Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave...City Officials and their Wheels

UPDATE: City Wide WI FI outage enters into its second day after it quit working at noon on Monday...with no ETA announced yet for restoration of the city's free internet service. ATT currently researching the source of the problem since it received the service request yesterday afternoon. Multiple reports from all over the city.

The city is scheduled to take control of the network's management and operations by Sept. 12.








"That's not the position that any public official wants to be in, that you don't know that you are doing something illegal."

---Riverside Councilwoman Nancy Hart


"Why would I suggest it?"

----Former Riverside Police Chief Russ Leach





"I think ultimately he's responsible as our top law enforcement officer to give our city manager advice on that, and he gave him bad advice," Bailey said.

How can this be true when Hudson said he never heard about cold plates until after the attorney generals inquiry?

Can anyone down there on the City Council tell the truth?"


---Commenter, PE.com who makes an excellent point but then the truth doesn't have to be remembered.










The whole cold plate scandal took a rather interesting turn when it was revealed through the Press Enterprise that five former or current city officials had also been driving around cars issued cold plates by the city. At this point, few people are really shocked to learn that this took place but it does explain the city council's rather blase attitude towards the recent scandals to rock City Hall. It's difficult to point fingers at your direct employees for what you've been doing too and besides, those fingers have all been collectively pointed at former Police Chief Russ Leach, a rather easy scapegoat in this mess. But probably not an accurate one.

After all, City Manager Brad Hudson and Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis have a rather extensive history of equipping or trying to equip themselves with various paraphernalia including badges, illegally purchased guns and emergency equipment in the case of DeSantis for his vehicle so he could "roll in" on critical public safety incidents. Hudson and he were allegedly highly involved in seeking out police paraphernalia since they first arrived in 2005 since it took all of six months or even less for the shenanigans involving the use of the police department as an illegal gun vendor to take place. The officer listed on the document as the agent of sale, he got promoted by Chief Sergio Diaz last week despite being demoted from that same rank little more than a year ago.

But the interesting thing about both Hudson and DeSantis is that every time they say something publicly, it's not too difficult to create a counterargument to what they have said, or corrections of the way they have said things. And so it is the case with the mystery of the cold plates. You have to remember that the newspaper is building its record of it based on again, very selective release of public documents pertaining to the issuance of cold plates provided by the city management at City Hall. Something that if the city council believes is going to be fixed by hiring another public information employee, then it's fooling itself which isn't good certainly not on the eve of an election year.

The infamous Cold Plate list

River City's Cold Plate Hall of Fame

"Sure, it makes you mad, but you move on. I'm tired of hearing about them, actually."

Said the plates on his city issued car where changed in late 2009 and he didn't know why

"I think ultimately he's responsible as our top law enforcement officer to give our city manager advice on that, and he gave him bad advice."

"There is really no benefit to having those plates. It doesn't allow you to park illegally, it doesn't allow you too drive fast. Why it was done, I don't know, and I don't understand even today."



[Note: Adams had his city-issued car impounded in Newport Beach allegedly for being "illegally parked". It was cold plated at the time and Former Chief Russ Leach had testified in a deposition that Adams had identified himself as an undercover police officer.]

"I'll blame Tom for the cold plates, Tom and the chief, with the chief getting a little more of the blame. But ultimately, I'm responsible." He said he didn't know about them until the you-know-what began hitting the fan.

Blames the chief who he directly supervised for the issuance of cold plates but if you've been watching closely, the accounts by city management have evolved through time and retelling more than that of Leach. But then he's been quite busy lately.






So you have five elected officials and their explanations as to why they had cold plates on their cars. It's only "old news" to them rather than their constituents because the city tried very hard including behind closed doors to make sure that the public wouldn't ever find out what took place.

They point the finger at Leach because he's easier to blame because he's a convicted criminal of sorts and has gone off into retirement after a scandal that shook the city. But the problem with this version of "I did it because Leach told me to" is that this doesn't explain why Leach then went and complained about the cold plating to two former lieutenants, Tim Bacon and Darryl Hurt who essentially no longer work for Riverside in large part because Leach wasn't really the responsible or the sole responsible party. Why would Leach institute illegal actions and then report them to Hurt and Bacon knowing fully well that they might or would take them to the state attorney general's office? That seems a bit bit foolish on its face and it doesn't jive with the portrait of an eager to please Leach who all of a sudden after four previous interim or permanent city managers and two assistant city managers decides to engage in illegal actions to give police-related equipment to his bosses. It doesn't jive with the reality is that Leach showed a pattern and practice of complaining to various people when disagreeing with actions that he was ordered or told to do by his bosses, Hudson and DeSantis. He didn't like what he was doing, he went off and told people about it.

And he's kept his version of events fairly consistent while Hudson and DeSantis' change their own with all three scandals.






[Another picture of the cold plate list which is difficult to read but on the bottom, next to the written notification for Schiavone (which is below a listing of his city-issued vehicle), there's a right slash (which means "per") and then "De Santis" which means that the authorization appears to have actually come from DeSantis.]





Per usual when the city gets caught doing something, the document record it provides after CPRA requests isn't complete but what was received seem to strongly indicate that the appropriate procedures for acquiring cold plates were violated. Even though the forms are required to be signed by Leach as the head of the law enforcement agency, they were instead signed by a former office specialist named Virginia Titus. So again, if Leach is so onboard with these cold plate issuances outside of the police department, then why isn't his signature on it or at the very least that of a high ranking designee if he was indisposed? Why leave it to an office specialist to authorize? Interestingly, one who just happens to no longer be employed by the city and issued a "no comment" response when called by a newspaper that clearly knew where to locate her. That's not an uncommon response to a journalist request necessarily but if it's a former employee, was a nondisclosure statement involved? As has happened in the case of some of the city's more high profile retirements since Hudson and DeSantis arrived in 2005.

The form even states that it's supposed to be signed by the head of the law enforcement agency and also states clearly what the very narrow parameters are for the issuance of cold plates, yet these forms were still processed anyway. But then the sales registration forms for the weapons purchased by Hudson and DeSantis by the police department clearly state that knowingly providing false information on them is a misdemeanor offense yet it didn't take long for a representative from the state attorney general's criminal division to query the city about questionable and ultimately false information produced on that form.

What's interesting about the belated email produced by DeSantis to *prove* that it was Leach who authorized the plates without of course explaining why his own name appears as authorizing Schiavone's plate on the cold plate list. Interestingly enough, the email was addressing the cold plates put on Schiavone's city-issued vehicle. The email subject line indicates that Leach was emailing administrative manager Karen Aquino about Schiavone's cold plate. He claimed to the Press Enterprise that the email was taken out of context. His email was written in January 2008 about a month before emails were sent by police employees to the State Attorney General's office. Leach had met with them on Jan. 8, 2008 about the issue and then later allegedly sent them the list of cold plated vehicles which were then forwarded to the State Attorney General's office.

Perhaps DeSantis could shed some light on the situation and provide the context by forwarding the entire email exchange to the Press Enterprise and the public in the spirit of this new pledge by City Hall to be more open and transparent. Very nice platitudes indeed to announce that the city government's going to make better efforts not to violate the CPRA law but it's time to see some actions.

Leach mentioned getting further information on vehicle codes from former Traffic Lt. Ken Carpenter (who retired in 2008) and that list of codes does include provisions for "confidential plates" which can be issued to a roster of type of people including elected officials but these aren't the same as cold plates. But even though all this took place including correspondence with the State Attorney General's office in early 2008, the city still issued out cold plated vehicles to city officials including Councilman Rusty Bailey who received his in September 2008.

Bailey and Hart then say that Riverside's politicians weren't the only ones to receive cold plated vehicles. After all, look what happened in neighboring Hemet, they said as if that had happened out of the blue. And it's true that Hemet Police Chief Richard Dana had to remove cold plates from several vehicles used by city officials upon learning it was illegal. But what Hart and Bailey don't mention is that Dana took the job in Hemet after retiring from the Riverside Police Department as a commander. In his interview with the Press Enterprise, Dana said he didn't know the practice was illegal because while working in Riverside, he knew that nonpolice employees had cold plates on their vehicles. So ironically, what happened in Hemet wasn't an isolated incident in a vacuum but stemmed from behavior that had been taking place in Riverside.

Adams who's up for reelection next year said in the article that he was puzzled at why it would be a good idea. Earlier he hadn't believe it was likely that vehicles issued to city officials would ever be used again as police cars because they had too much mileage on them. But then when his city-issued vehicle had been impounded in Newport Beach allegedly for being "illegally parked" it had been cold plated at the time and Leach had alleged in a deposition that he gave that Adams had identified himself as an undercover police officer and that a watch commander at Riverside's police department had been contacted to discuss that.

Several city council members including both Hart and Adams have issued dismissive statements about how it's all "old news" and it's time to move on. But while the city officials are eager to erase their memories and those of city residents especially before next year, what many city residents are thinking right now, is what the hell will be coming down the pike or spilling out about City Hall next? Because the scandals at Riverside's City Hall are the gift that keeps on giving.

It's difficult for city residents to be as blase about all these scandals as City Hall clearly wishes they would be but seriously everyone's just waiting to see what happens next in his unfolding soap opera. Over the weekend the latest scandal involving the filing of a claim for damages by former Deputy Chief Pete Esquivel hit the national news once again putting Riverside on the map as an epicenter for scandals. So far the reaction at City Hall has been to talk about hiring another public information person to handle intergovernmental relations and public information requests.


