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Saturday, February 23, 2019

Mesa PD Grappling To Get-A-Handle On Excessive Use-of-Force

It's hard not to make-a-mockery over the murky mishandling of allegations and lawsuits lodged against the Mesa PD and the City of Mesa about officer-involved use-of-force when both the public and investigative journalists have taken on more than just "bad behavior" or just "a few bad apples" in civilian police practices in the past few years.
The front lines of multiple confrontations frequently resulting in injuries or deaths to citizens have been crossed time-and-time again - way to many times. Not just last year . . .

Two new reports barely scratch-the-surface of the fuzzy under-belly the Mesa PD would prefer not to get exposed when citizens are starting to demand more oversight after years of being kept in the dark over efforts to keep the "Mesa's Finest" open, transparent and accountable.
We now have a new class of Civilian Warriors, many former military and special-ops veterans, who get hired and trained to perform their missions "To Protect & Serve" the public.
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NOTE: Readers of this blog can use THE SEARCHBOX to access more than a few posts about officer-involved use-of-force incidents here in Mesa.
You might want to start with the case of the killing of Daniel Shaver where his widow and family have lodged a large claim for damages currently pending for more than $100M in lawsuit against the City of Mesa.
Another claim for $1M got settled.
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Mesa police chief details departmental changes after high-profile force incidents

Posted: 1:48 PM, Feb 22, 2019 Updated: 6:15 PM, Feb 22, 2019

By: Max Walker

MESA, AZ — A series of investigations launched by the Mesa Police Department following several high-profile incidents that called officers' use of force into question last summer are nearly complete, Chief Ramon Batista announced Friday.
The department launched three investigations and hired an outside firm, the Police Executive Research Forum, after two incidents in May gained national attention. . .
The review by the Police Executive Research Forum is not yet complete, but all internal investigations are, Batista said. The officers involved in the two incidents will be disciplined, but not terminated. Due to the officers' ability to appeal their punishment, Batista said he could not disclose specifics. . .
"We are committed to continuing our pursuit for the highest standards and promoting our mission of partnering with our community to prevent and reduce crime and to ensure procedural justice by building trust, showing respect, and preserving human rights," Batista said.
Source: ABC15 News
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Breitbart Headline on Dexcom Job Loss Here In Mesa

Who's not clapping now after all the over-hype hoopla about "job creation" from Mesa Mayor Jivin' John Giles at a Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony for Dexcom's opening at the re-invented Fiesta Mall Corporate Park. Apparently the mayor's bragging rights about Mesa's "business-friendly" [low-paying wages] environment have been dashed by outsourcing jobs.

THANK YOU for the Jobs . . ?

Just one more dose of reality for the increasing tendencies of John Giles, the former track star, who's running again to re-elected to mayor's office in the 2020 campaign.
Giles has already formed and registered a committee for fund-raising purposes, located at the address of his private accident law/personal injury law Giles & Dickson where an employee there is the treasurer of his PAC to save his seat in public office.

He's not without his challenges when he used to say he liked to "under-promise and over-deliver" . . .
< Here's another inserted image of Mayor John Giles taking to the stage at another opportunity last year with AZ Governor Doug Ducey. That's the back-of-the-head of Mesa City Councilmember Kevin Thompson in the foreground.
The occasion: job expansion due to the federal funding for defense/aerospace contracts at a facility in District 6.
[It's not likely those domestic MRO jobs will get off-shored or out-sourced.]
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In the case of Dexcom, lured to re-locate here from California, a medical-device manufacturer, they got a calling to off-shore and outsource jobs to The Phillipines where "the business-friendly environment" works better in spite of the favorable corporate incentives offered by city officials.
Other news and previous posts on this blog were featured in a post yesterday, following a filing with the Security Exchange Commission [SEC] that was made public in Market Watch.
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Breitbart News definitely has a way-with-words:
Dexcom to Lay Off 350 Americans,
Outsource Jobs to the Philippines

by John Binder

Multinational corporation Dexcom, Inc. — which manufactures continuous glucose monitoring systems — has announced that it will lay off about 350 Americans in San Diego, California, and Mesa, Arizona, to outsource their jobs overseas, and specifically to the Philippines.

Dexcom executives announced this week that the corporation will lay off 350 American workers in order to outsource and offshore their jobs to foreign countries where workers are paid slave wages.

