City Hall: Complaints, commissioners and the CPRC, oh my!

The Riverside city council approved construction of a skate park in the Eastside on Tuesday night.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



The Riverside City Council on Tuesday approved conceptual plans to build a skate park on three little used tennis courts at Bobby Bonds Park. The park will offer a variety of obstacles, including tables, ramps, benches, stairs and rails for beginners and advanced skaters. The estimated cost is $785,000.

A group of Eastside skaters, who have rallied for the skate park, gave one another high fives outside the council chambers after the 7-0 vote.

"The squeaky wheel gets the oil," said Ciro Garza, 15, who headed the quest for the park. "If you don't talk you're not going to be heard."

The skaters had met with city staff several times over the past few months to develop plans for the park. They also got support from neighbors, gathering 25 signatures.

The council praised the teens' efforts.

"This is your city," Mayor Ron Loveridge said. "We are doing the park not because staff, in the abstract, thought it was a good idea, but because of your own interests."




Local columnist, Dan Bernstein addresses the skate park discussion here. It's interesting given how many observers don't think the Eastside neighborhood will even survive either the city or UCR's long-range plan that the mayor would actually tell some of its younger residents that this is "your city". But a lot of people celebrated the skate park's passage.




Tremors, the nightclub, has closed apparently forever.


The cozy relationships between Temecula's city council and developers (as if that's unique)are being criticized again.



In West Hemet, a housing project is attracting a lot of controversy.



When you think of racially diverse bodies in the city of Riverside, not many come to mind. One of those that doesn't come to mind is the Community Police Review Commission which since City Manager Brad Hudson has taken over the management of it, had become more White than the police department's sworn officer force that it oversees complaints against.

Of course, commenting on the lack of racial diversity on the CPRC at first resulted in rather defensive responses by White commissioners, who comprise seven out of nine spots on the commission. Then amazingly enough, the "concern" about this lack of ethnic and racial diversity is serious enough to warrant mention by CPRC Chair Brian Pearcy in the much belated annual report and even an agenda item under the Outreach Committee. These were interesting developments in the dialogue on this issue by the CPRC that initially hadn't seemed very receptive on this issue. It sent a strange message to the community to have concerns disregarded or dismissed on the racial diversity at several of its meetings and then having these concerns presented in the annual report before the city council.

But this posting isn't about that.

It's about how difficult it can be to be a man or woman of color in a sea of White faces on a commission and how vulnerable that makes you to being pushed by outside forces for removal from this body. That's happened three times, twice to a man or woman of color and one strictly behind the scenes involving a White male commissioner who resigned last summer. But there's been many more White commissioners than those who are Black or Latino. There has never been an Asian-American commissioner as of this year.

Latina Sheri Corral was the target of demands for her removal in 2004 by members of the Riverside Police Officers' Association's leadership for reasons of "bias" according to a letter submitted by that leadership to then Executive Director Don Williams. Amazingly enough, only days later a council member who had received ample funding from the RPOA's PAC when running for office contacted me and asked me my opinion on a proposed agenda item to bar active law enforcement officers from serving on the commission. The timing was just amazing between these two events.

Ultimately, the councilman's agenda item was referred to committee where it died, Corral remained on the commission and was reappointed and except for a statement made by Chief Russ Leach while deposed by the RPOA's attorney for Ryan Wilson v the City of Riverside apparently joining in "with my police association" in support for her ouster, it's been pretty quiet since on this front at least.

But not for all the commissioners, as former commissioner Steve Simpson discovered last summer when he was the focus of an attempt to either "shape up", "toe the line" or face a potential ouster. There's conflicting information in where the push to do this actually came from. A councilman who questioned me about Simpson's mental competence told me that "concerns" were raised by another council member and political supporter of that council member to him. At any rate, after several of what were called "counseling sessions" including at least one with Pearcy, Simpson resigned.

Next on deck in what's becoming a civic version of Survivor Island is Jim Ward, the commission's only Black member.

