SLAPPing community organizations and other follies
Fires continue to spread throughout different locations in the Inland Empire and elsewhere.
More than 135 homes have been burned and fire agencies across the United States are sending people to the fires to assist. Smoke and ash are making it difficult for those evacuating their homes and for those trying to breathe.
People are discussing the fire here.
"You wouldn't believe how many people have been bought and sold in this city."
---Riversider
Ken Stansbury asks here why no one has responded to his comments about the SLAPP law suit filed against him and the Riversiders for Property Rights after they tried to circulate a ballot initiative proposal on the use of Eminent Domain in the city of Riverside.
One of them answered that because Stansbury was polite in discourse that they didn't want to argue with him about the issue of eminent domain if both sides didn't agree on it. What that's saying is that some parties are clearly more in arguing with other people who are deemed interesting in arguing, than in discussing issues. That the only point of discourse is to "win". That's a trait that we all are prone to at one time or another.
But unless I'm misreading Stansbury wrong, that's not the question that he's asking there. In a sense, it's not even the issue that is at stake here. Eminent Domain is an important issue, but what appears to be the question is how do you feel about a SLAPP law suit being used as a tool of intimidation against a community organization trying to utilize the process of circulating a petition to place something on the ballot?
That's an interesting question, and here's one possible response as to why there's no responses on the issue. Those who don't answer don't want to talk about the actions taken to intimidate a community organization into dropping out of their participation in an important part of the democratic process because they were scared that they were going to be slapped with the city's legal fees which at this point are at least $150,000.
Recently, the city including City Attorney Gregory Priamos backed off on announcing any intention to collect the city's legal fees on a law suit it initiated on its own behalf, but the damage has been done. The text regarding the city's intent to ask to be awarded attorney fees from the defendants had for the most part done its job.
How do you defend a SLAPP law suit? How do you defend your candidate's vote to authorize this law suit and its continuation? How do you factor in that the sole vote against it was cast by the city council's own villain, Councilman Art Gage? Other council members said his vote against it was self-serving and smacked of opportunism.
So was and so did this SLAPP suit.
Rather than let the voters decide on an issue that's being discussed, debated and coming up for vote in other cities, Riverside's government minus one decided to take that decision out of the voters' hands. In this case, it's eminent domain but tomorrow, it could be another issue but it would still come down to the same thing, which is stifling the efforts of a community organization to circulate a petition to put a measure on the ballot.
People can hem and haw over how just the city's actions were for the betterment of the city's residents but what if they also decide to utilize the ballot initiative under their right as Californians on a different issue? What if the city decides to SLAPP them? Will it be used as a tool to shut down this vital process in the future?
Stansbury of course has caught ire here. It's too bad that the more news that comes in from people marching the precincts in Ward One which favors the chances of Ward One candidate Mike Gardner, the more personal the attacks get towards those who criticize Betro or the GASS quartet on Craigslist get.
One individual I talked to who has marched what he called the "boondocks" and far reaches of Ward One said that the majority of homes he visited were planning on voting for Gardner. Whether or not those who plan to show up and vote at the polls is still the question, with the only poll that really counts still two weeks away. A lot of political agendas and futures are riding on the election so expect the rancor to intensify, not lessen in the next two weeks.
I've got to hand it to Stansbury who's been civil even when being personally attacked, rather than politically criticized to the point where someone even posted a picture of a woman's crotch in a posting to discourage him. But if the guy can stand up to the city in a courtroom on a regular basis, he's probably not going to be too bothered by cyberstalking porn posting nonsense.
In fact, he's made changes to his petition and intends to recirculate it.
Cyberharassers and cyberstalkers are not there to discuss politics, but to make personal attacks in the hopes of discouraging someone's expression through tactics meant to embarrass, frighten, humiliate or intimidate unless anyone can think of a reason how posting a porn picture or posting personal comments about a person's clothing or family court record constitutes political discourse.
Here are some resources to employ if you find yourself in this situation that you may find helpful.
California Anti-SLAPP Project
Survival Guide for SLAPP Victims
SLAPP Organization Center
SPJ: Anti-SLAPP Model
And while you're researching, here are two outstanding sites.
Californians Aware
California First Amendment Coalition
Both sites include information and letter templates on the California Public Records Act and the Ralph M. Brown Act. Every person interested in how their government operates should be aware of these two statutes.
