Will he or won't he, and other questions

Is Mayor Ron Loveridge going to seek out a fifth term of office? One clue to answer that question is found here. Apparently, the League of California Cities has elected him second vice-president which means that he's up for the president's seat in 2010.

Only he'd have to be serving as mayor to be elected. His current term is up in 2009. You do the math.




If he decides to do this, how will the race shape given that Inland Empire Magazine's two picks for the job have both lost their reelection bids for the city council? They both do have several years to regroup and go for this brass ring, though from a different angle.

Some people say that because in this city, the mayor can't do much but veto, and Loveridge only threatened to use his veto to preserve the budget of the CPRC. However, the mayor often is the stage manager on the dais and it's been interesting to watch him work everybody, as only a master of political science could do. Plus the position pays fairly well, so there are always folks lined up to try and win this seat. Anticipation is already building on the next mayoral election even though they've not even closed the door yet on Election 2007.


The Press Enterprise is apparently asking the same question about Loveridge's future plans but he's declined to comment.


At the mayor's office yesterday, was Community Police Review Commission Executive Manager Kevin Rogan who has told people in the community that he turned down a job with a major police labor law firm in Upland to take this position, which is very interesting and I guess a compliment to the CPRC. If he had taken that position, his relationship with the CPRC could have been very different. It adds an interesting dimension to the dynamics of the CPRC and the city, the direction of which they will go remains to be seen.

The commission will be discussing policy recommendations involving the fatal shooting of Lee Deante Brown in upcoming meetings. In upcoming months with all the political shakedowns of elected bodies and unions in this city, it will be interesting to see the impact in the CPRC. It could be both the best or worst thing that ever happened to it, depending on whether you see the glass as being half-filled or half-empty. If history is any indication, it should ultimately be good for the CPRC. And why if you've been following this blog for the past several years, none of what's unfolded should be surprising.

At any rate, it will be interesting to witness and even more so to blog about here. There will be a special set of postings labeled "CPRC 2008" as part of the ongoing "Canary in the Mine" series which has discussed what's been happening to the CPRC as a reflection of what's been going on inside the police department. As to why 2008 will be a critical year for the CPRC will be clear as well, beginning when the cast of characters who will be interacting with the body during that time period are introduced.


Who loves it? Who hates it? Who waves in support, embraces it or wails and gnashes their teeth every time it's mentioned? Where's the money gone and how does that shape the situation? And how will the leadership changes on the dais and inside the police labor union shape its future? And what will the response to that shaping be? What lies ahead for the seven-year-old panel?

And that age important question in popular culture, who's "hot" and who's not? As someone once wrote in the midst of euphoria, you gotta love it.


The CPRC is a popular topic among readers and there have been discussions in many places about the politicization of this body. It is anticipated that within the next year, it will be more so. Not to mention that it's a canary in the mine, a prism both in terms of providing insight into the police department, the city and the politics which impact both of them. While some anonymous folks might believe that the city residents are clueless about both, in reality the histrionics exhibited in the past several years are hard to miss. As will be those to come.

On both notes, a new series of postings will be launched.




Two homegrown individuals are now working for the CHP in Riverside. Is that rare for the CHP? Chief Russ Leach of the Riverside Police Department always tells the city council that 80% of the officers in his department live in Riverside, albeit about 90% of those live in one corner of it, almost as if it's a joke. It is good to see law enforcement officers work where they live and hold civic pride.


Unfortunately while hate crimes were going down nationwide, Riverside has the highest rate of hate crimes and incidents in the Inland Department followed by Palm Springs and Hemet, according to the Press Enterprise.



(excerpt)



"We take these types of crimes very seriously," said Steven Frasher, spokesman for the Riverside Police Department. "I cannot speak for any other agency."

The national hate-crime figures show Riverside had 26 hate-related crimes in 2006, while the unincorporated areas of Riverside County had 18. Hemet and Palm Springs each had 12 such episodes. Chino had eight, and Corona had seven.

Conversely, San Bernardino reported two hate-related crimes, the same number Rialto and Ontario did. Upland, Fontana, Yucaipa, Big Bear Lake, Colton and Chino Hills each reported a single such incident.

