Making the Grade: Who or what did we just hire?
"He was a model cadet, as described to me. There is nothing that could have predicted this shocking series of crimes."
---NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly about Officer (and alleged serial bank robber) Christian Torres after his arrest.
And no, Kelly was not speaking tongue in cheek. Apparently he was serious. More on the latest NYPD bad boy further in this posting, but Kelly's comments do raise questions about hiring practices in law enforcement agencies across the country and not just in the NYPD. But Torres isn't the only bad hire in recent months in New York City .
In May 2007, another NYPD officer shot and killed his fiancee, claiming at first that he shot her accidentally while defending them from two knife-welding Black men. Fortunately, his account fooled few people.
Then it was revealed that Officer Harry Rupnarine had nearly been kicked out of the police academy by an instructor for disruptive behavior. However, Rupnarine was still allowed to graduate in July 2005.
(excerpt, New York Post)
"They wanted to throw him out, but they were overruled by their bosses" in the academy, a police source said.
Who can say, what could have been if this cadet had been expelled before he could have been an officer. Would his fiancee, Guiatree Hardat who he shot in the face because she refused to get back together with him be alive today?
Her father, Sukhdeo Hardat recalls his last conversation with her by telephone, including the last words he would ever hear from his daughter.
(excerpt, New York Post)
He called her shortly before the shooting - to see if she needed a ride home from her bus stop - and heard Guiatree screaming, "I hate you! I hate you!"
He also heard a male voice, which Guiatree identified as Rupnarine's.
The worried dad tracked her down to the crime scene, where he saw Rupnarine in handcuffs and his daughter's body in a pool of blood.
New York City's police department boasts a roster of 40,000 a figure far greater than any other law enforcement agency in the country. So it makes sense that the raw numbers of police officers who are arrested and charged with committing crimes would be higher.
Some people blame low salaries in the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies for these problems with officers committing crimes on or off the job. Others believe that hiring processes especially when faced with economic shortages and very competitive recruiting pools which reward larger agencies over smaller ones are part of the problem. Ask a different person, you'll get a different answer.
But let's look at salaries most notably in the NYPD.
The starting salaries for NYPD officers begins at around $25,000 a year, a figure that a lot of people from NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelley to even "cop critics" (as they are called by an NYPD labor union) Low salaries have been blamed for difficulty filling academy classes with cadets with the potential result being that the NYPD could see its smallest force of sworn office in over a decade due to further budget cuts. It's not a lot of money to live on in a city with one of the highest standards of living and for working in a city that's pretty extensive both horizontally and vertically.
The starting salary used to be higher.
An arbitration decision in 2006 reduced the salary for starting officers by 27%. In exchange for this reduction, salary increases were given to the department's more experienced officers.
Meanwhile in Suffolk County, law enforcement officers working there received 21% raises in salary. NYPD officers looking for greener pastures began heading in that direction towards both Suffolk and Nassau Counties. In fact, the competition for positions in the law enforcement agencies of these two New York counties is among the highest in the country.
"They're tried. They're true. But how long do they stay?" That's a question that's asked as the city tries to maintain its staffing at what's becoming a numbers game, both in the department and on the pay checks of those employed there. Most of the officers do stay but others find their eyes wandering. Something other law enforcement agencies hoping to save some money by hiring experienced police officers have taken advantage of in order to staff their own departments.
Some agencies like the Seattle Police Department have tried to recruit and hire officers away from the NYPD while some police officers lateral over into the city's fire department in the same city, even at a huge pay reduction.
When another law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles Police Department, was pushed to implement a federal mandate to subject its special unit officers to periodic financial audits, complaints were made that this wasn't necessary because the LAPD's problems were usually involving issues besides a form of corruption known as "grafting". Even in the Rampart Scandal, which ultimately was responsible for the LAPD federal consent decree including this reform, involved officers beating and shooting people, planting evidence and lying about pretty much everything inside the operation of Rampart's CRASH unit. Any money that was made wasn't hoarded away in bank accounts belong to officers' relatives, it was spent in places like Las Vegas.
Contrast that with the NYPD, where grafting scandals were like bread and butter through large portions of its history, a fact noted by the Knapp Commission which investigated corruption within the NYPD in the 1960s among both what were called the "grass eaters" and the "meat eaters". And it wasn't the only special commission to do so.