The police department in Riverside gave an oral presentation of its crime statistics both citywide and within each neighborhood partnership center. Three of the four area commanders attended and so did many of the command staff members, Chief Russ Leach and Riverside Police Officers' Association President Ken Tutwiler.
The report was oral and on PowerPoint. Crime was down across the city in different categories in the four areas of the city and programs which had been implemented including neighborhood watches and the citizen academy for Spanish speakers were successes according to Leach.
Staffing issues continue to be a concern in the police department even though the city has created about 45 officer positions in the past several years, with the population and surface area expanding in the upcoming years.
The department could use about 50 officers spread out in a two-year period and more squad cars. More field officers. More detectives, more bodies in the positions as Tutwiler put it. And of course, with sworn officer positions there has to be civilian positions added to and it's not clear whether the information about the 25 civilian positions being added refers to newly created ones or the thawing out of a number of civilian positions in the police department which were frozen last year with the money "saved" being put back into the development arena.
And the department needs about 30 more squad cars.
City Manager Brad Hudson said that the city will have to find the money for the positions and the cars(which are going to have to wear themselves out more than some are already), which is interesting because from what we've all heard for the last year or so, the city is raining money. Just last night, the city voted to promise to devote a percentage of its annual budget to "promoting the arts". It's too bad Press Enterprise reporter Doug Haberman was absent this week because he had said money, what money after the city approved the "concept" of the "city of the arts", a process it often uses before it starts tossing money at something. Here is where Haberman can find part of his answer.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
At the request of Councilman Dom Betro, the city will also look into how to best fund the city's arts and cultural programs.
"This is a great plan, but it lacks a stable funding source," he said. "If we are going to live up to the name, we need to take that extra step. ... We have to significantly fund the arts at a better level than we have been."
There was an interesting discussion in the article about the demise of the Orange Blossom Festival and the birth of the newly proposed citrus festival scheduled for "after April".
(excerpt)
Belinda Graham, the city's development director, said the event is not meant to replace the downtown Orange Blossom Festival, which was axed last year because of violence. Graham said the 12-year festival was so successful that it lost its focus.
The new celebration will focus more on the history of the citrus industry, she said. A site has not been determined, Graham said.
"It's good to remember our history and celebrate it," Graham said. "It's what the city was built on."
I think promoting arts is absolutely necessary especially to kids and teenagers through classes, training programs and workshops. But what it looked like was that the "city of the arts" is an umbrella for subsidizing arts and culture for those who can already afford it. And the representative artists and musicians weren't the most ethnically, racially and gender diverse group. Why is this effort which purports to support diversity in the arts sending mostly White people to serve as its spokesmen?
Nearly $2 billion will be spent in the next several years on 20 years of projects squeezed into five years under the Riverside Renaissance banner but how much will go to public services to match and keep pace with the growth that's expected in the next five years or so? That's a question on many people's minds whether it's an election year or not.
An interesting thing happened at the city council meeting when a Councilman Steve Adams' supporter was second in line to anoint him the new city councilman and to tear into former mayor and current councilwoman, Terry Frizzel. That was after The Truth publisher, Salvador Santana stumped for Adams and also sharply criticized Frizzel who actually implemented more than a few of theh programs that Adams is taking credit for now during an election year.
Santana was responding to comments made by Yolanda Garland, a La Sierra resident, who took exception to her neighborhood and ward being called a "mess" by Santana at an earlier meeting and expressed her two cents on the issue last week.
This second person spoke about how tired he was of the ranting and raving and anger shown at the dais during city council meetings by speakers. Of course, he watches them on television and not much of the behavior taking place from the dais makes it on the air. He also made a pitch for Adams, who spent most of the time at the meeting trying to show how down he was with the city's rank and file police officers during his speeches because Tutwiler was present in the audience for the crime statistics report. Adams as you know is up for reelection in two weeks against Frizzel.
The city council, well most of the ones sitting in the middle, applauded this man's speech somewhat louder than they applaud the passage of most agenda items including the recent celebration of the arts. And hopefully, this applause did make it through to the viewers from home. Several elected officials did not participate in the applause, those being the more politically astute elected officials such as Mayor Ron Loveridge.
"B", who has been busy writing more mash notes for me at Craigslist obviously didn't like that much and responded. I totally agree with him in that I should have never mentioned my mother or bring her into "this". It's too bad that cyberstalkers that spent months pissing on this blog haven't accorded my mother the same courtesy, even demeaning her uterus as "filthy" or bringing her up in that lovely email I received that was traced back to an ISP registered to the city. It's too bad that all harassers can't be as considerate as "B".
