There will come soft rains, maybe

It might rain this weekend as a colder storm moves through the area but then again, it might not.


The pavilion at City Hall that is named after two local civil rights activists will be dedicated in a ceremony in May. Ironic in a building that's seen some abrupt departures of notable men and women of color in management positions including one who was told by her boss that she wasn't management material but then again, this is Riverside.

It's reminiscent of when Mayor Ron Loveridge dedicated the erection of the monument to Martin Luther King, jr. which now stands downtown by saying there would be a zero tolerance on racist language in the workplace. Of course, at the time there were allegations and a lawsuit filed by Black city employees including those in the Public Works Department that the city produced a racially hostile work environment including in its corporate yard.

The pavilion honor is one richly deserved by the Griers for all the great work they have done, but it's hard not to look at situations like these as the city's way of trying to look good especially when it's been criticized for racism in its employee ranks. And the city's paid out on law suits from Officer Roger Sutton's $1.64 million verdict to the settlements given to five employees who were plaintiffs in the 1997 law suit filed in U.S. District Court.

City departments are still getting sued. The Riverside Police Department has been a party in two lawsuits filed by current and past female police officers, Kelsy Metzler in Riverside County Superior Court and Laura Digiorgio in U.S. District Court.






The center of controversy this past week has been Rate My Cop which was removed from the internet by one hosting service but soon found another one. Some times you get there to the home page. Sometimes you're routed instead to a site about Victorian doll houses. None of the links work and when you refresh the page, you go back to looking at Victorian doll houses again. Yes, I can see why this site would have people up in arms. The doll houses look nice, but how expensive are they and are they limited in color scheme?

So what's the controversy? It's modeled after another site, Rate My Professor which also was the center of controversy several years ago.



CBS News covered this issue and the outrage expressed by law enforcement officers about the site and some have threatened to push legislation to ban the Web site.



(excerpt)



Officer Hector Basurto, the vice president of the Latino Police Officers Association, recently learned about the site. "I'd like to see it gone," he said.

"Having a website like this out there puts a lot of law enforcement in danger," he said. "It exposes us out there."

Kevin Martin, the vice president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, agrees. "Will they be able to access our home addresses, home phone numbers, marital status, whether or not we have children? That's always a big concern for us," he said.

Creators of the site say no personal information will be on the site. They gathered officers' names, which are public information, from more than 450 police agencies nationwide. Some listings also have badge numbers along with the officer's names.

Rebecca Costell says, in a statement, that the site helps people rate more than 130,000 officers by rating them on authority, fairness and satisfaction.

She adds, "Our website's purpose is to break the stereotype that people have that cops are all bad by having officers become responsible for their actions."


The site was created through numerous freedom of information requests to obtain the lists of officers employed by law enforcement agencies across the nation. Those lists are public records.

In fact, you can find a list of all the employees who work for the Riverside Police Department right here. Are they located in some database? No, they are listed in the police chief's annual report released earlier this year. Why were they listed? Because the police chief wanted to honor and recognize the accomplishments of his police agency and the names of all the individuals who were members of his organization who had worked hard the past year on those accomplishments. It is in a sense an inclusive commendation of employees by their boss. Is the inclusion of this list of employees in a public report that's also available online going to create much of a protest? Probably not, precisely because it was done to commend and praise the accomplishments of officers not criticize them.

If Chief Russ Leach instead had published a list and circulated it in a report listing the names of officers and the number of complaints they had received in the past five years, then he would have a problem. If he would have posted which ones were included in the department's early warning system, that might be a problem too. The laws which govern both the positive and negative are different, but so are the attitudes and belief systems because after all, it's the attitudes and systems that created those laws in the first place.


The concern about personal information about officers being included on sites like Rate My Cop is a very real one ranging from concerns to safety and identity theft in a world which increasingly is becoming more technologically advanced and dependent on computerized databases. The public has its own concerns about databases that include personal information being misused by police officers like what has happened here, here and here. Oh, and here too.


In Australia, not only are the databases used by police misused, the information is then sold.


Databases are also abused by police officers who want to control the women in their lives and are factors in many domestic violence cases involving law enforcement officers.


These situations are of great concern to the public, especially since nationwide, discipline is rare in cases like the above. Some agencies fire officers for accessing professional databases for personal use. Some agencies look the other way.


The controversy about the site is being blogged across the internet including at L.A. City Zine and fracas.


Freedom In Our Time writes about the controversy and finds a way to tie in the recent sentencing of former Gilligan's Island star Dawn Wells on marijuana charges.


The site is critiqued and discussed at Go Girlfriend and many other places.



If law enforcement agencies and their unions don't like sites like this one, one way to limit them in their tracks is to push as hard for an independent process of investigating civilian complaints that doesn't reek of covering up misconduct or protecting officers who engage in it. A process that has some accountability to it, which is missing in many law enforcement agencies in this country. Many smaller agencies have serious problems but large ones do too. It's really hard to take seriously statistics for agencies like Atlanta Police Department and Chicago Police Department that claim sustained allegation rates of around 2.5% with all the problems both agencies have been having.

