CPRC: A new Web site is coming and so's a new mythology

Coming soon will be a new and separate Web site on the Riverside Community Police Review Commission, including information on the complaint filing, investigation and review process as well as more information about the CPRC's history including the exercising of the different powers it has which are stated in the city's charter and municipal ordinance along with links where you can find different references to many of the events and issues involving the CPRC that are available online. As long as City Hall remains intent on rewriting its present and thus the past at almost every meeting addressing the CPRC, it's important that a detailed chronology can be made available to the public. At least to help people's heads stop spinning trying to keep up.

Alternative resources to access and use while filing complaints with the CPRC and the police department will also be listed on the site including several organizations which have expressed an interest in receiving any reports of complaints involving the Riverside Police Department including the ACLU and NAEJA which is also looking into the Rialto Police Department with the most recent news being is that some sort of federal intervention may be on its way or already there. More information on what specifically is being asked for will be included on the new site.

Yes, this city and its police department have a complaint system. Yes, this city has a form of civilian oversight so to speak. But if you want to to file a complaint, wait a year or longer to get a letter back from the city about its resolution and deal with a sustain rate of about 2.2%, then this is a place for you to go. And that's from the commission (and one that hasn't done any meaningful community outreach in well over a year), according to the statistics provided for 2008 in the recently posted draft of the upcoming 2007/08 annual report. It wouldn't be surprising if the sustain results for the police department and city manager's office were even lower but unless the 2008 figures for these two agencies are provided for the 2007/08 report, this can't be ascertained.

That may or may be an accurate reflection of what should be, but it's difficult to completely trust such a low number because very low numbers like that one are often found in law enforcement agencies from Atlanta (which clocked in at "very low" in both 1998 and 2007) to Chicago (and you can read about its low sustain rates here and its 1% sustain rate from 2002 here ) which have serious problems necessitating federal investigations. Yes, even Riverside in the 1990s which was the decade when complaints wound up in the circular file, right before the boom falls on all three of these agencies either through federal or state oversight. One can evaluate that Riverside's very low numbers this time around might be a product of the five-year consent decree that the city was forced to enter into with the State Attorney General's office in 2001 but given the decreasing lack of transparency in the police department since the dissolution of the consent decree, it's hard for the public to ascertain whether the decreasing sustain rate deserves a gold star or a red flag.

It's likely that it is the passage of time that will be the best judge of that.

Also the issue of retaliation for filing complaints is one that comes up with people wishing to file complaints. Whether it's perceived or real or both, it's a problem on some scale and it's creating concern in communities.

In some cases, it's really best not to file or be involved in the complaint or investigation process at all. It's a decision that each complainant must make taking all the factors including the well being of themselves or their families in consideration. Having had family members read in four different newspapers on Christmas Eve several years ago about comments made by a then-unidentified individual "praying" for harm to myself and them, this is unfortunately an area that I know about more than I would wish on anyone. And having all hell break loose on your Web site by people frothing at the keyboard because of an internal investigation which you really had very little to do with, has taught me about who really owns the investigative process anyway and who doesn't.

Unfortunately as it turned out both the individuals who wished harm on me and my family or not to bother to call the police are or have been assigned to my neighborhood policing center at one time or another. So yes, some of us do have to think twice before calling the police for assistance. Do you really want an officer to come out to assist you who wished you would be the victim of a violent crime by a parolee [in the area where you lived] purportedly to teach you some lesson? Even though it's more likely that a professional officer is going to be the one sent out to respond, do you really want to play the odds that this might not be the case?

A former law enforcement officer who once coauthored an opinion piece on the CPRC and Measure II in 2004 was told by a neighbor that several officers had told the neighbor that "a troublemaker lives in that house".

I was also recently in a situation where I gave some threatening writings associated with a gang that I had found while walking to a police officer which was to be forwarded to one of the department's investigative divisions. Because despite what one patrol officer used to go around telling people, I'm not particularly fond of gangs.

And there's nothing wrong with forwarding it to the division best equipped, staffed and trained to handle it.

The officer who was very nice asked for my contact information and I chose not to provide it because I didn't feel comfortable or safe at all doing it because I didn't know whose it would be given to and I have reason to believe that doing so in this case could impact my safety. It's difficult to want to do the right thing because it's your civic responsibility but to have to worry that the wrong police officer might have to be the one who has to contact you for further information, has to be factored into a decision as well. In this case, I wasn't going to provide my contact information and arranged through a community leader to have any questions that this division might have forwarded through another officer.

But it's difficult to really feel confident calling the police because you don't know which one will respond.

It could be the one who wished harm on your family. It could be the one who told you not to call. It could be the one (or more) who you've never met who may have written harassing and threatening things about you on the internet. It could be the officer you've never spoken to who told his partner he hated you just last month for reasons only known to him.

The majority of officers in the police department are good, professional and hard-working officers who do their job because they love it, they're called to it and they value themselves and what they do. That provides hope that the police department is going in the direction it needs to go and that it will go in that direction.

But some don't fall in that category and it's those ones the blue wall of silence protects first and last. The majority of the good officers in most law enforcement agencies aren't protected by the blue wall but they do participate in it. Because if they don't, they get ostracized and punished by those who do and often too, because in an unsafe profession, their lives depend on the bonds that exist between officers and each one of them knows that. There's both good and bad in those bonds. They are both necessary and detrimental at the same time and often it seems that the ones who behave badly can unfortunately leave a much stronger impression than those who outnumber them who don't.

You do have to really think about whether it's worth it to file a complaint that's going to take up to a year or perhaps longer to process on average just to have a letter telling you it didn't happen. And even if anything is sustained, there's no reassurance that the officer responsible is disciplined or at least encouraged to learn from a mistake or change a behavior. Having seen at least one of them (if not more) standing on award podiums at city council getting civic awards not long after the investigations are completed, the "sustained" finding's not worth anything either and it makes you wonder about the department that is issuing it. That it can do things very well and get some things right but still trip over the fundamentals. That's what makes it difficult to have confidence in its management, especially during a period where it appears the department has busy and successful managers but no real leader at its forefront during a time it very much needs one.

One of those fundamentals that the department stumbled over is when it gives awards to officers who have been caught misbehaving. Yes, that happened at least once and it's too bad because there's plenty of officers in the Riverside Police Department who richly deserve awards that they never receive. I once emailed the police chief after one such case that if he needed a list of officers to give awards to, I could provide him with quite a long one. I didn't receive any response.

Civil attorneys joke about how often they have seen an officer who's a "bad apple" or being sued is given an award and it's hard to believe it at first that this could ever happened. But I've seen it and it's hard to believe that it can be considered anything but a red flag about that law enforcement agency. Unless anyone can give an explanation of why that should put the department in the "gold star" category.

The complaint and investigation system of either the CPRC or the police department (and both together of course) is ultimately only as good as the intentions that motivate each of them and the hard work (or not) that goes into delivering a complaint and investigation process that is objective, thorough, timely and truly representative of accountability within a law enforcement agency. If that's not what is happening, then you've pretty much discovered what the intentions really are through action. And if that action conflicts with the words that are spoken, then it's the action that speak the truth.

But the Web site will also address the present and past of the CPRC because what the past events during the past few months have shown is that one is sorely needed.

It's become necessary to do this because of all the rhetoric and frankly, revisionist history coming out of various corners of City Hall regarding the CPRC, its history and most lately, the situation involving its investigative protocol for officer-involved deaths. What's funny is that listening to the various players in this situation talk about it is like walking in quick sand. What the "present" situation is constantly changes as time passes (or from one meeting to the next) and because this "present" has changed, so does the history which preceded it so that it can fit this envisioning of reality. Even if when the past was the present, it was something different than it is represented now by the city.

It will be interesting to attend the next meeting just to see what "reality" has become.

But as it turns out why wait until the next meeting? You can read about the newly revised history on the situation here.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)





Police Chief Russ Leach said he became concerned last year from media reports that the commission was trying to assume a greater role in investigations. He began discussions with Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco.

