It rains but once a year but then it pours

It's been raining quite a bit and very windy and there's been numerous power outages so if yours is out, it will be restored as soon as they get to it.




Riverside County's attempts to "cluster" services for the homeless was unveiled this week in the Northside section of the city. It offers "drop-in" services for homeless people in Riverside. The history of day shelters being what it has been in Riverside, this is good news for many.

R.E.A.C.H., which was the original day shelter on Kansas and Spruce was forced out when the rent was suddenly quadrupled and it would up in several different spaces including the All Saints Church on Magnolia across the street from Riverside Community College's main campus. Complaints arose from residents surrounding the church, leading then Ward One councilman, Chuck Beaty to claim that this homeless shelter was sitting in a "special" neighborhood and after that, its days were numbered.

Hopefully, the days when this shelter's days were numbered, are now numbered.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)


The new facility, located in a cul-de-sac in an industrial area north of downtown Riverside, consists of a 24 / 7 drop-in center and a 25-bed housing complex for single men and women. It is adjacent to an overnight shelter run by Path of Life Ministries, which offers 64 beds year-round and an additional 56 during the winter.

Sue Moreland, of Jefferson Transitional Programs, strolls through a commons area during the opening of The Place, a $1.4 million facility in Riverside to serve chronically homeless people with mental illnesses. Jefferson will run the facility, which is located in an industrial area north of downtown Riverside.


The target clientele will be street dwellers who are the most visible but often the hardest to reach: those who have been homeless for more than a year and have been diagnosed with a mental disorder.

The approach will be low-pressure. If someone wants to come in, grab a bite, take a shower, do laundry and leave, that's fine. Similarly, those who take part in the housing program do not have to commit to any treatment plan. As long as they behave, they can stay as long as they want.

But the goal, officials say, is to ready with services when residents do agree to work with a case manager to develop a recovery program and to be able to live on their own. Proponents of this "housing first" approach say that the hard-core homeless are more likely to accept services if they first have a permanent place to live.



Not everyone whose business is based in the cul-de-sac is happy about the opening of the center and want the city to relocate their businesses. It's ironic because in a sense, the shelter was placed in the Northside because many of the homeless it hopes to attract were located in the downtown area and hanging out near downtown businesses including those in the pedestrian mall.

But the city's tried really hard to push the homeless out of the downtown and any facilities which addresses their needs out of the downtown and within one mile of Beaty's "special" neighborhood, the Wood Streets. After all, when one of three potential sites for a residential shelter was within one mile of that neighborhood, it was promptly vetoed and it was built in the Eastside where the residents didn't really want it either in large part because they already had shelters. But if you have a population of people that you deem "undesirable", then they should be pushed to a neighborhood of poor and working class Black and Latino families who in a sense, are and have always been viewed in that same category.

After all, what are both the UCR or actually, the University Charrette development plan, the UCR's long-range development plan and the Riverside Renaissance bringing to these families? Gentrification, meaning that it's likely the Eastside will be Balkinized and the demographics in 10 years or so will more closely mirror those of the local university.

One reason why several long-awaited very worth-while projects in the Eastside have finally been constructed, in part because they're being built for a population of people that aren't there yet, in preparation for eventual gentrification.






Temecula has issued this mandate to the Press Enterprise that it will only take questions from it in writing. No, this isn't a joke. This is for real.



It seems that the elected folks there haven't liked some of the coverage they've received from the publication which actually has written some hard-hitting pieces about cities that aren't named, Riverside.

A legal expert from the California First Amendment Coalition responded to this most recent development with some cautionary words.


(excerpt)


The policy troubled Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit free speech and open government group of which The Press-Enterprise is a member.

If the policy is the result of the city not liking the direction of The Press-Enterprise's coverage, "It raises serious First Amendment concerns," he said. "The line between that and censorship is a very fine line."



Peter's cool and he's probably right on this one. But city officials bristling at what's been said and written about them is nothing new in the Inland Empire. It begs the question, if they're so worried about being criticized, why did they run for public office? Those in charge of Temecula's city government obviously believe that this strategy will protect them from being criticized or even having any misconduct exposed. But they're wrong.

They should do like Riverside does, by making regular trips to the subcommittee level in order to impose more restrictions on the expression by city residents at city council meetings or demanding that police officers "escort" elderly women away from the podium or even out of the building. Perhaps they have implemented similar measures already and imposing restrictions on the access of a media outlet to local government is just the next step.

It's a shame that the video cameras in Riverside don't point at the dais more often during city council meetings, so that the viewers who have asked me about the conduct of those on the dais can see for themselves the eye rolling, seat shifting, paper shuffling, palm pilot fidgeting and the sighs, grunts, grimaces, guffawing and the speeches that begin, "I wasn't going to say this but... she has a blog!" as if that was a shocking revelation for the ages or the Riverside version of "off with his head". Of course, if that were the case, the behavior of those in the dais would literally change overnight. Like night and day. It would make a very interesting "before and after" project.

