—Stephen Schwartz, Godspell

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

—Patrick Henry

“A government can’t be harmed by democracy.”

—Ken Stansbury to the Press Enterprise

David Silva, a writer for the alternative newspaper, Inland Empire Weekly appeared on a tear in his recent article on the decision of the State Court of Appeals to uphold the SLAPP law suit filed against Ken Stansbury and the Riversiders for Property Rights.

If you want to read it, go to Inland Empire Weekly and click the past issues.

The whole journey began for Stansbury when he heard from local merchants that the city had approached them to purchase their business properties for really low prices. If they didn’t sell to the city now, the city would take their properties later for much less money.

After that, Stansbury got an idea.

(excerpt, Inland Empire Weekly)

Stansbury and Riversiders for Property Rights convinced the merchants that the best way to keep their livelihoods out of City Hall’s clutches would be to pass a voter initiative barring the seizure of private property for private development. In October 2005, they began gathering signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot.

That move directly conflicted with the goals of Riverside city officials, who at the time were busily drawing up plans to revitalize downtown and other areas of the city. As City Hall revealed when it announced its $1.3 billion “Riverside Renaissance” initiative the following year, central to its plans were the seizing of dozens of local properties, to be handed over to private interests for retail and residential development more to the city’s liking.

Stansbury’s vision of applied democracy apparently also conflicted with the reelection ambitions of at least two City Council members, Dom Betro and Steve Adams, each of who were at the time grabbing with both hands thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from those same developers who would benefit from Riverside Renaissance.

No wonder City Hall won’t return our phone calls.

For a while, it was hard to find a copy of Inland Empire Weekly on city property including the downtown public library. The newspaper disappeared from the circulation area after a series of articles written by Silva about Riverside, including a bruiser about the ordeal faced by several of the city’s code compliance officers who were shipped off to work at the city’s corporate yard for reasons they believed were punitive.

When attempts were made to find out why, they led to the mysterious man in the blue shirt, the man who had no name.

Long before that, the city had lined up its attorneys from Best, Best and Krieger and sued Stansbury and Riversiders for Property Rights. It threatened to charge them with its own attorneys’ fees, an action intended to chill and intimidate him and the organization from circulating a petition to put the issue of eminent domain on the ballot for the city’s voters to decide.

But in Riverside, hiring an attorney is becoming more commonplace. And not just by the rich. The Friends of the Hills activists and others who serve as the city’s watchdogs regarding the enforcement of two voter-passed growth control measures, Measures C and R had to hire attorneys to protect the rights of those who lived in a city where its growth was regulated by those laws.

Stansbury had to hire a lawyer too.

The Downtown Fox Theater that sits on Mission Inn Avenue and Market Street had been the showcase back in the day for movie premieres including Gone with the Wind’s uncut version. It became the only property downtown to be seized by eminent domain by the Redevelopment Agency, while other business owners in the area received letters threatening the use of Eminent Domain. The Redevelopment Agency of course voted 7-0 to seize the property through Eminent Domain.

What concerns that business owners had related to Stansbury had come to pass. The seizure of the Fox Theater and the threats of Eminent Domain to other downtown businesses reverberated like ripples in a lake after a rock’s been thrown, to other corner malls throughout Ward One. Businesses leasing properties by where Tequesquite Park still stands, began to worry if they too would be forced to leave or face the same fate.

Only time will tell.

The future of the small business in Riverside was beginning to look less rosy, a vision that collided with that huge gamble, known as Riverside Renaissance.

But the battle that took place in the old courthouse at Riverside County Superior Court which still hears civil cases from time to time, had just begun.

Only, it didn’t have so much to do with Eminent Domain but the right to circulate a petition to place an initiative on the ballot. That was what was at stake when the city’s attorneys filed a SLAPP suit against Stansbury and his organization. His critics made it about Eminent Domain because that’s only slightly less opposed than the denial of a right to circulate a ballot initiative. That’s the part that goes unsaid in many discussions on the Stansbury case.

As stated in Silva’s article, the Court of Appeals upheld the SLAPP suit and undaunted, Stansbury filed his intent to recirculate the petition which could bring the issue of Eminent Domain to the city’s voters, as it has in other cities in this state. It’s anyone’s bet how long it will take City Hall to meet and decide to file another SLAPP law suit against Stansbury for doing the unthinkable, which is trying to circulate a petition to get an initiative on the ballot for the voters to decide on the role Eminent Domain will or will not play in their city.

Who on the dais voted for the SLAPP suit?

Everyone but Art Gage, from Ward Three. Six “team players” and one cast out. One reason why several council members on the dais and their supporters were out shopping for a new “team player” and why one prospect, William “Rusty” Bailey, was enthusiastically endorsed by the “team” before he even filed his papers noting his intent to run for office with the city clerk’s office.

Planes, Trains and Roosters

If this year has a designation, one idea might be to declare it the year of the ballot initiatives. Not about planes, but trains. Not about hens, but roosters. Councilmen Frank Schiavone and Ed Adkison, who avow that they are not BBF or part of that hybrid, FRED, had an experience that can only be described as synchronicity of the mind. Meaning that both of them came up with the idea to take ballot initiatives back to the City Council so it could decide to put them on the ballots in upcoming elections.

While this was all going on and even sooner, DHL, the air freight company, was launching its deluxe red-eye flying schedule of flights over portions of both Riverside proper and Schiavone’s ward, including the neighborhoods of Orangecrest, Mission Grove, Sycamore Canyon and Canyoncrest. The resultant noise which rattled people’s homes and nerves and kept them awake at night

Schiavone had taken some serious heat as a member of the March Joint Powers Commission which many blamed for the rude wake up calls six nights a week. Apparently at some point, Adkison resigned from the commission and at one of the candidate forums, Ward Three Councilman Art Gage had asked Schiavone and Mayor Ron Loveridge to resign as well.

Of course neither did, but Schiavone filed for election to run for county supervisor against incumbent and fellow commission member, Bob Buster, who had cast the smartest vote of all. That was a bit tough for the councilman who was stepping up to a bigger league to compete with, so he started thinking about trains, which have also been creating nightmares of epic proportions for everyone when both BNSF and Union Pacific turned the intersections of Riverside into their parking lots, blocking traffic from minutes to hours.

So Schiavione went to the city council to get support for his initiative which would involve levying fines at freight trains if they stopped at intersections, beginning with $100,000 and then adding $10,000 per minute spent not moving. Anyone who criticized his plan was told that they were impeding the democratic process and preventing the people from deciding at the polls.

More than one person asked the obvious person, if it’s good for the goose(in this case, Schiavone) why isn’t it good for the gander(the public, in this case Stansbury)?

That question still hasn’t been answered.

But the discussion moved on to roosters. Roosters that crow all day and all night, roosters that are being bred for cock fights, roosters, roosters, roosters. Symbols that stand in the path of the city’s attempts through Riverside Renaissance to urbanize the outlying rural areas of Riverside, for developers.

Even though only one such operation was discovered in Riverside, now roosters are going off to the ballot, courtesy of a drive by outgoing councilman, Adkison. They might not be best friends forever, or FRED but maybe it’s a case of similar minds thinking alike?

Still, the question hasn’t been answered. It won’t be.

The New Survival Island

During the summer of 2007 which wasn’t quite as hot as the one last year, a drama was playing out on the Seventh Floor of City Hall, what would be called the penthouse suite if it was a hotel.

That drama involved one of the city council’s favorite toys, the Community Police Review Commission. The city council happily handed it off to the city manager’s office most likely in exchange for the super-duper large marquee signs that have been erected all over town. They go something like this.

OUR TOWN NO MORE!

A Brad Hudson/Michael Beck Production!

Starring(drumroll, please)

Councilman[name your ward]

Co-starring [A cast of seven]

Stage Manager played by Brad Hudson

You don’t know whether it’s a development project or a Broadway show.

There’s a marquee of sorts for what’s been done to the CPRC, but not one that can be planted in one specific spot and it’s not one that any of the key players would want to place their names in lights.

Sometime in July, Commissioner Steve Simpson decided to resign from the CPRC after serving about four months. He said that he had been told during a meeting with Chair Brian Pearcy that he had to “tone it down” or face eviction. Who was Percy speaking for? That part wasn’t clear but the conversation had taken place after Simpson had raised some issues about the operation of the CPRC, most notably the wish to place an item on the agenda to discover retaining an independent counsel. Simpson believed that having the city attorney provide legal advice was a conflict of interest, as the city attorney couldn’t serve two masters, both the CPRC and the city council.

The city attorney disagreed. As did the individuals who allegedly ordered him to pull it off of the agenda on the city council.

Simpson also said that certain city officials had sent him the same message that he could face eviction if he didn’t tone it down. He related his experiences at a CPRC meeting after he had submitted his resignation, but Pearcy cut his speech to the quick at the five-minute mark.

Most departing commissioners get a chance to give parting words. Most departing commissioners have gotten a plaque of recognition.

Simpson, the bad boy, didn’t even past five minutes.

His troubles began last June when a city council member approached me on the street and asked me if I believed Simpson was mentally incompetent. I was a bit taken aback because I didn’t know where this was coming from. This elected official seemed set that something was wrong with Simpson’s mental state. It’s not hard if you read the city’s charter to know where this was going.

Simpson definitely marches to the beat of a different drummer, something the commission sorely needed but he was as sharp as a tack, probably one of the most intelligent CPRC commissioners who has served since it started.

When I asked this city council member where this concern was coming from, he said that he had been approached by another councilman and a “concerned citizen” who were concerned about his mental state. This was totally confusing because neither had spent any time with him. The “concerned citizen” spent 10 minutes at one general meeting while Simpson was on the commission. So what was this concern about Simpson’s mental state being based on?

Still, several weeks the concern about his mental state appeared to have been dropped and were replaced with concerns about his mouth. Several weeks after his “counseling sessions” with Pearcy, Simpson stepped down.

