Election 2007:Are you representing, part one?
The United States Attorney's office is still debating whether to file charges against former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department deputy Ivory J. Webb who was acquitted during his criminal trial.
In other news, the battle for the mantle of who will be at the top of the heap of initialed monikers continues unabated, while people involved in campaigns involving eight candidates continue canvassing households and calling phone banks to poll those who were planning to vote in these elections. If you want to follow the ongoing storyline including what they think about me and this blog, feel free to visit the battleground of the initialized saber rattlers. I guess I'm supposed to be embarrassed but if I should be, then I'm certainly not the only one.
I've been through worse on my own site, because individuals hated the fact that this blog existed and probably myself as well. They still hate it and that's something I came to terms with a long time ago. The best thing to do when dealing with cowards who hide behind initials is to just keep blogging. If people like that have nothing better to do on a beautiful Saturday with still air and the mountains in view, then I must be doing something right.
People who hide behind initials and fake monikers though extremely unpleasant and sometimes frightening to deal with aren't worth much except to serve as useful barometers to how effective this blog is with at least giving its readers something to think about. Obviously, there are those who believe that's dangerous for people to do so they are acting accordingly. It's just proof that what these folks are trying to push on the residents of this city isn't what it's cracked up to be because otherwise they would be flooding Craigslist with posts about how great everything is rather than singling out individuals once at a time on each side for harassment. Something is making them insecure or unhappy and they need someone to blame. So it's my turn.
The good news, is that since they started doing this, traffic to this site has been increasing in terms of visitors from Craigslist. It's only natural that people want to see what the fuss is about or how bad I am. I'm worse than has been said because I'm blogging.
All of this childish and ridiculous behavior over the Ward One election that either way it goes, will still leave much of that ward unrepresented. Mike Gardner is much nicer than Councilman Dom Betro whose arrogance is diplomatically referred to by some in his own camp as meaning he's not "personable", but is he really all that much different? Is he that much better?
Betro's a proven commodity and that's either good or bad depending on what kind of job you believe he's done. Gardner's not a proven commodity which is either good or bad depending on what you think of the performance of the city council.
There's this huge assumption that if you oppose Betro, then you support Mike Gardner, but there's a gorge between the two the size of a canyon which includes many people who don't really benefit or identify with a political race where two candidates fight over what will benefit a sizable number of those who live in the ward but will leave many people out including many who don't have access and alas, have to sit out the sand box antics at Craigslist.
Who's being represented and are the candidates representing? Now that's a question.
Let's look at the task forces that this city puts together. Most notably the most recent two involving the city's parks in Ward One.
After all, how many Latinos has Councilman Dom Betro placed on task forces for both Tequesquite Park and Fairmount Park? How many Black people?
How about none?
I attended several of those meetings and found the comments provided by those who attended interesting. It will be interesting to see how many of these recommendations survive the process, which still has several more stages to complete before the final product is approved by the city council after the election cycle of course. However, then I went outside and spoke with different people who were at the park, sitting in groups with their children or fishing in Lake Evans. Most of them weren't White at all. Most were Black and especially Latino. Many of them liked the open spaces, because in many neighborhoods that's nothing that can be taken for granted. Some of them wanted the merry-go-round back. They love the fishing. For many of them, it's about community with family, not about fancy tennis courts, shops and restaurants or how many holes the golf course has.
But none of these individuals were included in the selection process.
So, if you look at the task force for Fairmount Park, do you see people on it who are using it now or later?
Later.
Task forces are good mechanisms, but task forces which are tailored to only represent some segments of the city while omitting others aren't nearly as good. But this city's history of inclusion for people of color and people in lower income brackets has received mixed reviews at best.
Forget that Fairmount Park in particular was a haven for Black and Latino families. The Black families whose roots lie the deepest in this city regularly held reunion picnics, a practice that continues to this day.
Of course, three Riverside Police Department officers in 1997 marred that feeling that Fairmount Park is a place for families when they assaulted Jose Martinez, a laborer who helped build Zacatecas restaurant, and tossed him into Lake Evans not knowing or caring if he even knew how to swim. Martinez lie battered in the tall grass, waiting for his assailants to get back into their black-and-white vehicles and leave the scene before he stumbled home. The department investigated, he filed a law suit and the straw that broke the camel's back was only 18 months away.
So both very good and also very bad, there's ties between Black and Latino families and Fairmount Park but you'd never know this looking at the task force deliberating the future use of portions of this park. You'd think the park was for White people to decide its use and that Ward One only included White people in its population. Maybe in the campaign of Betro, it does.
Gardner was at least astute enough to notice the lack of ethnic and racial diversity on the two park task forces.
But would his task force be different?
That's part of the unknown commodity. We know that Betro's not big on the ethnic and racial diversity with these task forces(nor with the CPRC appointments for that matter) but Gardner's a complete unknown because he's not had the same opportunities to show that he's any different.
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
Downtown While Working
"Do you want to hear an African-American joke?"
---Male individual to two other individuals at a Starbucks
Part of erasing the "old" Riverside, means erasing its history and the fact that it was founded by abolitionists (which is included in the official biography) but had an active Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1920s(which is not usually included). It was the first public school district to voluntarily desegregate(which is often included in its official history) but the response was that several schools were burnt down, by who is not known.
Vincent Moses, the former director of the city's museums wrote a brief history of Riverside to circulate in the midst of the firestorm that was Tyisha Miller, to promote the idea of Riverside as a racially inclusive city, which wasn't what reality showed. It's not clear whether it was the city's idea or that provided by its public relations firm at the time, Sitrich, Inc who is currently representing the images of the hospitals in Los Angeles County who have been dumping indigent patients on Skid Row. But it wasn't a success.
Moses if you recall didn't last long during the present administration at City Hall. He was pushed into retirement by the city manager's office and replaced with a new director with scant experience in the area of museums. This was one of several departments that would witness this behavior from the city manager's office. This experience was also shared by the city's libraries.
The police department would have its own experience when the city manager's office tried to influence the promotional process some say down to the captain's level. Of course, that discussion never took place nor was action attempted to try to convert an assistant chief position and two deputy chief positions to being "at will". Oh no, that was a figment of overactive imaginations and impassioned bosoms! Of course by this time, the city had actually composed a tentative city council agenda including this item that was submitted by administrative analyst Jeremy Hammond who is said to be Hudson's point person in the Human Resources Department. So the "at will" positions were set to be created, even though City Attorney Gregory Priamos later said that couldn't be done to positions in the fire and police departments.
Still, the city manager's office claimed that most, no wait practically all of the management employees offered "at will" positions fully embraced them. Is that the truth?
As for being "at will" to whom are you beholden? That was what brought hundreds of police officers representing two labor unions down to City Hall demanding answers. Who was in charge of promotions in the upper levels of management, the police chief or the city manager? Where these managers independent of City Hall or were they its "yes men"?
Hundreds of men and women wanted to know.
Of course, those positions weren't considered for conversion to "at will" until three male Latinos had advanced through the ranks to be placed in those positions. Three very different men, bringing different perspectives to their jobs. Community members asked, if they were White, they get protected job status but if they're Latino, they don't. And there was reason to be concerned after a series of demotions, terminations and "resignations" at City Hall, all of them since City Manager Brad Hudson was hired by the current city council. After the list of high-level management employees of color had nearly been finished, the city council including those up for reelection in three wards this year voted Hudson a huge pay raise.
That list included the following and only those who have left the city are included. All were predicted to be gone, by the end of 2006. Fortunately that didn't come to pass.
Art Alcaraz, Human Resources Director, Latino, resigned
Jim Smith, Interim Asst. City Manager and city's budget director, Black, demoted and resigned
Tranda Drumwright, Director of Housing, Black, terminated not long after her boss told her she didn't see her as "management" material despite her stellar qualifications and years of experience.
Pedro Payne, Executive Director, Community Police Review Commission, Black, "resigned"
Who spoke for them? Who walked for them? Who mourned them when one by one they were pushed out by a City Hall which didn't want them?