Leach, Pacheco and City Councilman Frank Schiavone say they fear a private citizen may trample evidence in the most sensitive of cases, an officer-involved shooting.

Schiavone said the commission always has a private investigator, and that is not in question.

The issue to him is timing. He said the city charter says the commission is to "review and investigate" in that order.

Leach said his relationship with the commission has soured over the years. Its early work was insightful, but more recently it has become politically charged, he said.

"I think that does a tremendous disservice to the review process," he said.

In September, City Manager Brad Hudson issued a directive that the city would not fund commission investigations until law enforcement had concluded its portion. Hudson cited concerns of potential interference with police investigations.

Leach said the Police Department will never allow the commission's private investigator to collect evidence, such as blood or gun casings, at the scene.

"If they door knock and try and find witnesses, that's not up to me," he said.




If you're a city resident and ever heard Chief Russ Leach mention at a meeting that he and Ditrict Attorney Rod Pacheco got together to discuss this issue, raise your hand. One of the first versions had Pacheco initiate the discussion with the city not vice versa but that was very early on in this storyline.

It would also be helpful if Leach would elaborate on why he reached his conclusion that the CPRC was trying to "expand" its role in investigations and why on earth he's relying on "media reports"and didn't talk to the CPRC directly about his concerns. Why is it that the leadership in this city whether it's over departments or the city government can't ever address their issues with entities they view as having problems with them directly instead of doing it through the press, whether it's through articles like this one or opinion pieces?

Where are the leaders in this city? Where are the leaders in the city government? Where (or who's) the leader in the police department? Does it even have one? If it does, is that leader really running it from the halls of City Hall and not inside the walls of the department?

Not that many people in the community didn't suspect that Leach played a larger role in this situation than he had said at public meetings but it's interesting to see him actually come out and say it now months after this situation started. Especially when he didn't mention any such thing in quite a few other venues where the issue's risen.

Also notice how the history has shifted away from the insistence that the concerns about the commission's investigative patrol were its lack of written procedure (which hit City Hall like a lightning bolt last June) and now it's about some concern dating back last year that the CPRC was trying to expand its investigation power even as it has been essentially doing its investigations the same way since 2002! Because where in the above chronology is the commission's lack of a written procedure for investigating incustody deaths even mentioned? Remember, as of last month or so, it was the cause celebre of excuses and explanations for the round of actions taken by factions at City Hall involving the commission.

I guess it fell out of favor or became passe' this week.

But before you get too excited, wait another week and you'll probably see another version of what the problem involving the CPRC's protocol of conducting independent investigations really is about. And maybe the next time, they'll really mean it! This time, it will be the real explanation, not just one to carry them over until they can come up with another one!

Perhaps it might be useful to do what some entertainment magazines do and have a special What's hot/What's not column for all the various "real" explanations. Or one better, have a What's Hot/What was Hot Five Minutes Ago/What's Not.

Is it possible to have more than one issue raised? Yes, but that's not what is happening here. It's more like a Teflon throwing contest.

Oh what tangled webs we weave...


To be continued...











The Riverside Border Patrol office is the subject of further investigation by federal agencies. It's already under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for allegations that agents were forced to implement a quota system.






Press Enterprise Columnist Dan Bernstein writes about the $1.1 million bungalow otherwise known as the house that stands on top of the site of the Kawa Market.




If you're a Riverside customer of Western Municipal Water District, you will be facing a water ban while a water plant has been shut down. If you've lived in California for any length of time, you know the drill.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



The restrictions will affect about 22,500 of Western's 25,000 retail customers. They are in the city of Riverside in the Hillcrest, Mission Grove and Orangecrest neighborhoods and in the unincorporated areas of Woodcrest, Lake Mathews and Lake Hills, as well as March Air Reserve Base and Air Force Village West.

Western's 2,500 or so customers in Murrieta are not affected.

The prohibitions cover both business and residential customers.

Customers who believe they merit a waiver on the restrictions -- such as a resident who grows vegetables and sells them for income -- can contact Western to discuss the matter, said Michele McKinney Underwood , senior public affairs representative.




Taking an early retirement in Riverside County was this prosecutor.





The San Bernardino Police Officers' Association went to court against the city.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)

The union sued Wednesday to block city leaders from cutting officers' working hours and pay by 10 percent as leaders try to erase a budget deficit.

The lawsuit claims the furloughs violate Section 186 of the city charter, which sets a formula for determining officers' pay. Further, the city failed to meet a contractual requirement to meet and confer with the union before reducing officers' hours, the lawsuit argues.

In a new filing Friday, Sgts. Rich Lawhead and Travis Walker, the union president and vice president, argue that the reduced hours work out to the equivalent of removing 34 officers from the streets, which would increase demands on the officers remaining on duty. That will make it harder for officers to give each other essential backup support, the sergeants wrote.

"This is a serious risk to the citizens of this city and to the officers," Lawhead said in a brief interview Friday.

In a third affidavit, Sgt. Steve Filson, a union board member, cited a time when he was supervising officers handling two homicides when a third shooting occurred. He had no more officers to send in a timely manner, Filson wrote.

In statement written in response, Police Chief Mike Billdt noted that the union could have helped the city ease its budget woes by voting for a 10 percent reduction in pay or benefits.

And that's not all in San Bernardino! City Hall closed its doors for Friday, because of budget issues.




The Los Angeles Police Protective League lost a battle at the federal court of appeals after it overturned a ruling opposing financial disclosure rules imposed by the federal consent decree involving the department.


(excerpt, Los Angeles Times)





The unanimous ruling by a panel of judges from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals released Friday likely brings an end to a lengthy and contentious challenge by the Los Angeles Police Protective League and clears the way for the LAPD to impose the controversial policy.


Anthony Pacheco, president of the civilian board that oversees the Los Angeles Police Department, welcomed the court's decision and said he expected Police Chief William J. Bratton to move quickly to enact the plan.

Pacheco emphasized that the financial disclosure plan will fulfill one of the few remaining reforms called for in a sweeping consent decree imposed by the U.S. Department of Justice in the aftermath of a scandal in the late 1990s involving misconduct by anti-gang officers from the Rampart Division.

Under the terms of the plan, officers joining anti-gang and narcotics units that frequently seize cash or other contraband will be required to disclose to department officials a wide array of personal financial information every two years. The roughly 600 officers already assigned to the units will be granted a two-year grace period before having to complete the records.





Some bail bondsman allege there's some illegal coercion going on with inmates in Orange County's jails.






Blogged about at Injustice in Seattle was this videotaped beating of a teenaged girl in a holding cell by a King County Sheriff's Department deputy who is facing an assault charge. The videotape was released to the Seattle Press Intelligencer. The videotape is included in the link and shows the girl flicking off her shoes. Because one of them hits the deputy in the shin, he moves in the cell and grabs her, throws her against the call, on the ground and then punches her twice while another deputy is restraining her. He complains that his shin is contused from her shoe but most likely, that injury happened when while slamming her forward, he struck his shin against the metal toilet in the holding cell.

Maybe he beat up people in high school and the department either didn't know or heard about it and said, we got have him. King County Sheriff's Department is well-known for its serious issues including in its jails.



He plead not guilty to the charges while appearing in court.





Meetings:



Monday, March 2 at 4:00 p.m. in City Hall's fifth floor conference room: Human Resources Board meets on the first Monday each month. If you recall, the board members just found out that the city council amended an ordinance that apparently (but not quite) stripped them of their investigation powers in 2006, about one year after City Manager Brad Hudson came to the city. That issue is being researched by the chair of the board on what exactly transpired.

But it's sobering indeed. Could you imagine what would have happened to the CPRC's investigative powers if they hadn't been stated in the charter?



Tuesday, March 3, at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall: City Council is holding only an evening session this week. The agenda is a bit sparse with a "receive and file" report serving as the "discussion" calendar and a list of items on the consent calendar which involve rather sizable expenditures of city money. Otherwise, business as usual.




