SAN DIEGO POLITICS - Housing Shortage

"Morning Report: SANDAG Spells Out the Housing Shortage" by Sara Libby, Voice of San Diego 3/28/2018

Even if cities across San Diego County built every single last home or project allowed within their zoning plans over the next three decades – a very, very big “if” – the region still wouldn’t have homes for everyone.

That’s the conclusion of SANDAG officials who are working on the region’s long-term growth forecast, Lisa Halverstadt reports.

“SANDAG staffers have in recent months met with planners countywide to learn where their local plans allow for housing – and how much.  They concluded city and county plans permit 357,000 more units between now and 2050, short of the 509,000 additional homes SANDAG estimates the region will need,” Halverstadt writes.

As San Diego and other communities have seen time and again, just because a plan allows for a certain number of homes doesn’t mean those homes will ever be built.  There’s community opposition to contend with, and trouble cobbling together funding can also stymie projects.

Some city planners told SANDAG this week that they think granny flats – small units on existing lots – will be part of the solution in their communities.

• San Diego County Board of Education Trustee Mark Powell has an out-there idea for how to ease the homelessness crisis: House the homeless inside people’s homes, a sort-of foster care system for the homeless, he writes in a VOSD op-ed.  His proposal would include “a rigorous screening process” for both the homeowners and homeless residents.

JUSTICE IN AMERICAN - CalGang Database

"Morning Report: Audit Confirms Gang Database Fears" by Seth Hall, Voice of San Diego 8/12/2016

Excerpt

An audit of a California database of people suspected of being gang members has confirmed some of its critics' worst fears.  It's full of erroneous information, unjustified listings, messy practices and conflicted administration.  Sara Libby reports that the database includes 42 individuals who were younger than one year of age and loose criteria for inclusion in the database that could implicate entire neighborhoods.  The audit was prompted by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber.

“I was not shocked at all,” Weber said of the audit's findings.  “My own son was threatened to be put on the gang list, and he hadn't done anything.”

Law enforcement officials have said that being listed in the CalGang database doesn't really mean anything, but it sure meant something for Aaron Harvey who was threatened with life in prison for appearing in Facebook photos with gang members suspected in a shooting.  Weber said the database could still be useful if managed better.

SAN DIEGO - Abuse of Law, Guilt by Association

"Guilt by Association:  Facebook Pics Could Help Send a Young Man to Prison for Life" by Sara Libby, Voice of San Diego 3/4/2015

SUMMARY:  District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis is using an obscure criminal statute to prosecute a group of San Diego men.  The DA has admitted that some of the men had nothing to do with the underlying crimes at the heart of the case – a series of shootings by Lincoln Park gang members in 2013.  Rather, they’re charged with conspiracy for belonging to the same gang as the shooters.

Aaron Harvey was leaving his Las Vegas apartment to get some food one day in July 2014, when, suddenly, “man, Seal Team 6 came out of nowhere, pretty much.  Guns drawn, dogs, helicopters.”

It was the U.S. Marshals, who’d come to take Harvey back to San Diego.

“They told me that I was wanted for murders in the state of California,” Harvey said.  “I laughed.  I started laughing.  I told ‘em, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy.'”

Harvey isn’t charged with murder, though.  That’s precisely why his case is so controversial.

District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis is using an obscure criminal statute, Penal Code section 182.5, for what appears to be the first time ever in California to prosecute a group of 15 San Diego men, including Harvey.  The DA has admitted that some of the men had nothing to do with the underlying crimes at the heart of the case – a series of shootings by Lincoln Park gang members in 2013.  Rather, they’re charged with conspiracy for belonging to the same gang as the shooters.  For that, they could go to prison for life.

It’s guilt by association, basically, and if federal law is any guide, it’s perfectly constitutional.

The law says a person who “willfully promotes, furthers, assists, or benefits” from a gang crime can be charged with conspiracy.  The benefit Harvey received out of the shootings, according to the DA, is street cred.  If someone in the gang commits a crime, the reasoning goes, the whole gang gets a boost to its reputation.

“They’re saying I benefited because my stature, my respect, went up.  I didn’t even know I had any stature.  I don’t understand how someone can benefit from something they don’t even know exists,” said Harvey.  “It’s not a quantifiable thing, there’s no measure for stature.  They’re the ones quantifying it.”

Most of the attention on the case so far has centered on the rapper Tiny Doo, whose real name is Brandon Duncan.  Because some of the evidence tying Duncan to the Lincoln Park gang includes his own lyrics, his case has pulled at the heartstrings of everyone from music critics to legal scholars – “Rapper Tiny Doo facing long prison sentence over lyrics” reads one typical headline.

Harvey’s case has none of those sexy First Amendment issues.  Much of the evidence being presented against him isn’t rap lyrics but Facebook posts that prosecutors say link him unmistakably to the Lincoln Park gang.  But he, like Duncan, has no criminal record and is facing up to life in prison if convicted.

Harvey insists he’s no gang member – just a victim of living in a gang-heavy neighborhood, and thus, falling into the state’s gang database by virtue of having been seen in gang territory and socializing with other gang members, i.e., his friends and neighbors.

Being documented as a gang member isn’t a crime on its own.  But if Dumanis is successful, she’d effectively make it one – because anyone documented as a gang member could be held responsible for the crimes of any other member, so long as the crime benefited the gang somehow.

