then again, when exactly did the majority of him kick him out of the club? Was this one reason why? Gage has his faults, but on this issue at least he's realized how silly and expensive it is to in this case, fight democracy.
The funny thing is that it's likely that the elected officials who most strongly support the use of eminent domain and their supporters who go along with it would fight like tigers using whatever they could to prevent the city from taking their own properties whether it was their homes or their businesses. That's a given that this is what would come to pass if it impacted them.
The political would become personal. As it became for the owners of many small businesses in Riverside including the Fox Theater and Kawa Market and certainly many more to come.
Riverside County Sheriff's Department undersheriff, Neil Lingle who was poised to retire soon may be appointed interim sheriff in the wake of the abrupt announcement of current Sheriff Bob Doyle that he's jumping ship for a gig in Sacramento, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times.
(excerpt)
Supervisor Bob Buster said the five-member board would strive to maintain continuity in the Sheriff's Department and try to "fulfill the voters' will" when they reelected Doyle. He said Lingle appeared to be an obvious choice.
"We don't want the department upended with a whole new cops staff," said Buster, who called Lingle "a good ambassador" for the Sheriff's Department. "You really have to know the turf here, and Neil Lingle does. . . He's very familiar with most if not all the major issues."
Supervisor Roy Wilson described Lingle as "very qualified" for the post.
"He's a straight shooter, he's very knowledgeable," Wilson said. "He's very in tune with running the department."
Steve Lopez, also from the Los Angeles Times wrote about the criminalization of the homeless by the Los Angeles Police Department.
(excerpt)
But I'm not surprised Mr. Ayers got a ticket. Since September of last year, when Los Angeles began its Safer City Initiative, roughly 11,000 citations have been written in the skid row area. Many of the recipients can't afford the fines or don't have the wherewithal to make court appearances, so arrests on warrants for outstanding tickets are common.
Why should anyone care?
Because this isn't just bad public policy; it's expensive public policy. Time and resources are being wasted attacking symptoms rather than problems. There's no shortage of things that should be addressed before jaywalking on skid row, such as supportive housing and more mental health and drug rehab services, which are far more cost effective than churning clients through courts, jails and hospitals.
Philip Mangano, President Bush's homeless czar, called the city's efforts "shameful" and quickly named a host of cities that have done far better, including Denver, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and New York.
"The punitive approach has never worked anywhere in our country," said Mangano, who talks policy on occasion with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other local officials. Mangano plans to travel to Denver this month with L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to show him how that city's smart planning, political will and the involvement of business leaders have produced dramatic results.
Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor who studies skid row and has been crunching numbers on the recent police crackdown, said residents who get cited often are handcuffed while police run background checks on them.
"By far the most common ticket is for jaywalking," Blasi says. "The tickets are also for dropping an ash on the street, inappropriate use of a milk crate -- things that, if they were written in any other part of the city, would be considered ridiculous."
Where have all the Eastside citizen complaints gone? Hint, it's certainly not appearing to be through the department's established complaint process as zero complaints were filed.
Only in Riverside, would independent thinking be called being mentally incompetent but there you have it. If you ask too many questions or challenge seventh floor politics too loudly, you too might be treated to some coffee or a meal and an admonition to play by the politics or face expulsion. I'm sure the rest of the CPRC commissioners heard that one loud and clear. The story related by Simpson at the last CPRC meeting was very disturbing but appears reflective of what's been going on with that commission during the past 18 months.
When you apply for a board and commission, the city reveals some information about what that body does and its estimate of the time that will be required by those who sit on boards and commissions. However, for the CPRC, the estimate is between 18-20 hours of service time but in reality, most commissioners have served at least 30-40 hours each month, going to meetings, studying police complaints and doing some outreach. The city needs to provide its applicants with a more realistic estimate of the time commitment to serve on all of its boards and commissions most certainly including the CPRC.