Smith particularly faced undignified and many say racist behavior when a city council member pulled him out of the audience to put him on display as *proof* that the city wasn't racist. Of course, his treatment as a token to avoid addressing the issues of the departures of men and women of color from management positions at City Hall didn't prevent his demotion from his lofty interim position(which they only gave to him because they intended to give the permanent position to a White man). Smith watched as a man he trained, Paul Sundeen, was promoted into a permanent position as assistant city manager and Hudson brought in another White man, Tom DeSantis, who only possessed a Bachelors Degree to become the city manager who oversees and some say, runs several city departments. His foray into labor contract negotiations didn't win him many fans.
One of those three high-ranking police management employees, Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez, apparently had no desire to become "at will", concerned individuals said. If he had become "at will", the department would have soon most likely lost one of its most talented management officers with the closest ties to the community in a manner of months. Whether that's the case, that didn't happen and the city's better for it. But that's why it's important for officers like Dominguez to work with the communities, because the community will back up the officers who work the hardest to work with them and remain committed to partnership, not occupation.
The rank and file officers who worked under Dominguez including the leadership of the Riverside Police Officers' Association thought highly enough of him to support him at a community meeting after Dominguez had resolved a situation started by several council members who threatened to arrest four individuals including an 89-year-old woman by not arresting anyone.
We ask our city's police officers to opt for different resolutions than arrest but when one did, what happened? What can be said about city officials who treat police officers not as responsible for their safety and of those who attend meetings but as their personal bouncers to arrest or eject people they don't like or in the case of one elderly woman in 2006, because she exceeded the three-minute speaking rule. This woman didn't do it out of malice. She lived outside the city limits but the pipe that ruptured and flooded her property was inside city limits and was owned and operated by the city.
Our city council members, seven in all, could have referred her to the appropriate staff members to assist her with her situation. Instead, they had a very embarrassed police officer remove her and he did, very, very gently. She would only be the first elderly woman threatened with arrest, but not the last. Was this some sort of grey menace, or did the city council members just don't like uppity elderly women?
"You'll have to carry me out," Marjorie Von Pohle, 89, said to two officers when it was her turn.
This action not to arrest even as city officials were allegedly calling all over town including at the Riverside County District Attorney's office for assistance wasn't long before the "at will" situation arose. Funny, that. No one jumped, and the group was not arrested. Not one city official spoke out in the defense of the elderly women. But then why would they? They wouldn't be such good "team players" but they might be independent thinkers like they were elected to be by the majority of the voters in their wards. When none of these elected officials stepped forward for these women, the police officers essentially did.
It's funny too how some people say one thing in one venue and then say something else in another. The same people who say they take pride in Riverside's heritage and history are also the first who want to erase it and replace it with someone else's present reality. This includes the erasure of the contributions and presence of communities of color particularly poor ones. The many ways that this has been done and is being done will be explored in future posts after the election. After all, Chinatown, which was one ethnic community, is just a memory as much so as the old market that used to stand amidst the Wood Streets. The one whose owners were threatened with Eminent Domain outside of a redevelopment zone.
But then you have individuals who think that eminent domain is the answer to all that ails Riverside, but of course if it were their business that were at risk, they'd be down at City Hall making their feelings known and despite their disdain towards the businesses who have faced which they showed by confusing land negotiations between two parties on equal footing with "hostage taking", they would find these people in their corners.
At any rate, the Guans' market, a mainstay under different owners going back to World War II is no more, with not even a piece of rubble or other remnant to mark that it ever existed there. Like many other remnants of Riverside past, it's been erased from history. Somehow, this action has been rewritten to the extent, that it's been called an act of political courage to remove a long-standing market owned by an Asian-American family to stop the flow of Black and Latino residents, who someone at Craigslist referred to as "trash", from coming down Bandini Street to access the closest thing that they had for a market given that even considering Riverside Renaissance, no markets are planned for that area to serve residents of several apartment complexes and houses.
Downtown While Dreaming
Much like what happened with the downtown Fox Theater.
As you remember, that act of "political courage" involved seizing the theater and crushing the dream of a family through the only action (rather than threats) of eminent domain taken in the downtown area. A dream died, the children cried and the deal was closed when one councilman said, "we're done talking. Let's do it."
And so they did.
The more courageous action would have been to partner with the property owners, work together and with widespread community input have been to work to help that dream which many people do share to be realized. But instead, the family was branded the villains who were trying to crush the city's dream of progress downtown that had yet to be unveiled to much fanfare as the Riverside Renaissance in a rather stunning reversal. And a very risky project became the cornerstone project to catalyze the expression of Riverside Renaissance downtown. After witnessing the failure of the theater in Palm Springs in part due to an unrealized potential of mixed usage possibilities, it's hard to not see past become prologue once again.
But then the whole Riverside Renaissance is a gamble, with the futures of our children and grandchildren in the ante pot. But if you borrow, borrow and borrow from bonds, during times of plenty, will you be ready when the bill collectors come calling(with interest) during times of famine which will include a housing market that has collapsed much more so than Betro's rewriting of downtown's history to equate it with Pompeii's last days until he arrived on the dais, as described in a column by Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise. Not to mention, the recession that many fear is already here or at least close at hand.
Still, since it's our children, and grandchildren whose access to city services that we're gambling with, it's practically a sin to be concerned about that and also makes you a party pooper. Maybe American Indians look seven generations into the future when making decisions, but the leaders in Riverside could care less. Attempts at immediate gratification at high risk rather than careful, thoughtful, responsible planning are par for the course.
I find myself asking, okay, we know how incumbent Betro would view this. What would Gardner think? What would he do? And how would he respond if the current city council viewed his actions as him not being a "team player". By endorsing candidates before they even file to run, the current city council has made it clear it's not a governmental body as much as a country club with admission subject to its muster as much as any voter. One person's team work is another person's cronyism. Does that mean if none of the "team players" that are being groomed as replacements make it in, that the current city council will pack up its toys and go home?
Also in the Wood Streets is the All Saints Episcopal Church which lies across from Riverside Community College. That church temporarily housed the day facility utilized by homeless people in this city after it was forced to vacate its home at Kansas and Spruce after its rent was quadrupled when its lease expired. It soon found a home in the church, and several churches, including the First Congregational Church downtown have been havens for the homeless and have advocated for their existence let alone their well being against the city government.
The Wood Street residents objected to the homeless in their midst. Then Ward One city councilman Chuck Beaty, calling this neighborhood a "special" one objected for them. The shelter had to go. When the city tried to even consider putting a residential shelter for homeless people within a mile of the "special neighborhood", it balked and the prospective sites were narrowed down to several in a neighborhood less "special".
Eventually, the city found a site for the day shelter and built it, not downtown but in closer proximity to the Eastside which has been the haven for homeless shelters whether it's liked it or not. Whether the Eastside has asked for it or not.
It's not like the Eastsiders were ever included in the process or on any homeless shelter task force set up by the city. But then if you have to pack a task force with your own people, it doesn't leave much room for the community's residents. But then are these people even people? One of my blog visitors, "Kevin, R.P.D." didn't seem to think so. His advice in October 2005 was to have Animal Control police the Eastside. He was also the charming guy, who "prayed" for harm on me and my family. Where does he fit in a post-Miller Riverside?
But then that's an extension of an attitude that too often is expressed towards poor communities like the Eastside that are predominately populated by Black and Latino families. The Eastside originated from racist property laws that existed until nearly the end of the 1960s that restricted what land could be purchased by Black and Latino residents.
Racial segregation didn't just take place in the southern states. It took place in Riverside particularly against Latinos. One Latina told me, a woman who lawn bowls regularly at Fairmount Park and would have been perfect for the task force, that when she went to school whenever she and other students spoke Spanish, their mouths were washed out with soap. They weren't allowed to swim in White-only swimming pools or use White-only facilities.
But as soon as this Latina opened her mouth to challenge the composition of the task force at the first meeting and was quoted in the Press Enterprise, it became clear why she would have been a poor choice for the task force. The expressions on the faces of some on the task force along with Betro's were priceless.
The Eastside has been the center of a huge firestorm, including the tragic killings of two police officers in the early 1970s. An incident the department has yet to recover from 30 years later and in fact, never has in part because no one was ever convicted during three trials involving that case. What was in the book, Ambush Murders written by a former Press Enterprise reporter back in the day when they were reflective amply showed that when it came to relations between the Eastside's residents and the police department, nothing had changed up to the early morning hours on Dec. 28 when Tyisha Miller was shot and killed by four inexperienced police officers. A crisis that if it happened to today's current leadership would probably result in it spending half of its time in Governmental Affairs trying to alter the conduct policy code to keep people from complaining and the other half of the time calling for people's arrests. If they can't handle city residents criticizing them during relatively quiet times, then, then they couldn't handle back then when the most important thing a city government could do was listen.
