A Look Back in History: The other 2004

"History teaches everything including the future."


---Lamartine




When people think of the year 2004 in Riverside in connection with civilian review, they think of Measure II which passed the muster of the city's voters in November 2004. Some remember that fondly. Others clearly do not.

However, before that event there were the workshops which brought those to the table who were viewed as stake holders in the process of civilian review.



They were the brain child of Commissioner Jim Ward who originally wanted to put all the parties together on one panel but instead, each entity received their own workshop to present their viewpoints on the issue and to answer questions.







Time: Winter, 2004

Place: Riverside, CA





Besides the already discussed CPRC workshop held with members of the Police Review Policy Committee, there were three others held with representatives of different parties in the process. The links below are minute records of those meetings that took place. They were four very different, but very interesting gatherings.

Invitations were sent out to the parties and with the exception of one of them, all of them accepted.



Appearing for the city manager's office was then City Manager George Carvalho and then Asst. City Manager Penny Culbreth-Graft, who is now head administrator in Huntington Beach.

City manager's office workshop on Feb. 11, 2004







City Attorney Gregory Priamos declined to participate or send a designee to his workshop due to the inability to discuss issues that were legal issues in a public forum. A problem he obviously doesn't have today.





Representing the police department was the police chief.


Chief Russ Leach's workshop on March 17, 2004




Representing the RPOA at its workshop was then president, Pat McCarthy and vice-president Christopher Lanzillo who is currently the president of the RPOA.




RPOA's workshop on March 24, 2004



Each workshop provided interesting information on the commission and how it was operating. The workshops were not enthusiastically embraced by the commission in the beginning but were later viewed as a worthwhile venture, if an eye opener on several fronts.



It makes you wonder if the same workshops were held today, what they would be like. Who would show up and who would say what. It would certainly be interesting to see what's evolved in the last four years.


Soon after the workshops, were the budget hearings where former Councilman Art Gage had made his stand to defund the CPRC's annual budget by up to 95% so it would match that of the Human Relations Commission. He didn't receive much support from his colleagues with only Councilman Steve Adams offering a weak second the first time of two times Gage attemped his motion. The rest of the city council either wasn't interested in diluting the commission in this matter or they realized that it was a lost cause because Mayor Ron Loveridge had threatened to do what he had never done while in office which is to veto any such action by the city council against the CPRC. While the city council could add up to four, it couldn't reach the five votes it would have needed to overturn any veto enacted by Loveridge.



Around this time, another councilman, Frank Schiavone was attempting to rewrite the rules when it came to who would be appointed to the CPRC and who could not. Meaning in this case, that law enforcement officers would not be allowed to serve.







"In an effort to maintain the integrity and the public's trust and confidence in the CPRC organization, it is my belief that sworn law enforcement or civilians employed by a law enforcement agency should not be eligible to serve on the CPRC."



---Frank Schiavone, June 2004





Amazingly enough, this proposal by Schiavone and backed by Adams was introduced only days after the RPOA had written a letter to then executive director Don Williams and city council members demanding the removal of Commissioner Sheri Corral, a Riverside Community College District Police Department officer for comments she had made about receiving different treatment from some Riverside Police Department officers. However, it turned out that there was another commissioner that would have been removed under Schiavone's proposal if it was applied retroactively and that was Brian Pearcy who was a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and a current reserve officer with the same agency. That would complicate matters because if Corral had to go, then so would Pearcy.

When a crowd of people showed up to protest against this plan with Corral and her husband sitting in the front row of the city council chambers, Schiavone said that anyone who believed that his measure was aimed at Corral was "mean spirited" but the timing of it coming so closely on the heels of the RPOA's letter urging her expulsion was a matter of days. Also at that meeting, Gage defended his decision to push for the defunding of the CPRC by 90%, saying that he didn't oppose the commission but he thought its budget was excessive. He also criticized community members' criticism of his proposal to cut its budget.