The passage of Measure GG which mandates ward representation and changes to the selection process for three of this city's boards and commissions have increasingly politicized the appointment process to the point where most of the people who are picked know next to nothing about the panel they have been chosen to sit on. Many of them can't even answer the questions that they are asked during the interviews, because they have done so little research on the body in question. Of course, there's no need to do so unless you're interested in it.
But one often wonders whether an applicant is cognizant of what a board or commission is about if the people who are ultimately found favorable by the city council and Mayor Ron Loveridge are using it as a stepping stone to get elsewhere, including elected office. The perils involved with these individuals that they usually know full well that their decision making options are limited by whether or not their decisions as commissioners are going to impact their ability to find favor a nd remain in favor with the political structure at City Hall.
Unwritten rules appear to have been added such as requiring prior board and commission experience in applicants appointed to serve on this "special" commission or to "hit the ground running" given its "current situation". Councilmen Ed Adkison and Dom Betro made these statements during the selection process in March even though no such requirements had been outlined at the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee two months earlier. This was why three out of four of the commission candidates who made it to the final interviews had prior board and commission experience even though one of them knew little about the commission and said he had applied because after serving 10 years on the Board of Public Utilities, he felt a "hole" in his life. Still, he received the most votes from elected officials during the two-meeting process last March.
Yet, the commissioners with prior board and commission experience which until recently included five of them struggled the most because they applied their prior experiences served on very different commissions from the Human Relations Commission to the Planning Commission to a very differently run commission such as the CPRC. Several of them even struggled with certain portions of the Brown Act.
When people apply to serve on boards and commissioners to freely give their time and energy, they are not informed of these unwritten requirements that are used for selection purposes. They assume that all the requirements for the position that are necessary are included in the instructions. But the brochures are quite small and lack the space to fit all the back room politics that appear to go into selections involving certain boards and commissions.
Which is why you have certain council members who abstain in votes involving who will represent a particular ward on a commission because even though it's a secret ballot until the votes are tallied by Mayor Ron Loveridge and recorded by city clerk Colleen Nichol and there is often no prior discussion, these individuals already know what the final vote will be.
One example of that occurred several months ago when Councilman Art Gage abstained from voting during the process that appointed current commissioner, Linda Soubirous on the CPRC despite the fact that she had received financial contributions from several law enforcement unions including the Riverside Police Officers' Association when she ran for county supervisor in 2004.
Gage explained afterward that he wasn't going to vote for her because of that reason. One other councilman said that it didn't matter if she had gotten funding from law enforcement unions because he had while running for city council, apparently confusing the difference between being an elected official and being an appointed commissioner on a board designed to review police complaints involving officers who were members of one union she had accepted financial contributions from while seeing higher office.
Speaking of appointing people to serve on boards and commissions, the Governmental Affairs is discussing the appointment process next week. As you can see from the report, several dozen people including individuals from all seven wards have applied to serve on the CPRC. It's unlikely that Simpson's replacement will be drawn from this list of city residents who applied in good faith for a commission they believed they would actually have a chance to be screened and interviewed for.
The new commissioner will most likely be a candidate who is not on that list to be screened but who simply receives votes. That may be one way to do things and it has been done, but it's definitely not included in the recruitment brochure.
In the Governmental Affairs report, the city includes pages and pages of material on how it recruits candidates to apply for its boards and commissions, yet at least in the case of CPRC, last minute substitutions on those lists usually after the screening process has been completed by the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee have received higher favor and consideration from the city council than those who apply through the channels that were set up for applicants.
Another problem, is when last minutes substitutions were added as occurred during the last two rounds of selections including that where a person was selected to serve on the commission, there's no application or resume provided for these applicants as there were for other candidates. That means less transparency.
The selections should be submitted through the application process. Members of the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee can add names at that meeting with information available about them so they are treated on an equal basis as other applicants. Council members not on the committee should submit the same information on applicants that they might add to the pool to the city clerk's office well before the screening process begins by the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee.