But that era is time passed, given that one of the individuals who actually shut down a city council meeting in 1999, eight years later was one of the staunchest supporters for the latest round of speaking restrictions passed by the city council on July 12, 2005.
The Eastside never recovered from the "Ambush Murders" either, or Tyisha Miller or the massive projects forced on it to push its residents aside as the University of California, Riverside pushes its way down the conduit named after it, to the downtown. Gentrification it's called, a term which has been prettied up mostly by those not affected by it. Mostly by those who think those neighborhoods would be lovely if they were just less brown, less populated by poor people. Mostly by those who benefit from the massive displacement of Black and Latino families, many working-class and multi-generational which will take place during the next 10 years.
In 10 years, it will be another Westwood, like in Los Angeles not an Eastside, Riverside, a neighborhood with a rich history. Another adage to Riverside's belief that imitation is a form of flattery and as good as the real thing in its search for an identity that fits. Another point taken that history as it's been written is to be erased.
Here's a list of some of Riverside's chosen titles when it decides to reinvent itself.
City of Abolitionists
City of the Ku Klux Klan(scratch that)
City of the Oranges
City of the Trees
All-American City(in 1998) which became the All-American Nightmare(in 1999).
Most Livable City
And now, the City of the Arts in homage to the cities so chock filled with arts that they operate under the show rather than tell policy.
Still the Eastside holds on and hangs in there despite it all. Realtors still wait a week to get services done to remove abandoned furniture on their properties that they could get done in hours in places like Canyon Crest and Hawardan Hills.
What's been interesting is to see a president of the Riverside Police Officers' Association like Det. Ken Tutwiler make an effort to reach out to the leadership of the Eastside. Maybe it's his background as a minister of the Christian faith but people report back that they enjoy talking with the tall, somewhat burly officer. The relationship may be "tenuous" but it's a start.
What's been interesting is to see community groups continue to form and grow, sometimes within community groups, like flowers growing through cracks in the sidewalks that never seemed to get paved or repaired there as they do like in, other places.
What's been good is to see people there speaking out and not afraid to step outside the box and question City Hall, even though the only news coverage the Press Enterprise gives the Eastside is to talk about people dying rather than living there.
Downtown While Black
I met her by chance after an officer from the NAACP asked me to sit in a meeting at the CPRC office with a woman and her sons, who were filing complaints of racial profiling in the downtown area with the CPRC. She was taller than me, and angry because her two sons were both just out of high school and didn't have criminal records on file, but because they're young, Black men and especially tall Black men they had been pulled over a half-dozen times apiece in a several week long period. Each time, they were asked whether or not they were on what's called the P&P, probation or parole. They weren't and out of all those encounters with police officers, had two citations to show for it. One was for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. The other, for riding a bicycle in the middle of the street in a residential neighborhood.
Raise your hand if you ever since the time you were a kid, including on training wheels ridden your bike on the sidewalk. This is what's known as a pretext stop, meaning that it's for reasons other than the involved violation. In fact, many traffic violations which are rarely enforced are used as pretexts to stop vehicles. That's what happened to her two sons.
What is your name?
Are you on parole or probation?
Raise your hand if you're White and have ever been asked the second question. Now, if you're Black or Latino, raise it. Higher. Even if you're a judge, a prosecutor or a police officer. Even if you're making a late-run to the store to buy some milk or work the night shift since Black and Latino men and women are disproportionately represented in graveyard shift work.
The two teenagers learned that because they live within walking distance and in their cases, bicycle riding distance from the epicenter of Riverside Renaissance, that's not for them. In fact, perhaps the city's structure including its elected government is hoping that if they police these young men and others like them for long enough, they will move out of the area and play the role that's been assigned to them as part of the gentrification of downtown Riverside. Downtown's not for them. It's not for the poor. It's not for Black or Latino or even Asian-American business owners who don't fit the appropriate categories that they've been relegated to as solely owning restaurants specializing in *their* food. If you're Mexican, you can have a restaurant, but not a nail salon, a car repair lot or a market.
If you're Black, you can sell soul food but you can't have beauty shops or barber shops.
If you are the owner of an adult book store, you can stay and even get a new paint job. .
Downtown While Homeless
It reminded me of a story I heard several years ago, about a Black man on a bicycle who allegedly tried to steal hub caps from an unmarked car with two police officers who when they saw him got out of their car. One of them put him in what's called a carotid hold, the other struck him in the head with a flashlight. Several individuals at an apartment complex across the street who were watching, heard the officer yelling, "stop messing with my car".
Then five years ago, there was "Zimba", the young Black man with the accent from Jamaica who used to be seen conversing with men and women in three-piece streets in the pedestrian mall during the lunch hour, though he often walked barefoot, wearing his boots around his neck tied with a shoe string.
One night, a woman who worked on homeless outreach through a downtown church came to the office one day asking if anyone had seen him. She had heard that he had been on the railroad tracks downtown picking up soda cans for recycling and 5-6 police officers had come up to him and told him he was trespassing on private property. So he moved his bag of cans to the sidewalk. Later, he told a woman that talked to the outreach worker that the police officers had beat him up and kicked him in the ribs, lifting up his shirt to show the woman. The outreach worker told me that there was a witness to the incident.
I had seen "Zimba" sitting on park benches with police officers telling him to keep "walking until he reached Corona" and one incident, where they detained him for three hours and were in the process of searching him supervised by a plainclothed detective when I saw him.
Were the accounts of "Zimba" and the man on the bicycle true? The residents of the apartment complex said the bicycle remained on the ground where the man had left it, and he apparently never returned to claim it.
I've heard rumors that when City Hall was pushing the homeless population out of downtown that there were police officers upset with being put in the inenviable position of having to be the ones to do it but they remained silent to not endanger their jobs. If this is true, then who are their advocates? If it's true, it wouldn't surprise me. Who directs law enforcement? Is it City Hall?
But during the long, hot summer, where were they? They were at City Hall sitting and standing in the city council chambers speaking out on the breakdown and closeout of labor negotiations that impacted their two unions and three others which represent the city's work force. The city council looked shocked at the sight, but it had been a summer of rallies like this one, strike votes, law suits and other actions and words.
The city manager and city council apparently tried to pit labor unions against each other, but it didn't work.
Police Chief Russ Leach received more than a few phone calls, it's been said, from city officials complaining about his officers appearing at community meetings while offduty and asking questions on the issues. Leach didn't appear to be impressed. As he has said, he's politically astute but he backs his officers, "my police association" as he told RPOA attorney Michael Lackey during a deposition last February.
Former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer stated in his lawsuit against the city to reform the department blamed lack of appropriate staffing for many of the department's problems. Today, that still remains a serious issue that concerns many.
We need more bodies, Tutwiler and other officers have said then and now. More bodies and more equipment.
Hudson says in response, he doesn't have the money. And you have to shake your head at that answer for one of a billion dollars worth of reasons and wonder if the gamble will pay off.
Downtown While Mentally Ill
While walking on Friday, I noticed that there were two men fighting in the middle of 14th Street. One man was trying to lie flat on the ground and the other man was cursing at him while dragging the heavyset man out of the streets, while cars stopped when they saw them or drove alongside them as if they weren't there.
A man on a bicycle who found the situation funny for some reason blocked my path on the sidewalk and told me that it wasn't a good idea if I walked that way and gestured towards them.
They could have been homeless, and about one-third of that population is mentally ill but it wasn't clear. I actually thought about calling the police, but what flashed before me were two faces. That of a relative who is mentally ill and has been since he started hearing voices when he was 19. I also saw the face of Lee Deante Brown, who was shot to death in the parking lot of a motel on University Avenue on April 3, 2006.