And it didn't end with the Knapp Commission. Years later, along came its sequel, the Mollen Commission which investigated allegations of corruption as well.
In NYPD Confidential, questions were raised as to whether an independent monitor would ever be hired to oversee that police department. The answer is no at least not while Kelly's in command.
Torres' arrest for bank robbery attracted attention but it's not like he was the first law enforcement officer to face charges for robbing banks. Former Los Angeles Police Department officer David Mack is in state prison after being convicted of robbing banks. He's better known for serving as the partner of another disgraced LAPD officer, Rafael Perez, who under the terms of a plea bargain after he was caught trying to steal drugs from an evidence locker exposed the notorious Rampart Scandal.
Other officers in Los Angeles County did home invasion robberies and were recently convicted in a trial which outlined their robbery ring through testimony and other evidence.
But the LAPD's salaries aren't especially on the low end of the scale. In fact, the starting pay for a new officer there is about the same level at where an NYPD officer's salary maxes out and in fact, the starting salary at the LAPD is about twice that at the NYPD.
The salaries in the LAPD are much competitive than those in the NYPD in part because the LAPD is constantly locked in a contest of sorts with its neighbor, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to attract candidates. Still, the LAPD struggles in this area of hiring. You can't attribute it to a higher standard of living influencing the salary levels in both cities as comparison because in this case, the two cities are both on the higher end, but the salaries are still very disparate.
But even though the LAPD and other larger law enforcement agencies might provide larger salaries, they have employed criminals within their ranks. Either crimes in the past which eluded background checks perhaps because some of them were contained in sealed juvenile files like was the case of several LAPD officers who had burglary convictions while juveniles and then amazingly went on to commit home invasion robberies while employed as LAPD officers. And don't forget Torres of the NYPD who was actually out brandishing a gun and robbing banks one month before starting work as a police officer where he did, what else, continued his bank robbing spree. Even as his photograph provided courtesy of a surveillance camera was probably being circulated by his future employer, the important connection was never made until it was too late.
The Riverside Police Department has had its share of bad stories involving bad police officers including bad hires. When reading the letter sent by the Santa Ana Police Department sergeant involving the Community Police Review Commission, I noticed that he explained that police officers should be believed (and people who hang around "seedy hotels" should not be) because of the extensive background checks including psychological testing and polygraph testing.
I have two words for him in response. Adam Brown who was busted several years ago for child molestation in two states. Brown passed all the checks and balances supposedly built in the system of hiring to keep applicants like him out of policing. It's not a perfect process by any means.
Even the polygraph test.
Last year, federal agents arrested Office Jose Nazario from the Riverside Police Department and he was later indicted on two counts of manslaughter in connection with the killing of Iraq detainees in Fallujah in 2004. Nazario's innocence or guilt still has to be proven or disproven. What doesn't is that he passed his polygraph.
(excerpt, L.A. Weekly)
That August 7 morning, Nazario stepped out of his cruiser and followed his supervisor into a sergeant's room at the Riverside Police Department. On a table sat a piece of paper, what Nazario thought was a six-month-evaluation form. His supervisor directed him to sign it. As Nazario leaned in to read the paper, hands seized his arms from behind. Another set of hands removed the 40-caliber Glock from his service belt and wrapped handcuffs around his wrists. Agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service placed him under arrest.
The criminal complaint read, plainly: "On or about November 9, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq, defendant Jose Luis Nazario Jr., in heat of passion caused by adequate provocation, unlawfully and intentionally killed two unarmed male human beings, without malice."
It was the same ruse the department used on Adam Brown. Ironically in Nazario's case, his arrest was the result of statements that another ex-Marine had made while he was taking his polygraph for a position in the Secret Service in Los Angeles.
It's frustrating for communities when an officer engages in misconduct and isn't held accountable for it. It's even more frustrating when it turns out that the officer involved had a history of misconduct in his or her current agency or some place else. After all, the Riverside Police Department thought it was hiring just another LAPD lateral in 1997, but what it hired instead was an officer whose name was on the Warren Christopher Commission list of problematic officers. A few dozen officers out of about 9,000 total are included on the list of they have histories of problems using excessive force, multiple onduty shootings and misconduct.