Candidates should be welcome from a variety of backgrounds for the CPRC rather than just selecting people with only law enforcement and/or legal backgrounds. Underutilized backgrounds include educational for example as several excellent candidates who were professors in behavioral sciences, humanities and other fields have applied and were denied interviews, except for one woman who gave a really good interview during the original selection process in 2000. There were also people from medical backgrounds including former commissioner, Gloria Huerta who can also bring many skills to the process utilized in those professions.
For the interview process, applicants should be given some questions to think about ahead of time and then asked further questions during the actual interviews. There's not much information provided to prospective applicants selected for interview on what that process entails. Generally, the quality of interviews has gone down in recent years, particularly after the passage of Measure GG which politicized the selection process and prioritized politics over the commission though the quality of the questions asked by elected officials has improved.
There should be a larger pool of selected candidates for interviews by the city council than there has been. One council member did express that opinion during the last selection process.
Still, it's likely that politics will rule the day during the upcoming selection process as surely as they ruled the day that led to Simpson's resignation. It's likely that the person who's ultimately chosen has already in fact been chosen precisely because of the discussions that clearly took place at City Hall regarding Simpson's presence on the commission beginning several months ago.
That has nothing to do with the limitations of the city's charter or ordinance when it comes to the CPRC and the challenges of implementing its powers, but has to do with what's going on among the halls of power at City Hall.
Press Enterprise columnist, Dan Bernstein reported on the scintillating golf match that took place among district attorneys in this state. Who won? Sources said representatives from the Riverside County office.
What's interesting is that if you went on the Riverside County District Attorney's Web site, you would find on its recruitment page, the boast that this county had more golf courses than any other one nearby.
(excerpt)
Soon, I was speaking to DA Mike Ramos.
Had he heard anything sub-par about Napa Pacheco? Heard? He saw! "I called him on it!" chuckled Ramos, who praised RivCo's team as "very good" but "sneaky." Ramos can't recall what Team Sneaky did -- maybe slipped a great golfer onto the squad at the last minute. "My partner noticed." They made sure Pacheco knew they noticed. "It was all in fun."
I headed back to my umbrella drink, ears still ringing from Pacheco's silence, which was louder than a Sunday gallery welcoming Tiger to the 18th.
But golf's a funny game. As we talked, Mike Ramos confided, "My golf score is more like my conviction rate. It's way up there." Imagine. A DA who takes pokes at himself! He makes golf writing a snap.
Remember the University Lodge, you know the motel where the city council paid its slumlord, the notorious Menlo Park, over $400,000 to vacate the premises several years back? It's back in the news again as the Press Enterprise published this article detailing the plans that the city has for its future including one that was passed by the city's planning commission.
(excerpt)
The plan calls for building a 41,000-square-foot center with a mix of stores and restaurants that would attract UC Riverside students, said Michael Stock, who has overseen the project for the owner, the Menlo Trust. It would also include office spaces.
The buildings would come right to the sidewalk, although some of the restaurant spaces would have setbacks to allow for outdoor tables.
Parking would be in the rear. A metal fence and landscaping would provide a buffer for neighboring houses on Ninth Street.
If the council approves the plans, construction would begin at the end of the year. The $5 million project should take about a year to build, Stock said.
"I have tried to create the nicest building I could," he told commissioners.
Facing future eviction near that parcel will be a Latino-owned car wash which has been on the strip for years.
In local election news, Riverside Ward Four Councilman Frank Schiavone announced that he plans to endorse Donna Doty-Michalka in the Ward Five race. This must irk his former BFF, Ed Adkison, who had thrown his support behind her opponent, Chris MacArthur since pretty much the beginning although he only publicly endorsed him several months ago.
Love SmartPark or hate it? Go here to fill out the poll.
More letters on the city council's decision to revoke the electric rate hikes it had approved in December 2006.