But it’s not like he’s the only commissioner to do so from the CPRC in the past 12 months. In fact, he joins a growing cadre that includes Frank Arreola, Ric Castro, Bonavita Quinto-MacCullum and Les Davidson. One individual who qualified for the oral interviews of the executive manager position of the CPRC and is under consideration to be hired as a consultant, said that a mass exodus of members off of a commission was a sure sign of problems within.

But if you ask what’s really behind the exodus, the answers are many, but pretty much point to one floor at City Hall.

Riverside Convention Center

Monday, Nov. 5, 2007

The Riverside County District Attorney’s office is sponsoring a gang conference for both law enforcement personnel and community organizations. Only, as is usually the case, the community organizations do not know which community organizations were actually invited, given that this event sponsored by the District Attorney’s office and the Riverside County Gang Task Force.

Many of these people in these organizations have tried to get “tickets” to the event only to be told that select invites were issued weeks ago, leaving many groups in the cold. Proving once again that the District Attorney’s office has little desire to effectively partner with the many community groups out there despite the words that they have told community leaders and members about the “outreach” that they do.

The session of the conference couldn’t have been too interesting because witnesses said that many of the law enforcement personnel invited left during the first break in the proceedings. And this is during a seminar tailored specifically for them.

Perusual as is the case with the District Attorney’s office, the Black-owned media was not included on the “invite” list. But given the comments made about Black media on this site, being everything from an exercise in Ebonics to a coloring book, hardly surprising. “Trash” and “rag” are two other popular names for it.

Perusual, left off the invite list were community members who live with gang violence on a daily basis. The District Attorney’s office even with a meeting with both Councilman Andrew Melendrez, from Ward Two and County Supervisor Bob Buster under its belt still refuses to meet with residents in the Eastside who have concerns and questions about the injunction, in the Eastside or elsewhere. He’s passed that ball to the police department which can only answered the questions it’s equipped to answer.

Area Commander of the East Neighborhood Center Larry Gonzalez was on Charter Communication’s Governmental Channel the other night talking about the department’s four precinct plan. He made some excellent points about the importance of community engagement and most of all, communication when dealing with issues and situations both big and small. It’s the relationships built between community residents and police officers that often define how the bigger issues and situations are addressed.

Pacheco has said how much he cares about the “good” people in the Eastside, but apparently not enough to send a representative from his office to speak with them and answer their questions. The message that he and his office are sending is that all of the Eastside’s residents, Black and Latino, are criminals. It’s perfectly fine to hold a press conference there to launch an injunction for the media’s benefit, but not to come back and answer questions by its residents regarding actions taken in their neighborhood.

Who pays the money to finance the District Attorney’s office and the Riverside County Gang Task Force? Not a list of people that’s by invitation only.

“It’s all about politics,” a local attorney said. Tell people something they don’t know.

Foot note

One officer.

One man.

One baton.

Many blows.

One night.

Investigation?

I stopped reading Inland Craigslist unless the post looks like it’s addressing local information because there’s been personal fighting going on between individuals who though unidentified to most Craigslist readers know each other. It makes voyeurs of the rest of us who are not privy to this and didn’t ask to be.

I did notice that a post about my site was posted today and then was not there anymore, which probably means that someone or some people did not like my posting yesterday, but I’ve also received quite a few positive responses on it. Next time someone appeals or cries to me how unfair the “other side” is when it comes to removing posts, I’ll remind them of that because posts linked to my site or about my site are regularly removed. In fact, individuals who flagged those posts in the pasts then posted about how proud they were of their righteous actions.

The Screen Writers’ Guild is set to walk out tomorrow unless there’s a last minute reprieve. And in what some call a stunning development, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has offered to assist with getting the entertainment industry back on track.

The United States Attorney’s Office is looking into the 2006 shooting of Elio Carrion by former San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department Deputy Ivory J. Webb, according to the Press Enterprise.

In May, that office will decide whether or not to file civil rights charges in this case. The lawyer for Carrion expects the federal agency to side with Webb.

(excerpt)

In July, attorney Luis Carrillo and several of Carrion’s relatives, angry over Webb’s acquittal in San Bernardino County, met with Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney George Cardona.

Carrillo wrote that Cardona indicated his office would review the case.
Carrillo pointed out in the same set of documents that Carrion’s shooting, unlike the 1991 Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police and the four officers’ subsequent acquittal in 1992 in Simi Valley, has not sparked a public outcry that would pressure federal officials into filing charges.“There are no mass demonstrations in the Latino community for ‘Justice for Elio Carrion,’ ” Carrillo wrote. “Other issues take priority in the Latino community: jobs, health care, housing, crime, education immigration reform.”

Sheriff Gary Penrod defends his deputy, yet refuses to take him back.

(excerpt)

In the civil suit, Penrod and Webb squarely blame Carrion for causing Webb to open fire.

Webb claims he acted in self-defense.Carrion “knew or should have known he was being arrested and had a duty to refrain from resisting arrest,” the filings say.

At Belo blog, there is a partial list of allegations faced by the defendants in the corruption case involving Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona.

Do you want to comment on the scandal? You can do so here. You might just have to stand in line.

The Chicago Tribune wrote this article about the decision of prosecutors to no longer conduct reviewws of shootings committed by onduty police officers in that city.

It seems they are unhappy with the process especially in light of the recent scandals which have plagued the police department lately.

(excerpt)

Part of the meeting was spent encouraging them to remain involved,” police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. If prosecutors left, “it would be a disservice to the legal process and to the public.”She said Wednesday’s meeting was an “open discussion on the roundtable process.”

In San Antonio, the city council approved a review of the police department’s use of force policies by the Police Executive Research Forum.

In other news, the battle for the mantle of who will be at the top of the heap of initialed monikers continues unabated, while people involved in campaigns involving eight candidates continue canvassing households and calling phone banks to poll those who were planning to vote in these elections. If you want to follow the ongoing storyline including what they think about me and this blog, feel free to visit the battleground of the initialized saber rattlers. I guess I’m supposed to be embarrassed but if I should be, then I’m certainly not the only one.

I’ve been through worse on my own site, because individuals hated the fact that this blog existed and probably myself as well. They still hate it and that’s something I came to terms with a long time ago. The best thing to do when dealing with cowards who hide behind initials is to just keep blogging. If people like that have nothing better to do on a beautiful Saturday with still air and the mountains in view, then I must be doing something right.

People who hide behind initials and fake monikers though extremely unpleasant and sometimes frightening to deal with aren’t worth much except to serve as useful barometers to how effective this blog is with at least giving its readers something to think about. Obviously, there are those who believe that’s dangerous for people to do so they are acting accordingly. It’s just proof that what these folks are trying to push on the residents of this city isn’t what it’s cracked up to be because otherwise they would be flooding Craigslist with posts about how great everything is rather than singling out individuals once at a time on each side for harassment. Something is making them insecure or unhappy and they need someone to blame. So it’s my turn.

The good news, is that since they started doing this, traffic to this site has been increasing in terms of visitors from Craigslist. It’s only natural that people want to see what the fuss is about or how bad I am. I’m worse than has been said because I’m blogging.

All of this childish and ridiculous behavior over the Ward One election that either way it goes, will still leave much of that ward unrepresented. Mike Gardner is much nicer than Councilman Dom Betro whose arrogance is diplomatically referred to by some in his own camp as meaning he’s not “personable”, but is he really all that much different? Is he that much better?

Betro’s a proven commodity and that’s either good or bad depending on what kind of job you believe he’s done. Gardner’s not a proven commodity which is either good or bad depending on what you think of the performance of the city council.

There’s this huge assumption that if you oppose Betro, then you support Mike Gardner, but there’s a gorge between the two the size of a canyon which includes many people who don’t really benefit or identify with a political race where two candidates fight over what will benefit a sizable number of those who live in the ward but will leave many people out including many who don’t have access and alas, have to sit out the sand box antics at Craigslist.

Who’s being represented and are the candidates representing? Now that’s a question.

Let’s look at the task forces that this city puts together. Most notably the most recent two involving the city’s parks in Ward One.

After all, how many Latinos has Councilman Dom Betro placed on task forces for both Tequesquite Park and Fairmount Park? How many Black people?

How about none?

I attended several of those meetings and found the comments provided by those who attended interesting. It will be interesting to see how many of these recommendations survive the process, which still has several more stages to complete before the final product is approved by the city council after the election cycle of course. However, then I went outside and spoke with different people who were at the park, sitting in groups with their children or fishing in Lake Evans. Most of them weren’t White at all. Most were Black and especially Latino. Many of them liked the open spaces, because in many neighborhoods that’s nothing that can be taken for granted. Some of them wanted the merry-go-round back. They love the fishing. For many of them, it’s about community with family, not about fancy tennis courts, shops and restaurants or how many holes the golf course has.

But none of these individuals were included in the selection process.

So, if you look at the task force for Fairmount Park, do you see people on it who are using it now or later?

Later.

Task forces are good mechanisms, but task forces which are tailored to only represent some segments of the city while omitting others aren’t nearly as good. But this city’s history of inclusion for people of color and people in lower income brackets has received mixed reviews at best.

Forget that Fairmount Park in particular was a haven for Black and Latino families. The Black families whose roots lie the deepest in this city regularly held reunion picnics, a practice that continues to this day.

Of course, three Riverside Police Department officers in 1997 marred that feeling that Fairmount Park is a place for families when they assaulted Jose Martinez, a laborer who helped build Zacatecas restaurant, and tossed him into Lake Evans not knowing or caring if he even knew how to swim. Martinez lie battered in the tall grass, waiting for his assailants to get back into their black-and-white vehicles and leave the scene before he stumbled home. The department investigated, he filed a law suit and the straw that broke the camel’s back was only 18 months away.