But hiring laterals (officers who have worked for prior law enforcement agencies) is fraught with both promise and peril. Less money is invested in hiring an officer who comes ready trained and with experience to work in policing. However, police officers don't always jump ship based on the "grass is greener" philosophy. Sometimes, they're running away.
In California, one source of frustration as explained by individuals in the Riverside Police Department involved in the hiring process is the difficulty with being able to obtain personnel information on the officers they are looking to hire. Rather than being able to inspect their files, they often have to sit there and ask a person holding the keys to the information on that particular officer questions akin to going on a fishing expedition. If they don't know what to ask, they miss pertinent information they might regret not knowing later on. The reality of this which is attributed mostly to the state's very strict laws regarding the release of the personnel information of peace officers resembles a game show more than a hiring and screening process.
And guess what? Often there's the concern that the Keeper of the Information might not be entirely honest when answering these questions and might try to portray even a rogue officer as a model employee simply to get rid of him or her. It's an "out" for law enforcement agencies faced with a bad officer who in addition could be a financial liability for the city or county involved if it keeps him. So why not hand off your huge problem to an unsuspecting law enforcement agency?
And if you have a sergeant like the one who criticized the CPRC actually working in the hiring process who apparently believes police officers should simply be taken at their word when something awful happens, I guess all you can do is cross your fingers and pray hard that this person doesn't cross paths with a bad officer his agency is evaluating from another agency. At least for the well being of the people in Santa Ana.
You have the law enforcement agencies who might mistakenly hire crooked officers. And believe it or not, you also have departments who boast about hiring them.
Communities should be more vigilant of the hiring and recruiting processes of the agencies which police their communities though given the strict laws that often seem more intent on protecting crooked police (who already receive enough of that from that lovely blue wall of silence which pervades departments from coast to coast). Push for good police officers who build strong working partnerships with communities to be rewarded for doing so because few of them are by law enforcement agencies in comparison to officers who don't do these things. It often seems that despite a lot of verbiage by the heads of law enforcement agencies about the importance of community policing as a philosophy, few officers actually receive awards for this. A few years ago, there was a joint proposal by the CPRC and the Human Relations Commission to create an award for officers and community members who worked together on community policing projects.
It didn't take long at all for the city, another purported supporter of community policing, to nip this one in the bud.
Those officers who do work hard to build partnerships should be encouraged (and these are the ones who rarely need much encouragement) to speak in schools and other venues about their jobs, including officers who are men of color and women.
Mayor Ron Loveridge's task force to address the planned renovations of the downtown library and museum met for the first time on Friday afternoon. It would have been really nice to attend but somehow the city always plans these meetings when few people can attend them. Still at least 40 city residents did attend this meeting.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Minneapolis-based architect Jeffrey Scherer, board chairman of the nonprofit advocacy group Libraries for the Future, warned that not everyone is going to like every aspect of the task force's recommendations, whatever they turn out to be.
"Somebody in this room is not going to get something they want," Scherer said. "But you're probably going to get what you need."
Six task force members did not attend the meeting in a conference room on the top floor of City Hall. About 40 members of the public attended in addition to the task force and city staff.
Three community groups presented their thoughts and the city manager, library director and museum director all made presentations to the group.
The City Council appointed the task force in the wake of a January meeting attended by more than 300 people, most of whom said they favored two separate expansions for the library and museum rather than a shared facility the city had proposed in front of the library.
Scherer made clear there was no prescribed outcome for the task force. But he did say museums and libraries have commonalities.
"I think there's some purpose in thinking about what can be shared," he said.
What's most likely to happen? The city will get what it wants. The city's residents will have to accept that as what it needs. And by the time city residents can actually attend a meeting to freely provide public input, minds will probably already be made up. If you wait to go to the city council meeting to speak on an issue like this one, it's probably too late.
A woman was raped while running on a popular route by Gage Canal in Riverside. Women in Riverside will be crossing another pathway off of their accessibility list to run or walk on. I've known women who have pepper sprayed men who attacked them on the Gage Canal including one woman who was attacked by two men years ago. The woman who got away from her assailant on the bike path was a close friend of a friend of mine who knows her through running. Many female runners have their stories of narrow escapes from being assaulted or raped while running in Riverside, whether it's Gage Canal, the bike path that runs parallel to the Santa Ana riverbed or even Sycamore Canyon Park.
