The Ugly Truth





21 February 2012
Why Napa Sucks! Part Eight: Law Enforcement Run By Thugs



A year ago in January, there was a public meeting at the County Library to discuss whether Napa needed some kind of citizens' review board to oversee the local Police Department after it shot a man on his front porch on the previous Thanksgiving weekend. Informed that the man seemed despondent and might be suicidal, the cops went on over and their sniper shot him after their discussion went awry.

Organized by some kind of Green Party coalition, coordinators of the meeting made it clear that they weren't second guessing the decision to shoot the man; they just thought we needed better communication between the police and mental health services. And a citizens' review board might have some valuable advice in helping the police better serve the community. Then a panel of experts--four or five--introduced themselves; Bay Area mental health worker, citizen activists, and a local attorney identified as a civil liberties specialist.

I listened to the experts' presentation for half-an-hour, and they could have been discussing any police department anywhere, in the wake of an aberrant accident.

When I had an opportunity, I asked the civil liberties attorney if he didn't believe Napa law enforcement might be prone to an extraordinary heavy-handedness; I cited the fact that the police and sheriff's departments routinely manhandled people, and the District Attorney just as routinely supported the tendency by knowingly charging detainees with crimes of which they were innocent.

The attorney, Vincent Spohn, responded that he was appalled at the number of weekly phone calls he received from young men who were brutalized at the hands of local cops, and further, that of course the DA routinely overcharged people. They all do. And that there was nothing especially pernicious about Napa law enforcement.

Now think about that: a civil liberties attorney who finds it perfectly normal that the police beat people up unnecessarily, and that the district attorney frames people for crimes they did not commit. In order to extort a plea bargain.

Then the discussion continued as if Napa were just like any other town, one that doesn't gratuitously jail, beat or shoot its citizens in order to pump up the local budgets and let the people know who's boss.

Unfortunately, most citizens of Napa seem not to mind that they're ruled by a local police dictatorship, and they appear positively enthusiastic about sending their fellow Americans to jail on trumped up charges. As for the attendees at that meeting, half were classic law and order types who unquestioningly want the cops to be able to have their way to get "bad guys," and the Green types who support the police in hopes of getting people for hate crimes or crimes against nature. You know, like smoking. And for suggesting that someone harrassing you over it might be a nag will result in punishment for general anti-socialness.

We already have cops who will arrest grandma for drugs if she has her prescription pills, but lacks the written prescription; cops who arrest kids for lying to a police officer as a result of a conversation during a routine traffic stop; cops who stigmatize kids as gang members for a lifetime because they find a prohibited number on their cell phones.

When I mention things like that to other citizens, they shrug their shoulders with some nostrum about the law being the law and we have to follow it, or someone should have known better, or something like that. It never seems to occur to them that there's something wrong with a town that keeps dreaming up reasons to put people in jail.

Dancing is effectively against the law here, and now you can go to jail, lose your kids and pay a hefty fine if you should get caught giving your kid a drink. Under any circumstances. Not a small glass of wine at dinner, as was common as I grew up, not a beer for a teenager at the family Super Bowl party, not a glass of champagne at a wedding.

And matters that were once settled with a weekend in jail now turn into an excuse to put people on probation so they can be supervised--closely--forever. The classic life on the installment plan.


A Sampler of Napa Valley Law Enforcement at Work in Recent Years

•Two kids were falsely accused of setting off firecrackers near Silverado Middle School by a policeman, even though an adult crossing guard working for the school told the cop the kids couldn't have done it because the guard had seen them when the firecrackers went off, providing an instant alibi. The cop insisted on searching the kids anyway, who were by then off campus. One of the children had been visiting his out of home dad, and they'd been fishing. The kid had a pocket knife in his backpack as a result. The cop told the kid they had to go back to the school to talk to the principal. On returning to the campus, the cop then arrested the 13-year-old for having a weapon on campus.

•A highschool history teacher was house sitting his mother's place, went for a walk before bed at around midnight. He was stopped as a suspected burglar, identified himself, cooperated completely. But after 15, 20 minutes of being detained, after determining that everything checked out, they still wouldn't let him go. He started to object, complaining that what they were doing was unconstitutional. He was promptly arrested and charged with burglary.

•A 40 something guy who lived with his 70 something mother got drunk and passed out on the front lawn one night, cops showed up, mom went out to talk. She objected when they started talking about arresting him, wanted to bring him into house. She didn't move fast enough when they started ordering her around, started to manhandle her, and broke her arm. She and her son were both charged.

•A 15-year-old cuts school repeatedly, the school sends a letter to the parents that goes unanswered because they had moved, though their phone number still worked. The parents get arrested and charged with child neglect; they could find them to arrest them, but not to talk to them, and no one thought to make a phone call.

