DEAD WRONG

Hey, I just thought of a really great reason to live in Los Angeles. They've
got a daily newspaper that kicks butt.

I'm talking about how lately the Los Angeles Police Department is getting
beat up badly - and deservedly - by the L.A. Times' journalists. Ever have a
typewriter dropped on your head? Ouch. That really smarts. Guess now they
know how Rodney King felt.

The Times' coverage of the LAPD's Rampart Division is revealing beatings,
shootings, the planting of evidence - and lots more. This is ugly stuff. And
the Times is telling the whole rotten story.

If something like that was going on up here and if the Tribune covered it,
it'd probably appear under some headline like, "Accusations Highlight
Difficulty of Being a Police Officer."

I mean, really. If your only source of information were the Tribune, you'd
think the cops here were all sweetness and light. Not so. Looks to me like
there's bad stuff happening with some of SLO County's cops. But the Tribune
doesn't.

What's their problem? Laziness, I guess. And a terminal fear of asking tough
questions. But sometimes it seems worse than that, as if they were
deliberately trying to sugar-coat police abuses to curry the cops' favor.
Sure doesn't sound like my idea of a newspaper.

Consider this: In September, the county settled two wrongful death cases
involving two men who died in 1997 while being taken into custody by SLO
County Sheriff's deputies. The settlement amounts: $20,000 for one and
$350,000 for another.

You didn't hear about that? Oh, you must mostly read the Tribune. What very
little reporting, and I use that term loosely, the Trib did on the Donal
Schneider and Ralph Stuart cases was buried inside the paper, managed to
misspell names, and was off by a cool $100,000 in the total settlement
amount for the Stuart suit.

If you only read the Tribune you'd probably also be surprised that the
county paid out $350,000 to a man who attacked a deputy with a two-by-four.
Why would they pay THAT much if the deputy was justified in defending himself?

Well, obviously there's lots more to this story than the Tribune ever said
back in April of 1997 when it was on the front page under the headline, "Man
fatally shot after attacking officer." That news story said that the
unidentified deputy "shot a man who struck him with a two-by-four during an
eviction that turned violent."

Here are a few things that weren't in the story or in any follow-up: There
was no civil eviction proceeding, only the deputy acting on his own to
follow up an order to leave he made two weeks earlier, when he also drew his
gun on Stuart.

Stuart was also mildly retarded and was severely beaten by the
baton-wielding deputy before being shot; and he was shot in the upper-rear
part of his head while on his hands and knees with his head down.

None of this has ever appeared in the Tribune, even though most of it was in
the coroner's report and confirmed by county officials. Or they could have
read it in New Times last week.

The Tribune applied the same kid-gloves treatment to another deputy-induced
death eight months later, when government critic Donal Schneider had a fatal
heart attack after being stopped for lack of proper tags on his car.

Again, the story was front-page news for a few days. It said Schneider
tussled with deputies, collapsed to the ground while being handcuffed from a
heart attack that came on without warning, and that deputies removed the
handcuffs to deliver CPR. Later, the autopsy found Schneider died of a heart
attack.

But again, most of that information is either not true or only sort of true,
according to the Sheriff's Department's own reports.

Schneider wasn't handcuffed until after a deputy pepper-sprayed him twice
and had held him face-down in the dirt for seven minutes. That's what
accounted for the coroner listing "mechanical asphyxia" as a contributing
cause of death. Again, the Tribune never reported that, despite plenty of
medical evidence showing asphyxia can cause heart attacks.

Schneider also told the deputies "my heart, my heart" and "I can't breathe"
before the heart attack struck, which they apparently ignored. And
Schneider's handcuffs were never removed by the deputies when they applied
CPR, which made it more damaging to him than life-saving.

None of this information has ever appeared in the Tribune. Not even after a
New Times reporter told Tribune editor Sandra Duerr about all of it and
urged her to help set the record straight.

I don't know about most people, but I get really pissed off when I find out
someone has lied to me. And I ESPECIALLY don't like it when the government
does it. I guess the Tribune doesn't have my sense of outrage. But what
about YOU? How do you feel about being lied to by cops and journalists?

You should be as mad as me. Because this isn't some trivial matter. This is
life-and-death stuff.

When you take the Tribune's abdication of its watchdog role and combine it
with laws that prevent media access to even the most routine information
about police abuses, then maybe you can understand why the American Civil
Liberties Union thinks we ought to have a civilian police oversight commission.

But I say, just put me in charge. I'll straighten this mess right out.