Marin County's Sham Civilian Oversight

Part One: I, Carpetbagger

What if I told you that the principal accomplishment of Marin County’s Sheriff Civilian Oversight working group was to create the distracting illusion of reform while the County funneled an additional $2.866 million into the Sheriff Office?

Would you call me a carpetbagger?

“You’re a carpetbagger!” the grizzled Chicago transplant shouted at me at Marin County’s storied Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Civic Center. This term “carpetbagger” was being directed at me only after I had been violently shoved and screamed at by another attendee, the wife of the Chair of Marin County’s Human Rights Commission.

But why should they be so outraged? I had merely stated the truth: that civilian oversight of law enforcement had been a failure in nearly every jurisdiction where it had been implemented, and that Marin County’s opaque, exclusionary oversight process would not magically overcome the flaws inherent in civilian oversight.

The Human Rights Commission was an appropriate venue to voice these concerns, because its Chair and Vice Chair had been appointed to the 15-person “Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group” (later renamed “Sheriff Community Outreach Working Group”, or “SCOWG”).

But it was also one of the only places to voice such concerns, as no members of the public had been permitted into any of the 12 “SCOWG” meetings.

There was irony in this. The impetus for the County to implement the SCOWG was a 2022 Marin Civil Grand Jury report that focused on abuses by the Sheriff against Black residents of Marin City. But the SCOWG’s membership had specifically excluded any Black residents of Marin City. To add insult to injury: the SCOWG also excluded any Latino residents of the Canal District.

Black and Latino residents of those imperiled sub-districts are the most targeted by the Marin County Sheriff, as indicated by the 32 years of arrests referred to prosecution for every law enforcement agency in Marin County (1989 through 2020), which I was able to CPRA in late 2020, and which I made public in early 2021.

But those two demographic/district groups weren’t the only ones excluded from SCOWG membership. The 15-person SCOWG was made up entirely of County insiders trusted to execute the County’s wishes. This included many who had worked directly for the County as employees; existing Board/Commission appointees; and those whose nonprofits did significant business with the County.

The vast majority of the SCOWG members are also property owners (one of whom has an unnerving habit of noisily proclaiming her family’s vast property holdings during public meetings.) And yet the Sheriff’s largest targets are renters and unhoused people; it is the Sheriff who issues the terrifying eviction notices that so often transform renters into unhoused people.

In short, SCOWG members were the very people who, even if they had a bad encounter with law enforcement, would never have to seek “civilian oversight” as remedy. At least four of the SCOWG members had previously employed powerful attorneys to sue individual law enforcement agencies (though, curiously, never the DA office.) But such powerful attorneys have rarely represented Marin’s poorest Black and Latino residents, who have long suffered more grievous abuses by the Sheriff and police.

One of those powerful attorneys is Charles Dresow of Ragghianti Freitas, the “insider’s insider law firm”. Dresow also served on the SCOWG, alongside his client Jeremy Portje. Coincidentally, Dresow, who has pulled notable punches from the Marin DA’s office, is the longtime director of Alternate Defenders, Inc., which was awarded another two-year, multimillion-dollar contract just a few hours before the County accepted the SCOWG’s proposals. (Never fear: County Counsel has assured me that they do not perceive this to be a conflict of interest.)

*****

Because the County did not permit the public to attend any of the 12 SCOWG meetings, I had to CPRA the recordings. Although all the meetings were recorded, the County produced only four videos in response to my CPRA.

What is on the four released recordings is revealing:

Multiple members of SCOWG willfully suppressed relevant data regarding arrest demographics, even though the data had not only been repeatedly shared with them, but reported in the two most-read local media outlets.

SCOWG member Ashley Raveche, of Marin’s near-lilywhite League of Women Voters, repeatedly exhorted the group to craft oversight proposals acceptable to the Sheriff and its union. This quickly became a mantra for the group, along with the false claim that law enforcement was somehow not represented in the working group, even though the group included multiple members who were partnered with law enforcement either through family or through County/nonprofit work.

