June 22 

BLACK LIVES MATTER IN POLITICAL OFFICE TOO.
Drew Glover was a spirited and spirit-filled Santa Cruzan whose recall from office should not have happened. He was elected with a plurality of votes in 2018, 10,972. But he needed a majority of votes in this past March 3rd recall election. Even though Glover received more votes in the recall–11,796–he was still cast out of office. So, let’s see if I have this right, Glover received more votes and a significantly higher percentage of total votes in 2020 than in 2018. In over two years in office Drew actually grew his voter base by over 800! That is a positive testament to his time in office given that his politics are about inclusivity and representing the underrepresented–students, renters, houseless–and that is not necessarily shared in all quarters of Surf City.

His Name is Drew Glover, Presente!
Glover grew up in Santa Cruz. He graduated from Harbor High and was president of his senior class. He studied feminist studies at Cabrillo College and was a member of the United Nations Association board. His Mom was a UCSC graduate and until her untimely death in 2016 was probably his closest friend. He worked alongside a plethora of UCSC students too. In only two years and 5 months on the city council Glover was able to bring in over two dozen interns and expose them to the process of local policy making. One of Drew’s passions was police reform. When he was finally appointed to the city council’s Public Safety Committee earlier this year he brought with him a relentless agenda. At the time of his ouster from office he was pushing for a Surveillance ordinance that would protect locals from overzealous police spying; he was organizing with others to put into place a Human Rights Commission; and Glover fought mightily for a managed camp ground, which now has been put in place by the city and county as a result of the tragedy of Covid-19. But Glover had a plan to create a real “managed” campground, one that drew from the experiences and wisdom of houseless people, past and present. He was also instrumental in advocating for the city’s CACH, the Community Advisory Council on Homelessness. The CACH has now been thrown onto the ash heap of the work of two past other homeless committees. Great work, but no thanks say callus city administrators. The current CACH made sound and timely endorsements of sensible programs only to be undermined by the now Czar-like authority of city manager, Martin Bernal, who unceremoniously dissolved it this past month. In addition, Glover was a yes vote on the city’s purchase of a homeless navigation center on Coral Street, but alas this too has been undermined by anti-houseless and anti-Glover forces. The deal was called off last week. The city will NOT be buying the Seaborg property after eight months of intense negotiation. It is clear, for the price of half a luxury condominium moneyed interests were able to drive a Santa Cruz true homie from office. 

SAVE TREES AND THE FARMER’S MARKET! Here is just one of at least eleven heritage trees that will likely be cut down to make way for parking garage. We cannot let this happen. My 19-year old daughter is in the tree and has been climbing it since she was 8.

What Has Santa Cruz Lost?
Over two-hundred thousand dollars was spent to tar, feather, smite, defame and dislodge a true fighter for social justice and friend of the working class too. His absence has not gone unnoticed over these past months. In recent weeks, there has been a fervent effort to turn back what the previous progressive council was doing, after all, Glover was the fourth vote and developers, real estate interests, and a few racists wanted him out of office. The library-in-a-garage project, a Glover NO vote, is on the cusp of becoming a reality despite the overwhelming lack of community support. This is a project Glover was vocal about because approving it will likely ax at least 11 heritage trees and displace the community’s beloved Farmer’s Market. A wall of market-rate condos is also poised to be built along Front Street. Its six to seven stories will tower over the San Lorenzo River ecosystem from Soquel Avenue to Laurel Street. There will be scant, if any; affordable units built in these intensely profit-driven developments. Glover was an obstacle for developers in their path to making Silicon Beach a reality. He wanted housing for Santa Cruzans who lived here now, not second home buyers from over the hill. He understood this. In addition, he was an environmentalist who spent several years on a project acknowledging the importance of bees, their demise, and how we could bring them back. His Project Pollinate worked with young people to study the importance of bees on our eco-system. Another reason he opposed the towering 6-story parking garage on Cedar Street was the detrimental effects it will bring to our city while sending the wrong message to young people that a car-centric town is somehow okay.If Drew was still on the council he would also be supporting, and likely help lead, many of the Black Lives Matter protests that have taken place over the last two weeks in Santa Cruz. He was an African-American voice on the city council for the underrepresented. 