Listening to the audiorecording that came from the device used by Officer Michael Paul Stucker, you can hear Brown's voice in the background calling for his daughter, Mariah, God and the Aztec Warriors. Mixed with his rants, you can hear Stucker's voice giving orders, first in a low, authorative tone. Soon though, his pitch is higher, his cadence faster and he sounds panicky, as if he can't understand why this man isn't even hearing him, let alone obeying him. The tone begins to change after the taser discharges in the background which was apparently Stucker's first out in the field. Brown doesn't care about Stucker's commands or getting shocked with tens of thousands of volts of electricity. He's lost in the world where his daughter is awaiting rescue from devils and gods that may be real or not.
Anyone who' s had to deal with an individual experiencing with a psychotic episode knows that the voices this person hears aren't real, they're products of a neurological imbalance of substances in the brain. But Brown thinks they are real and he acts accordingly. It's not clear if he's ever aware that the officers that showed up to help him, restrain him and then ultimately kill him were even there at all.
Stucker and Officer Terry Ellefson who fired the shots were described by Leach as "hard charging" and "high performing" officers. At the time, Leach was addressing concerned residents and members of the Group, an organization of African-American men and women, with Tutwiler and another RPOA representative watching carefully, because after all, Stucker and Ellefson are their responsibilities in ways much different than they are as Leach's.
Of course we don't know the discussions about the shooting that took place behind closed doors. Were tactics questioned? Was training found to be wanting? Would Brown happen again, and again? What of the officers involved?
What Ellefson was left with by the time Brown drew his last breath was the reality that he had shot two mentally ill men to death in five months in different circumstances. Leach said at another meeting how hard it was to have several young officers with multiple shootings. It is indeed, but it's not any easier for the families of those who have been killed by those officers either.
Brown's been described as Black, his skin so dark that it obstructs a jet-black X26 taser. He's been assigned characteristics by some members of the Community Police Review Commission that make him appear more akin to a violent animal to be dispatched than a person who's confused, sick and faced with two officers who rush into the situation towards in its inevitable conclusion.
Animal Control, wrote "Kevin, R.P.D." from the shadows.
The only thing missing from the discussion of his death was his humanity. But then when you have a commission that mirrors City Hall and not the community, what can you expect? For the most part, its members are more likely to be seen at a law enforcement appreciation dinner than at City Hall or a police station helping a family member filing a complaint or filing one themselves. An examination of the commission's outreach ventures in the past eight months will show that there's been a dearth of outreach into several city neighborhoods since Hudson forbade Payne from doing outreach or attending community meetings.
What City Hall wanted on its commission is what it got and the communities it represents had no input on the matter.
More changes are set to be made, again with no input from the community members on what they would like to see in the CPRC. Stake holders, they are not and that interest in community input to be part of the "solution" came to you courtesy of the current city government including the three candidates that are up for election.
The irony is that two of them are smart and perhaps graceful enough not to bring up the CPRC at all, while the other opportunistically uses the actions of his own government to bash his rival with by scapegoating him for the current problems of the CPRC, even though Gardner hasn't served on the commission for 18 months. He was such a bad chair that the commissioners voted to change the bylaws allowing him to remain chair for a third consecutive term.
Visit the Sixth Floor of City Hall and look at the sign that directs you to the office of the CPRC and see which word in its name is missing.
But what to do about Brown? A man whose death at the hands of a police officer nearly started an uproar at the corner of University Avenue and Ottawa after nearly a hundred people appeared and started yelling at the police. A death reduced to a finding that will never make policy. A death that may result in policy recommendations that may never be made public. So much a minefield, has been Brown, a case that some predict will settle quietly in federal court within the next year.
Before the CPRC even got the Brown case, the police department did what it felt it had to do and what the community demanded, which was to develop a crisis intervention training program to assist officers to interface with the mentally and medically ill. After all, about one out of every nine contacts a police officer had with the public involved a mentally ill person, a number sure to grow especially with changes in legislatioin that negatively impact the mentally ill along with deinstitutionalization practices began in the 1980s under former president, Ronald Reagan.
The 30 hour curriculum has been used to train officers and civilian employees and within 18 months should reach most of the department's ranks. It was definitely a step in the right direction, both for officers and the public.
Still, as more and more police officers leave those training sessions and take their education out to use in the streets, it still a decision to make with a mentally person in terms of what to do. Call the police if it's a safety issue like a man lying in the middle of a busy street and hope they don't end up like Brown? Not to mention Margaret Mitchell, the mentally ill Black woman shot to death by a police officer in Los Angeles nearly 10 years ago.
A Riverside County Sheriff Department deputy drove by and noticed what was going on. He shone his light on the two men and finally the man on the ground was pulled up on his feet without fighting by the other man and they took off, hopefully not to find another street to lie on.
The issues impacting the mentally ill and the policies impacting them are very serious, especially to those families most impacted by them. The city council initially didn't seem all that receptive to this training. Emails to them about it received no response and comments given about it during public comment at city council meetings just resulted in disinterested looks. But finally, it was set forward.
It doesn't help that people use mental illness to discredit or demean other people but it happens all the time. One example locally, is the use of the term, "SaneRiverside" in an attempt to ridicule the organization, Save-Riverside. There are plenty ways to criticize and even try to ridicule it or anyone else besides resorting to that type of prejudice against a poorly understood and often misunderstood segment of the city's population. But it's so damn easy when you're trying to score points in some internet battle.
Yet what are the individuals who use that term really saying? And it's ironic that those who use it purport to support a councilman they claim is a champion for the mentally ill. The individuals who use this term whine that their posts are being removed because they do so. It's actually a damn shame that the posts are being removed because they should remain so that those who lurk can see what that person is revealing about his or her feelings about the mentally ill.
Downtown While Dark
Date: Friday, Oct. 26, 2007
Time: 6:40 a.m.
Place: Throughout Riverside
Discussion arose again as to how the city's electricity crisis would be so bad in several years because the aging infrastructure would be unable to meet the demands of the flow of people city and civic leaders hoped to see come to Riverside to eat, work, shop and especially live.
Last year, you know the one where there wasn't a local election, the city council voted to create a multi-tier of rate increases for electric power based on usage of this resource. It was an attempt to encourage city residents to conserve power in anticipation of the rolling blackouts that the region could be facing as early as 2009.
In July which was sandwiched between the election round that was supposed to happen and the one that wasn't, city residents opened up their utility bills and complained about much, much larger electric bills. So predictably the city council went retro and rescinded, acting as shocked as the public it failed to adequately educate about the increased rates. But what they showed, is that they passed rate hikes without either reading back up material or they passed it not caring because after all, it's not an election year.
Even the Press Enterprises's Editorial Board which is quite soft on the current city leadership except those it doesn't endorse called this revote a political calculation. It may win three of the elected officials on the dais votes, but what does it do to address the problem of once again, a basic service that will likely struggle to keep pace with renaissance.
All these things, past, present and future come to mind when looking back at Election 2007 which hopefully will be operating under full electric power, including many issues and things that haven't been addressed by those who support either candidate in ways that are different than how they view these issues themselve. Not in the campaigns. Not in the forums. Not in the televised appearances. Not at events. Not even on the soap opera playing out at Inland Empire's Craiglist.
If not today, when? As soon as the tit for tat from different on Craigslist gets old and boring, even as the venom increases? Elections aren't won or lost on the internet, they are won and lost at the polls. And this means that the candidates and those who support them need to get out in the communities and the neighborhoods including those in Ward One which apparently don't exist, because they aren't considered a "jewel" like Downtown or "special" like the Wood Streets or even a product of gentrification like portions of the University Neighborhood. But most people don't want to bother.
Surveys on the internet discovered that only about 5% read commentary on Web sites because they don't like negative infighting or what's called "flaming". What they want to read is information that helps them learn more about the world around them or to make informed choices. Craigslist is much better served as a venue for doing that than as the personal litter box of different individuals without names who seem to be the only ones who know who each other is.
More on the death of United States marathoner Ryan Shay here. His father said that Shay had been diagnosed with a larger than normal heart but was cleared for running last spring. He had been told he might need a pacemaker later in life.
For years, it was believed that Shay's expanding heart size was due to his athletic training which can cause the heart to become larger due to increased fitness. Unfortunately, so can diseases affecting the heart and it's likely that the latter at least was partly responsible in his case.
And here's Danny!! He hasn't found Bigfoot yet but you go, Danny. He's a very cool guy if you ever run into him.
