(Other Voices is an opinion column that provides a criminal justice forum where different viewpoints can be expressed by people from all political, socio-economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds.)
By: Armando Vazquez
Guest Contributor
This ruthless war on our youth and the obscene and mindless expenditure of millions of taxpayers’ dollars is American Exceptionalism Oxnard style.
Former Mayor Holden and his cabal wanted to build a militaristic tough on crime, zero tolerance administration, carried out on the city’s youth of color.
The elite of Oxnard, with a wink and knob, supported the assault on our youth, no matter the cost; after all it was not their money. Or to be more precise it was their money, their property and their power that this youth war was fabricated on in the first place. Create war to consolidate power, sound familiar?
I will continue with this narrative until the City Council, The new City Manager and the Police Chief all conceded that the current war on our youth is a dismal failure.
The war on youth has produced nothing to show but hundreds if not thousands of young lives ruined lives, hatred and distrust for the police in the communities of color, millions of dollars squandered on retired well placed ex-cops, carpet bagging know nothing consultants and all manner of CBO’s that are willing to sell out the youth of Oxnard for a little slice of the rotten pie.
December, 2008
August 27, 2013 1.3 million
In 2008 despite the fact that serious crime had been on a steady decline for more than decade, and the OPD’s public relations department boasted that the city of Oxnard was one of the safest cities for it size in all of the United States, the Oxnard Police Department, along with the County of Ventura DA’s Offices, and the Sheriff’s Department continued their unrelenting full court law enforcement assault on the youth of Oxnard.
2008 was the year that the Oxnard Alliance for Community Strength was birthed, the father of this chest thumping monstrosity was former Mayor Tom Holden; the midwives were then Police Chief John Crombach and Ventura County DA Chief Greg Totten.
The Oxnard Alliance for Community Strength was designed obstensively to curb gang violence with the misguided and naive ideations of using imported and relatively new and emerging major city gang suppression models and strategies from as far away as Boston, New York and other major American cities that had been experimented with and resulted in varying degrees of success in eradicating local gangs and gang violence.
The Oxnard Alliance was an ill conceived and a costly blunder from the beginning. In fact, the dismal failure of the Alliance has proven that is was nothing more than a self serving and a very expensive promotional election campaign strategy shamelessly produced and promoted by the then tough on crime mayor and his flunkies, and of course it is still with around today doing absolutely nothing to help our at-risk youth transform their lives.
In fact the only thing that the Oxnard Alliance created was a huge slush fund for former high ranking OPD officers and high priced consultants. The monies that came to Alliance were from various state and federal funding streams; the most notable of the funding streams was the Cal GRIP funds that began pouring into Oxnard, from state coffers in 2008. To date the Alliance has received approximately 1.3 million Cal GRIP dollars.
Where has the all the money gone? You can begin by asking your Deputy City Manager Grace Magistrale Hoffman, or high priced carpet bagging consultant Barbara Marquez O’Neil , they should know exactly where the roughly 1.3 million dollars have gone. Now asked these folks for supporting information, data, charts, files, quantifiable and verifiable results on the youth that have been provided services and programming. In other words; what did the citizens of Oxnard get for 1.3 million?
I will tell you what the city of Oxnard got; one high priced consultant after another, almost all are former high ranking OPD police officers and flunkies, with a couple of notable consultants exceptions that are noted in the attachment.
The consultants that have received contracts from the city of Oxnard through the Alliance slush funds are Tom Cady, retired OPD, Mike Madlock, retired OPD, Edgar Mohorko (clergy), Gregory Runyon (clergy), Barbara Marquez O’Neil, the DA’s office, City Impact. Other recipients may have been the OPD’s PALS, Oxnard’s City Corp., and the OPD’s Clergy Council.
Other consultants may have been hired from The California Cities Gang Prevention Network. Not one local CBO, as far as I am aware, with the exception of City Impact received funds from the Alliance.
I write this expose because the City of Oxnard has again authorized, this year 2013, The Oxnard Alliance, under the supervision of Tom Cady, to submit yet another proposal to Cal GRIP requesting more than $600,000.00 to continue this failed and now totally useless and obsolete so called community safety program. The Alliance will probably get the Cal GRIP grant as it has done four times in the past decade.
2013
Between 2013-2015 1.7 million
The questions are what will the new city council do with this new Cal GRIP grant? Will they continue to turn a blind eye to the scandalous cronyism and old boy nepotism that richly reward a few retired cops and their lackeys at the expense of the vital services and programs needed to serve the most at-risk youth of our community? Or will they, investigate, act and acknowledge as long as the Oxnard Alliance is controlled by former OPD officers nothing good will come of this failed community safety fiasco. Left unchecked and properly supervised the Alliance that will continue to devour the city’s precious youth empowerment dollars and resources. Shamelessly left to its own devices the Alliance will continue to roll out year after year, phony, failed and oppressive “community safety” strategies that do nothing to help our at-risk youth, but rather fatten up the pockets of the greedy and shameless good old boys and girls network that still thrives in Oxnard.
