From: Carmi Woods
To: City Council Public Comments
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Comment on Item #3.3 of today"s meeting Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 9:02:14 AM
Good morning Santa Rosa City Council members,
I am emailing all of you to comment on agenda item 3.3 of today's meeting regarding the addition of a Community Oversight committee. I am in opposition of such a committee for the following reasons.
1. This is a duplicate effort of a program that already exists - the OIR Group LLC which is a completely independent auditor of the police department. It is my understanding that this is a group of qualified individuals that are doing this job already. Qualified being the key word here. By putting together a community outreach I highly doubt you will obtain individuals that are actually qualified but would rather find ways to make it harder for SRPD to do their job.
2. By adding
another level of scrutiny to our police department only makes it more difficult for our officers to do their job and less will get done not more. You will be hurting our community instead of helping it.
3. Why are you looking for problems within our police department that do not exist? What a waste of efforts and time for you and our SRPD to have to deal with. A better use of your time would be to work WITH the SRPD and figure out how to deal with homeless mess in our community, reduce the violent crimes that are on the rise and actually let our officers patrol our streets and hold criminals accountable for their wrong doings.
Instead what I see is you -
the city council - trying to find ways to criminalize our police. The ones that are out there each day risking their lives for you.
You are making it hard to want to continue to live in Santa Rosa. Do your job and let SRPD do their job.
A response is welcome.
Sincerely,
Carmi Woods
From: Eric Fraser
To: CityCouncilListPublic
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Police Oversight
Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 6:19:32 PM
My comment was censored unfairly by the Mayor concerning oversight extending over code enforcement officers. We are seeing a fact pattern of erroneously issued citations, and widespread abuses of process that expose the City to legal penalties for violations of civil rights, and abuse property owners and their tenants.
This oversight should also extend to the Santa Rosa parking district that is observed to have (had?) policies and procedures that insult people's civil rights.
Here are my comments regarding the code enforcement abuses we are seeing:
Slide 5 and 6 of the presentation found at the 5/17 Economic Subcommittee meeting discusses code enforcement and shows 124 complaints. Our report from 5/16 assembled from public information shows 96 enforcement files, so I’m not sure why the discrepancies.
When we analyzed the data from our report, we did find a couple properties with multiple complaints, but that doesn’t account for the missing 28 files.
Also, most of the property
owners we contacted said they never received the complaint. (Staff's excuses for why this is doesn't jive with the information. Only two files (some with multiple complaints) regarded a breach of operation standards (estimated 4% - 4 complaints – had to do with operational violations like noise, parking, excessive occupancy – out of 100).
These two properties have
evidence provided by owners/managers that refutes the allegations.
We estimate the other 96% are divided between citations given to those in the permit process admitting that they had short term tenants prior to applying for a permit (~50), and ~46 who received a citation because an activist prepared a list of properties with defective advertisements and submitted it to enforcement.
This also coincides with a list of about 40
properties whereby the complainer and staff apparently decided they need intense scrutiny - and extra-judicial
processes - to deny their permit. We are researching to see to what extent this list was formed by racial animus.
In addition to the civil rights violations, potential financial liability to the city, widespread pattern of abuses, overlap with policing activities (there is testimony that code enforcement has been a tool used by police to harass property owners and guests), and obvious policing powers, there is no reason why code enforcement should not be included in auditing and oversight.
Thank you for your time, and we will appreciate your response.
Eric Fraser
Truth in Tourism