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Sentinel 08-14-20

By Mark Gutglueck
It does not appear that San Bernardino County Chief Operating Officer Leonard Hernandez will carry out a comprehensive investigation into partisan political activity being run out of county facilities by Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe’s staff members or any other personnel working for members of the county board of supervisors.
After more than a year of reports that suggested three of the staff members working for Rowe were gearing up for or were engaged in electioneering activity while functioning out of county government facilities, Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford at the July 28 board of supervisors’ meeting called upon either County Counsel Michelle Blakemore or Hernandez to undertake some form of activity that would provide the public with an assurance that the staff of the county’s highest ranking officials were not using county facilities, equipment or their governmental authority to carry out political activity.
At 4:45:33 into the July 28, 2020 meeting, Supervisor Rutherford said, “I wanted to ask perhaps [County Chief Operating Officer] Leonard [Hernandez] or [County Counsel] Michelle [Blakemore], whoever feels it’s appropriate: We are entering what we refer to lovingly as silly season, that is, the campaign season where there’s lots of campaigning and politicking, and I know we have state law and county policy that we ask our county staff to abide by in terms of not using public resources to do political or campaign work. I wonder if we could just review those and give the public some assurance that we are emphasizing those and communicating those to our staff.”
At that point, a computerized voice from a teleconference line that the county maintains was, in the words of County Spokesman David Wert, “accidentally left open after it had been used,” thereby interrupting the proceedings. “Hello. There doesn’t appear to be any activity in this meeting,” the voice-over stated. Board of Supervisors Chairman Curt Hagman, who was conducting the meeting and had control over the meeting microphones and communication devices, was then heard laughing. “I think that’s the accumulation of a long day,” Hagman said, perhaps in response to the computerized voice interruption, which was either a technical faux pas or an effort to sidetrack the request Rutherford had made. Ultimately, Hagman responded to the substance of what Rutherford had said, simultaneously downplaying any suggestion that there had been any improper political activity involving supervisorial staff.
“Leonard’s here and he’ll make sure that gets out,” said Hagman, directing, in his capacity as board chairman, that the action Rutherford had requested be carried out by Hernandez as opposed to Blakemore. “He doesn’t have much to report.”
At least some members of the public observing the proceedings, which were video-recorded and streamed simultaneously and mounted on the county’s website, took what was said by Supervisor Rutherford to be a call for Hernandez or Blakemore to look into the issues pertaining to campaigns being run out of county facilities by county personnel, and investigate whether there is any substance to recurrent reports to that effect.
In 2018, then-Third District Supervisor James Ramos, a Democrat, ran successfully for the California Assembly in the 40th Assembly District. To move into that state office, he was obligated to resign his county position, with two years yet remaining on his term as supervisor, as he had most recently been reelected to that position in 2016. In December 2018, the remaining members of the board of supervisors – Republicans Janice Rutherford, Robert Lovingood and Curt Hagman and Democrat Josie Gonzales – chose Dawn Rowe, a former Yucca Valley town councilwoman, to succeed Ramos, despite Ramos’s wish that his replacement be a Democrat. Rowe is a Republican, and at the time of her appointment she was a staff member with Congressman Paul Cook, a Republican. Upon assuming office, Rowe hired Matt Knox, who was also one of Cook’s Congressional staffers, as her chief of staff, and Dillon Lesovsky, who formerly worked in Cook’s office, as her policy advisor. Both Knox and Lesovsky were Republican Party political operatives who were actively involved in the campaigns of Republican candidates for elected office. In particular, Knox and Lesovsky had an established record as “political hitmen,” who were responsible for attack ads, mailers, presentations, activities and websites which pointedly criticized, berated or characterized in a negative light the opponents of the candidates they were working on behalf of. These tactics were almost always vicious and had proven generally effective. One of Knox’s and Lesovsky’s signature attacks had been that on Tim Donnelly, another Republican whose challenge of Cook in 2018 had been so effective he found himself in the November 2018 runoff against Cook, a rare circumstance, since generally same-party candidates face each other only in a primary election rather than in a general election. Knox’s and Lesovsky’s tactics worked, and the incumbent held off the surging Donnelly, celebrated widely as the most conservative of California’s politicians when he previously served in the Assembly and ran unsuccessfully for governor, retaining for Cook his position as congressman.
In January 2019, Rowe fleshed out her supervisorial staff, hiring both Knox and Lesovsky into the chief of staff and policy advisor positions, respectively, and also taking on Suzette Swallow as her communications director. Swallow was a loan from Rutherford’s staff. Swallow had been active in Rutherford’s 2018 reelection campaign.
The hiring of three political operatives as Rowe’s staff members raised immediate red flags, such that before February 2019 began there was suspicion that a political operation was being run out of the fifth floor of the San Bernardino County administration building at 385 North Arrowhead Avenue in downtown San Bernardino, where the county supervisors have their county seat offices and where the offices of the county chief executive officer and his staff are also housed.
Almost immediately upon coming into office, a good portion of Rowe’s focus turned to ensuring that she would remain in office beyond the final two years of Ramos’s term, which in practical terms meant she and her political team needed to work toward winning the 2020 Third District supervisor’s race. Word soon came that Knox, Lesovsky and Swallow were engaged in assuring their boss’s political longevity, and that they were to lesser degrees lending support to the then-anticipated upcoming campaigns of Rowe’s allies, Republicans all, including Cook in his congressional effort; Jay Obernolte in his reelection campaign for the 33rd Assembly District in 2020; Robert Lovingood, then due to stand for reelection this year as First District county supervisor; and that they were scouting the horizon for a viable Republican candidate to seek the supervisor’s post in the Fifth District, where Josie Gonzales, the only Democrat on the board of supervisors, is to be termed out this year.
In August 2019, Supervisor Lovingood announced he would not seek reelection as supervisor, which immediately touched off a round of political musical chairs. Congressman Cook, who had previously served in the Assembly, abruptly announced that he would descend at least two rungs on the political evolutionary ladder by vying to succeed Lovingood as supervisor, an otherwise extraordinary move but for the consideration that at the age of 76, he was finding the constant transcontinental flights between California and Washington, D.C. to be wearying. That created a vacuum that Obernolte moved at once to fill, and he announced he would not seek to return to Sacramento as the 33rd District assemblyman but would instead seek to replace Cook as California’s 8th District congressman. For a brief interim, there was speculation that Lovingood would then step up to run for Obernolte’s Assembly seat. When Lovingood made clear that he was getting out of the political game entirely, the Republican clique in the High Desert put forth Thurston Smith, the one-time mayor of Hesperia, as the logical heir in the 33rd Assembly District, where the GOP holds a strong registration advantage over the Democrats.