But Riverside's been hitting the national radar since earlier this year and it's interesting hearing from people outside the city and the state wondering what the hell's going on in this former city that historically had been more interested in its now vanishing citrus industry rather than in generating scandals. But this is reflective of an indecisive body of leadership at City Hall which remained silent on all the scandals involving illegal behavior as they erupted until it decided it was time to hire another employee on the Seventh Floor to monitor public information requests which still will be overseen by the same two direct employees, Hudson and City Attorney Gregory Priamos who have generated most of the problems involving the city's compliance with the CPRA. Remember Priamos was the one who three years ago couldn't find two police management contracts which were generated by his own office as evidenced by his office's information being stamped on every single page of these contracts when they did finally show up just a month ago. It comes down to elected leadership being able and willing to collectively hold their direct employees accountable including for their misdeeds and that's glaringly absent from the equation so much so that many city residents have picked up on it as an election cycle looms for four elected officials on the dais. City officials including those who are elected don't take responsibility for their actions or those of their direct employees and pass the buck elsewhere, this case at Leach who's responsible for his own share of misbehavior but there's more than one individual involved in this rash of illegal behavior and misconduct that's shaken the confidence of many residents in City Hall.

Look at the scandals and look at the sheer list of claims for damages and lawsuits faced by the city from all over its workplaces. Major litigation is brewing that could embarrass the city in several different departments not to mention employees who suddenly don't work for the city anymore. The cost of this ligitation including that at the grievance level (and the city does lose quite a few even at this stage) will be one that many city residents would be shocked to know. Which is very distressing in a city that prides itself in being self-insured.



And the sense is that when it comes to revelations about more scandals, there are still plenty more of those where they came from currently sitting on the horizon. After all, 2010 isn't over yet and when you combine apathetic, rudderless leadership at the top with entitlement and opportunism in upper management, it's hard to imagine any other outcome.

After all, Riverside is reaping what it has sown.




Riverside hires another manager at the Fox Theater to be more user friendly?



More pension troubles erupt in Riverside County.

WI FI UPDATE


Another outage took place beginning about noon today. The extent of it is not clear nor is the estimated time for restoring the service back online.

Scandal plagued Maywood severs its "marriage" to scandal plagued Bell.

The House That City Hall Built Part. 1: Who's Who and Where

"This is way above us bro..."

---Patrol officer, before wondering if Leach might use his weapon on them if armed. Longer dash cam video here and if it doesn't come up, scroll down and click where it's listed.



"Hey John, it's Russ..."


----Former Chief Russ Leach on cell phone to Asst. Chief John DeLaRosa before Sgt. Frank Orta arrived onscene.






"Who's John. I'm like who's John..."


---Patrol Officer Grant Linhart to CHP investigators





"He's reaching under the seat dude, that makes me nervous..."


---Patrol officer to other just before Leach gets out of his car




"And as I got within arms' distance, he just stuck the phone at me and he said it's the Assistant Chief John DeLaRosa. So I thought that was odd. You know, so they handed me the phone and so he goes "Hey Frank what's going on there"? I said "I don't know I just got here. " He goes, well he goes, is he drunk?"


---Sgt. Frank Orta about a phone conversation with DeLaRosa, to CHP investigators









[Part of a letter by the Office of State Attorney General Jerry Brown to former Chief Russ Leach inquiring about potentially illegal conduct involving a weapons sales transaction involving the police department as well as the creation and issuance of flat badges to City Manager Brad Hudson and Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis. Click the photo for a better look at the letter's wording.]






"So I put my head in the car and I'm really looking and I get a side view of the driver, looks like an old man, kind of get a frontal view and then he just kind of glanced my way and then I was like, "Oh Crap. That's the chief. The chief." I immediately went over the top and I'm like "Miller" and I pointed down and I'm like "it's Chief One"." He motions to me with a hand signal, you now the telephone to his ear, and he's like "Call the Serge".



---Officer Grant Linhart to CHP investigators during his interview.

River City: 2010

"Bro don't...You're good dude...We're Code 4, this is a political nightmare...Dude just leave. Go 10-8."

---Patrol officer Grant Linhart to another officer passing through the area of the stop. He could have told him Dude, welcome to River City...now go home.







Welcome to River City, a location of very much activity and intrigue which it appears never takes much of a rest.

Within the city limits, lies a house called the Riverside Police Department, and within the past five years, that's become the house that City Hall built. And that house has inside it an assortment of colorful characters who were created along with the house.

But first let's start this story with a more current event, the latest fallout in the incident that arose from the house that City Hall built that crashed into the canvas along with Former Police Chief Russ Leach's city-owned Black Chrysler 300 on Feb. 8.

The day that the house built by City Hall began seeing its walls begin to crumble, its foundation begin to shake.

And now nearly four months later, the house has begun to collapse on itself like the house of cards that it turned out to be when trouble came calling.

Capt. Meredyth Meredith allegedly came into her office one recent morning and found a packet on her desk belonging to one of her subordinates, Lt. Leon Phillips who had been the watch commander the time of the fateful Feb. 8 Super Bowl incident which would once again, put Riverside on the national radar and remind everyone that River City is still very much alive and well. If Meredith, who also happens to be the department's highest ranking female, started to feel a little bit more pressure, it's hard to blame her for that. Because her job given to her by Capt. Mike Blakely of Personnel apparently was to recommend disciplinary action for Phillips. If she went too lightly, she herself could get into trouble for failure to properly supervise. If she went too heavy she could start a range war inside the department with her as a focus.

Meredith has already had some difficult situations to deal with, having had her last two promotions prove to be rocky experiences. Her promotion to 1999 helped spark a reverse racism and sexism lawsuit filed by a group of White male sergeants already charged up over the promotions of now retired lieutenants, Alex Tortes and Ron Orrantia. This lawsuit was actually a pivotal part of helping City Hall build its house because two of the litigants would later return in this story. Meredith originally was asked by members of the so-called "suing sergeants" to join in on their lawsuit and she demurred. When she herself was promoted to fill a lieutenant's vacancy that came about due to Audrey Wilson's promotion to captain, she became a focus of some of that ire herself.

But Meredith did ultimately get promoted and she worked as a lieutenant in different assignments including the Internal Affairs Division. Then she applied to be promoted to captain and around December 2005, Leach picked her as his choice. And someone from his office called Meredith to come down to his office to receive her promotion to captain.


Leach recalled in his deposition the process of notification of the promotion to Meredith and about how it went south.

(excerpt, Leach deposition)


"And that's when I had one of the two secretaries call her to have her--and again, this is like mid-morning, after 10:00 or so that morning. I said, "Have her come at 2:00 o'clock." Give me time to have someone prepare a Certificate of Promotion and find a badge--a captain's badge. And Then I think, absolutely within the hour, I got a call back from Tom DeSantis saying to look elsewhere."




Leach said it was the first time the city manager's office had ever asked him to veto a promotion from his department. And he responded in his deposition to the request to un-promote Meredith:


(excerpt, Leach deposition)


"Well what happened after that was, I wasn't really pleased but, you know, was told to take a look at the list. And obviously I took that to mean that she was not--approved for the promotion. So I called --and I forget which of the two secretaries it was. I said, "Call her back and tell her not to come." And it was a very difficult thing to do."




Meredith was friends with Maureen Mitchell who had worked directly in Leach's office before being transferred to City Hall to do the same for Hudson. She was the messenger for some of these conversations involving Meredith getting promoted and then un-promoted and had been very upset about it, according to Leach's deposition.

When Leach was asked in his deposition, what he had heard about any concerns he had heard or reasons why his promotion of Meredith was vetoed, he said that he couldn't recall any specifics but that he had heard that there had been some concern expressed by someone on the seventh floor about her promotion.


And who was that, Leach's memory reached for details.


(excerpt, Leach deposition)


"That a councilman, Steve Adams had expressed to the city manager or Desantis or both his concern over her being promoted. And so, you know, that was the reason why I got this phone call back from Desantis. He never mentioned Adams to me. He just told me-he never said Steve Adams was involved. Like I said, I learned that after the fact."



If this is the case, it paints a very disturbing portrait because it would reflect that there's some reason to think that Adams had involved himself in the promotional process of a captain inside the police department. To do so, would be a violation of the city's charter and Adams actually knew the law because he testified under oath that he had knowledge that for city officials to involve themselves in the promotional process was in fact illegal.

Now Adams has his own version of events and you'll read them in his own words later on in this series, including his terminology that he used to describe Meredith, the kind reserved for women, interestingly in a city where Mayor Ron Loveridge once stood at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, jr. statue and averred that the city had a zero tolerance for such comments. Some people whether or not they agreed or disagreed with Meredith's promotion have called this the most disgraceful incident associated with any police department position. Because surely that sounds like a reputable promotional process if you've ever seen or heard of one, what an embarrassment to any professional working environment to have this type of behavior take place involving anyone.

But Meredith did get promoted to fill a newly created captain's position which some say resulted after Meredith decided to play some hardball by threatening to file a discrimination lawsuit against the city, saying to Leach, hey I've got a case. Maybe the city attorney's office directed the department to do so to save the city from bankruptcy as a result of paying out on any lawsuit she would have filed on this matter.