In other news, the battle for the mantle of who will be at the top of the heap of initialed monikers continues unabated, while people involved in campaigns involving eight candidates continue canvassing households and calling phone banks to poll those who were planning to vote in these elections. If you want to follow the ongoing storyline including what they think about me and this blog, feel free to visit the battleground of the initialized saber rattlers. I guess I'm supposed to be embarrassed but if I should be, then I'm certainly not the only one.
I've been through worse on my own site, because individuals hated the fact that this blog existed and probably myself as well. They still hate it and that's something I came to terms with a long time ago. The best thing to do when dealing with cowards who hide behind initials is to just keep blogging. If people like that have nothing better to do on a beautiful Saturday with still air and the mountains in view, then I must be doing something right.
People who hide behind initials and fake monikers though extremely unpleasant and sometimes frightening to deal with aren't worth much except to serve as useful barometers to how effective this blog is with at least giving its readers something to think about. Obviously, there are those who believe that's dangerous for people to do so they are acting accordingly. It's just proof that what these folks are trying to push on the residents of this city isn't what it's cracked up to be because otherwise they would be flooding Craigslist with posts about how great everything is rather than singling out individuals once at a time on each side for harassment. Something is making them insecure or unhappy and they need someone to blame. So it's my turn.
The good news, is that since they started doing this, traffic to this site has been increasing in terms of visitors from Craigslist. It's only natural that people want to see what the fuss is about or how bad I am. I'm worse than has been said because I'm blogging.
All of this childish and ridiculous behavior over the Ward One election that either way it goes, will still leave much of that ward unrepresented. Mike Gardner is much nicer than Councilman Dom Betro whose arrogance is diplomatically referred to by some in his own camp as meaning he's not "personable", but is he really all that much different? Is he that much better?
Betro's a proven commodity and that's either good or bad depending on what kind of job you believe he's done. Gardner's not a proven commodity which is either good or bad depending on what you think of the performance of the city council.
There's this huge assumption that if you oppose Betro, then you support Mike Gardner, but there's a gorge between the two the size of a canyon which includes many people who don't really benefit or identify with a political race where two candidates fight over what will benefit a sizable number of those who live in the ward but will leave many people out including many who don't have access and alas, have to sit out the sand box antics at Craigslist.
Who's being represented and are the candidates representing? Now that's a question.
Let's look at the task forces that this city puts together. Most notably the most recent two involving the city's parks in Ward One.
After all, how many Latinos has Councilman Dom Betro placed on task forces for both Tequesquite Park and Fairmount Park? How many Black people?
How about none?
I attended several of those meetings and found the comments provided by those who attended interesting. It will be interesting to see how many of these recommendations survive the process, which still has several more stages to complete before the final product is approved by the city council after the election cycle of course. However, then I went outside and spoke with different people who were at the park, sitting in groups with their children or fishing in Lake Evans. Most of them weren't White at all. Most were Black and especially Latino. Many of them liked the open spaces, because in many neighborhoods that's nothing that can be taken for granted. Some of them wanted the merry-go-round back. They love the fishing. For many of them, it's about community with family, not about fancy tennis courts, shops and restaurants or how many holes the golf course has.
But none of these individuals were included in the selection process.
So, if you look at the task force for Fairmount Park, do you see people on it who are using it now or later?
Later.
Task forces are good mechanisms, but task forces which are tailored to only represent some segments of the city while omitting others aren't nearly as good. But this city's history of inclusion for people of color and people in lower income brackets has received mixed reviews at best.
Forget that Fairmount Park in particular was a haven for Black and Latino families. The Black families whose roots lie the deepest in this city regularly held reunion picnics, a practice that continues to this day.
Of course, three Riverside Police Department officers in 1997 marred that feeling that Fairmount Park is a place for families when they assaulted Jose Martinez, a laborer who helped build Zacatecas restaurant, and tossed him into Lake Evans not knowing or caring if he even knew how to swim. Martinez lie battered in the tall grass, waiting for his assailants to get back into their black-and-white vehicles and leave the scene before he stumbled home. The department investigated, he filed a law suit and the straw that broke the camel's back was only 18 months away.
So both very good and also very bad, there's ties between Black and Latino families and Fairmount Park but you'd never know this looking at the task force deliberating the future use of portions of this park. You'd think the park was for White people to decide its use and that Ward One only included White people in its population. Maybe in the campaign of Betro, it does.
Gardner was at least astute enough to notice the lack of ethnic and racial diversity on the two park task forces.
But would his task force be different?
That's part of the unknown commodity. We know that Betro's not big on the ethnic and racial diversity with these task forces(nor with the CPRC appointments for that matter) but Gardner's a complete unknown because he's not had the same opportunities to show that he's any different.
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
---Lewis Carroll
Downtown While Working
"Do you want to hear an African-American joke?"
---Male individual to two other individuals at a Starbucks
"If you don't do what they want, they will take a lie about you and make it true."
---Female city employee, 2007Part of erasing the "old" Riverside, means erasing its history and the fact that it was founded by abolitionists (which is included in the official biography) but had an active Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1920s(which is not usually included). It was the first public school district to voluntarily desegregate(which is often included in its official history) but the response was that several schools were burnt down, by who is not known.
Vincent Moses, the former director of the city's museums wrote a brief history of Riverside to circulate in the midst of the firestorm that was Tyisha Miller, to promote the idea of Riverside as a racially inclusive city, which wasn't what reality showed. It's not clear whether it was the city's idea or that provided by its public relations firm at the time, Sitrich, Inc who is currently representing the images of the hospitals in Los Angeles County who have been dumping indigent patients on Skid Row. But it wasn't a success.
Moses if you recall didn't last long during the present administration at City Hall. He was pushed into retirement by the city manager's office and replaced with a new director with scant experience in the area of museums. This was one of several departments that would witness this behavior from the city manager's office. This experience was also shared by the city's libraries.
The police department would have its own experience when the city manager's office tried to influence the promotional process some say down to the captain's level. Of course, that discussion never took place nor was action attempted to try to convert an assistant chief position and two deputy chief positions to being "at will". Oh no, that was a figment of overactive imaginations and impassioned bosoms! Of course by this time, the city had actually composed a tentative city council agenda including this item that was submitted by administrative analyst Jeremy Hammond who is said to be Hudson's point person in the Human Resources Department. So the "at will" positions were set to be created, even though City Attorney Gregory Priamos later said that couldn't be done to positions in the fire and police departments.
Still, the city manager's office claimed that most, no wait practically all of the management employees offered "at will" positions fully embraced them. Is that the truth?
As for being "at will" to whom are you beholden? That was what brought hundreds of police officers representing two labor unions down to City Hall demanding answers. Who was in charge of promotions in the upper levels of management, the police chief or the city manager? Where these managers independent of City Hall or were they its "yes men"?
Hundreds of men and women wanted to know.
Of course, those positions weren't considered for conversion to "at will" until three male Latinos had advanced through the ranks to be placed in those positions. Three very different men, bringing different perspectives to their jobs. Community members asked, if they were White, they get protected job status but if they're Latino, they don't. And there was reason to be concerned after a series of demotions, terminations and "resignations" at City Hall, all of them since City Manager Brad Hudson was hired by the current city council. After the list of high-level management employees of color had nearly been finished, the city council including those up for reelection in three wards this year voted Hudson a huge pay raise.
That list included the following and only those who have left the city are included. All were predicted to be gone, by the end of 2006. Fortunately that didn't come to pass.
Art Alcaraz, Human Resources Director, Latino, resigned
Jim Smith, Interim Asst. City Manager and city's budget director, Black, demoted and resigned
Tranda Drumwright, Director of Housing, Black, terminated not long after her boss told her she didn't see her as "management" material despite her stellar qualifications and years of experience.
Pedro Payne, Executive Director, Community Police Review Commission, Black, "resigned"
Who spoke for them? Who walked for them? Who mourned them when one by one they were pushed out by a City Hall which didn't want them?
Smith particularly faced undignified and many say racist behavior when a city council member pulled him out of the audience to put him on display as *proof* that the city wasn't racist. Of course, his treatment as a token to avoid addressing the issues of the departures of men and women of color from management positions at City Hall didn't prevent his demotion from his lofty interim position(which they only gave to him because they intended to give the permanent position to a White man). Smith watched as a man he trained, Paul Sundeen, was promoted into a permanent position as assistant city manager and Hudson brought in another White man, Tom DeSantis, who only possessed a Bachelors Degree to become the city manager who oversees and some say, runs several city departments. His foray into labor contract negotiations didn't win him many fans.