“Diminishing Dollars” and “Little Wiggle Room”
In conclusion the disingenuous assertion by some city officials that “there are diminishing dollars and very little wiggle room”, to move and shift line item monies around in the city budget to fund community youth empowerment programs is put simply a lie. What is at issue here is entrenched mind sets and entrenched priorities.
For example, currently the yearly funds generated from Oxnard’s Measure O alone are anywhere from 5-11 million dollars. The language of Measure O is such that it has given ample “wiggle room” for the city council to fund the Police and Fire Departments, fix countless potholes in city streets and back fill questionable budget line item deficits, yet not one penny has “wiggled” into funding community based organization that are providing restorative and empowering program for our youth.
So the issue is not the lack of money but rather a lack of backbone and a different mindset that acknowledges that police enforcement, suppression and militarization of our community cannot possibly be the best answer to a safe, prosperous, inclusive and creative city that I believe we all want.
We must organize, due our research, our due diligence and begin to actively work to create a movement in the city that can begin with the youth of the community that demands a review, appropriate action, and the redistribution of Oxnard city Cal GRIP, Measure O, CDBG funds, and all other local streams of community empowerment dollars. The youth and their allies must demand that equitable city of Oxnard dollars to be spent on community based organizations that have a successful history of helping and working toward restorative, redemptive and empowering changes in the lives of our youth and their families.
To: Carmen Ramirez Jaime Casillas Roberto Juarez Dave Rodriguez David Cruz and 87 more…
Feb 2, 2015 at 5:03 PM
City Council: Carmen Ramirez, Dorina Padilla, Mayor Tim Flynn, Bert Perello:
Tomorrow you will have the Gang Intervention and Street Outreach Services contract authorizations presented to you for approval. The Acuna community Center at the Cafe on A strongly opposes this “Cross and Sword” approach to the City’s social building community work with the at-promise youth, people on probation or parole, offenders and the way too many folks that have be caught and terminally trapped by the criminal justice in Oxnard.
The point man Ken Klopman is a former city cop. You guys preach transparency, rigorous competition, and the elimination of cronyism yet this program and funding is the most egregious good old boy legacy from the FOM, friends of former mayor Tom Holden era.
I write about self-determination a lot because it is so badly needed in our community; again we leave it up to the cops to develop community social empowerment and liberation program. This request made by Klopman smacks of continued community repression by the long ago discredited “Cross and Sword” colonial model, gross ignorance or indifference to the real needs of the targeted community, of “placating the cop voting bloc”, sole source contracting injustices and vile shameless stupidity. Please reject this approval until other community based organizations are at the very least interviewed to do the work that this cop and his homies are doing in the city of Oxnard.
Respectfully,
Armando Vazquez
May 12, 19, 26 2015 1.3million
(CalGRIP) program grant.)Cal-GRIP RFP Released: On Friday, the City of Oxnard issued an Request for Proposal (RFP) seeking a qualified CBO/FBO to act as the lead agency responsible for carrying out the direct services activities of the California Gang Reduction, Intervention, and Prevention (Cal-GRIP) Program grant, Project Transformation Pathways (PTP). A mandatory pre-proposal meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, May 12, 2015 from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. in the Human Resources Community Room, located at 300 West 3rd Street, First Floor, Oxnard, CA 93030. Only proposals from agencies that are present at the mandatory meeting will be considered for funding. RFP application packets may be obtained from the Purchasing Office or the City of Oxnard website: http://www.ci.oxnard.ca.us. Proposal packets are due on Friday, May 29, 2015 before 4:00 p.m. Any inquiries regarding this notice should be directed to Patricia Garcia, Buyer at [email protected] or (805) 385-7538. A copy of the RFP is attached.
This was not an open process, the fix was in, Klopman, Hoffman and the Alliance Gang already had the money counted, divided and awarded long before the “mandatory” RFP was convened.
I have been following this pathetic CALGrip affair since 2008, I have made every effort to be through in my research and I may off by a few thousand dollars with respect to funds actually award to the city of Oxnard’s Alliance, but the approximate $3.7 million is a number that accurately reflects the amount of millions squandered on the war that Oxnard has declared on its youth of color.
Armando Vazquez, is an owner of Café on A / Acuña Gallery and Cultural Center in Oxnard, California The Café on A has had a historical presence in the Ventura County art scene for 15 years.
For more information on Cafe on A:
Executive Directors Dr. Deborah DeVries and Armando Vazquez
438 South “A” Street, Oxnard , CA 93030 Box 1387, Oxnard 93032-1387
Phone: 805-216-4560
Perhaps this is an example of the pot calling the kettle black.