At any rate, this is just one of the stories that came because of the house that City Hall built but in the meantime, Meredith had that packet on her desk and a decision to make.

But did she make it the recommendation to fire Phillips or did someone else?

Ground Zero: Arlington and Rutland, around 3 a.m. on Feb. 8

Sarg, hey can you come up to our stop? We're at Arlington and Rutland and I'll tell you, you'll know who it is. It's a black no plates Chrysler 300...really nice...and I think you know who drives that kind of car."


---Patrol officer to Sgt. Frank Orta, while at the scene of Leach's traffic stop around 2:53 a.m. The officer then warns an officer, telling him to leave and essentially get out of Dodge because we have a "train wreck" here. "I'm just trying to save you..."




"Aaaah, I'm all the way at Mag..."


----Sgt. Orta to Patrol officer when notified after hearing the description of the vehicle.




"I wish I could do that..."


---Patrol officer to the other, after warning another one to hit the road to avoid the political train wreck.

Lt. Leon Phillips Fired?

The house as directed by City Manager Brad Hudson served Lt. Leon Phillips with his papers for intent to terminate giving him about two weeks to schedule his Skelly hearing to contest his termination. Does this mean he'll be fired? No, he could receive lessor disciplinary action if this is a case of charging an uncooperative party with a higher offense so you'll get him to plea bargain to something lesser later on. Phillips' lawyer, Ken Yuwiler was very actively on the day of his notice of termination so this process is clearly playing itself out. It's probably fitting to demote Phillips for his role in the incident but terminating him in the absence of similar disciplinary action against his boss just sends the message that everything the city ever said about management accountability is essentially a lie to the public, not just by words but by actions because most often, it's actions that speak the loudest.

Still awaiting disciplinary action if he'll receive any at all, is Phillips supervisor that early morning, current Acting Chief John DeLaRosa who was praised by Hudson in this news article for delivering consistent stories to both California Highway Patrol investigators and to Hudson's own internal probe. While coyly branding Phillips for doing differently. But what's fascinating about the situation that if DeLaRosa were truly clueless as he claims after being on the phone at least three times with Phillips including likely towards the end of the traffic stop after 4 a.m., then why did the direction of the stop change from the officers' suspicions of a DUI to Leach getting a ride home from Phillips after Phillips got on the phone with DeLaRosa?

Not to mention having been talking to onscene sergeant, Frank Orta (who took a medical retirement) and Officer Jeremy Miller on the phone as well. DeLaRosa told investigators that he knew Leach had been a heavy drinker and Orta had said that he had specifically told DeLaRosa that the traffic stop involved a possibly drunk chief and then the two got into this kind of discussion about how to treat the chief versus a Riverside city resident and mere mortal.

Yet, even after Phillips talks back and forth with a supervisor three ranks above him several times, he still "decides" to give Leach a ride home. What's interesting about this situation too is that there are other questions which apparently were never asked including:


1) Why did Leach call DeLaRosa and in fact handed a phone to Orta with DeLaRosa on the other end of the line for him to speak with? And why call DeLaRosa in the first place?

2) Why didn't Leach call someone else lower...like Deputy Chief Pete Esquivel (who interestingly enough, said he had been "trumped") instead?

3) Why did Phillips decide not to enforce the stop as a DUI investigation after talking to DeLaRosa?

4)Why did Phillips after apparently deciding to treat it as a "traffic collision" with no DUI yet call DeLaRosa twice to have conversations with him including after 4 a.m.?

5) Why after talking to Orta (whose statement differs from DeLaRosa yet unlike Phillips, no innuendo coming from Hudson that he's inconsistent in his words) did DeLaRosa still have no clue that "intoxication" might be involved?

6) Why didn't DeLaRosa notify the city management of the "high profile" police contact that took place involving Leach? Why was no criminal investigation ever launched by the RPD and why did it take so long to farm out to the CHP?

7) Why to this day has City Hall not been investigated for any potential role in this incident?




Interestingly enough, what Hudson apparently doesn't realize that if he believes DeLaRosa's "consistent" account of not being aware that "intoxication" was involved, then essentially he's just branded two other officers, Orta and Miller as liars. And yet neither of them were fired nor should they be because they probably weren't lying about their conversations with DeLaRosa.

And what Hudson and DeLaRosa don't remember is this basic tenet. That in a truly accountable and honest police department culture when it comes to dealing with the boss's crimes, that once that first phone notification was made, period, then the traffic stop would have proceeded in the right direction. Even if all the facts were not forthcoming to DeLaRosa. Because it's not all the facts themselves that were necessary and they were provided to DeLaRosa according to other participants.

Why? Because a department with an accountable, ethical and honest management would through attitude, direction and through example on a daily basis (even outside of a crisis) would have made it absolutely clear, no doubts about it that any criminal conduct even by the chief would be handled as it would against any other person. Meaning it gets evaluated, investigated and a case is sent for disposition by the District Attorney's office. The individual whether chief, elected official or mere resident is given a citation of notice to appear in court. That's the tone that would be so firmly entrenched into the department's handling of criminal investigations including DUI stops, that most of the drama that took place during the Leach incident would never have happened or needed to happen. It happened because there's a serious breach of ethical expectations in the management personnel of the police department. There must be because if not, the DUI stop would have happened much differently than it did.

If the management structure which both Leach and DeLaRosa were integral parts of was accountable, ethical and honest, Leach wouldn't have been on the phone to DeLaRosa at the very beginning, clearly to "handle" it. You wouldn't have patrol officers being deferential to Leach, turning off their microphones and talking about being "torn" in their decision whether to do the job they took an oath to do. You wouldn't have a DUI expert and supervisor like Orta burn up the phone lines with DeLaRosa talking about how he would handle an ordinary person in a DUI situation or telling DeLaRosa he didn't want trouble, let alone writing a completely bogus report (and omitting information in a police incident report is as inherently dishonest as lying on it).

You wouldn't have Phillips chatting back and forth with DeLaRosa during the stop, or lying to investigators about not knowing Leach was drunk when everyone else there did. Driving the chief home and then removing himself off the captain's list the next day. DeLaRosa would have never had to tell the chief to come clean, to say that he didn't have to suspend people's beliefs by saying that even though he knew the chief was a drinker, he had no idea on the morning following the Super Bowl that alcohol could be involved. DeLaRosa would have notified the city management as required under policy because it didn't even have to be a DUI to do that, the fact that the police had any contact with Leach, who fits the "high profile" category, was enough for that notification. The fact that DeLaRosa didn't do it but inexplicably left it to Leach to do so paints a different picture than ignorance about a DUI incident, along with the fact that DeLaRosa didn't initiate an investigation inhouse and didn't farm it out for over 24 hours after the incident.

There's talk of "indecision" and mistakes being made but none of the mistakes were actually made during that traffic stop and its aftermath but in the five years of department restructuring at the top level that preceded it. The mistake being that it was allowed to happen unchecked. Hudson clearly thinks that most residents are stupid. Only time will tell if that's the case or not including during the next election cycle when people take their views on many civic issues including this episode to the voting polls with them. And you'll find during this series of blog postings just how stupid Hudson and a few others in City Hall think that the public really is about what's been doing on behind closed doors inside a publicly owned building.

But there's a place and a time where this all began...



In the House that City Hall Built...






[The Riverside Police Department's administrative headquarters, otherwise known as Orange Street Station, the place where many high ranking members of the "brass" hang out. Just as this is rental space the city is borrowing the county, so it seems are some of the promotions which have come out of this building...and.....]




[This building houses much higher players in the police department than those in uniform, including the man who on a recent recruitment flier for the police chief's position called himself, or more literally, his title the top of the police department's "chain of command" and oh, more than any of his predecessors, City Manager Brad Hudson has lived up to that title.]








[The design of the badge that City Manager Brad Hudson allegedly arranged to have created for himself and two assistant city managers in the wake of a legal opinion from the State Attorney General Jerry Brown outlawing such badges. These faux badges were ordered destroyed by the State Attorney General's criminal division. Hudson's excuse? The Community Development Division made me do it.]





[This is the design for a police officer badge in Riverside. Compare and contrast how similar it looks to the non-police badge just above it. ]

Okay, why on earth would a city manager even one toting a concealed weapon complete with permit need a badge?






[A page taken from a transaction that took place involving gun and assorted paraphernalia sold by the Riverside Police Department to city management employees, an action that attracted attention from the State Attorney General's criminal division to determine whether any criminal violations were involved. ]






[Oh, this is just an ATM machine located in the lobby of Riverside's City Hall but some people think that this is a fairly good representation of what the city management team sees when it envisions the police department.]



All these things will be described in much greater detail in future postings here but first there's some people that you need to meet in case you haven't already. Alas, this isn't a happy little tale but one that in retrospect will put this incident involving Leach and the mishandling and attempted cover up of his DUI incident in an interesting light. Because that incident wasn't an isolated event, but a culmination of some years of problematic behavior involving the police department and its micromanagement by different elements from inside City Hall.

It's ironic isn't it? The whole idea that the department that had so many chiefs wound up with none. But that road included a series of steps.

Cast of Characters:

Police Chief Russ Leach: the head of the police department who’s encharged with hiring, firing and promoting employees. He's currently medically retired after the DUI thing.