So both very good and also very bad, there’s ties between Black and Latino families and Fairmount Park but you’d never know this looking at the task force deliberating the future use of portions of this park. You’d think the park was for White people to decide its use and that Ward One only included White people in its population. Maybe in the campaign of Betro, it does.

Gardner was at least astute enough to notice the lack of ethnic and racial diversity on the two park task forces.

But would his task force be different?

That’s part of the unknown commodity. We know that Betro’s not big on the ethnic and racial diversity with these task forces(nor with the CPRC appointments for that matter) but Gardner’s a complete unknown because he’s not had the same opportunities to show that he’s any different.

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

—Lewis Carroll

Downtown While Working

“Do you want to hear an African-American joke?”


—Male individual to two other individuals at a Starbucks

“If you don’t do what they want, they will take a lie about you and make it true.”

—Female city employee, 2007

Part of erasing the “old” Riverside, means erasing its history and the fact that it was founded by abolitionists (which is included in the official biography) but had an active Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1920s(which is not usually included). It was the first public school district to voluntarily desegregate(which is often included in its official history) but the response was that several schools were burnt down, by who is not known.

Vincent Moses, the former director of the city’s museums wrote a brief history of Riverside to circulate in the midst of the firestorm that was Tyisha Miller, to promote the idea of Riverside as a racially inclusive city, which wasn’t what reality showed. It’s not clear whether it was the city’s idea or that provided by its public relations firm at the time, Sitrich, Inc who is currently representing the images of the hospitals in Los Angeles County who have been dumping indigent patients on Skid Row. But it wasn’t a success.

Moses if you recall didn’t last long during the present administration at City Hall. He was pushed into retirement by the city manager’s office and replaced with a new director with scant experience in the area of museums. This was one of several departments that would witness this behavior from the city manager’s office. This experience was also shared by the city’s libraries.

The police department would have its own experience when the city manager’s office tried to influence the promotional process some say down to the captain’s level. Of course, that discussion never took place nor was action attempted to try to convert an assistant chief position and two deputy chief positions to being “at will”. Oh no, that was a figment of overactive imaginations and impassioned bosoms! Of course by this time, the city had actually composed a tentative city council agenda including this item that was submitted by administrative analyst Jeremy Hammond who is said to be Hudson’s point person in the Human Resources Department. So the “at will” positions were set to be created, even though City Attorney Gregory Priamos later said that couldn’t be done to positions in the fire and police departments.

Still, the city manager’s office claimed that most, no wait practically all of the management employees offered “at will” positions fully embraced them. Is that the truth?

As for being “at will” to whom are you beholden? That was what brought hundreds of police officers representing two labor unions down to City Hall demanding answers. Who was in charge of promotions in the upper levels of management, the police chief or the city manager? Where these managers independent of City Hall or were they its “yes men”?

Hundreds of men and women wanted to know.

Of course, those positions weren’t considered for conversion to “at will” until three male Latinos had advanced through the ranks to be placed in those positions. Three very different men, bringing different perspectives to their jobs. Community members asked, if they were White, they get protected job status but if they’re Latino, they don’t. And there was reason to be concerned after a series of demotions, terminations and “resignations” at City Hall, all of them since City Manager Brad Hudson was hired by the current city council. After the list of high-level management employees of color had nearly been finished, the city council including those up for reelection in three wards this year voted Hudson a huge pay raise.

That list included the following and only those who have left the city are included. All were predicted to be gone, by the end of 2006. Fortunately that didn’t come to pass.

Art Alcaraz, Human Resources Director, Latino, resigned

Jim Smith, Interim Asst. City Manager and city’s budget director, Black, demoted and resigned

Tranda Drumwright, Director of Housing, Black, terminated not long after her boss told her she didn’t see her as “management” material despite her stellar qualifications and years of experience.

Pedro Payne, Executive Director, Community Police Review Commission, Black, “resigned”

Who spoke for them? Who walked for them? Who mourned them when one by one they were pushed out by a City Hall which didn’t want them?

Smith particularly faced undignified and many say racist behavior when a city council member pulled him out of the audience to put him on display as *proof* that the city wasn’t racist. Of course, his treatment as a token to avoid addressing the issues of the departures of men and women of color from management positions at City Hall didn’t prevent his demotion from his lofty interim position(which they only gave to him because they intended to give the permanent position to a White man). Smith watched as a man he trained, Paul Sundeen, was promoted into a permanent position as assistant city manager and Hudson brought in another White man, Tom DeSantis, who only possessed a Bachelors Degree to become the city manager who oversees and some say, runs several city departments. His foray into labor contract negotiations didn’t win him many fans.

One of those three high-ranking police management employees, Deputy Chief Dave Dominguez, apparently had no desire to become “at will”, concerned individuals said. If he had become “at will”, the department would have soon most likely lost one of its most talented management officers with the closest ties to the community in a manner of months. Whether that’s the case, that didn’t happen and the city’s better for it. But that’s why it’s important for officers like Dominguez to work with the communities, because the community will back up the officers who work the hardest to work with them and remain committed to partnership, not occupation.

The rank and file officers who worked under Dominguez including the leadership of the Riverside Police Officers’ Association thought highly enough of him to support him at a community meeting after Dominguez had resolved a situation started by several council members who threatened to arrest four individuals including an 89-year-old woman by not arresting anyone.

We ask our city’s police officers to opt for different resolutions than arrest but when one did, what happened? What can be said about city officials who treat police officers not as responsible for their safety and of those who attend meetings but as their personal bouncers to arrest or eject people they don’t like or in the case of one elderly woman in 2006, because she exceeded the three-minute speaking rule. This woman didn’t do it out of malice. She lived outside the city limits but the pipe that ruptured and flooded her property was inside city limits and was owned and operated by the city.

Our city council members, seven in all, could have referred her to the appropriate staff members to assist her with her situation. Instead, they had a very embarrassed police officer remove her and he did, very, very gently. She would only be the first elderly woman threatened with arrest, but not the last. Was this some sort of grey menace, or did the city council members just don’t like uppity elderly women?

“You’ll have to carry me out,” Marjorie Von Pohle, 89, said to two officers when it was her turn.

This action not to arrest even as city officials were allegedly calling all over town including at the Riverside County District Attorney’s office for assistance wasn’t long before the “at will” situation arose. Funny, that. No one jumped, and the group was not arrested. Not one city official spoke out in the defense of the elderly women. But then why would they? They wouldn’t be such good “team players” but they might be independent thinkers like they were elected to be by the majority of the voters in their wards. When none of these elected officials stepped forward for these women, the police officers essentially did.

It’s funny too how some people say one thing in one venue and then say something else in another. The same people who say they take pride in Riverside’s heritage and history are also the first who want to erase it and replace it with someone else’s present reality. This includes the erasure of the contributions and presence of communities of color particularly poor ones. The many ways that this has been done and is being done will be explored in future posts after the election. After all, Chinatown, which was one ethnic community, is just a memory as much so as the old market that used to stand amidst the Wood Streets. The one whose owners were threatened with Eminent Domain outside of a redevelopment zone.

But then you have individuals who think that eminent domain is the answer to all that ails Riverside, but of course if it were their business that were at risk, they’d be down at City Hall making their feelings known and despite their disdain towards the businesses who have faced which they showed by confusing land negotiations between two parties on equal footing with “hostage taking”, they would find these people in their corners.

At any rate, the Guans’ market, a mainstay under different owners going back to World War II is no more, with not even a piece of rubble or other remnant to mark that it ever existed there. Like many other remnants of Riverside past, it’s been erased from history. Somehow, this action has been rewritten to the extent, that it’s been called an act of political courage to remove a long-standing market owned by an Asian-American family to stop the flow of Black and Latino residents, who someone at Craigslist referred to as “trash”, from coming down Bandini Street to access the closest thing that they had for a market given that even considering Riverside Renaissance, no markets are planned for that area to serve residents of several apartment complexes and houses.
Downtown While Dreaming

Much like what happened with the downtown Fox Theater.

As you remember, that act of “political courage” involved seizing the theater and crushing the dream of a family through the only action (rather than threats) of eminent domain taken in the downtown area. A dream died, the children cried and the deal was closed when one councilman said, “we’re done talking. Let’s do it.”

And so they did.

The more courageous action would have been to partner with the property owners, work together and with widespread community input have been to work to help that dream which many people do share to be realized. But instead, the family was branded the villains who were trying to crush the city’s dream of progress downtown that had yet to be unveiled to much fanfare as the Riverside Renaissance in a rather stunning reversal. And a very risky project became the cornerstone project to catalyze the expression of Riverside Renaissance downtown. After witnessing the failure of the theater in Palm Springs in part due to an unrealized potential of mixed usage possibilities, it’s hard to not see past become prologue once again.

But then the whole Riverside Renaissance is a gamble, with the futures of our children and grandchildren in the ante pot. But if you borrow, borrow and borrow from bonds, during times of plenty, will you be ready when the bill collectors come calling(with interest) during times of famine which will include a housing market that has collapsed much more so than Betro’s rewriting of downtown’s history to equate it with Pompeii’s last days until he arrived on the dais, as described in a column by Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise. Not to mention, the recession that many fear is already here or at least close at hand.

Still, since it’s our children, and grandchildren whose access to city services that we’re gambling with, it’s practically a sin to be concerned about that and also makes you a party pooper. Maybe American Indians look seven generations into the future when making decisions, but the leaders in Riverside could care less. Attempts at immediate gratification at high risk rather than careful, thoughtful, responsible planning are par for the course.

I find myself asking, okay, we know how incumbent Betro would view this. What would Gardner think? What would he do? And how would he respond if the current city council viewed his actions as him not being a “team player”. By endorsing candidates before they even file to run, the current city council has made it clear it’s not a governmental body as much as a country club with admission subject to its muster as much as any voter. One person’s team work is another person’s cronyism. Does that mean if none of the “team players” that are being groomed as replacements make it in, that the current city council will pack up its toys and go home?