“This is not the American justice system.  We attach personal liability to things.  You’re not guilty by mere association or mere membership,” said Edward Kinsey, Harvey’s lawyer.  “It’s just wrong.  If they can get away with this, I fear for our future as free citizens.”

“This is as draconian a conspiracy law as you’ll see anywhere in the United States,” said Robert Weisberg, a professor at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.  “It exploits it to the absolute maximum, but it’s not unconstitutional.  It’s just unbelievably tough.”

Harvey’s trial is set for April 20.

=====
Harvey moved to Las Vegas in 2013, he said, after one encounter with San Diego police became the last straw.  He was stopped outside his home and searched.  An officer found his EMT card in his wallet, Harvey said, and told him they’d have to call his boss and tell him he was a gang member.

He said he was so spooked by the encounter, he decided to move to Nevada, where two of his sisters live.  He made money as a club promoter while he studied to become a Realtor.  He said he’d passed the required classes and was studying for the real estate exam when he was arrested – forfeiting the money he’d spent on books and courses.

Harvey says San Diego police stopped and questioned him more than 50 times while he was growing up in Lincoln Park, and that he was routinely handcuffed, or placed in the back of a police patrol car in many of those instances, then released without being charged with a crime.

“In the process of those stops, there were never any crimes being committed,” Harvey said.  “Nobody called in, saying, ‘Oh there’s a disturbance.’  They’re just stops.  Stops of me in front of my grandmother’s house, walking through the neighborhood, to the store, whatever.”

To hear Harvey and his supporters tell it, his case is at best a misunderstanding.  At worst, it’s the product of a system that’s stacked against young men in poor, gang-ridden neighborhoods.

Harvey says his classification as a gang member was cemented just after he turned 18, largely because of information collected during those police stops, including photos of him outside his family’s home and his grandmother’s home, also in Lincoln Park.

To Harvey and his parents, Aaron’s inclusion in the gang database paints a wildly misleading picture of their family.  Once people hear “gang member,” they won’t see that Aaron comes from a two-parent family, that Kelly, his mother, and Dwayne, his father, have been married for about 30 years.  They won’t see that Aaron finished high school and attended college at Washburn University on a football scholarship until one too many shoulder injuries forced him off the team (“He washed out of Washburn,” Dwayne says with a chuckle).  They won’t see that Aaron’s grandparents moved to Lincoln Park in the 1950s, establishing a legacy in the neighborhood that the family is proud of.

“Aaron’s no angel.  I’ve been up at the school a bunch of times before when they’d call me because of stuff he was doing,” Dwayne Harvey said.  “But it was always for ‘Dennis the Menace’-type stuff.”

According to the state, a person can be entered into the CALGANG database if he or she meets any two criteria from a list that includes:  Admitting to being a gang member,  being arrested alongside known gang members, being ID’d as a gang member by a reliable source, being seen affiliating with documented gang members, displaying hand gestures affiliated with a gang, frequenting gang areas, wearing gang dress, or having gang tattoos.

It’s easy to see, then, why advocates and community leaders think a young person could be condemned by circumstance — entered into the database, and made to suffer all the consequences that come with it, simply for living in a certain neighborhood and for socializing with other people who live there.

The fact that Harvey has no criminal record has attracted advocates and local leaders to his cause.  His case has crossed Assemblywoman Shirley Weber’s radar, and the lawmaker plans to meet with Dumanis to express concern about her office’s use of Section 182.5.

Dana Greisen, head of the district attorney’s gang prosecution unit, says the idea that someone could make it into the database simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for something vague like wearing a red shirt, is absurd.

Much of the evidence tying Harvey to the Lincoln Park gang was gathered from social media.

“In every type of crime that gang members involve themselves, they’re using the internet,” said Greisen.  “So, they’re posting pics of themselves with firearms, recruiting and advertising girls for prostitution, making statements in posts, songs, etc. that are threatening real neighborhoods, real people, so that when they walk into those neighborhoods, they can do whatever they want.  It’s kind of the Wild West on the internet right now.”

The district attorney’s office said it has included “numerous Facebook posts” in its case against Harvey, in which he’s “throwing up gang signs representing the Lincoln Park Bloods.  Also numerous pictures with Aaron Harvey and numerous Lincoln Park Gang members who are throwing signs for ‘Crip Killer’ and ‘Lynch Mob’ a subset of Lincoln Park Bloods, and numerous references and posts related to the Lincoln Park Gang.”

“It’s not a guessing game.  They’ve made it as obvious as they possibly could.  The social media stuff is in our face, in their rivals’ faces in no uncertain terms,” Greisen said.  “People talk to their girlfriends and the media and say they’ve never been a gang member, that this is all just a big misunderstanding.  And then you look at the evidence, and it’s not a close call.”

While it’s true Harvey has no criminal convictions to his name, it’s hard to believe, as he contends, that he had no idea police had documented him as a gang member until he was charged in this case.

Harvey was tried on of a single count of drug possession in 2010.  In that case, prosecutors were allowed to present evidence tying Harvey to the Lincoln Park gang.  The exhibit list from the trial includes things like “Waist belt with ‘Lincoln Park’ written on one side” and “Red polo shirt with the defendant’s known street moniker written on the front.”

A jury took just over an hour to find Harvey not guilty.

