News

In his trip from debate to debate around Humboldt County this election season, District Attorney Paul Gallegos has taken credit for reducing violent crime during his eight years as the county's chief prosecutor.

To state it up front: I believe that the case the counselor is advancing here is a piece of minor campaign flummery -- a political infraction or maybe a misdemeanor, far short of a felony. It's hard to imagine any thinking person taking it too seriously. Crime tends to wave up and down like housing prices -- the whole nation more or less in sync -- and, as the Washington Post editorialized a few months ago, no one seems to know exactly why.

So Gallegos taking credit for a reduction in the violent crime rate is something like an incumbent President taking credit for a boom economy: Most everyone agrees that he might have had some sort of hand in the matter, even if no one can pinpoint exactly what it was. So it's pretty much allowed, and only the most churlish of commentators will throw even a yellow flag.

As recently as last night, though, Gallegos himself demonstrated that he takes the numbers very seriously indeed. Both Allison Jackson and Paul Hagen called him on this in different ways. Jackson asserted that the violent crime rate has in fact gone up, not down, during his tenure. Hagen, ready with that yellow flag, wryly quizzed Gallegos about what exactly he had done to bring the crime rate down.

During that debate, I promised a complete blog post on the subject today. Here it is. In short: Gallegos' central claim is true, barely. However: He should immediately fire whatever genius inspired him to take sole credit for the Humboldt County crime rate and make it part of his campaign pitch. The news on that front is far from good.

The chart above shows the per-capita violent crime rate in Humboldt County from 2001 to 2008, the last year for which the state Department of Justice has complete statistics. Gallegos took office at the beginning of 2003. The vertical scale on the chart indicates the number of violent crimes -- homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault -- per 100,000 residents. A simple glance shows that Gallegos is indeed correct. The crime rate is lower in 2008 than it was in 2002, the last year of Terry Farmer's regime.

Drill down, though -- what does this chart really show? If you accept the Gallegos narrative -- again, we don't, he does -- then in his first year in office the new District Attorney cleaned up the county something fierce. With a new head prosecutor in town, the thugs were on the run: The 2003 violent crime rate was 21.8 percent lower than the year previous.

After that? Not so good. Somewhere in the third season of The Wire, someone -- Daniels? Colvin? Burrell? -- shared his maxim of police work: You never take credit for crime going down, because then you gotta take the blame when it goes up. If Gallegos single-handedly brought crooks to bay in 2003, what did he do to screw the pooch so badly in 2007? Violent crime shot up 18.1 percent in that year, and the next year didn't offer much relief.

This is especially egregious when you consider that national and especially state trends continued in the opposite direction:

In other words, if you accept the Gallegos narrative -- he does, we don't -- the question should be: What happened to that unstoppable crimebuster who singlehandedly pulled us out of Mad Max-style chaos and cleaned up the streets in his first year in office? The other 57 District Attorneys in the state of California continue to push the crime rate into freefall; ours, contrarily, now lets the hoodlums have their way with us.

That is, if you accept the great man theory of crime-fighting. We don't. Gallegos does.

Sources:

Humboldt County: California Department of Justice.

California: California Department of Justice.

USA: Federal Bureau of Investigation.

... via the KHUM Crap-Cam. This debate was tons of fun -- two more to come, next Thursday and the Thursday after, with the candidates for supervisor.

StreamGuys, an Arcata-based company that provides streaming media services (like allowing you to listen to KHUM online, for example), is now fulfilling the flannel-clad dreams of diehard grungers everywhere: Earlier this week, Pearl Jam, the seminal (as in semen, to which the band's name refers) Seattle angst-rockers, launched Pearl Jam Radio, an online, 'round-the-clock feed of Pearl jams spanning the band's 20-year career. The tunes, from bootleg concert recordings and rarities to studio tracks, is streaming courtesy of the techie dudes working out of an old church in Bayside.

"As an aging '90s rocker, nothing made my year more than [getting] to support the streaming of the new Pearl Jam radio," StreamGuys Chief Operating Officer and co-owner Jonathan Speaker said this morning. 

Rock on.

Faculty and staff aren't the only ones feeling disgruntled about the direction College of the Redwoods has taken under President Jeff Marsee; students are pissed, too.

At Friday's Board of Trustees meeting, which will be held up Del Norte way, former leaders of student government will address why the entire cabinet resigned in protest earlier this year.

Actually, they'll be asking Board President Bruce Emad, right, to read their angry letter aloud, according to former student trustee Karen Rio. In a nutshell, the students allege that their governing body, the Associated Students of College of the Redwoods (ASCR), was infiltrated by a woman hired by Marsee for the ill-defined and previously nonexistent job of Campus Life Director. This woman [redacted] proceeded to hijack ASCR's finances, misappropriate funds and verbally berate the student officers, the letter claims. 