City Manager Brad Hudson[center]: Leach’s boss and some say puppeteer who under the city’s charter had the “final say” in promotions by his department heads










Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis[photo of his chief's "badge"]: Hudson’s errand boy and hatchet man, hired to run interference for Hudson or to pick up stranded elected officials in Orange County but alas, Hudson had to do for him after the infamous Hemet incident. He has the gun, he had the police equipment, he even (almost) had the badge and some say...he now has the chief's newly spiffed up Chrysler 300 as his very own.





Deputy Chief Pete Esquivel: Third highest ranking police employee and close friend of Councilman Steve Adams, helping him to “mediate” a dispute between Adams and captain’s candidate, John Carpenter. Retired in the wake of several internal investigations after considering going for the chief’s job.










Councilman Steve Adams: Retired police officer turned elected official and friend of Esquivel who factored into the promotions of no less than three captains, torpedoing one and allowing at least two others. Some say he played a bigger role in the police department than he did his years as a patrol officer. He's up for reelection next year, has recently married and has settled in with his new wife...and occasionally he spends time in his ward. Adams had his city-owned car towed from Newport Beach and put on Asst. City Manager Tom DeSantis' Triple A card.

The Crafty Captains:

(in alphabetical order)

Mike Blakely[left]: Former deputy chief in another era who has in recent months reached alpha male status in the management pecking order. After DeLaRosa’s fall from grace courtesy of some cell phone disclosure, he essentially took over the helm of the police department, is now firmly in control of it, and is currently blissfully happy.







Mark Boyer: One of the “suing sergeants” who managed to parlay himself into the captain’s seat after bumping another candidate out of line. Retired in 2009 after allegedly being placed on paid administrative leave by Leach who apparently never got past the embarrassment with Meredith.








John Carpenter: Another “suing sergeant” who allegedly fell out of good grace with Adams endangering his promotional status until a peace treaty was brokered with Adams in a Corona eatery with Esquivel mediating. Carpenter was promoted less than 24 hours after that meeting and now is hitting the department's talk show circuit explaining the incident to his colleagues.








David Dominguez: The former deputy chief who is now a police chief in Palm Springs.
Allegedly, the city management including DeSantis wanted to demote him.











Meredyth Meredith: The only female in the group and not a suing sergeant, she nearly became a suing lieutenant when she was ousted over her promotion to captain in the 11th hour by Adams. She became the first and last captain of the department’s Communications Division within a year of the subterfuge involving her promotion. Unlike Carpenter, Meredith wasn't afforded the opportunity to appeal her endangered promotion to the head of arbitration, Adams.









John Wallace: Rather young but very ambitious officer who first lobbied hard to become a captain and then decided to apply to become chief. Did he pick up an inebriated Leach out in the High Desert one early morning and drive him home?





These are some of the characters who will be playing more or less prominent roles in the story of the House that City Hall Built, which will be coming to you in a series of installments in future blog postings. The information in these blog postings was information that City Hall didn't want anyone to see, and in fact, paid a considerable sum of money so that it would never be seen. As the city has done in many other cases, settling so much civil litigation (even when its insurance company didn't like its inability or unwillingness to actually take lawsuits to trial) so that the public wouldn't know what is going on inside buildings paid for by tax dollars and decisions being made by people also paid for by tax dollars including those entrusted to serve the city residents who vote them into office.



More to come from River City...





Riverside City Attorney Gregory Priamos goes on the defensive after allegations arose in the California Highway Patrol investigation report that he approved the controversial handwritten report on the incident involving former Riverside Chief Russ Leach before now-retired Deputy Chief Pete Esquivel signed it. But he's still not answered the questions as to why the city passed off an unsigned copy of Orta's report as the real thing to the media and to the public.

CHP Report Implicates DeLaRosa, Phillips in Handling of Leach DUI Incident

UPDATE: City Manager Brad Hudson releases updated report on the 2500 page internal probe.

---Best, Best and Krieger Attorney Grover Trask: No evidence of cover up just "tragically deficient decisions by police management."

Hudson: "Individuals responsible for these failures are being held accountable."


MORE TO COME....







""I knew right away, I'm like, 'This is a political mess,' "


---Officer Grant Linhart, to CHP investigators about Leach DUI and clearly knowing the score about different standards for DUI enforcement despite less than three years employment by the RPD.





"Well, if it wasn't the chief, if it was anybody else, I'd arrest him and store the vehicle."

---Former Sgt. Frank Orta, to investigators who also seemed to be aware of the double standard probably including when he engaged in creative report writing.




"I said, 'I trust your judgment,' and that was it."


----Acting Police Chief John DeLaRosa who apparently never heard the Harry S. Truman adage, "the bucks stops here".









[The car involved in the incident that generated so many questions while it sits hidden away in a storage facility at Magnolia Police Center.]





The California Highway Patrol's investigative report on the Feb. 8 DUI incident involving former Chief Russ Leach was finally released after having allegedly been withheld by the Riverside County District Attorney's office upon request by City Hall. It does present some kind of portrait of events but raises even more questions than it does answers because of what appears to be some obvious contradictory statements among the parties involved and later interviewed as well as written documentation of the "traffic collision" turned DUI crime.

DUI Recognition 101

Should Rookie Officers be the Teachers and Management the Students?

The report's conclusion confirms what many Riversiders figured out a long time ago that the decision made to not investigate Leach for DUI was not made by patrol officers Jeremy Miller and Grant Linhart at the scene not even their immediate supervisor, Sgt. Frank Orta, three individuals vilified over this incident. Instead the decisions on how to handle the Leach incident were made by personnel who were higher up on the department's command structure. And that earlier indications that the officers statements would contradict each other appear to have born out as the statements of the patrol officers and Orta contradict with those of the higher ranking, Lt. Leon Phillips and Asst. (now acting) Chief John DeLaRosa. Phillips denied suspecting Leach was drinking until he was driving home while DeLaRosa said as far as he could recall, no one had mentioned Leach's intoxication to him.

Which is in sharp contrast to the two relatively inexperienced officers who believed from their first contact with Leach that he might be drunk, as assertion also reached by Orta when he arrived. So how is it then that two relatively inexperienced officers could note signs of the police chief probably being a DUI yet Phillips with his wealth of experience didn't realize Leach might be drunk until he drove him home san a DUI evaluation? Not to mention that Phillips was on the captain's list while apparently lacking the basic skills that his patrol officers showed in recognizing "objective" signs of a DUI in an individual who had bloodshot eyes, had been unsteady, who had been engaging in repetitive speech, who had no idea where he was and who apparently had lost control of his elimination functions soiling his clothes. Leach wasn't a borderline DUI, he had an extrapolated blood alcohol when he left Club 215 after his seven "doubles" of 0.29 and an estimated value of 0.22 when he was stopped according to the CHP report.

So Miller and Linhart can recognize a DUI and so can Orta and these individuals really have little reason to lie given that they are the lower ranking officers involved in the situation. And it's reasonable to expect that the more senior officers including those at the management level would be able to more quickly recognize a DUI than those with lesser experience. And according to this dash cam video from ABC, Leach clearly wasn't steady on his feet.

Yet the senior officer at the scene, Phillips was clueless that Leach might be drunk enough to at least do a DUI evaluation. He couldn't do the evaluation but he took Leach home rather than allow Leach to work out his own transportation. After all, if he were legally stone cold sober, he could certainly find his own way home even without a car to drive.

It's clear that the officers at the bottom and Orta realized the implications of busting the boss for criminal conduct given comments they made about the situation afterward and to investigators. Linhart knew it was enough of a career and political hot potato to warn another officer away, Orta warned DeLaRosa not to make things difficult for him and Phillips withdrew his name from the captain's list clearly guessing that trouble lay ahead.

But Orta said that he had discussed the situation with DeLaRosa which included a contrast between how he would arrest and impound the car in one case as long as it wasn't the police
chief. It's clear that in that context that Orta's comparison involved the discussion of a double standard that would exist between how a police chief would be treated in a DUI situation compared to an ordinary person. It's also clear that if what Orta said is true, then DeLaRosa should have known that alcohol was involved despite his protests in his own statement to CHP investigators that intoxication was never mentioned.

The only conclusion that can be reached here besides the obvious is that perhaps the rookie officers like Miller and Linhart should be teaching DUI recognition skills to the department's management personnel who seem to be totally in the dark about what a person who's roaring drunk looks like. Because those who supervised them, outranked them and pulled in larger paychecks them act in their versions of events like they had no clue at all.

Of course, for those who buy that, there's some beach property up for sale in Idaho for you to buy...but what throws a kink in the idea that the higher ranking officers didn't know what happeend comes to you in writing, in the form of Orta's report which essentially proves that some form of conspiracy (no, not the tin foil kind, the kind where two or more people get together to discuss or plan the commission of criminal conduct). Because it's very believable that the officers saw the signs of DUI and it's likely that their immediate supervisor who they called specifically to assist them with a probable DUI involving their boss would come to the same conclusions but it's above Orta that the situation gets murkier and yet also clearer. Orta's report is one major reason why.