Included in the closed session is this workman's compensation case involving a police department employee as well as contract negotiations with the city's bargaining units. What's going on there? Not a whole lot. The city's not at the point where it's apparently doing much negotiation right now. Several contracts expire on June 30. While the situation involving Riverside's police officers isn't as serious as it is in San Bernardino, Hemet and other cities in the Inland Empire and Southern California, it's important that the police officers get a new contract that they can live with and on and that efforts are taken to minimize freezes and prevent layoffs in the civilian and sworn divisions of the department.




Wednesday, March 4 at 3 p.m. on City Hall's seventh floor: The Governmental Affairs Committee meeting brings back the Mobile Home Park issue.

There has been no more news from this committee or any of its staff on whether or not there will actually be an ad hoc committee addressing the CPRC's investigative protocol which has already been diluted down enough to consist of some sort of quasi-get together meeting between city employees and community members to hash out differences in language, wording and other semantics. But seriously, it will be surprising if there will actually be any update on this situation at all by this committee which might just exercise the oft-used strategy of letting something hang or "die" in committee which allows them to keep the status quo of noninvestigation* in place while allowing the city council members especially those running for reelection this year to keep the fray away and out of their campaigns.

*The word "noninvestigation" is used here because it's unlikely that by the time any of the four officer-involved death investigations get to the CPRC, that there will actually be any investigations conducted by the CPRC since so much time in the past. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising at all to see efforts made at that point to actually discourage any investigations from being done. The purpose of doing this wasn't just to delay investigations but given that the difficulty of conducting independent investigations grows with the passage of time, to probably eliminate them.


Carlos Quinonez: 180 days

Robert Luis Sanchez: 170 days

Marlon Oliver Acevedo: 120 days

Russell Franklin Hyatt: 42 days

Russell Franklin Hyatt (InstantRiverside)

Speaking of city council standing committees, here's a list of all of them and their meeting schedules. Even when they are scheduled when few people can attend them, it's important to check them out if at all possible because the majority of city business that's still conducted from outside closed doors is done at the committee level. However, if you look at the meeting schedules for most of the committees in comparison with previous years, you will see that quite a few of them don't even meet very often anymore.


Wednesday, March 4 at 6:30 P.M. at Orange Terrace Community Center: The Community/Police Summit meeting for Neighborhood Policing Center West, an event sponsored under the five-year Strategic Plan.




The 100 worst bottlenecks in the United States Is the bane of your commuting existence here?

CPRC: Smokes, mirrors and a lot of dancing

Sorry this blog posting is short but unfortunately, there was a huge power outage in part of the city late Thursday night caused by a truck that ran off the street and struck a brick and metal gated wall and a transformer which powered a huge section of a neighborhood and so the lights went out.

The car then apparently drove away and was being pursued at some point by the Riverside Police Department. It should be hard to miss because it's the truck that's missing part of its fender, which was left behind at the scene. Utility workers armed with flashlights and maps looked at the shorn off transformer box and said that it was a loss but the utility emergency division was trying to reroute power and they successfully did that to a large portion of the blackened area within an hour of that decision.

But one good sign is the changing of some of the major traffic signals to not be reliant on main power sources to operate which had been the case in the past.








The Riverside NAACP dinner was held and attended by hundreds of people as awards were given out in different categories at the Riverside Convention Center. Included in attendance were Mayor Ron Loveridge who gave an address and Council members Mike Gardner, Andrew Melendrez, Chris MacArthur and Nancy Hart as well as a contingent from the Riverside Police Department, the Riverside County District Attorney's office and the Riverside Police Officers' Association (which purchased a lifetime membership). More on the event here.

Feb. 12, 2009 was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP.





Some people have been asking for more information about the CPRC meetings. They are on the second and fourth Wednesdays each month at 5:30 p.m. If you can't attend, you can listen to the meetings on the Web site and these recordings are usually updated to the site within one week. It's useful to people who can't attend because the meetings begin earlier in the evening schedule but are often quite lengthy.

Some non-monetary side wagers were made about how much worse the situation will get as the commission tries to move towards writing its own policies, procedures and bylaws most particularly on the issue of the investigative protocol of officer-involved deaths. Several votes involving the inclusion of "officer-involved deaths" in the bylaws (which have to undergo two readings) and creating separate sections for complaints and officer-involved deaths in Section VIII of the policies and procedures took place last night and already the micromanagement coming down from what one commissioner called the "Seventh Floor" was apparent.

Don't be surprised if it becomes much more so in the weeks and months ahead. The only question will be how creative will this behavior become and how utterly ridiculous and which particular parts of it will be referred to the Hall of Shame. And it will indeed be ironic after the latest round of revisionism going around about how the CPRC has been horribly out of step due to a lack of written practices on the investigation of officer-involved deaths for its entire tenure which of course is a sudden reversal on the earlier position that it actually had a written policy, Section VIII B which governed both complaints and death cases.

The mayor and city council members actually touted VIII B as the written policy just several months ago and since it's not likely they all independently did their own research it's likely that they were instructed on this by Hudson's office. Which is strange because you would have think that at some point, City Attorney Gregory Priamos would have swooped up from the fifth floor and informed his direct employers (and Hudson) that even if this were the policy in effect, that it was negated by the fact that officer-involved deaths weren't mentioned in the governing bylaws, which is the latest cause celebre among those city employees who attended the meeting earlier this week. That in order to have policies and procedures for officer-involved deaths, they had to be included in the bylaws first.

Of course now the period of time when the city officials were acting on this is now being rewritten all the way back to June 2008 as being about something entirely different was that there was this realization in the administration of City Hall that there was no written policy even though during the month, June, when the lightning bolt of realization apparently hit Hudson and his minions, you could have heard a pin drop on the issue at the 'Hall.

As stated earlier, there were no pronouncements out of City Hall about any problems until after the death of Martin Pablo on July 10. And there was no mention in the attempts to prohibit that investigation about any lack of written protocol involving officer-involved deaths during that time. In fact, there wasn't any directive to wait on the investigations of all officer-involved deaths until the police department was done with its own investigation at that time. There was only such a prohibition on that particular death because as some said, it wasn't an "obvious" example of a death covered by what was in writing, Charter Section 810(d) but the city wanted to wait until it received an autopsy report from the Riverside County Sheriff's/Coroner's office. So now while they city claims there's nothing in writing, it was actually using something in writing (known as the city's charter) to justify its position.

The CPRC actually did investigate on a preliminary level and wasn't denied the funds by Priamos office to do so. It backed the department's position on the death that it was from natural causes which could hardly cause the considerable harm that some have alleged. In fact, it placed the department in a better position on that case with many city residents. Yet now we're supposed to believe that all the way back to this discovery in June of anything in writing about the investigative protocol was the major focus behind the Hudson directive. What the protocol did was to change the deaths from being done soon after notification of the death but to after the police department was completed with its own investigation, which was then backed purportedly by Section VIII B which of course, didn't have the language in the bylaws to back it that any policy and procedures so desparately needs now. And around and around the city goes and where it will stop, no one knows.

Then there was the Governmental Affairs Committee meeting where this policy was proposed and promoted by Hudson in the absence of the rest of Section VIII which outlines the criteria in part for what qualifies under that portion of the policies and procedures by the use of words keying in to the complaints not the officer-involved deaths. Then he's promoting a policy as being the one to use for the investigative protocol with no mention either from him or a city attorney representative about the issue of changing the bylaws. So as we discovered, either everyone's truly ignorant including in some cases as they claim to be, or there's a different standard for enforcing and writing (as if that purview goes outside of the commission which is a whole another posting) for commissioners as opposed to the employees at City Hall.

See, that's what happens when people try to rewrite history under false pretences intended to confuse and mislead people is that it's very difficult to go back and remember let alone rewrite all of the past history especially since except for Priamos, none of these players were here when it actually unfolded. The great thing about the truth is that you don't actually have to remember it. Some of the historians at City Hall should try it some time.