The five elected members of student government quit in protest, and now they're demanding a full review of [the woman's] actions. "All five of us want her fired, but we don't know if that will happen," former ASCR Vice President Polly Johns told the Journal this morning.

Click "more" to read the students' letter in full.

Dear Board of Trustees:

We are writing about concerns we have about ASCR [Associated Students of College of the Redwoods] finances and the treatment of ASCR elected representatives.

First, about ASCR finances: After Campus Life Director [redacted] was hired in fall 2009, it wasn't long before there were problems. Nikiya wouldn't give reports to us about what was in the accounts. She would never explain the differences between Student Life accounts and ASCR funds, and she wouldn't explain where the money for events was coming from. When we voted to approve a $2,500 gift to Central Asia Institute (in support of Greg Mortenson's Book of the Year event), she claimed that we didn't have enough money for this, even though we had been told by Sean Hofer, our advisor from the previous year, that we had over $100,000 in the ASCR account.

Then, when Jennifer Swaggert, the ASCR Treasurer, in early fall 2009, decided she didn't want to do that job anymore, Nikiya took over all ASCR finances, and a number of events were paid for, but without ASCR voting on these activities. In fact, Jennifer told us that "Nikiya made all the financial decisions anyway." Finally, when we wanted to find out what monies were in the ASCR accounts (since Nikiya wouldn't do this for us), Polly Johns, Vice President of ASCR, went to the Business Office to get a Datatel printout. In response, Nikiya threatened Polly with a disciplinary write-up for supposedly missing meetings (from two months previous). During a meeting with Nikiya following this threat, Nikiya told Polly "not to worry about the monies." From our perspective, there's a pretty clear conflict of interest in having half of Nikiya's salary come from student funds while at the same time she is pushing her Campus Life agenda on ASCR.

Next, there has been a lot of mistreatment of ASCR elected representatives. From the start, Nikiya didn't want to answer any of our questions during ASCR meetings. For instance, at one of the first meetings, in fall 2009, when we asked her exactly what the Campus Life Director did, she told us that we could "look at her job description." She talked down to us, brushed off our suggestions, and resorted to yelling and bullying us in order to get her way. When we approved the $2,500 gift to Central Asia Institute, Nikiya yelled at us about the gift and then told us that because of the gift we couldn't attend a General Assembly Leadership Conference in the Bay Area. Also, she yelled at us for deciding to attend the Mortenson event and would not attend the event itself. She singled out Vice President of ASCR Polly Johns by referring to her as a "brat" and "an idiot."

We tried to fix the situation, but it didn't seem like anyone would listen to us. Ashley Chapman and Cody Anderson spoke with Vice President of Student Services Keith Snow-Flamer about these problems. Nothing happened. A faculty member on our behalf spoke with both Joe Hash and Keith Snow-Flamer about Nikiya's behavior. Nothing happened. Polly Johns spoke with Joe Hash. Nothing happened. Karen Rio even wrote a letter to President [Jeff] Marsee. And still nothing happened. Nothing came of any of these meetings or the letter. What was obvious to us from what Nikiya told us is that she would do whatever President Marsee asked her, but completely ignored us, even though we were paying half her salary. The end result of such treatment is that all five elected ASCR representatives (excluding student-trustee) resigned this year because they could no longer put up with such outrageous treatment.

In order to fix this situation, we would like you to:

1) Do a complete and public review of the ASCR finances. If Nikiya authorized any money without ASCR approval, we want this money refunded to the ASCR accounts.
2) We want ASCR to have its own advisor for 20 hours a week. That is what our monies should be paying for--not Campus Life events.
3) We want the immediate removal of Nikiya McWilliams as Campus Life Director for her completely unacceptable behavior toward us.
4) Before there is another Campus Life Director hired, the ASCR representatives must be involved in what Campus Life will be and how it will be paid for.

Sincerely,

Karen Rio, former Student Trustee
Polly Johns, former ASCR Vice President

 

The North Coast Journal's new Internet home has arrived! Peek around, poke around, and file any complaints in the comments. There's bound to be some dusty corners of this thing that still need sprucing up.

This is a top-down and head-to-toe revision of our most recent site, which was circa 2007. The first thing you'll notice is the superclean and way more modern design, with bigger typefaces and 10 times the overall readability. All credit here is due to the marvelous Topaz Design shop in Portland, Ore., and the codin' CSS freaks at Slice 'n' Dice, who implemented Ms. Topaz's vision.

But there's more, so much more. First: This is hosted on speedy new servers which will never groan under the weight you've been throwing at them lately. Also: The thing is cached out the wazoo, so you should be getting lightning-quick page loads pretty much throughout.

Again: Not everything shows up where it used to, so it might take some mental adjusting. Any problems or complaints, post them here and we'll either set you straight or put your suggestion on our to-do list.

Enjoy!