Canary in the Mine: A tale of two masters, part one

As stated, the cool, damp weather on Saturday helped with the fire situation in Southern California including the Inland Empire, but more Santa Anas are on the way.



(excerpt, Los Angeles Times)




"This is a kind of blessing," said meteorologist Valerie L. Meyers at an evening briefing in Running Springs.

Even as something approaching normality returned to many areas, firefighters worked feverishly to take advantage of the comparatively low temperatures and light breezes. Some forecasters were predicting that the fire-triggering blasts of Santa Ana winds would return, although perhaps not as severely, at week's end.

In all, 1,997 houses had been listed as destroyed by Saturday night -- an increase of 222 from the total listed on Friday -- as officials continued to assess damage.

At the 27,521-acre Santiago fire, a cliffhanger that was still threatening dozens of homes in Orange's County's Silverado Canyon, a sprinkle of rain raised the hopes of weary firefighters and frustrated residents. At least 16 homes have been destroyed overall in the arson-triggered blaze.

"The threat is diminishing day by day," said county Battalion Chief Pat Antrim, himself a resident of the canyon for 46 years. "We're getting a little drizzle, which is better than hot wind."




The rain fell in Riverside too, surprising many of its residents. With La Nina on her way, the rain should be enjoyed while it lasts as it's been anticipated by everyone from meteorologists to the Farmers' Almanac that this region will have a winter that's both warmer and drier than normal.







"We have to look out for our own because the others do."


---What a woman said an officer said to her on a traffic stop after deciding not to give her a citation.



Was this an example of racial profiling or a response to it? Definitely one of the strangest stories I ever heard for why a police officer apparently decided not to issue a traffic citation, according to a Black woman. I'm not sure what to say about what was told to me by this woman including this quoted statement. It's probably a good subject for a future posting.





"No man can serve two masters: For either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”

---Jesus Christ






The Community Police Review Commission's report is out. I noticed that it had a section labeled, "Police/Commission Relations" but it didn't have a section on "Community/Commission Relations". Why this is emblematic of problems in the CPRC especially those that have erupted since the city decided it didn't like it when this body reached sustained findings of excessive force on officer-involved deaths would take a series of postings to address.

In addition, the city's charter has a requirement that the commission "advise the mayor and city council on all police/community relations issues" and this section doesn't provide any information on those issues, just a summary on its outreach efforts.

When addressing police/commission relations, the report discusses the commission's program initiated by former executive director, Pedro Payne to hold meetings between this office and new hires, including 21 last year, to discuss and ask and answer questions about the CPRC. The CPRC director also held meetings with the police department's internal affairs division to discuss "differences of opinion" about complaints that are on hold and resolve those cases. Although, it sounds like according to the complaint statistics, the city manager's office and the police department are more in line with each other than either is with the commission, particularly on which allegations to sustain and which they decide are unfounded.

Many community members are still unsure of what the commission does, don't file complaints because they say they fear for themselves and their families and many still wonder about its independence from the police department and City Hall considering how many of the most recent members of the commission are political appointments. Police officers still distrust the commission, probably not much less now than when it started. After all, only one Riverside Police Department officer has ever publicly professed his affection for the commission during its entire history. Not a very impressive number, in an agency of nearly 400 sworn officers. Still, from little acorns, mighty oaks grow, so even one individual is a small but hopeful start.

But given that there are more police officers and city employees at meetings these days than community members, it's clear where the focus of this body has gone to win the hearts and minds of those who will never surrender them. On the other hand, the commission assumes that community loyalty is its birthright and has let outreach to this sector of the city fall by the wayside, but if you have a city manager's office banning public outreach by an executive director because it gives a perception of bias against the police and of course in its mind, if you're for outreaching to the community, you must be against the police department, what can you expect?

Still, it's important to work as hard with community outreach as the commission has with the police department even if the barriers the city appears to erect particularly in recent years are higher.

Candidate X who was interviewed for the executive manager's position and now may be hired by the city in a consulting role commented on the high percentage of current and past police officers on the commission. Then there are the commissioners who for all practical purposes are city employees whose employers are contracting with the city manager's office. Another took campaign contributions from the police union's political action committee while running for a county seat. Another alleged that a councilman threatened him with removal if he didn't "tone it down". At the time, he was asking questions about whether or not the commission could retain its own attorney.

Mere weeks later, Commissioner Steve Simpson resigned.

No commissioners from the Eastside, Casa Blanca or Arlanza communities serve on a commission that was created in large part because of community activism in all three communities.

No big surprise there, with the current bloc on the city council who sees downtown as the major jewel and predominantly White neighborhoods too "special" for things like homeless shelters and the creation of low-income housing. Only one African-American commissioner serves on the commission and one Latina in the sea of White faces on the commission, including three from Ward One.