What's disappointing is the city council members who are backing (or in at least two cases, fronting) the protocol released by City Manager Brad Hudson at the Governmental Affairs Committee meeting in February particularly the policies and procedures Section VIII B. It's interesting how Hudson included only that section of the policies and procedures in part because by removing it from the rest of VIII, you also remove most of its context and since it's too difficult for the elected officials to go back and read the entire section, they aren't reading all the references to "complaints" and "complainant" in that section. And they certainly aren't reading Section VIII G regarding the investigative report whether done by the police department or the CPRC being completed within 60 calendar days of the filing of the complaint. If "complaint" were transposed to mean the date of the officer-involved death. Not that this can even be done for the average complaint, not even close to the backlogged and overwhelmed Internal Affairs Division of the police department having more than it can handle even though at least 70% of complaints (and nearly all Category 2 complaints) received are farmed out to the department's field supervisors. It's unlikely however that any city officials except possibly Councilman Mike Gardner even knows that VIII G exists at all.

It would be refreshing if the city government would actually know much more about the CPRC than it clearly does before pushing mandates on its direct employees (who seem if possible to know less or are certainly selective on what parts they use to educate their employers) but that's not likely to happen as they continue to operate out of either ignorance (which is their choice) or out of an animosity towards the CPRC despite the passage of Measure II in every single precinct in every single ward in the November 2004 election.



In Riverside County, the administration offered early retirements to ease the budget crisis and 400 people have taken.

One of those retiring is the clerk of the board of supervisors.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



Romero, 61, whose duties include publicizing the board's agendas, processing supervisors' directives and administering the property-tax appeals process, said she will leave her post at the end of March.

"It's going to be a real loss without Nancy," Supervisor Roy Wilson said. "She's been our backbone in making sure the board functions very effectively."

Board Chairman Jeff Stone asked County Executive Officer Bill Luna on Tuesday to report back on how the county will seek a replacement for Romero.

About 400 county employees have accepted the county's early-retirement package, said county spokesman Ray Smith. The county began offering the incentives this year in order to take higher-paid, longtime employees off the payroll and help reduce need for countywide layoffs and cuts to services.

Robin Zimpfer, the head of the county's Economic Development Agency, announced earlier this month that she will also retire at the end of March.

Former County Counsel Joe Rank retired at the end of last year. His second-in-command, Pamela Walls, was appointed his permanent successor this week.



In San Bernardino just days after the police union threatened a lawsuit, the fire fighters' union accused the city of using a "bait and switch" strategy against them.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



"In short, (Interim City Manager) Mark Weinberg now believes that our concession is not great enough and even though he acknowledges that this was his proposal, he still wants to change several terms of the agreement," union President Scott Moss said in a written statement.

"We remain hopeful, however, that the City Council will see that 'bait and switch' tactics in matters of wage cut agreements are a very serious matter," he wrote.

Weinberg denied any bad faith.

In talks to resolve a $9 million deficit in the city's $150 million general fund budget by the end of June, union members agreed to log four hours of unpaid leave per week in a vacation bank.

But city policy requires that anytime a firefighter misses work, he must be replaced by another firefighter. The union contract stipulates that the replacement must be paid overtime, with no limit on time-and-a-half pay.








Some people in San Bernardino thought they were losing a police chief and they were but guess what they're getting instead. The outgoing chief coming back as a consultant! So is his outgoing assistant chief! Both got no-confidence votes from the police union! Both are going to be making about 10% less than they are now. Not that the city of Riverside's not hired outgoing employees back as consultants as happened with Asst. City Manager of Finance Paul Sundeen and the former human resources directer, Art Alcaraz, who resigned in the wake of controversy about whether or not the city manager's office was asking him to alter the job requirements for management positions to not requiring a master's degree which if true, was most helpful for one particular incoming management employee.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



Police union President Rich Lawhead noted that, in addition to their new city contracts, both executives will receive pensions.

"(City officials) just asked us for $3.3 million in concessions, and now they're going to allow the administration of the Police Department to double dip," he said.

Weinberg said cities often employ retirees.










A lawsuit challenging the pensions of Orange County Sheriff's Department deputies was dismissed.



(excerpt, Los Angeles Times)



The case is being watched by counties and municipalities throughout the state, in part because the law enforcement benefits at stake are identical to those in all but two of California's 58 counties.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors filed the lawsuit last year, seeking to repeal part of their pension agreement with sheriff's deputies, saying the county could not afford the expense.

If the county ultimately prevails, the county says it could save as much as $187 million in the coming decades. But it has come at a cost already, driving a wedge between county bureaucrats and one of the county's most politically powerful unions.


At the heart of the legal dispute is the structure of a labor contract between the sheriff's union and the county that has been adopted by government agencies throughout the state for police, teachers and other public employees. The 2001 contract increased pensions by one-third and granted the benefit retroactively.

Last year, the Board of Supervisors, led by Supervisor John Moorlach, filed the suit arguing that the retroactive portion of the agreement was unconstitutional and should be repealed because it violated a state prohibition on pay for work already performed. The supervisors also argued that the benefit exceeded the county's debt limit.

Moorlach has estimated that the county could save $187 million over the next 30 years if the lawsuit is ultimately successful, helping to reduce an enormous debt in its pension fund.




Civilian oversight in California in the wake of Copley.


(excerpt, Indybay Media)



Nevertheless — while that Police Bill of Rights layed out specific procedures for officer discipline and provided for extra protections for police officers not afforded other public employees — citizens' police review boards such as those in Oakland and San Francisco have been investigating cases of police misconduct since the 1980s, holding open hearings separate from those of the police agencies' own internal affairs units. Rashidah Grinag, of Oakland's PUEBLO (People United for a Better Life in Oakland), reported to the Berekely Daily Planet that police agency attorneys "didn’t mind having public disciplinary hearings in the past, but recently, members of the press and defense attorneys have begun to show up to monitor them. So they were saying they didn’t mind having the public hearings, so long as the public didn’t notice them. Now that the public is noticing them, they want them stopped. There’s a lot of irony in that."

In 2006, the state Supreme Court handed down a decision in Copley Press Inc. vs. Superior Court of San Diego, based in part on the Police Officers Bill of Rights, which ushered in the current, near-complete lockdown on police disciplinary records in California. Hence, the non-public hearings regarding the murders of Casper Banjo and others — the public simply has no legal right to know. Hence, the current lack of accountability as evidenced by a recent report to the Oakland Citizens' Police Review Board by the OPD which listed 45 officer-involved shootings in the last five years and not a single one of those officers disciplined in any way.

Police watchdog groups and state legislators attempted in 2007 to break through the wall of silence by supporting AB1648, by Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), and SB1019, by State Senator Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles). The proposed legislation would have re-opened police disciplinary hearings and related files. After several months of back and forth in committees of the California legislature, the move for greater transparency ultimately failed when Assembly Public Safety Committee members such as Fiona Ma (D-San Francisco) and Chair Jose Solorio (D-Anaheim) refused to even allow the Senate's version, SB1019, to come to a vote.

Police union representatives had exerted increasing pressure on the legislature, asserting that transparency would endanger the safety of officers. The Fog City Journal noted: "This assertion [of police endangerment] — repeated by dozens of police union reps — was completely unchallenged by even a single member of the committee, including Assemblywoman Fiona Ma. Not a single Assembly member pointed out the obvious: that in the over 30 years of public oversight in California, there is not a single example of a police officer being physically harmed because of the public release of information about misconduct complaints and discipline." BeyondChron added that several police unions "threatened to scuttle term limit reform — a wholly unrelated matter [but of great interest to legislators] — if SB 1019 passes."

And so we find ourselves where we are today...




At least 15 Broward County Sheriff's Department deputies are off the streets being investigated for steroid abuse.



(excerpt, Sun-Sentinel)





Agency policy allows deputies to take steroids and similar muscle-building drugs if they are prescribed by a licensed physician. That could protect the deputies no matter what their drug test results show in 10 days or so, an agency spokesman said.

Jim Leljedal, the spokesman, stressed it's too early to say whether the deputies even took the drugs, let alone whether they did so under doctor's orders.

"There's probably nothing we could do if that's the case," Leljedal said. "The policy indicates that if there is a legitimate doctor -patient relationship, and they were prescribed in that situation, then they would be allowed."