No DUI Mentioned In the Police Incident Report by Orta

[The page of Orta's handwritten report that includes Orta's disposition that the accident was to be filed away as a traffic collision, with no mention of any suspicions of a DUI. ]




Orta's statements of suspecting Leach of having been drinking contrast greatly with the police report that he had written on the incident which hardly mentioned drinking at all, let alone included any information about a DUI evaluation being done, including information provided by the two patrol officers which should have been included in the report. If Orta so strongly believed that Leach had been drunk when he arrived to supervise the officers, then why doesn't his report reflect that? Why doesn't his report written hours later include any mention of the probability of DUI or even DUI at all for that matter? That glaring omission and Orta's assertion that the incident was a mere traffic collision provides a major clue that during the process of this incident that Orta was given instructions by someone else there to treat it as anything but. Orta gets the call for supervision from his patrol officers and the court recognized DUI expert arrives onscene and at some point talks to DeLaRosa about how he would handle the case...if it weren't the police chief which would be to arrest them and to impound the car for towing and storage. So if Orta is providing a compare and contrast scenario for DeLaRosa, then yes, Virginia it's a given that intoxication involving the police chief had to have reached DeLaRosa's ears and thus he did know about it.

So who exactly wrote this police report in the first place? Officially, that was clearly Orta but why would he produce a work product (literally) in writing that contradicted the statements he provided to CHP investigators? When and more importantly how did Orta's "immediate" suspicions that Leach was drunk become instead a report about a relatively innocuous "traffic collision" where "drinking" is mentioned in passing and no DUI investigation was conducted? But it's clear that if Orta told the CHP investigators that he knew that Leach was DUI and he knew that there's a different standard for Leach's handling compared with the mere mortals in this city who get caught driving drunk, then this report is pretty much pure fabrication and there was full knowledge by Orta and probably those above him that this was the case. And that there was some planning as part of the cover up to write a report that's essentially false, which just happens to be a crime. But then covering up criminal conduct and obstructing any investigation of it is also a crime for most individuals anyway.


But not for police management personnel in Riverside.

Political Hot Potato Alert

As noted earlier, the two responding patrol officers Jeremy Miller and Grant Linhart had performed an initial evaluation on Leach's sobriety noting "objective" signs including bloodshot eyes, disorientation, repetitive speech and then called for their supervisor, Sgt. Frank Orta who is a court recognized DUI expert. Not surprisingly, he noticed that Leach was drunk too. Both the patrol officers and Orta clearly knew the political hot potato that had been tossed their way, with Orta saying how he could handle the situation as a proper DUI stop if it were someone else besides his boss. Linhart made comments about what a "political mess" it would be and had warned the colleague who had responded not to get involved. Both officers had told the investigators that they felt conflicted between pursuing their suspicions of the chief being a DUI and having to bust their boss. So they did what other officers have done in cases like these which is call for the supervisor to take care of him which is what other officers have done in cases like these for different law enforcement agencies.

Orta knows it's bad news because he goes and tells DeLaRosa not to make trouble for him because he's close to retirement. Did he participate in this conspiracy to cover up for Leach because he was set to retire soon and didn't want anyone to jeopardize his retirement? Phillips as it turned out was on the captain's list less than two years after his July 2008 promotion to lieutenant to replace a retiring Lt. Ken Carpenter. His statements of not guessing that Leach was drunk until driving him home are highly suspect. If the subordinates at the scene including two relatively newly hired officers would recognize the signs of DUI on their boss as quickly as they recognize who the identity of the inebriated driver they had stopped, then why couldn't he? It's just impossible for the average person to swallow that Phillips really had been that clueless. He's clearly protecting himself and he's clearly protecting someone else as well, his supervisor that night, DeLaRosa. Which is really loyal of him but if he's read the CHP report by now which he probably is, he must realize that his loyalty towards someone who's above him in the chain of command like DeLaRosa was clearly not returned.

In fact just from the little that was detailed in the news article, there's more than just hints that DeLaRosa threw him under the bus. The officers say he's drunk, call supervision because this is a political hot potato. Orta arrives and say, he's drunk but there's how I would treat the average person and how the chief would be treated. Phillips throws up his hands and says, hey I didn't even guess he might look drunk until he was in the seat of my car and I drove him home. And DeLaRosa, the highest ranking officer involved who wasn't drunk says, hey I wasn't there, I was clueless and it's [pointing index finger]...Leon's fault. And Leon's probably thinking, hey wait a minute boss...I've been the loyal underling and you're throwing me under the bus as the patsy in this whole mess. And in this case, Leon would be correct because it's clear to the average person that this situation must have been DeLaRosa's call and the CHP appears to have reached that same conclusion in its report. Both men should have realized that a DUI might have been involved and both handled it inappropriately in a way that nearly protected Leach from prosecution for the crime of DUI which he later plead guilty to through an attorney at his arraignment.

Clearly not realizing that night that at least from the police department's end, the buck stops with him, part and parcel of being the police chief's second highest ranking employee. And DeLaRosa hurt his own cause by making statements about Leach being a "heavy drinker" and yet having no idea that intoxication could be involved in an accident involving Leach at 3 a.m. in the morning and he also leaves it to Leach to notify the city manager's office about the incident when that procedure of notification does allow both the assistant chief and deputy chiefs to themselves notify the city management of any incidents involving "high profile" individuals. If DeLaRosa were truly as clueless as he claimed about the DUI incident when it happened, he certainly knew hours later at work and yet he never notified the city management leaving Mayor Ron Loveridge's office (after it was tipped off by a female caller) to fulfill that responsibility.


He never initiated a DUI investigation against his boss by the department either but instead farmed it out to the CHP just at the time the phone lines were burning up at City Hall and the department by inquiring media outlets tipped off about the Leach incident.





Here are some of the highlights in the summary of events described in the Press Enterprise article and it's clear that even in this brief volume of information that there's some serious problems with this version of events.


(excerpt)

In separate interviews, Linhart, Miller and their immediate supervisor, Sgt. Frank Orta, told the CHP that it was obvious to them, almost immediately, that Leach had been drinking. His speech was repetitive and disoriented; he didn't seem to know where he was.

"Well, if it wasn't the chief, if it was anybody else, I'd arrest him and store the vehicle," Orta said he told De La Rosa over the phone just after arriving on scene.

Phillips told investigators that it was not until he was driving Leach home that he began to believe the chief may have been drunk. And De La Rosa said that, as far as he could recall, intoxication was never mentioned to him.

De La Rosa, the assistant chief at the time, did not leave home to assess the scene personally. He briefly spoke over the phone to Leach, Miller and Orta, and traded several calls with Phillips, with whom he said he left the ultimate decision.

"I said, 'I trust your judgment,' and that was it," De La Rosa said.

Later that morning, however, the ramifications of what had occurred were clear. Phillips immediately sent an e-mail to then-Deputy Chief Pete Esquivel, removing his name from consideration for a promotion to captain.

And Orta told De La Rosa that with eight months until his retirement, he didn't want any trouble.

De La Rosa said that he told Leach, whom he identified as a heavy drinker, to come clean to City Hall about what had transpired.

"I felt at that point he should have already reported what ... had occurred to (the city manager's office)," he told investigators, "and you know (I was) just irritated with him in general, just for the circumstances."

All of what has been written here in this analysis is pretty self-explanatory from the excerpts published by the Press Enterprise. It's hard not to get more disgusted the further this situation goes in its evolution from pure fabrication to maybe some semblance of truth. But while the narrative provided by the newspaper gleaned from over 500 pages of criminal investigation material, the truth is still as X-Files character, Fox Muldur might say, still out there...somewhere.

The hardest part of this for many people is the damage to public trust that this episode has created in city residents, but harder than that is the realization for people that working hard to reform the pattern and practices of a department that's come a long way in 10 years means little if those in the decision making positions at its top echelon along with those who fill the top positions at City Hall aren't serious themselves and in fact, treat the whole process that's lasted more than a decade as a joke. Because for the city residents and maybe for quite a few employees of the department, the joke has been on us this entire time. Because while pushing for improved staffing, accountability, resources and promoting the philosophy of community policing has been important for most of those invested in improving the police department, there's been others at City Hall and at the higher ranks of the police department who have used the agency, its personnel and resources for their own often personal and very much political purposes.

This includes using the department of equipment for personal use including one very questionable financial transaction of sale which will be discussed in a future posting and for turning the promotional system certainly at the top of the management ladder into promotions for barter, sale and trade. If Phillips had been using this Leach incident to get himself promoted (and there's not really any evidence so far that he did), it would almost be understandable if you really sit and think about how the employees at the captain's level and above have been promoted since 2005. More details of what exactly happened in many of the promotions involving the current command staff will be more fully detailed here in upcoming weeks and after reading them, a lot about what's happened in the department including this so-called Leach incident will be placed in its appropriate context and will make much more sense including that the troubling episode with the former chief wasn't an isolated or random event but the culmination of at least five years of willful misconduct including from City Hall. Even if individuals from City Hall didn't really know about Leach until later on or after they turned their city-issued phones back on, they certainly knew of the high potential for such an embarrassing scandal that spread across the nation.

Is Leon Phillips Going to be DeLaRosa's Fall Guy?