What's also interesting is that the newcomers on the dais and individuals like Councilman Andrew Melendrez provide an interesting if startling contrast through their own well-behaved conduct to those on the dais who look like listening to the concerns and criticism of the public is so beneath them. It's clear which ones received the most gold stars during "quiet time" in preschool and who alas, probably did not.






In Los Angeles, the latest showdown between the Los Angeles Police Department, the Police Commission and the Police Protective League will play out on the radio.


According to the Los Angeles Times, the police union that represents most of the LAPD's officers is getting ready to begin a radio campaign to persuade city residents not to support a controversial mandate of the city's federal consent decree with the Department of Justice to have hundreds of special unit officers hand over their financial records for inspection every two years.

The Police Commission recently created a proposal in which to carry out this component of the federal decree that the city entered into stemming from an investigation conducted by the Department of Justice in the wake of the Rampart Scandal in 1999.

The radio ads will focus on stating that if this component goes into effect, it will "cripple the fight against drugs, gangs and crime" and it urges listeners to contact elected officials to put a halt to the process in order to presumably ensure their own safety.

Not surprisingly, the planned campaign has sparked some criticism.




(excerpt, Los Angeles Times)


The league is launching an ill-advised campaign to amp up the heat," said Commissioner John Mack, who accused union officials of using scare tactics.The ad's suggestion that "more than 500 officers are willing to leave their units rather than take the financial risk of sharing their personal information" is unsubstantiated, Mack said. He said any transfers would have to be approved by the department's leaders, and that they would not sanction a mass exodus.

"Ultimately, that's a decision that the chief of police and the command staff of the LAPD will make," Mack said. "The request for a transfer doesn't mean a transfer will happen."

Union officials acknowledged that they did not have an accurate count on how many officers would seek job transfers, but said they have heard from many of their members who have said they intend to request reassignments if the disclosure rule is finalized.

Commissioners said they also have responded to the union's concern that disclosing financial information leaves officers vulnerable to identity theft by adjusting the policy to ensure that all the records be locked in Police Chief William J. Bratton's office and destroyed periodically.

In the union ad, listeners are encouraged to contact their City Council members and tell them to support the officers so they can go "out there defending our communities against criminals, not having to worry about their families' safety, security and future."




The measure to inspect these financial records seems well-intended in the fight against corruption as in the case of the Rampart scandal. However, it's cumbersome bureaucracy at best which the police officers who are engaging in corrupt behavior will likely laugh at all the way to the bank or wherever they are stashing their ill-gotten goods if that's the behavior that they are engaging in. It does happen after all, as scandal after scandal in many different law enforcement agencies, big and small, across the country has shown.

Some of the agencies where scandals in the past and present have hit involving theft or other forms of corrupt behavior involving money might benefit from a program such as this one. But the situation involving the LAPD and its scandals is much different and it's the Rampart Scandal that shows that this is indeed the case.

The officers involved in the Rampart scandal didn't put their ill-gotten money in their own or their family's bank accounts. They spent most of it. Besides, if they were going to deposit it some place, what's to stop them from doing it in a way that circumvents or sidesteps the financial audits and reporting as has been done by corrupt police officers in other places? Nothing at all, certainly not the auditing process proposed by the federal governmental agency that is enforcing the consent decree.

Financial grifting played a relatively small role in the Rampart scandal in comparison to other well-known scandals in other agencies and the misconduct which defined the scandal in Rampart consisted largely of planting evidence, framing individuals and lying on reports and on the witness stand. The focus of the consent decree that arose in large part from this scandal should be on elements of reform addressing these issues as well as one of the LAPD's major troubling issues which involves its use of force including at public events like rallies and marches as the MacArthur Park incident last year showed. Where are those elements exactly and are they being addressed?

However, the advertising campaign by the union is as Commissioner John Mack said, ill-advised. Relying on scare tactics to try to get city residents to rush to contact city officials is disingenuous and is similar to tactics used by the Riverside Police Officers' Association in its campaign to try and dissuade individuals from voting to support the inclusion of the Community Police Review Commission in the city's charter by blaming the commission for tying the hands of police officers when it came from addressing everything from crime to terrorism. In other words, trying to essentially scare voters into checking the "no" box.