Of course, this was only about a year before Gage would call the commission a "piece of trash" at a city council meeting, spawning more criticism of his comments at the next meeting which was when the CPRC gave its 2004 annual report. It's hard to believe that someone wouldn't be opposed to a commission then call it by such a derogatory name. But then it's hard to know where city council members really stand on the CPRC and if their true feelings match what they say publicly.

When the CPRC has been challenged this way by those on the dais and those in the RPOA, the community responded in full force to defend it. But that was several years ago, about one or two executive directors or managers ago and almost a completely different compositition of members sitting on the panel. It's hard to believe that people really believe the commission stabilized after the passage of Measure II in 2004. Then there are others who said that's when the challenges it would face would really begin in earnest, but then these voices haven't been the ones which were listened to even while one executive manager and four commissioners resigned in its wake.

I was on the phone with one of the candidates for the executive manager position who didn't get the job, though he apparently did very well in his oral interviews with two panels. His observation was that if so many commissioners had resigned in such a short period of time, that didn't speak to the body's health or its functioning. That might seem obvious to most of us, but to the folks at City Hall, all those resignations seem perfectly normal, which is logical considering how little they understand about its history given that except for Paul Sundeen, no one in the city manager's office was even in Riverside when this history played out.

I was reading through the report and noted that there's a section of observations and I wasn't sure whether they were the views of the communities or those of the commissioners. One statement in particular, was this one. "Several expresssed concerns about the CPRC not being moe visible in the community and an observation that some of the more vocal criticis of the CPRC disagre with the role that is defined by the charter."

What struck me was the term "vocal critics", because what that means depends on who you ask. It's just language but it defines different things to different people, even in the issue of the CPRC and civilian review.

Who are the "vocal critics"?

Ask City Hall and it's probably the community but not the city residents. It's people including the leaders who met with City Hall on two occasions about the CPRC's direction and former executive manager, Pedro Payne's resignation in January 2006, but it's not "the people". The use of "vocal critics" from City Hall might closely resemble the language used by Portland City Auditor Gary Blackmer when he referred to that city's critics of the Independent Police Review and Citizen Review Committee as not really being "community".

Ask the commissioners and the newer ones might agree about that definition of a "vocal critic". In a public outreach committee meeting in 2007, several commissioners complained bitterly about a group of community leaders who appeared at a CPRC meeting to criticize the handling of the Lee Deante Brown shooting by commissioners. Comments made by some of those commissioners were similar in language to some of those in the report.

I sat in the same room and listened to them do this for several minutes before one of them noticed that I was there. He quickly said, oh we weren't talking about you as if I was the exception. But to me, it felt like I was the token. It's like sitting in a room with men as the only women and being invisible while they joked about women. Then one of them turns around and says we didn't mean you. We meant other women.

The older ones who have served longer might add the RPOA, which has never made a secret of its opposition to the CPRC since even before it's been founded. But since 2004, the RPOA's been pretty quiet regarding the CPRC in part because of other critical issues impacting its members, hence it might only be in the collective memory of several commissioners.

Ask the community and they'll say the RPOA because they have longer memories. They may define themselves as vocal critics or they might not. Those members of communities who don't support a commission would probably not call themselves critic of it either though some might.

Ask the RPOA and it might say, that "vocal critics" are those people who criticize the police and the department(excluding officers who do this). The RPOA may or may not define itself as a "vocal critic" of the CPRC paralleling the communities' dynamic of self-identification.

Two words that can have many different meanings in this city and their many possible definitions go back to the history of civilian review in this city. Though it's back about being what is history and who tells it? Whose definition of it stands? And what does it teach us about the future?






Renew the Library is a Web site started by a group of individuals committed to the present and future of Riverside's public library system particularly the branch which is located in downtown Riverside. The site provided this update on the ongoing situation.


As you know, there's this kind of strange dynamic where even though hundreds of people responded to City Manager Brad Hudson's challenge to pack the city council chambers and then some, the city's still apparently pushing the combined library and museum expansion and renovation project.

Keep attending meetings of both the Board of Library Trustees and the Metropolitan Museum Board and let your presence by noted and your voices heard. Keep contacting your elected officials on the issue as well.