Other Inland cities reported no hate crimes during 2006.

Hemet Police Chief Richard Dana knows the latest hate-crime statistics show Hemet tied for second place among Riverside County cities that reported hate crimes, but he doesn't think that reflects life in the city.

"Makes it look like Hemet is a racial hot spot," Dana said. "It really isn't."


Actually it is, based on complaints that I've heard this past year.




In Riverside County, the fate of Mary Pickford's Oscar statuettes may be decided in Riverside's nonexistent civil courtrooms.


Pencil in a date for trial some day in the next 20 years or something like that according to the Press Enterprise.


Even with the strike team of judges to hear criminal trials in the backed up Riverside County Superior Court, the list of pending felony trials has actually grown to 2,100 cases. This puts civil trials even further on the bottom of the list to reach their day in court to be heard in front of a jury.


The only full-time judge hearing civil trials is Gary Tranburger who's been papered by the petulant Riverside County District Attorney's office for being backed into a corner and dismissing several misdemeanor cases quite a while back. Since then, judges have dismissed misdemeanor and felony cases that have ran out the clock. Most of them are refiled soon after to start the clock running again.


The civil litigants are devastated by the situation that they are faced, having their futures put on hold for years.


(excerpt)


Delays in civil court are routine in Riverside County. Vicki Brook, 49, of Homeland, recalled when her 2003 medical malpractice case was continued in February. She had anticipated it was going to trial.

Her judge had to take a criminal case, the third such delay for her.

"To them, putting it off ... is nothing. To me, it was devastating. I've had this thing put off over and over again. Financially, it's devastating," she said.
"I've lost massive wages; I'm struggling," she said.

Although she wants to win her case, she said the delays have made her anxious just to reach a conclusion.

"If you don't win, at least you know where you're going to go in your life and what you've got to do to get there," she said.

Brook's latest court date was Nov. 8. Her attorneys moved to send the case outside Riverside County.

Brook said she has gone through seven surgeries on her right shoulder, six of them efforts to correct what she claims is a botched job on an impinged ligament.

While her case dragged on, she lost her home-based bookkeeping business, had to sell property, and refinanced a paid-for home to stay afloat. She is also going through a divorce ending her 18-year marriage.

"My life is in suspense all the time between the divorce, a lot of which is over this, and my son trying to get into college. It's very violating and out of control," she said.



Their attorneys are outraged as well.


(excerpt)



Civil attorneys blame the backlog on the number of criminal cases flowing through Riverside County's court system.

"The unfairness to the civil litigants is what needs to come across," lawyer Fred Adelman said. "The hijacking of the civil justice system by the district attorney's office is really pretty outrageous."


San Bernardino County has similar crowded court issues, but there were 97 civil jury trials there from July of 2006 through June of this year. Riverside County had 22 such trials for the same period, some heard out of the county.

"The district attorney's office agrees that there needs to be more room for both criminal and civil trials," spokeswoman Ingrid Wyatt said in a statement. "Felony and misdemeanor cases have been dismissed due to a lack of judges, courtrooms, and court resources."

Extensive delays and dismissals victimize citizens using the courts and victims of crime, and "they deserve to have their day in court," the statement said. The district attorney's office has argued that family court and others that don't traditionally deal with criminal cases should be open if a case faces dismissal.



The whole situation is terrible and it's embarrassing that of all the counties in the state, it's happening here. But until all the stakeholders put their egos on the bench and work together for the betterment of the system and not just their own interests, this crisis will worsen and not improve even if you throw a 100 retired judges at it for a century. It's like filling a leaky bucket less quickly than it is draining rather than dealing with the bucket.





Santa Anas are predicted for the holidays, but instead of being hot and dry, they'll be cool and moderately humid. That's hopefully good news to reduce the risk of more fires in the region.




Questions about a past officer-involved shooting in San Bernardino join questions abou the high shooting rate in a city that's seen 11 shooting, including seven fatal in 2007 so far.


(excerpt)


Christopher Terrell Jackson died on the street where police said he refused to surrender. Markham was charged as an adult Monday with brandishing a firearm, threatening a peace officer with a firearm and possession of stolen property. He remained at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton.