Past Ward Seven city council candidate, Jim Martin reminded the city council members of how messy democracy is, and of the importance of engagement between the city government's leaders and those who elect them. His point hit home with those in the audience even though it was lost on several of those sitting on the dais. But it does provide food for thought. Prior city councils have had to navigate themselves through some pretty turbulent times and not once did they pass restrictions on public comment at city council meetings. Not once did they applaud someone who criticized their critics. And not once did they order police officers to remove little old ladies or anyone else from the dais for any reason let alone for having exceeded the three-minute(which was actually five minutes back then) speaking limit.
They even had individuals who refused to stop talking after five minutes and the only thing that Loveridge did was shut the meeting down on one occasion in June 1999 because someone did what someone might call "ranting and raving" today, but he didn't order police officers to remove this individual from the building like several mayor pro tems seem prone to do.
That city council that "did nothing" could have sent the issue on the city council conduct code to the Governmental Affairs Committee and imposed restrictions on public comment at its meetings and blamed it on one individual like the one who shut down a meeting in 1999 or groups of individuals. But they didn't. They may have not liked what they heard, may have even recoiled at a lot of it, because they were criticized much more severely than this current group by many sides, but they listened.
They didn't spend time clicking palm pilots, flipping through reports, rolling eyes, grunting, sighing, hmphing, talking amongst themselves or doing other things.
It's interesting running into several of these elected officials who "did nothing" and lacked "courage" and discussing with them the incidents of the past. Several of them were much more aware of why it was important to make the decisions they did during that turbulent time and were glad they made them. Former Councilwoman Maureen Kane made some interesting comments as well during a Community Police Review Commission workshop on her experiences on a research committee at a special workshop conducted in 2004.
This makes me wonder if this current leadership would have handled a difficult situation like the shooting of Tyisha Miller quite as well as the prior one tried to do. The same city council members who even blame the past leadership for 30 years worth of problems with the police department never had to face meeting after meeting of angry, upset community members of all different races and backgrounds for months on end to push them to act on an issue that for a while, they dragged their feet on. I'm not sure they would have handled it nearly so well but in part like Martin said, that is what they are elected to do, to handle the difficult situations and turbulent times, with a political courage far different than that type that's been cited often in campaign speeches during the past several months.
The had to make some very difficult decisions to move this city forward and even if it took them time to make them, they stepped up to the plate on these issues. Some of these same city council members I have criticized myself many times, some of them are having their actions totally erased or rewritten to label them as failures and "do nothings" by those stumping for candidates running for election. But could this city council that is in place now have responded in the same way or better?
How they handle their roles in much calmer times doesn't indicate that they have enough fortitude and patience to tackle the issues that the city council of the late 1990s had to address. If they can't handle the critical comments they hear now, they would have had a much more difficult time back then.
The applause at the city council meeting might have been an emotional release of frustration from the dais, but it was not an example of fine leadership.
On Monday, the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office charged Kris Antonio Wiggins with murder in relation to the fatal onduty shooting of a Rialto Police Department officer, according to the San Bernardino Sun.
(excerpt)
During a news conference Monday, San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael A. Ramos announced Wiggins, 32, has been charged with murder in the death of Officer Sergio Carrera Jr., 29.
Two special allegations - that Wiggins "personally and intentionally" discharged a rifle and that he killed a peace officer - also were filed.
The criminal complaint against Wiggins also asserts his actions "proximately caused great bodily injury and death to Sergio Carrera."
Wiggins, who told Rialto police his name was Jaranard Thomas, could face 50 years to life in prison if convicted. The District Attorney's Office has not ruled out seeking the death penalty.
"Anytime a peace officer goes down in the line of duty, it's a big deal to us," Ramos told a crowd of about 100 people.
Carrera, of Beaumont, was fatally shot in the head Thursday when he and three other Rialto SWAT officers barged into Wiggins' West Cascade Drive apartment during a drug raid.
Police said Wiggins struggled with an officer but have refused to say whose gun was fired, who pulled the trigger or even whether Wiggins had a gun of his own.
"I want to make it very clear today that it was not a Rialto police officer that pulled the trigger," Ramos said Monday. "It was not friendly fire."
But he balked at saying Wiggins deliberately shot Carrera and refused to discuss the facts of the case.