What the Police Protective League should do is circulate a factual sheet on what exactly the mandate is, what it consists of and why it wouldn't be effective at exposing and stamping out departmental corruption and what steps should be taken to do that instead. Their campaign might be more effective if they gave the populace they served a bit more credit than they are giving them with the current strategy of taking their case to the radio or using groundless scare tactics. Or if they do choose to do so, why not participate on talk shows to discuss the issue rather than submit an alarmist ad backed up by stereo sound and technicolor? That would probably be both more effective and less likely to alienate them from communities in the city.

The above advertisement was created as an insert for several additions of the Press Enterprise in the autumn of 2004. It was criticized by the editorial board of that publication as well as Columnist Dan Bernstein. What was interesting was that after the election, the designer of the advertisement who had apparently been hired by the union said that he thought that Measure II had passed because the union had not been effective in getting its message out to the voters during the leadup to the election. Bernstein disagreed and said that the message had gotten out. He was probably right that a message had gotten out but it probably wasn't the one that the RPOA and the designer of the advertisement had intended. Did it impact the final vote in favor of the civilian review measure? Perhaps, it was a deciding factor for individuals sitting on the fence and possibly for police officers who might dislike the CPRC but not as much as they did the advertising campaign.


Bernstein might have something there, in that the residents of cities may not shine to advertisement campaigns like that involving Officer Hands-Tied (who's been an occasional commenter on police culture here) and possibly the one in Los Angeles as well. For one thing, many people in Riverside know that response times are slow in some neighborhoods especially those in the southern area of the city because of ongoing staffing shortages, equipment problems and traffic, traffic and more traffic. So why then, was the RPOA coming out with a political advertisement blaming these very real issues on the CPRC? Doing so might have been viewed as being opportunistic, or even exploiting problems in order to achieve a political end and also turned voters off.

Not that the leaders of the RPOA weren't at meetings advocating for increases in staffing including the creation of new law enforcement positions because they were. And this of all years, might be one where that advocacy might be very important.

Political advertisements by police associations and unions including from their political action committees often make listeners, readers and viewers queasy because they feel like a line is being crossed. They view police officers as city employees not as political entities so political advertising by labor unions representing law enforcement officers is at best, a gamble.

Some controversy arose during the past city election when the RPOA apparently took out a political advertisement in the Press Enterprise against Ward Five candidate Chris MacArthur. The union's PAC was backing his rival, Donna Doty-Michalka for the seat being vacated by Councilman Ed Adkison. MacArthur won the election, pretty much as convincingly as he did the preliminary round in June and the impact of the advertisement might have expanded beyond the city election, given that the city's populace isn't the only one that's currently divided.











William and Joseph Ferguson are brothers who were both law enforcement officers for different departments in Southern California. Now, both of them are on trial for robbery according to the Los Angeles Times.



(excerpt)


William Ferguson is accused of posing as Palomares' partner during many of the robberies, in which the officers and others allegedly stole drugs, money and other valuables while pretending to conduct narcotics raids between 1999 and 2001.

Joseph Ferguson is accused of driving his brother and Palomares to the LAPD academy to steal cars to be used in the robberies and of acting as a lookout outside some of the locations while they were being robbed. He is also accused of making a fake 911 call that resulted in the arrest and eventual imprisonment of one of the drug dealers who had been providing information to them but was asking for a larger share of the take.

Prosecutors plan to call victims from at least 15 of the robberies to testify, according to a 43-page trial memorandum by Assistant U.S. Atty. Douglas M. Miller, the lead prosecutor on the case. They also plan to call Palomares to testify against his alleged former cohorts, but Miller declined to say when he was to take the stand.

Much of the testimony this week came from victims of robberies, who described people dressed as police arriving at their residences, saying they were there to search for drugs. Some said they were held at gunpoint or handcuffed as their houses were searched. One man wiped away tears as he described a 2001 encounter in which he said he was beaten with a baton and hit over the head with a sap because the "officers" didn't find the drugs they were looking for.


Rodrigo Duran, a former corrections officer has already testified on the criminal activity.


(excerpt)


Blumberg asked Duran, who had no previous criminal record, why he accepted Palomares' invitation to become involved in the ring.


"Greed," he said. "It was all about trying to help myself out because I was hurting financially."

"Did you think you'd get caught?" the prosecutor asked.

"Never," Duran replied.

"Why's that?" Blumberg asked.

"Because we were law enforcement."

This statement made by Duran is that because the criminals committing crimes in this case were members of law enforcement, be they in the field or in corrections, they were safe, meaning that no one would either discover what they were doing or if so, turn them in. They were in a sense, counting on the Code of Silence, not just between themselves but between them and other law enforcement officers to protect their crimes as it has for other officers in other instances.




Not surprisingly, the Blue Code of Silence is well known enough in the lexicon of this country to warrant its own Wikipedia entry.


(excerpt)



The Blue Code of Silence is an unwritten code of honor among police officers in which reporting another officer's errors, misconduct, or crimes is regarded as a betrayal.