The management of the Atlanta Police Department rehauled its upper level staffing including who was assigned to oversee the internal affairs division not long after federal prosecutors told the world that the agency was rife with corruption. Perhaps it is rethinking its 2.5% sustain rate going back to at least 1998. And the city of Chicago had to hire an ex-FBI employee to lead that city's agency which at this moment is still being rehauled at its upper levels of management.

Dismantle that blue wall of silence where even good officers will say nothing in the face of misconduct by other officers either to protect the code or their own jobs. While touring the Lincoln Station, I noticed posted in the roll call room were posters about labor rights in the workplace including those protecting whistle blowers. That's all well and good, but are these policies really in place or are they just words on pieces of paper?

The code of silence doesn't really do much good for police officers who do their jobs without engaging in misconduct and in the long run is detrimental. In fact, does corruption enhance morale inside a law enforcement agency or does it diminish it? In these situations involving law enforcement agencies, it appears that morale deteroriates over a period of time when there's corruption in an environment.

The agencies with the most broken down complaint systems which treat the process like a circular file will probably be the ones where the officers receive the most comments. The ones where the officers stand and watch silently including supervisors as their officers behave badly either not caring enough to do or say anything or believing that chiding them behind closed doors afterward is enough to restore community's trust. It also wouldn't be surprising if many of the departments that receive a lot of attention by people on sites like Rate My Cop were actually smaller agencies who don't benefit from being able to tap into sizable hiring pools of very qualified candidates (and in fact, several have hired registered sex offenders as officers) and may not have functioning complaint systems that are nonbiased and user-friendly for the public.



Officers who work in communities should do just that, work with communities, not work through them. The discussions which take place on these types of sites, whether they're about police, teachers or judges (as more than one commenter suggested) are already being conducted or have been in many communities in many cities, counties and towns when it comes to "grading" police officers on their conduct or misconduct in those communities.

Certain officers, both in terms of good behavior and bad, are mentioned over and over again and that's probably the case everywhere. Whether in the case of bad behavior these trends are reflected in complaints received is not known due to the secrecy of that process in most states. But the departments must be aware of it because all you have to do is mention that community members are concerned about an officer with a history of complaints being involved in a controversial incident or a shooting and a representative will say, it wasn't him without being told the name of the officer. That's what has happened in cases where there were controversial incidents involving officers with past complaints and problems, like in the case of Inglewood Police Department officer, Jeremy Morse and Los Angeles Police Department officers Lawrence Powell and Ted Briseno.

The department in Riverside is supposed to have a nondisciplinary system in place to in a sense do like, in that it monitors police officers who fall within a certain range of criteria that warrants their tracking over a period of time by supervisors. The "Early Warning System" is being set up in more and more law enforcement agencies, often due to court-mandated reform programs.

It was first suggested in Riverside by the Mayor's Use of Force Panel as one of its recommendations in 1999. This particular recommendation was fought with more resistance by the police union than any of the others except both the recommendations for a civilian review board and a traffic stop study program but it was sent to the Human Relations Commission and then its subcommittee, LEPAC for development. It was mandated and modified by the stipulated judgment with the state attorney general's office in 2001.

The EWS serves a purpose to track officers in the hopes of correcting behaviors that might lead to bigger (and more expensive for the city) problems. However, the one shortcoming of this system to most community members is that it's process is completely internalized so people know very little of what's going on with it or if it's having any positive impact at all.

EWS programs aren't established during times of calm within law enforcement agencies and their cities or counties. They are most often called for or mandated during times of distrust and volatility between law enforcement agencies and the communities they police. Many of them as stated come through federal and state decrees, which result from investigations done by outside agencies during times of strife between communities and their law enforcement agencies. That makes the situation more difficult.

What's hard for community members often is that the officer who seems to most often have the backs of the other officers are the bad ones. Not the good ones who might and have historically discovered how lonely things can get when they report on their fellow officers who engage in misconduct. After all, what happens to most of them who expose corruption or misconduct? They get ostracized or run out by their own from one end of the country to the other. Even Frank Serpico of the New York City Police Department was vilified by many police officers in his department even decades after he blew the whistle on serious corruption. But there's probably those who stand in the background or go up and whisper in his ear that they were glad someone finally exposed what they hadn't been able to do in years or decades. Then they look around to make sure no one from inside the ranks and especially not a supervisor has seen what they've done, hanging with the "enemy". Because they might not want the same treatment aimed at them.

And the stories aren't much different outside of the United States.

In Australia, one officer was put in what must be the law enforcement's version of the Witness Protection Program for testifying on serious misconduct and corruption at the agency that employed him. That's pretty damn sad that it comes to that to clean up a law enforcement agency.






Here's a shock. State governments don't like "sunshine" laws.





Chicago's police department is undergoing a major clean sweep by its new police chief, according to the Chicago Tribune. About 21 of 27 district commander positions will be restaffed and that's just for starters. This shouldn't be so surprising considering the serious problems that have impacted this law enforcement agency some say for decades.


(excerpt)


Some of the changes announced Thursday involve promotions and lateral moves, others retirements and demotions.

