When relatives arrived to help Tyisha Miller with a flat tire, they found her comatose in her car, doors locked, and a pistol on her lap. After failed attempts to arouse her, they called 911 emergency.

The four officers who responded broke a side window to open a car door, startling Miller, 19, who had the gun for protection. When she reached for it, the officers opened fire with a barrage of 24 shots into the car, four to her head.

Miller’s death in 1998 generated outrage across the country, especially in African American communities. That three white officers and one Latino would gun down a young black woman under those circumstances accentuated questions about virulent racism in the Riverside, Calif. Police Department.

Even though Miller’s relatives had called police, they also had sent someone to retrieve a spare key to open the car door. Miller, of Rubidoux, Calif., an unincorporated area of Riverside County, would still be alive had only the officers waited for the key, her relatives maintained.

Miller’s death became such a high profile case that it helped serve as a catalyst for a local movement amongst Riverside residents asking for more accountability from their police department. The Riverside Coalition for Police Accountability was one group organized at that time.

Ultimately, the city established a civilian oversight agency called “The Community Police Review Commission,” and then-Attorney General Bill Lockyer also ordered Riverside Police to make changes as part of a consent decree.

But many local leaders in the Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, don’t feel like much has changed in how their communities are policed in the 16 years since Miller’s death. Surely, policing techniques have changed with the introduction of body cams and new training methods. But the Inland Empire remains a disturbing hotspot where police misconduct rarely, if ever, is corrected.

For that reason, the ACLU of Southern California is providing communities in Southern California with the tools they need to make sustainable reforms in police practices.

RSVP for the Riverside Community Conference: Oct 5-7

 

Alongside our partners from the Riverside Coalition for Police Accountability, we are co-hosting a free, three-day Community Conference in Downtown Riverside, October 5-7, to help provide individuals with legal and policy information involved in policing.

Make sure to RSVP online. We hope you can join us so that you too can be a part of the collective efforts to create transparency, accountability and justice for all communities.
California data on deaths in police custody between 2009 and 2014 compiled by the Attorney General’s office showed that the second deadliest city law enforcement agency in the state is the San Bernardino Police Department with 17 homicides for a force of 224 sworn officers.

Among counties, Riverside with a population of 2.3 million is second in the state with 63 deaths in custody, and San Bernardino with a population of 2 million is third.

Without the proper systems in place to address issues like the high number of deaths in custody, the public cannot hold any police agencies accountable.

Will anyone be held accountable for the death in custody of Dante Parker who San Bernardino sheriff's deputies Tased 23 times before he died?

The whole country saw the video of San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies pummeling Francis Pusok as he lay on the ground attempting to surrender. But there was some accountability in that case. Three of the 10 deputies involved in that beating have been charged with felony assault, and the county has paid Pusok $650,000.

A statewide ACLU poll released in August found that almost four in five likely California voters (79 percent) say that where police have engaged in misconduct, the public should have access to the findings and conclusions of investigations into that misconduct.

That overwhelming support for reform carries across all ethnicities within the state, including more than nine out of ten African American voters (91 percent), five out of six Latino and Asian voters (84 percent) and over three-quarters of white voters (76 percent).

California voters overwhelmingly see the absence of police transparency as a problem and support reforms that promote transparency. The law enforcement lobby has been the main obstacle to any reform, stopping every effort to bring transparency to police misconduct investigations. It is time for elected leaders to listen to the voters and embrace meaningful reform.

RSVP for the Riverside Community Conference for Just and Dignified Policing

Luis Nolasco is a community engagement and policy advocate in the Inland Empire office of the ACLU of Southern California.

This post was originally published in the Voice of OC

Elected officials in Orange County are grasping for a quick, showy solution to their expanding homeless population by calling for more outreach. But without more housing, outreach can’t possibly end homelessness.