•A security guard for a local firm wanted to quit, insists on his final check, goes to office to get it. His former supervisor, a woman, doesn't want him to quit, follows him out to his car, forces a physical confrontation. The guy was arrested and charged, the woman was not.

•A woman objected to the way a court appointed administrator handled her grandmother's affairs, arbitrarily disregarding the law and standard procedures to the benefit of another relative. The woman started making official complaints, and got the State Attorney General involved based on official documents with the administrator's signature, confirming that there were irregularities. The administrator claimed that they were forgeries, and got the police to arrest the woman and jail her, which got the State to abandon its investigation, because the evidence was supposedly forged, based solely on the claims of the administrator who was being investigated.

•The sheriffs arrest and jail a landowner who will not pay the dubious fines levied against him by the County Planning Department and threaten him with a month in jail if he won't pay. He says to jail him, he won't pay. The authorities do so, for a week. Then they talk to him again, ask if he's ready to pay yet. He refuses again. They release him immediately because they are losing more money by jailing him than the dubious fine was worth.

•A 17-year-old on probation is caught with a bottle of vodka, providing all the reason needed to put him in jail for violating probation. But he won't tell the authorities where he got the vodka, so he's charged with theft, despite a complete absence of evidence of a theft, but since he's on probation, he has no right to a conventional trial, and he's punished accordingly.

•A 50-something Mexican who owns a taco truck is drinking beer on his front porch and the police confront him and start to arrest him, to his dismay. He ends up dead in jail several days later, apparently from a police beating. The cops describe him as a dangerous man, say he was arrested with a crumpled $20 bill in his pocket, with a bindle of cocaine in it. He has no known drug history, and routinely carried a roll of hundreds of dollars in his pocket. The thick wad of money he always had mysteriously disappeared.

•A dry-cleaner-store owner has a problem with an employee who won't stop playing with her cell phone. He chatises her one day, tells her to get off the phone, she aims the phone at him to take a video, says she'll get evidence to sue him. He snatches the phone from her hand, sends her home, which is across the street, and later returns the cell phone. Without any warning or preliminaries, the police walked into his business, ordered him to turn around, spread his arms and legs. He doesn't move fast enough so they manhandle the 60 something, further damaging his already injured back, and charge him with a wide variety of felonies.

•A 30-something with one or two run ins with the local law enforcement community as a youngster is in a car with a woman friend who's driving. He's been drinking. She has an accident, flips the car. The police show up, drag the man from the car, charge him with felony drunk driving--though he wasn't driving and no one was hurt--and he ends up being sent to prison for life based on the three-strikes law. His previous two strikes derive from a single teenage fight, from more than a decade before.

•An unfriendly man who has lived in his apartment for 15 years has an argument with the Mexican woman who just moved into the building. She calls the police, who inform the man that he must move immediately or they will arrest him for hate crimes. He moves, in fear of the felonies the cops threaten to charge him with. Six months later, he moves into another apartment in the same building, inhabited by his girlfriend, who has lived there with her children for several years. The Mexican woman complains to the building owner that the man smokes outside, and she doesn't want her child exposed even to distant second hand smoke that may drift in from the street. Fearing more problems from the police and a possible lawsuit, he evicts the girlfriend and her family, to get rid of the man, who was run off by police threats, though he was never cited or charged for anything. An American citizen was run out of two homes in a year on behalf of a foreigner of dubious right to be in this country at all.

•A man meets a woman at a bar, drinks too much, talks her into giving him a ride home. As they're leaving, he goes to his car to get his jacket, a police car appears. He's on probation, the cops know him. As soon as he puts the key in the door, the cops arrest him for drunk driving and violation of probation.

•A man gets arrested for meth sales, goes through court preliminaries, gets released, goes to clerk's office as directed to schedule further proceedings and court dates. After pulling up his file, the clerk informs him that he's facing another identical charge. The police just duplicated the info from his first arrest, changed the date, and reported an arrest and crime that never happened. The man pled guilty to both charges to avoid jail.

•An 18-year-old girl and her boyfriend are arrested for grafitti vandalism after a month-long investigation. She's released pending further proceedings, shoots her mouth off to the Napa Register about how stupid it was to go after her, revealing herself as a spoiled brat. The police use this as an excuse to raid and search her parents' house where she is rearrested for having in her possession the tools of her crime, in this instance, pens and pencils, in her bedroom.

•A 30 something prostitute is accused by her client, an illiterate illegal Mexican, of trying to steal his wallet; that is all that is clear. The woman is charged with a wide variety of felonies, and the DA tries--but fails--to put her into prison for life under the three strikes law, designed for violent criminals. It seems she had been arrested for stealing a wallet before. She's found guilty, and the DA settles for 8 years in prison.

•The cops round up all the usual suspects they could in town for any trumped up charge they might contrive. They snag the homeless, the bums, the occasional drunks, and they drag them in, apparently, because the jail numbers were getting low, threatening their level of federal funding. At least that's what the one deputy at the jail told the other deputy who asked what was going on. See how crime pays in Napa?

