Letters

LBPD Corruption

[Letter to District Attorney Jackie Lacey from local attorney Thomas E. Beck]

I am enclosing a copy of today’s Long Beach Beachcomber and direct your attention to Stephen Downing’s column entitled “Misplaced Loyalty.” As you will see, it discloses a Long Beach Officer (Michael Hynes) who is bragging about how his department covered for him knowing he was lying so as to keep Hynes’ criminal misconduct away from your office and the Brady roster Hynes and his partner Faris have long belonged on.

I am bringing this to your attention myself because I am certain no one at LBPD will ever deal correctly with these demonstrably dishonest cops and will deliberately keep your office in the dark. Because your office does not put miscreants on its Brady list until and unless a law enforcement agency asks you to, defendants who are entitled under Brady to know about a prosecution witnesses’ proven proclivity for deceit and mendacity are prejudiced daily.

My client, Miguel Contreras, was harmed by these officers’ omission from the Brady list when we were defending the criminal case these officers fraudulently and maliciously caused by their wilful falsehoods. Mr. Cervantes’ criminal case was dismissed on the eve of trial without my ever learning what Brady evidence existed which I should have been given without asking. It took our civil suit in federal court to learn about these officers’ abysmal records, all of which had been concealed from me as defense counsel and withheld by LBPD from the District Attorney’s office. LBPD knew of information that is required by Brady to be revealed but was not.

Hynes and Sgt. Faris have been proven to have framed my client and his cousin and lied about their wrongful violent behavior from the start in 2010. They conspired to cause both victims to be criminally prosecuted based on their wilful lies, false crime and arrest reports, false I/A interviews and throughout our civil case and jury trial. The jury trial finally and for the first time exposed their massive corruption.

It is not enough that Long Beach taxpayers had to shell out over $2 million for the harm these officers caused. Neither cop has ever been properly held accountable, which is what prompted me to complain to Long Beach’s chief of police, city manager and CPCC head after our verdict came in. These parties deliberately dragged their feet to allow more than a year to pass enabling the time within which the officers could be disciplined to lapse and, as the column notes, came out favorably to the officers in direct contradiction of the civil jury’s unanimous determination Hynes and Faris engaged in a pattern of deceit and falsehoods as well as perjury.

The weakness of your Brady catalogue is that it depends entirely on the cooperation of law enforcement agencies and officials to alert you to name officers to the list. In Long Beach, this pattern of withholding is institutionalized. If you didn’t know it before, you should by now.

Thomas E. Beck

School Shootings

In the Beachcomber letters section [March 16], writer Janet Starkey wrote about banning guns as an answer to school violence. She stated that in Europe guns are banned and authorities are able to enforce that ban, and to research it. So I did.

In a Washington Post story, dated February 2015, a European Commission study released in 2014 cited an “estimate of 67 million illicit firearms across the continent.”

Here’s more from the story. “It’s very easy to get such a weapon,” said Hans Jorgen Bonnichsen, a former operations director for the Danish security service PET. “It’s not only a problem for Denmark. It’s a problem for all of Europe.” He was speaking about hand guns and assault weapons like Kalashnikovs.

A study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10 when measured by death rate per million from mass public shootings.

If an anti-gun person cannot prove that banning guns results in there being ‘no illicit guns in the hands of criminals’, their entire argument is baseless. It becomes nothing more than taking personal feelings and imposing their will on the freedom and liberty of an entire society. That’s what you see happening on the national stage and they’re using children to spread misinformation!

Its unsubstantiated conclusion/opinion being used to ignore a right guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution because they just don’t like guns. Go figure.

Robert Van der Upwich

LB Sanctuary City

So when we lose all our federal funding we will know who to blame: the idiots that run this city, namely the mayor and his motley crew of council members. Elections are coming up; please remember who passed this.

Maria (online)

City Council has gone rogue. Sad day for Long Beach California.

Eric Schlatter

It is time to remove any council member that will not support federal law. I am getting tired of my tax dollars going to protect people here illegally.

Ted (online)

Celebrate, Drive Wisely

Prom and graduation plans can easily derail if dangerous choices are made. In 1992, I was 16 and an athlete at Tracy High School. My eventful life as a junior ended when a drunken driver hit me.  My teenage life was then filled with surgeries and therapy.

With my condition, I was unable to study at any college, like Pacific Coast University, independently. My hearing, talking and walking are damaged, and I cannot drive. I never imagined living like this.

I am thankful people are slowly learning to not drive drunk. Please, continue that.

We are in the age of technology. A new driving threat comes: cell phones. As a teenager, I only saw them in science fiction films. I see them everywhere now. Driving drunk and cell phones both cause distraction and impair driving. Each can cause drivers to follow too closely, not brake on time or weave into traffic.

Texting is common. You could be driving in a neighborhood checking your e-mail and run into a car or even a pedestrian. If your phone rings when driving, do not check the message. The speed and location does not matter. Taking one look could be your last. People kill people, phones do not. Drivers must police themselves and avoid the cell phone and drinking when driving.

Lori Martin