Studies demonstrate that most police feel that the code is applicable in cases of "illegal brutality or bending of the rules in order to protect colleagues from criminal proceedings," but not to illegal actions with an "acquisitive motive."[1][2]

Nevertheless, cases such as the Rampart Scandal demonstrate that blue code culture can sometimes extend to cover-ups of every level of crime, acquisitive or otherwise.

Other terms that can have a similar meaning include the "Blue Wall of Silence" and "the Thin Blue Line".



It's ironic that the coverup of illegal conduct including crimes is viewed as part of an unwritten "code of honor" among law enforcement officers entrusted with enforcing and upholding the laws. But there you have it. The Code of Silence epitomizes the "us vs them" sentiment that exists inside many police agencies, with the department being "us" and the residents being "them" and the rank and file officers being "us" and the department's managment being "them" depending on what's going on and what's at stake in a given situation.



The International Association of Chiefs of Police tried to crack the code and cited some statistics about its usage in law enforcement including from a study involving a confidential survey given to academy recruits.


(excerpt)



· 79% said that a law enforcement Code of Silence exists and is fairly common throughout the nation.

· 52% said that the fact a Code of Silence exists doesn’t really bother them.

· 24% said the Code of Silence is more justified when excessive force involves a citizen who’s abusive.

· 46% said they would not tell on another officer for having sex on duty.

· 23% said they wouldn’t tell on another cop for regularly smoking marijuana off duty.


And what about the officer who adhered to and upheld the Code of Silence? A survey involving several thousands law enforcement officers filling out confidential questionnaires on the subject yielded interesting results.

The vast majority of them were male who averaged 31.4 years of age when they first covered up an incident of misconduct. They averaged about eight years on the force. Many of them did it on orders of their leadership and were pressured to keep silent out of fear that the involved officer would be fired, or that if the officer reported it, they would be ostracized, harassed or the department wouldn't act on the information.

The allegation which was most covered up by the Code of Silence involved excessive force. Possible solutions involved protection for whistle blowers, an anonymous reporting process, ethics training and improved communications between officers and supervisors.


The San Francisco Chronicle published an article in 2003 about the Code of Silence stemming from a scandal involving high-ranking officers in the city's department.



(excerpt)



Said one San Francisco officer with more than two decades on the force:

"Believe it or not, things are actually better than they used to be. In the old days, the rule was, 'You do not air your dirty laundry in public. Period.' It was strictly, Us against Them, the public just doesn't understand.

"Now, for as much as everybody griped about affirmative action, it has opened up the culture. The 'brotherhood' not only looks different, it is different. You still circle the wagons, but it's a bigger circle. You see more cops saying no to that old mentality."

Another veteran cop agreed, but said: "That's why this kind of collusion at the command level (alleged by the grand jury) is scary. It's like this administration is picking up the Police Department and running backward with it."

Said a longtime officer with experience in several divisions:

"What we're going through now reminds me a lot of the Catholic Church. You have all these decent priests -- or cops -- keeping their nose clean, just trying to do their job. But there's enough of the Code of Silence mentality left, especially the higher you go up the chain of command, so that when some guys do have major problems, no one feels safe admitting it.

"If you get in front of that kind of problem, if you identify it and tell the public, 'We're going to fix this,' you retain your credibility and integrity. If you don't, the press is eventually going to get wind of it and do their own investigation. Then it's too late and everybody gets painted with the same brush."

In a 1995 essay about ending the Code of Silence, former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara wrote:

"A corrupt, racist or brutal cop will abstain from misconduct only when he looks at the cop next to him and believes that the officer will blow the whistle if he hits the suspect. The police value system is what permits the kind of behavior that gets bad headlines."





Former Bolingbrook Police Department sergeant Drew Peterson will be defended against a law suit alleging excessive force according to the Chicago Sun-Times.


(excerpt)


The village of Bolingbrook will provide legal representation for Drew Peterson in a lawsuit after police determined the former sergeant suspected in the disappearance of his wife wasn't on duty when a man claims Peterson broke his thumb.

''Everyone knows that Drew Peterson worked the night shift and this happened at 2 in the afternoon,'' said Commander Chris Prochut. ''We have a videotape and it's not even him.''

Village attorney James Boan would not comment on the federal lawsuit filed last month against Peterson, two other officers and the village of Bolingbrook by Timothy Brownlee. But Peterson's attorney, Joel Brodsky, provided The Associated Press a copy of a letter in which Boan said the village would provide Peterson an attorney.









What's the 2007 Word of the Year chosen by linguists? Subprime.



Will there be an awards season this year for motion pictures? That's the question on a lot of people's lips.