Is there room in the Inland Empire for two civilian review boards?

"Five Before Midnight" continues its reign as the focus of most removed topics at Inland Empire's Craigslist as apparently two postings were removed relating to how Riverside's police department performed in the 2007 audit done by Californians Aware and the possible impact that the housing market crisis could have on the development of high-density housing projects in the Inland Empire including Riverside.

Okay, I guess we'll have to continue covering these two issues in greater depth because someone or some people don't want people to read about either one of them for whatever reason.

But a lot is going on in what is now the City of the Arts but unfortunately, also may be the City of the Foreclosures if the trend in the Inland Empire with foreclosures of properties continues.

Is there unequal access to free parking in Riverside?



That was only one of the questions asked by Press Enterprise columnist, Dan Bernstein. He focuses mostly on two of the new councilmen, Ward One representative Mike Gardner and Ward Three representative Rusty Bailey, while as he said, Ward Five Chris MacArthur was crafting the city's immigration policy, an homage to his somewhat xenophobic campaign that helped win him his seat in both rounds of Election 2007.



(excerpt)



How did the gents feel about the city charging for parking in one area while giving it away in another?

Gardner: "Don't think for a minute the downtown businesses don't know what's going on."

Bailey, whose domain includes RivPlaza: "I hadn't even thought of that. There might be a little inequity there."

Common ground. But what are they going to do about it?

Gardner's moving cautiously. "Should we have downtown meters? What area should it cover? How should we collect fees?"

"Public forums" (not City Hall decrees) will cough up answers. Gardner seems partial to new "bullhead" meters (one per space) that are savvy enough to swallow bills, coins and accept plastic. The city is on the brink of spending $600K on 85 new SnarkPark boxes. Gardner wants to hit the pause button.

He also says the city should provide "adequate" free parking for library/museum customers. But no new parking's planned for the library-museum expansion. Gardner says this "should be looked at." Uh, yeah. (The city should also offer free hypnotherapy so citizens will feel better about using parking garages.)

Another thing Gardner's mulling: Opening the mall (between Mission Inn & University avenues) to traffic and parking. "It came up in conversations with business owners." This would collide with the vision of a permanent home for the Sasha Cohen Skating Rink; sacred monuments (including Gandhi!) would be uprooted. I see many public forums in Gardner's future.



I think any improvements to the pedestrian mall should be minor, not extensive but it's still early in the process and I agree that there should be plenty of opportunity for public forums. I'm not exactly sure where all the money's going to come from given that the city's clearly making cuts already including some say in the area of overtime pay and staffing even as it continues to green-light expensive ticket items on the city council meetings' consent calendars.

But those who criticize Gardner should take their own advice that they handed out quite freely to those who criticized the actions of his predecessor, Dom Betro. Instead of bringing up "conspiracy" theories of backroom deals and underhandedness, they should call or email their new councilman their concerns or schedule a meeting with him to discuss this issue. if it's good for Betro's critics, then it's good for Gardner's too.





A new arrangement exists in the Riverside County Superior Court in terms of how it will handle felony cases to reduce the current hefty trial backlog, according to the Press Enterprise

The courts will be adopting what's called a "pre-preliminary hearing" system already being used by courts in neighboring San Bernardino County. The article highlighted the differences between the two counties which share the problem of high population growth coupled with too few judge appointments to match that group. But that's where the similarities end.


(excerpt)


More details will be hammered out during a Jan. 10 meeting, but the statement said the plan will be in place by March 1.

Variations of front loading are used in several superior courts throughout the state, including San Bernardino County, which has a heavier per-judge caseload than Riverside County does but has not suffered the same court congestion problems.

Both counties suffered during the past decade as their populations grew rapidly but the number of judge positions remained virtually unchanged.

The state Legislature has added judgeships during the past two years, but the numbers are still far behind actual need.

In the past year, 11 criminal cases in Riverside County have been dismissed for lack of a judge to hear them and civil trials there have virtually halted. All but one of the eight dismissed cases that involved felonies were immediately refiled. Prosecutors opted to use a parole-violation charge to resolve the eighth case.

San Bernardino County, which has far fewer criminal trials, has not had dismissals related to speedy-trial limits, and its judges have been able to hear civil trials.




Currently, judges in Riverside County face several hundred preliminary hearings in one day. Richard Huffman, the justice from the 4th Court of Appeals is in charge of implementing reforms that will change both the infrastructure and operations of the court system to get the civil courts functioning again and the criminal trials backlog down.

As for civil trials, they've resumed and are currently being heard by judges and juries in assigned classrooms at a former elementary school. Only in Riverside?



Police harassment was the topic of a meeting in the Westside neighborhood of San Bernardino, according to the Press Enterprise.