More than 135 homes have been burned and fire agencies across the United States are sending people to the fires to assist. Smoke and ash are making it difficult for those evacuating their homes and for those trying to breathe.
People are discussing the fire here.
"You wouldn't believe how many people have been bought and sold in this city."
---Riversider
Ken Stansbury asks here why no one has responded to his comments about the SLAPP law suit filed against him and the Riversiders for Property Rights after they tried to circulate a ballot initiative proposal on the use of Eminent Domain in the city of Riverside.
One of them answered that because Stansbury was polite in discourse that they didn't want to argue with him about the issue of eminent domain if both sides didn't agree on it. What that's saying is that some parties are clearly more in arguing with other people who are deemed interesting in arguing, than in discussing issues. That the only point of discourse is to "win". That's a trait that we all are prone to at one time or another.
But unless I'm misreading Stansbury wrong, that's not the question that he's asking there. In a sense, it's not even the issue that is at stake here. Eminent Domain is an important issue, but what appears to be the question is how do you feel about a SLAPP law suit being used as a tool of intimidation against a community organization trying to utilize the process of circulating a petition to place something on the ballot?
That's an interesting question, and here's one possible response as to why there's no responses on the issue. Those who don't answer don't want to talk about the actions taken to intimidate a community organization into dropping out of their participation in an important part of the democratic process because they were scared that they were going to be slapped with the city's legal fees which at this point are at least $150,000.
Recently, the city including City Attorney Gregory Priamos backed off on announcing any intention to collect the city's legal fees on a law suit it initiated on its own behalf, but the damage has been done. The text regarding the city's intent to ask to be awarded attorney fees from the defendants had for the most part done its job.
How do you defend a SLAPP law suit? How do you defend your candidate's vote to authorize this law suit and its continuation? How do you factor in that the sole vote against it was cast by the city council's own villain, Councilman Art Gage? Other council members said his vote against it was self-serving and smacked of opportunism.
So was and so did this SLAPP suit.
Rather than let the voters decide on an issue that's being discussed, debated and coming up for vote in other cities, Riverside's government minus one decided to take that decision out of the voters' hands. In this case, it's eminent domain but tomorrow, it could be another issue but it would still come down to the same thing, which is stifling the efforts of a community organization to circulate a petition to put a measure on the ballot.
People can hem and haw over how just the city's actions were for the betterment of the city's residents but what if they also decide to utilize the ballot initiative under their right as Californians on a different issue? What if the city decides to SLAPP them? Will it be used as a tool to shut down this vital process in the future?
Stansbury of course has caught ire here. It's too bad that the more news that comes in from people marching the precincts in Ward One which favors the chances of Ward One candidate Mike Gardner, the more personal the attacks get towards those who criticize Betro or the GASS quartet on Craigslist get.
One individual I talked to who has marched what he called the "boondocks" and far reaches of Ward One said that the majority of homes he visited were planning on voting for Gardner. Whether or not those who plan to show up and vote at the polls is still the question, with the only poll that really counts still two weeks away. A lot of political agendas and futures are riding on the election so expect the rancor to intensify, not lessen in the next two weeks.
I've got to hand it to Stansbury who's been civil even when being personally attacked, rather than politically criticized to the point where someone even posted a picture of a woman's crotch in a posting to discourage him. But if the guy can stand up to the city in a courtroom on a regular basis, he's probably not going to be too bothered by cyberstalking porn posting nonsense.
In fact, he's made changes to his petition and intends to recirculate it.
Cyberharassers and cyberstalkers are not there to discuss politics, but to make personal attacks in the hopes of discouraging someone's expression through tactics meant to embarrass, frighten, humiliate or intimidate unless anyone can think of a reason how posting a porn picture or posting personal comments about a person's clothing or family court record constitutes political discourse.
Here are some resources to employ if you find yourself in this situation that you may find helpful.
California Anti-SLAPP Project
Survival Guide for SLAPP Victims
SLAPP Organization Center
SPJ: Anti-SLAPP Model
And while you're researching, here are two outstanding sites.
Californians Aware
California First Amendment Coalition
Both sites include information and letter templates on the California Public Records Act and the Ralph M. Brown Act. Every person interested in how their government operates should be aware of these two statutes.
The police department in Riverside gave an oral presentation of its crime statistics both citywide and within each neighborhood partnership center. Three of the four area commanders attended and so did many of the command staff members, Chief Russ Leach and Riverside Police Officers' Association President Ken Tutwiler.
