Just as the Sheriff’s Office is facing renewed scrutiny over the Nov. 24 death of a Petaluma man, the community advisory arm of a county law enforcement watchdog held its last meeting with its founding members on Monday, Dec. 2.

Over three and a half years after its formation, the Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach (IOLERO) remains underfunded, the office’s supporters argue. Additionally, the community advisory council has been hampered by a lack of cooperation from the Sheriff’s Office for the past year, according to former members council.

But, the public has renewed the conversation around the issue of law enforcement oversight in the wake of the death of David Ward.

Ward, 52, died at a local hospital on Wednesday, Nov. 24, about an hour after a Sheriff’s deputy attempted a controversial neck hold on him, according to an account released by the Santa Rosa Police Department.

The case, which has made headlines nationwide, began when an off-duty Santa Rosa police detective informed the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office that he had spotted Ward’s car, which Ward had reported stolen several days earlier.

After leading law enforcement officials on a seven-minute car chase, Ward reportedly did not follow orders from law enforcement officials to exit his car.

Santa Rosa Police Lt. Dan Marincik told the Press Democrat last week that, after the chase but before the altercation began, Ward said to law enforcement officers through his car’s open window, “I can’t believe this. I’m the injured party in this. Why are you f—ing harassing me all the time.”

The situation soon escalated, according to the police department’s account. The officers hit and used a Taser on Ward. Then Blount attempted a neck restraint on Ward.

“Deputy Blount who was outside next to Ward’s driver’s door placed one of his arms around the neck of Ward and attempted to administer a carotid restraint,” the police department’s report states.

Because of its potential to injure or kill a subject if administered incorrectly, some law enforcement agencies ban the carotid hold.

And, among a long list of recommended changes to the Sheriff’s Office’s use of force policy released as a draft in November, the IOLERO community advisory council asked the sheriff’s office to prohibit all officers “from using restrictive choke holds and strangle holds including the carotid restraints.”

Karlene Navarro, who has led IOLERO since March, said on Tuesday, Dec. 10, that the Sheriff’s Office has told her they won’t implement the suggested ban of carotid restraints on a temporary or ongoing basis.

“I had a lengthy meeting with the Sheriff yesterday and we discussed a plan to research how other jurisdictions have dealt with this issue and what safer alternatives may exist,” Navarro wrote to the Bohemian. “One of the concerns is that evidence shows that an outright ban on resistance tools such as the carotid hold sometimes lead to a rise in other instances of force and more injuries.”

However, two former members of the CAC who worked on the use of force policy recommendations say that the Sheriff’s Office did not participate in the development of the CAC’s recommendations as the office had done during similar previous processes.

If they had, the CAC would have been able to consider the Sheriff’s Office’s concerns well before they issued recommendations, the council members argue.

Navarro decided not to extend the terms of any of the current members of the advisory council. As a result, the council’s Dec. 2 meeting was its last with its founding members. Navarro is currently searching for new members.

To two former CAC members who worked on the proposals, the use of force recommendation process was a frustrating communication breakdown between the Sheriff’s Office and IOLERO.

“[In previous policy recommendation processes] there was really a lot of good back and forth so that we could end up hammering out a policy that already reflected something that had a good chance of being passed by the Sheriff, because we already kind of worked out the kinks,” Cozine told the Bohemian.

After hearing the Sheriff’s Office comments, the CAC could share the results of the conversations, and the Sheriff’s thinking about the suggestions, at public meetings before issuing final recommendations. However, the relationship started to break down when the CAC started to consider the use of force policies, Cozine said.

Representatives of the Sheriff’s Office stopped coming to as many meetings and “it became clear right away that the new director and the Sheriff were not interested in having the CAC meet with them and discuss policy,” Cozine said.

Sgt. Juan Valencia, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, says that the office values the input from the IOLERO director and community advisory council, and noted that representatives of the Sheriff’s Office attended the CAC’s Dec. 2 meeting.

Navarro says that, while she wasn’t around for the entire process of creating the use of force policies, she recommended that the CAC include some of the research they had conducted about carotid restraints, instead of offering a one-line request, as they did in the case of the carotid restraint.

Navarro said she “never understood” the CAC’s previous approach to policy recommendations.