Also in the Wood Streets is the All Saints Episcopal Church which lies across from Riverside Community College. That church temporarily housed the day facility utilized by homeless people in this city after it was forced to vacate its home at Kansas and Spruce after its rent was quadrupled when its lease expired. It soon found a home in the church, and several churches, including the First Congregational Church downtown have been havens for the homeless and have advocated for their existence let alone their well being against the city government.

The Wood Street residents objected to the homeless in their midst. Then Ward One city councilman Chuck Beaty, calling this neighborhood a “special” one objected for them. The shelter had to go. When the city tried to even consider putting a residential shelter for homeless people within a mile of the “special neighborhood”, it balked and the prospective sites were narrowed down to several in a neighborhood less “special”.

Eventually, the city found a site for the day shelter and built it, not downtown but in closer proximity to the Eastside which has been the haven for homeless shelters whether it’s liked it or not. Whether the Eastside has asked for it or not.

It’s not like the Eastsiders were ever included in the process or on any homeless shelter task force set up by the city. But then if you have to pack a task force with your own people, it doesn’t leave much room for the community’s residents. But then are these people even people? One of my blog visitors, “Kevin, R.P.D.” didn’t seem to think so. His advice in October 2005 was to have Animal Control police the Eastside. He was also the charming guy, who “prayed” for harm on me and my family. Where does he fit in a post-Miller Riverside?

But then that’s an extension of an attitude that too often is expressed towards poor communities like the Eastside that are predominately populated by Black and Latino families. The Eastside originated from racist property laws that existed until nearly the end of the 1960s that restricted what land could be purchased by Black and Latino residents.

Racial segregation didn’t just take place in the southern states. It took place in Riverside particularly against Latinos. One Latina told me, a woman who lawn bowls regularly at Fairmount Park and would have been perfect for the task force, that when she went to school whenever she and other students spoke Spanish, their mouths were washed out with soap. They weren’t allowed to swim in White-only swimming pools or use White-only facilities.

But as soon as this Latina opened her mouth to challenge the composition of the task force at the first meeting and was quoted in the Press Enterprise, it became clear why she would have been a poor choice for the task force. The expressions on the faces of some on the task force along with Betro’s were priceless.

The Eastside has been the center of a huge firestorm, including the tragic killings of two police officers in the early 1970s. An incident the department has yet to recover from 30 years later and in fact, never has in part because no one was ever convicted during three trials involving that case. What was in the book, Ambush Murders written by a former Press Enterprise reporter back in the day when they were reflective amply showed that when it came to relations between the Eastside’s residents and the police department, nothing had changed up to the early morning hours on Dec. 28 when Tyisha Miller was shot and killed by four inexperienced police officers. A crisis that if it happened to today’s current leadership would probably result in it spending half of its time in Governmental Affairs trying to alter the conduct policy code to keep people from complaining and the other half of the time calling for people’s arrests. If they can’t handle city residents criticizing them during relatively quiet times, then, then they couldn’t handle back then when the most important thing a city government could do was listen.

But that era is time passed, given that one of the individuals who actually shut down a city council meeting in 1999, eight years later was one of the staunchest supporters for the latest round of speaking restrictions passed by the city council on July 12, 2005.

The Eastside never recovered from the “Ambush Murders” either, or Tyisha Miller or the massive projects forced on it to push its residents aside as the University of California, Riverside pushes its way down the conduit named after it, to the downtown. Gentrification it’s called, a term which has been prettied up mostly by those not affected by it. Mostly by those who think those neighborhoods would be lovely if they were just less brown, less populated by poor people. Mostly by those who benefit from the massive displacement of Black and Latino families, many working-class and multi-generational which will take place during the next 10 years.

In 10 years, it will be another Westwood, like in Los Angeles not an Eastside, Riverside, a neighborhood with a rich history. Another adage to Riverside’s belief that imitation is a form of flattery and as good as the real thing in its search for an identity that fits. Another point taken that history as it’s been written is to be erased.

Here’s a list of some of Riverside’s chosen titles when it decides to reinvent itself.

City of Abolitionists

City of the Ku Klux Klan(scratch that)

City of the Oranges

City of the Trees

All-American City(in 1998) which became the All-American Nightmare(in 1999).

Most Livable City

And now, the City of the Arts in homage to the cities so chock filled with arts that they operate under the show rather than tell policy.

Still the Eastside holds on and hangs in there despite it all. Realtors still wait a week to get services done to remove abandoned furniture on their properties that they could get done in hours in places like Canyon Crest and Hawardan Hills.

What’s been interesting is to see a president of the Riverside Police Officers’ Association like Det. Ken Tutwiler make an effort to reach out to the leadership of the Eastside. Maybe it’s his background as a minister of the Christian faith but people report back that they enjoy talking with the tall, somewhat burly officer. The relationship may be “tenuous” but it’s a start.

What’s been interesting is to see community groups continue to form and grow, sometimes within community groups, like flowers growing through cracks in the sidewalks that never seemed to get paved or repaired there as they do like in, other places.

What’s been good is to see people there speaking out and not afraid to step outside the box and question City Hall, even though the only news coverage the Press Enterprise gives the Eastside is to talk about people dying rather than living there.

Downtown While Black

I met her by chance after an officer from the NAACP asked me to sit in a meeting at the CPRC office with a woman and her sons, who were filing complaints of racial profiling in the downtown area with the CPRC. She was taller than me, and angry because her two sons were both just out of high school and didn’t have criminal records on file, but because they’re young, Black men and especially tall Black men they had been pulled over a half-dozen times apiece in a several week long period. Each time, they were asked whether or not they were on what’s called the P&P, probation or parole. They weren’t and out of all those encounters with police officers, had two citations to show for it. One was for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. The other, for riding a bicycle in the middle of the street in a residential neighborhood.

Raise your hand if you ever since the time you were a kid, including on training wheels ridden your bike on the sidewalk. This is what’s known as a pretext stop, meaning that it’s for reasons other than the involved violation. In fact, many traffic violations which are rarely enforced are used as pretexts to stop vehicles. That’s what happened to her two sons.

What is your name?
Are you on parole or probation?

Raise your hand if you’re White and have ever been asked the second question. Now, if you’re Black or Latino, raise it. Higher. Even if you’re a judge, a prosecutor or a police officer. Even if you’re making a late-run to the store to buy some milk or work the night shift since Black and Latino men and women are disproportionately represented in graveyard shift work.

The two teenagers learned that because they live within walking distance and in their cases, bicycle riding distance from the epicenter of Riverside Renaissance, that’s not for them. In fact, perhaps the city’s structure including its elected government is hoping that if they police these young men and others like them for long enough, they will move out of the area and play the role that’s been assigned to them as part of the gentrification of downtown Riverside. Downtown’s not for them. It’s not for the poor. It’s not for Black or Latino or even Asian-American business owners who don’t fit the appropriate categories that they’ve been relegated to as solely owning restaurants specializing in *their* food. If you’re Mexican, you can have a restaurant, but not a nail salon, a car repair lot or a market.

If you’re Black, you can sell soul food but you can’t have beauty shops or barber shops.

If you are the owner of an adult book store, you can stay and even get a new paint job. .

Downtown While Homeless

It reminded me of a story I heard several years ago, about a Black man on a bicycle who allegedly tried to steal hub caps from an unmarked car with two police officers who when they saw him got out of their car. One of them put him in what’s called a carotid hold, the other struck him in the head with a flashlight. Several individuals at an apartment complex across the street who were watching, heard the officer yelling, “stop messing with my car”.

Then five years ago, there was “Zimba”, the young Black man with the accent from Jamaica who used to be seen conversing with men and women in three-piece streets in the pedestrian mall during the lunch hour, though he often walked barefoot, wearing his boots around his neck tied with a shoe string.

One night, a woman who worked on homeless outreach through a downtown church came to the office one day asking if anyone had seen him. She had heard that he had been on the railroad tracks downtown picking up soda cans for recycling and 5-6 police officers had come up to him and told him he was trespassing on private property. So he moved his bag of cans to the sidewalk. Later, he told a woman that talked to the outreach worker that the police officers had beat him up and kicked him in the ribs, lifting up his shirt to show the woman. The outreach worker told me that there was a witness to the incident.

I had seen “Zimba” sitting on park benches with police officers telling him to keep “walking until he reached Corona” and one incident, where they detained him for three hours and were in the process of searching him supervised by a plainclothed detective when I saw him.

Were the accounts of “Zimba” and the man on the bicycle true? The residents of the apartment complex said the bicycle remained on the ground where the man had left it, and he apparently never returned to claim it.

I’ve heard rumors that when City Hall was pushing the homeless population out of downtown that there were police officers upset with being put in the inenviable position of having to be the ones to do it but they remained silent to not endanger their jobs. If this is true, then who are their advocates? If it’s true, it wouldn’t surprise me. Who directs law enforcement? Is it City Hall?

But during the long, hot summer, where were they? They were at City Hall sitting and standing in the city council chambers speaking out on the breakdown and closeout of labor negotiations that impacted their two unions and three others which represent the city’s work force. The city council looked shocked at the sight, but it had been a summer of rallies like this one, strike votes, law suits and other actions and words.

The city manager and city council apparently tried to pit labor unions against each other, but it didn’t work.

Police Chief Russ Leach received more than a few phone calls, it’s been said, from city officials complaining about his officers appearing at community meetings while offduty and asking questions on the issues. Leach didn’t appear to be impressed. As he has said, he’s politically astute but he backs his officers, “my police association” as he told RPOA attorney Michael Lackey during a deposition last February.

Former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer stated in his lawsuit against the city to reform the department blamed lack of appropriate staffing for many of the department’s problems. Today, that still remains a serious issue that concerns many.

We need more bodies, Tutwiler and other officers have said then and now. More bodies and more equipment.

