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From: lvlus_tx <lvlus_tx@yahoo.

com>
To: policeoversight@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, October 28, 2009 5:04:21 AM
Subject: [police oversight] Civilian-Only Government Oversight Bill
Dear [NACOLE Members],
I have been reading for some time and with interest the contents of your emails
because it seems to me you would be better able to understand that what is wrong
with law enforcement is not something that can be resolved so long as we have
"...the fox guarding the chicken coop....". The US Dept of Justice (USDJ) spent gobs
of our tax money to come up with an astounding - yet quite simple - revelation: the
problem lies in the police culture!
After many years of hosting mediations between police forces and the communities
that pay them for protection, the USDJ came up with the simplest of solutions to
the problem: the police culture must change if any real and permanent progress is
to be achieved in the struggle to curb police abuses of authority, both deliberate
and accidental. We have a choice, therefore, whether or not to agree with the
findings of the USDJ Mediation Service that changing the police culture must be
Job One for any goal of police oversight. I agree with them because I could not in
any logical sense be able to overturn their many years of research into the subject
with the unlimited resources of the federal government.
When I first learned about NACOLE, I hoped it would be a truly useful org to come
up with a good oversight plan that would work nationwide for us civilians, but when
I saw they let the fox in the door, us chickens were doomed before they could even
get started.
I am a native Houstonian activist who has been here for the many police
atrocities they continue to perpetrate. After the Pedro Oregon murder, we
formed a group of about 20 community groups to mediate with the HPD using
the mediation service of USDJ. We met for almost two years at first weekly and
then monthly but in the end, the Chief said, "We will not change anything." We
civilians sacrificed greatly in the belief the HPD was on the level with us, but we
learned they were simply stalling us. They fooled us and the Mediation Service
into thinking they were honestly working with us to make change for the better.

Shortly after that, a few of us got together to try to get legislative help, and a bill
was sent in but did not get on the floor. We have since revised it to accommodate
what some leaders said needed to be better planned-out in order to get more public
support for it. It does not include the police forces; instead, it is a democratic
process where an agency is formed from nominees selected by local civilian
groups. It can work nationwide similar to the way the NAACP is working now to
take complaints from civilians, which is what the LULAC has been doing for many
years now, quite unsuccessfully, I must say.
We have the bill ready for review now; we must build support for it by forming the
Local Groups that will enlist volunteer activists to do that. We believe we need to
form a non-profit to start out in one state or in any state that we can agree may be
better able to succeed in the endeavor. I have the Bill available for anyone who is
interested in reviewing it. If this is an interesting subject to you, or if you have
questions about it, please feel free to reply. There is no obligation, but I would like
to hear your opinion(s) of this project. There four of us in the initial group; one has
since passed away, one is struggling with her aged father, and the other has moved
to the far suburbs. I would like to work on this project some more because I have
no confidence any current project, whether of NACOLE, LULAC, or the NAACP, is
doing anything more than spinning their wheels being co-opted by police forces for
another generation just like we have done.
We are at another crossroad where a nation's population has to act to preserve
whatever substantive rights it has managed to win and hold so far in the evolution
of social systems or risk turning the wrong way into the arms of those who would
encroach upon them, as happens in every human society sooner or later and,
unfortunately quite too often. With the installation of the current administration,
we civilians and the Executive branch of the US government have closed ranks to
wage war against those who choose to continue to gain enhanced power over the
people as opposed to change for the better for the majority of the population. Such
times are rare in human history but when they come, they present opportunities to
leap forward to the Utopia we seek with the invention of a democratic society.
Unfortunately, it also becomes a time when individual freedoms are at the highest
risk of being lost to those who hold the most power in the given society. It should
be clear to everyone by now that our legal forces no longer practice the axiom
which had in the past great approval by the educational and political entities, to wit:
"It is better to let 100 guilty persons go free than to convict one innocent man".
Instead, police forces are trained to initially assume no one is innocent and they are
allowed to perpetrate abuses of authority under the pretense of fear as an excuse.
Prosecuting forces no longer act under the high moral and ethical values desired in

any system of justice; rather, they act to win cases by any means necessary and
they have great power over the accused with private access to Grand Juries and the
private handling of evidence. Judgeships are not impartially granted and judges do
not answer to the general population. Rehabilitation is a lost cause under the
excuse it is not feasible or viable. We solve the problem of mental illness with
"suicide-by- cop" and reward those who "fear" the mentally ill so much as to gladly
put them down.
The ills of our society are many, but the situation can be changed for the better.
This is not a situation where the sitting President has the political collateral to
enable this type of change by himself, nor is it one where any government agency
would want to change for our benefit, but it is a case where government entities see
their roles as a merging of their powers over individuals and, as the DOJ Mediation
Service put it, "...the circling of their wagons" against the civilian population.
Unless we act to curb their growing power over us, the history of our times may be
that we again failed to learn the lessons of our own history
Tom Garcia

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