History Lesson from Berkeley in the 1970’s
Clearly, we have lost an important civic champion in Drew Glover. He, along with the current mayor, were the very first two Black men ever elected to the Santa Cruz city council. The following article was penned by Judge D’Army Bailey. He was only the second African-American ever elected to the Berkeley city council. Bailey was also recalled after a couple years in office by similar forces that came after Drew Glover. I bring this to your attention because so much in this life repeats itself. Rodney King in 1992 and George Floyd in 2020. D’Army Bailey in 1973 and Drew Glover in 2020. This community has much to learn.

Tuesday September 23, 2003

Reprinted from the Berkeley Daily Planet

Californians appear condemned to repeat history because they refuse to learn from it. I shake my head as the Berkeley recall of 30 years ago repeats itself on a statewide level.  

I became the only person ever recalled from the City Council in Berkeley, and one of the few—if not only—black ever recalled in California history on Aug. 21, 1973. No one learned from the Berkeley experience that recalls start with those who lost the election and always play on the fears of a nervous populace. Moreover, recalls allow 25 percent or less of the voters in the last election to force an elected official to get a majority of the votes in his/her defense. This means that even though as many as 49 percent of those voting may favor the targeted officeholder, without a majority he or she loses-—and the minority which started the fight wins. The Berkeley recall began with the partnership of the liberal left and the Berkeley Black Caucus. A native of Memphis, I had finished my law degree at Yale University, moved to California to work for Legal Services and joined the Caucus. Flush with success of electing black Congressman Ron Dellums, the Caucus ran a coalition slate of blacks, whites and women in the April 1971 city elections. I was tapped as part of the coalition.  

Our campaign platform included the creation of jobs with top priorities to minorities and women, expanded housing and child care programs, extended recreational facilities, and liberal juvenile justice policies. I promised quite clearly that I would serve the interests of the black community. Berkeley’s business and conservative and moderate leaders were far from unified in the Council elections. But on the day after the election, the defeated conservatives and moderates announced a recall against our coalition. The strategies later became to recall Bailey and effectively neutralize the other black council member. 

As a Councilman, I challenged the city’s racial fairness in Berkeley City government. In my two and a half years the city hired its first black city manager and city attorney, passed an affirmative action program, increased blacks in police and fire, and gave the all-black garbage workers an accelerated wage increase to help them achieve parity. We opposed the Vietnam War and blocked a shopping mall development at the Berkeley Marina. 

Conservatives and the business community mobilized their recall petition drive. The recall petition charged that I refused to compromise at council meetings; filibustered; and staged outbursts that caused the council to break up in disarray. They charged I disparaged the image of established black leaders, and introduced race into the politics of Berkeley. With financial support from businesses and relentless backing from the Berkeley Daily Gazette, Bailey recall went on the ballot. My financial backers became a subject of great interest-even reporter Mike Wallace pressed me on Sixty Minutes to reveal my financial sources. I was funded primarily by a discreet, progressive family who did not wish to be identified and not, as charged, by the CIA or Communists. 

I had many supporters: Congressman Dellums, who was heavily reliant on the white left, made some statements against the recall; Legendary Longshoreman leader Harry Bridges who understood the divisive implication of recall. My main support came from those who elected me in the first place —the black community and white activists who supported black political self-determination. 

Others came. Medgar Ever’s widow, Myrlie Evers and Jesse Jackson took to the streets of Berkeley for me. My fellow lawyers in National Bar Association took an unprecedented Convention vote denouncing the recall as “violating of Councilman Bailey’s constitutional right of free speech.” Black activist Angela Davis wrote that the recall’s “motivation is fundamentally racist and anti-democratic….D’Army’s seat was won by a coalition of voters who demanded representation, not for big business, but for the people.” The recallers’ main strategy was to make it appear that the 25 percent black population wanted me out. That strategy failed. I won every black precinct. But the conservatives weren’t really interested in what the blacks thought. I was beaten in the almost all-white, upper income Berkeley Hills where turnout was substantial. 