Hudson says in response, he doesn’t have the money. And you have to shake your head at that answer for one of a billion dollars worth of reasons and wonder if the gamble will pay off.

Downtown While Mentally Ill

While walking on Friday, I noticed that there were two men fighting in the middle of 14th Street. One man was trying to lie flat on the ground and the other man was cursing at him while dragging the heavyset man out of the streets, while cars stopped when they saw them or drove alongside them as if they weren’t there.

A man on a bicycle who found the situation funny for some reason blocked my path on the sidewalk and told me that it wasn’t a good idea if I walked that way and gestured towards them.

They could have been homeless, and about one-third of that population is mentally ill but it wasn’t clear. I actually thought about calling the police, but what flashed before me were two faces. That of a relative who is mentally ill and has been since he started hearing voices when he was 19. I also saw the face of Lee Deante Brown, who was shot to death in the parking lot of a motel on University Avenue on April 3, 2006.

Listening to the audiorecording that came from the device used by Officer Michael Paul Stucker, you can hear Brown’s voice in the background calling for his daughter, Mariah, God and the Aztec Warriors. Mixed with his rants, you can hear Stucker’s voice giving orders, first in a low, authorative tone. Soon though, his pitch is higher, his cadence faster and he sounds panicky, as if he can’t understand why this man isn’t even hearing him, let alone obeying him. The tone begins to change after the taser discharges in the background which was apparently Stucker’s first out in the field. Brown doesn’t care about Stucker’s commands or getting shocked with tens of thousands of volts of electricity. He’s lost in the world where his daughter is awaiting rescue from devils and gods that may be real or not.

Anyone who’ s had to deal with an individual experiencing with a psychotic episode knows that the voices this person hears aren’t real, they’re products of a neurological imbalance of substances in the brain. But Brown thinks they are real and he acts accordingly. It’s not clear if he’s ever aware that the officers that showed up to help him, restrain him and then ultimately kill him were even there at all.

Stucker and Officer Terry Ellefson who fired the shots were described by Leach as “hard charging” and “high performing” officers. At the time, Leach was addressing concerned residents and members of the Group, an organization of African-American men and women, with Tutwiler and another RPOA representative watching carefully, because after all, Stucker and Ellefson are their responsibilities in ways much different than they are as Leach’s.

Of course we don’t know the discussions about the shooting that took place behind closed doors. Were tactics questioned? Was training found to be wanting? Would Brown happen again, and again? What of the officers involved?

What Ellefson was left with by the time Brown drew his last breath was the reality that he had shot two mentally ill men to death in five months in different circumstances. Leach said at another meeting how hard it was to have several young officers with multiple shootings. It is indeed, but it’s not any easier for the families of those who have been killed by those officers either.

Brown’s been described as Black, his skin so dark that it obstructs a jet-black X26 taser. He’s been assigned characteristics by some members of the Community Police Review Commission that make him appear more akin to a violent animal to be dispatched than a person who’s confused, sick and faced with two officers who rush into the situation towards in its inevitable conclusion.

Animal Control, wrote “Kevin, R.P.D.” from the shadows.

The only thing missing from the discussion of his death was his humanity. But then when you have a commission that mirrors City Hall and not the community, what can you expect? For the most part, its members are more likely to be seen at a law enforcement appreciation dinner than at City Hall or a police station helping a family member filing a complaint or filing one themselves. An examination of the commission’s outreach ventures in the past eight months will show that there’s been a dearth of outreach into several city neighborhoods since Hudson forbade Payne from doing outreach or attending community meetings.

What City Hall wanted on its commission is what it got and the communities it represents had no input on the matter.

More changes are set to be made, again with no input from the community members on what they would like to see in the CPRC. Stake holders, they are not and that interest in community input to be part of the “solution” came to you courtesy of the current city government including the three candidates that are up for election.

The irony is that two of them are smart and perhaps graceful enough not to bring up the CPRC at all, while the other opportunistically uses the actions of his own government to bash his rival with by scapegoating him for the current problems of the CPRC, even though Gardner hasn’t served on the commission for 18 months. He was such a bad chair that the commissioners voted to change the bylaws allowing him to remain chair for a third consecutive term.

Visit the Sixth Floor of City Hall and look at the sign that directs you to the office of the CPRC and see which word in its name is missing.

But what to do about Brown? A man whose death at the hands of a police officer nearly started an uproar at the corner of University Avenue and Ottawa after nearly a hundred people appeared and started yelling at the police. A death reduced to a finding that will never make policy. A death that may result in policy recommendations that may never be made public. So much a minefield, has been Brown, a case that some predict will settle quietly in federal court within the next year.

Before the CPRC even got the Brown case, the police department did what it felt it had to do and what the community demanded, which was to develop a crisis intervention training program to assist officers to interface with the mentally and medically ill. After all, about one out of every nine contacts a police officer had with the public involved a mentally ill person, a number sure to grow especially with changes in legislatioin that negatively impact the mentally ill along with deinstitutionalization practices began in the 1980s under former president, Ronald Reagan.

The 30 hour curriculum has been used to train officers and civilian employees and within 18 months should reach most of the department’s ranks. It was definitely a step in the right direction, both for officers and the public.

Still, as more and more police officers leave those training sessions and take their education out to use in the streets, it still a decision to make with a mentally person in terms of what to do. Call the police if it’s a safety issue like a man lying in the middle of a busy street and hope they don’t end up like Brown? Not to mention Margaret Mitchell, the mentally ill Black woman shot to death by a police officer in Los Angeles nearly 10 years ago.

A Riverside County Sheriff Department deputy drove by and noticed what was going on. He shone his light on the two men and finally the man on the ground was pulled up on his feet without fighting by the other man and they took off, hopefully not to find another street to lie on.

The issues impacting the mentally ill and the policies impacting them are very serious, especially to those families most impacted by them. The city council initially didn’t seem all that receptive to this training. Emails to them about it received no response and comments given about it during public comment at city council meetings just resulted in disinterested looks. But finally, it was set forward.

It doesn’t help that people use mental illness to discredit or demean other people but it happens all the time. One example locally, is the use of the term, “SaneRiverside” in an attempt to ridicule the organization, Save-Riverside. There are plenty ways to criticize and even try to ridicule it or anyone else besides resorting to that type of prejudice against a poorly understood and often misunderstood segment of the city’s population. But it’s so damn easy when you’re trying to score points in some internet battle.

Yet what are the individuals who use that term really saying? And it’s ironic that those who use it purport to support a councilman they claim is a champion for the mentally ill. The individuals who use this term whine that their posts are being removed because they do so. It’s actually a damn shame that the posts are being removed because they should remain so that those who lurk can see what that person is revealing about his or her feelings about the mentally ill.

Downtown While Dark

Date: Friday, Oct. 26, 2007

Time: 6:40 a.m.

Place: Throughout Riverside

Discussion arose again as to how the city’s electricity crisis would be so bad in several years because the aging infrastructure would be unable to meet the demands of the flow of people city and civic leaders hoped to see come to Riverside to eat, work, shop and especially live.

Last year, you know the one where there wasn’t a local election, the city council voted to create a multi-tier of rate increases for electric power based on usage of this resource. It was an attempt to encourage city residents to conserve power in anticipation of the rolling blackouts that the region could be facing as early as 2009.

In July which was sandwiched between the election round that was supposed to happen and the one that wasn’t, city residents opened up their utility bills and complained about much, much larger electric bills. So predictably the city council went retro and rescinded, acting as shocked as the public it failed to adequately educate about the increased rates. But what they showed, is that they passed rate hikes without either reading back up material or they passed it not caring because after all, it’s not an election year.

Even the Press Enterprises’s Editorial Board which is quite soft on the current city leadership except those it doesn’t endorse called this revote a political calculation. It may win three of the elected officials on the dais votes, but what does it do to address the problem of once again, a basic service that will likely struggle to keep pace with renaissance.

All these things, past, present and future come to mind when looking back at Election 2007 which hopefully will be operating under full electric power, including many issues and things that haven’t been addressed by those who support either candidate in ways that are different than how they view these issues themselve. Not in the campaigns. Not in the forums. Not in the televised appearances. Not at events. Not even on the soap opera playing out at Inland Empire’s Craiglist.

If not today, when? As soon as the tit for tat from different on Craigslist gets old and boring, even as the venom increases? Elections aren’t won or lost on the internet, they are won and lost at the polls. And this means that the candidates and those who support them need to get out in the communities and the neighborhoods including those in Ward One which apparently don’t exist, because they aren’t considered a “jewel” like Downtown or “special” like the Wood Streets or even a product of gentrification like portions of the University Neighborhood. But most people don’t want to bother.

Surveys on the internet discovered that only about 5% read commentary on Web sites because they don’t like negative infighting or what’s called “flaming”. What they want to read is information that helps them learn more about the world around them or to make informed choices. Craigslist is much better served as a venue for doing that than as the personal litter box of different individuals without names who seem to be the only ones who know who each other is.

More on the death of United States marathoner Ryan Shay here. His father said that Shay had been diagnosed with a larger than normal heart but was cleared for running last spring. He had been told he might need a pacemaker later in life.

For years, it was believed that Shay’s expanding heart size was due to his athletic training which can cause the heart to become larger due to increased fitness. Unfortunately, so can diseases affecting the heart and it’s likely that the latter at least was partly responsible in his case.

And here’s Danny!! He hasn’t found Bigfoot yet but you go, Danny. He’s a very cool guy if you ever run into him.

“There’s only one way you’re gonna leave me and that’s dead.”

—Tacoma Police Chief David Brame allegedly to his wife and murder victim, Crystal Judson.
Riverside County, May 2005

David McGowan, 44, worked for the District Attorney’s office as a senior investigator. On May 10, 2005, McGowan shot and killed five of his family members before turning the gun on himself.