Leljedal provided few specifics and would not name those involved, saying the case is under review by the Internal Affairs unit. He did say that 15 deputies and one civilian employee were shifted to office assignments last Friday after a lengthy investigation into reported steroid use, but would not comment on what prompted the inquiry.


A veteran police officer in Alameda has been busted on a narcotics charge.

CPRC: Down the Rabbit's Hole, We go....

"I used to think I was a good person."



---Former Atlanta Police Department Officer Gregg Junnier at his sentencing hearing for convictions stemming from his actions in the shooting death of Kathryn Johnston, 92. He was sentenced to six years in federal prison.





"If you've done that before that might have been nice but that day is done."


---CPRC Manager Kevin Rogan talking about the ongoing situation with the RPD casebooks for Officer-involved death cases to be discussed in a future blogging called The Mystery of the Two Casebooks.





The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,

All on a summer day:

The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,

And took them quite away!



---Lewis Carroll who had a scheduling conflict and couldn't catch the latest CPRC meeting.






Cause its time, its time in time

With your time and its news is captured

For the queen to use.

Move me on to any black square,

Use me any time you want,

Just remember that the golds

for us to capture all we want, anywhere,

Yea, yea, yea.



---Yes





S.S. CPRC



Time of Departure: 5:30 p.m.

Terminal: Fifth Floor Conference Room, City Hall

Point of Departure: River City

Destination: Next stop, Wonderland



"Welcome aboard our ship, the S.S. CPRC. This is your captain speaking. Well, captains actually because there's more of us than this flight deck can hold. We just have some instructions to give to you while we prepare for take off. Park your sense at the curb. Strap on your gullibility and keep your eyes faced in the other direction and not on what is happening right in front of you.

Otherwise, sit back and enjoy the show. The operating budget is strictly shoe string and subject to approval by the captains, but we do think we can get some permission to throw some bags of peanuts your way."

"And for your entertainment viewing pleasure, we have the old song and dance."



At this point, there's supposed to be a White Rabbit who's rushing off some place because he's late because he's missed some sort of important date or statutory deadline and when he asked the Wise Owl in bespectacled glasses for the correct deadline, he received three different responses. Unable to process them to figure out which one was correct, he nearly collapsed in a pile of neurosis. All the time, Wise Owl insisted that all of them were the correct time depending on which side of the clock he looked at, the White Rabbit simply ran off down the hall, beads of angst-driven sweat flowing off of him to form a rapidly swelling river, which threatened to sweep the other creatures away.


"I'm late, I'm late...for a very important date," The White Rabbit wailed.


The Cheshire Cat, a cigar-chomping gambler type in more ways than one in this version who scarcely ever left his tree but still ruled all that he could see, showed up at that point with the Mad Hatter who gave up writing up sanitized versions of outrageous tea parties including one which put its guests to sleep from some funny (and very expensive) tea, to serve at the pleasure of the Cat who of course, served at the pleasure of the Court. The Court often seemed preoccupied with its daily croquet matches to do much more than wind up the Cat and send him out across the kingdom to carry out its will until it became his will and the Court, his goodwill ambassadors.

And so Wonderland ran itself until the day that everything changed.

One day, the Cat and his assistant, the Mad Hatter who as usual was chafing on the leash, discovered nine knaves who had planted the wrong colored rose bushes and were trying to rectify the situation by painting what was white, red before the queen and her court arrived for the daily croquet match and witnessed the blasphemy. The poor knaves were so confused in the task they had taken on, that the rose bushes looked like striped peppermint candy after a while and the Cat and the Mad Hatter felt at a loss on how to handle the mess. So after huddling, they decided to banish them outside the kingdom for a while until they figured out first what to do with the knaves, and then how to write it all down so that the Court would be properly entertained and the queen, properly appeased.

But this didn't happen right away, not without difficulty, because the Cat was no more than a polished smile wrapped in brilliant fur and the Mad Hatter was well, mad so there was only so much they could actually plan without being exposed like the poor emperor from another story line. The dormouse to the kingdom had to change the rules just to allow the Mad Hatter into it before being banished to the Island of Lost Gate Keepers himself to be never heard from again after the party had ended.

The two of them in unison said that the right direction was the other way. So all the creatures began swimming up the increasingly swift current to where he had pointed.

When Alice and the creatures first saw the flustered marionette standing alone, they thought they had wandered into the wrong story but as they looked closer, they saw that he fit in with them and was just as confused as anyone else but every time he tried to point them to the right direction, a string would yank him, causing him to point the other direction. It didn't take long for all that tugging to give him a king-sized headache so he walked around in circles for a while then sat down and cried. The Mad Hatter came off and sat him down to explain to him why his head hurt and then he replaced the strings with sturdier ones and the two walked on down the path while the creatures still struggled upstream to where they thought safety lie.

Then the Duchess ran up, wearing a mustache which didn't make sense until you figured out that while sometimes a duchess is really just a duchess, that wasn't the case in this story. The duchess had come home after a long day of listening to the Mad Hatter rattle her with a list of new rules to follow. A baby laid in a crib screaming and flailing its arms and the duchess didn't pay much mind because he was waiting instructions from the Mad Hatter on how to take care of the baby. The baby crawled out of its crib and grabbed some finger paints and started writing a list of things it needed not tomorrow, but right now on the floor but the duchess paid little mind. Until it changed into something else entirely and ran off, wailing that the other babies wouldn't listen to it either. They wanted a new baby to speak for them and threatened to take it to a vote. To find another baby who would not spend his spare time arguing with his twin on whether or not they liked or hated the cook who of course had neither done or said anything to either one of them.

Then the nine wandering knaves walked around day and night, through rain, sleet and blistering sunlight until they realized with horrendous dismay that they had been walking in circles and they were not only back at the peppermint striped bushes which betrayed their transgressions but the queen was coming with her entourage so it was too late to leave. What else was there to do but squabble among themselves while the marionette cried, the Cat plied and the Mad Hatter, went on a rampage cutting up every rose bush in the kingdom into little bitty pieces.

When the queen arrived with her court, the nine knaves all pointed fingers at each other, fingers covered with the tell-tale red paint. So the queen started yelling, "off with your heads" and got that ball rolling. And so it went gathering moss, until Alice who was growing in leaps and bounds stood up, shaking the royal court and saying, "Hey you're just a bunch of cards anyway."

Fade to black.

If this sad story sounds confusing, try sitting through a meeting of the CPRC, because if that ever makes any sense then perhaps the above tale will start making sense as well. Then it's probably time to be a little concerned.

So what happened at this month's non-special meeting?


The monthly general meeting of the Community Police Review Commission in Riverside was indeed not without its fireworks as the power plays which have come to define it not just at the commission level but all the way to the penthouse floor of City Hall were on full display. Even though Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis didn't attend and City Attorney Gregory Priamos left the meeting in the middle, apparently confident his work was done, it still scintillated. And actually that was pretty much the case. Nobody missed a stage direction or a cued line from a very old script.

New commissioner Robert Slawsby who referred to the CPRC as a "public relations tool" in his interview in front of the city council earlier this month took exception to public comment on concerns about the training of new commissioners. He cited a copy of the use of force policy and an hour's worth of training as his offer of what he had received. Which isn't bad but if I were an officer with a complaint filed against me, I might want a little bit more training than that particularly on use of force issues. But maybe I'm the exception and not the rule.

The poor guy has four years. He should pace himself with the scarecrows and catapult.

A lot happened at the general meeting including allegations that DeSantis changed complaint findings and that there apparently was a change of protocol when it comes to not just redacting information from the police department's investigative casebook for Joseph Darnell Hill for public viewing but also for commissioners' eyes as well, courtesy of the police department.


But so much happened in one action-packed meeting so that's fodder for another day, because it became clear what thematic elements truly dominated the affair lasting over four hours and it had more to do with other pressing issues.