In January, a White male sergeant from the Santa Ana Police Department submitted what he called a "formal complaint" in writing to current executive manager, Kevin Rogan. His complaint was on allegations he raised that Ward's comments in a Press Enterprise article about the fatal shooting in April 2006 of Lee Deante Brown were "ignorant" and "unprofessional". He listed a series of examples, all of which will be addressed in future postings on this site based on material in both the CPRC's majority report, Ward's minority report, the CPRC's investigators report on his investigation and all the public records available in the police department's own investigation of this shooting. These are documents that this individual didn't mention in his letter as having even read. It's too bad he didn't do so before he wrote his letter to Rogan. If he had, he might have had a larger pool of data on the Brown case to assist him in formulating stronger arguments addressing his concerns. Suffice it to say, the "grounds" for the complaint against Ward and the recommendation for him to "step down" were based on a difference of opinion rather than factual issues if what is presented so far in both the public investigations involving the Brown shooting are factually correct.

Rogan wrote back on Feb. 7, stating that the CPRC had no jurisdiction to process or review on a complaint filed against one of its members so the complainant should contact members of the city council with his concerns and his complaint.

Ward also wrote a letter to Rogan and cced it to various parties including the city council and the complainant about his willingness to address at a future meeting the concerns raised by the complainant "and his supporters" and his request for it to be placed on the agenda. Pending approval of the city attorney's office, hopefully it will be on the agenda for the general meeting later this month.

No stranger to criticism is Ward. In fact, a video tape of him participating in a discussion which was part of the department's training on avoiding racial profiling of individuals was aired during a training session involving a group of Riverside Police Department and Riverside Community College District police officers as a joke and a means to ridicule him. When this issue was made known to the supervising sergeant of that training, he allegedly said there was nothing he could do about it. It's interesting that the only commissioner who's Black is the one who would be treated like that by police officers in Riverside. Not all police officers, but ones in that training group who went into that room believing that their behavior ridiculing him was acceptable behavior and an appropriate style of joking and that belief in their right to do so wasn't created inside that room. Those officers brought it into that room with them.

Joking like this is a means to avoid addressing complicity in behavior that's offensive and it's a means to try to gather more individuals into joining you to shame this individual.


That was several years ago and Ward's challenge is coming from a different area this time but it's interesting how he and Corral, the nonwhite commissioners who are still left after the resignations of three Latino commissioners and the terming out of another one within a time span less than a year, have faced complaints or demands for expulsion from the commission. It's also interesting how with the exception of Simpson, no White commissioners' tenure on this body has been challenged or complained about through trying to call for their ouster or pressing them to "step down".

In fact, after the councilman who proposed that law enforcement officers be barred from the CPRC realized that there wasn't just Corral who would be ineligible but also Pearcy, a reserve officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, the timbre on the dialogue changed and it came to be about not challenging current officers serving on the CPRC.

Still, it will be interesting if the complainant even takes up Ward on his offer for a discussion to take place at a future general meeting. One can only he does do so because that could be an opportunity for great discussion by this complainant, his supporters and the commission. In the meantime, more to come here.






In Colton, the location of much intrigue involving its city government, Latinos are criticizing the police department for racial profiling.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



Police officials denied that the department targets minorities. The head of the officer's union said the event was politically motivated, organized in part by a supporter of the recall effort against Colton Mayor Kelly Chastain. The association backs the mayor.

The event was organized after an April 2 incident at La Villa, a restaurant owned by Maria Serrano, a recall supporter, said Latino activist Gil Navarro. Police went to La Villa to serve an arrest warrant against Serrano's nephew after receiving a tip that he was there.

Activists said it was no coincidence that a fundraiser was being held at the restaurant that same night for an opponent of Chastain.

The illegal raid, as activists described the incident, was meant to intimidate supporters of Mel Albiso, a Latino mayoral candidate.

Police officials said officers acted professionally. Police Chief Bob Miller said an audio recording of the encounter, not released to the public, indicated officers were not abusive.

He said by the time officers arrived, the fundraiser had ended.

"(The critics) are making frivolous and false allegations against police officers," said Sgt. Kyle Kershner, president of the Colton Police Officers Association.




The last witness called by the defense gave his testimony. Not testifying were any of the three New York City Police Department officers on trial in connection with the November 2006 fatal shooting of Sean Bell outside a Queens nightclub.





A judge in Orange County who called Latino defendants "Pedro" and calling people "Nazis" has been asked to resign.