•I heard that last story from a young friend arrested for an outstanding traffic warrant about the same time. He ended up charged with multiple felonies. He earned those after being stopped for some bogus excuse while he had a couple of friends in the car. The friends had marijuana prescriptions, and they had legal marijuana, about which the cops could do nothing. But it wasn't enough just to settle the traffic charges with the driver. At the jail, they make you exchange your clothes for prisoners' garb. In searching the young man's pants, they found the last half inch of a joint in one of the pockets. So they chargd him with trying to smuggle drugs into jail, and for possession of concentrated cannabis. For just a few thousand dollars, the kid got a lawyer to set the district attorney straight, and drop the false charges. He took care of the traffic issue, and the case was due for dismissal. But on the weekend before his court date, the cops raided his mother's house, bashing through the door with a battering ram, dragging his mother out on the porch, without her wig, which hid the fact that she had a disease that had made her hair fall out. The cops just couldn't stand it, apparently, that their made up charges wouldn't stick.

•Something similar happened to another young man I know, also during last spring. He was on probation, getting along without any trouble with his probation officer, yet the cops raided his home one weekend. Again, they battered the door down, even though the kid was out front a little ways off playing hacky-sack with some friends. His mother lost her hair during chemo-therapy for her cancer, and they dragged her out, another sick old lady deprived of her wig and her dignity. They roughed her up enough for the son to confront the cops, who backed off since their raid wasn't authorized by his probation officer. Apparently, they mounted the operation merely to see if they could provoke the kid into violence and jail. His probation officer filed a complaint over the incident.

•In June, they stopped a 40-year-old handyman on his bicycle at around eight o'clock, as he rode home from his job downtown. The sky still summer-evening bright, the cop claimed to stop him for lack of a headlight. The cop expressed annoyance at the man's argument that it was far from dark, and ran a check on him; supposedly. Then the cop badgered the man for five or ten minutes, during which he demanded to see the man's cell-phone. The man resisted, the cop got threatening, the man gave up his phone, the cop went through the man's numbers. Wanted to check to see if he was calling any bad guys. Chuckle. The cop finally tired of humiliating the guy, want back to the car, blabbed on the radio, returned to tell Handyman that he could leave. Handyman went to the police station the next day to file a complaint with someone, about being stopped for a made up reason, the seizure and search of his cell-phone, the general humiliation. But there was no record of the cop running a check on Handyman in any of the logs. So it must not have happened, and they sent Handyman on his way.

•But my favorite incident I saw with my own eyes. Over the years, I'd come to find it bizarre to note the heavy-handed law enforcement presence on the evenings of the summer Chef's Market. I've been going to events like that for decades, attended them by the hundreds, in dozens of countries. I've never seen its like at festivals, carnivals, fairs, anywhere, outside of Central America, during the wars of the '80s. And in Napa, they even have squads of probation officers hanging around, vulture-like. Just the happy face you want to associate with a World Class Travel Destination. Menacing cops. Everywhere. On refined party night in Wine Country. One such night within a few days of Independence Day--you know, the day we declared our freedom from oppressive government--a cop set out with four probation officers in her wake. By chance, they looked like the cast of some whack Reality Show. The female cop was a genuine hottie, and the POs were all a good five-foot-eight, lean, shapely women, all 30-something. Wearing flack vests and hardware and officious expressions. They took off down where Randolph Street dead-ends at the walkways by Kohl's Deaprtment Store, gathering place for the town's teenagers during these Chefs' Market evenings. I followed at a distance, and before I knew it, the foxy cop had collared some kid in the crowd, and the Amazon POs surrounded him. She flashed a light into his eyes, demanded answers, the POs took shots from the sidelines. Quick as a blink they moved on, grabbed another youngster, same routine. His girlfriend said something, so they got in her face. These kids weren't doing anything, except hanging out with other kids on the night the whole town hangs out. The fem gestapo unit had no reason at all to stop these kids, yet they were snagging one a minute for harrassment. They got six or seven kids in five or ten minutes, just messing with them, and moving on to the next kid who caught their eyes. Finally, they accosted an 18-year-old Mexican boy, just after he rounded the corner. They hadn't observed him do anything, because they couldn't see him. A big kid. they promptly put his hands behind his back, in restraints. They questioned him for 10 minutes, the women taking turns barking at him, led by the cop. Then they released him and returned toward First Street. I asked the kid what excuse the cops gave for working him over like that. They said I was acting crazy, he said, in native English. I don't know why they stopped me. I was just walking down the street.

They stopped him because the police forces are out of control in this County, because the bureaucrats they serve want to keep us intimidated and scared as they plunder us. It happens all the time, and one day it may happen to you. ~ ~ ~


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