The recall group manipulated the timing of the recall election to occur in the summer when most of the Berkeley college students were away. Though that may not have affected the ultimate outcome, it reflected the recallers’ cynical attempt to disenfranchise a large segment of the city’s voters. Later Berkeley banned special elections in the summer. Californians failed to grasp the lessons from this Berkeley slice of history and now they are doomed to repeat them.  

For the past thirteen years D’Army Bailey has served as an elected State Circuit Judge in Memphis, Tenn. He is Tennessee’s designated founder of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.(Note: Judge Bailey died on July 12, 2015. NY Times Obituary)

“A few days ago, temperatures within the Arctic Circle topped 100 degrees, shattering records. With so many unprecedented crises facing this nation and the world, we must never lose sight of the biggest existential threat facing the planet: climate change.” (June 22)

June 15

YES, BLACK LIVES MATTER 

“The core Community-Oriented Policing philosophy was first enacted more than 20 years ago under the direction of then-Police Chief Steve Belcher.”

Police Reform?
What is “community policing?” Surely it goes back to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s when police were put on notice that they could not continue to patrol Black and Brown neighborhoods in the same way as they had become accustomed. Community policing in the 1970’s took the form of police foot patrols, and later the University of Wisconsin’s ace criminologist Herman Goldstein and his “POP, Problem Oriented Policing” took hold. It’s an updated and reformed version of an old concept. Goldstein’s work focused on not only getting cops out of their cars and getting to know neighbors who resided on their beats, but by using some of these relationship-building techniques police were trained to think more deeply and understand how to solve the intractable problems (crimes?) afflicting various parts of a community. In 1982, with the publication of an article “Broken Windows,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, it seemed that community policing took a setback. Broken Windows ultimately led to the now infamous, stop and frisk policy that was made popular by former New York City police chief, Rudy Giuliani, and hopefully finally put to rest as a police policy, by current mayor Bill De Blasio. More recently, along came PredPol Inc. a form of policing put forward by a company that “uses predictive analytics to support law enforcement” by using software they develop and sell to police departments. Both PredPol and stop and frisk target communities of color and are part of the problem our society has been embroiled in over the last several decades, that being a violent culture embedded in police culture itself.

“Officers became responsible not just for responding to calls, but for solving the problems the calls reported,” Belcher said. “It was an evolutionary process.”

Is Community Policing Working in Santa Cruz?

Many community policing techniques have been tried over the years, then reformed, then tried again, then reformed again. Most recently, Police Chief Andy Mills is often seen walking up and down Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz and actually talking it up with business owners, houseless people, and visitors from out of town. Chief Mills has sought to be a model for this kind of community policing to his rank and file. From my perspective, it has worked in an uneven way for several reasons. Communicating with locals is uncomfortable and not easy for many police officers. It is also quite time consuming, and cops might wonder, is this why they were hired? What community policing has lately come to mean in Santa Cruz are the resident’s police academy; the yearly get-to-know-your-neighbors block parties, both sponsored by the SCPD; and a Police Auditor position to analyze and process complaints against police. (BTW, as far as I know, the Santa Cruz’s Police Auditor, Bob Aaronson, left about a year ago and I do not believe this position has yet been filled, although the city web site continues to list his name, which is also part of the larger problem of effective police oversight.) )

“Community-Oriented Policing also brought focus to the root cause of issues. Rather than repeatedly dealing with the same call for service, officers gave new attention to problem solving in order to prevent the issues from reoccurring.”

What Might Defunding the Police Look Like?

If community policing was ever to be successful in Santa Cruz police ought to spend much more of their time on foot and on bicycle patrol. After all, it would be implementing the Chief’s example, and really do some community policing. I walk around Santa Cruz a lot and I find few police officers doing the same. Yes, they’ve got a good bit of geography to cover during their shift, but they can leave their vehicle, or bicycle, close by and just walk. I would recommend getting to know at least two or three neighborhoods per week. What the public often glimpses are police personnel hanging out in groups shooting the s**t, often for long periods of time, (especially during parades, Halloween, and protest rallies), or simply jetting around, several miles above the speed limit, in their new SUV police cars and never really getting to know the community members where they patrol. I know from personal experience that the Chief has tried tirelessly to put forward his mentor Goldstein’s POP approaches to policing, all of which are centered around community policing, but there still remains a department largely out of touch with regular Santa Cruzans. Why? Perhaps because we are asking the wrong people to do the wrong job and they’re obviously way over-burdened with it. Aren’t we asking our $30 million a year police department to carry out the work they were not necessarily trained for nor signed up to do? I think so. Most definitely, public safety needs to be redefined. What I hear Santa Cruzans crying out for right now are jobs for the unemployed, more social workers and drug and alcohol counselors, lower rents, and transitional housing opportunities, not necessarily all in that order. We have been directly and indirectly asking police to address many of these needs and it’s finally becoming clearer and clearer to decision-makers around the country that this is no longer feasible.