A woman was attacked and suffered broken bones while running on the track of Riverside Community College several years ago. Her assailant was eventually caught after physically attacking numerous women.
So who's this guy? It's not known but he's stated to be a little out of the ordinary.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
"He's a fairly clean-cut guy," Frasher said. "It doesn't fit the description of the stereotypical ... rapist, which again is a cause for concern."
The thing is, the stereotypical rapist doesn't exist. They come in all different shapes, sizes and types. In fact, most rapists are known by their victims though it's often those cases that are never reported. You want to eliminate rape? You'll have to change the culture that glorifies male dominance and violence against women. But until then, there are profiles of the four different types and some information on possible tactics to use if you are attacked by any of them.
Press Enterprise Dan Bernstein noticed huge differences between the prices of matzo and other Jewish foods depending on whether you were a member of the Ralph's price club or not. Up to $19 worth of difference. This was the Ralphs at the Canyoncrest Town Center.
He also discusses the perplexing situation involving Hemet's former city manager.
Inland Empire Democrats will be electing delegates for the convention this weekend. Search for the candidates for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the state's congressional districts here.
$500 million has been allocated to the Inland Empire to address traffic issues at railroad crossings.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Almost half of the money will go toward easing the teeth-gnashing delays Inland drivers endure at 19 intersections where vehicle traffic must wait for trains to pass. Other funds will be for projects to overhaul and widen freeway interchanges and to build a rail bridge in Colton.
Thursday's vote involved the second major pot of money from Prop. 1B, the $19.9 billion transportation bond voters passed in 2006. Officials distributed $4.5 billion statewide in congestion-relief funds last year.
Construction on all the projects is supposed to be under way no later than 2013. By late September, though, the California Transportation Commission wants local agencies and railroads to have hammered out plans to coordinate the wave of complicated grade-separation work, which will allow vehicles to avoid having to cross tracks.
"We want to be in there with our projects, spend the money, and get the improvements done," said Anne Mayer, executive director of the Riverside County Transportation Commission. "We want to spend our allocation as quickly as we can."
The San Bernardino County assessor who found his office the focus of a search warrant by the District Attorney's office will cooperate with the investigation.
What will become of the Los Angeles Police Department's Amendment 40? One councilman wants to weaken it.
Even as both sides in the trial of three New York City Police Department officers on trial in connection with the fatal onduty shooting of Sean Bell prepare to deliver their closing arguments next week to their jury of one, several arrests of other police officers have rocked the city.
Officer Wilfred Rosario has been arrested on allegations he sexually abused one woman and tried to rape another one and has been indicted on several felony charges, according to the New York Daily News.
(excerpt)
Rosario, in his police uniform, first encountered the woman on March 26, prosecutors said. They said he took her address and telephone number, and on March 30, while off duty, went to her home, picked her up and drove to a secluded area along Riverside Drive where he sexually abused her.
The woman tried to get out of the car, but Rosario grabbed her and snatched her back in, prosecutors said. They said he sexually abused her again before finally taking her home.
While investigating that incident, prosecutors said, investigators learned that in March 2002 Rosario attempted to force a then-18-year-old woman to have sex with him.
He's currently in jail on (cough) $10,000 bail.
Another officer,Christian Torres, was recently arrested for robbing a bank as stated earlier. And guess what? It's not the only bank he robbed.
(excerpt, New York Daily News)
A month before he joined the NYPD, Christian Torres robbed a Sovereign Bank on Avenue A in the East Village on June 8, 2007, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
Torres, 21, made off with $16,305 after he passed a note to a teller just after the branch opened.
Donning a matching suit and tie, stylish sunglasses and a fashionable skullcap, Torres returned to the same branch the morning of Nov. 16 and stole $102,000 after he flashed what appeared to be a gun at clerks, Kelly said.
Though Torres' image - and slick wardrobe - was captured on a bank surveillance camera and distributed to the media, his crime spree did not end until he was nabbed at another Sovereign Bank in Muhlenberg, Pa., Thursday morning.
The disgraced transit cop - who makes $32,800 a year - told NYPD investigators he used the bank loot to buy a new car and get his fiancée a fancy engagement ring.
"He made certain admissions," Kelly said. "He said he was getting married."
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Cozy Newsletter (otherwise known as "Old Friend"'s rock of choice, WARNING: Adult Content)
---NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly about Officer (and alleged serial bank robber) Christian Torres after his arrest.
And no, Kelly was not speaking tongue in cheek. Apparently he was serious. More on the latest NYPD bad boy further in this posting, but Kelly's comments do raise questions about hiring practices in law enforcement agencies across the country and not just in the NYPD. But Torres isn't the only bad hire in recent months in New York City .
In May 2007, another NYPD officer shot and killed his fiancee, claiming at first that he shot her accidentally while defending them from two knife-welding Black men. Fortunately, his account fooled few people.
Then it was revealed that Officer Harry Rupnarine had nearly been kicked out of the police academy by an instructor for disruptive behavior. However, Rupnarine was still allowed to graduate in July 2005.
(excerpt, New York Post)
"They wanted to throw him out, but they were overruled by their bosses" in the academy, a police source said.
Who can say, what could have been if this cadet had been expelled before he could have been an officer. Would his fiancee, Guiatree Hardat who he shot in the face because she refused to get back together with him be alive today?
Her father, Sukhdeo Hardat recalls his last conversation with her by telephone, including the last words he would ever hear from his daughter.
(excerpt, New York Post)
He called her shortly before the shooting - to see if she needed a ride home from her bus stop - and heard Guiatree screaming, "I hate you! I hate you!"
He also heard a male voice, which Guiatree identified as Rupnarine's.
The worried dad tracked her down to the crime scene, where he saw Rupnarine in handcuffs and his daughter's body in a pool of blood.
New York City's police department boasts a roster of 40,000 a figure far greater than any other law enforcement agency in the country. So it makes sense that the raw numbers of police officers who are arrested and charged with committing crimes would be higher.
Some people blame low salaries in the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies for these problems with officers committing crimes on or off the job. Others believe that hiring processes especially when faced with economic shortages and very competitive recruiting pools which reward larger agencies over smaller ones are part of the problem. Ask a different person, you'll get a different answer.
But let's look at salaries most notably in the NYPD.
The starting salaries for NYPD officers begins at around $25,000 a year, a figure that a lot of people from NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelley to even "cop critics" (as they are called by an NYPD labor union) Low salaries have been blamed for difficulty filling academy classes with cadets with the potential result being that the NYPD could see its smallest force of sworn office in over a decade due to further budget cuts. It's not a lot of money to live on in a city with one of the highest standards of living and for working in a city that's pretty extensive both horizontally and vertically.
The starting salary used to be higher.
An arbitration decision in 2006 reduced the salary for starting officers by 27%. In exchange for this reduction, salary increases were given to the department's more experienced officers.
Meanwhile in Suffolk County, law enforcement officers working there received 21% raises in salary. NYPD officers looking for greener pastures began heading in that direction towards both Suffolk and Nassau Counties. In fact, the competition for positions in the law enforcement agencies of these two New York counties is among the highest in the country.
"They're tried. They're true. But how long do they stay?" That's a question that's asked as the city tries to maintain its staffing at what's becoming a numbers game, both in the department and on the pay checks of those employed there. Most of the officers do stay but others find their eyes wandering. Something other law enforcement agencies hoping to save some money by hiring experienced police officers have taken advantage of in order to staff their own departments.
Some agencies like the Seattle Police Department have tried to recruit and hire officers away from the NYPD while some police officers lateral over into the city's fire department in the same city, even at a huge pay reduction.
When another law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles Police Department, was pushed to implement a federal mandate to subject its special unit officers to periodic financial audits, complaints were made that this wasn't necessary because the LAPD's problems were usually involving issues besides a form of corruption known as "grafting". Even in the Rampart Scandal, which ultimately was responsible for the LAPD federal consent decree including this reform, involved officers beating and shooting people, planting evidence and lying about pretty much everything inside the operation of Rampart's CRASH unit. Any money that was made wasn't hoarded away in bank accounts belong to officers' relatives, it was spent in places like Las Vegas.
Contrast that with the NYPD, where grafting scandals were like bread and butter through large portions of its history, a fact noted by the Knapp Commission which investigated corruption within the NYPD in the 1960s among both what were called the "grass eaters" and the "meat eaters". And it wasn't the only special commission to do so.