Phillips has been described by people in ways similar to Orta. Both are described as being ethical and moral but both are also described as officers who would readily obey any order that was given to them by superior officers. It has also been said by some that Phillips would jump on the bayonet for a superior officer if asked. And it appears from their explanations of why they didn't process the Leach traffic stop as a DUI evaluation that they are protecting themselves with DeLaRosa going further and shifting the blame to Phillips, essentially throwing him under the bus. Because Phillips is just again, saying that he didn't know which makes no sense given his experience as an officer for nearly 30 years including many contacts with people who were DUI should have taught him how to recognize the potential for a DUI in a person staggering around with no clue where he was enough to have an evaluation performed. Through his statement, he's protecting himself but also DeLaRosa. Too bad for Phillips that DeLaRosa clearly didn't reciprocate and in fact, appears to be blaming Phillips by saying, hey I left it up for him to decide because I "trust his judgment" even though I'm also saying that no one told me about the intoxication part of it which essentially gave me no reason for telling Phillips that I trusted his ability to make a discretionary call on criminal behavior but...."

Then DeLaRosa goes further and says he told Leach to come clean about the incident and how much it irritated him. But DeLaRosa has yet to come clean about his role in the incident even as public hangings were called for the two patrol officers and their sergeant and DeLaRosa never said that he himself reported Leach to his boss, City Manager Brad Hudson which as assistant chief, he had the authority to do under the city's procedure of notification. He does helpfully point out that he knew Leach was a "heavy drinker" which then hurts his own cause because if that's the case (and hey, at least someone in a position of power did admit Leach's binge drinking), then that would have given him less excuse to be clueless about the potential for Leach's behavior and the condition of his vehicle being related to a DUI incident.


So far no disciplinary action has been dealt out in this incident though recently, Orta took a medical retirement. Phillips was transferred by DeLaRosa to the Orange Street Station for what the acting chief called a "special assignment" but allegedly, it was done to humiliate Phillips before he was to be disciplined, possibly through demotion to sergeant. DeLaRosa told a roll call session on May 29 that the investigation against him has been completed and the case is sitting on a desk awaiting disposition. It's been said that DeLaRosa's anticipating a demotion to the captain's position which if the case, is no disciplinary action against him at all given that he currently holds the classified position of captain and the appointed non-classified title of assistant chief which is an at-will title. Hudson tried to change the status of the assistant chief to a classified position serving under the will of the city manager's office but that as everyone now knows didn't work out in his favor though contracts were signed with at least two high-ranking police management employees including DeLaRosa. Contracts the city now denies existed.

Phillips isn't alone at Orange Street to cool his heels while awaiting his punishment. Former Riverside Police Officers' Association President Det. Chris Lanzillo who filed a claim against the city that included allegations that DeLaRosa knew what was going on during the traffic stop is awaiting termination from the department by DeLaRosa who despite being now completely implicated by the CHP's investigation in the mishandling of Leach is still handing out discipline and "non-disciplinary" transfers from inside Orange Street Station as the department's current top cop. Only in Riverside?


And as always, more to come...

Eastside Think Tank Speaks Out

Not long after the Eastside Think Tank called on the city to suspend the process of hiring a new chief, another member of the Eastside Think Tank speaks out on the community panel that will be interviewing applicants later this week and the newspaper reported the rumors of former Assistant chief, Mike Smith (now chief of investigations at the San Bernardino County District Attorneys' office) being the front runner and some say preordained pick for the job. Actually, Smith allegedly applied for the position in the last few days of the application process after being lobbied by several police employees and is favored to be among the finalists interviewed this week. Any rumors associating him with an elected official were not about former Councilman Frank Schiavone but about another individual still currently on the dais. Smith's playing it close to the chest neither confirming or denying he applied, which of course pretty much indicates that he did. If he hadn't applied, he'd deny it and Riverside Police Officers' Association remains hopeful and says that calling the process a sham is unfair. He didn't mention whether or not he played any role as heavily rumored in the recruitment of Smith for the chief's position. But it appears that so far without opening his mouth for questions by this so-called interview panel, Smith might already carry two panelists' votes. Of course it remains to be seen and even if the panelists themselves view the process during or after the fact as a sham, they can't talk about it because they reportedly had to sign confidentiality agreements with Hudson.


One confirmed finalist for the interview session is the police department's only inside candidate, Capt. John Wallace. Interviews are set for June 3 in a top secret location. Others not confirmed for the finals include Smith, CHP Captain Jeff Talbott and a high ranking Los Angeles Police Department officer. Also applying was Capt. James McElvain from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department Perris Station but it's not known if he made the finals.

When Disciplinary Action Becomes a "Special Assignment"

"By nature, the chief is a somewhat controversial position and no matter who is chosen, someone will think it's the wrong person."


---Councilman Mike Gardner to Press Enterprise while rumors continue to spread that the police chief candidate has already been chosen by City Hall, mirroring the hiring process of City Manager Brad Hudson in 2005.



UPDATE: CHP Reports Released, implicate Acting Chief John DeLaRosa and Lt. Leon Phillips in mishandling of Leach incident amid a sea of contradictory statements, rookie officers noting signs of DUI in Leach that seasoned management personnel miss and DeLaRosa telling Phillips to use his judgment (totally unnecessary if no criminal conduct had occurred) while denying anyone informed him that "intoxication" was involved. More to come...






[The Riverside Police Department's administrative headquarters on Orange Street in downtown Riverside have become the center of some interesting activity as of late including the transfer of officers to await disciplinary action including a detective who filed a claim against the city. Phillips works there as well...but wasn't sent there to be disciplined but given a "special assignment" according to DeLaRosa. So, it's the place where a male lieutenant facing discipline for sustained misconduct can be handed a "special assignment" by DeLaRosa (though both have sustained allegations of misconduct stemming from the same incident in relation to the orders one gave the other to carry out) and two female sergeants who rank in the top three of the current lieutenants' list are transferred out to make room for them? This situation just gets more interesting...the more that DeLaRosa tries to "clarify" it. ]








[Acting Chief John DeLaRosa awaits his fate at Orange Street Station...while deciding on the fates of others including the recent transfers of Lt. Leon Phillips who also faces disciplinary action for the Leach incident and Det. Chris Lanzillo who DeLaRosa is allegedly trying to terminate not long after Lanzillo accused him of knowing about the Leach incident when it was happening. ]






A previous blog posting addressed the ongoing situation that's unfolding at the Riverside Police Department's administrative headquarters on Orange Street in downtown Riverside where apparently a decision came out of Acting Police Chief John DeLaRosa's office to transfer Watch Commander and Lt. Leon Phillips from his field assignment to spend his time inside the Orange Street station alongside at least five other police officers assigned to the facility to await disciplinary actions.

It was very interesting that Phillips who had been assigned to work a graveyard shift as watch commander was moved to work in the administrative headquarters to await disciplinary action by the individual who most likely issued the order that helped Phillips place himself in that situation in the first place. It's also very interesting that Phillips has been placed in a more restrictive environment under the eye of the chief and his administration while his supervisor during the Feb. 8 DUI incident involving former Chief Russ Leach, DeLaRosa was actually elevated by City Manager Brad Hudson to serve as that acting chief. It's not clear what Phillips "special assignment" involves but DeLaRosa still has the power to hire, promote, fire and...transfer. After all, in the rather interesting world of City Manager Brad Hudson, it's perfectly fitting to replace a chief who broke the law with a subordinate implicated in the mishandling of that chief.

These actions were clearly inappropriate as Phillips' fate or future shouldn't be left at all in the hands of the individual who supervised and directed his actions during the Leach incident. Even transferring him at this point whether for disciplinary reasons or to reward him with a "special assignment" should never have been left in DeLaRosa's hands by the city management because although Phillips chose his own actions to obey a superior's order, he most likely was directed to do so via phone calls by DeLaRosa. But then even as city officials effusively praise Hudson for being the best city manager ever, questions arise in the city's populace regarding his handling of the Leach incident. After all, this is the same governmental body which allowed its direct employer to direct an investigation at the police department's management while deftly avoiding any similar probe among the power brokers at City Hall. After all, most people that it's difficult for any investigator to well, investigate himself.

And it remains interesting that although in many cities, a management employee like DeLaRosa would have been placed on paid administrative leave once it became clear he was suspected of committing misconduct, in Riverside, he continues to serve as its acting police chief making decisions to discipline and transfer employees while he awaits his own discipline for his involvement in the Leach incident. But then perhaps more cities have management employees more experienced in serious labor issues and this city's management employee kept his investigation of the Feb. 8 Leach incident only aimed at the high-ranking personnel of the department and not at City Hall. To this date, no one at City Hall has been independently investigated for any involvement in the Feb. 8 incident and its attempted cover up.

So how was DeLaRosa able to find himself in this position in the first place, and does it stem from having a city manager who spent most of his career before Riverside specializing in economic development rather than labor issues? That alone should have prompted an investigation or at least an inquiry from the legislative body and mayor to Hudson and DeSantis but as usual...this was the response.


**pin dropping**


Okay, so maybe it's because DeLaRosa was made acting chief before Hudson went to the press and blamed "management" for the mishandling and attempted cover up of Leach's traffic stop and maybe, there's not anyone in the command staff to fill the position even temporarily especially after the untimely retirement of Deputy Chief Pete Esquivel who apparently at one time thought about applying for the top spot himself until someone else played their hand and helped the 30+ year veteran officer send himself into retirement in a New York minute. After Esquivel, there's a dearth of management personnel in the next level who could handle the job or at least Hudson seems to think so. Else why leave an employee awaiting discipline including potentially demotion for obstructing or misdirecting the handling of a criminal incident at the helm of the police department? So some say, that DeLaRosa remains at the helm essentially by default. If anyone can come up with a bigger indictment against the police department's management staff than that delivered by Hudson and his decision to keep a member of it awaiting discipline in charge of the agency, that might be a somewhat difficult task indeed.