Recurrent reports were that the political machine in Rowe’s office – Knox, Lesovsky and Swallow – were awork to maintain Republican primacy in San Bernardino County. And indeed, in the March 3, 2020 California Primary, all four of the Republican candidates the trio were said to be associated with prevailed. Rowe, challenged by four others, captured 54.96 percent of the vote to win outright in the Third District, and Cook, facing three opponents, triumphed with 64.66 percent of the vote in the county’s First District. Both avoided having to participate in a run-off election in the upcoming November general election, and will now serve on the board of supervisors at least until 2024. Obernolte comfortably captured first place with 35.71 percent of the vote against eight other candidates in the 8th Congressional District race, and Smith polled 37.9 percent of the vote for first place among seven candidates seeking the 33rd Assembly District berth. Smith outdistanced his closest competitor by more than 20 percent and Obernolte, whose opponents included four Republicans who together claimed more than 25 percent of the vote, bettered the second place finisher, a Democrat, by 7.93 percent. Both Smith and Obernolte are heavily favored in the upcoming November general election.
Thus, Rutherford’s request on July 28 was seen as a move that might force into the open the political activity ongoing in Rowe’s office, leaving open the possibility that Hernandez, depending upon how aggressively he pursued that request, might churn up documentation or irrefutable proof of the illegal activity that has been rumored to be taking place at the highest level in San Bernardino County government.
On August 6, 2020, the Sentinel emailed Hernandez, inquiring to confirm that he perceived the request by Supervisor Rutherford to be one calling for him to investigate the allegations of political activity ongoing in Supervisor Rowe’s office and whether, in the nine days since he had been tasked with the assignment, he had been able to document the activities involving Knox, Lesovsky and Swallow and thoroughly account for the time they had spent since November in their function as county employees. The Sentinel further inquired of Hernandez as to whether he had carried out a forensic analysis of the computers at Knox’s, Lesovsky’s and Swallow’s workstations, and whether he was able to document their involvement in political activity while they were simultaneously functioning in their official capacities as county employees, what that political activity consisted of and if he had ascertained which political candidates they were working on behalf of.
The Sentinel also endeavored to determine from Hernandez if he was able to determine if the political activity Knox, Lesovsky and Swallow were engaged in was being coordinated with, through or at the behest of Supervisor Rowe, and if he had come across any communications between Supervisor Rowe and her employees with regard to that political activity.
Hernandez did not respond to the Sentinel’s inquiry.
Rather, the Sentinel has learned, Hernandez – either of his own volition, at the direction of his political masters or possibly County Chief Executive Officer Gary McBride – elected to stand down in the assignment to look into political activity emanating out of the supervisors’ offices.
A multitude of factors appear to have gone into the decision to short-circuit the investigation.
Hernandez has a reputation for being both hypervigilant and super-efficient in his function, which has resulted in his rapid rise from that of county librarian in 2016 to the vaunted position of the county’s chief operating officer. Moreover, as a consequence of his position, Hernandez has access to assets, facilities, personnel, information and data that absolutely outruns that available to those outside the confines of government and which generally exceeds that available to nearly all of those functioning within the county governmental structure, with the possible exceptions of McBride as the county’s chief executive officer and Blakemore, as county counsel. Moreover, as the county’s chief operating officer, Hernandez’s access to a substantial amount of that information is more direct than that of anyone, McBride, Blakemore and the supervisors themselves included. Were Hernandez to carry out the full-dimensional investigation his position, his authority and the assets at his command make possible, he would be able to get to the bottom of the political activity that is going on within Supervisor Rowe’s office in which Lesovsky, Knox, Swallow and any others are or were involved.
The use of public facilities, equipment and personnel for partisan political activity is illegal.
Hernandez and McBride either collectively and or independently came to the conclusion that creating an evidence file establishing or otherwise documenting that a member or members of the board of supervisors was or were in violation of the law was inadvisable for a multitude of reasons. Hernandez and McBride also recognized that any documentation of the misdeeds in Rowe’s supervisorial office would potentially either indirectly or indirectly implicate Supervisor-elect Cook, as his campaign was a beneficiary of some of that political activity, and shedding discredit on two or more of the members of the board of supervisors might have unfavorable consequences for both Hernandez and McBride once Cook takes up his position as supervisor later this year.
Another issue persuaded Hernandez to eighty-six the investigation.
Ironically, it turns out, Rutherford’s staff has been implicated in ongoing political activity. Swallow, after serving as Rowe’s communications director, has now returned to Rutherford’s office, according to the county’s official spokesperson, David Wert. Additionally, Phil Paule, Rutherford’s chief of staff, has been moonlighting as a political operative.
The Sentinel has obtained documentation showing that Rowe’s supervisorial campaign made a $16,500 payment to Knox, her chief of staff, for services he rendered to his boss’s 2020 electioneering effort.
Rowe’s campaign also made a payment of $7,000 to Lesovsky as remuneration for his role as a consultant to her campaign for election on March 3 of this year, documentation in the possession of the Sentinel shows.
The Paul Cook for Supervisor campaign paid Lesovsky $2,700, another document obtained by the Sentinel establishes. That document states, without any clarification, that Lesovsy was paid that sum for rent on an office.
Additionally, the Sentinel has learned from campaign disclosure documents filed with the federal government, Paule, while simultaneously employed in the capacity of Rutherford’s chief of staff, has been working on behalf of Obernolte’s congressional campaign. The Obernolte for Congress campaign paid Paule’s company, Paule Consulting, $10,000 for his assistance in this year’s campaign.
Furthermore, information, documentation and other evidence available to the Sentinel show that Paule, along with Rutherford’s Assistant Chief of Staff Mark Taylor, Swallow and one of Rutherford’s district representatives, Ben Lopez, were actively involved in Rutherford’s 2018 reelection campaign.
Swallow served in the capacity of Rutherford’s campaign manager and as her scheduler. Finance documentation for Rutherford’s 2018 reelection campaign obtained by the Sentinel shows that Swallow received $24,262.35 in payments and reimbursements for her work, which included serving as a campaign consultant.
Mark Taylor was not paid directly by the Rutherford campaign for the work he did on behalf of the effort to reelect Rutherford in 2018. Rather, his wife, Mondi Taylor, was paid $10,948.49 by the Rutherford campaign in 2018, primarily for “professional services.”
Campaign documentation shows Lopez was paid $2,878.31 by the Rutherford campaign, $2,750 of which was for consulting work. Documentation relating to the reimbursements Lopez received from the Rutherford campaign establish that he was engaged in campaign-related activity during normal business hours when he was supposed to be functioning in his role as a county employee.
