Various community groups held a press conference outside city hall on Tuesday to demand the firing of City Manager Pat West and Police Chief Robert Luna.

Community Groups Call for Termination of City Manager and LBPD Chief Amid TigerText Controversy

by Joe Brizzolara  |  Published October 3, 2018 in Journalism

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Black Lives Matter LBC  and the Democratic Socialists of America – Long Beach, as well as other community groups and residents affected by police violence, held a press conference Tuesday afternoon outside of city hall shortly before the weekly city council meeting. They demanded the termination of City Manager Pat West and Long Beach Police Department Chief Robert Luna due to the use of the self-deleting messaging app TigerText by police officers.

“Delete Chief Luna, Delete Pat West. Cut P.D.’s budget, reinvest,” organizers chanted.

Al Jazeera reported two weeks ago that officers had been using the app since 2014, and that department administrators had advised the use of TigerText for conversations between officers—making those conversations undiscoverable during litigation. TigerText, now rebranded TigerConnect, is an encrypted messaging application and has a feature that can automatically delete texts after a set time period.

The LBPD has halted use of the app “pending further review of whether the use is consistent with the city’s record retention policy and administrative regulations for the use of mobile devices,” the department said in a statement.

“From a standard and policy perspective there was no malice here, there was no intent to do anything wrong,” Luna told the Los Angeles Times.

However, coalition organizers on Tuesday said they believe the use of the app represents an intentional effort on the part of the police to destroy public records that could have had a bearing on investigations and prosecutions. 

“This is the type of communication that would be used in cases where [Long Beach Police Officers] have shot people, where they have killed people. [People] like Donte Jordan, like Tyler Woods, like Lionel Gibson,” said Dawn Modkins of BLM Long Beach, listing individuals shot by officers.

The coalition demanded a reopening of all cases since 2014, with an emphasis on those involving officer-inflicted injuries and for the LBPD to pay all associated costs. Other demands included that the Long Beach Unified School District end its program of stationing officers on campus for security; they want to create community-based mental health teams to respond to crisis situations involving those with mental health issues, rather than having law enforcement be the first response; and they are also demanding an independent investigation of the LBPD’s usage of the app.

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City Attorney Charles Parkin and City Manager Patrick West, have announced that they will be commissioning an investigation to be conducted by the law firm Best Best & Krieger, headed by former public-corruption prosecutor, Gary W. Schons. The law firm most recently represented the city in their legal challenges to two ballot opposition arguments against mayor-backed charter amendments that will be voted on in November.

James Suazo of DSA – Long Beach believes this law firm is too closely connected with city leadership to run an independent investigation.

“There’s been numerous cases where they’ve defended the city in legal cases. As long as the city manager, who is obviously complicit, is overseeing this, it’s not a truly independent investigation. What we’re calling for is [an investigation] that the community oversees,” said Suazo.

The coalition, which also included Standing Up for Racial Justice Long Beach and Stop LAPD Spying, holds Luna and West responsible for the debacle because they represent the direct chain of command overseeing departmental affairs.

“The police chief doesn’t report to the mayor or city council, he reports to the city manager. So it’s the city manager’s responsibility to ensure that all of his subordinates are following the law,” said Suazo.  

Preceding the press conference, the city council discussed an evaluation of West’s job performance in a closed session.

Coalition members also pointed to the tens of millions the city has had to payout in lawsuits stemming from officer-involved shootings as proof that the department is not upholding the motto displayed on their police vehicles: “to protect and serve.”

“The trust is gone,” said Modkins, speaking about the police department. “It’s been gone for a lot of us.”

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition