[Peace-discuss] CPRB

[John W.]

At 12:21 PM 7/17/2007, Robert Dunn wrote:

>ps, have anyone outside of myself ever done a ride-a-along with a police 
>officer? How about participating in Kiwanis "Shop with a Cop" program 
>where the Urbana Police Department uses its own budget to take low-income 
>families Christmas Shopping on the UPDs tab? Yes, thats right, the same 
>Department that is "targeting" low-income African Americans is willing to 
>help them out.

Then who is it who is always phoning me and soliciting money for such 
programs?  I was under the impression that it was MY money and that of 
other citizens that paid for those Christmas toys.  For the police, it's a 
PR program.


>  That is more than what the Left has done for low-income persons.

Oh?  Excuse me?  Members of "The Left" never help low-income persons?  May 
I ask your source of information on that assertion?


>Police work is dangerous! They go out there and risk their lives everyday 
>to make sure that our streets our safe from criminals. Part of the reason 
>why i "left the Left" was because i was a victim of a mugging. Ironically, 
>i was on my way to a meeting in San Bernardino to establish a CPRB there. 
> From being someone who believed that cops were "pigs", i developed an 
>apprecriation (sp) for the police. I found myself more and more 
>uncomfortable establishing something that would deny someone like me who 
>had been robbed at gunpoint justice. What if you were in the same 
>situation that i was? The Left did not stand up for me. When i shared my 
>story with my comrades in San Bernardino, they took the robbers side. They 
>made excuses for him, just like you guys make excuses for criminals here! 
>I was the Damn Victim, but i was turned into the enemy automatically 
>because i wanted justice and was denied it.

Why were you denied justice?  Didn't the police catch the criminal who 
mugged you?  What did the police do for you?


>I felt so guilty because of what i had done. I could not come up to the 
>same City Council in San Bernardino and say that i was wrong for opposing 
>the police. Well, here is my chance.

How fortunate for you.


>Also, i want to thank Danielle Chynoweth for showing courtesy to me and 
>welcoming me back home. Even though my comments were directed at her, she 
>did not act the way that Charlie Smyth and Mort Brussel did. I also want 
>to thank Mayor Prussing for stopping Mr. Smyth. He is so unprofessional 
>and rude, and i thought Tod Sattherwaite was bad! Im sorry, i don't know 
>anything about statistics, i was horrible in math, only made it to college 
>algebra and fought like mad for a C. All i can go by is my experiences and 
>basic commonsense. Its something that ideology blinds people to. But, my 
>traumatic incident shattered my Leftist illlusions!

All I can say is that I'm thankful my various traumatic incidents have left 
my "Leftist" illusions intact.

When I was in high school in Chicago, age 14 or 15, coming out of 
basketball practice after dark, I had the shit beat out of me by about 20 
black youth who surrounded me on the sidewalk.  Several of them held my 
arms behind my back, while several more took turns punching me in the 
face.  They broke my glasses and bloodied my face.  The only thing that 
saved me from further harm was deciding, as I was falling to the ground, to 
"play dead" and hope they'd get scared and run away, which they did.

After they were gone I went across the street to a service station, run by 
a couple of white gentlemen.  They didn't offer to call the police or help 
in any way.  When I asked them if I could borrow a flashlight to search for 
the pieces of my broken glasses, they refused.  So I took the bus home, and 
my father went back and found my broken glasses.  The white bus driver, 
seeing my bloody face, didn't offer to call the police or show any sort of 
concern.

At age 17, I was harassed by the police for curfew violation in 
Chicago.  Two of us couples were "making out" in a car on the Lake Michigan 
beach, harming no one.  I was already in college by that time, had lived on 
my own for a year.  Yet the cops took us to the precinct house, 
fingerprinted and booked us, and locked the two males in a jail cell for a 
couple of hours.  It seemed to be great sport to them.  They finally let us 
go without pressing any charges.

At age 20, while doing a teaching internship in inner-city Jersey City, I 
had my life savings of $300 stolen out of the chest of drawers in my 
room.  The police were called, but when they arrived they acted so put out 
about having to investigate or file a report that I told them to just 
forget about it.

As a rookie firefighter, I was used by the police to help them conduct an 
illegal search, and to hose down noisy prisoners in the city jail.  I was 
ordered to do so, and faced threats of insubordination if I refused.

Before coming here to C-U, I sold my house to the town's chief of 
detectives (brother-in-law of the police chief), who promptly breached the 
contract.  When I dared to sue him in small claims court, he threatened my 
life, with only his wife as a witness.  There was nothing I could do at the 
time, but a couple years later I was vindicated when he was fired from the 
police force for threatening other citizens and even threatening fellow 
police officers.  He was a true rogue cop.  It was, unfortunately, his 
threatening of his fellow police officers that finally did him in.

In that town he was fired by the three-person civilian Board of Police and 
Fire Commissioners after a lengthy hearing - a slightly different form of 
civilian police oversight.  In all this time, I haven't been able to find 
out much about whether or not Champaign and/or Urbana have Boards of Police 
and Fire Commissioners, and if they do, what their disciplinary powers are. 
No one seems to know.

The point of all this, though, is that through all of these experiences I 
have never felt it necessary to classify any of these protagonists - black 
or white, cops or not - as ALL good or ALL bad.  Life is not black and 
white.  There are good cops and bad cops.  A CPRB exists to identify the 
rogue cops and hopefully help to get rid of them.  It exists to provide 
civilian oversight over questionable police practices.  In no way could a 
CPRB ever have the power to "coddle" criminals or somehow allow the crime 
rate to soar.  By asserting that it could, you and other like-minded 
individuals on "The Right" denigrate the integrity and common sense of 
those who will serve as CPRB members, and you show very little 
understanding of how a CPRB actually functions.

John



>
>From:  Bob Illyes <illyes at uiuc.edu>
>To:  peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>Subject:  [Peace-discuss] CPRB
>Date:  Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:59:51 -0500
>
> >For those of you who were not at the Urbana City Council last
> >night, Robert Dunn was the only speaker who opposed the
> >Civilian Police Review Board.
> >
> >You know perfectly well, Robert, that the police and the
> >military must be under strict civilian control. The number of
> >complaints against the police here in the African-American
> >community is huge. This is the sort of thing that gave us
> >the torching of Detroit. We need some mechanism outside of
> >the police department to process these complaints in a way
> >that most see as fair.
> >
> >Bob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20070717/85438876/attachment.html