SCOWG member Cesar Lagleva, a former longtime County staffer who served on the Board of Multicultural Center of Marin (which in January received over $262,000 in funding from the County’s probation department for “justice activities” including drug testing) reserved his most passionate arguments for inclusion of Marin’s dysfunctional nonprofits in planned oversight processes. (Lagleva, who is Filipino-American, is erroneously considered Latino by many white Marinites, and whether by design or not, his appointments to multiple boards and commissions as the unofficial “Latino substitute” may have contributed to an ongoing dearth of Latino representation on County boards and commissions.)

SCOWG member Stephen Bingham stated that new Sheriff presented “a real opportunity for reform”, painting former Sheriff Doyle as unusually intransigent on reform, the proverbial “bad apple.” But Mr. Bingham left out that the new Sheriff, Jamie Scardina, Doyle’s longtime enforcer, has shepherded through practices that are more exploitative and draconian than Sheriff Doyle could have imagined, including but not limited to involuntary psychiatric medications at Marin County’s deadly, subterranean jail.

In one of the later videos, Bingham frankly assessed the working group’s survey process as a failure. They needed 2,000 survey responses, but retrieved only 526 survey responses, with too few responses coming from the communities they promised to survey, the Canal and Marin City.

And so on.

*****

But what had happened to the other eight recordings? When I asked Cameron McEllhiney, the well-paid NACOLE oversight “facilitator” (and now the Executive Director of NACOLE) about the eight missing recordings, she shrugged, “It was a technical glitch.”

“Eight? That’s a lot of technical glitches,” I responded to McEllhiney.

McEllhiney has the porcelain white skin and pillowy figure of an antique doll; she held a frozen smile in response. Civilian oversight has long been its own cottage industry, and NACOLE is doing this work all over the country. In how many other counties has NACOLE deleted important evidence of the oversight process?

Was the deletion only in service of the County administration? Or is NACOLE itself afraid of critics who point out that “civilian oversight” hasn’t delivered at all? In Los Angeles, where NACOLE has been active, in-custody deaths have dramatically increased every year since civilian oversight was established. In New York, civilian oversight of NYPD has built entire political careers for its practitioners, but has delivered very little to actual victims; those held at Rikers continue to be tortured and killed.

Marin County has maintained that the oversight group was merely writing a set of proposals/ recommendations for the Board. But it was clear when the weakest of proposals were finally delivered to the Board of Supervisors on June 13, 2023, that the mold had already been set to the Sheriff’s demands; there had been no active input from the communities most targeted by the Sheriff.

With great ceremony, and with a bevy of upper-middle-class white ladies appearing during public comment to coo at the SCOWG’s “final memorandum” (they praised the significance of the proposals like so many withered courtiers at Versailles admiring the arrival of the Archduchess of Austria), the lily-white Board of Supervisors accepted the report of the working group.

Sheriff Jamie Scardina was so happy that he beamed. “Thank you” he said into the microphone, motioning his long and powerful left arm toward the SCOWG members, praising their “collaborative partnership” with him.

As one observer from Marin City, a survivor of one of the worst decades of targeted harassment from the Sheriff, later described the scene with a sardonic laugh, “Of course Jamie’s happy! He got everything he wanted!”

And then, in near-perfect imitation of the dysfunctional working group, the Marin Independent- Journal coverage omitted any comment made by non-white and/or workingclass members of the public, and made no effort to seek comment from workingclass residents of the Canal or Marin City. The I-J did quote four of the wealthy white, liberal lady homeowners from Mill Valley (one of whom, Rebekah Helzel, is a “green” investor married to the heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune made from plastics manufacturing and investments in oil drilling technology) who praised the significance of civilian oversight.

Predictably, just seven days later, on June 20, 2023, the Sheriff was awarded an additional $2.866 million in the 2023-24 budget. Not a single member of the SCOWG uttered a word of protest about it. In fact, although many SCOWG members had shown up to gloat over their victory the week before when the Supervisors accepted their oversight proposals, they appeared entirely absent from the Sheriff budget discussion.

The SCOWG had served its purpose: they had delivered the distraction and the weak proposal.

Somewhere, one could only imagine, Charlie Dresow was laughing.

©️Eva Chrysanthe 2023

Extra Video:

How To Get Called A Carpetbagger and Influence People:

https://twitter.com/marindatanow/status/1659235788985384960?s=46&t=q4VsCWEzorcI3TrikyJ90g