But who built this management staff in the first place? Some answers and some analysis of that will be forthcoming. But Hudson played a large role in the creation of what became the very shaky foundation of the department's leadership and management structure.

Only one person from inside the department even applied to be chief and that was Capt. John Wallace whose currently manning both the Investigations and Special Operations Divisions. The rest of the management staff sat this hiring process out...maybe after seeing what happened to Esquivel.

So why did DeLaRosa really transfer Phillips to the Orange Street Station and why was he given the authority to do so given how closely these two employees are intertwined in the Leach incident? There's just no way for DeLaRosa to exert the normal authority of a chief on this subordinate considering the circumstances and it's really troubling that this apparently isn't seen as being the case by Hudson and the rest of City Hall. By placing these individuals in this position, it makes it seem more questionable than it might already be otherwise because the filter provided by the Feb. 8 incident is what will influence how people look at the decisions made by DeLaRosa as is only natural. And it's troubling if Phillips' union representative, Lt. Ed Blevins doesn't advocate on his behalf in an attempt to perhaps push any decision making involving Phillips including that of a transfer away from DeLaRosa.

But Phillips' situation in particular had been a bit troubling given that his transfer appeared clearly disciplinary in nature and even punitive considering the circumstances not only involving his placement at the Orange Street Station and its timing but also considering just how costly it is to the department to remove Phillips from his watch commander assignment at this moment in time. And it's beyond disturbing that this decision to transfer him was made by the higher ranking officer who had been chatting with him on his city-issued cell phone at least twice during Leach's traffic stop. It's very likely that while Phillips participated in what happened during Leach's stop, that he was doing what DeLaRosa told him to do and okay, maybe in a place like Wonderland or Oz, the person who gives a subordinate the green light to engage in covering up a DUI incident is then allowed to make decisions about his fate. Oh, and Riverside too of course. Remember that at this time, the investigation has pretty much been finished, it's been a month since Hudson himself branded management personnel as being to blame for what happened and what awaits is disposition on those allegations of misconduct which have been sustained for the remaining responsible parties. So you have an acting chief awaiting discipline making decisions concerning discipline and "non-disciplinary" transfers involving personnel including Phillips. How ironic is that?

As you read here, within 24 hours of the blog posting on the situation with Phillips and other officers at Orange Street Station, DeLaRosa took leave of his station at that facility and traveled across town on a Saturday during a holiday weekend to speak with officers at a roll call station being conducted at Magnolia Policing Center near Tyler Galleria. During most of the roll call session, he stood in the back of the room but towards its end, he came up front to make a speech to those in attendance. He told them that he had to provide "clarification" on a situation in that Phillips had not been assigned to Orange Street Station as discipline but because he had been transferred into a "special assignment" there. DeLaRosa apparently didn't provide specific details about the nature of this "special assignment" nor did he say what he what he was providing clarification to, or why he had chosen to do so, again on a holiday weekend when administrators are usually scarce.

He also mentioned that the investigation involving him was completed and was on a desk awaiting disposition. And then asked people if they had any questions but apparently no one did. That blog posting received responses from city residents expressing concern about what has been transpiring since this whole mess started but also specifically about the recent events at Orange Street Station.


But while it was very nice and helpful for DeLaRosa to clarify the situation involving the assignment of Phillips to the Orange Street Station, it did raise some additional concerns and relevant issues of why Phillips is being pulled out of an assignment with a high vacancy rate into a "special assignment" in the first place.






Lieutenant Staffing Situations in Watch Commands, at Critical Levels



This current staffing chart showed the number of vacancies at lieutenant and above as of Feb. 22, 2010. Of course, you have to subtract two more lieutenant positions, those assigned to Darryl Hurt and Tim Bacon on that chart. These two lieutenants are both on paid administrative leave until they reach retirement age. The other change is that Audit and Compliance with Brennan's departure has been completely dissolved. Incidentally, that bureau had been the one assigned to create the department's Strategic Plan 2010-2015, the fate of which will be the subject of a future blog posting. Before the recent promotion of Melissa Bartholomew, the lieutenant vacancy rate was roughly around 33% with these losses being felt keenly in the area of watch commands.

If you subtract Bacon and Hurt from the chart and add up the vacancies for permanent and relief watch command positions, you will see that there are some definite shortages there. In fact, last year when the vacancies numbered roughly five by December 2009, the department had already in at least two separate stints dating back to 2008, experienced severe shortages in the assignment of watch commands and there were discussions and apparently cases where management personnel above the rank of lieutenants had to serve partial or complete shifts as watch commanders. Not to mention that many lieutenants had to work back to back shifts meaning their own and then at least partial watch command shifts.

Now it's time to subtract Phillips from that department's staffing chart.

Now the number of watch commanders has been decreased in total, 50% or neatly cut in half. That is countered by the promotion of Bartholomew for that one position. But it was when the department was at its December 2010 levels when there were enough deficits in staffing to necessitate farming outside the lieutenant rank for replacements. And when this is done, the department has to look upward because of the prohibitive costs behind using sergeants as watch commanders. Sergeants working partial or complete shifts as watch commanders have to be paid the same rate as a top level lieutenant pursuant to a MOU involving the sergeants unit and the city from the 1990s. This MOU was passed to prevent the over reliance on sergeant watch commanders though this issue had also been raised during the lawsuit set to be filed against Riverside by the State Attorney General's office in 2001 and was part of the stipulated judgment which pushed for the use of lieutenant watch commanders on all shifts as often as possible.

Due to the severe shortages in the police department's watch command assignment, it's very interesting to justify the removal of one lieutenant for the purpose of placing this individual in a "special assignment" at the Orange Street Station. At one time, there were apparently discussions about possibly phasing out the NPC lieutenants due to budget cuts and the high percentage of lieutenant vacancies. At one point, only one out of three lieutenant positions in the Special Operations division (which has to share its captain with Investigations) were filled until Lt. Guy Toussaint was assigned to oversee the Traffic Division vacated by the retirement of Lt. Rick Tedesco late last year. A lieutenant, Gary Leach, was pulled out of his assignment in the Personnel and Training Division to fill a watch command assignment during the day shifts. Still, the watch commands are filled on some shifts through weekly rotations with other lieutenants which may be necessary and more practical as a short-term solution but the longer this system is used, the higher risk there is for employee burnout at this rank. Which the city including the city council was duly warned about several years ago.

But suffice it to say that if lieutenants including Leach are put in a situation where they're actually being pulled out of "special assignments" to be placed in watch commands and other lieutenants are being rotated onto watch commands in addition to their regular assignments, it seems a bit odd that DeLaRosa has actually pulled a reversal to rotate a lieutenant out of the watch command assignment and it happens to be the lieutenant who was like him, investigated in the Leach incident. Yes, it's true that it's probable that Phillips faces discipline including possibly a demotion out of his rank but it's not clear when that will take place and in the meantime, it makes little sense to pull a lieutenant out of the understaffed watch command assignment just to have them languish in a "special assignment" until they get demoted and reassigned elsewhere possibly by or during the next shift change in July? The sensible thing to do is to keep him in his assignment as a watch commander until it's time to discipline. Unless DeLaRosa plans to keep him in a "special assignment" given that one has just been vacated of its female sergeant inside the Chief's office at the Orange Street Station and that involves the creation of the police department's Strategic Plan which currently has no author.

After all, isn't that what the city has been doing to DeLaRosa? Even though he's facing discipline too and would be subject to greater culpability than Phillips as a higher ranking officer, he's not being pulled out of the chief's office to be reassigned elsewhere until he's disciplined. No, he's currently still acting as police chief with disciplinary action hanging over his head issuing disciplinary action or transfers to Orange Street Station to await disciplinary actions to other officers including Phillips. And keeping an acting chief who's awaiting discipline seems to be more serious than keeping in place a watch commander in a similar situation.

But it's interesting in the face of the lieutenant shortage that Phillips is being transferred out of the watch command to Orange Street Station.

Contrast that with the situation involving the sergeants, who currently face a slightly better vacancy rate just below 10% though some retirements are anticipated by December 2010. For two years, they operated at even higher vacancy rates before the promotional freeze was lifted in February and since then, there have been five sergeant positions. The department announced that every field assignment had been filled and that the vacant positions in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse division had been filled. The sergeant position in the Family Violence was vacated by the departure of Paul De Jong (his rank vacancy filled by the promotion of Det. Linda Byerly) and filled with the assignment of Jay Greenstein.

The vacancy created by the recent medical retirement of Sgt. Frank Orta was filled by the promotion of Det. Brian Dodson. Yet, around the time of Dodson's promotion, Sgt. Jaybee Brennan who filled three assignments inside the chief's office was transferred to the patrol division. Before she was transferred, she had been assigned as the primary officer to work on the creation and development of Strategic Plan 2010 and in fact, had recently given a presentation with Capt. Mike Blakely to the Public Safety Committee on the progress of that Plan. Even while it was absolutely critical to dip into the lieutenant's watch command shortage to free up Phillips for the "special assignment", it was just as critical to ship Brennan back to field operations even though the shortage there isn't as critical as that involving lieutenants in part because of recent promotions and a growing number of vacancies at the patrol officer level.