The report was oral and on PowerPoint. Crime was down across the city in different categories in the four areas of the city and programs which had been implemented including neighborhood watches and the citizen academy for Spanish speakers were successes according to Leach.
Staffing issues continue to be a concern in the police department even though the city has created about 45 officer positions in the past several years, with the population and surface area expanding in the upcoming years.
The department could use about 50 officers spread out in a two-year period and more squad cars. More field officers. More detectives, more bodies in the positions as Tutwiler put it. And of course, with sworn officer positions there has to be civilian positions added to and it's not clear whether the information about the 25 civilian positions being added refers to newly created ones or the thawing out of a number of civilian positions in the police department which were frozen last year with the money "saved" being put back into the development arena.
And the department needs about 30 more squad cars.
City Manager Brad Hudson said that the city will have to find the money for the positions and the cars(which are going to have to wear themselves out more than some are already), which is interesting because from what we've all heard for the last year or so, the city is raining money. Just last night, the city voted to promise to devote a percentage of its annual budget to "promoting the arts". It's too bad Press Enterprise reporter Doug Haberman was absent this week because he had said money, what money after the city approved the "concept" of the "city of the arts", a process it often uses before it starts tossing money at something. Here is where Haberman can find part of his answer.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
At the request of Councilman Dom Betro, the city will also look into how to best fund the city's arts and cultural programs.
"This is a great plan, but it lacks a stable funding source," he said. "If we are going to live up to the name, we need to take that extra step. ... We have to significantly fund the arts at a better level than we have been."
There was an interesting discussion in the article about the demise of the Orange Blossom Festival and the birth of the newly proposed citrus festival scheduled for "after April".
(excerpt)
Belinda Graham, the city's development director, said the event is not meant to replace the downtown Orange Blossom Festival, which was axed last year because of violence. Graham said the 12-year festival was so successful that it lost its focus.
The new celebration will focus more on the history of the citrus industry, she said. A site has not been determined, Graham said.
"It's good to remember our history and celebrate it," Graham said. "It's what the city was built on."
I think promoting arts is absolutely necessary especially to kids and teenagers through classes, training programs and workshops. But what it looked like was that the "city of the arts" is an umbrella for subsidizing arts and culture for those who can already afford it. And the representative artists and musicians weren't the most ethnically, racially and gender diverse group. Why is this effort which purports to support diversity in the arts sending mostly White people to serve as its spokesmen?
Nearly $2 billion will be spent in the next several years on 20 years of projects squeezed into five years under the Riverside Renaissance banner but how much will go to public services to match and keep pace with the growth that's expected in the next five years or so? That's a question on many people's minds whether it's an election year or not.
An interesting thing happened at the city council meeting when a Councilman Steve Adams' supporter was second in line to anoint him the new city councilman and to tear into former mayor and current councilwoman, Terry Frizzel. That was after The Truth publisher, Salvador Santana stumped for Adams and also sharply criticized Frizzel who actually implemented more than a few of theh programs that Adams is taking credit for now during an election year.
Santana was responding to comments made by Yolanda Garland, a La Sierra resident, who took exception to her neighborhood and ward being called a "mess" by Santana at an earlier meeting and expressed her two cents on the issue last week.
This second person spoke about how tired he was of the ranting and raving and anger shown at the dais during city council meetings by speakers. Of course, he watches them on television and not much of the behavior taking place from the dais makes it on the air. He also made a pitch for Adams, who spent most of the time at the meeting trying to show how down he was with the city's rank and file police officers during his speeches because Tutwiler was present in the audience for the crime statistics report. Adams as you know is up for reelection in two weeks against Frizzel.
The city council, well most of the ones sitting in the middle, applauded this man's speech somewhat louder than they applaud the passage of most agenda items including the recent celebration of the arts. And hopefully, this applause did make it through to the viewers from home. Several elected officials did not participate in the applause, those being the more politically astute elected officials such as Mayor Ron Loveridge.
"B", who has been busy writing more mash notes for me at Craigslist obviously didn't like that much and responded. I totally agree with him in that I should have never mentioned my mother or bring her into "this". It's too bad that cyberstalkers that spent months pissing on this blog haven't accorded my mother the same courtesy, even demeaning her uterus as "filthy" or bringing her up in that lovely email I received that was traced back to an ISP registered to the city. It's too bad that all harassers can't be as considerate as "B".