=====
Like any criminal case, the district attorney’s office and Harvey couldn’t be further apart in their versions of reality.  Either Harvey is a hardcore gang member who was helped terrorize a community, or he’s a young man who just wants the police to leave him alone to get his real estate license.

But both sides seem to agree on at least one thing:  Using the law in this way is new, and it could have big consequences if it works.

Section 182.5 was created as part of Proposition 21, a 2000 voter-approved package of criminal justice reforms.  Pushed by former Gov. Pete Wilson, most of the reforms targeted juvenile offenders, and made them eligible in some cases to be tried as adults.

Harvey’s case marks the first time Section 182.5 has been used in San Diego, according to the district attorney’s office, and possibly the entire state.

“It’s the first time this statute has been used at any significant level,” said Greisen.  “We’ve spent many hours in regard to what this law says and what evidence we need in order to prove it.  Literally thousands and thousands of docs retrieved, numerous witnesses involved in the case, years of documentation, wiretaps, etc., has gone into this.”

The California penal code is both gratuitously complicated and extremely harsh, said Weisberg, the Stanford law professor.  “Prosecutors are situated to take advantage of those things more than any other participants in the system.  They know how to work the penal code,” he said.

Greisen said the DA’s office believes a higher court will ultimately have to weigh in on the law.  But federal law has a similar version of the statute, RICO, which has been used to criminalize gang membership.

Even if a jury takes prosecutors at their absolute word, and believes Harvey is a member of the Lincoln Park gang, the conspiracy charge could still be a tough sell without evidence he knew about the shootings.

“There’s always the risk a jury will nullify a charge even when it’s legally sound because they think it’s too draconian,” said Weisberg.  “Or if they’re bothered by the vagueness of the statute they’re being asked to enforce, they may just acquit.  It’s a huge gamble.”

As you might imagine, Harvey doesn’t care much for being part of a trial balloon that could land him in prison for life.  He’s spoken to the City Council’s public safety committee and to a class at San Diego City College, warning against what he says are the dangerous implications of the law.  The last time I met with him, he was about to meet with a group that’s organizing an effort to repeal Prop. 21.

“This is about a penal code that is so unjust, that if we are convicted, we will be used as a model throughout the state that will have the capabilities of annihilating and eliminating communities,” Harvey said at a press conference last week.

Though he says he moved to Las Vegas to escape the constant questioning by San Diego police, his arrest, counterintuitively, has convinced him to stay in San Diego for good.

“They have created a young activist now,” Harvey said.  “I am going to be actively involved in my community.  Not just in my community that I grew up in, but hopefully all communities across the state.  I even plan on going to law school.”

He pauses for a moment, then corrects himself.  “Not planning.  I am going to law school.”

PS:  Could Harvey be 'guilty' because he's black..... NAA....

LIE FACTORY - National Review Gets a San Diego School Wrong

"Fact Check:  Lincoln High’s Bad Rap" by Mario Koran, Voice of San Diego 1/7/2015

Statement:  “At one San Diego public charter school, assaults on campus involving mostly black and Hispanic students occur almost daily,” wrote Vicki E. Alger, an education researcher, in a story for the National Review (titled "Obama’s Two-Front War on Kids" to show where they lean).

Rating:  False

Analysis:  Lincoln High School’s reputation might be its worst enemy.

Since it reopened with a new campus in 2007, Lincoln has struggled to “rise like a phoenix,” as a former principal once put it, from a disappointing past.  The school has turned over leadership and hemorrhaged students.  Students struggled to raise their test scores higher than the district’s bottom rung.  Lincoln has been portrayed as a place that is simply unsafe to send kids.

A lot of those are valid concerns.  Numbers bear out the students who’ve struggled academically and those who have left the school.  But some of what’s attributed to the school simply isn’t accurate.

Last month, National Review published a story arguing that softening school discipline policies will likely result in more dangerous schools – places where black and brown students aren’t held accountable for bad behavior and assaults occur on a near-daily basis.

The article’s author, Vicki E. Alger, is a fellow with the Independent Institute, a non-partisan education think tank, and author of a forthcoming book on the history of the U.S Department of Education.

The thrust of her piece was that by focusing on racial disparities in school discipline rates, the federal government is implicitly discouraging schools from punishing black and Hispanic students.  Eventually schools give these students a pass for bad behavior, she argues, thus making them even more dangerous.

Here’s a section from the piece:

“Several California school districts that adopted similar quota-based discipline “remedies” are coping with increased violence.  At one San Diego public charter school, assaults on campus involving mostly black and Hispanic students occur almost daily.  Similar tales of chaos and violence are playing out in school districts from Los Angeles to Oakland, where minority students know they now have free reign to threaten and hurt others.  The worst consequence they may have to face is a meeting with a “restorative justice” counselor.”

In the story, Alger doesn’t name the San Diego charter school, but told me through an Independent Institute spokesman she was referring to Lincoln High School.

First, Lincoln isn’t a charter school – it’s a traditional public school.  So that’s a strike.

But putting that error aside, Alger passed along a few articles to support her claim that assaults occur at Lincoln on a near-daily basis.

One of those was a story from KPBS about rising crime at San Diego schools.  A former principal was quoted as saying that drugs, violence and gang activity were constant threats at Lincoln High.  That story, however, was published in 2010.