These days the most entertaining and illuminating part of the CPRC meetings involve the Policies, Procedure and Bylaws Committee meetings whether they are "special" (meaning no public comment on nonagendized items allowed) or not. Lewis Carroll could write a few sequels to his books about Alice who hung out in some rather strange places with stranger characters, just based on sitting in and bearing witness to what takes place during these exercises as the once-vibrant commission sinks further down the rabbit hole into Riverside's version of Wonderland. As Commissioner Chani Beeman put it, this whole situation has been flipped upside down. Kevin Costner playing a role in the Oliver Stone movie, JFK put it better.


We're through the looking-glass here, people... white is black and black is white.



But the Looking Glass tale comes later. For now, we're in Wonderland and a trial's taking place in a royal courtroom with the characters playing their parts in front of an audience.

Putting a knave of hearts from a deck of regular playing cards on trial for stealing mere tarts? Trivial in comparison with just a typical meeting of this reinstated from the "Island of Lost Committees" when it actually takes place. But if there were a knave of hearts, it would probably be the two commissioners who were on one city councilman's "naughty" list, John Brandriff and Chani Beeman. Although the commission has looked a little less like Survivor Island for a change since it doesn't appear like any of them are trying to get anyone else thrown off at the moment. Thank goodness for small favors!

No Queen of Hearts because that takes a real pro, but some pretty good understudies in the wings should a production of Alice 'n Wonderland ever comes to this city. Nominees will be forthcoming. Must be able to wear a tiara well and carry off emoting some rather corny dialogue in a convincing manner.

Before the meeting even took place, the excitement had already started.

The committee chair, John Brandriff, was called into an office (before the case review meeting which preceded the public meeting) by Manager Kevin Rogan about certain items which were deleted from the agenda "for different reasons", said Brandriff later on through mostly zipped lips. Deep Throat might have wanted to attend it but he was probably scheduled for a briefing session in one of Riverside's emerging downtown garages and couldn't come. And the Cigarette Smoking Man from the X-Files might have done just as well in a pinch but you'd never find him by following his trail of smoke since they banned tobacco products from all buildings. While great for the lungs of all involved, it cast a damper in what could have been an even more intriguing state of affairs.

Brandriff showed up at the CPRC meeting clearly muzzled and each word that came out of his mouth in explanation just led to admonitions that he wasn't allowed to discuss it unless it was privately done so with Rogan. Only in Riverside can the law that's meant to encourage transparency can be used a different way, a skill some play at but one that really only Priamos has mastered during his tenure as the city's legal counsel.

But anyway, Brandriff apologized for the mundane items left on what was once a crowded agenda saying that they were the ones which were left after the scalpel had been taken to the agenda. But he also told the commission and the incredulous audience that he had asked Rogan to give a brief explanation of what happened. It didn't appear that this happened. Because under the current administration at City Hall, "transparency" is a word you use to shield yourself from being well...transparent.

That flash of movement by the door could have been the White Rabbit.

The issue of Brandriff getting informed about The Case of the Disappearing Agenda Items might not have been agendized but neither was the meeting that preceded it and if a serious issue like this arises and other commissioners are aware that something's up with an agenda, then the commission chair or subcommittee chair should have the opportunity to provide a brief explanation of what happened. If not a discussion, a brief statement.

Rogan defended his position by saying the following.


"I can't agendize any items which contradict the bylaws. I may not discuss them nor will you."


Yet Brandriff who attributed the problem to a "lack of communication" wasn't even allowed to explain what had happened with the items. He didn't try to hold a discussion on the missing items or even elaborate what they were, but there's been a lot of distrust fostered in this commission and among members of a growing populace of city residents about these "behind closed doors" meetings and the outright censorship of meeting agendas by the dynamic duo, meaning Hudson and Priamos since someone who holds their strings gave them a directive to change course probably about a year or so ago.


Beeman said, wait a minute, these items are proposed amendments to bylaws. They might come into conflict But Rogan said he wouldn't forward any recommendation that was illegal, immoral, unethical or in violation. Yet he and other people at City Hall are trying to meld VIII B (which has more holes than Swiss cheese) into something it was never intended to be as if that were instead, its destiny. Interestingly enough, Councilman Mike Gardner was here during that time, serving on the commission, the only truly informed city official and he's the only one not buying hook, line and sinker the reappropriation and reinvention of VIII B.

Pity, he views even discussing this issue involving the CPRC to be too much of a political risk for him to do in public. In that way, he's not any different than his predecessor Dom Betro.


What was interesting about the insistence that policies and procedures couldn't be created in written form for the investigative protocol of officer-involved deaths without officer-involved deaths being included in the bylaws (which serve as a guide for the policies and procedures)is that apparently that applies only to commissioners during their meetings. Clearly, the same doesn't apply to City Manager Brad Hudson and several city council members who tried to impose the use of policy and procedure Section VIII B to govern this investigative protocol for officer-involved deaths even though the bylaws lacked the same language regarding officer-involved death investigations that they don't have now. So if you're on the commission, you can't write let alone enforce a policy on officer-involved deaths until it's mentioned in the bylaws but if you're a member of the dynamic duo or a city official, you can not only write such a policy but enforce one?

Forget that the creation of policies, procedures and bylaws has always been the power and responsibility of the members of the city's boards and commissions and not those outside of it including elected officials. It just goes to show that city officials and their direct employees and so forth can insist that the commissioners follow the rules that they themselves break. And that they won't hesitate to throw whatever roadblock they can in the path of the commission's attempts to write its own bylaws and policies and procedures as is within its purview. Contrast that with the much more quieter period of time in 2001 when the founding commissioners crafted a policy and procedure for investigating citizen complaints but didn't do so for officer-involved death investigations. But that's back when this city had a government in place that actually respected the city residents who served on the city's boards and commissions enough just to let them do their job and to come up with their own bylaws, policies and procedures.

But what is interesting is how the script is constantly in rewrites even as this latest episode of micromanagement by the CPRC plays out. Now, the proper characters are claiming that it was just discovered last summer that the CPRC was operating improperly without written policies for nine years and was in violation of well...some violation. Chair Brian Pearcy in his final meeting in that position for some reason seemed to stump as the ambassador to that latest revision of history in his comments.

Actually no, last June, City Hall was silent and silent for part of July until the death of Martin Pablo when it broke its silence not allowing the CPRC to investigate, not because it lacked written policies but because the city didn't believe that the Pablo death fell within the purview of the city charter's Section 810(d) which outlined the CPRC's power to investigate officer-involved deaths. Far from arguing that it had discovered the smoking gun that nothing existed in writing governing the investigative protocol of officer-involved deaths, it was relying on its own interpretation (or rather reinterpretation) what was in writing to tell the commission it had to wait to initiate an investigation on Pablo until the coroner's report was final.

Well, the CPRC chose the charter over the city manager and city attorney and initiated an investigation. At some point, Hudson issued his directive barring the CPRC from investigating officer-involved deaths until the police department had completed its own investigations and handed the purse strings of the CPRC's investigative budget over to Priamos to mete out as he saw fit. Hudson never mentioned the lack of written policies and procedures but outlined a protocol for the CPRC to follow never mentioning that anything backed it in writing in public.

Then Hudson and several city council members tried to use a policy and procedure (and not even all of it, just one paragraph, VIII B) to front as the policy in place to govern the investigative protocol not realizing (and given their lack of knowledge about the CPRC that's not surprising especially on the part of the elected officials) that it applied only to complaints. How do you know that? Maybe because the words, "complaint" and "complainant" are sprinkled throughout VIII B as is the guideline of investigations being completed within 60 days of when the complaint was filed? But there are those beginning at the highest levels of City Hall and working their way on down the ladder who insist that the officer-involved death protocol can neatly fit into VIII B. Why it's not nearly the neat fit that these individuals claim (and in actuality could cause several potentially serious problems) will be explained in much greater detail in future postings.


If you don't believe it, read the following links below.


Bylaws of the CPRCM

Policies and Procedures of the CPRC (emphasis: Section VIII)



But hold onto your skirts because by the next meeting, there will be an entirely new version of history rewritten blaming the commission for some transgression and this most recent one will be stashed away on the Island of Lost Mythology like its predecessors.