Dead were his wife, Karen and his three children, Chase,14, Paige,10, and Rayne,8. There was another woman shot to death but it would take a while to learn she was McGowan’s mother, Angelia, 75. All but Karen had died in their beds, shot in the head by McGowan’s duty weapon.

The head of the responding law enforcement agency told ABC-News what deputies found when they arrived at the home.

(excerpt)

Sheriff Bob Doyle said all of the victims died from a gunshot wound to the head and all but McGowan were shot in their beds.“The beds were undisturbed. The house itself was undisturbed. It did not appear that the house had been ransacked,” Doyle said, adding there were no signs of a break-in.After he killed his family members, McGowan called 9-11 and then killed himself. The last thing heard by the 911 operator was the sound of the phone striking a wall and a gunshot.The news of what was called a murder-suicide reverberated through the quite neighborhood, as its residents could not believe what had happened.

(excerpt)

“It’s just really quiet here,” said David Merriman, whose parents live about a mile from the McGowans. “A lot could happen right next door and you wouldn’t even know it.”

What McGowan left behind, besides the dead bodies of those he had loved best, was a suicide note and song lyrics.

“Woe is me. I’m looking forward to seeing you in the next life,” was all the note said. It couldn’t begin to answer a litany of questions about why the tragedy had happened, it could only add to them.

Those he had worked so closely with at the District Attorney’s office said they hadn’t seen it coming and were as shocked as everyone else.

(excerpt, Shawnee News-Star)

Colleagues said McGowan, who helped prosecutors prepare cases for trial, gave no clues that anything was wrong.A model employee, he had just returned from a week’s vacation and had received an outstanding review, said Ingrid Wyatt, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. He had a normal workload, she said.“He reported to work every day, just like normal. We weren’t aware of any financial or personal problems within the family,” she said. “That’s why we’re all so shocked about the situation.”Still, some noticed some changes in McGowan including those who didn’t spend a lot of time around him which could have made any changes more noticeable.

“Dave was a great guy. He was so quiet and humble. He was all business, very professional,” Cathedral City Fire Chief Steve Sowles said.Sowles said he ran into David McGowan a few weeks ago at the courthouse and noted that he seemed to have aged a lot in the six months since they last met. He said he attributed it to the stress of the investigator’s job.“I was surprised (by) how gray his hair had gotten and he looked tired,” Sowles said. “I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, we’re getting old.”‘McGowan’s actions were the end result of domestic violence. There was speculation that he may have suffered from depression and been experiencing financial difficulties but on May 10, he made the decision to kill his family along with himself and left no real clues about anything that might have preceded those actions or what life was like behind those closed doors until that final night.

When people recall a murder-suicide form of domestic violence by a law enforcement officer, the case that comes to mind is that of Tacoma Police Chief David Brame who shot his wife Crystal Judson to death before killing himself in a parking lot. His history even before Tacoma hired him to lead its department was filled with serious problems including a reported sexual assault by another law enforcement officer.

Before Judson’s death came the domestic violence which built up to it. Abuse that Judson believed she had finally broken free from, but doing so just put her in more danger.

(excerpt, CBS-News)

“It just kind of broke my heart to see Crystal up there with him pinning the badge on and making it look like she was very happy,” says Patty Judson, Crystal’s mother. “We were sitting there in the audience knowing we knew different.”But after 11 years of marriage, Crystal felt anything but safe. She had begun talking to her parents, Lane and Patty; her sister Julie and her husband, Dave; shopkeeper Linda Lee Clark; and Debbie Phillips, who works at a local tanning parlor.“She was on a time schedule. David kept very close tabs of her time,” says Phillips.”He’d mark the time, check the receipts,” says Conmy. “He used to give her $100 every two weeks for the family of three and then four, and that’s all the money she had,” adds Clark. “From the first time I met her, I would see her count out pennies and nickels and dimes.”

The index of stories includes the following.

Who’s who

The timeline

And the breaking series of articles, “The Thin Blue Lie” which exposes the questionable hiring of Brame and the coverup after the fact.

The Crystal Judson Family Justice Center was created after her death to offer services to victims of family violence.

Before his stint at the District Attorney’s office in Riverside, McGowan had worked at a local policy agency. Brame was the police chief of Tacoma’s police department. Both worked in a profession of employees who are at a higher risk for domestic violence involving their own relationships even as they are the ones entrusted with investigating domestic violence in others.

Blogging about this is difficult because there’s a lot of information and unfortunately, incidents of domestic violence involving law enforcement officers including homicides that even posting a series on the topic only shows the tip of the iceberg. This issue only comes to life when incidents like that involving Brame and McGowan and other tragedies like them come to public attention.

In most cases, they don’t come to light at all.

Probably the best series ever written about police-related domestic violence was the Badge of Dishonor series published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Written in multiple parts, it covers the gambit of a very serious but relatively unknown issue.

It includes detailed profiles of cases involving dozens of law enforcement officers in Washington State and how those officers who engage in domestic violence often receive slaps on the wrist.

The National Center For Women and Policing has this fact sheet on the prevalence of domestic violence in law enforcement. Several studies have shown that about 40% of officers commit domestic violence compared to 10% of the members of the general publication,

Only about 55% of law enforcement agencies had policies in place to address inhouse domestic violence. Discipline given to law enforcement officers is usually light consisting of mainly counseling and only about 19% of police officers are fired after the second incident of domestic violence that is sustained against them.

One of the most important sources of information on police related domestic violence is at the Abuse of Power Web site which is operated by Diane Wetendorf who is affiliated with the Battered Women’s Justice Project.

Why are women afraid to report police related domestic violence? The advice they often hear from their abusers is to not doing the following, according to the Abuse of Power Web site.

(excerpt)

Call the police – He is the police.Go to a shelter – He knows where the shelters are located.Have him arrested – Responding officers may invoke the code of silence.Take him to court – It’s your word against that of an officer, and he knows the system.

(excerpt)

Authoritative PresencePolice officers establish their authority through their appearance. Their uniform, badge and gun are the symbols of power that set them apart from others. The mere presence of an officer intimidates people. (Ask people how they react when they see a patrol car driving behind them.)Officers learn that body language has the power to intimidate and manipulate people. Simply moving or standing a certain way, or getting in someone’s space can elicit trust or fear.Police are trained to use their voice to gain control of people. Different tones of voice convey increasing levels of control: from a polite request, to an order, to an ultimatum or a threat. As with body language, a voice can solicit trust or inspire fear.

When a citizen beats up his wife, it’s a crime. When a cop beats up his wife, it’s only a family problem.When a citizen’s career is jeopardized by having battered his wife, police say he should have thought about that before he hit her. When a cop hits his wife, they say he doesn’t deserve to lose his career over it.Past behavior is considered a good indicator of future behavior. This doesn’t apply to abusive cops… they have changed and left the past behind.There are two sides to every story and the truth is somewhere in the middle… except when one side is a cop’s side. In that case, the cop is telling the truth and the other person is lying.

Signs of an abuser may include the following from Women Abuse Prevention.

Abusers often:

Do not listen to you, ignore you or talk over you.Sit or stand too close to you, making you uncomfortable and seem to enjoy it.
Do only what they want or push you to get what they want.Express anger and violence towards women either through words or physically.Have a bad attitude toward women.

(excerpt)

In the wake of Brame’s death, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did an extensive investigation into officer-involved domestic violence in the Seattle area. They found 41 officers who had been accused of domestic violence within the previous five years, a number of them accused of multiple incidents. Few paid any professional price; less than half faced charges, and only one was convicted. Among the cases unearthed by the Post-Intelligencer are these:Seattle Police Ofcr. Phil Rees flew into a rage and slammed his wife, Jenifer, into a wall and hurled a dresser drawer at her, leaving visible injuries. Jenifer Rees called King County sheriff’s deputies, who handed her intoxicated husband back his gun and let him drive away, “so he wouldn’t miss work in the morning.” No charges were filed. Rees was not disciplined, despite two prior complaints of domestic violence against him.In a fight with his wife, Ofcr. Kevin Hawley grabbed his handgun saying, “I’m going to blow my fucking head off and you’re going to watch.” He then put the gun barrel in his mouth and pressed his cheek against hers. No internal investigation was conducted. Hawley was promoted to detective.Four days before Christmas, Washington State Trooper Ronald Somerville grabbed his girlfriend by the throat, shoved her over the couch and pounced on her. When she ran to the phone to call 911, Somerville snatched the receiver and hung it up. As she darted for the stairs, he grabbed her again, put his hand around her throat and pushed her down, shouting, “You don’t want to go out this way.” Somerville was charged with 4th degree assault and vandalism, charges that were later dismissed. His discipline? A written reprimand.

In Chicago, the message of a disgraced police officers to his superiors reads “you are going down with me,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times. CPD officer, Jerome Finnigan, if you remember was busted during a sting and charged with conspiring to kill a former police officer to keep him from reporting serious misconduct by Finnigan.

(excerpt)

Finnigan started singing recently about the shakedowns, kidnappings and home invasions he allegedly masterminded with at least five other officers and a sergeant since 2002.In addition to those allegations in state court, Finnigan is charged federally with plotting to kill officers he suspected were ratting on him.“They’re using Finnigan to move up the food chain,” one source said.
Another source said, “He’s cooperating. What he’s trying to do is get someone bigger than himself.”Finnigan is cooperating to cut a deal to whittle down the decades of potential prison time he faces, the sources said Monday.

An interesting and informative brochure has been created to help stop police brutality against women of color and trans people of color by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

It requires Adobe Acrobat to read but is filled with information about serious problems including sexual violence, the handling of domestic violence calls and racial profiling reported by these communities in cities all over the country.

There were so many issues covered that it’s impossible to blog about them all, except in a serial fashion, so we’ll start with the topic of “driving while female”.

I was thinking about the issue of driving while female especially after a conversation I had with an individual whose loved one was one of the victims of a former Riverside Police Department officer named Eric Hanby.