Despite the different scenarios, Crump said Monday he hopes Markham's family doesn't have to wait as long for answers.

Ten months later, he has yet to see a prosecutor's report to corroborate that description of events, about which he remains skeptical.

"All I've got is word from the street," Crump said. "We haven't gotten anything but the body."

On Jan. 7, Jackson became the first of eight people San Bernardino police have shot and killed this year. Police said Jackson turned and fired at an officer chasing him on suspicion of vehicle break-ins.







The two words that the San Antonio Police Department probably had hoped it would never hear have been said and they are federal intervention, according to the San Antonio Express-News.


About 27 civil rights organizations including the ACLU and the NAACP have taken their case to the United States Department of Justice.



(excerpt)


"We ask for your intervention because the SAPD, the chief of police and officials with the city of San Antonio are unwilling or incapable of providing redress to individual victims of police misconduct and abuse," the complaint states.

Representatives from the Coalition of Human and Civil Rights gathered Thursday morning outside the local U.S. attorney's office to announce they had delivered the complaint to local federal authorities.

Mario Salas, a coalition member and former city councilman, said the Police Department's failure to hold officers accountable and District Attorney Susan Reed's refusal to prosecute them "has resulted in massive violations of our citizens' civil rights."

Police Chief William McManus said in a prepared statement the department was aware of the coalition's concerns.

"I have met with the group twice within the last month to discuss their issues," McManus said.

He said the city has taken the additional step of hiring a Washington-based police research group to conduct a "thorough review" of policies, procedures and training associated with the coalition's complaints.

But Salas said the hiring of the Police Executive Research Forum is "wholly deficient, inadequate and unresponsive for immediate relief."

"In the time since the PERF was announced, we have had allegations of a woman being sexually assaulted by a police officer and other complaints that seem to be on the increase," Salas said, referring to a complaint made public Wednesday from a woman who claims to have been abused Sunday morning.



The police department, police union and criminal prosecutor's office all disagree with the allegations raised by the civil rights organizations, yet they still plan to move forward.




(excerpt)


Salas said the problem with the Police Department mostly is with the way it handles public complaints against officers.

"The Internal Affairs Department of the San Antonio Police Department is rigged to the benefit of the San Antonio Police Officers Association," Salas said.

The coalition also argues the city's police union wields too much control over the Chief's Advisory Action Board, the panel charged with hearing grievances against officers.

Coalition members say seven of the 11 members of the board are police officers and the other four are civilians chosen with the blessing of the union.

"This must be changed and violations of human and civil rights must be prosecuted," Salas said. "This rigged system of justice is an insult to the norms of a civilized society."






The steroids made me do it, Officer Robert "Kiko" Pulido told federal agents after having told them about the role he played in a cocaine shipping scandal which has rocked Boston's police department.



(excerpt, Boston Globe)



In a phone interview from a New Hampshire jail, Pulido acknowledged his role in one of the biggest police scandals in Boston history, a scheme to ship cocaine into the city. But as Pulido admitted guilt, he tried to salvage his reputation, saying that a steroid addiction made him exaggerate many of the statements that were caught on FBI surveillance tapes.

Much of what was captured on the tapes, he said, was pure fantasy. In his mind at the time, he said, he was a stand-up police officer playing a role in a real-life Hollywood blockbuster. He said he even recited lines from "Training Day," a movie about a corrupt police officer, that were captured on the tapes.

"Anyone that knows me knows that I was acting," Pulido said. "It was puffery."

Pulido pleaded guilty Thursday, the fourth day of his trial in US District Court, to charges that he conspired to ship more than 5 kilograms of cocaine and 1 kilogram of heroin. He pleaded no contest to carrying a gun in a drug trafficking crime. The 10-year police veteran, who resigned from the force, now faces a prison sentence of 15 years to life when he is sentenced Feb. 6.

His coconspirators in the case, Nelson Carrasquillo and Carlos Pizarro, both former officers, have pleaded guilty.



Pulido said he only hoped the department had sent him to rehabilitation for his steroid addiction before he got involved in the cocaine scandal. Department representatives responded to his comments by saying, good riddance.