No payments were made directly to Paule or his consulting company from Rutherford’s 2018 electioneering fund. Nevertheless, in 2018 during the campaign, Paule was repeatedly present at Rutherford’s campaign headquarters during normal weekday business hours. Similarly, Lopez, Swallow and Taylor were witnessed at Rutherford’s Rancho Cucamonga campaign office during the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday window on several days during the Spring 2018 campaign season, hours when, as county employees, they were required to be at their county work stations.
Additionally, Meridian Pacific, Inc., which provided the Rutherford campaign with digital advertising, campaign literature and mailings and communication services for which it was paid $279,798.31, utilized Rutherford’s staff employees as subcontractors for work it was carrying out related to the Rutherford campaign, documents show.
Upon Rutherford learning that her July 28 remarks were being interpreted as a call for Hernandez to undertake an investigation into the electioneering activity of the county’s supervisors’ staff members, including her own, she made clear that was not her intent, according to David Wert, the county’s public information officer.
Last week, on August 6, Wert told the Sentinel that Rutherford “clearly did not ask for anything akin to an investigation and she clearly made no reference to a specific circumstance. She asked for a ‘review’ of state law and county policy that we ask county staff to abide by in terms of not using public resources to do political or campaign work, and to ‘assure’ the public that we emphasize and communicate those state laws and county policies to county staff. In brief, she asked for a review of laws and policy, and an assurance to the public that those laws and policies are communicated to county employees. Even more briefly, she was asking for the county to tell the public that county employees are informed that they cannot use public resources for political purposes. I cannot see how anyone could interpret that to mean she asked for an investigation of a particular incident or incidents. I asked her about this this morning, and she confirmed she did not ask for an investigation, nor did she reference any specific circumstance.”
Wert continued, “Why was Leonard asked to handle it? Probably because Leonard oversees me, and it would be my job to make the communication requested by Supervisor Rutherford to the public. If an investigation into what you have described had been requested, neither Leonard nor Michelle would have been asked to handle it. It would have been referred to the district attorney.”
Wert asked “[W]hy would Supervisor Rutherford ask for an investigation? [N]o one has made any allegation to the county, or anyone else as far as the county knows, about anything you referenced in your email [to Hernandez].”
Wert asserted that the “only place those suggestions have appeared are in stories” which previously appeared in the Sentinel “with no attribution or sourcing.” Wert dismissed the Sentinel’s reference to “numerous” reports relating to Rowe’s staff being involved in political campaigns as falling in the class of unsupported assertions. “Are they ‘numerous?’ he asked. “Where else have they appeared besides your unattributed stories? Who has made those allegations?”
Wert made no reference to the campaign finance documentation filed by Rowe’s campaign treasurer, Bryan Burch and her assistant treasurer, Rebecca Luby, which disclosed her 2020 campaign’s payments to Knox and Lesovsky. Nor did Wert mention the campaign finance documentation filed by the treasurer of Cook’s 2020 campaign, Phil Waller, which identified the Cook campaign’s payment to Lesovsky, or the campaign finance documentation filed by Mondi Taylor, the treasurer for Rutherford’s 2018 reelection campaign, which identified the payments to Mark Taylor, Swallow and Lopez, nor the federal political campaign disclosure documents identifying Paule as a recipient of money from Obernolte’s campaign.
On August 8, Wert told the Sentinel, “I just learned Dillon Lesovsky hasn’t worked for Supervisor Rowe or any other county-affiliated entity for quite some time.” Wert did not give a precise date for the termination of Lesovsky’s employment with Rowe’s office.
Lesovsky was initially hired to serve as Rowe’s policy advisor in January 2019, effective January 22, 2019, through August 2, 2019. On August 20, 2019, the board of supervisors approved an employment contract with Lesovsky to provide support services to the Third District Supervisor as a policy advisor, effective August 17, 2019, with no termination date specified.
Lesovsky has a reputation for being indiscreet. In 2015, the Project Veritas organization, carrying out an investigation into pay-for-play politics, caught Lesovsky, then working as a staffer for Congressman Cook, on a hidden camera saying openly that political donations to Cook would earn the donors favorable treatment from the congressman. That exchange can be viewed at this link: https://www.projectveritas.com/2015/06/22/caught-on-hidden-camera-politicians-cash-in-on-export-import-bank/
That circumstance led to Cook seeking to distance himself from Lesovsky, who sometime thereafter departed as a member of Cook’s staff. Lesovsky was able to land on his feet, however, when it was arranged for him to go to work for Supervisor Robert Lovingood as a member of his staff. One member of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee characterized Lesovsky as a “blabbermouth” who constantly brags about the campaign work he is involved in. Indeed, elements of the Sentinel’s previous reporting with regard to the political activity ongoing in Rowe’s office stemmed either directly or indirectly from Lesovsky’s unguarded statements.
Wert was insistent that there is no inquiry into political activity involving the staff of the members of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, nor grounds for one.
“Supervisor Rutherford clearly did not ask anyone to look into anything,” Wert told the Sentinel. “County staff did not interpret her comments to mean that, no one is looking into anything, and that’s primarily because no one has made any allegations of the type you’ve described. You’ve repeatedly reported that allegations exist, but you’ve never reported that anyone has made the allegations. Even if allegations of the type to which you have alluded were to be made, they would not be made to the county, and the county would have no standing to look into them. They would be made to law enforcement. [I]f someone were to ask for an investigation into something of that nature, neither the chief operating officer nor county counsel would conduct the investigation. It would be a law enforcement agency conducting the ‘analysis of activity on their workplace computers’ or anything else germane to such an investigation.”

Dr. Sam Hessami, M.D. was recently selected to succeed Dr. Varadarajan Subbish as the chief medical officer at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center.
Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, located in Colton, is the main campus of the San Bernadino County Hospital.
Hessami has solid credentials not only as an accomplished medical doctor but as a hospital administrator in a highly active and challenging environment.
He is a double board-certified physician with 27 years experience as a practicing physician and approaching two decades of clinical and leadership expertise in hospital department management and service line development. Included in his previous management responsibilities were ensuring clinical quality, safety, and device utilization improvement.
As a physician, he is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist who specializes in urogynecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery. He practiced at the Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, New Jersey, at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey and Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, New Jersey. He also had a private practice in Wayne, New Jersey, and practiced in association with the Sovereign Health Medical Group in Fair Lawn, New Jersey and Jersey City, New Jersey.
Dr. Hessami was also an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where he was the chief of urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery. He was the director of the fellowship program in urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center.