(excerpt)


"They don't have any respect," said Ruby Brown, after telling how an officer pulled her over and questioned her about what she was doing as she drove to work before dawn recently.

"They think everybody on the Westside is dealing drugs, every house is a drug house," she said.

Operation Phoenix, which combines community-based policing and social services such as job training and recreation programs, is credited with decreasing serious crime by 38 percent in what was once called the city's most violent neighborhood.

Last month, the San Bernardino City Council voted to expand the program to three neighborhoods, including the Westside.

Neighborhood resident Brenda Walker questioned the program's value Monday.

"The young men are getting beaten by the police, shot by the police, and then, when they go downtown, the judge is saying 'Take this plea bargain,' " Walker said. "Operation Phoenix is a joke."


Community residents will be meeting with the police chief on Jan. 15 but they are looking beyond that in a different direction and first on their minds, is creating and implementing an independent police oversight committee in their city. Unlike Riverside which of course has the Community Police Review Commission, San Bernardino already has a committee of sorts in place, though the city keeps it toothless. But what it really needs and what the city residents need to push for is a civilian review board of their own, preferably through the much tougher but much more honest process of the ballot initiative.


(excerpt)


San Bernardino municipal law empowers the city Board of Police Commissioners to review police operations, but it provides no budget for such oversight. Still, board member Carl Clemons told audience members Monday that public participation might increase the board's effectiveness.

"Hold us accountable," he said. "There's no use to us being there if you don't come down."


So the city provides the mechanism but not any money for it to do its job effectively, the ultimate in public relations ploys to keep a populace in a state of thinking that there's oversight when there's really not. Riverside flirted with that in 2004, when then-Councilman Art Gage tried to push a motion during the city's budget reconciliation hearings to defund the CPRC by up to 95% of its annual budget. But Riverside's residents were "given" through ordinance their review mechanism, a response by the city which feared that a initiative to create a Berkeley-style model of civilian review that had been making the rounds for signatures would make it on the ballot and even worse, pass. And perhaps, it hadn't occurred to the city yet that it simply could sue people in a SLAPP fashion to block ballot initiatives that went against what it perceived were its best interests, as happened in the case of Ken Stansbury and the Riversiders for Property Rights.

A good test case would be to try to circulate a ballot initiative which would allow the CPRC to seek its own independent counsel or at least discuss it in a public meeting without having to get the current city attorney's permission to do so as is the case now. And to no surprise, what was that office's response recently?

Permission denied.


The city's residents showed Gage and the other city council members who inwardly were probably upset at Gage for launching such a transparent offensive against a body that the majority of the city council opposed at the time, at the voting polls that autumn how wrong he was to do that. Several members on the dais who also loathed the CPRC probably never forgave Gage for what he did. But if you look at the CPRC, now as 2007 draws to a close, you can see that the city government through its direct employees now have the next best thing.

A CPRC that's seen more turnover in its staff and its commissioners in the past year than it ever had. A CPRC forced to wait over a year to even discuss officer-involved deaths given that the fatal shootings of Douglas Steven Cloud and Joseph Darnell Hill which both occurred in October 2007 are still being investigated. The public report on the fatal shooting of Lee Deante Brown was just approved last week, more than 18 months after he was shot and killed on April 3, 2006.

In addition, the CPRC commissioners and staff people can't even place an item on the agenda without having it thoroughly vetted and approved by the city manager's office and the city attorney's office. Who issued that order? Most likely, one or more members of the city council. After all, these employees act at its direction and the interest of the city attorney's office in the commission only began recently in the CPRC's seven-year history.

Another issue is the exclusion of the CPRC's annual budget from the public report when past reports had included it. The official response is that the CPRC's budget can be found in the city's 2007-2008 budget report online here. That's indeed true, but one of the questions that's often asked is what is the commission's budget. The answer? A little bit less than $300,000.

Don't be surprised that if the city cuts its budget to tighten its belt that the commission is on the list of items to receive cuts. Of course, there's the adage, pay now or pay later. Pay now for strong civilian review or pay out later in civil law suits filed against the police department which recently settled a law suit filed in U.S. District Court for a fatal onduty shooting to the tune of $395,000. It might not be the last settlement, especially with five other law suits involving four incustody deaths from 2005 and 2006 currently in the pipeline.

That also applies to the staffing and equipping of the police department in that the city's history of providing inadequate quantities of either due to budget cuts played a large role in leading us down the path to the $22 million and counting stipulated agreement with former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer in 2001. Anyone who doubts this can read the writ mandamus in the case of The People of California v The City of Riverside. Count how many times words to the effect of inadequate staffing are mentioned in this document.

