AS THE FUR FLIES

AS THE FUR FLIES: The dish continues and the dishes continue to fly in the local paper and in the blogosphere today over Juan Wilson’s weekend column and yesterday’s flippant response from Kaua`i Police Chief Darryl Perry.

This morning found a report by Wilson at his Island Breath web site purporting that it was not actually the “Mission Statement” of KPD that the Chief changed without going through proper state procedures as we detailed yesterday but rather the “Chief’s Message” which is right below the mission statement at the KPD web site but is not really worth the bandwidth it’s written on as an official document.

The “message” now includes the words “Aloha Spirit” and “integrity” according to Wilson, who posted Perry’s letter and a link to the new “Chief’s Message” and original “Mission Statement”

So essentially it seems that, if not guilty of illegally changing the Mission Statement of the Department, Chief Perry misrepresented what had changed as a response to Wilson’s critique of what’s wrong with KPD’s Mission Statement especially when compared with those on other islands.

But a quick look at the local paper also found another glib straw-man tirade this time from Police Commission Chair and ex-marine Tom Iannucci saying it indeed was the Mission Statement that was formulated in an insular manner without public input.

Iannucci said

The mission statement is just one of many works in progress. Before your attack on our department and its mission statement, the updated statement was being handed out. Myself, as a police commissioner, along with all the other commissioners present and the leaders of the department were handed the updated mission statement that has been worked on for months with the input from various members of KPD. Among other things, the revised mission statement included a section on the “aloha spirit” and its inclusion in Hawai‘i state law.

But with words like “verbal buffoonery at its finest”, “what planet Wilson (is) writing from”, “trash talk” and “the right to bash our department” Iannucci accuses Wilson of wanting to disarm the force and take away their patrol cars, all the while fear mongering and raising the specter of the “Oklahoma City bombing or the destruction of the World Trade Center towers”, waving the militarization-of-the-police-force flag with such aplomb as to make any Homeland Security nut and Patriot Act-loving Chaneyac’s crotch swell with a testosterone-fueled pride and fury.

But blogger Larry Geller of Disappeared News http://disappearednews.com/ wonders what article Iannucci and Perry read. He wrote us an email saying:

Judging from the reaction, Juan must have hit some sensitive points.

They are getting better at raising straw men. Now we've got the
fire department on skateboards?? Patrolling in electric carts is quite common, security guards use those and even Segways, as do some police I understand. Unless I missed something, Juan didn't suggest trading in their SUVs for these things, nor turning in their weapons.

The dialog is going. You have a newspaper that seems willing to take these things up. The Honolulu Advertiser here is quite different.

We’ve hear word that Wilson and Perry are tentatively scheduled to appear on a KKCR radio talk show on Thursday at 4 p.m. but whether their will both be live or whether the Chief will only sit for a pre-taped interview with programmer Jonathan Jay remains to be seen.

And evidently Darryl and Tom weren’t the only ones who read Juan’s column as an ill-considered, wild and fanciful rant.

This morning found Koko’s human, numero-uno Kaua`i news-blogger Joan Conrow assailing not just Wilson’s column but his future viability to speak on the issue saying:

Juan has already blown his wad with the cops, and he’s not going to get anywhere with them from here. He has lost all effectiveness, if he ever had any, as a spokesman on this issue.

She prefaced this by saying:

Juan lost credibility, at least with me, and most likely many others, when he started out by saying the cops should give up their guns and cars and use “sporty electric golf carts,” bicycles and horse patrols. That was before he morphed into a conspiracy bit about the cops “providing speculators security for unwanted development” and “protecting the pesticide spraying of GMO corporations on the Westside.” Huh?

When you come from an extreme premise like that, it’s easy to be discredited and dismissed, which both the chief and Iannucci did in their responses. And in the process, the legitimate concerns about the further militarization of police that Juan also raised go unexamined.

We’re not going to defend everything Juan had to say or how he said it but Tom Iannucci’s tome is certainly more indefensible in ostensibly denying there are any governance and oversight problems and giving the impression that everything’s hunky-dory at the “just doing our job” KPD.

Iannucci said

Unlike your conspiracy theory, our police officers have to go out and provide protection for both the Superferry and those who protest against it. They don’t arrest protesters, but those who violate those laws that allow us all free speech

If Iannucci is going to deny the harassment of dissidents then how about getting Perry to talk about the Apioalina and Mawae incidents instead of just stonewalling.

Iannucci says that

“to even insinuate that the chief and our officers are in some way ‘suppressing’ Hawaiian Sovereignty groups or ‘protecting’ the pesticide spraying by our children in schools is just shameful”.

If Tom is denying KPD’s complicity in any “cover-up” of what really happened in the west side spraying incidents then where is the police investigation of Sygenta and even the DOH? Perhaps it would clear them, perhaps it would collar them. But if there’s “no comment” and apparently no investigation how can the people think there isn’t something wrong?

Perhaps the lack of any substantive investigation in the light of overwhelming evidence Sygenta lied and tried to mislead and cover up their complicity and place kids in the way of harm is what’s “shameful”.

If KPD doesn’t know what everyone in town knows it may be because they didn’t try to find out.

Or are all the parent, teachers and community leaders and members in Waimea who allege a crime, a cover-up and a lack of police investigation all a bunch of liars and nuts, to be ignored and ridiculed too?

For Tom and Darryl’s information getting officers out of their cars and onto bikes, horses, electric carts and even on foot is a national trend in policing and is a part and parcel of a movement called “Community Policing”. Try googleing it. Thousands of jurisdictions throughout the country practice it. Our last two chiefs were outspoken proponents.

We would turn it around on Tom- is there never a circumstance where an officer getting out of his or her car and going sans six-shooter appropriate? It sounds like your answer is no.- never. That’s just as absurd as saying police should never drive cars or carry guns which we never head Juan say in the first place, only hearing this straw man from you and Darryl.

It isn’t about taking away all the cars and guns but it is about, where appropriate, putting policing on the ground in the community and making the officers part of that community.

But possibly Iannucci and Perry, if they have heard of this national trend in policing, see it as a challenge to the “us and them” mentality that people legitimately fear is the growing local trend under their tutelage.

That is what the problem is and why people like Juan see conspiracy everywhere. Whether they agree with him or not the Chief’s and Chair’s job is to understand, acknowledge and deal with the “reality” that Wilson isn’t alone and not to concoct their own fantasies to counter with an equally fanciful hyped-up, paranoiac “reality”.

Iannucci and Perry owe it to us and themselves to figure out why there are these “conspiracy theories”. Perhaps it is the dots they are unintentionally drawing that people are connecting.

Wilson is apparently judging KPD by it’s words and deeds and lately it has been dismal on both accounts. The fact that Iannucci and Perry don’t understand and in fact ridicule Wilson’s reaction to some of the Department’s recent alleged abusive words and deeds and refusal to discuss them is more telling than Wilson’s apprehension of and at a conspiracy.