Hessami’s most recent administrative assignment before coming to California was that of chief patient safety officer at St. Joseph’s Health System, a 651-bed academic medical center in New Jersey. He is credited with having developed and implemented a comprehensive system-wide educational plan to advance the concept of a “safe and just culture.” Additionally, he expanded the range of services while in a management role at the Hackensack Meridian Palisades Women’s Group, where he created and administrated a new hospital-sponsored faculty practice in obstetrics and gynecology.
He attended medical school at New York Medical College and graduated in 1993 and completed his residency at hospitals associated with West Virginia University. Hessami has a master of healthcare administration degree and is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.
According to a report to the county board of supervisors dated June 2, 2020 from William Gilbert, the director of Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, Hessami is to “provide services as chief medical officer for Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, for an estimated annual cost of $447,739, with a salary of $295,131 and benefits of $152,608, effective August 1, 2020, through July 28, 2023.” The board also authorized Gilbert or his successor to “execute amendments to extend the term of the contract for a maximum of three successive one-year periods on behalf of the county, subject to county counsel review.”
Hessami’s compensation is defrayed by California State Medi-Cal, federal Medicare, private insurances, and other departmental revenue.
Hessami joins Gilbert; Chief Operating Officer Andrew Goldfrach; Chief Financial Officer Arvind Oswal; Chief Nursing Officer Nanette Buenavidez; Staci McClane, the associate hospital administrator for ambulatory care services; Katrina Shelby, the associate hospital administrator for quality and accreditation; Ron Taber, the associate hospital administrator for ancillary & support services; and Wesley Toh, the associate hospital administrator for support services as a member of Arrowhead Regional Medical Center’s management and leadership team.
“Dr. Hessami’s distinguished career makes him an ideal candidate to lead Arrowhead Regional Medical Center’s medical team and spearhead innovative initiatives for continued advancements at the medical center,” Gilbert said in a prepared statement. “His broad experience in hospital administration, combined with his significant assets pertinent to patient safety and quality of care, make him an excellent fit with our vision and culture for ensuring patient well-being, while overseeing enhancements to our service-lines and programs.”
-Mark Gutglueck

More than a decade-and-a-half has elapsed since the City of Redlands and the State of California’s Water Quality Control Board initiated a remediation effort to eliminate perchlorate from that community’s drinking water or reduce its presence to levels that will not negatively impact the health of those drinking local tap water. Still, the chemical remains present in the local aquifer. As a consequence, the same water treatment methodology deemed to be the best safeguard of the public’s health previously remains in place.
Meanwhile, a report that there are a cluster of advanced thyroid cancer cases in the Redlands area has yet to be validated by scientific or medical authorities, who have not, however, contradicted that report.
State and local authorities maintain that the area’s water supply remains safe.
In 1997, it was discovered that perchlorate had shown up in the water of two of the City of Redlands’ wells that provide the city’s domestic and commercial water supply.
Perchlorate sometimes occurs naturally in arid environments. It can be associated with nitrate deposits. It was also a constituent of nitrate fertilizers imported from Chile for use in the United States from the late 1800s to the 1950s as well as in fertilizers using potash from New Mexico and Saskatchewan. Perchlorate has some limited industrial applications, and is used in fireworks, highway flares, the manufacturing of matches, airbag inflators, electroplating, aluminum refinishing, textile dye fixing, analytical chemistry and some pharmaceuticals. It is also used as a reactive agent in rocket fuel.
Lockheed Martin manufactured solid rocket fuel rockets and propellant from 1961 to 1974 at its 400-acre Mentone facility east of Redlands. Prior to 1961, the Grand Central Rocket Company manufactured, tested, and disposed of solid rocket propellant at the Redlands site.
An inquiry into the matter by the City of Redlands and the State of California Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board determined that waste disposal from the Lockheed Martin and Grand Central operations led to chemical contamination, including perchlorate, and resulted in a groundwater plume approximately seven square miles in surface area. It was determined that the perchlorate originating in Mentone was reaching a number of domestic water supply wells that serve several water purveyors throughout lower San Bernardino and upper Riverside counties, which included both Redlands and Loma Linda. Extensive sampling for perchlorate in the area included drawing water from wells located on former Norton Air Force Base. Monitoring wells at Norton were used to assist Lockheed and the Regional Water Quality Board in delineating the plume. Sampling indicated no on-site perchlorate contamination sources at Norton. Perchlorate was determined to be present in 46 municipal wells, with the highest concentration in the wells being 87 parts per billion. Lockheed Martin was put under a clean-up and abatement order.
By 2001, using a resin-based filtration system to deal with the issue was considered to be the best methodology for the perchlorate contamination remediation. Negotiations between Lockheed Martin and the Regional Water Quality Control Board led to an agreement that the company defray the cost of an ion-exchange filtration system and a management plan for it.
Lockheed Martin covered the more than $1 million cost of the installation of the resin-based ion-exchange devices in 2004 and 2005 and costs of approximately $1 million yearly ever since to replace the filters and maintain them.
This week, Ailene Voisin, a spokeswoman with the State of California for its various water quality control boards, told the Sentinel the resin-based filtration system is still in use by the City of Redlands as overseen by the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. “The specific type of resin-based filtration system is called ion exchange or IX for short,” she said. “Lockheed Martin still covers the cost for the operation and maintenance of the ion exchange system.”
Beyond the filtration system, Voisin said, the city is diluting water drawn and filtered from contaminated wells with water that has no perchlorate in it.
“In addition to the ion exchange system, another industry practice is blending,” Voisin said. “In 2007, Lockheed Martin funded the installation of two separate mechanical blending systems to address perchlorate impacts. Blending is the process where water from two different locations, with different qualities are blended to achieve the regulatory standards. For drinking water, these are concentrations of contaminants below the California maximum contaminant levels. The addition of blending enhances the reliability of the water supply system.”
Voisin indicated that the perchlorate contamination is no longer expanding further into the water table, but the contamination yet persists.
“Further migration of the perchlorate plume in the groundwater in a westerly direction has been stopped; however, the plume is still being monitored and treated as necessary,” she said.
Voisin said that “None of the extraction wells have been shut down yet. Regular monitoring and sampling are being conducted within the City of Redlands and surrounding cities to evaluate changes in the perchlorate groundwater plume. The frequency of sampling depends on various factors that ensure the adequate evaluation of perchlorate to ensure protection of public health.”