”My question to the CAC was why should the Sheriff’s Office dictate what recommendation to me?” Navarro told the Bohemian.

Navarro added that an assistant sheriff had told the CAC at a meeting in July that “I’ve already talked to you about [use of force policies].” Still, Navarro acknowledged that there was “some disagreement” among the CAC about whether the Sheriff’s Office had addressed their concerns.

Jim Duffy, another former CAC member, says that policy recommendations are “where the rubber hits the road” for a law enforcement review office because of the possibility of bringing about change.

However, in Duffy’s view, the CAC’s role is to work “hand in glove with the Sheriff’s Office” in order to craft the best recommendations. Without the opportunity to speak to the Sheriff’s Office earlier in the process, that wasn’t possible.
Underfunded, Overtasked

IOLERO came out of the community outrage and protest stemming from the 2013 death of Andy Lopez, a 13-year old boy who a sheriff’s deputy killed on Moorland Avenue, a then-unincorporated area of Santa Rosa.

After 16 months of meetings, the Community and Local Law Enforcement (CALLE) task force, a 21-member group with representatives from across the county and within the Sheriff’s Office, issued its recommendations, including forming a law enforcement review and public outreach office.

The CALLE task force recommended forming the auditor’s office based on “a desire to enhance community confidence in the delivery of law enforcement services and ultimately to bring law enforcement and the community closer together.”

Ultimately, the supervisors created the office with one full-time auditor and a full-time assistant with a promise to revisit the level of funding for the office once the first auditor advised the board on further needs.

But pretty much everyone involved in the formation and operation of IOLERO says that the state has underfunded it throughout its short life.

Caroline Bañuelos, who served as chair of the CALLE task force, told the Bohemian that she’s had concerns about the level of funding the office has received since it’s approval in late 2015.

Jerry Threet, who served as auditor between April 2016 and March 2019, says he asked for additional staff several times during his time leading the office but never received any.

Navarro, the current director of IOLERO, told KSRO last week that the office is “really underfunded and over-tasked.”

The Board of Supervisors recently allowed Navarro to hire an additional full-time staffer to help her run the office and conduct community outreach.

But Navarro says the new employee won’t begin work until January at the earliest. And, despite the additional staffer, Navarro will still be the only employee who can conduct law enforcement audits, write annual reports or make policy recommendations, tasks considered central to the office’s role.

In the county’s current recommended budget, IOLERO receives $549,793, approximately 0.3 percent the size of Sheriff’s current recommended budget, $180 million.

In a ballot measure proposal aimed at strengthening the office, Threet and other advocates propose increasing IOLERO’s funding to 1 percent of the Sheriff’s Office’s annual budget, approximately $1.8 million under the current budget.

Threet and other backers hope to get the measure, known as the Evelyn Cheatham Effective IOLERO Ordinance, on the county’s November 2020 ballot.
Outside Eyes

Done well, the benefits of community involvement and review could make the Sheriff’s Office stronger and more popular with the community it serves, Cozine says.

One possible benefit could be saving the county money from lawsuit settlements.

“I really think that [increased spending on oversight] would be saved by the county in spending on lawsuits,” Cozine told the Bohemian. “If you have a strong and robust oversight office, you are going to have a well-functioning and best-practicing law enforcement organization.”

In 2018, the county agreed to pay a $3 million settlement to Andy Lopez’s family after years of fighting a case that ultimately went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Charlies Blount, the deputy who attempted a carotid hold on Ward in November, reportedly has a legal history of his own.

In 2015, the county settled a court case about a 2011 excessive force case involving Blount and other deputies for $375,000, according to KQED.

Another attorney told KQED that her client settled a 2016 case involving Blount for a “low monetary amount.”

Of course, settlement amounts do not include the cost of county staff time and outside legal fees.

Eighty-six-year-old Georgina Rivas grew up in the Peruvian countryside. Her mother’s pregnancy was difficult and Rivas owes her very life to herbal medicine.

Now, Rivas shares her lifelong herbal knowledge with her Sonoma County community. Another Sonoma County woman, also from Peru, struggles with intense anxiety. The deep herbal knowledge of her own ancestors has proven to be the right medicine for her.