One of those three high-ranking police management employees, Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez, apparently had no desire to become "at will", concerned individuals said. If he had become "at will", the department would have soon most likely lost one of its most talented management officers with the closest ties to the community in a manner of months. Whether that's the case, that didn't happen and the city's better for it. But that's why it's important for officers like Dominguez to work with the communities, because the community will back up the officers who work the hardest to work with them and remain committed to partnership, not occupation.
The rank and file officers who worked under Dominguez including the leadership of the Riverside Police Officers' Association thought highly enough of him to support him at a community meeting after Dominguez had resolved a situation started by several council members who threatened to arrest four individuals including an 89-year-old woman by not arresting anyone.
We ask our city's police officers to opt for different resolutions than arrest but when one did, what happened? What can be said about city officials who treat police officers not as responsible for their safety and of those who attend meetings but as their personal bouncers to arrest or eject people they don't like or in the case of one elderly woman in 2006, because she exceeded the three-minute speaking rule. This woman didn't do it out of malice. She lived outside the city limits but the pipe that ruptured and flooded her property was inside city limits and was owned and operated by the city.
Our city council members, seven in all, could have referred her to the appropriate staff members to assist her with her situation. Instead, they had a very embarrassed police officer remove her and he did, very, very gently. She would only be the first elderly woman threatened with arrest, but not the last. Was this some sort of grey menace, or did the city council members just don't like uppity elderly women?
"You'll have to carry me out," Marjorie Von Pohle, 89, said to two officers when it was her turn.
This action not to arrest even as city officials were allegedly calling all over town including at the Riverside County District Attorney's office for assistance wasn't long before the "at will" situation arose. Funny, that. No one jumped, and the group was not arrested. Not one city official spoke out in the defense of the elderly women. But then why would they? They wouldn't be such good "team players" but they might be independent thinkers like they were elected to be by the majority of the voters in their wards. When none of these elected officials stepped forward for these women, the police officers essentially did.
It's funny too how some people say one thing in one venue and then say something else in another. The same people who say they take pride in Riverside's heritage and history are also the first who want to erase it and replace it with someone else's present reality. This includes the erasure of the contributions and presence of communities of color particularly poor ones. The many ways that this has been done and is being done will be explored in future posts after the election. After all, Chinatown, which was one ethnic community, is just a memory as much so as the old market that used to stand amidst the Wood Streets. The one whose owners were threatened with Eminent Domain outside of a redevelopment zone.
But then you have individuals who think that eminent domain is the answer to all that ails Riverside, but of course if it were their business that were at risk, they'd be down at City Hall making their feelings known and despite their disdain towards the businesses who have faced which they showed by confusing land negotiations between two parties on equal footing with "hostage taking", they would find these people in their corners.
At any rate, the Guans' market, a mainstay under different owners going back to World War II is no more, with not even a piece of rubble or other remnant to mark that it ever existed there. Like many other remnants of Riverside past, it's been erased from history. Somehow, this action has been rewritten to the extent, that it's been called an act of political courage to remove a long-standing market owned by an Asian-American family to stop the flow of Black and Latino residents, who someone at Craigslist referred to as "trash", from coming down Bandini Street to access the closest thing that they had for a market given that even considering Riverside Renaissance, no markets are planned for that area to serve residents of several apartment complexes and houses.
Downtown While Dreaming
Much like what happened with the downtown Fox Theater.
As you remember, that act of "political courage" involved seizing the theater and crushing the dream of a family through the only action (rather than threats) of eminent domain taken in the downtown area. A dream died, the children cried and the deal was closed when one councilman said, "we're done talking. Let's do it."
And so they did.
The more courageous action would have been to partner with the property owners, work together and with widespread community input have been to work to help that dream which many people do share to be realized. But instead, the family was branded the villains who were trying to crush the city's dream of progress downtown that had yet to be unveiled to much fanfare as the Riverside Renaissance in a rather stunning reversal. And a very risky project became the cornerstone project to catalyze the expression of Riverside Renaissance downtown. After witnessing the failure of the theater in Palm Springs in part due to an unrealized potential of mixed usage possibilities, it's hard to not see past become prologue once again.
But then the whole Riverside Renaissance is a gamble, with the futures of our children and grandchildren in the ante pot. But if you borrow, borrow and borrow from bonds, during times of plenty, will you be ready when the bill collectors come calling(with interest) during times of famine which will include a housing market that has collapsed much more so than Betro's rewriting of downtown's history to equate it with Pompeii's last days until he arrived on the dais, as described in a column by Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise. Not to mention, the recession that many fear is already here or at least close at hand.
Still, since it's our children, and grandchildren whose access to city services that we're gambling with, it's practically a sin to be concerned about that and also makes you a party pooper. Maybe American Indians look seven generations into the future when making decisions, but the leaders in Riverside could care less. Attempts at immediate gratification at high risk rather than careful, thoughtful, responsible planning are par for the course.
I find myself asking, okay, we know how incumbent Betro would view this. What would Gardner think? What would he do? And how would he respond if the current city council viewed his actions as him not being a "team player". By endorsing candidates before they even file to run, the current city council has made it clear it's not a governmental body as much as a country club with admission subject to its muster as much as any voter. One person's team work is another person's cronyism. Does that mean if none of the "team players" that are being groomed as replacements make it in, that the current city council will pack up its toys and go home?
Also in the Wood Streets is the All Saints Episcopal Church which lies across from Riverside Community College. That church temporarily housed the day facility utilized by homeless people in this city after it was forced to vacate its home at Kansas and Spruce after its rent was quadrupled when its lease expired. It soon found a home in the church, and several churches, including the First Congregational Church downtown have been havens for the homeless and have advocated for their existence let alone their well being against the city government.
The Wood Street residents objected to the homeless in their midst. Then Ward One city councilman Chuck Beaty, calling this neighborhood a "special" one objected for them. The shelter had to go. When the city tried to even consider putting a residential shelter for homeless people within a mile of the "special neighborhood", it balked and the prospective sites were narrowed down to several in a neighborhood less "special".
Eventually, the city found a site for the day shelter and built it, not downtown but in closer proximity to the Eastside which has been the haven for homeless shelters whether it's liked it or not. Whether the Eastside has asked for it or not.
It's not like the Eastsiders were ever included in the process or on any homeless shelter task force set up by the city. But then if you have to pack a task force with your own people, it doesn't leave much room for the community's residents. But then are these people even people? One of my blog visitors, "Kevin, R.P.D." didn't seem to think so. His advice in October 2005 was to have Animal Control police the Eastside. He was also the charming guy, who "prayed" for harm on me and my family. Where does he fit in a post-Miller Riverside?
But then that's an extension of an attitude that too often is expressed towards poor communities like the Eastside that are predominately populated by Black and Latino families. The Eastside originated from racist property laws that existed until nearly the end of the 1960s that restricted what land could be purchased by Black and Latino residents.
Racial segregation didn't just take place in the southern states. It took place in Riverside particularly against Latinos. One Latina told me, a woman who lawn bowls regularly at Fairmount Park and would have been perfect for the task force, that when she went to school whenever she and other students spoke Spanish, their mouths were washed out with soap. They weren't allowed to swim in White-only swimming pools or use White-only facilities.
But as soon as this Latina opened her mouth to challenge the composition of the task force at the first meeting and was quoted in the Press Enterprise, it became clear why she would have been a poor choice for the task force. The expressions on the faces of some on the task force along with Betro's were priceless.
The Eastside has been the center of a huge firestorm, including the tragic killings of two police officers in the early 1970s. An incident the department has yet to recover from 30 years later and in fact, never has in part because no one was ever convicted during three trials involving that case. What was in the book, Ambush Murders written by a former Press Enterprise reporter back in the day when they were reflective amply showed that when it came to relations between the Eastside's residents and the police department, nothing had changed up to the early morning hours on Dec. 28 when Tyisha Miller was shot and killed by four inexperienced police officers. A crisis that if it happened to today's current leadership would probably result in it spending half of its time in Governmental Affairs trying to alter the conduct policy code to keep people from complaining and the other half of the time calling for people's arrests. If they can't handle city residents criticizing them during relatively quiet times, then, then they couldn't handle back then when the most important thing a city government could do was listen.