According to Voisin, “In April 1997, the California Department of Health Services developed an improved method for testing perchlorate in drinking water. The Department of Health Services initially established a provisional action level of 18 parts per billion. The current maximum contaminant levels for perchlorate is 6 parts per billion. The initial sampling in April 1997 found perchlorate in several production wells, including wells that belonged to the City of Redlands, the City of Loma Linda, the City of Riverside, the Victoria Farms Mutual Water Company, and Loma Linda University. A few of these production wells exceeded the provisional action level. In June 1997, the water board requested Lockheed Martin to address perchlorate that had been identified. In August 1997, the Water Board issued a cleanup and abatement order to Lockheed Martin to address the perchlorate groundwater plume. In April 2001, the cleanup and abatement order was amended. However, remediation of the perchlorate groundwater plume was still required.”
Carl Baker, Redlands’ officials spokesman, told the Sentinel, “The remediation is ongoing. The system is still active. Lockheed Martin continues to fund operations and maintenance costs,” which he said “vary annually. The treatment system consists of an ion exchange media that becomes exhausted based on operational conditions, gallons treated, perchlorate levels etc.”
Baker said the perchlorate contamination issue is not yet resolved. “When in use, perchlorate monitoring, consisting of source and treatment performance, is a weekly activity,” he said. “These results are reported to the State of California.”
Baker said, “Perchlorate source contamination and treatment is not solely an issue related to Redlands. Several local water utilities – Loma Linda, Riverside, San Bernardino – also manage perchlorate.”
In very minute quantities, perchlorate is used as a medication to control overactive thyroid hormone production. Nevertheless, an otherwise healthy individual’s exposure to perchlorate can prove highly destructive to his or her thyroid and other vital organs.
-Mark Gutglueck

The motivating factor in his run for Chino mayor, Christopher Hutchinson said, is what brought him and his wife back to Chino Valley five years ago, after seven years of living in Los Angeles. He and his wife moved to the megalopolis to the west shortly after they were married because of the entrepreneurial opportunity there.
Having made some money and created some businesses which he has since sold, Hutchison returned to Chino in 2015.
He said he and his wife made the decision to return to Chino because they did not feel that Los Angeles offered a healthy environment for raising their family, which now includes children who are 8, 6 and 4 years old.
“I’m running to improve my community,” he said. He said he is distinguished from the incumbent, Eunice Ulloa, and better suited for the role of mayor than she is because she is no longer actively engaged in raising a family, and he is. Ulloa is out of touch with the challenges and reality of current family dynamics and the actual lives of the more prevalent young demographics in Chino, he said.
“I have a family that I am raising in modern day Chino,” he said. “The mayor is not raising a family. If she has a family, her children are now grown. She is 74 years old. She is at a different stage in life than I am. I am raising kids and the immediate thing for me in my outlook is for my children and how the city is going to run and what it is to become for them. What is best for my children is going to drive the changes I would make as mayor.”
Hutchison said he believes he is qualified to hold the position of mayor “through my successes and failures at business and the experience I have gotten through the businesses I have run. I have had a lot of successes and a lot of failures,” he said, which has refined his approach to how he functions professionally. “Failures were important because I learned through failure why I was failing,” he said. “I made the adjustments I needed to make in order to succeed. There is a learning curve. A lot of what I went through taught me how to not fail and how to succeed with the tools and the resources I have been given.”
The major issues facing Chino, Hutchison said, are “a lack of affordable housing, the lack of leisure attractions, a lack of shopping centers. We need to invite business, be they large or small, and give our residents the convenience of shopping in their own city. We need growth in the city, economic growth, more development, more schools. Our schools are impacted. Kids aren’t getting the necessary attention.”
He elaborated, “What we are doing is spending our leisure money, shopping and dining dollars in the neighboring cities, Chino Hills, Eastvale, Ontario. These other cities are thriving off of our residents. We need more places where our residents can spend their money in our own neighborhoods and in our own city.”
In making his pitch for votes, Hutchison went beyond the normal purview of City Hall, extending his analysis of the city’s woes to issues bedeviling the Chino Valley Unified School District, the jurisdiction for which includes Chino and Chino Hills. A major social struggle played out in the district over the last decade, after three born again Christians who attended Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills – James Na, Andrew Cruz and Sylvia Orozco – were elected to the school board. The pastor at Chino Hills Calvary Chapel, the Reverend Jack Hibbs, evinced a denominationalist philosophy, which holds that Christians have a duty to take over public office and promote their religious beliefs from the positions they occupy. Na, Cruz and Orozco ratified a district policy for Bible study classes to become a part of the district’s high school curriculum and they incorporated the inclusion of prayer, i.e., specifically Christian prayer, as a feature of school events. Moreover, both Na and Cruz worked religious homilies and constant reference to God into the discussions of the school board at its public meetings.
This triggered a lawsuit that was lodged by the Freedom From Religion Foundation of Madison, Wisconsin in Riverside Federal Court in November 2014 on behalf of two named plaintiffs, Larry Maldonado and Mike Anderson, along with 21 unnamed plaintiffs who asserted they were alienated or intimidated at school board meetings because of overt and constant references to Christianity, including “prayers, Bible readings and proselytizing.” In the suit, the plaintiffs sought the cessation of religiosity as an element in the district’s conducting of business. Penultimately, the case went before Federal Judge Jesus Bernal, who on February 18, 2016 issued his own encyclical in which he rejected the argument that the district’s policy of celebrating the beliefs of a majority of the board did not violate the plaintiffs’ rights to attend district board meetings and participate in other district and school functions without being subjected to an intensive round of religious advocacy. Bernal ordered the Chino Unified School District Board to discontinue its overt and constant references to Christianity during its public meetings and refrain forthwith from inserting religion into official proceedings. Bernal awarded the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s legal team $202,425 in attorney’s fees and $546.70 in court costs to be paid by the district. The district appealed Bernal’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court, which in July 2018 upheld in its entirety Bernal’s 2016 ruling. The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s legal team was awarded another $200,000 in legal fees to cover its work in answering the appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Shortly thereafter, after contemplating an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the school board abandoned doing so. In 2018, Orozco opted against seeking reelection. Joe Schaffer and Christina Gagnier were elected to the school board. Schaffer and Gagnier then joined with incumbent Board Member Irene Hernandez-Blair to end the district policy of allowing school prayer and Bible instruction.
Hutchison envisions rallying the Chino City Council and the City of Chino to reassert the Christian values he believes are intrinsic in the community to influence the school district policy with regard to undoing the intrusion of liberal concepts and policies in local schools once he is in position as mayor.