With great fanfare, Board of Supervisor Chair Todd Spitzer has ordered county Health Care Agency workers to do more outreach to the growing number of people—many with disabling conditions—who camp out in Civic Center Plaza, a stretch of grass and concrete just steps from the county administration office in Santa Ana.

This approach is disingenuous.

For starters, Orange County doesn’t even have sufficient emergency shelter beds to address the mounting number of individuals forced to sleep on the streets most nights, much less safe, affordable housing. It has only one year-round shelter that provides fewer than 50 beds, and over 2,000 people living on the streets, without any shelter at all, on any given night.

Secondly, an outreach-only approach is based on the dubious belief that the services needed to end homelessness are available but that potential recipients are either unaware the services exist, or reject them because they distrust our fragmented service systems.

Such assumptions, however, are unfounded. Chronically homeless individuals—people with disabilities who experience long or frequent bouts of homelessness—need permanent supportive housing, a model that combines immediate affordable housing with supportive services. Without it they are unlikely to escape homelessness.

Yet existing permanent supportive housing beds in Orange County are filled to capacity, with only enough new beds in the pipeline this year to house about one in five of the nearly 600 persons who are chronically homeless on any given night.

Indeed, nobody is more aware of the regional scarcity of housing for homeless persons than the people who desperately need it, such as Falcon, a 58-year-old woman who is struggling with cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

After becoming homeless, she called the referrals for housing and transitional programs on the list that an Orange County outreach worker gave her. Every program she contacted was filled to capacity, put her on a waiting list and never called back, or told her she wasn’t eligible. So she moved into a tent under a noisy freeway overpass in the Santa Ana River bed.

Referral programs also run up against the hard reality of the housing shortage. At a recent forum for Orange County homeless service providers, a representative from a nonprofit mental health organization proudly described the more than 2,000 referrals for various social services provided by the agency’s hotline.

Yet, she admitted that the agency is unable to connect people to housing, given the current shortage. She recounted midnight calls to the hotline from people with mental illness—alone, frightened, and in need of a place to stay—and hotline workers who could do little more than lend a sympathetic ear.

“We run into issues all the time with housing,” she said. “It’s a major issue. What we do is to provide emotional support and encouragement while the person is navigating the maze.”

Of course, linking people to mental health services and benefits is valuable in its own right. But let’s not kid ourselves. Without affordable housing, it won’t end homelessness. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, connecting people to Supplemental Security Income benefits, for example—the primary income support for indigent persons with disabilities--provides recipients with enough income to afford $263 in rent. That’s not even close to the actual Fair Market rent of $1,283 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Orange County.

And health and mental health interventions are far less effective when people are unhoused. Stresses of street life make people sick and exacerbate existing illnesses, interfering with treatment effectiveness and adherence. That’s why the federal government and public health officials view housing as the most vital health intervention for people who are experiencing homelessness.

Officials may think that calling for outreach instead of investing in housing will save public dollars, but such thinking is without merit. Combining housing with services actually costs less than services alone for chronically homeless persons.

This is because people become heavy users of costly public services such as emergency rooms and inpatient hospitalization when they are homeless for long periods. One study found that the typical public cost for chronically homeless persons living in Los Angeles was five times greater than the typical public cost of similar residents in permanent supportive housing.

Like elected officials in Orange County, Los Angeles County supervisors and city council members have called for more outreach in the face of rising homelessness. But unlike Orange County officials, City of Los Angeles leaders have also declared a homeless “state of emergency” and have proposed $100 million to fund housing and other homeless programs.

Meanwhile, Orange County devotes exactly none of its expanding budget to permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless people.

It’s clear that elected officials in Orange County are not rising to the challenge of the homeless crisis in a serious way. They may give the impression that they are committed to ending homelessness when they call for more outreach, but this is an empty promise. They need to throw their political clout behind real solutions, particularly permanent, affordable housing, with supportive services when needed. Only then will outreach end homelessness.

Eve Garrow is homelessness policy analyst and advocate at the ACLU of Southern California.