But that era is time passed, given that one of the individuals who actually shut down a city council meeting in 1999, eight years later was one of the staunchest supporters for the latest round of speaking restrictions passed by the city council on July 12, 2005.
The Eastside never recovered from the "Ambush Murders" either, or Tyisha Miller or the massive projects forced on it to push its residents aside as the University of California, Riverside pushes its way down the conduit named after it, to the downtown. Gentrification it's called, a term which has been prettied up mostly by those not affected by it. Mostly by those who think those neighborhoods would be lovely if they were just less brown, less populated by poor people. Mostly by those who benefit from the massive displacement of Black and Latino families, many working-class and multi-generational which will take place during the next 10 years.
In 10 years, it will be another Westwood, like in Los Angeles not an Eastside, Riverside, a neighborhood with a rich history. Another adage to Riverside's belief that imitation is a form of flattery and as good as the real thing in its search for an identity that fits. Another point taken that history as it's been written is to be erased.
Here's a list of some of Riverside's chosen titles when it decides to reinvent itself.
City of Abolitionists
City of the Ku Klux Klan(scratch that)
City of the Oranges
City of the Trees
All-American City(in 1998) which became the All-American Nightmare(in 1999).
Most Livable City
And now, the City of the Arts in homage to the cities so chock filled with arts that they operate under the show rather than tell policy.
Still the Eastside holds on and hangs in there despite it all. Realtors still wait a week to get services done to remove abandoned furniture on their properties that they could get done in hours in places like Canyon Crest and Hawardan Hills.
What's been interesting is to see a president of the Riverside Police Officers' Association like Det. Ken Tutwiler make an effort to reach out to the leadership of the Eastside. Maybe it's his background as a minister of the Christian faith but people report back that they enjoy talking with the tall, somewhat burly officer. The relationship may be "tenuous" but it's a start.
What's been interesting is to see community groups continue to form and grow, sometimes within community groups, like flowers growing through cracks in the sidewalks that never seemed to get paved or repaired there as they do like in, other places.
What's been good is to see people there speaking out and not afraid to step outside the box and question City Hall, even though the only news coverage the Press Enterprise gives the Eastside is to talk about people dying rather than living there.
Downtown While Black
I met her by chance after an officer from the NAACP asked me to sit in a meeting at the CPRC office with a woman and her sons, who were filing complaints of racial profiling in the downtown area with the CPRC. She was taller than me, and angry because her two sons were both just out of high school and didn't have criminal records on file, but because they're young, Black men and especially tall Black men they had been pulled over a half-dozen times apiece in a several week long period. Each time, they were asked whether or not they were on what's called the P&P, probation or parole. They weren't and out of all those encounters with police officers, had two citations to show for it. One was for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. The other, for riding a bicycle in the middle of the street in a residential neighborhood.
Raise your hand if you ever since the time you were a kid, including on training wheels ridden your bike on the sidewalk. This is what's known as a pretext stop, meaning that it's for reasons other than the involved violation. In fact, many traffic violations which are rarely enforced are used as pretexts to stop vehicles. That's what happened to her two sons.
What is your name?
Are you on parole or probation?
Raise your hand if you're White and have ever been asked the second question. Now, if you're Black or Latino, raise it. Higher. Even if you're a judge, a prosecutor or a police officer. Even if you're making a late-run to the store to buy some milk or work the night shift since Black and Latino men and women are disproportionately represented in graveyard shift work.
The two teenagers learned that because they live within walking distance and in their cases, bicycle riding distance from the epicenter of Riverside Renaissance, that's not for them. In fact, perhaps the city's structure including its elected government is hoping that if they police these young men and others like them for long enough, they will move out of the area and play the role that's been assigned to them as part of the gentrification of downtown Riverside. Downtown's not for them. It's not for the poor. It's not for Black or Latino or even Asian-American business owners who don't fit the appropriate categories that they've been relegated to as solely owning restaurants specializing in *their* food. If you're Mexican, you can have a restaurant, but not a nail salon, a car repair lot or a market.
If you're Black, you can sell soul food but you can't have beauty shops or barber shops.
If you are the owner of an adult book store, you can stay and even get a new paint job. .
Downtown While Homeless
It reminded me of a story I heard several years ago, about a Black man on a bicycle who allegedly tried to steal hub caps from an unmarked car with two police officers who when they saw him got out of their car. One of them put him in what's called a carotid hold, the other struck him in the head with a flashlight. Several individuals at an apartment complex across the street who were watching, heard the officer yelling, "stop messing with my car".
Then five years ago, there was "Zimba", the young Black man with the accent from Jamaica who used to be seen conversing with men and women in three-piece streets in the pedestrian mall during the lunch hour, though he often walked barefoot, wearing his boots around his neck tied with a shoe string.
One night, a woman who worked on homeless outreach through a downtown church came to the office one day asking if anyone had seen him. She had heard that he had been on the railroad tracks downtown picking up soda cans for recycling and 5-6 police officers had come up to him and told him he was trespassing on private property. So he moved his bag of cans to the sidewalk. Later, he told a woman that talked to the outreach worker that the police officers had beat him up and kicked him in the ribs, lifting up his shirt to show the woman. The outreach worker told me that there was a witness to the incident.
I had seen "Zimba" sitting on park benches with police officers telling him to keep "walking until he reached Corona" and one incident, where they detained him for three hours and were in the process of searching him supervised by a plainclothed detective when I saw him.
Were the accounts of "Zimba" and the man on the bicycle true? The residents of the apartment complex said the bicycle remained on the ground where the man had left it, and he apparently never returned to claim it.
I've heard rumors that when City Hall was pushing the homeless population out of downtown that there were police officers upset with being put in the inenviable position of having to be the ones to do it but they remained silent to not endanger their jobs. If this is true, then who are their advocates? If it's true, it wouldn't surprise me. Who directs law enforcement? Is it City Hall?
But during the long, hot summer, where were they? They were at City Hall sitting and standing in the city council chambers speaking out on the breakdown and closeout of labor negotiations that impacted their two unions and three others which represent the city's work force. The city council looked shocked at the sight, but it had been a summer of rallies like this one, strike votes, law suits and other actions and words.
The city manager and city council apparently tried to pit labor unions against each other, but it didn't work.
Police Chief Russ Leach received more than a few phone calls, it's been said, from city officials complaining about his officers appearing at community meetings while offduty and asking questions on the issues. Leach didn't appear to be impressed. As he has said, he's politically astute but he backs his officers, "my police association" as he told RPOA attorney Michael Lackey during a deposition last February.
Former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer stated in his lawsuit against the city to reform the department blamed lack of appropriate staffing for many of the department's problems. Today, that still remains a serious issue that concerns many.
We need more bodies, Tutwiler and other officers have said then and now. More bodies and more equipment.
Hudson says in response, he doesn't have the money. And you have to shake your head at that answer for one of a billion dollars worth of reasons and wonder if the gamble will pay off.
Downtown While Mentally Ill
While walking on Friday, I noticed that there were two men fighting in the middle of 14th Street. One man was trying to lie flat on the ground and the other man was cursing at him while dragging the heavyset man out of the streets, while cars stopped when they saw them or drove alongside them as if they weren't there.
A man on a bicycle who found the situation funny for some reason blocked my path on the sidewalk and told me that it wasn't a good idea if I walked that way and gestured towards them.
They could have been homeless, and about one-third of that population is mentally ill but it wasn't clear. I actually thought about calling the police, but what flashed before me were two faces. That of a relative who is mentally ill and has been since he started hearing voices when he was 19. I also saw the face of Lee Deante Brown, who was shot to death in the parking lot of a motel on University Avenue on April 3, 2006.
Listening to the audiorecording that came from the device used by Officer Michael Paul Stucker, you can hear Brown's voice in the background calling for his daughter, Mariah, God and the Aztec Warriors. Mixed with his rants, you can hear Stucker's voice giving orders, first in a low, authorative tone. Soon though, his pitch is higher, his cadence faster and he sounds panicky, as if he can't understand why this man isn't even hearing him, let alone obeying him. The tone begins to change after the taser discharges in the background which was apparently Stucker's first out in the field. Brown doesn't care about Stucker's commands or getting shocked with tens of thousands of volts of electricity. He's lost in the world where his daughter is awaiting rescue from devils and gods that may be real or not.