“We should begin by working with the school board to make sure the curriculum is appropriate when it comes to sex education,” Hutchison said. “My wife and I have a conservative view on whether or not children should be exposed to certain curriculum. We want to make sure the appropriate material is put in front of our kids. I don’t think our kids should be encouraged at a young age to choose their gender or explore their sexuality. I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
Hutchison said the city should similarly resist liberal anti-development sentiment and efforts by no-growth advocates to block economic development that the city can use to defray the cost of community improvements he advocates.
“We need to make the city appealing to investors, builders and businesses,” Hutchison said. “If a project meets the criteria and falls within the guidelines of the state, county and local government, the project should be approved even if it is opposed by a group of people in the community who want to keep things as they are. If a project meets the zoning and land use criteria, it should be approved as proposed.”
The fashion in which the city can pay for the improvements it needs to make, Hutchison said, is through spurring commercial development. “We need more businesses, more big businesses and more small businesses,” he said. “The city will receive more tax revenue. We need to make it so we appeal to people to come and engage in business in our city.”
Hutchison said he had previous experience relating to government but “I never worked for the government. I’ve run multiple businesses that had government contracts,” he said, but stopped short of describing that work. “I’d prefer not to say,” Hutchison said.
Hutchison grew up in Chino, attending and graduating from Ontario High School. He had college experience at Los Angeles City College where he studied economics. He dropped his educational aspirations when his professional commitments intensified, he said.
His forays into the business world, Hutchison said, entailed “real estate development. I owned a retail cabinet shop and a cabinet fabrication shop.” He was further engaged in the sale of tile, which he said included a “showroom for tile in Beverly Hills. I’ve done a lot of higher-end construction, and that included design, the type that is featured in design magazines.” His mainstay, Hutchison said, is specialized residential development. “I do custom homes,” he said.
Hutchison has been married 13 years.
Asked what more about him or his candidacy he wanted the Sentinel’s readers to know, he said, “I attend Cavalry Chapel in Chino Hills. I am a born again Christian. I hold those values to be true, and I live that.”
-M.G.

With the last two-thirds of his life intrinsically bound up in Montclair, it is unsurprising that Robert Pipersky is now vying for a position on the city council in this year’s race. He has been employed as a Montclair police officer for four decades and has lived in the city for a quarter of a century.
“I live in and work in the city,” he said. “I absolutely love the city. This city has done great by me, having lived here the past 25 years. It is a great place to live and work.”
His qualifications for the council position, Pipersky said, consist of his being steeped in every aspect of the community.
“I bring 40 years of experience being a city employee,” he said. “I have an institutional knowledge of the city. I have been an employee in the police department, I know everyone in the fire department, I am familiar with those in human services and most everyone in City Hall. All of this is a result of having been an employee here for 40 years. I have a good working knowledge of how we bring money into our budget. I know the value of the mall in terms of being a revenue producer. I know how to get the most out of what we have.”
When asked what distinguishes him from his opponents for the council position, Pipersky said, “There are several people who are running, and I am sure each one of them has something valuable to offer, so I am not going to make a qualitative comparison between us. I am not going to say anything negative about my opponents. I don’t know what qualifications they may have. The one thing they don’t have is my experience working within the same organization as long as I have. That is in and of itself a plus. If there is something in general that distinguishes me from the others, I would go back to the institutional knowledge I have from working in the community the length of time I have, knowing the policies and procedures of the city.”
Pipersky pointed out that he was employed for nearly four decades on the streets as a working police officer but is now functioning in the capacity of the City of Montclair’s public safety administrative services supervisor, which oversees the city’s emergency response team. In this fashion, Pipersky is the architect of Montclair’s COVID-19 policy.
“It is not accurate to say that I created the city’s emergency operations plan, but I have updated and modernized it,” he said. “Like I said, I have a good institutional working knowledge of the city’s operations. I know what the city’s positions are for. I know most, if not all, of the people in the city.”
In sizing up the major issues facing the city, Pipersky said, “Currently COVID-19, not the disease, but what the disease is doing to us with the shutdown of our economic base is our biggest challenge. We are a retail community, and much of our retail operations have been shut down. That is affecting our tax base. We are working to get money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and doing a comparatively good job to the cities surrounding us, but that is still not close to our actual losses. We’re suffering close to a $4 million budget shortfall. Mr. Starr [Montclair City Manager Ed Starr] has put aside enough in reserves to carry us through, but we are still going to suffer greatly because of the economic downturn. We should be able to recover quickly. One of the effects of the disaster is after recovery starts people will need to buy things, and as a retail community we should see customers starting to spend money here rather than in other places, I would think.”
In the long term, Pipersky said, the city’s overarching problem is its looming pension debt crisis.
“The public employee retirement system is beset with an unfunded liability that is causing a great financial drain on the city as well as other cities,” Pipersky said. He was more sanguine about the situation than a lot of financial prognosticators, however, asserting the city could overcome the problem by growing the size of city government and thereby eventually transferring the burden of paying workers who are no longer working for the city from the city’s residents and taxpayers to future employees who will be paying into the retirement system.
“When we were hiring part-time employees and not filling the positions from behind, once they leave we do not have as many employees making contributions into the retirement system, causing us issues,” he said. “Now, with the unfunded liability, that has become a problem. With the hiring of more employees and increases in the number of employees contributing to the system, the unfunded liability will go down quite a bit. At the present time, the city is looking to address the shortfall with bonds, which is another way to set these financial problems right.”
The city can also use taxes as a temporary stopgap until it redresses its fiscal issues, Pipersky opined.
“Currently the City of Montclair is trying to get passed on the November ballot a one percent transaction use tax that will give us a one percent return on all sales taking place in the city,” he said. “It will bring in up to nine million dollars per year when we are at our full potential retail operation. That transaction use tax will help address some of what we are experiencing, and help pick up some of our losses from COVID-19, bring our manpower levels up to what we should have in public works, human services, the fire department, the police department, City Hall, our people all around, as well as building our infrastructure for the future. We are fortunate. The transaction use tax is supported by 75 percent of the city’s residents. We are a retail community, and so 80 percent of the tax income will come from people outside of our city. As residents, we will pay only 20 percent of the tax and get 100 percent of the benefit. That investment is a win/win.”
He possesses substantial experience relating to government, Pipersky said.
“I am currently working with and have worked with members of the city council for 40 years,” he said. “I have talked to council members on a regular basis throughout that time. I am constantly learning what goes on in the city and how the city works.”
Pipersky is a graduate of Chino High School, Class of 1971.
He has attended Mount San Antonio College, and San Bernardino Valley College. He originally studied ornamental horticulture, as that was the subject most germane to his father’s business, with which he was then employed. He subsequently changed his focus to fire science when he went to work for the California Division of Forestry.
