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| NEWS > 19 December 2007 |
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Civil rights trial begins for
PROVIDENCE, R.I. --A lawyer for the mother of a black police sergeant shot dead by two white colleagues said the accident may not have happened if Providence police were trained to recognize off-duty officers.
Attorney Barry Scheck said the Providence Police Department required its officers to carry their badges and guns while off-duty, but it never trained recruits on how to prevent friendly fire accidents.
Scheck, part of a team of lawyers who successfully defended O.J. Simpson against murder charges, said the policy was especially dangerous for minority officers like S... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Oakland Tribune - Oakland,CA,U
19 December 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Oakland Police Department, CA
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Oakland: Council votes to keep
The City Council voted Tuesday to pay a team of monitors $1.8 million over a two-year period to review how well the Oakland Police Department does in completing a host of court-mandated reforms.
The contract, approved by a 6-2 vote, came months after it appeared questionable whether the same team of monitors would complete work it began in 2003, as the city and the monitors haggled over how much the team should be paid for a two-year extension of an original contract.
The monitors were assigned to keep watch on the Police Department following the city's settlement in the "Riders" police misconduct case, in which a group of rogue officers were prosecuted for beating and framing residents in West Oakland. The total contract amount, including the two-year extension, will not exceed $5.02million, according to the city.
Attorney John Burris, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys in the Riders case, said keeping the same monitoring team was crucial.
He said it would have been "unconscionable" for the city to switch to a new team after the original one already had done five years of work.
"It's extremely important," he said, of the agreement. "A lot of work has already been done."
The Independent Monitoring Team, as it is called, released its 10th report on the police department in September. It found the Police Department made significant progress on a host of reforms, but needed to do a better job of training its officers in order to move toward full compliance with the orders of the court.
Police Chief Wayne Tucker told the council Tuesday he was confident full compliance would be reached in two year's time.
Burris credited Tucker and other top police officials for quickening the pace of reforms in recent years.
It wasn't always so, he said.
In fact, Judge Thelton Henderson's decision earlier this year to extend court oversight of the department through Jan. 20, 2010, two years beyond the original five-year period, said the department made "virtually no progress" during the initial two years of the settlement.
All along, city officials maintained that they hoped to work with the same monitoring team for the two-year extension. But City Attorney John Russo said in September his office was taking initial steps toward finding a new monitoring team after the two sides were hundreds of thousands of dollars apart in agreeing on what a fair price for their work was.
Russo said City Administrator Deborah Edgerly ended up playing a leading role in the negotiations. He said the compromise may not have been "the best possible deal" for the city but that it represented significant improvement.
"The contract is better than what they were demanding (in September) by hundreds of thousands of dollars," Russo said.
Voting in favor of the contract were Councilmembers Patricia Kernighan (Grand Lake-Chinatown), Nancy Nadel (Downtown-West Oakland), Jean Quan (Montclair-Laurel), Henry Chang Jr. (at-large), Desley Brooks (Eastmont-Seminary) and Larry Reid (Elmhurst-East Oakland).
Opposing it were Council President Ignacio De La Fuente (Glenview-Fruitvale) and Councilmember Jane Brunner (North Oakland).
De La Fuente questioned whether the monitoring team's role in the settlement years had improved police services. He also said the city should conduct a competitive bid process to find a monitoring team, rather than simply use the original team.
"The reason why the (settlement agreement) was extended was based on the reports of the Independent Monitoring Team," he said, "so I think it was self-serving in a number of ways."
Quan said Henderson's decision earlier this year left little wiggle room in the matter. She said it made sense to extend the contract.
"We really don't have a lot of choice here," he said. "I think we need to just go ahead and finish the job."
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