Unfortunately, one side effect of the tremendous turnover in city management and the city government led to the reality that most of those making the decisions today weren't under the spotlight or in the trenches during the episode which produced both the CPRC and the stipulated judgment. They didn't experience the high emotional and political cost it took on everyone involved, so they seem too willing to travel down the same paths as they did before which ended up at these two junctures. Some of these paths are well-worn with foot traffic.

Any mention of what was past usually elicits the comments about how that was yesterday, the past, buried history or so forth, but one of the purposes of history and probably its most useful purpose is to learn lessons out of it so that you don't repeat it but pick the road less traveled that leads you to a better place, called the future.

Which brings up the issue of being a minority of one, in the face of a majority of many, a point I've given some thought to since Schiavone made his comments at last week's meeting. I can think of an example in 2006 when this was the case. At least a minority of one in a public venue.

I took some heat when at a city council meeting in October 2006 after a report had been presented by Police Chief Russ Leach I didn't have much if anything to say that was positive about the department's "progress" since the dissolution of the stipulated judgment in March 2006. But that was because there really wasn't any progress in relation to its Strategic Plan and in fact, in some areas critical to its development, there was regression. And you know what? These critical areas including training weren't even mentioned at all during Leach's report, a sign that something was amiss.

Later, it turned out that the police department had received a grade of "C-" during that period of time including that public report in an audit performed by a professional police practices consultant. A grade that didn't surprise me at all especially comments about the lack of paperwork done both of accomplishments and road blocks. Given that most of the department's written policies were either approved no earlier than 1984( and this seems retroactive) or 1993, when Ken Fortier became the chief, it doesn't seem during most of its history, it was a fan of written product. A problem also noted in the writ of mandamus when it stated that evaluations weren't regularly done or up to date on officers' performances on the job.


I wasn't the only one who wasn't surprised though it seemed that other city residents in attendance were shocked into silence. Did they not know what was coming or were they afraid to agree with a negative grade given to the department in public? How many people would have spoken publicly if the grade had been say, an "A" or an "A+"? More than a few police officers employed by that agency weren't shocked either. Probably because the problems being experienced by those managing them were trickling down to where they were at as is inevitable in these situations and impacting them.

The city government leaders seemed taken aback at my comments, some refuted it and the others praised the department. The positive thing was that they did participate fully in the discussion of the report when in the past, they hadn't and in fact, the semiannual report had been relegated on one occasion to the consent calendar. A community leader or two refuted what I said and took the same public stance. People talk about problems in private, even grumble but in public, take a united front, well almost a united front, that everything's just fine. Criticism is an increasingly unpopular approach as has been seen, even when the emperor is standing in front of them seriously in need of some threads.

Councilman Frank Schiavone said last week in an initial comment that he hadn't received any emails or contacts from a city of 300,000 people, just complaints from me. Sometimes elected officials who disagree with you on an issue say these things to try to marginalize the dissenting opinion and bolster his own position as the correct one. But as I said in response, I can be the only person in a city of 300,000 with an opinion and if it's on an important issue, I'm still going to voice it. A validation technique like that one should be saved for those who merely wish to follow the crowd and that's just not me.

I was the minority of one at that October 2006 meeting who refused to praise the department's performance, in the wake of problems it experienced beginning in the summer after the consent decree ended not to mention the labor strife between the city and the police unions which led hundreds of the latter to confront the former at a city council meeting in September over the way they were treated during negotiations. The fact is, that if the police officers feel disenfranchised from the city, this is not in line with Lockyer's image of the three-way partnership between the city, communities and department either. The fact, is that if the police officers were treated like that by the city, then there's little hope that the community will be treated better or differently.

And if the department is experiencing problems, a lot of them frankly lying on the door of the city manager's office and the city council, then flattery and praise isn't going to accomplish anything, except to show that the bar for the department's performance should be at a "C-" level and that's the very best it can do. But that's not giving the department enough credit or putting your belief into its ability to be an outstanding law enforcement agency some day.

A "C-" is not something it should ever aspire to and employed by this agency are many men and women who don't really believe that it should do so either. I might be its most vocal critic and I've paid a price for that on different fronts, but it would be ironic and unfortunate if I were also the only person who believed in its potential meaning that believing that just because there's room for lots of improvement doesn't mean that this equates failure, but simply means that the higher you set the bar and the more capable you believe people are of meeting that level, the more the potential exists for the improvement to get there.

The department showed marked improvement in its next audit which was clear in the huge difference between the public report given in October 2006 and that given in April 2007. Schiavone made a comment about it being some landmark thing which seemed positively intended. I'm not sure why he was so shocked. He shouldn't have been. We'd have some good, productive discussions in the past about the police department for him to draw on.