As he is headed into the home stretch on his professional career and sprinting toward the finish line of retirement, his current title is public safety administrative services supervisor. Throughout most of his career with the police department, he was a police officer field training officer. Prior to the advent of the COVID-19 exigency, his daily routine consisted of emergency preparedness for disasters such as earthquakes and fires at the city’s emergency operations center in order to make for fluid and instantaneous incident response and management, transforming the department’s newly acquired police cars for use by the patrol division by outfitting them with guns, lights, sirens and the installation of mobile information processing and communications units. He further oversees the cadet program, consisting of six part-time youthful non-sworn employees on a trajectory toward becoming full-fledged police officers who assist with traffic control and parking tickets.
At present, the city is using federally-provided recovery funds at the emergency operations center in coordinating the city’s reaction to the COVID-19 crisis. He works as the city’s liaison with the county.
He is married, Pipersky said, with what he called “a plethora” of children and even more grandchildren.
Upon becoming councilman, Pipersky said, “What I want to do is ensure the North Montclair Specific Plan is completed and make sure the [light passenger rail] Gold Line comes to Montclair. In working toward completing the North Montclair Specific Plan, we have to start building infrastructure. Montclair at build out will be up to about 75,000 people. We need to start planning to make sure we have the resources, the manpower, to be able to move forward. CIM Group, the company that has Montclair Place [known formerly for a half century as Montclair Plaza] is interested in seeing it grow. We are landlocked. We have to grow to get more population in to be self-sustaining. The city is following a 30-year development plan. I personally would like to see it happen a lot faster. There is going to be population growth on the north end. There is a lot of development ongoing right now on the south end of the city. I want to see industry go into where that is planned. Montclair should provide a safe, healthy environment for all of our residents and businesses. We need to make it a place where people want to come, live and stay.”
Pipersky said, “Previously, my wife, Ester Vargas Pipersky, was the supervisor in the senior center until her retirement this year. We had the best program in the entire valley at that point, prior to COVID-19. I want us to get back to a place where our seniors and youth have top notch senior and youth centers  We need to get those programs back on track.”
Pipersky said, “I look forward to this opportunity to serve the people. Having been an officer within the city for 40 years, I can’t give up. I want to help our employees and residents within the city. I am looking forward to the opportunity to help.”
-M.G.

By Carlos Avalos
As you walk down the grey, dimly lit halls of the Fontana Police department, you are immediately plummeted back to the pre-civil rights era, where minorities were not treated fairly in American society. While some people are not made particularly uncomfortable by this ambiance, it is hardly welcoming to people of color. Predominant in the historic photographs of the department and its personnel displayed throughout police headquarters are white, that is Caucasian, officers. Some of the more modern photographs on the walls are scenes of officers engaged in detentions and making arrests. Other pictures project a sort of Humphrey Bogart glamour, as officers are seen fraternizing with women. As you approach the rollcall room of the station, you can’t help but be reminded that you are surrounded by an old, white male-dominated police force. There are few photos of African-American officers. There is one police ID card of a black officer, amid those for dozens of white officers. If you use a magnifying glass, you may be able to see one civilian, a black female employee standing in police formation, in a crowd of Caucasians.
Over the decades, diversity within the Fontana Police Department has changed imperceptibly and at a glacial pace. Fontana remains the least diverse police agency in the Inland Empire. Out of the department’s 197 sworn officers, there are only two recently-hired African Americans. This recruitment only came after several other minority officers were forced out of the police department. Simultaneously, African Americans represent roughly 12 percent of the city’s population.
While the city of Fontana is approximately 60.2 percent Hispanic, Latinos represent 16 percent of the police force. Most of the police officer positions are reserved for white males, many of whom have a familial association, by blood or marriage, with other white members of the department. Nepotism within the Fontana Police Department has for some time been an issue, and continues to flourish. Meanwhile, other people, specifically minorities, find themselves trying to penetrate what has been characterized as the department’s “good ol’ boy” culture that has traditionally dominated much of American government and its law enforcement agencies.
With considerable frequency, minority youth join police-sponsored programs like the Explorer and Cadet programs, only to be washed out or skipped over for recruits who are well-connected. One recent instance of this occurred in 2018, where two captains’ sons were recruited just after two minority, senior officers were forced out of the department. One of these well-connected recruits was recently arrested for a sexual assault on a minor.
In the department’s hallway of fame, you can see numerous photos of white officers performing their jobs and some standing in common police formation. Even the most eagle-eyed observer will not find any African-American officers depicted separately. This is partly because Negro officers scarcely existed and the few that did exist were simply left out of station décor.
As is often the case in people’s homes, where personal photos, memorabilia and knick-knacks allow guests or visitors to immediately size up what is important to the occupants, the photos and décor in a police department lobby or gracing the walls of its hallways or offices can give department outsiders a glimpse of the organization’s culture and values.
Most minority officers within the so-called Fontana police family are treated like forgotten stepchildren or bastards. Over its 68 years of existence, the Fontana Police Department has only employed a handful of African-Americans. As often as not, once the Fontana Police Department has hired black officers deemed to have met the organization’s standards, those officers’ careers end abruptly, as they have been forced to resign or they were terminated for less than clear, questionable, indefensible or frivolous reasons. There has been no shortage of black applicants for positions with the department, but for reasons that remain unexplained, the vast majority of them are screened out during the hiring process. Increasingly, as more and more potential black and minority candidates for positions on the Fontana force have heard of the difficult and biased hiring process, they refrain from applying, considering doing so to be futile or a waste of their time and effort.
There have never been more than four black police officers at any given time employed at the Fontana Police Department. In recent years, this number has dwindled to one or two black officers. In the history of the Fontana Police Department, there have been four black officers who surpassed the rank of basic police officer or patrolman. The promotional ceiling for three of those four was the rank of corporal, considered to be a non-investigatory patrol-or-basic-enforcement-officer supervisor roughly equivalent in status to that of detective. A single black department employee was able to promote above the rank of corporal. While those four officers were highly decorated and rare, their photos are not displayed on the walls at police headquarters. Out of the scores of photos the department features showing a single officer, none of those is an African-American officer. There are some photos of the department’s few Hispanic officers, and those looking carefully or employing a magnifying glass can discern one or two or three black officers standing in police formation. These photos are located just outside the detective bureau, near the internal affairs office. These photos are used at times to identify officers during investigations of police misconduct.
It is perhaps noteworthy that the department chose to honor one deceased white officer who died off duty out of uniform but opted to not honor two African-American officers with the department who died while in uniform. The department accorded that particular deceased white officer – Aaron Scharff – with the honor of naming the department’s special enforcement detail’s training center after him.