These women are part of a growing community coordinated by the Botanical Bus Bilingual Mobile Herb Clinic. The mobile clinic has coordinated free group workshops for four years in community gardens across Sonoma County, where it facilitates the sharing of indigenous herbal knowledge via recipe sharing and herbal remedy-making. In Spring 2020, it will fundraise for the bus itself, which will include a tincture bar and provide mobile integrative medicine on a sliding scale to workshop participants and others.

Other programs include medicine gardens and the Promotora Program, (“promotora” meaning “community health worker”) which empowers women to lead culturally-relevant wellness workshops in their communities.

“It’s a large percentage of immigrant women at the workshops, and usually the remedies or recipes they are sharing are plant medicine from the land where they were born and raised,” says Jocelyn Boreta, cofounder of the Botanical Bus. “Herbal medicine is a pillar of what we’re doing because herbal medicine works and also because herbal medicine in the Latinx population is really alive and culturally relevant.”

According to Boreta, who worked with Global Exchange in the Fair Trade program for 10 years, many immigrants come to the United States with a knowledge base and cultural integrity that the next generation can lose.

“We are empowering a traditional form of medicine that connects people to place too—maybe it’s even connecting them to the place where they came from,” she says.

Participants in the workshops include all ages and generations, from service and agricultural workers to students, cooks, herbalists and organizers, all sharing what they know with each other. They meet in gathering places that are already community hubs for participants: Latinx
health and resource centers, social justice organizations and community gardens.

The Botanical Bus is unique in that it doesn’t provide resources top-down but enables people to share the knowledge they have with each other.

“We are not trying to ‘serve underserved populations.’ It’s an empowerment project,” Boreta says. “Even a really progressive free clinic is passing out limited resources from the top-down. In this time of deepening disparity, the people’s knowledge is an unlimited resource.”

The workshops have no teachers, are two hours long and begin in the garden with everyone sharing their own plant knowledge, then making a remedy like a sleep tincture or an immunity elixir. Every workshop has a different theme, defined by the group at the beginning of the year. Trauma, stress and sleep emerge as top health concerns.

According to A Portrait of Sonoma County: Sonoma County Human Development Report commissioned by the County of Sonoma Department of Health Services, Latinxs outlive white populations despite having the least access to healthy food, clean air and outdoor space, all of which are social determinants for good health. Furthermore, although second-generation immigrants generally have more access to health resources than their parents, they have lower health outcomes.

Since the 2017 North Bay fires, the Botanical Bus has partnered with La Luz Center, Corazon Healdsburg and North Bay Organizing Project to host clinics throughout Sonoma County. During the Kincaid fire, the Botanical Bus distributed donations of herbal syrups and teas for stress, sleep and lung support to recipients at evacuation centers.

It all began in a garden.

“The birth of the organization was really organic; women coming together,” Boreta says.

She and Angeles Quiñones from Farming for Health connected by talking in a community garden about remedies and recipes for wellness. After the Tubbs fire, Boreta, Quiñones and Lily Mazzarella, owner of Farmacopia, an Integrative Health Clinic in Santa Rosa, decided the time was right to begin the nonprofit Botanical Bus.

The goals stated on their website for 2020 are ambitious—fundraise and launch the bus itself; engage 1,000 wellness-workshop participants; empower a team of six promotoras (community health workers) to lead wellness workshops; connect 650 mobile-clinic clients with holistic health practitioners and cultivate three community-medicine gardens.

It’s a positive path to wellness on many levels. Second-generation Latinxs’ benefit healthwise from their ancestors’ knowledge, while immigrant women like Rivas also benefit from sharing their knowledge with the next generations.

“It’s really empowering people and that’s the main goal,” Boreta says. “They leave feeling empowered to be healthy.”

Bus Stops

To celebrate meeting their crowdfunding goal, a “dine and donate” fundraiser for the Botanical Bus commences at 5pm Wednesday, Dec. 4 at Fern Bar 6780 Depot St., Suite 120, Sebastopol. Proceeds from the dinner will benefit the Botanical Bus until 10 pm. The Botanical Bus organizers will be at the event from 5–7pm for meet-and-greets.

The Botanical Bus Workshop, Corazon Healdsburg (in the Healdsburg Community Garden “Jardin de Sanacion”), 1557 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg, every first Saturday of the month.