And it didn't end with the Knapp Commission. Years later, along came its sequel, the Mollen Commission which investigated allegations of corruption as well.
In NYPD Confidential, questions were raised as to whether an independent monitor would ever be hired to oversee that police department. The answer is no at least not while Kelly's in command.
Torres' arrest for bank robbery attracted attention but it's not like he was the first law enforcement officer to face charges for robbing banks. Former Los Angeles Police Department officer David Mack is in state prison after being convicted of robbing banks. He's better known for serving as the partner of another disgraced LAPD officer, Rafael Perez, who under the terms of a plea bargain after he was caught trying to steal drugs from an evidence locker exposed the notorious Rampart Scandal.
Other officers in Los Angeles County did home invasion robberies and were recently convicted in a trial which outlined their robbery ring through testimony and other evidence.
But the LAPD's salaries aren't especially on the low end of the scale. In fact, the starting pay for a new officer there is about the same level at where an NYPD officer's salary maxes out and in fact, the starting salary at the LAPD is about twice that at the NYPD.
The salaries in the LAPD are much competitive than those in the NYPD in part because the LAPD is constantly locked in a contest of sorts with its neighbor, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to attract candidates. Still, the LAPD struggles in this area of hiring. You can't attribute it to a higher standard of living influencing the salary levels in both cities as comparison because in this case, the two cities are both on the higher end, but the salaries are still very disparate.
But even though the LAPD and other larger law enforcement agencies might provide larger salaries, they have employed criminals within their ranks. Either crimes in the past which eluded background checks perhaps because some of them were contained in sealed juvenile files like was the case of several LAPD officers who had burglary convictions while juveniles and then amazingly went on to commit home invasion robberies while employed as LAPD officers. And don't forget Torres of the NYPD who was actually out brandishing a gun and robbing banks one month before starting work as a police officer where he did, what else, continued his bank robbing spree. Even as his photograph provided courtesy of a surveillance camera was probably being circulated by his future employer, the important connection was never made until it was too late.
The Riverside Police Department has had its share of bad stories involving bad police officers including bad hires. When reading the letter sent by the Santa Ana Police Department sergeant involving the Community Police Review Commission, I noticed that he explained that police officers should be believed (and people who hang around "seedy hotels" should not be) because of the extensive background checks including psychological testing and polygraph testing.
I have two words for him in response. Adam Brown who was busted several years ago for child molestation in two states. Brown passed all the checks and balances supposedly built in the system of hiring to keep applicants like him out of policing. It's not a perfect process by any means.
Even the polygraph test.
Last year, federal agents arrested Office Jose Nazario from the Riverside Police Department and he was later indicted on two counts of manslaughter in connection with the killing of Iraq detainees in Fallujah in 2004. Nazario's innocence or guilt still has to be proven or disproven. What doesn't is that he passed his polygraph.
(excerpt, L.A. Weekly)
That August 7 morning, Nazario stepped out of his cruiser and followed his supervisor into a sergeant's room at the Riverside Police Department. On a table sat a piece of paper, what Nazario thought was a six-month-evaluation form. His supervisor directed him to sign it. As Nazario leaned in to read the paper, hands seized his arms from behind. Another set of hands removed the 40-caliber Glock from his service belt and wrapped handcuffs around his wrists. Agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service placed him under arrest.
The criminal complaint read, plainly: "On or about November 9, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq, defendant Jose Luis Nazario Jr., in heat of passion caused by adequate provocation, unlawfully and intentionally killed two unarmed male human beings, without malice."
It was the same ruse the department used on Adam Brown. Ironically in Nazario's case, his arrest was the result of statements that another ex-Marine had made while he was taking his polygraph for a position in the Secret Service in Los Angeles.
It's frustrating for communities when an officer engages in misconduct and isn't held accountable for it. It's even more frustrating when it turns out that the officer involved had a history of misconduct in his or her current agency or some place else. After all, the Riverside Police Department thought it was hiring just another LAPD lateral in 1997, but what it hired instead was an officer whose name was on the Warren Christopher Commission list of problematic officers. A few dozen officers out of about 9,000 total are included on the list of they have histories of problems using excessive force, multiple onduty shootings and misconduct.