“Early Community-Oriented Policing initiatives in Santa Cruz included…Specifically assigned beats for officers so they could get to know neighborhoods and residents could become familiar with them.”

Are We the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For?

Yes, we need to shift our priorities and just like the bank robber Willie Sutton and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders replied when asked essentially where the money is, Sutton responded, the banks, and Bernie said, the Pentagon. Well, in Santa Cruz the bulk of the general fund goes to the police department. So, Defunding the Police in Santa Cruz would start by shifting money from their budget to a human services budget. This would be a beginning. It does not mean Abolish the Police, but it does mean creating a seismic shift of resources away from what the police are trained to carry out and towards those services offered by social workers, counselors, and housing specialists that we so sorely need and, which PD will never be able to adequately deliver. Arguably this is a heavy lift and a policy change that has never happened in Santa Cruz before, but the current social movement that’s been unfolding over the past 21 days offers opportunities to serious address the way public safety is looked at and carried out in Surf City. We should be mindful that these moments do not come along very often. Be the change you want to see in the world, and know we are the ones we’ve been waiting for come to mind right now precisely because Black Lives Matter.

Retweet: “Today’s police forces look more like armies equipped with weapons of war. A fed’l program from the 1990s sends surplus military equipment to NYPD & other police. Today, I’ve introduced legislation to end this initiative once and for all.  #BlackLivesMatter #EndPoliceViolence” (Rep. Nydia Velazquez June 10) (Send the BearCat back!)

Santa Cruz Main Beach, June 15, 10:37am…

This picture speaks loudly about what “community policing” is NOT. How do we break down the barriers between the community and its police department? Is it possible? Why are these vehicles on the beach? It’s a ridiculous show of force on a balmy day on a sparsely populated beach. What might a community policing scenario look like on this beach on this day? One police officer and one ranger ride their bicycles from the PD dept. on Center Street to the foot of the Wharf. Each is wearing a face mask and sporting comfortable shorts. They wave at residents along the way. The pandemic face mask hides their wide smiles. Each officer locks their bike at the bike rack by the Ideal Fish Co. and proceed by stairway down onto Main Beach. Each public safety official is carrying a package of masks to hand out. They inform every beach-goer of the rules and that they’d be safer wearing a mask. ‘Wouldn’t you like a mask?’ They both cover the entire Main Beach from the Wharf to the San Lorenzo River and back to the bikes in less than an hour. And today they would’ve encountered over 100 people, most willing to have a pleasant encounter with a public safety officer. These actions would speak volumes and break down that constant wall, real and imagined, between officer and community resident and visitor alike.

June 9

BLACK LIVES MATTER
We won’t stop until the @MayorOfLA supports a #PeoplesBudgetLA that will #DefundThePolice. We’ll see you in the streets!

–Tweeted June 8 by Black Lives Matter-LA

“Defund the Police”
Black Lives Matter is leading a game-changing social revolution urging residents everywhere to start in their home cities and look into restructuring, and defunding, their own police departments. What I am hearing from the national debate is that it is not necessarily individual officers and departments that are so bad, but the police culture is itself is inherently toxic. How officers are trained, equipped, and deployed really matters. The origins of American-style policing have their roots in slave owners’ desires to get back their property and so hired groups to enforce slave recovery even before the “Fugitive Slave Law” came into being in 1850. From the Library of Congress web site, the “slave law” was “A bill to amend the act entitled, An act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters.” (https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.33700200/?st=text) The most recent Time Magazinereported on the current nationwide police budget defunding efforts. Journalist Olivia B. Waxman writes, “In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts…”(https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)