And as a side note to comments made by Rogan at last night's meeting that the public report was "carved away" later on in the investigative process by the CPRC, below is the very first public report released by the CPRC.



Vanpaseuth Phaisouphanh




Phaisouphanh was the first officer-involved death to be reviewed and investigated by the CPRC in 2001 and naturally, was also the subject of the first such public report. It was also the second one to be reviewed. Can anyone name the first case? The answer will be the subject of a future posting.

Public reports were part of the process from the beginning, not an afterthought or a sign that the commission was going astray as implied. In fact, they were drafted in all but two cases. The only times that public reports were not issued was for the fatal shooting of Anastacio Munoz in 2002 and the Volne Lamont Stokes case in 2003. The document online for the Stokes case isn't technically a report but was actually released as an MOU.


Those links will lead you to what they state and it's interesting that none of the city council members or direct city employees have provided copies of the Bylaws or the policies and procedures involving the CPRC at any of the meetings where they've tried to push changes of the investigative protocol on the commission, having already pulled the wool over the eyes of some rather gullible city officials and those who aren't as gullible but who in all likelihood are stirring the dynamic duo including the S.S. Hudson.

The fireworks were on full display throughout.


Ward criticized Rogan by telling those in attendance that he had been told that the prior manager Pedro Payne had been chastised by DeSantis for not having his commissioners under control. Payne was "ripped up one side and down the other" by the seventh floor for his failure to do so.


"He obviously won't have that problem with Kevin," Ward said.


Though Ward was actually referring to an earlier episode during the meeting called the "Mystery of the Two Case books" because for the all the insistence that there could be only one, online or in the vault of the CPRC office, and not actually different ones, as it turns out there are indeed two casebooks. One for the police department and one for the commissioners. Not that this was clearly explained of course, still it was hanging in the air for all to notice.

In the end once the dust cleared, the commissioners voted 4-3 to separate the policies and procedures into separate sections for complaint review and investigations and the investigative protocol for officer-involved deaths even though Commissioner Ken Rotker kept insisting that the city council members that adhered to Section VIII B as their security blanket to support Hudson's protocol simply because they were told to do so by direct employee (who of course clearly didn't explain the rest of VIII to them). Rotker kept asking to hear from both sides of the issue so he could make up his own mind, apparently not realizing he was actually advocating for one of those "sides" over the other. For some reason, even commissioners who are polar opposites roll their eyes at each other when he speaks but then there's commissioners who laugh when people in the audience speak. They laugh at city residents. They laugh with police representatives and don't think that most of the people who attend the meetings see the difference.

The commissioner, Sheri Corral, who could have cast the tying vote had left the building. And the meeting was actually ajourned before the city turned its lights out. If you wanted to see an unsettled person, all you needed to do was look at the expression on Rogan's face when that motion passed. But who can blame him because he's the one who has to explain it to DeSantis the next day. But the meeting ended just before the lights or City Hall's own version of a curtain could close it down.

Kind of a fitting and poetic closure to the meeting actually.

Until next month.





Press Enterprise Columnist Dan Bernstein roasts several Riverside County supervisors over their yen for expensive vehicles paid for by county residents. You go Dan!



(excerpt)



But he's only a supervisor. His hands were tied. They weighed him down with a sunroof, Bose speakers and lousy mileage! What could he do? Send his 2009 Yukon back to Purchasing? Demand (obscene word alert) a minivan to squire his staff around rugged Rubidoux?

Marion Ashley didn't fare much better. But he knew it wouldn't do any good to complain.

He just sucked it up after picking out a Toyota Highlander that cost $6,000 more than the basic model. Ashley figured he'd just have to find a way to live with those heated leather seats and big wheels. After all, he is a big wheel! A big dog! With a subwoofer! And a power moon roof (I don't want to know what a supervisor does with a moon roof).

We elect our leaders to be visionaries, but the other supes set their sights appallingly low. Jeff Stone's V8 Dodge Charger gets terrible mileage. But it only cost $37K. If Stone really walked his talk, he'd have ordered the waterless-urinal option. Roy Wilson cruises his sprawling district in a nerdy $35K two-wheel drive Camry hybrid. Bob Buster is a flat-out embarrassment. He couldn't even trade his county-issue 2002 Impala for Tavaglione's $1,000 DVD player. (Not that Tavaglione wants to keep it.)

Times are tough. A lot of county workers will lose their jobs. But the supes won't. Nobody's going to hand them a pink slip. They and their department heads are special. Exceptions to every rule. All the $50K Klubbers are trying to do is drive that point home.

In style.




The former Canyonlake councilman charged with embezzlement plead guilty in Riverside County Superior Court.





The mayor of Riverside County's newest city, Menifee, gave his state of the city address.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)




Edgerton's speech, delivered to an audience of almost 200, mixed free-wheeling jokes with serious talk about the city's financial state.

For its first year the city expects to have a $20 million budget and run a $5 million surplus, he said. New cities usually are able to save during their start-up period since they can continue relying on county services without having to repay the county for five years.

Edgerton also questioned how the city wants to approach staffing.

"Is it cost-effective to hire our own employees and equipment or will it be better to contract out?" he asked.

Like Supervisor Jeff Stone, who spoke first, Edgerton emphasized the need for the city to snag its share of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package.

"If we can catch any money falling from the airplane we're going to do that," said Edgerton.




The recall drive against one of Lake Elsinore's council members continues.



(excerpt, Press Enterprise)




Enelida "Nellie" Caron, an employee at Trevi, a bowling alley, arcade and restaurant complex, was among more than 20 residents who signed a petition accusing Buckley of political corruption and using his office to defraud taxpayers of more than $1.5 million.

Interim City Clerk Carol Cowley informed Caron on Wednesday that she failed to collect the 20 valid signatures to file the notice of intent to circulate a recall petition. Only 17 of the 23 signatures were valid, Cowley said.

Knight said recall organizers would meet the requirement today.

"Had we known we needed 20, we would've brought 50 signatures," Knight said Wednesday.

A successful petition would start the recall process that at some point requires recall proponents to collect the signatures of 20.percent of the city's more-than-16,000 registered voters in 120 days. If they collect enough signatures, the city would set a special election that could cost from $25,000 to $40,000.

Caron told the City Council on Tuesday of the intent to recall the two-term councilman.






Not exactly earth shattering news but the San Bernardino Police Officers' Association has sued the city.




(excerpt, Press Enterprise)




Union attorney Michael McGill said he'll seek a court hearing to argue for an injunction against the cut, scheduled to go into effect Sunday. City Attorney Jim Penman said the hearing is set for Monday.

Meanwhile, the police union discussed Wednesday a proposal to accept a package of budget concessions that could help avert a showdown with the city.

The lawsuit claims the furloughs violate Section 186 of the city charter, which sets a formula for determining officers' pay. Further, the city failed to satisfy a contractual requirement to meet and confer with the union before reducing hours, the lawsuit argues.

In a written response, Mayor Pat Morris notes that officials have sought 10 percent pay cuts from everyone.

"If union leaders prevent the city from stopping the bleeding, we will either continue hell-bent towards fiscal catastrophe or be forced to lay off police officers and compromise our public safety. Nobody wants that result," the mayor wrote.

Hit by a decrease in sales and property taxes, city officials say they must plug a $9 million deficit in their $150 million general fund budget by June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

The police officers' share of the budget cuts is $3.3 million, Interim City Manager Mark Weinberg said.






The day has finally come when the police officers who murdered Kathryn Johnston, 92 in her own home in Atlanta are sentenced for their crimes. It's called a "botched raid" but it was an illegal raid with an illegally gotten warrant signed from a judge that ended with the woman handcuffed and bleeding to death from six bullet wounds on her floor while narcotics officers frantically looked and then decided to plant drugs in her home.


The former officers were sentenced but not before apologizing for their actions.



(excerpt, CNN)




Smith, Junnier and Tesler pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to violate civil rights resulting in death. Smith and Junnier also pleaded guilty to state charges of voluntary manslaughter and making false statements, and Smith admitted to planting bags of marijuana in Johnston's house after her death.