But hiring laterals (officers who have worked for prior law enforcement agencies) is fraught with both promise and peril. Less money is invested in hiring an officer who comes ready trained and with experience to work in policing. However, police officers don't always jump ship based on the "grass is greener" philosophy. Sometimes, they're running away.
In California, one source of frustration as explained by individuals in the Riverside Police Department involved in the hiring process is the difficulty with being able to obtain personnel information on the officers they are looking to hire. Rather than being able to inspect their files, they often have to sit there and ask a person holding the keys to the information on that particular officer questions akin to going on a fishing expedition. If they don't know what to ask, they miss pertinent information they might regret not knowing later on. The reality of this which is attributed mostly to the state's very strict laws regarding the release of the personnel information of peace officers resembles a game show more than a hiring and screening process.
And guess what? Often there's the concern that the Keeper of the Information might not be entirely honest when answering these questions and might try to portray even a rogue officer as a model employee simply to get rid of him or her. It's an "out" for law enforcement agencies faced with a bad officer who in addition could be a financial liability for the city or county involved if it keeps him. So why not hand off your huge problem to an unsuspecting law enforcement agency?
And if you have a sergeant like the one who criticized the CPRC actually working in the hiring process who apparently believes police officers should simply be taken at their word when something awful happens, I guess all you can do is cross your fingers and pray hard that this person doesn't cross paths with a bad officer his agency is evaluating from another agency. At least for the well being of the people in Santa Ana.
You have the law enforcement agencies who might mistakenly hire crooked officers. And believe it or not, you also have departments who boast about hiring them.
Communities should be more vigilant of the hiring and recruiting processes of the agencies which police their communities though given the strict laws that often seem more intent on protecting crooked police (who already receive enough of that from that lovely blue wall of silence which pervades departments from coast to coast). Push for good police officers who build strong working partnerships with communities to be rewarded for doing so because few of them are by law enforcement agencies in comparison to officers who don't do these things. It often seems that despite a lot of verbiage by the heads of law enforcement agencies about the importance of community policing as a philosophy, few officers actually receive awards for this. A few years ago, there was a joint proposal by the CPRC and the Human Relations Commission to create an award for officers and community members who worked together on community policing projects.
It didn't take long at all for the city, another purported supporter of community policing, to nip this one in the bud.
Those officers who do work hard to build partnerships should be encouraged (and these are the ones who rarely need much encouragement) to speak in schools and other venues about their jobs, including officers who are men of color and women.
Mayor Ron Loveridge's task force to address the planned renovations of the downtown library and museum met for the first time on Friday afternoon. It would have been really nice to attend but somehow the city always plans these meetings when few people can attend them. Still at least 40 city residents did attend this meeting.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Minneapolis-based architect Jeffrey Scherer, board chairman of the nonprofit advocacy group Libraries for the Future, warned that not everyone is going to like every aspect of the task force's recommendations, whatever they turn out to be.
"Somebody in this room is not going to get something they want," Scherer said. "But you're probably going to get what you need."
Six task force members did not attend the meeting in a conference room on the top floor of City Hall. About 40 members of the public attended in addition to the task force and city staff.
Three community groups presented their thoughts and the city manager, library director and museum director all made presentations to the group.
The City Council appointed the task force in the wake of a January meeting attended by more than 300 people, most of whom said they favored two separate expansions for the library and museum rather than a shared facility the city had proposed in front of the library.
Scherer made clear there was no prescribed outcome for the task force. But he did say museums and libraries have commonalities.
"I think there's some purpose in thinking about what can be shared," he said.
What's most likely to happen? The city will get what it wants. The city's residents will have to accept that as what it needs. And by the time city residents can actually attend a meeting to freely provide public input, minds will probably already be made up. If you wait to go to the city council meeting to speak on an issue like this one, it's probably too late.
A woman was raped while running on a popular route by Gage Canal in Riverside. Women in Riverside will be crossing another pathway off of their accessibility list to run or walk on. I've known women who have pepper sprayed men who attacked them on the Gage Canal including one woman who was attacked by two men years ago. The woman who got away from her assailant on the bike path was a close friend of a friend of mine who knows her through running. Many female runners have their stories of narrow escapes from being assaulted or raped while running in Riverside, whether it's Gage Canal, the bike path that runs parallel to the Santa Ana riverbed or even Sycamore Canyon Park.