A humorous look at the city of Riverside's battle to keep the issue of eminent domain from coming to the city's voters even as it pushes its own initiatives on choo choo trains and crowing roosters in the interest of democracy and "allowing the people to decide". Humor is often the best way to get a message across of what's broken and what there is to be said about this travesty of a law suit which has been foisted on the people because the city doesn't want them to have a voice at the polls on the issue of the use of eminent domain in this city just continues.
I certainly do not wish the legal expenses that were spent by the city fighting this law suit to be paid for by those who launched the petition drive to put eminent domain on the ballot in 2005. The money spent fighting this law suit is already wasted money that could have been spent on something that would truly benefit this city and the people living in it.
Why not celebrate the democratic process and take all three ballot initiatives to the voters to decide what they want to do with trains, roosters and eminent domain? Just something to consider in the name of democracy for those elected officials who wrap themselves around it to block criticism of their own proposed ballot initiatives.
At least, Councilman Art Gage apparently voted against continuing the appeal, but then again, when exactly did the majority of him kick him out of the club? Was this one reason why? Gage has his faults, but on this issue at least he's realized how silly and expensive it is to in this case, fight democracy.
The funny thing is that it's likely that the elected officials who most strongly support the use of eminent domain and their supporters who go along with it would fight like tigers using whatever they could to prevent the city from taking their own properties whether it was their homes or their businesses. That's a given that this is what would come to pass if it impacted them.
The political would become personal. As it became for the owners of many small businesses in Riverside including the Fox Theater and Kawa Market and certainly many more to come.
Riverside County Sheriff's Department undersheriff, Neil Lingle who was poised to retire soon may be appointed interim sheriff in the wake of the abrupt announcement of current Sheriff Bob Doyle that he's jumping ship for a gig in Sacramento, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times.
(excerpt)
Supervisor Bob Buster said the five-member board would strive to maintain continuity in the Sheriff's Department and try to "fulfill the voters' will" when they reelected Doyle. He said Lingle appeared to be an obvious choice.
"We don't want the department upended with a whole new cops staff," said Buster, who called Lingle "a good ambassador" for the Sheriff's Department. "You really have to know the turf here, and Neil Lingle does. . . He's very familiar with most if not all the major issues."
Supervisor Roy Wilson described Lingle as "very qualified" for the post.
"He's a straight shooter, he's very knowledgeable," Wilson said. "He's very in tune with running the department."
Steve Lopez, also from the Los Angeles Times wrote about the criminalization of the homeless by the Los Angeles Police Department.
(excerpt)
But I'm not surprised Mr. Ayers got a ticket. Since September of last year, when Los Angeles began its Safer City Initiative, roughly 11,000 citations have been written in the skid row area. Many of the recipients can't afford the fines or don't have the wherewithal to make court appearances, so arrests on warrants for outstanding tickets are common.
Why should anyone care?
Because this isn't just bad public policy; it's expensive public policy. Time and resources are being wasted attacking symptoms rather than problems. There's no shortage of things that should be addressed before jaywalking on skid row, such as supportive housing and more mental health and drug rehab services, which are far more cost effective than churning clients through courts, jails and hospitals.
Philip Mangano, President Bush's homeless czar, called the city's efforts "shameful" and quickly named a host of cities that have done far better, including Denver, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and New York.
"The punitive approach has never worked anywhere in our country," said Mangano, who talks policy on occasion with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other local officials. Mangano plans to travel to Denver this month with L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to show him how that city's smart planning, political will and the involvement of business leaders have produced dramatic results.
Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor who studies skid row and has been crunching numbers on the recent police crackdown, said residents who get cited often are handcuffed while police run background checks on them.
"By far the most common ticket is for jaywalking," Blasi says. "The tickets are also for dropping an ash on the street, inappropriate use of a milk crate -- things that, if they were written in any other part of the city, would be considered ridiculous."
Where have all the Eastside citizen complaints gone? Hint, it's certainly not appearing to be through the department's established complaint process as zero complaints were filed.
Labels: City elections, CPRC vs the city, Minority owned business watch, public forums in all places
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