By Mary Shelton

The Community Police Review Commission presented its annual report to the Riverside City Council on April 12, one week after a councilman derided the commission, calling it a piece of trash.

At the earlier meeting, Councilman Art Gage had spoken against the commission, also calling it junk and saying that he would like to see it gone. After he spoke, Councilmen Dom Betro and Ameal Moore took Gage to task for his words, and reaffirmed their support for the beleaguered commission. Over 30 people in the audience also expressed their support by applauding after Betro and Moore finished speaking.

A more subdued city council listened to CPRC Chair Michael Gardner as he outlined both progress made, and problems encountered by the CPRC, including a "deteriorating" relationship with the police department. Gardner said that communications between the CPRC and the department had become a "paper war" and that more face to face discussions were needed.

The report also stated that the quality of complaint investigations done by field sergeants had decreased during the past year. The department currently assigns over half of complaints to the field division for investigation.

According to Gardner, the department continues to assign citizen complaints to field sergeants who witnessed the incident under investigation. Most seriously, the department continued to assign sergeants to investigate incidents they witnessed, and incidents where they directed the officer to commit an action which was complained about. The agency even continued to assign sergeants to investigate incidents where their own actions were the subject of a complaint. Five years ago, the CPRC submitted a policy recommendation, stating that the department should not engage in the practice of assigning sergeants to investigate alleged misconduct committed either by them or officers they supervised, yet the department still willfully engaged in this practice and appears reluctant to drop this practice.

The problems with assigning involved field sergeants to investigate complaints manifested itself further through biased interrogation tactics used by these sergeants during their investigations. In some cases, according to the report, sergeants fail to interview all the witnesses, which is mandated by departmental policy. Sergeants also fail to ask questions which elicited facts, but were instead biased in favor of the officer, such as saying "you did this for safety reasons, right" rather than asking an officer, why did you do that?

Gardner said that it appeared that the field sergeants believed it was "their job to protect the ranks". A conclusion which is no surprise to community members who have long argued that a department can not fairly investigate its own employees. In 2001, State Attorney General Bill Lockyer agreed, when he alleged that the department's complaint process had violated state law, according to court records. The ongoing problems with the department's complaint investigations also fly in the face of critics of the CPRC who have said that they believed Internal Affairs did an adequate job investigating citizen complaints.

To combat this ongoing problem, the CPRC will put together an investigation evaluation mechanism this year, the report stated.

Problems with how the Internal Affairs division investigates officer-involved shootings also continued to frustrate the CPRC. After reviewing the 2003 shooting of Anastacio Munoz, the CPRC recommended that the Internal Affairs division either conduct its own independent investigation as required by policy, or amend its policy to match its current practice of simply reviewing the department's criminal investigation. This policy recommendation was put on hold by the city manager's office upon resolution of a law suit filed by the Riverside Police Officers' Association against the city. In its law suit, the RPOA said the department violated the policy, governing the investigation of officer-involved shootings. According to court records, both parties settled the law suit last week.

The cases submitted to the CPRC continue to decrease, but it remained unclear whether this was due to increased training and supervision of officers or disillusionment by city residents towards the complaint process. The downtown area continues to generate the highest number of personnel complaints, followed by both the La Sierra and Eastside neighborhoods. Casa Blanca, the center of several controversial use of force incidents last year generated only four complaints even though community members held several meetings with the police department and protested near City Hall, against several police officers assigned to their area who they alleged engaged in excessive force against community members.

According to the report, the CPRC received 90 cases, a sharp reduction from last year. It sustained 10 percent of all allegations, including one allegation of excessive force and 29 percent of the allegations, received a not sustained finding. Last year, the CPRC sustained 11 percent of all allegations, with 27 percent receiving a not sustained finding. The report attributed the decline in filed cases to officers becoming increasingly cognizant of how their words, actions and demeanors are interpreted by people they encounter.

Two policy recommendations were rejected by the department last year.

A policy recommendation that addressed officers searching suspects of the opposite gender, was met with a statement from the department that the current policy in place, was effective. Another policy recommendation that the complaint form be changed so that complainant personal information including address and telephone numbers was not accessible to the officer who was the subject of the complaint. The department rejected this recommendation, stating that there was no compelling reason to implement it.

There was not much discussion of the report by the city council, although both Betro and Nancy Hart spoke in favor of the CPRC, saying that it provided a vital service to the city's residents.

However, the CPRC continues to draw opposition from the city council, even after being included in the city's charter.

Gage's comments about the CPRC at the April 7 meeting were only his latest coming about a month after he said he wished he could disband the CPRC at a Finance Committee meeting. Gage is one of four council members who were heavily funded by the RPOA, which strongly opposes the CPRC, during their past elections. When he first ran for office in 2003, Gage received $14,000 in financial contributions from the RROA. In September 2004, he received another $2,500 from the RPOA, according to his year-end campaign disclosure statements. Last year, he proposed motions to severely reduce the CPRC's operating budget, but failed to receive any support from the rest of the council. When Gage made his latest controversial comments, fellow councilmen Steve Adams, Frank Schiavone and Ed Adkison remained silent on the issue. Combined, the three men received over $25,000 in contributions from the RPOA during their past elections, with Schiavone receiving another $3,000 on Nov. 1, 2004 according to campaign disclosure statements.

Gage has said publicly he will abide by the will of the voters and not try to cut its funding. It remains to be seen of which words he has spoken, he will remain true.

One commissioner said last week that this was not good enough.

"Art Gage owes the commission an apology," Sheri Corral, a ward 3 resident, said.