Anyone who' s had to deal with an individual experiencing with a psychotic episode knows that the voices this person hears aren't real, they're products of a neurological imbalance of substances in the brain. But Brown thinks they are real and he acts accordingly. It's not clear if he's ever aware that the officers that showed up to help him, restrain him and then ultimately kill him were even there at all.
Stucker and Officer Terry Ellefson who fired the shots were described by Leach as "hard charging" and "high performing" officers. At the time, Leach was addressing concerned residents and members of the Group, an organization of African-American men and women, with Tutwiler and another RPOA representative watching carefully, because after all, Stucker and Ellefson are their responsibilities in ways much different than they are as Leach's.
Of course we don't know the discussions about the shooting that took place behind closed doors. Were tactics questioned? Was training found to be wanting? Would Brown happen again, and again? What of the officers involved?
What Ellefson was left with by the time Brown drew his last breath was the reality that he had shot two mentally ill men to death in five months in different circumstances. Leach said at another meeting how hard it was to have several young officers with multiple shootings. It is indeed, but it's not any easier for the families of those who have been killed by those officers either.
Brown's been described as Black, his skin so dark that it obstructs a jet-black X26 taser. He's been assigned characteristics by some members of the Community Police Review Commission that make him appear more akin to a violent animal to be dispatched than a person who's confused, sick and faced with two officers who rush into the situation towards in its inevitable conclusion.
Animal Control, wrote "Kevin, R.P.D." from the shadows.
The only thing missing from the discussion of his death was his humanity. But then when you have a commission that mirrors City Hall and not the community, what can you expect? For the most part, its members are more likely to be seen at a law enforcement appreciation dinner than at City Hall or a police station helping a family member filing a complaint or filing one themselves. An examination of the commission's outreach ventures in the past eight months will show that there's been a dearth of outreach into several city neighborhoods since Hudson forbade Payne from doing outreach or attending community meetings.
What City Hall wanted on its commission is what it got and the communities it represents had no input on the matter.
More changes are set to be made, again with no input from the community members on what they would like to see in the CPRC. Stake holders, they are not and that interest in community input to be part of the "solution" came to you courtesy of the current city government including the three candidates that are up for election.
The irony is that two of them are smart and perhaps graceful enough not to bring up the CPRC at all, while the other opportunistically uses the actions of his own government to bash his rival with by scapegoating him for the current problems of the CPRC, even though Gardner hasn't served on the commission for 18 months. He was such a bad chair that the commissioners voted to change the bylaws allowing him to remain chair for a third consecutive term.
Visit the Sixth Floor of City Hall and look at the sign that directs you to the office of the CPRC and see which word in its name is missing.
But what to do about Brown? A man whose death at the hands of a police officer nearly started an uproar at the corner of University Avenue and Ottawa after nearly a hundred people appeared and started yelling at the police. A death reduced to a finding that will never make policy. A death that may result in policy recommendations that may never be made public. So much a minefield, has been Brown, a case that some predict will settle quietly in federal court within the next year.
Before the CPRC even got the Brown case, the police department did what it felt it had to do and what the community demanded, which was to develop a crisis intervention training program to assist officers to interface with the mentally and medically ill. After all, about one out of every nine contacts a police officer had with the public involved a mentally ill person, a number sure to grow especially with changes in legislatioin that negatively impact the mentally ill along with deinstitutionalization practices began in the 1980s under former president, Ronald Reagan.
The 30 hour curriculum has been used to train officers and civilian employees and within 18 months should reach most of the department's ranks. It was definitely a step in the right direction, both for officers and the public.
Still, as more and more police officers leave those training sessions and take their education out to use in the streets, it still a decision to make with a mentally person in terms of what to do. Call the police if it's a safety issue like a man lying in the middle of a busy street and hope they don't end up like Brown? Not to mention Margaret Mitchell, the mentally ill Black woman shot to death by a police officer in Los Angeles nearly 10 years ago.
A Riverside County Sheriff Department deputy drove by and noticed what was going on. He shone his light on the two men and finally the man on the ground was pulled up on his feet without fighting by the other man and they took off, hopefully not to find another street to lie on.
The issues impacting the mentally ill and the policies impacting them are very serious, especially to those families most impacted by them. The city council initially didn't seem all that receptive to this training. Emails to them about it received no response and comments given about it during public comment at city council meetings just resulted in disinterested looks. But finally, it was set forward.
It doesn't help that people use mental illness to discredit or demean other people but it happens all the time. One example locally, is the use of the term, "SaneRiverside" in an attempt to ridicule the organization, Save-Riverside. There are plenty ways to criticize and even try to ridicule it or anyone else besides resorting to that type of prejudice against a poorly understood and often misunderstood segment of the city's population. But it's so damn easy when you're trying to score points in some internet battle.
Yet what are the individuals who use that term really saying? And it's ironic that those who use it purport to support a councilman they claim is a champion for the mentally ill. The individuals who use this term whine that their posts are being removed because they do so. It's actually a damn shame that the posts are being removed because they should remain so that those who lurk can see what that person is revealing about his or her feelings about the mentally ill.
Downtown While Dark
Date: Friday, Oct. 26, 2007
Time: 6:40 a.m.
Place: Throughout Riverside
Discussion arose again as to how the city's electricity crisis would be so bad in several years because the aging infrastructure would be unable to meet the demands of the flow of people city and civic leaders hoped to see come to Riverside to eat, work, shop and especially live.
Last year, you know the one where there wasn't a local election, the city council voted to create a multi-tier of rate increases for electric power based on usage of this resource. It was an attempt to encourage city residents to conserve power in anticipation of the rolling blackouts that the region could be facing as early as 2009.
In July which was sandwiched between the election round that was supposed to happen and the one that wasn't, city residents opened up their utility bills and complained about much, much larger electric bills. So predictably the city council went retro and rescinded, acting as shocked as the public it failed to adequately educate about the increased rates. But what they showed, is that they passed rate hikes without either reading back up material or they passed it not caring because after all, it's not an election year.
Even the Press Enterprises's Editorial Board which is quite soft on the current city leadership except those it doesn't endorse called this revote a political calculation. It may win three of the elected officials on the dais votes, but what does it do to address the problem of once again, a basic service that will likely struggle to keep pace with renaissance.
All these things, past, present and future come to mind when looking back at Election 2007 which hopefully will be operating under full electric power, including many issues and things that haven't been addressed by those who support either candidate in ways that are different than how they view these issues themselve. Not in the campaigns. Not in the forums. Not in the televised appearances. Not at events. Not even on the soap opera playing out at Inland Empire's Craiglist.
If not today, when? As soon as the tit for tat from different on Craigslist gets old and boring, even as the venom increases? Elections aren't won or lost on the internet, they are won and lost at the polls. And this means that the candidates and those who support them need to get out in the communities and the neighborhoods including those in Ward One which apparently don't exist, because they aren't considered a "jewel" like Downtown or "special" like the Wood Streets or even a product of gentrification like portions of the University Neighborhood. But most people don't want to bother.
Surveys on the internet discovered that only about 5% read commentary on Web sites because they don't like negative infighting or what's called "flaming". What they want to read is information that helps them learn more about the world around them or to make informed choices. Craigslist is much better served as a venue for doing that than as the personal litter box of different individuals without names who seem to be the only ones who know who each other is.
More on the death of United States marathoner Ryan Shay here. His father said that Shay had been diagnosed with a larger than normal heart but was cleared for running last spring. He had been told he might need a pacemaker later in life.
For years, it was believed that Shay's expanding heart size was due to his athletic training which can cause the heart to become larger due to increased fitness. Unfortunately, so can diseases affecting the heart and it's likely that the latter at least was partly responsible in his case.
And here's Danny!! He hasn't found Bigfoot yet but you go, Danny. He's a very cool guy if you ever run into him.
Labels: Black city employee watch, City elections, Latino city employee watch, officer-involved shootings, public forums in all places
posted by Five Before Midnight | 5:54 PM
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