Among the more notable moves, Belmont Area Cmdr. Thomas Byrne was appointed chief of detectives while Debra Kirby, former head of the internal affairs division, was named Weis' top lawyer.

The changes surprised the police union president, who called the shake-up the largest shuffle in his three decades of police work.

"A couple of them are understandable, and some are puzzling," said Mark Donahue, Fraternal Order of Police president.

Donahue questioned how Weis, on the job since just Feb. 1, made the changes so quickly, saying the moves will cost many veteran police officers their positions. "I think it's unexpected to a lot of these individuals, " he said.

While it isn't uncommon for police superintendents to make staff changes, Weis' move to shift more than 40 officers at the same time may be unprecedented.




The Eugene Register-Guard Editorial Board stated that the city government needs to support the police auditor in the wake of controversy involving Christina Beamud.



(excerpt)



The imminent arrival of a new city manager provides an opportunity for the council to resolve its differences and ensure that the auditor gets the strong support she needs from both council and administration. Hesitant councilors should reflect on the sex abuse scandal that prompted the 2005 vote on external police review. It festered for six years before the predatory officers finally were brought to justice, in part because female victims were too fearful of retaliation and intimidation to report their complaints to police. The city ended up paying millions of dollars to victims — and a far higher price in the loss of public trust.

Police Chief Robert Lehner should make clear to his employees that he will not tolerate frivolous complaints targeting the auditor. He should remind them that hard-working, honest officers have a vested interest in accessible, impartial, transparent and accountable oversight. The auditor is attempting to do work that is essential to restoring the community’s trust in its police.

If the police department and council continue to send mixed messages on oversight, it wouldn’t be long before the current auditor leaves out of frustration. Her successors eventually would do the same.

It’s time for the council — the entire council — to commit fully to the auditor’s survival and success. Those who want independent oversight to go away, or be rendered ineffective, must not prevail.









Remember Columbia, Missouri's quest for civilian review? The citizen Oversight Committee just held its first meeting and this body might be the next step towards the city getting a civilian review board of its own.



(excerpt, KOMU)



Among the participants was Paul Brugmann, a Boone County resident who read a testimony involving what happened to his mother. He said she was “traumatized” by the police officers before being taken to jail for an unpaid traffic ticket.

Bruce Maier, another member of the audience, told the 15 committee members about two incidents involving aggressive action by the police within the past six months. Maier felt the Columbia Police Department should serve the people, not their corporate entity, and there should be no reason for them to object the formation of a review board.

Other speakers were more lighthearted, saying they like police but felt that just as the mayor and city council answer to citizens, police should do same.

The audience’s testimony will be used for a report to present to the city council this fall. The committee members were appointed to their positions on November 20, 2007.

"We started out by looking at models of other citizen boards in other cities," said Rex Campbell of the Citizen Oversight Committee. "Then we got people who had considerable expertise in that area to come in and talk to us about various types of citizen review boards."

Committee members said there was a struggle getting off the ground, but the session was only a small part of what is needed to determine the purpose of the review board.





About a dozen Boston Police Department officers have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury. One of the topics they will be questioned on is steroid abuse within the department, according to the Boston Globe.



(excerpt)



The steroid investigation is the latest fallout from one of the most embarrassing episodes in the department's recent history, a scandal that involved officers scheming to guard truckloads of cocaine, and using steroids. The ringleader, former officer Roberto "Kiko" Pulido, also guarded parties hosted by a convicted drug dealer, where nude dancers and prostitutes mingled with police officers.

For at least three months, the grand jury has been questioning officers whose names were mentioned in hours of videotape and wiretapped cellphone conversations recorded by the FBI during its investigation of Pulido, who pleaded guilty in November to charges that he conspired to traffic cocaine and heroin from Western Massachusetts to Jamaica Plain. An FBI agent wrote in a 2006 affidavit that Pulido "unwittingly provided extensive information about the illegal conduct of other Boston officers."

"They're hauling in people who may have once used steroids," said one of the law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition he not be named. "They're following up on every lead that came out of those wiretaps." The officials all spoke separately and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe and because grand jury proceedings are secret.




Why on earth would a deputy tase his own friends? Perhaps a Lee County Sheriff's Department deputy can answer that after being suspended for tasing three of his friends during a Super Bowl party. There was some alcohol served at the party and Deputy Michael Detar admitted to using his taser after an investigation was conducted that apparently included viewing a video taken of the troubling incident.



(excerpt, Naples News)



Detar said he knew tasing his friends was a stupid thing to do, inappropriate and against agency policy, according to the report.

He apologized for his behavior and any embarrassment he may have caused Sheriff Mike Scott and the Sheriff’s Office. R>
Scott could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.




You would think that if a law enforcement agency was going to train an officer to use a taser that it would teach him or her that it's not a toy. Perhaps that is some information that needs to be added to the curriculum?

Unfortunately these incidents don't seem to be too uncommon. Recently, one law enforcement officer tried out his taser on another officer, shooting him in the face and mouth with the two taser probes. That unfortunate officer had to be hospitalized.




Friends of Stacey Peterson who's been missing since last Oct. 28 have asked people to boycott the bar where her husband, Drew Peterson hangs out.