Tesler was convicted on one state count of making false statements for filling out an affidavit stating that an informant had purchased crack cocaine at Johnston's home in a crime-plagued neighborhood near downtown Atlanta. The informant denied having been to Johnston's home, leading to investigations by local authorities and the FBI, and the breakup and reorganization of the Atlanta police narcotics unit.

Police said Johnston fired at them with an old pistol during the raid, and they shot back in self-defense. Johnston's one shot went through her front door and over the officers' heads; they responded with 39 shots, hitting Johnston five times.

"Her death was the foreseeable culmination of a long-standing conspiracy in which the officers violated their oaths of office," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon-Peter Kelly said, according to CNN affiliate WSB. The officers "regularly swore falsely" to get warrants and make cases, he said.

Federal prosecutors said officers cut corners to make more time for lucrative side jobs providing additional security to businesses, often while on duty and for cash payments.

Johnston's family was not in court Monday. But U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes heard a letter from Johnston's niece during the hearing, and family spokesman Markel Hutchins told WXIA he hopes an FBI report of the case can be used to prompt additional charges at the local level.

"The real culprit in this is the culture within the Atlanta Police Department and the higher-ups that laid the foundation. Why aren't they being held accountable?" Hutchins asked.



The three ex-officers received prison sentences between five and 10 years from the judge. They were ordered to three years of supervision after their release from prison and to split the costs of Johnston's funeral.



(excerpt, CNN)




Jason Smith was sentenced to 10 years in the November 2006 raid that left Kathryn Johnston dead in a hail of bullets. Former officers Greg Junnier and Arthur Tesler were sentenced to six and five years, respectively, said Patrick Crosby, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Georgia.

Investigators determined the raid at Johnston's home was based on falsified paperwork stating that illegal drugs were present. The incident prompted a major overhaul of the Atlanta Police Department's drug unit.

"Officers who think, as these defendants once did, that the ends justify the means or that 'taking shortcuts' and telling lies will not be discovered and punished should realize that they are risking their careers and their liberty." U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said in a written statement.

"Officers who try to obstruct justice when their misconduct faces exposure, rather than cooperating in the investigation, should realize that they will face even more severe punishment."









Budget cuts in San Francisco have impacted the staffing of the Office of Citizen Complaints, the civilian oversight mechanism in that city.



(excerpt, San Francisco Examiner)




In 2007, the agency was the subject of a scathing audit by the Controller’s Office, which found that mismanagement and understaffing rendered it nearly ineffective in resolving complaints. Since then, a change of leadership and mediation program have breathed new life into the agency, advocates say.

To combat a citywide deficit, Mayor Gavin Newsom required all city departments to trim their budgets by 14.5 percent and to plan for an additional 14.5 percent “contingency” reduction. On Feb. 1, director Joyce Hicks eliminated three vacant positions from the Office of Citizen Complaints, which saved $330,000. The additional contingency cut represents a “bloodletting” within the $4.2 million budget, she said, that would require the agency to lay off a staff attorney and an investigator.

The cuts would leave 16 investigators, the minimum allowed by the City Charter. Each would handle an average of 23 cases at any given time. The average caseload in similar agencies is 16 probes per investigator, according to the City Controller’s report.

Potential investigation delays threaten to erode public trust in the agency, one advocate said.

“You’re really playing with public confidence,” said Abel Habtegeorgis, spokesman for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which lobbies for fairness in police practices across the Bay Area. “Residents in the community already don’t have faith anything will get done when they lodge a complaint against a police officer.”

The delay for getting complaints resolved has improved since 2007, but is still imposing. About 60 percent of complaints are resolved in six months, while 75 percent are resolved in nine months, the maximum investigation limit the City Charter allows.





The editorial board of the San Francisco Examiner told the city to go easy on welding that budget ax.



(excerpt)




However, there are some instances where the one-size-fits-all departmental ax creates irreplaceable service losses for the public. In such cases there ought to be some sort of transparent review process — or at least a determined effort to maintain key services with other funding sources.

The voter-mandated Office of Citizen Complaints, The City’s main watchdog agency investigating public grievances against police officers, is this sort of special case. The agency was created in 1982 by a City Charter amendment ballot in response to voter demand for an impartial body to investigate all complaints filed against officers.

But by 2007, the agency was targeted with a scathing audit by the Controller’s Office, which found that mismanagement and understaffing made it nearly ineffective. The audit said 40 percent of cases between 2003 and 2006 took longer than 10 months to resolve.

The majority of delayed cases had no work done on them for at least 30 days at a time. And sometimes, the Police Department actually refused to supply information the agency sought, or to follow up on disciplinary recommendations before the one-year statute of limitations.

Happily, the watchdog agency seems to have turned itself around since 2007. With new leadership and a larger staff, case closure is improving. Some 60 percent of complaints are now resolved in six months, and 75 percent are resolved by the nine-month investigation deadline.

The agency’s mediation program is a big success. Its 92 percent officer participation rate is the nation’s highest. Instead of waiting months or even years for a complaint to be resolved in a formal hearing, mediation allows the officer and complaining citizen to negotiate their issues in a neutral setting.



The Department of Justice might look into problems in the DeKalb County Sheriff's Department among the employees there.






Okay, who out there thinks that conducting background checks on prospective law enforcement officers isn't a bad idea? Well, Hallelujah apparently now both the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County Sheriff's Department are among the converts who think doing so might be necessary.


But Chicago's latest police chief refused a federal judge's order to hand over a list of officers with five or more complaints.

What has happened is that the chief has just guaranteed that there will be a lot more news articles about the trouble and scandal-plagued police department in the future. Because perusual, a bad officer gets more protection from management than a good one.


(excerpt, Windy Citizen)



For one, complaints generally aren’t filed frivolously. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice found that due to fear of retaliation or inaction, only 10 percent of citizens who believe they’ve been abused go on to report the incident.

Second, his contention that the CPD review process adequately investigates citizen complaints is undermined by the data. A 2007 study conducted by University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman found (PDF) that while 80 percent of the entire force received three or fewer complaints between 2001 and 2006, the odds that the few officers charged with abuse would be disciplined was exceedingly low: two per thousand. “A good friend of mine -- and former police officer -- told me that if the department investigated crimes like it did internal complaints, they’d never close a case,” Futterman told us today.

What’s most frustrating about CPD’s secrecy is that accountability is not only important to citizens but to the department’s own employees. Nothing prevents good investigative work like the alienation of entire communities thanks to egregious behavior by a small cadre of officers. “I love good police. It’s a hard job, you’re not going to get rich doing it, and it serves the public,” says Futterman. “But any good police officer knows that accountability is critical to their success.”





In Fresno, city residents packed the mayor's forum on exploring the need for a police auditor's office.



(excerpt, Fresno Bee)




"Chief Dyer, I know that you are a good man," Jones said. "This is wrong."

Dyer was present during most of the presentation and appeared to
listen intently as the complaints were aired. He did not speak about
Swearengin's framework for the auditor, which would be independent of
the Police Department and apolitical.

Under the proposal, the auditor would review department internal
affairs investigations, identify trends and produce an annual report.
The auditor would be an attorney and be assisted by a community
liaison. Goals would include reducing claims against the city and
increasing public confidence in the department.

Gloria Hernandez called for the auditor to investigate all
officer-involved shootings and other serious incidents and said the
auditor should have subpoena power. She also called for the chief of
police to respond to auditor inquiries within five days.

Francine Farber of the League of Women Voters called for the auditor
to publish a semiannual report and reach out to young people about
their rights and responsibilities.

Not all of those attending were in favor of the plan. Bishop John Sims
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said
a citizens' review committee would be a better method of overseeing
the Police Department. He said an auditor would be on the city's
payroll and could not be objective. Sims added that his plan would be
much less expensive for taxpayers.

Another opponent is former city Council Member Brian Calhoun. "The
annual call for an [auditor] begins anew," he said. "I did not support
it then, and I don't today."