Sergeant Aaron Scharff died in his residence off duty. His photo is displayed at different spots throughout the police station, and the department’s administrators dedicated the special enforcement detail (SED) training center where the special weapons and training team, known by the acronym SWAT, hones its skills, to him.
As you walk further down the station hallway, a turn of the corner brings you to the SMASH unit’s area of the station. SMASH is an acronym for San Bernardino Movement Against Street Hoodlums, implying officers assigned to that division deal primarily with hardened thugs. Indeed, in large measure that is how the officers act when they put on their green polo shirts and cargo pants to patrol the streets of Fontana. Citizens in the community report that SMASH officers act in ways that are indistinguishable from the gang members they are assigned to control. SMASH officers evince a militaristic attitude toward many of those they encounter when in this mode, at times treating citizens as if they are common criminals. On patrol, the SMASH unit, collectively and as single officers, find it challenging to role shift from dealing with gangsters to interacting with the community’s residents who are simply going about their business in territory where the department believes gang members are active. This has provoked a hostile attitude towards the police. Many citizens have complained that SMASH officers take their personal information during questionable detentions and store it in law enforcement databases, which are used inappropriately for gang identification at a later date. This information is used nationwide, as it is by extension reposited into the Cal-Gangs law enforcement database. This blurring of the distinction between bona fide gang members and their victims is doubly disenabling for law enforcement, entailing unnecessary future delays when investigators must sift through a too-numerous suspect pool as well as triggering an uncooperative response from potential witnesses.
The photos on the walls in the SMASH unit area suggest enforcement is primarily focused on minorities. Virtually all of the photos displayed there depict officers detaining and arresting people of color. Meanwhile, there are other volatile, active white gangs in Fontana such as; NLR- Nazi Low Riders, Skin Heads, AB-Aryan Brotherhood, Peni (Public Enemy Number 1) and the Hells Angels. None of the FPD station photos depict these active white gang members being detained or arrested. Conspicuously absent are photos showing positive interactions with the police.
Whereas the bias inherent in the Fontana Police Department’s past operations and culture was open and overt, today it is institutionalized and covert. The department strategically employs a smattering of minorities in a way that successfully obscures the department’s traditional white-dominated structure, using these minority officers as racial camouflage. This allows the department, or elements within it, to carry out unscrupulous acts against other unsuspecting minority members of the community. Some of those minority officers, perceiving that they are tokens being utilized to propagate the agenda of the regime, have rejected the ethos of the department and broken with its command structure. In many of the cases where the department administration has encountered this dissent, those officers have been ostracized, extending to assaults on those officers’ careers.
On the second floor of police headquarters is the department’s traffic division office. The vast majority of the photos in that area show white traffic officers conducting field sobriety tests on Hispanic men. The faces of these Hispanic men are not concealed, a demonstration that the reputations, feelings and dignity of those citizens are insignificant.
The department’s halls are visited by the public during station tours and community events. When the station was freshly renovated in 2013, then-Chief Rodney Jones and Mayor Acquanetta Warren, toured the station with members of the community. Some community members voiced their concern with the militaristic and 1960s-like nostalgia that emanated from the remodel. The early 1940s and into the late 1990s was a time in Fontana where racism was rampant and minorities were accorded cold welcome. Fontana history is replete with the horrific experience of the African-American Short Family, whose members in 1945 were burned to death in their home. In 1980, an African-American man was shot in the back for merely working as a telephone repairman. These incidents were perpetrated by white supremacists affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. To the media, the Fontana Police downplayed racial issues, despite crosses being burned on minorities’ lawns. KKK rallies were launched at City Hall. There were heated protests resisting the Klan in Fontana. During many of the public encounters between the Klan and their detractors, it was not the police but rather the Hells Angels, to their credit, who inserted themselves between the differing parties to preserve the peace.
One photo displayed at the police station, dated August 9, 1980, shows the Fontana Police SED – Special Enforcement Detail – dressed in full riot gear, with a police dog, surrounding an anti-KKK demonstration. The following day Fontana police also responded in full riot gear as the KKK arrived to host their rally in front of City Hall. Buried in the Fontana Herald News’ newspaper archives is a photo not featured in any of the displays on the headquarters hallway walls. That photo accompanies a story about the KKK rally, showing a Fontana police officer standing in close proximity to a Klan member. The officer is holding a confiscated dagger. Possession of such an item is a felony. The caption for the photo reads, “Fontana police officer confiscates knife found in possession of Klan supporter.” No arrest was made. One wonders whether an arrest would have been made if the dagger had been found in the possession of one of the minority anti-Klan protestors.
While members of the general public do not commonly have access behind the locked doors of the police department, officers, police volunteers, civilian employees and Explorer and Cadet program youth do. The depictions in those photos, many embodying a militaristic image of the police department, reinforce an attitude toward minority community members in which they are represented as unwelcome and insignificant, an ethos at odds with the theme of respecting the members of the public the department is sworn to serve.
A photo of one African-American man that circulated in the bowels of the FPD documented the desecration of a black man’s corpse. A Fontana Police Department evidence technician placed an eaten chicken bone in the deceased man’s hand as his corpse lay filleted on the San Bernardino County Coroner’s autopsy table. The photo was taken as some order of a racist joke, based upon the murdered man having been found behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken operation on Sierra Avenue. This crime – the alteration of evidence – was not properly investigated and Fontana Police Department administrators concealed the crime from the survivor’s family, as well as the public. When white Police Corporal Ray Schneider reported the incident, his previously promising career plateaued and he was forced out of the department. The 1994 murder of the victim went unsolved.
Now-retired FPD Lieutenant Bob Morris in 2006 carried out a mock lynching of Martin Luther King Jr. He constructed a makeshift noose and hung an MLK doll in the presence of other officers. The department made denials and resisted any disclosure of the incident when word about it leaked out.
In 2003, three minorities died at the hands of the same group of SMASH officers within 5 months. None of the officers was disciplined or subjected to corrective training to prevent further deaths. All of the officers involved in those deaths were eventually promoted to high ranking positions. Current Police Chief Billy Green is one of those officers. A lawsuit relating to the three suspicious deaths was settled out of court for undisclosed amounts of money. There were two versions of what happened to these three minorities. One version was submitted in official police reports, while another version was told around the police station which suggested the men, after having been identified as priority SMASH targets, were subjected to excessive force that played a role in their deaths.
The city engaged a team of high-priced lawyers to clear Green and the other SMASH officers. The deaths were eloquently explained away as routine police work in a city where in excess of 80 percent of the population are classified as minorities.