Past Ward Seven city council candidate, Jim Martin reminded the city council members of how messy democracy is, and of the importance of engagement between the city government's leaders and those who elect them. His point hit home with those in the audience even though it was lost on several of those sitting on the dais. But it does provide food for thought. Prior city councils have had to navigate themselves through some pretty turbulent times and not once did they pass restrictions on public comment at city council meetings. Not once did they applaud someone who criticized their critics. And not once did they order police officers to remove little old ladies or anyone else from the dais for any reason let alone for having exceeded the three-minute(which was actually five minutes back then) speaking limit.
They even had individuals who refused to stop talking after five minutes and the only thing that Loveridge did was shut the meeting down on one occasion in June 1999 because someone did what someone might call "ranting and raving" today, but he didn't order police officers to remove this individual from the building like several mayor pro tems seem prone to do.
That city council that "did nothing" could have sent the issue on the city council conduct code to the Governmental Affairs Committee and imposed restrictions on public comment at its meetings and blamed it on one individual like the one who shut down a meeting in 1999 or groups of individuals. But they didn't. They may have not liked what they heard, may have even recoiled at a lot of it, because they were criticized much more severely than this current group by many sides, but they listened.
They didn't spend time clicking palm pilots, flipping through reports, rolling eyes, grunting, sighing, hmphing, talking amongst themselves or doing other things.
It's interesting running into several of these elected officials who "did nothing" and lacked "courage" and discussing with them the incidents of the past. Several of them were much more aware of why it was important to make the decisions they did during that turbulent time and were glad they made them. Former Councilwoman Maureen Kane made some interesting comments as well during a Community Police Review Commission workshop on her experiences on a research committee at a special workshop conducted in 2004.
This makes me wonder if this current leadership would have handled a difficult situation like the shooting of Tyisha Miller quite as well as the prior one tried to do. The same city council members who even blame the past leadership for 30 years worth of problems with the police department never had to face meeting after meeting of angry, upset community members of all different races and backgrounds for months on end to push them to act on an issue that for a while, they dragged their feet on. I'm not sure they would have handled it nearly so well but in part like Martin said, that is what they are elected to do, to handle the difficult situations and turbulent times, with a political courage far different than that type that's been cited often in campaign speeches during the past several months.
The had to make some very difficult decisions to move this city forward and even if it took them time to make them, they stepped up to the plate on these issues. Some of these same city council members I have criticized myself many times, some of them are having their actions totally erased or rewritten to label them as failures and "do nothings" by those stumping for candidates running for election. But could this city council that is in place now have responded in the same way or better?
How they handle their roles in much calmer times doesn't indicate that they have enough fortitude and patience to tackle the issues that the city council of the late 1990s had to address. If they can't handle the critical comments they hear now, they would have had a much more difficult time back then.
The applause at the city council meeting might have been an emotional release of frustration from the dais, but it was not an example of fine leadership.
On Monday, the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office charged Kris Antonio Wiggins with murder in relation to the fatal onduty shooting of a Rialto Police Department officer, according to the San Bernardino Sun.
(excerpt)
During a news conference Monday, San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael A. Ramos announced Wiggins, 32, has been charged with murder in the death of Officer Sergio Carrera Jr., 29.
Two special allegations - that Wiggins "personally and intentionally" discharged a rifle and that he killed a peace officer - also were filed.
The criminal complaint against Wiggins also asserts his actions "proximately caused great bodily injury and death to Sergio Carrera."
Wiggins, who told Rialto police his name was Jaranard Thomas, could face 50 years to life in prison if convicted. The District Attorney's Office has not ruled out seeking the death penalty.
"Anytime a peace officer goes down in the line of duty, it's a big deal to us," Ramos told a crowd of about 100 people.
Carrera, of Beaumont, was fatally shot in the head Thursday when he and three other Rialto SWAT officers barged into Wiggins' West Cascade Drive apartment during a drug raid.
Police said Wiggins struggled with an officer but have refused to say whose gun was fired, who pulled the trigger or even whether Wiggins had a gun of his own.
"I want to make it very clear today that it was not a Rialto police officer that pulled the trigger," Ramos said Monday. "It was not friendly fire."
But he balked at saying Wiggins deliberately shot Carrera and refused to discuss the facts of the case.
Labels: City elections, officer-involved shootings, public forums in all places
posted by Five Before Midnight | 2:14 PM
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