An editorial from Investor’s Business Daily claimed that Minnesota was adopting race-based discipline policies that looked a lot like state-sanctioned reverse racism.  Here’s how Lincoln was depicted in that story:

Take San Diego.  Just weeks after adopting similar racial discipline quotas, San Diego public schools have witnessed an explosion of violent assaults.

At its premier charter school, Lincoln High, students report daily fights now, mostly involving black kids.  In the past month, there have been several arrests, including one involving a butcher knife, according to local reports.  Victims have been hauled off by ambulance.

Again with the charter school claim.

Alger shared one more story, an Oct. 4 piece from Channel 10:   “Student:  Daily fights at Lincoln High School have created atmosphere of fear.”

The claim that assaults happen every day was attributed to one Lincoln sophomore, identified only by first name, whose face wasn’t shown on camera.

None of the three stories Alger shared with me to defend her claim included any actual statistics about assaults or fights happening daily at Lincoln High.  Anecdotes are one thing, but for Alger’s claim about near daily assaults to be true, the numbers should support it.

I asked the school district for data on assaults recorded at Lincoln so far this school year.  As of Dec. 17, there were 16 batteries and no assaults, the two categories the district generally uses for fights.

Sixteen cases of battery is a concern and worthy of exploration, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the claim that assaults occur on a near daily basis.  Alger’s story was published Dec. 3.  By then, there had been about 60 days of school, meaning that, at most, fights at Lincoln happen roughly every four days.

Even if you allow for fights Lincoln staff might have not been heard about or ones that happened off campus, the official number isn’t close enough to back Alger’s claim.

In this case, a national outlet seized on a narrative about a troubled school, and Lincoln was held out as a cautionary tale of what could go wrong when a district tries to recalibrate its approach to discipline.

The problem was, Alger’s facts weren’t sound.  She claimed assaults happened “almost daily” at a school later determined to be Lincoln High.  They don’t.  That makes her claim false.

SAN DIEGO - 2024 Summer Olympic Bid?

"Fact Check:  San Diego’s Phantom Olympic Venues" by Lisa Halverstadt, Voice of San Diego 2/19/2014

Statement:  “More than 80 percent of necessary proposed venues are already in place,” an announcer said in a recent video produced by San Diego’s 2024 Olympic exploratory committee.

Determination:  Misleading

Analysis:  Russia has pumped more than $50 billion into the Olympic games in Sochi, and like many hosts before it, a big chunk of that investment went toward new sports venues.

The latest estimates put the sticker price for new facilities at $6.7 billion but a group of San Diegans hoping to bring the summer games here in 2024 recently debuted a splashy new video that seems to suggest the region’s investment could be far less.

The promotional video, which aims to show San Diego is nearly Olympic-ready, claims more than 80 percent of necessary venues for the summer games are already in place as the camera pans to footage of Petco Park and cheering fans at San Diego State’s Viejas Arena.

The video highlights San Diego’s “first-rate” transportation network and emphasizes the region’s ability to leverage resources from a countywide half-cent transportation tax expected to draw more than $17 billion for transit, highway and road projects over the next 60 years.

What the video doesn’t mention is that San Diego is missing four very expensive sports facilities; two new stadiums, a basketball arena and a large aquatics center.

Vincent Mudd, chairman of San Diego’s 2024 exploratory committee, doesn’t deny that the group wants to focus on what the region already has.

He argues other cities looking to host the summer games have much more to build and says his committee’s assessment is based on information from the U.S. Olympic Committee, which detailed about three dozen facilities needed to host a summer games.  San Diego is just one of at least seven U.S. cities working on a 2024 bid.  The USOC is expected to pick its preferred host city by the end of the year.

The USOC did not respond to requests to confirm its facility requirements or information shared with the San Diego exploratory committee.

We did, however, find 2008 marketing materials for the Beijing summer games that described 37 Olympic facilities, the same number Mudd’s committee documented.  A 2005 U.S. Government Accountability Office review of the 2004 games in Athens also said Greek officials used 35 sports venues, which also closely matches the required number of facilities Mudd’s committee detailed to VOSD.

Mudd says his committee has used the USOC’s guidance to fan out across the region and assess the area’s sports venues.  They’ve tentatively nailed down roughly 30 locations they believe meet USOC protocols, including a beach in Coronado for volleyball and Mission Bay for everything from rowing to the triathlon.

Organizers have yet to pursue formal commitments, Mudd said.

But again, four major facilities are missing from this initial roadmap.  Organizers believe San Diego needs two stadiums, a sports arena and a large aquatic center to host a summer games – four venues likely to come with very large sticker prices.

The committee’s current plan assumes one of those new stadiums will be downtown, a general location the Chargers have also floated as recently as this fall.

They also envision the Olympic village – the hub of the games – would be in Mission Valley, the Chargers’ current home base, and that Qualcomm Stadium will be demolished to make room for more developments.  This concept, like the new downtown stadium, is far from a slam-dunk.  There aren’t any deals with contractors or official discussions about who would pay for it.

Mudd sees five major elements to the prospective Olympic village project: a new stadium that’s better situated for Olympic plans, a hotel, retail stores plus office space and housing for athletes.  The latter two could be used by college students or businesses before and after the 2024 games.

To appease the USOC, one of those stadiums must be outfitted to host track and field events and another for rugby and soccer.