Status of the Santa Cruz Police Budget
Almost 30% of the city of Santa Cruz’s budget now pays for the police department. That figure is from of the “adopted” 2020 general fund budget of $107 million. That is, just over $30 million goes to the fund police. The overall budget, which includes “enterprise funds,” like water, garbage, recycling pickup, and sewage for fiscal year 2020 is $264 million. Enterprise funds are areas of the budget which generate their own resources through the bills residents pay. Police, Fire, Parks and Recreation, Planning, Finance, Economic Development and the City Manager’s office make up the bulk of discretionary funding decisions made by the city council. It is important to note that while the police budget has risen by 20% since 2018, the overall general fund budget has only gone up 11.2% during that same period. Admittedly, residents ask the police to do a lot that includes often addressing homeless service coordination, being aliaison for our huge visitor community, and providing frontline counseling among other needs. During a city council meeting last year, the Santa Cruz chief of police said up to 60% of his budget goes for enforcement around the various homeless issues that persist in Surf City. Now that a national discussion of “defunding” the police has begun, perhaps Santa Cruz can take steps to move money from the police department and put it towards fundingthe needs of the social and human services sectors.

“When we talk about defunding the police, what we’re saying is ‘invest in the resources that our communities need.”

–Alicia Garza, founder of Black Lives Matter, on NBC, Meet the Press

Why Not?
Why not lop off part of the police budget and create a Department of Health and Human Services (as the city of Berkeley did several years ago)? It would certainly alleviate a lot of the sociology and psychology work law enforcement officers are now asked to engage in. Why not plan to demilitarize the police department? Send the Bear Cat tank back to Homeland Security, eliminate any purchases of military weaponry, require every sworn officer to spend 40% of their time on a bicycle, increase the number of unarmed community service officer hires and decrease the more expensive sworn officer employees, and finally, revamp the entire police training manual as Minneapolis is looking to do. What if $10 million out (30%) of the current $30 million police budget was devoted to homeless services and getting folks off the streets and into programs whichdeal directly with mental health and substance abuse issues? It is a telling, sad, and startling detail that two out of the four officers involved in the Minneapolis police murder were trained by the same cop, Derek Chauvin, who placed himself so tragically on the neck of George Floyd. Talk about the foxes being in charge of the hen house?!? Incidentally, as the New York City Council debates cutting $1 billion of its $6 billion budget, a majority, of the Minneapolis city council, 9 of 13 members, “pledged to dismantle” that city’s police department and start over (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52960227) while Los Angeles Mayor, Gil Garcetti is proposing to cut $150 million out of the LAPD budget. Now these are the signs of change and reform that people from Staten Island (Eric Garner) to Ferguson (Michael Brown), to Georgia (Ahmaud Arbery) and Louisville (Breonna Taylor) might welcome.

What It Will Take to Get Us Back to Work

Source:  safejobchecklist.org

How does your workplace rate?

1. The right personal protective equipment (PPE)

   To keep the COVID virus out of your body and to keep you from spreading it to anyone else, every worker needs a supply of gloves and masks. Front line workers who know they are being exposed to people who may be sick need impermeable gowns, properly fitted respirators and face shields or goggles too.

2. Hand washing time and facilities

   The time and the facilities to wash and dry your hands several times during your shift and a hand sanitizer containing at least 60% alcohol to use in between.

3. Social Distancing

   Work stations that allow six feet between you and the people around you or sneeze guards if you need to be any closer and other adaptations like staggered shift and break times and job descriptions that allow you to keep away from other workers and the public.

4. Cleaning and disinfecting

   Work stations, shared tools and electronics, bathrooms and locker and break rooms are sanitized, and deep cleaning is done after known exposure.

5. Wellness rules

   Enforced rules that send people home, preferably before they enter the workplace, if they feel sick or have a fever or test positive for COVID and benefits that allow people to stay home, with pay, if they or a family member feel sick.

6. The right to speak up

   Ways to provide suggestions or raise concerns about workplace safety and health without fear of retaliation.

“We need to work from the ground up to transform our society. It’s clear we cannot wait any longer to act forcefully and boldly to root out systemic racism and police violence. And when we act together, we win.” (June 8)