The Boston Globe Editorial Board said that perhaps that department's scandal arose from "bad apples" but asks how did they get that way? And what role did the blue wall of silence play?



(excerpt)



That tarnished sense of loyalty has infected the Boston Police Department before, notably in 1995 when dozens of officers fled behind a blue wall of silence rather than testify against colleagues who had nearly beaten a fellow officer to death after mistaking him for a fleeing suspect.

Some signs are encouraging. Davis says the department displayed its capacity for self-policing by bringing the Pulido crew to the attention of the FBI in the first place. And two officers, he says, reported the illicit activities allegedly taking place at the Hyde Park after-hours club to their superiors.

Other signs point in the wrong direction. Pulido tested positive for cocaine back in 1999 under the department's mandatory drug testing policy. But overly lenient accountability measures gave him a chance to return to duty after a 45-day suspension. In New York or Los Angeles, he would have been out on the street, where he belonged.

An underlying corrosion of standards - weak control of evidence lockers, sloppy documentation by detectives, poor recruitment practices - has been linked to prior corruption problems in the Boston Police Department. This case is likely to be no different. Maybe Pulido and his crew are rotten apples. But the public still needs to know how the decay got in them in the first place.






The New York Times published an article about how the rate of complaints filed against Chicago Police Department officers was higher than the national average involving law enforcement agencies. With all the scandals emerging in this police department not to mention scandals going back 30 or so years, this shouldn't be surprising to anyone.




(excerpt)



According to the new report, rogue police officers abuse victims without fear of punishment, and the lack of accountability has tainted the entire department, resulting in a loss of public confidence. Patterns of abuse and disciplinary neglect were worst in low-income minority neighborhoods, said the authors, Craig B. Futterman, H. Melissa Mather and Melanie Miles.

The national average among large police departments for excessive-force complaints is 9.5 per 100 full-time officers. For a department of Chicago’s size (13,500, second only to New York), that would correspond to 1,283 complaints a year. From 1999 to 2004, however, citizens filed about 1,774 brutality complaints a year against Chicago officers. Less than 5 percent of the department was responsible for nearly half of abuse complaints, from 2001 to 2006.

Although a great majority of the department is not abusive, the report said, “This does not mean that it bears no responsibility,” adding, “The police code of silence contributes to the machinery of denial.”

Analyzing a broader array of complaints in another breakdown, the authors said that from 2002 to 2004 civilians filed 10,149 complaints accusing officers of excessive force, illegal searches and false arrests, and of abusing them sexually or because of race.

The rate at which the department found enough evidence to believe that the charge of abuse might have occurred in order to sustain a case was 1 percent (124 of the 10,149 complaints), the report said, compared with a national average of 8 percent from 2002, the most recent year for which national data is available.

Just 19 of the 10,149 complaints in Chicago led to suspensions of a week or more, said Mr. Futterman of the University of Chicago.



The Chicago police department has been auditing its search warrants to see if they are legitimate according to the Chicago Sun-Times. This step was taken in the wake of the scandal involving the Special Operations Section Team which included one officer, Jerome Finnigan who was indicted in connection with a murder-for-hire plot.





In Bolingbrook, police sergeant, Drew Peterson was on the Today show again with his attorney to denounce the autopsy conducted on his third wife Kathleen Savio by her family's pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden according to the Chicago Tribune.

Matt Lauer asked questions of Peterson that his attorney, Joel Brodsky answered.



(excerpt)


Baden, Brodsky said, had "a pre-existing opinion" as to the cause of Savio's death and his findings were a "self-fulfilling prophecy," he said. He also noted that Baden was "a paid commentator for Fox."

"We do disagree with his findings," Brodsky said. "The first autopsy, from what I understand, was very thorough."



That might be the case but the interpretation of the results of that autopsy is what has changed in three years, most notably after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacey, disappeared on Oct. 28 and apparently hasn't been seen or heard from since.




Meanwhile, there's an argument here about who's a bully and who's been called one and who's not and it's being conducted by anonymous people who expect people to be able to tell them apart from one another. It gets too confusing after a while.