Areas where the department has improved is its embrace of new training to the point where it wants to set a standard for it, including the big step it took in doing so in the area of mental health crisis intervention. A big problem area? The citizen complaint system is in danger of breaking down, as the average lengths of times taken to investigate complaints stretches way beyond the guidelines set in departmental policy #4.12. It's troubling that the average time for completing complaint investigations is approaching and in some cases even surpassing 12 months, according to the CPRC's monthly reports. If that continues, the process won't be that useful either to community members or police officers.


That level of improvement needed also applies to the Californians Aware audit which apparently someone or some people visiting Craigslist didn't want people to read about there or here. If Banning's police department can raise its score in one year up to an A+, the Riverside Police Department is more than capable of doing like. Unfortunately, the key behind the improvement may not lie with the department itself, but the city council which would have to redirect its city attorney's office to fulfill its obligations to city residents whose money finances that office's operation through allowing them to access this public information.

So being in a minority even a minority of one doesn't bother me and to even make a comment that an opinion is any less valid because it's of one is a bit high-school for a city government.


As for the residents of San Bernardino, they should work hard to get an independent civilian review board of their own. It's going to be a tough fight to get one and if Riverside's any indication, an even tougher and never-ending fight to keep it that way.








The Chicago Tribune published this article about a special unit set up by the state attorney's office to investigate onduty shootings and allegations of excessive force involving law enforcement officers in Cook County. Good luck with that effort. Any such committee has its work cut out for it, for sure.





A county sheriff in North Carolina allegedly took bribes and kickbacks from local businesses and is now in serious trouble along with several fellow employees.


(excerpt, Officer.com)


Investigators said that the crimes occurred between 2000 and 2006, while Bobby Medford was Buncombe County Sheriff.

The deputies, Lt. John Harrison, Lt. Ronnie "Butch" Davis and Capt. Guy Penland were serving under Medford at the time.

Among the allegations are claims that the men organized golf tournaments to generate money for themselves, that they made direct demands for cash from video poker machine businesses and got cash for convincing store owners to place machines in their businesses.

In exchange for the bribes, prosecutors said that the men would allow operators to unlawfully register more video poker machines, even though the state of North Carolina was phasing them out.

The indictment said Medford would use the bribe and kickback money to support his own gambling habit and build his campaign funds.

Medford and his co-defendants have another federal court hearing set on Monday.





The San Francisco Examiner is looking into the law suit filed by a Mexican citizen alleging racial profiling by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department.



(excerpt)


The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, outlines several instances where Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies are accused of overstepping their authority to conduct immigration raids, targeting people solely based on race and detaining individuals who are legally in the country.

Although only one plaintiff is identified, the lawsuit is a class-action suit filed on behalf of all others similarly situated.

Arpaio called the lawsuit frivolous and said it is an attempt to intimidate him before his office begins enforcing the employer-sanctions law on Jan. 1.

The state law threatens suspension and revocation of business licenses if an employer is found to have knowingly hired an illegal worker.

The suit seeks a declaratory judgment that Arpaio's actions are unconstitutional, injunctions prohibiting the use of the sheriff's anti-immigration hotline and directing the Sheriff's Office to disband its Illegal Immigration Interdiction unit.

"Our investigations show that the Sheriff's Office has routinely exceeded their authority and shown a blatant disregard for the civil rights of individuals in Maricopa County," said Lou Moffa, a lead attorney in the case. "With this suit, we hope to demonstrate that no matter how politically popular an issue is, the Sheriff's Office does not have the right to trounce haphazardly over an individual's rights."

The suit claims a Hispanic man who is a U.S. citizen was illegally detained.



That man was stopped and despite proving his identity was detained for over eight hours.








Lawson Lamar, the Florida State Attorney General wants to clear the backlog of excessive force cases in Orlando, according to the Orlando Sentinel.



(excerpt)


Twenty-eight Orlando-area cops who had been waiting up to two years for a prosecutor to evaluate their use of deadly force have been cleared during the past two months by State Attorney Lawson Lamar.

His office closed 15 of those cases during three days in mid-November, a week before the Orlando Sentinel reported that Lamar's office took months and sometimes years longer than other Central Florida state attorneys to review such cases.

At the time, Lamar's staff said no backlog existed. This week, it was disclosed that extra prosecutors had been assigned to resolve the cases.

"No case was forgotten, but there were a number of factors why the reviews were not completed in a timely manner, several of [them] . . . unacceptable," Chief of Investigations Randy Means wrote this week in an e-mail to the newspaper. "We have accomplished our goal of finishing the reviews and now have a better tracking method that should keep reviews up to date."






Bud White: "Why are you doing this? The Nite Owl made you. You want to tear all that down?"

Ed Exley: "With a wrecking ball. You want to help me swing it?"



---L.A. Confidential