Councilman Dom Betro's candidates on the CPRC have been as White as the faces on the two park advisory task forces for Tequesquite and Fairmount Parks in his ward. But the other elected officials, even if they don't stump on their respect for diversity as much, have records which aren't any better. One of the main questions that I receive on the commissioners is what the ethnic, racial and gender breakdown is on the panel, but the truth is, even the police department which has struggled in this area, is more ethnically and racially diverse than the CPRC.

The latest trend in the CPRC is to cloak as much of its operations into closed sessions as possible including get this, policy recommendations coming out of officer-involved deaths. In what can only be described as coming from River City's very own version of Wonderland, the city is rewriting state law and mudding the waters even further between the department's officer-involved investigation and its administrative review by hoping that no one in this city has a memory that's goes back far enough.

But it's interesting that it wasn't until the fatal officer-involved shooting of Lee Deante Brown that the rules began to change and take effect. Secret findings. Secret policy recommendations. This and more coming from different corners of City Hall. The fact that this shooting has attracted attention and resulted in litigation filed by one of the top civil rights law firms in the country has nothing to do with all this intrigue of course.

Next up on the docket, is the fatal shooting of Douglas Steven Cloud which is over a year old at this point.

Also in litigation, also receiving attention is Cloud, who if you recall was shot to death by two police officers after crashing his car into a palm tree and a truck after driving at a high speed away from the Home Depot where he tried to steal a cleaner. This one should provide an interesting chain of events, but the sentiment is, it's the Joseph Darnell Hill shooting that might actually be the most question-filled journey of the trio of 2006 shootings of men who at least initially, were unarmed.

“I won't go into details about my expenses throughout all this. It's been a complete challenge on my life. But my constitutional rights are not for sale. My daughter needs a full and intact Constitution.”

---Ken Stansbury, to the Inland Empire Weekly regarding the state's court of appeals decision to uphold Riverside's right to sue people who circulate ballot initiatives.

The article is here.


(excerpt)


On Nov. 16, 2005, attorneys for the city sued Stansbury and Riversiders for Property Rights. The plaintiff's case in the City of Riverside vs. Ken Stansbury et al , didn't mention what the city of Riverside was really pissed about, which was that Stansbury et al stood in the way of all those dreamy condemnation lawsuits it planned to file (18 by the close of 2006), and it sure as hell didn't mention all that developer money funneling to Betro and Adams (more than $40,000, last we checked). Instead, City Atty. Greg Priamos (with some help from the powerful law firm of Best, Best & Krieger) held forth that Stansbury's proposed initiative was unconstitutional because it conflicted with state law.

That argument flew not at all with Riverside Superior Court Judge E. Michael Kaiser, who agreed with Richard Brent Reed, Stansbury's attorney, that the city's lawsuit was a blatant attempt to block the signature gathering, and tossed the suit out. Perhaps the fact that constitutional concerns didn't stop Anaheim, Dana Point and Newport Beach from enacting laws similar to the one Stansbury proposed helped influence Kaiser's decision.

But unfortunately for Stansbury, he doesn't live in Anaheim, Dana Point or Newport Beach. He lives in Riverside, where the only rights you have are the ones left after a team of high-priced lawyers get through with you. The city felt so strongly about its constitutionality claim that it appealed Kaiser's decision, but not so strongly that it was above buying off Riversiders for Property Rights, which it did for $11,000 with the sole proviso that the group promise to keep its filthy hands off Riverside's precious powers of condemnation.

Isolated and with no bottomless city trough to dip into when his resources ran low, Stansbury didn't have a chance. The three fools on the appellate court swallowed the city's argument whole and ruled that their lower-court colleague had erred.

“I expected the decision,” Stansbury says. “This court is known for being protective of government powers and of being the most pro-government court in the country.”




Allegations of racism in the School of Graduate School of Education at the University of California Riverside have hit the campus, according to the Press Enterprise.


(excerpt)


Currently none of the graduate school's 13 full-time tenured faculty is from an underrepresented minority group: Black, Latinos or American Indians.

The groups called for the UCR chancellor, the University of California Office of the President and the UC Regents, among others, to investigate the situation and take action.

"They need to respond to our demands and our demographics," said Barbara Flores of the Inland Empire Latino Coalition Education Task Force and the National Association for Bilingual Education. She made her comments at a campus news conference last week.

Dr. Manuela Sosa, a retired dentist and UCR alumnus, said the Graduate School of Education is only one example of a wider problem of lack of diversity at UCR.

"These are issues we've been dealing with for a long time," Sosa said.

Acting UCR Chancellor Robert Grey said in a statement the campus needs to work harder to increase the number of minority faculty members. Blacks, Latinos and American Indians totaled 51 out of 564 full-time tenured faculty in 2006. Asians are not included in the underrepresented minorities designation.