Hanby was investigated and later prosecuted for sexual assaulting women in the early 1990s. When he went to trial, he was acquitted by a jury but the department fired him, although I was told he might still be working for a smaller law enforcement agency in the state. If that’s true, then it’s a sad commentary that odious behavior like that he engaged in can still get you hired in the law enforcement profession but then at least one smaller agency hired a registered sex offender.

The profession needs to stop doing so if it respects what it stands for and organizations representing the different ranks of police officers should together work on issues in the hiring and recruitment processes that cause many smaller law enforcement agencies to dip into really bad hiring pools to fill their ranks.

Was Hanby’s behavior strictly an isolated example of a “bad apple” in the Riverside Police Department or in law enforcement in general, or is it more a serious problem stemming from sexism within the profession not to mention its agencies. With a string of deputies, both field and correctional, from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department who are facing criminal prosecution for committing sexual assault under the color of authority, in several cases involving multiple women, that’s a question that’s being asked more and more.

The epidemic of sheriff deputies arrested for sexual crimes in Riverside County not to mention the prosecution of San Bernardino Police Department officer, Ronald VanRossum led to an exploration of this issue in the Press Enterprise in 2004.

(excerpt, Press Enterprise)

Most agencies have policies dictating what peace officers should do when they have members of the opposite sex in their custody, Deal said. The officers are required to notify dispatch of their location and destination and mileage, policies that protect inmates and officers alike.The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department has such a policy, Doyle said. But ultimately agencies rely on the honesty of an individual to follow it.Any officer who commits a crime thinks he is above the law, Kamau said.“Any cop who operates in this conduct has been doing it for some time before he got caught. At some point, this cop assesses the situation around him and came to the conclusion that he could engage in this behavior and not get caught or engage in this behavior and not get penalized,” he said.Such conduct affects other officers, said Kamau, who said he dismisses any police leader who talks of his or her organization being large and calls unacceptable behavior the result of a “few bad apples.”

The officer was what many women would describe as good-looking. He had dark hair, tanned skin and wore a thick gold wedding band which I saw when he took a look at me, opened his door further as it had been ajar and shoved the woman out of the driver’s side of the car. She landed in the street, he closed the car and he took off down University in a westerly direction before turning right on a street behind the bus station.

The woman got up on her feet and started running, but one of her shoes was off so she gave up after a few steps but was yelling something at the departing squad car which I couldn’t understand.

I was shocked. I didn’t know what I had just seen but it didn’t look appropriate, let alone professional police conduct. Pretty blatant even considering how quiet and unpopulated downtown Riverside was back then. Hopefully, the years of change in the department has eradicated that type of misconduct but given that sometimes it can take up to a dozen years or longer to catch an officer doing it and bring him to justice, you can never be really all that sure.

I didn’t complain though I did think about it but back then, I didn’t know anyone could complain about police officers or that systems to do so existed. It’s just as well that I didn’t because back in 1991 was also back in the day when the complaints that were filed to the department were alleged tossed in the circular file. That’s what even what former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said happened in those days. Back even before former Chief Ken Fortier’s failed attempts to reform the complaint system.

After all, it would take the state of California, with lawsuit in hand and a citywide outcry for civilian oversight, to do that.

Driving While Female is complex though, because it often intersects with what’s called Driving While Black or Brown when it happens to women of color. And women in these ethnic and racial groups are more likely to encounter Driving While Female than are White women, though many of the most highly publicized cases that result in splashy investigations have involved White middle-class women. Driving While female combined with Driving While Black or Brown makes life difficult for women of color and fosters much of the sentiment that law enforcement agencies aren’t there to protect and serve them, just police them and occupy their neighborhoods.

An excellent definition of the various forms of racial profiling is here courtesy of the ACLU and another one is here by Amnesty International. Racial profiling impacts both men and women of color. Gender profiling can impact men of color as well, because in most cases in most law enforcement agencies, men are more likely to be pulled over by officers than women are. That’s the case with the Riverside Police Department, according to the annual traffic stop studies it conducted between 2002-2005. The much anticipated return of these studies beginning next year should reveal similar statistics.

Kenita Nichols and Mercedes Johnson, two young Black women, filed lawsuits in relation to being racially profiled by Chesterfield Township Police Department officers. Their case is hardly isolated. They were arrested because a robbery had taken place even though their vehicle didn’t match the description of the vehicle used in the crime.

As we know, Black women have been shot to death inside vehicles, in Chicago, Portland, Oregon and here in Riverside.

Some of the categories of problems encountered by women who encountered police officers while driving or riding in cars include the following:
Driving While Female and denied rape kit

A woman arrested in Austin on a DUI was denied access to a rape kit and toxicology screening after making allegations that she may have been drugged and then sexually assaulted. Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident. Women who report rape particularly women of color have been arrested instead on old warrants including for misdemeanors and denied access to rape kits.

The Austin case led to litigation and I contacted a captain in Austin for more information but he said he couldn’t comment until the litigation was resolved in a year or so, but that there was a whole other side of the story. Here’s the side that’s been told so far.

(excerpt, Austin Chronicle)

What began as a routine Friday payday — “a mom’s afternoon” with her best friend Charlotte Hughes — turned into a fractured evening that, to this day, Glore barely remembers. By 11pm that night she’d totaled her husband’s rare, “cherry” Ford Thunderbird, smashed out the rear passenger window of an Austin Police Department squad car, and landed herself in the Travis County Jail on a charge of driving while intoxicated. That wasn’t all — indeed, that was far from the worst.The next day Glore awoke, or came to — Glore says she doesn’t know which it was — in the city’s central booking facility. Hughes picked her up, and brought more disturbing revelations. “When I got in the car with Charlotte,” Glore remembers, “the first thing she says is, ‘Girl, we were drugged.’ When she said that, I started to shake. I could feel it in my gut. I said, ‘I want to go to the hospital.’”Even before Glore left the jail she had begun to realize that something was very wrong. She was bruised, cut, bloody, and burned. Her fingernails were torn, her clothes filthy and her underwear stained — and she didn’t remember how any of this had happened. She says she had flashes and impressions — for example, looking at the round cigarette-like burn she discovered on her foot while still in a holding cell. “I realized that I had a round burn on the top of my foot,” she said. “And every time I look at it I get this impression of people going, well, ‘How will she react to this?’ And then someone burning me. This is an impression; I don’t know if it’s what happened, but it is the impression and the feeling that I get every time I see it.” Impressions and feelings, along with the soiled underwear and her numerous cuts and bruises, were all Glore knew of what had happened that August evening. For her, the empirical evidence dovetailed into an inevitable conclusion: Glore became convinced that not only had she been drugged, but that she had also been raped.When Glore arrived the next evening at South Austin Hospital, she told the emergency room staff what she believed had happened, and asked that the staff give her a rape kit test and a toxicological screen. “The tox screen was especially important to me,” she said. “Then I felt I could prove that I had been drugged, that all of this had happened.” The ER staff alerted the APD that Glore wanted to file a report and that she wanted the tests — standard operating procedure in rape or sexual assault cases.The officers who responded to the call from the hospital took her report and called it in to APD’s sex crimes unit, she said, but when headquarters radioed back, Glore was horrified. The officers told her they knew she’d spent the night in jail on a DWI, she said, and moreover they believed she was fabricating the whole drug and rape story in order to evade the misdemeanor charge. In short, the APD explicitly denied Glore access to the rape kit test and the tox screen — even after Glore said she herself would pay for the exams. Glore’s medical report from South Austin Hospital confirms her story. “Also noted APD was here,” reads the ER report, “and they felt that this patient’s story was fabricated, that she has this lapse in memory and they think this is just all a scheme to get out of her DUI [sic]… They [APD] are not going to approve of [the] rape exam, and they are not going to take her to the SANE [sexual assault nurse exam] nurse at St. David’s.”

When California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer spoke about Wallkill which was breathing down Riverside’s neck to become the first department to be placed under a state consent decree, he called it a case of “Driving While Blond” but for the women involved, it was no joke as it isn’t for women who have shared their experiences.

It was no joke for the newspaper that reported on the sexual harassment of female motorists by Wallkill Police Department and faced retaliation in response.

Here are the allegations made against Wallkill’s police department by the state attorney general’s office.

(excerpt)

Among the illegal actions alleged in the 54-page complaint are the following:Police officers stopped female motorists – often at night and on lightly traveled roads – to solicit dates or sexual favors. At times the uniformed officers would make sexually suggestive comments or implied that falsified charges could be dropped if the women would agree to go out on dates with them.Police officers harassed women at their places of employment and elsewhere. In one instance, a uniformed male police officer forced a woman to partially disrobe, and subsequently interrogated her about her sexual past, when there was no valid law enforcement reason for either action. In another instance, a uniformed officer repeatedly visited a local dining establishment where he grabbed several 16-year old waitresses around the waist and hips or putt his hand on their thighs. The officer also repeatedly made sexually suggestive comments, for example, asking what the waitresses would look like if they took their shirts off. Although parents complained to the Town about this officer, no disciplinary action was ever taken.Police officers harassed Wallkill citizens who questioned or spoke out about police conduct.police conduct.Police officers ticketed Middletown Times Herald Record delivery trucks in a coordinated effort to retaliate against the newspaper for news articles critical of the department.

”I think it is a department in transition and moving in the right direction,” Mr. Esserman said yesterday in a phone interview from his office at Thacher Associates, a private investigative and monitoring firm in New York City.The 37-page report noted that the Police Department had installed video cameras in patrol cars, but officers sometimes failed to turn on the cameras or the microphones. It also said that officers often did not record all required information when stopping drivers, and were known to turn in ”sloppy paperwork” with the wrong dates and patrol car numbers, among other things.Still, the report acknowledged that there had been no more ”ugly allegations” of misconduct and that the Police Department had forged better relationships with other law enforcement agencies. The report said: ”The complaints from other local law enforcement agencies about the lack of professionalism and cooperation by Wallkill have abated. One has the sense that the Wallkill P.D. hit bottom and in the last seven months has begun the upward climb.”Asst. State Attorney General Mark Peters was cautiously optimistic, said the department was no longer a threat to public safety but had this to say.(excerpt)

In 2006, Wallkill completed its decree, hopefully a much better department including in terms of how it treats women.
Driving While Female and sexually abused

Wallkill’s police department wasn’t the only small law enforcement agency in New York state that employed officers who harassed female motorists.