The site stated that the city council will support a "right sized" library, they need to hear from their constituents. I'm assuming they mean city residents, not development firms. If this is the case, then city residents, here's some ways you can contact the city government as a constituent.


City Council phone number: 826-5991

City Council email addresses:


mgardner@riversideca.gov

asmelendrez@riversideca.gov

rbailey@riversideca.gov

fschiavone@riversideca.gov

cmacarthur@riversideca.gov

nhart@riversideca.gov

sadams@riversideca.gov


Mayor Ron Loveridge can be reached by this phone number, 826-5551.



You can also reach him by email.

rloveridge@riversideca.gov



You can try contacting city staff who are directly involved in the library project but they may or may not respond back. It's more effective to contact their employers, the city council.










Nichole Paultre-Bell will be seated in the courtroom where the three New York City Police Department officers will be tried for the killing of her fiance, Sean.



(excerpt, New York Daily News)



"As hard as this may be, nothing is harder than the day I lost Sean," said Paultre Bell, 23. "I'm ready, I'm going to say my prayer every day before I step into the courtroom, and pray that I get through this."

The mother of Bell's two young daughters has prepared the girls for her after-school absences, telling 5-year-old, Jada, "This is for a good reason. She knows it's for Dad."

When the trial begins Feb. 25, Room 190 in Queens Supreme Court will barely contain all of Bell's friends and family members - including his parents, Valerie and William Bell - as well as friends and supporters of indicted detectives Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper.

Those who can't make it into the courtroom will have to go to overflow areas outside the metal police barricades along Queens Blvd., where tensions could flare as the trial heats up.

Paultre Bell urged everyone to keep the peace - ensuring "that everything is done with dignity, as it has been - that's how it should be."




The New York Daily News did a study and discovered that Black and Latinos who ride subways are more likely to be stopped and patted down than White subway riders.



(excerpt)


Blacks and Hispanics make up 49% of subway riders, yet account for nearly 90% of the citizens stopped and questioned in the subways in the last two years.

Whites make up 35.5% of subway ridership, yet they account for a mere 7.9% of the subway riders stopped in the last two years, records show.

This racial disparity occurs across the city, particularly in NYPD Transit Districts that serve mostly white neighborhoods of Manhattan, including Wall Street, SoHo, Tribeca, the West Village, the upper West and East Sides, and midtown.

Unlike in the rest of the city, the NYPD's practice of stopping subway riders grew dramatically through last year - even as the crime rate has plummeted.






More New York City Police Department officers were arrested in connection with an off-duty incident. This time four police officers were arrested for a brawl which left the owner of a bar blind. Two for the beating and two more who arrived in response to the beating but ended up assisting their fellow officers who committed the assault.


(excerpt, New York Daily News)




Officers Michael McGhee, 30, and Thomas Wimmer, 25, were off-duty when they attacked Peter Cummins on Sept. 14 as he walked his girlfriend home from a McLean Ave. bar, authorities said Friday.

Cummins, 26, told prosecutors that one of the off-duty cops insulted his girlfriend, sparking an argument. The cops then jumped him, delivering a savage beating, prosecutors said. Cummins lost his left eye in the assault.

NYPD Officers Jeffrey Alicea and Stella Ibanez were on patrol in the Bronx's 47th Precinct near the Yonkers border when they were called to the scene, not knowing off-duty cops were involved, authorities said.

They arrived as McGhee was punching Cummins in the face, prosecutors said.

Alicea, 32, and Ibanez, 39, initially arrested McGhee, who is assigned to the Bronx's 44th Precinct. But they freed him and let him leave after discovering he was a fellow officer, prosecutors said.






The Riverside Downtown Partnership is awarding two individuals including Dell Roberts as volunteer of the year on Feb. 21 at the Marriott Hotel.








After viewing trailers for the film, Vantage Point, I have this to say, that is not the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca. It looks a bit like it. The aerial shots maybe, but the plaza? Not the real thing. Wandering Woman blogs about the filming of the aerial shots here.