A woman was attacked and suffered broken bones while running on the track of Riverside Community College several years ago. Her assailant was eventually caught after physically attacking numerous women.
So who's this guy? It's not known but he's stated to be a little out of the ordinary.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
"He's a fairly clean-cut guy," Frasher said. "It doesn't fit the description of the stereotypical ... rapist, which again is a cause for concern."
The thing is, the stereotypical rapist doesn't exist. They come in all different shapes, sizes and types. In fact, most rapists are known by their victims though it's often those cases that are never reported. You want to eliminate rape? You'll have to change the culture that glorifies male dominance and violence against women. But until then, there are profiles of the four different types and some information on possible tactics to use if you are attacked by any of them.
Press Enterprise Dan Bernstein noticed huge differences between the prices of matzo and other Jewish foods depending on whether you were a member of the Ralph's price club or not. Up to $19 worth of difference. This was the Ralphs at the Canyoncrest Town Center.
He also discusses the perplexing situation involving Hemet's former city manager.
Inland Empire Democrats will be electing delegates for the convention this weekend. Search for the candidates for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the state's congressional districts here.
$500 million has been allocated to the Inland Empire to address traffic issues at railroad crossings.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Almost half of the money will go toward easing the teeth-gnashing delays Inland drivers endure at 19 intersections where vehicle traffic must wait for trains to pass. Other funds will be for projects to overhaul and widen freeway interchanges and to build a rail bridge in Colton.
Thursday's vote involved the second major pot of money from Prop. 1B, the $19.9 billion transportation bond voters passed in 2006. Officials distributed $4.5 billion statewide in congestion-relief funds last year.
Construction on all the projects is supposed to be under way no later than 2013. By late September, though, the California Transportation Commission wants local agencies and railroads to have hammered out plans to coordinate the wave of complicated grade-separation work, which will allow vehicles to avoid having to cross tracks.
"We want to be in there with our projects, spend the money, and get the improvements done," said Anne Mayer, executive director of the Riverside County Transportation Commission. "We want to spend our allocation as quickly as we can."
The San Bernardino County assessor who found his office the focus of a search warrant by the District Attorney's office will cooperate with the investigation.
What will become of the Los Angeles Police Department's Amendment 40? One councilman wants to weaken it.
Even as both sides in the trial of three New York City Police Department officers on trial in connection with the fatal onduty shooting of Sean Bell prepare to deliver their closing arguments next week to their jury of one, several arrests of other police officers have rocked the city.
Officer Wilfred Rosario has been arrested on allegations he sexually abused one woman and tried to rape another one and has been indicted on several felony charges, according to the New York Daily News.
(excerpt)
Rosario, in his police uniform, first encountered the woman on March 26, prosecutors said. They said he took her address and telephone number, and on March 30, while off duty, went to her home, picked her up and drove to a secluded area along Riverside Drive where he sexually abused her.
The woman tried to get out of the car, but Rosario grabbed her and snatched her back in, prosecutors said. They said he sexually abused her again before finally taking her home.
While investigating that incident, prosecutors said, investigators learned that in March 2002 Rosario attempted to force a then-18-year-old woman to have sex with him.
He's currently in jail on (cough) $10,000 bail.
Another officer,Christian Torres, was recently arrested for robbing a bank as stated earlier. And guess what? It's not the only bank he robbed.
(excerpt, New York Daily News)
A month before he joined the NYPD, Christian Torres robbed a Sovereign Bank on Avenue A in the East Village on June 8, 2007, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
Torres, 21, made off with $16,305 after he passed a note to a teller just after the branch opened.
Donning a matching suit and tie, stylish sunglasses and a fashionable skullcap, Torres returned to the same branch the morning of Nov. 16 and stole $102,000 after he flashed what appeared to be a gun at clerks, Kelly said.
Though Torres' image - and slick wardrobe - was captured on a bank surveillance camera and distributed to the media, his crime spree did not end until he was nabbed at another Sovereign Bank in Muhlenberg, Pa., Thursday morning.
The disgraced transit cop - who makes $32,800 a year - told NYPD investigators he used the bank loot to buy a new car and get his fiancée a fancy engagement ring.
"He made certain admissions," Kelly said. "He said he was getting married."
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Labels: battering while blue, business as usual, labor pains, recruitment
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