The Botanical Bus Workshop, Sonoma Centro, La Luz, 17560 Greger St., Sonoma, every last Friday of the month.

For more information, visit
thebotanicalbus.org

Sonoma County will have one less winter shelter to offer respite to people living on the street through the rainy and cold months this year.

In recent years, the county has contracted with the California Military Guard to offer beds at the armory building behind the Santa Rosa Junior College’s main campus between November and March. This year, the state is using the space for another purpose, according to Michael Gause, who leads the Sonoma County Community Development Commission’s efforts to house people experiencing homelessness.

One thing is for sure: The loss significantly reduces the number of spaces for people seeking refuge from winter conditions, leaving approximately 100 more people without shelter this winter.

All told, there are an estimated 2,951 people experiencing homelessness in Sonoma County, according to a count conducted by the county in January 2019.

Nearly 2,000 of those people are without shelter, meaning that they are sleeping on the street, in a car or in another improvised structure. The roughly 1,000 sheltered people at the time of the count include those staying in emergency shelters.

The county offers 699 shelter beds year-round. With the addition of 184 winter beds for the next few months, they are offering 883 beds this winter, Gause told the Bohemian.

Last year, the Armory offered about 115 additional beds.

Permanent supportive housing is not included in the homeless count because the solutions are, hopefully, permanent, according to Gause.

All in all, that leaves about 2,000 without shelter this winter.

Outpouring of Support

A sizable portion of that number have gathered in an encampment along the Joe Rodota Trail on the outskirts of Santa Rosa.

In recent months, dozens of people without homes have gathered in the encampment, which is visible from Highway 12.

For a few reasons, the encampment has garnered a lot of public attention this year. And, although not all of the reactions have been good, the publicity has resulted in an outpouring of support, says Adrienne Lauby, a co-founder of Homeless Action!, a local activist group.

The Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition gathered more than 1,300 signatures calling on the county to “legally and humanely” relocate the residents of the encampment to a “safe, sanctioned location.” Meanwhile, members of a new Facebook group, Sonoma County Acts of Kindness, have focused on raising funds and donating goods to those living along the trail.

It all culminated at a Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 19. After a lengthy debate, advocates won a concession from the county: Permission from the Parks Department to install temporary toilets for use by residents.

Last week, activists put in eight portable toilets, funded by a range of Sonoma County residents, to serve the encampment, which groups estimate to have more than 150 residents.

This result may not have happened in years past. After the county removed residents of a predecessor encampment from the Joe Rodota Trail last year, several residents of the encampment, activists and attorneys sued the county and other local agencies, arguing that the agencies should have to offer the residents of the trail a suitable alternative to living on the street before forcing them to move.

Ultimately, Federal Judge Vince Chhabria brokered a temporary deal between the parties. The current agreement lasts until June 30, 2020.

It seems that the combination of public calls for a long-term solution, the outpouring of public support and the legal agreement has created a new conversation around the Joe Rodota Trail encampment, Lauby says.

Still, it’s unclear what Sonoma County can or will do for the roughly 2,000 other people experiencing homelessness throughout the county.

Climate rally planned

This week, dozens of heads of state joined thousands of attendees in Madrid to discuss the ever-grimmer reality of our heating planet at the two-week COP25 climate conference.

On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched the gathering with a grim message. Previous efforts to curb climate change were “utterly inadequate” and the effects of global warming could soon pass a “point of no return.”

It’s heavy, overwhelming stuff, but Sonoma County activists are doing their part to draw attention to the problem. This Friday, Dec. 6, climate activists will take to the streets of Santa Rosa for a two-part protest to draw attention to the unfolding threats of Climate Change.

At noon, they will stage “die-ins for life” at six local schools and Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square. Then, between 5:00pm and 7:30pm, they will march through downtown, culminating in a climate vigil in Courthouse Square.

The Sonoma County chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a recently formed group intent on holding politicians accountable for inaction on climate change, organized the actions.

Guterres agrees about the root problem.

“What is still lacking is political will,” he said at the start of the climate conference. “Political will to put a price on carbon. Political will to stop subsidies on fossil fuels. Political will to stop building coal power plants from 2020 onwards. Political will to shift taxation from income to carbon. Taxing pollution instead of people.”