Mudd acknowledged that the Chargers are unlikely to use a stadium built for running events due to the track that circles around the venue, separating players and fans.  The rugby and soccer stadium, however, could work for the football team if it’s properly outfitted.

Then there’s the new sports arena.  Mudd said it would need at least 17,000 seats and large locker rooms that none of the region’s current basketball-ready venues have.

San Diego also needs an aquatic center with at least three 50-meter pools plus two smaller ones swimmers could use for warm-ups, Mudd said.

Altogether, these new facilities are likely to exceed $2 billion, and it’s not clear whether taxpayers or private backers would be writing the checks.

Just to give you an idea, here’s a sample of costs associated with venues similar to what the exploratory committee has proposed:

Last fall, the Atlanta Falcons revealed their new stadium would cost $1.2 billion and the Dallas Cowboys reported similar spending on AT&T Stadium.

Meanwhile, the Beijing National Aquatics Center that debuted for the 2008 summer Olympics cost a reported $140 million, and a basketball arena erected for the 2012 Olympics in London went for about $62.5 million.

Mudd doesn’t deny the four facilities San Diego is missing are pricey but he prefers to focus on what the region wouldn’t need to build – and so does the video.

“When people realize that of everything that you need San Diego has a large percentage of it, that all of the sudden focuses you on the fact that we’re not building this from scratch,” Mudd said.  “We’re not spending the money others (who have hosted Olympics) are because they built everything absolutely from scratch.”

He also emphasized that any facilities San Diego builds don’t need to be especially flashy and should be useful to San Diegans long after the Olympics.

For the purposes of this Fact Check, we decided to assume that the exploratory committee has accurately documented required venues, as dictated by the USOC.

But even if that’s the case, the promotional video’s claim that San Diego already has most of the facilities it needs to host the 2024 Olympic is problematic.

This statement implies San Diego won’t have to invest much cash to ready itself for the Olympics when even the exploratory chair admits taxpayers or private interests must invest in four major venues likely to cost at least $2 billion.

San Diego may indeed only need to erect less than 20 percent of required facilities but the ones it does have to build are especially costly.  Focusing on the percentage of venues the region already has is akin to announcing Thanksgiving dinner is mostly ready — you just have to cook the turkey.

The missing facilities – particularly the two stadiums – are central to San Diego’s Olympic bid.  Other venues the exploratory committee has tentatively nailed down are certainly crucial but beaches and bays, for example, exist because they’re natural resources, whereas a stadium must be built from the ground up — at a high cost.

The promotional video’s claim that San Diego already has more than 80 percent of needed Olympic venues is misleading.  It takes an element of truth about San Diego’s existing sports hubs and leaves a deceiving impression: that San Diego is nearly ready for the Olympics when even the committee pushing for it admits the region needs significant cash and political will to build four major sports venues.

POLITICS - San Diego's (California) New Mayor

Another big-business lackey gets elected to Mayor.  It is going to be busines$ as usual.

"With Faulconer, San Diego Pivots Back Toward Business as Usual" by Liam Dillon, Voice of San Diego 2/12/2014

After almost 1,000 days, tens of millions of dollars and one resignation, San Diego’s new mayor looks a lot like the mayors who have come before him.

Kevin Faulconer, a 47-year-old moderate Republican city councilman, won Tuesday night’s special election by a much bigger majority than expected.  He led David Alvarez, a liberal Democratic councilman, 55.24 percent to 44.76 percent, with 85.9 percent of precincts reporting, according to the county Registrar of Voters.  A jubilant crowd at Faulconer’s downtown election night headquarters only got more jubilant as the night wore on and his early lead held strong.

“Thank you San Diego, thank you San Diego, thank you San Diego,” Faulconer said to his throng of supporters.  “I can’t wait to be your next mayor.”

Faulconer’s ascendance ends a nearly three-year process to find a permanent replacement for another moderate Republican mayor, Jerry Sanders.  Democrat Bob Filner won in November 2012, but flamed out in less than 10 months after committing a felony related to his treatment of women.

Filner, a combative and unabashedly liberal ex-congressman, was supposed to represent the city’s demographic shift toward greater progressivism and ethnic diversity and away from the downtown-centered, moderate Republican leadership that’s been the hallmark of San Diego city government for decades.  But with Faulconer’s victory, Filner’s tenure stands, for now, as a brief detour.

Faulconer looks and acts the part.  A San Diego State University grad and former PR man, Faulconer is the city’s longest tenured councilman, representing beach communities and Point Loma.  His past support for pension reforms, competitive bidding for city services and the tourism industry puts him in lockstep with Sanders and the center-right coalition that backed him.

That coalition picked Faulconer as its candidate at a series of meetings, culminating in one in late August at the La Jolla home of a prominent developer.  The decision cleared the Republican field for Faulconer.

On the campaign trail, Faulconer talked about meat-and-potatoes subjects: public safety, infrastructure, job creation.  But his style reflected a change in rhetoric sparked by Filner’s successful narrative that the city’s diverse neighborhoods had been neglected over the years thanks to downtown boosterism.

Faulconer spoke in Spanish when he announced he was running for mayor.  He emphasized ties to black pastors and Asian-Pacific Islander and Hispanic advocacy groups.  His most prominent surrogate was Father Joe Carroll, who’s best known for his work on behalf of the city’s homeless population.  A diverse group of supporters stood behind Faulconer during his victory speech, where Faulconer talked again and again about nonpartisanship and policies that benefited every neighborhood.