In Suffolk County, Highway Patrol officer Frank Wright was sentenced to serve five years in prison in a courtroom in Central Islip after he was convicted of sexually abusing four women including one who was forced to strip down to their underwear and then walk in 38 degree weather while holding her clothing.

And in Nassau County, a police officer was charged with forcing a woman to have oral sex with him, according to this New York Times article.

(excerpt)

The allegations have led to investigations by local police forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two grand jury proceedings, a lawsuit by the state and a change in Nassau police policy. In several cases, including this latest one, news reports about the women’s complaints have prompted others to come forward, sometimes about incidents that took place months or years earlier.”Often when people come forward, they discover that things are more widespread, and it means other people come forward with other types of stories, more readily,” said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, which has been following the New York cases. ”This is exactly the kind of thing people wouldn’t like to come forward with, but there is strength in numbers.”Officer Murphy, 36, was arrested Thursday night at the Eighth Precinct station house in Levittown. The police said that after a witness came forward with information this week — prompted by other recent allegations of assaults by police officers — they interviewed a woman who said that in December 1999, Officer Murphy ordered her to follow his police cruiser in her car to a wooded area in West Farmingdale, where he sodomized her.Officer Murphy is also under investigation by the Nassau Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit about a woman’s claim of a similar assault last August, when, she says, she was forced to perform oral sex on a plainclothes officer in exchange for her release after a drunk-driving stop, the police said. Although the department would not call Officer Murphy a suspect in that case, it placed him on administrative assignment this week. It is also investigating why the woman’s complaint was not looked into immediately by the Internal Affairs Unit but instead languished for five months.Driving While Female and miscarrying

The suspensions came two days after police released a videotape showing Sofia Salva telling officers during her arrest last year that she was three months pregnant, bleeding and needed to go to a hospital. The tape shows officers ignoring her pleas.After the ninth request, the tape shows, a female officer asked: “How is that my problem?”The officers’ behavior is “inconsistent with the values and policies of this department and inconsistent with the training they received in the police academy,” Chief James Corwin said at a news conference Thursday.Driving While Female and murderedThen there was Cara Knott, the young woman who was strangled to death by a California Highway Patrol officer during a traffic stop in Craig Peyer was convicted of the murder and had before his arrest, been chosen to provide televised safety tips for women after Knott’s murder. Recently, Peyer declined the requests of a prosecutor to submit a sample of DNA to be tested against evidence.

Dr. Samuel Walker and Dawn Irlbeck, from the University of Nebraska, Omaha drafted an amazing research paper called Driving While Female: A National Problem in Police Misconduct

An Indianapolis Police Department officer for example had his statistics for his traffic stops broken down by gender and it was discovered that 89% of the motorists he stopped were female. Not surprisingly, he wound up getting into serious trouble for misconduct against women and is no longer in law enforcement.

The study done by Walker and Irlbeck discusses strategies for addressing problems in police departments that involve crimes and other serious misconduct committed by women by their officers. One of the most pressing issues, the study stated, was addressing what it called the sexist culture that exists in most law enforcement agencies. Signs of a sexist police culture include the following.

(excerpt)

(1) employment discrimination against women, including the failure to promote women to supervisory positions;[14](2) tolerance of sexual harassment within the department;[15](3) a systematic failure to investigate domestic violence incidents where the alleged perpetrator is an officer in the department;[16](4) inadequate policies regarding pregnancy and parental leave.[17]Because police departments in general tend to have isolated, insulated cultures, it’s hard for people on the outside of them to know how they fare when it comes to identifying a sexist culture, let alone addressing one.

Also having adequate supervision of police officers while they are working in the field. Having a complaint system in place that is implemented properly and increasing the number of female officers through all the ranks in a police agency, because women are at much lower risk of this type of behavior than their male counterparts.

Tracking complaints is also useful. An agency can ask itself this. Do you have an officer or officers who’s primarily getting complaints filed by women, for different allegations? How are these investigations conducted and do the complaints keep coming in from different women even if an officer is exonerated? Do you have officers who tell sexist or sexual jokes or engage in such banter out in the field? To other officers, male and/or female? To women out in the field that they encounter? If a supervising sergeant is out in the field and witnesses this banter, how does he or she respond? Does he or she respond?

How does the agency handle sexual discrimination and sexual harassment complaints filed by its employees? Does it investigate them as thoroughly as it recites those policies so quickly on request? Does it instead ignore, retaliate, terminate, or blackball those female officers when they try to get employed elsewhere. Does it tell the women who complain how unhappy it is that they did complain?

Do the racial discrimination and harassment policies have teeth? Are the sexual discrimination and harassment policies enforced? Are they simply pieces of paper with writing on them? Are those who harass women in law enforcement and in the field seen as the problems or are the women who complain seen as the problems? Does an agency educate its employees on filing complaints of harassment and then turn around and punish them when they do? Does an agency educate the public on how to file complaints of harassment and then punish them when they do?

To the officers, who witness misconduct by other officers, one could ask this. Do you tell the officer to knock it off and why? Do you report it to a supervisor? Do you stand there in silence and do nothing? Do you participate? Are you one of those problem officers?

Training officers, the ambassadors to the department’s culture, do you train your officers not to engage in this conduct through your own example? Do you educate your officers on the harassment policies? Do you accept their complaints and not treat them badly for doing so? Are you the problem officer?

To supervisors, if an officer in their rank is making sexual or sexist comments, what do you do? Do you tell that officer to knock it off and why? Do you report that officer to their supervisor? Do you sit there and do nothing? Do you engage in it? Are you the problem?

To the management, do you mandate and promote an environment that discourages racism and sexism on your watch? Do you create and implement policies in this area which actually have teeth to them? Do you encourage people to use the policies or do you punish them after the fact? Do you engage in this bad behavior or do nothing? Are you the problem?

These are some questions from which to start.

But members of the public have to step up and report the conduct too, and though I didn’t back then, I would certainly do so now if the complainant was willing to do so. The problem is when filing a complaint on someone else’s behalf as a witness is that you don’t know what will happen to that person as a result. Will they be fairly treated or will they be punished?

For a civilian witness, it’s not the same thing because if officers report this conduct, their word is given greater credence by investigators and taken much more seriously. That greater credence given to officers is shown by the much higher rate of sustaining investigations generated inhouse than those by complainants. It’s very difficult listening to complaints of misconduct for example and trying to respect people’s wishes to not file complaints due to fear for their safety or that of their families. It’s sad that the only prayer that women who are victimized by police officers often have is that a brave officer will do his job and report that officer, thus putting a bit of a dent in the code of silence philosophy that still pervades most law enforcement agencies.

Both have happened to women who do file these complaints in terms of being treated fairly or being treated badly.

One obvious problem is that many women are too embarrassed or too fearful to report sexual misconduct whether it’s a joke that makes them uncomfortable or worse so a lot of this conduct probably goes unreported. They fear retaliation if they do come forward or having to deal with an agency that often looks at them as less than human and backs its own. So what often happens is that these officers who engage in this misconduct like Van Rossum do so for years, before they finally get caught.

But not always.

One woman who alleged that she was raped by a police officer working for an Orange County agency reported the crime while being contacted for a customer satisfaction survey for another law enforcement agency. When the person conducting the survey heard her story, an investigation was initiated by the involved agency and criminal charges were filed against an officer

Sista II Sista is planning several strategies to address police misconduct against women of color at meetings it’s been holding.

(excerpt)

Isabel Gonzalez spoke next, emphasizing that the “solution to violence against women does not lie with the cops.” She said, “In our experiences, the police sexually harass women in the community and women get harassed by the cops [when they are victims of] domestic violence because of the patriarchal structure of the police department.” She added that “the cops can’t protect girls from harassment by other boys,” when they are doing the harassment themselves.She said they have been working on alternatives to fighting violence against women without involving the police department. They have also been working on a campaign to publicize police sexual harassment of women: in a program they call “CopWatch,” in which they will videotape incidents of police harassment of girls in the 831 precinct and then take the videotape to the precinct headquarters to show it to police. They will also hold a press conference to show the videotape to the media and hope to display the video in other places around the community.More on the issues of gender and policing to come in this continuing series on these issues.Riverside’s city government will be holding public meetings at various occasions to receive input on how the latest round of Community Development Block Grant funds should be spent. They’ve been handling it through this system since the city council voted to dissolve the community organizations which oversaw the dispersion of funds in their CDBG zones.The decision of scheduling judge, Gary Tranbarger of the Riverside County Superior Court to dismiss several misdemeanor cases due to a lack of courtrooms to hear them was upheld during its appeal, according to the Press Enterprise.

(excerpt)

The judicial panel’s decision sided with Tranbarger and Riverside County court administrators, saying the absence of precise language in Penal Code 1050a about civil courts means the courts can use discretion in applying it.“The trial court is permitted to consider the circumstances of each case in exercising its discretion in determining whether to give a particular criminal case precedence over a particular civil action or proceeding,” the decision said.“I can’t comment on a pending case, but we will continue to comply with all orders of the court.” Fields, the presiding judge, said Monday.The ruling will not make a change in how cases currently facing dismissal are argued, said Assistant Public Defender Bryant Villagran.“This gives guidance to parties as to what the appellate position might be, but it doesn’t get rid of the problem,” Villagran said. “So each side will continue to assert their position until it plays out at the appellate level.”