The deficits at the sergeant's level are serious and need to be filled by unfreezing the remaining positions, but there's more deficiencies both numerically and percentage wise at the lieutenant's level which over time, could lead to burnout rates increasing at this rank if individuals are required to do double assignments for a long period of time. Police Practices consultant Joe Brann at a June 2008 audit warned the city council, mayor and Hudson that this could happen over time if the staffing shortages weren't addressed. Yet they are ushering sergeants out of "special assignments" and into the field as urgent staffing changes while removing lieutenants from the watch command division to fill "special assignments" even in the light of the fact that there's enough of a shortage of lieutenants there to have mandated several "pushes" of lieutenants to work extra shifts and to even have upper management personnel come in as relief commanders. The situation is indeed very interesting but it attracts a myriad of questions.

So why is one of the remaining permanently assigned watch commanders being moved to Orange Street Station to fill a "special assignment"? On its face, that explanation seems more than a little suspect. Especially since Phillips shares space with other officers who were assigned to Orange Street Station while DeLaRosa has been acting chief specifically to await disciplinary action including Det. Chris Lanzillo who filed a claim against the city which included allegations of misconduct by DeLaRosa in relation to the Leach incident. Allegations which apparently turned out to be true. So if Phillips is being taken out of a division facing a shortage because it's absolutely imperative for him to fill this "special assignment" at Orange Street, then that itself bears questions as to why that involves him sharing space as an officer awaiting disciplinary actions with a small group of other officers including Lanzillo sharing the same fate.

From Discipline to "Special Assignment", a Reversal?

What struck me as interesting about DeLaRosa's comments to the officers at the roll call session was his assertion that his decision to transfer Phillips to the Orange Street Station wasn't made to discipline him but because he was needed for a "special assignment". The reason being is that usually it appears that there's a big span of ground between disciplinary action and the placement of an officer in a "special assignment" which is usually one outside of the field operations division. In many cases, there might be competition among officers for a "special assignment" and it's usually afforded on some basis whether merit or politics and viewed as a privilege in at least some cases. Officers might want the assignment or they might accept it een if they aren't as favorable to it because it might offer, for example, a means to help them advance in the ranks. Phillips himself once was offered a choice between going to the Audit and Compliance Panel as a sergeant and he accepted, saying that it was between that and working a graveyard shift as a supervising sergeant so for him the choice to be made was obvious and he had made it. He went to audit and compliance where he served a stint.

Special assignments hardly ever appear to be associated with an individual who is facing disciplinary action such as that by someone like Phillips. Why did DeLaRosa appear in the reasoning behind his rationale to assign Phillips to the Orange Street Station associate his actions with placing him in some unspecified "special assignment"? It sounds like what he's saying is that I'm not punishing him, I'm rewarding him. Because often "special assignments" are associated with rewards whether for good performance, great service or for being on the right "team" as there might be variation in the intent behind those assignments. And with DeLaRosa being placed in the completely inappropriate position of acting chief which gives him the authority to determine Phillips' fate...at least until DeLaRosa steps down, if Phillips is being given a "special assignment" then unfairly or not, that looks unseemly. DeLaRosa apparently ordered or persuaded Phillips his subordinate to participate in a conspiracy to conceal Leach's criminal conduct so any interactions between the two rightly or wrongly are going to be viewed through that filter or perspective.

But it's beyond odd that two officers receiving sustained allegations of misconduct stemming from the same incident could be in the situation where one of them could give the other a "special assignment". It's completely inappropriate given the clear involvement of both parties in the Feb. 8 conspiracy to cover up criminal conduct by Leach to have DeLaRosa making any type of decisions, "special assignment" or otherwise, involving Phillips.

And if DeLaRosa had a boss outside the department at City Hall who was as experienced in these types of labor issues as he was enthusiastic about micromanaging the police department, then this situation probably wouldn't have been allowed to arise.

One Step Forward, Two Back?

Last week, DeLaRosa promoted Sgt. Melissa Bartholomew from the #5 position on the promotional list, breaking a drought in the lieutenant's rank for female officers that goes back to late 2004. Before or around that time, DeLaRosa also promoted the two higher ranking females on the list, Sgts Jaybee Brennan (who ranks #1) and Lisa Williams (who ranks #3) out of assignments in the Orange Street Station before the arrival of the new (or "new") police chief. They were transferred to field supervision with even money being placed that it's most likely graveyard shifts on the other side of the city or at least working outside the police chief's working hours, far away from this individual. Only because Siberia is a bit outside the range of the police department's operations. If this were the private sector, this is often how those in management positions try to reconfigure the process of deciding who will come up to join them. But this is a public agency after all, surely it must be using a different playbook!

An interesting development in the very interesting topic of goings on at the Orange Street Station which as stated earlier, has an acting chief awaiting disciplinary action at its helm. This is going on to fill staffing vacancies even as DeLaRosa's pulled Phillips out of the severely impacted field command division to bring the lieutenant who's also awaiting disciplinary action in connection for the Feb. 8 incident into his fold for a undefined "special assignment".

Talk about borrowing a commonly used strategy from a more corporate climate of which the police department seems to be borrowing from and it's interesting to have watched DeLaRosa's all too brief tenure in the top seat before his descent downward unfold with the decision making taking place at Orange Street Station these days and weeks.


It's also interesting at the same time a female sergeant who had been encharged with working on the department's upcoming strategic plan is being moved out of a "special assignment" at Orange Street Station because of staffing shortages in that rank, a male lieutenant facing disciplinary action is being moved out of an even more critically depleted rank to fill a "special assignment" and possibly even the same assignment that had been held by the female sergeant. That's happened in other police agencies too and it's been costly in the long run for the city's which offer these agencies indemnity. There might be more to this picture in many different ways but from the surface, it looks like executive boardroom politics.

It's more than likely that even if Phillips gets demoted that he will remain in that assignment, because after all, if that weren't the case why go through the trouble of placing him in a "special assignment" at the Orange Street Station to begin with? And then there's the natural law of inertia meaning that any chief coming in even an autonomous one (as part of an alternate universe of course) might be reluctant to make major changes first while he or she tries to figure out the canvas beginning inside the department.

If Phillips were going to stay in field operations, he would probably be still working in that capacity especially considering the staffing issues in watch command. After all as stated earlier, DeLaRosa is still acting police chief in the face of likely disciplinary action including potentially, demotion. He's not removed from that assignment, transferred to some holding pattern until he learns his fate, as happened with Phillips.

But a female sergeant on the top of a promotional list getting transferred out of a "special assignment" while a male lieutenant facing disciplinary action gets moved in for a "special assignment" even though he's leaving a rank and assignment facing a more critical shortage of personnel. All very interesting, meaning never a dull moment at Orange Street Station

If this is the case, what kind of message does it send in a department which has just promoted its first female lieutenant since 2004 and its second female supervisor since November 2005. Especially since Brennan is the second female sergeant to be transferred out of the Orange Street Station in the past several months. The promotions were very interesting developments during a tumultuous period of the department's history and so are these recent personnel transfers.

Although tempering those developments is this reality and that is the last two female supervisors promoted in 2004 and 2005 to the ranks of lieutenant and sergeant respectively failed to pass probation. There hasn't been a female supervisor since Sgt. Michelle Jackson's promotion to sergeant in November 2004 to have passed the probationary period. Whether the probationary failures were justified or not is something the police department has the answer to, but factually speaking, this was the case.

But it's interesting seeing sergeants being rotated out of Orange Street Station and the watch command's ranks becoming stripped even more with a lieutenant being transferred to Orange Street Station. And this issue of the reassignments of the two female sergeants at the top of the promotional list just before the arrival of the new police chief will be blogged about in the Out of Sight out of Mind? installment of the ongoing series on gender and policing, Hiding in Plain Sight: Women in the RPD.





Press Enterprise Columnist Dan Bernstein comments on the ongoing tale of the former chief, the ex-councilman and the stripper and how it would play out if it were pitched as a story idea for a movie. No way would it ever sell because it's just too unbelievable. That's what they always say until it happens.




Two Riverside Parks will be improved.




Some local defense attorneys believe that Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco must go.

And his elections rival, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Paul Zellerbach has been doing some fundraising and more public employee unions dump money into local campaigns.



Will Jurupa become Riverside County's next city? Hopefully if so, its experience will be a bit smoother than that experienced by Menifee.

Coming Soon:

A Retrospective On City Manager Brad Hudson

Starring in


The House That City Hall Built

Just Like a Cop?

[A design of the name tag or what's called a "flat badge" that Hudson wanted for himself and other assistant city manager employees including Tom DeSantis and Michael Beck when he first arrived in Riverside. Later ordered destroyed by the State Attorney General's Office after an investigation was launched by that office's criminal division, one of several on Hudson's watch. ]

Public Meetings

Tuesday, June 1 at 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. the Riverside City Council will be conducting its meetings to discuss this agenda.



Thursday, June 3 NTA City Manager Brad Hudson and his panel will be interviewing the finalists for the police chief's position in absolute secrecy with the panelists even signing confidentiality agreements.

In Memorial



Capt. John Wister Haines, U.S. Army Medical Corps.

Born: 1912

Died: Oct. 24, 1944

During the sinking of the Arisan Maru with 1832 aboard, nine survivors.



A family of one of the deceased recorded their experience who at least at one time had familial connections in Riverside.