Still, many of the solutions Faulconer offers amount to center-right boilerplate, such as streamlining city permitting and other regulatory processes and saving money through competitive bidding services.

“He’s talked about neighborhoods,” said Erik Bruvold, who heads the National University System Institute for Policy Research, a local right-leaning think tank.  “But I don’t think we’ve gotten anything specific that’s much different than the status quo.”

Bruvold said he expected Faulconer to continue policies from the Sanders era and before.  That means strong backing for the hotel industry and big business in land-use decisions, and few large-scale shakeups in the city’s fiscal structure.

A glimpse of Faulconer’s vision for the city can be seen through his stances on big upcoming issues.  Faulconer supports ballot measures to overturn a development blueprint for Barrio Logan and an increase to the city’s affordable housing fee.  He’s against measures to boost the city’s minimum wage and hike taxes to pay for an infrastructure megabond.

Alvarez has opposite positions on all those things.  He picked a platform designed to excite the city’s Democratic base.  He emphasized holding landlords accountable for problem properties, environmental activism and providing more city contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses.

He saw enormous spending from labor unions, which raised more than $4 million on his behalf – an amount roughly equivalent to all the money raised for Faulconer and more than 80 percent of Alvarez’s total.

Alvarez’ platform didn’t leave much room for him to court the city’s large block of middle-of-the-road voters.  In hindsight, that looks like a huge miscalculation.  Turnout appeared to be only slightly higher than the 36 percent who cast votes in last November’s primary.  Lower turnout favors Republicans, and it did again Tuesday.

SAN DIEGO - Police Department

"What It Means to Be ‘Black While Blue’" by Liam Dillon, Voice of San Diego 1/8/2014

Benjamin Kelso thinks parents in minority-dominated areas of San Diego should be aware of the color of clothes their children wear.  Their children might draw negative attention from police who think they’re in a gang, he said.

Kelso knows because he’s a police officer.  And he knows because in the early 1990s, fellow San Diego police officers pulled him over for wearing blue and driving a blue Cadillac.

Kelso now heads the San Diego Black Police Officers Association and he’s risen to become a detective sergeant in SDPD’s domestic violence unit.

He said police and community race relations have improved since he’s been on the force, but SDPD still has a long way to go.  We spoke with Kelso for our investigation into the department’s approach to racial profiling issues.

He talked about how his organization’s appearance at Trayvon Martin marches led some SDPD officers to question his loyalty to the force and how certain police practices have upset minority community members.

Q: Can you talk about how the department has changed since when you were pulled over?

A lot of things have changed, not just department-wide.  If we look at our national views on race relations over the past 20 to 30 years, let’s go back further, from the Civil Rights era forward, there’s been significant change, significant progress leading up to now.  There’s been significant progress on the San Diego Police Department.

Being openly racist is not condoned.  In fact, it’s shunned.  In some cases it’s disciplined when it’s brought out, when it’s discovered.

The gray area is those situations that lie in between – that could have racial connotations but they also have justifiable law enforcement applications, so to speak.  That’s that crossroad between criminal profiling and racial profiling.  Depending on the circumstances and the situation, one could be deemed totally justifiable where another one may not be.

They have certainly not solved any sort of larger context race relations problem.  Are there officers in the police department that are racist?  Certainly.  Of every color.  Because racism is still alive and well in the United States.  It’s just not open.

Q: Can you give me an example of the blurred line between criminal and racial profiling?

Because people of different races commit crimes race can’t be completely eliminated as a potential factor in a certain crime.  If a robbery is committed and the perpetrator happens to be black, that’s probably the No. 1 criteria associated with that.  But you can’t use that alone as the basis for a stop.  Otherwise we go back to what we had in the pre-Civil Rights era.

Q: All of the experts we’ve spoken with and folks in the community have said the key issue with respect to racial profiling is the issue of trust between the community and law enforcement.  When profiling incidents happen here, do they erode trust within the community?

They do erode trust.  They create problems.  They create political backlash, so to speak.  They ultimately wind up being situations that organizations like the Black Police Officers Association or the Latino Police Officers or some of the other minority organizations within law enforcement, we work in those communities to build those bridges again, to repair that damage, to try to keep those lines of communications open for when something goes wrong.  It’s not a contest of loyalties because we’re law enforcement officers first and foremost.  But even that gets questioned.

The damaging thing, the hurtful thing, is to have individuals that we work with question our loyalty because we are out trying to solve a problem, trying to mend a fence.

Q: Can you give an example?

The Trayvon Martin situation was certainly a nationally volatile situation.  It raised a lot of community concerns.  There were a lot of protests, marches.  Nationwide.

We attend those things.  Then we have officers that know who we are, see who we are.  We’re identifiable as law enforcement, but we’re in the crowd at those things to help show the community that we support you.  We don’t necessarily have to believe what your organization believes or whatever.  But we support your right to protest, we support your right to feel pain about something that has happened in law enforcement.

Those things are huge.  Those things build huge amounts of trust between us and the community.  But it has a backlash.  Everything has a cost.  We get dirty looks from officers on the periphery that are watching the thing wondering,  “What’re they doing there?  Are they with them or are they with us?  What is going on?”