"Our faculty needs to better reflect the diversity of the citizens of today's California and, especially, of the people of Inland Southern California that we're here to serve," Grey said.




UCR is the third most ethnically and racially diverse campus in the system when it comes to its faculty, sitting behind the La Merced and Santa Cruz campuses. But given that its student population is among the system's diverse in the wake of the passage of proposition 209 in 1996, its percentages are still very low.



TENURED FACULTY(source: Press Enterprise article, 10/29/07)

The number of tenured, full-time faculty at UC Riverside in 2006:

American Indian

0.7%

Black

3.2%

Chicano/Latino

5.1%

Asian

19.5%

White

71.5%



Speaking of UCR, Mayor Ron Loveridge, who still teaches political science there, wrote this about the city's recent designation as a "City of the Arts" in the Press Enterprise.


An interesting point made by Loveridge is that in the 20th Century, Riverside was all about being a "city of the trees" with a "heritage" related to the orange groves that used to populate the city until recently. But as we know, few of those groves are still standing.

Will the same fate await the arts in Riverside when the 22nd Century arrives?



Inland Empire home buyers are shunning the bigger is better principle, according to the Press Enterprise. Staying in Riverside will be the bird farm that was in danger of being ousted until it got a reprieve a according to the Press Enterprise.


(excerpt)



The order was suspended after Harris contacted Councilman Art Gage, who interceded at City Hall on his behalf.

Under the plan that will be sent to the Planning Commission, Harris' 3-acre property would be rezoned "rural residential."

The World War II veteran expressed relief this week that he would get to keep his birds, and he criticized the city officials who came after him in the first place.

"The folks at City Hall don't care anything about what happens here," Harris said as he sat on his back steps. "I already got rid of my roosters. Now they found something else to complain about. It's always something."


His ducks and geese and the pond they swim in, dubbed "the bird farm" by locals, have delighted generations of neighborhood children and their parents.

Gage said his office was inundated with telephone calls and e-mails after news reports that Harris might lose his birds.

"There's been a tremendous response and not just from Riverside," Gage said.




You've got to love election years. But after the ballots are counted in November, the stagecoach and horses could be turning back into a pumpkin and a pack of mice.

There are some local endorsements of city council candidates here and here.


Even as a report came back that stated that his police department had systemic problems involving the application of its use of force policy, Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton was sworn in for a second term, according to the Los Angeles Times.


(excerpt)


The 60-year-old Bratton became the first chief to be reappointed since charter reform arose from the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King and the riots that followed when four Los Angeles Police Department officers were initially acquitted of brutality. By law, this will be Bratton's final five-year term.

The second act, the chief vowed to the audience, will be better than the first.

"We have saved thousands of lives over the last five years," he said, alluding to the 31% drop in major crime recorded over his first term. "So crime is down and will continue to go down. Fear is down, and we hope that it will continue to go down, as will disorder."

It was an emotional ceremony that reflected Bratton's Boston roots and Hollywood ties. It was conducted on the athletic field of the storied Los Angeles Police Academy in the heart of Elysian Park. After taking the podium, Bratton thanked everyone present, including an elementary school buddy, his police academy classmates, a cadre of colleagues from his tenures as chief in Boston and New York, as well as his wife, Rikki Klieman, son and father.








The Two Michaels


While a scandal may be emerging in New York City's City Hall involving one of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's top aides, the police department's labor union head, Michael Palladino who backs the officers involved in the Sean Bell shooting according to the New York Daily News.


(excerpt)


With Detectives Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper set to go on trial in January, Palladino has been holding press conferences after every court date, meeting with reporters and editors at major newspapers and turning up regularly on TV to discuss the case.

In addition, his union has spent tens of thousands of dollars to make its case in newspaper ads and radio spots and is paying a portion of the cops' legal fees.

"I thought it was very, very important to set the record straight," Palladino, 49, said. "I feel very strongly they did not act with criminality in their heart or in their mind that night."

Palladino denies he has been smearing the victims, only advocating for the cops. "Quite frankly, I don't think they can get a fair trial here in New York," he said. "I think [the jury pool] has already been poisoned."

For that, he blames the Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network, whose advocacy on behalf of Bell's fiancée and the shooting victims has infuriated the Detectives' Endowment Association. "Sharpton is a master of deception and a misleader of the public," Palladino said.

At issue is whether police were justified in firing at Bell, 23, and his friends as they left his bachelor party at Kalua Cabaret in Jamaica, Queens, on Nov. 25, 2006. Trent Benefield, 24, and Joseph Guzman, 32, were wounded.

"The only issue here is why Sean Bell was killed, why the two men were wounded. There's no gun found, there's no motivation explained," said Sharpton in response. "That's all we have said. That's not a distortion. He can have the playing field all to himself if he can explain why these men have bullets in them and this man is dead for no reason."