Q: So that happened?  You were at events and you sort of got a side-eye from other folks on the force?

Yeah.  It became a big topic of discussion.  People actually bring up questions.  Officers do.  They come out with it: “Well, what would have happened if there would have been a riot?  Who would you have sided with?”

Q: That happened?

That question did come up, yeah.  Obviously we keep those things in-house and we talk about those things.  I had a very candid conversation with one individual who brought that subject up, as did others.  When it ended, the individual walked away with a better understanding of what we’re here for and what we’re about.  But what was it that made him question it?  Only he can say what that was.

Q: What can police leadership do to address these kinds of issues?

Supporting efforts for training, making mandates that people should be treated fairly.  I’m not saying that they don’t, either.  I’m saying that if executive leadership supports change, change takes place.

I’ll bring up a prime example: making people sit on the curb.  It has a safety concern for officers.  In certain situations when an officer is outnumbered, it’s reasonable.  But when suddenly those situations become the common practice for everyone, everyone at least in those areas, maybe it’s not so reasonable.

Maybe the commanding officers can get involved in those sorts of things, and say, you know what, if you need to do something like that because it’s a legitimate safety concern, do that.  But when help arrives, move the person, have them sit in the back of the police car.  Or have them sit in the back of the police car from the beginning if you can.

Because [sitting on the curb] is not the procedure that’s taught in the police academy – that is a cultural thing that’s taught in the field by other officers.  It’s demeaning.

When we bring that up to officers, it’s actually met with anger sometimes.  Because the cultural belief is that doing so impacts their safety.  Now, by asking you to not put a person on the curb, you are now asking me to not be safe.  And I want to go home at the end of the night.  That’s not what the issue is at all.

Q: City Councilman David Alvarez said at a mayoral debate that it’s come to his attention that cultural competency training within the department might not be as strong as it used to be.  Have you seen any changes to it?

Have I seen changes in cultural competency training over the years?  Yes.  Specific programs?  I can’t name specific programs.  I can only say that the training of today is not what it was once in the past.  I think that those trainings should always be a part of ongoing training to help people deal with recognizing the impact of our actions as law enforcement officers.

We do a lot of things because we can and not necessarily because we have to.  I guess we have to know where the intersection is of taking an action.  Is this action absolutely necessary, or am I taking this action simply because I can take the action without consequence?

I think nationally we feel like we don’t have race problems anymore.  We believe we’re post-racial. San Diego PD, do they feel they’re post-racial?  Probably.  But we know that we’re not.

"San Diego Has Fallen Behind on Combating Police Racial Profiling" by Liam Dillon and Megan Burks, Voice of San Diego 1/8/2014

The San Diego Police Department and its chief, William Lansdowne, used to be national leaders in addressing concerns about racial profiling.  Now they’re not.

More than a decade ago, San Diego police were among the first to use data to examine how frequently officers targeted minorities in traffic stops.  Today, that policy has become the norm in big urban departments across the country.  But in San Diego, the effort has largely fallen by the wayside.  Officers here now track race in fewer than one out of every five stops and a sergeant in the department’s research and analysis division wasn’t aware that the requirement to gather the information still existed when we asked about it.

Lansdowne isn’t troubled by the decrease in the department’s data collection efforts.  He and his top deputies said residents don’t believe racial profiling is a problem.

“It hasn’t come up in years and years and years in interactions with the community,” said Assistant Chief Shelley Zimmerman, who’s in charge of the department’s neighborhood policing efforts.

But those who monitor San Diego police don’t share that perspective.  The head of the local Black Police Officers Association, the president of the local NAACP and a city councilman all said racial profiling happens in San Diego and they hear about it.

“Everyone knows it exists,” said Lei-Chala Wilson, the local NAACP president.

And city taxpayers recently had to foot the bill for an incident where police officers stopped young minorities for no reason.

This spring, a federal judge ruled that two officers violated the Fourth Amendment rights of two black residents, Dante Harrell and Shannon Robinson, during a City Heights traffic stop in 2010.  Harrell and Robinson’s lawsuit didn’t specifically allege racial profiling, but Harrell said he believed the stop happened because police look for reasons to pull over minorities in minority neighborhoods.  The city agreed to settle the case last month for $450,000.

The lawsuit and renewed national scrutiny over racial profiling got Lansdowne’s attention.  He has ordered a new round of data collection on race at traffic stops, saying profiling has again become an issue in San Diego.

Criminal justice experts, however, say racial profiling is always an issue: Incidents can erode trust between police and the communities they serve.  For some people of color who believe San Diego police officers have pulled them over for that alone, the traffic stops have taken their toll.

"Nobody that I know or myself do I feel safe around [police],” said Abdihakim Afewerki, a 26-year-old engineering student who is black.  Afewerki frequently spends time in Encanto and Lincoln Park.  “In my eyes, they're not there to protect me, they're there to harass me.”


‘We Can’t Be Afraid to Look at the Statistics’

In the late 1990s, civil rights groups in San Jose demanded action after allegations emerged of racial profiling in traffic stops.  Lansdowne, San Jose’s police chief at the time, responded.

His department pledged to gather race and ethnicity information voluntarily on traffic stops to see how frequently officers pulled over people of color.  Criminal justice researchers hailed Lansdowne as the "father of data collection" on police racial profiling.

"We can't be afraid to look at the statistics," Lansdowne said when San Jose released its initial 1999 report, which showed only small disparities between minorities stopped and the citywide population.

But more than a decade later, Lansdowne, San Diego's chief for the last 10 years, has few statistics to look at.

The San Diego Police Department has had a policy to collect race and ethnicity data during traffic stops since 2000, making it one of the first big urban departments to do so, along with San Jose.  The department has told officers they needed to gather this information multiple times in the years since.

But the message didn’t stick.  A sergeant in the department’s research and analysis division wasn’t aware that a data collection policy still existed when we asked in late October.

“We do not keep any demographics on traffic stops,” Sgt. Laura McLean told us in an email.

It turns out officers were keeping demographics on traffic stops – just not very much.  In the first 10 months of 2013, officers gathered racial information on roughly 16,000 traffic stops, an amount equivalent to about a fifth of the citations issued over the same time.  Officers pulled over an untold number of additional drivers without giving them tickets – or noting their race.  Many officers gathered the information diligently, police officials said, but the amount of data the department collected decreased substantially over time.

Lansdowne said the effort slowed because no one demanded the department analyze racial profiling in traffic stops, so he didn’t emphasize the requirement to collect the data.  In the meantime, other law enforcement agencies have surpassed the San Diego Police Department when it comes to being proactive on the issue.

Seven of the 10 largest police departments in the country currently have policies requiring them to gather race and ethnicity information on traffic or pedestrian stops even if officers don’t arrest or cite the person stopped.  An eighth department, Washington D.C., documents the race of those frisked by police.

These data are the cornerstone of a high-profile legal challenge over the New York City Police Department’s practice of stopping and frisking pedestrians in an effort to fight crime.  Researchers found 84 percent of those stopped and frisked by New York police were black or Hispanic.  Civil rights groups have argued these numbers show the practice is unconstitutionally biased against minorities.

Researchers who study the issue say data collection is a key part of a larger effort, along with robust diversity training and strict anti-bias policies, to prevent racial profiling.

“If there is a spirit and culture of transparency and accountability in the department, they’ll collect the data,” said Carol Archbold, a criminal justice professor who specializes in racial profiling issues at North Dakota State University.

SAN DIEGO - My Hometown Reflects U.S. Infrastructure Problem

This is what happens when you DO NOT have budgets with a yearly built-in upkeep for infrastructure.  The problems just keep accumulating until the cost for fixing problems is much bigger than if you had cyclic yearly upkeep.  It's better and cheaper to fix problems in small bites.

Note that this reflects one of the problems that killed the U.S. steel industry, not upgrading machines on a regular bases.  Hence they grew older and more expensive to repair, and did not keep up with more modern steel factories in competing nations.

"Victory for San Diego Sidewalks" by Liam Dillon, Voice of San Diego 6/11/2013

Sidewalks had a good day on Monday.

For the first time, San Diego will evaluate its 5,000 miles of sidewalks after City Council members voted to include a $1 million assessment in next year’s budget.  The evaluation will uniformly identify broken and missing sidewalks, rank the blocks needing the most help and put a price tag on fixing them and building new ones.

And it gets better.  The council also committed to changing the city’s illogical policies that make homeowners responsible for repairing broken sidewalks but the city legally liable for trip-and-fall lawsuits.

“Ultimately we want to revamp the policy in such a fashion that it works,” said Councilman Mark Kersey, who heads the city’s infrastructure committee.

Kersey said he expects the city’s transportation department to bring his committee a formal plan for the assessment in the fall.  At the same time, the committee will begin revamping sidewalk polices.

These efforts should lead to what everyone wants:  A plan to fix the city’s decaying sidewalks so they don’t look like this one in City Heights anymore.

Photo courtesy of The Stumblr
A busted sidewalk in City Heights

Getting money for the sidewalk evaluation wasn’t a slam dunk.  Mayor Bob Filner, who supported the concept of the evaluation, didn’t include it in his initial or revised budgets.  His staffers had concerns about a spate of new trip-and-fall lawsuits should the city identify bad sidewalks but not fix them.  Councilwoman Sherri Lightner recently said she opposed the evaluation because she feared the city would use it as an excuse to send unsuspecting residents a bill to fix the sidewalk outside their house.

But at Monday’s meeting, Lightner made the motion to include the evaluation, along with boosting library hours and other changes, in the budget.  She said she wanted to support the majority of her colleagues who had asked for it.

Numerous neighborhood interest groups and disabled advocates had pushed for the study as well.  I’ve beat the drum for changes to sidewalk policies since January, including through our Stumblr broken sidewalks photo blog.   At the council hearing, Kersey said the sidewalk evaluation “captured the attention of the public.”

The legal concerns are real, he said, but the city has to deal with its sidewalks.

“We can’t just bury our heads in the sand and hope that it goes away,” Kersey said.

A couple notes about our continuing sidewalk coverage.  With the sidewalk assessment funded, we’re going to scale back our publishing on The Stumblr.  So far, we’ve been posting new photos every work day and have almost 130 of them.  We’re going to keep the blog rolling, but now we’re only going to put up photos as they come in.

And make sure to put those photos to good use.  We’re sponsoring an art contest inspired by The Stumblr for the best art project using Stumblr photos or actual sidewalks.  The contest deadline is July 8 and we’ll be unveiling the winner at an event soon after.

Make sure to send in your ideas!