Breitbart.com/Politics 22 Feb 2019

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"Despite boasting about massive sales and rapid company growth, Dexcom executives will outsource the hundreds of American jobs to a facility in the Philippines and in other regions of Asia. Meanwhile, Dexcom CEO Terrance Gregg continues earning a yearly salary of more than $3 million.
Cheap, foreign labor is the most prominent driver of multinational corporations outsourcing American workers’ jobs to third-world nations, with the help of global free trade.
For instance, while the average yearly American family’s income is roughly $73,000, the average family’s income in the Philippines is about $5,200 U.S. dollars, making it a haven for multinational corporations to exploit cheap labor, lay off Americans, and widen executives’ profit margins.
Outsourcing and the offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries is a business model that has been embraced by multinational corporations like Wells Fargo, General Motors, AT&T, Harley-Davidson, Ralph Lauren, Nike, and IBM have all laid off Americans in order to send their jobs overseas.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Friday, February 22, 2019

Just A Coincidence: Food & Real Estate + Mesa Vice Mayor Mark Freeman Gets A Feature

Just like staff writers for mainstream media like to write 'could be' or 'might be' just a serendipity - and just a coincidence in the timing - all over again when your MesaZona blogger got a feed on this from Urban Land Institute
Food & Real Estate
ULI’s Food and Real Estate Project explores the mutually beneficial relationship between food-based amenities—such as working farms, community gardens, food halls, restaurants, and grocery stores—and real estate. It highlights how the growing interest in and awareness of fresh, local food is spurring innovation in development projects.
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What's that "Farm-to-Table" Mantra all about anyway?
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19 February 2019

District 1 Mesa City Councilmember Mark Freeman Gets A Feature Story

https://mesazona.blogspot.com/2019/02/district-1-mesa-city-councilmember-mark.html

To be honest, your MesaZona blogger was bowled over by just one more what appears to be yet another "planted-story" in mainstream media so soon after Mark Freeman was named Vice-Mayor. The feature was accompanied by 7 images of Freeman taken on a 1-acre plot of land at the SWC of Brown Road/Center Street that adjoins the Fitch Family Farm Homestead. The small parcel is irrigated by old open canal ditches. It is closely surrounded by larger parcels of real estate development to create family fortunes . . .

The land itself is lucrative, too, though more for what's to come than for what is planted there now.
Here's an easy-to-see time-lapse of the explosive expansion of Suburbia into what once were agriculture lands here in Maricopa County taken over by the Real Estate/Industrial Complex from 1900-2010.
It does not include the 3,600 acres in east Mesa, formerly the General Motors Proving Grounds, where new massive secluded suburban enclaves of Master-Planned Communities Eastmark and Cadence at Gateway are being built.
No mention of the new wealth for more family fortunes in suburban real estate speculation and development East Valley communities, instead we get this assertion from Freeman: "like Mesa's Eastmark and Gilbert's Agritopia, [they] already have embraced urban farming. . . " HUH?

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Reports

Agrihoods: Cultivating Best Practices
2018
Inspired by a growing body of evidence that developments centered on working farms can have a positive effect on human health, environmental sustainability, and real estate performance, Agrihoods: Cultivating Best Practices identifies strategies to aid developers and their partners in planning, creating, and operating single-family, multifamily, or mixed-use communities built with a working farm as a focus.

Cultivating Development: Trends and Opportunities at the Intersection of Food and Real Estate
2016

This publication explores how developers are integrating food-based amenities—such as farms, gardens, food halls, restaurants, and grocery stores—within projects, thereby generating real estate value and benefits for people and the planet.

Rogue Columnist Jon Talton Created A Hot Thread Re-Posting "Phoenix 101: The Mormons"

Jon Talton first posted his column back on June 23, 2009. Ten years and six months later Talton re-posted his primer in a post on Facebook on Arizona Memories just 23 hours ago:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/AZmemories/permalink
"An admin turned off commenting for this post"

Jon Talton shared a link to the group: Arizona Memories.

23 hrs

The name "Mormon" is now frowned upon by the LDS leadership. But here's my primer on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and their influence on metro Phoenix:

Phoenix 101: The Mormons

The Arizona Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in…

15 Comments

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". . . The Mormons were revered among the great Arizona pioneers. They were known for their generosity, including to "gentiles," [Laminates] something our family experienced. Mormons were hard-working, reliable, self-reliant, patrons of education and the arts. Mesa in those days was a beautiful small city, a monument to the energy and far-sightedness of its LDS founders. We would regularly drive down neat and prosperous Main Street to see the beautiful Arizona Temple. The Mormon kids with whom I went to high school were among the most talented in one of the country's top high-school fine arts program.

The Mormons were also powerful. That was clear even at an early age
. . . Mormons market themselves as Protestants, but they're not. LDS theology, which is intriguing, is based on continuing revelation . . . The LDS faith is different in many other ways, and compelling to millions. It's an American-born creed that is growing fast around the world. But it is generally opposed to equality of the sexes in the sense many modern Americans would understand it, and some lapsed Mormon women ("jack Mormons") tell horror stories. Well, every denomination has its problems and critics.
> The mainsteam LDS doesn't cover itself with glory on the issue of polygamy.
While it condemns the practice and excommunicates members who practice it, the church seems to have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. At times, it appears more interested in protecting its image than addressing the problem.
> Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle was defeated for re-election, largely because of mainstream Mormon unhappiness with the state's 1953 raid on the Short Creek polygamy community. The hamlet changed its name to Colorado City. We now know that polygamy isn't like Big Love. It involves child rape, welfare fraud, the banishment of young men who would compete with the powerful old bulls. It may never be stamped out. But there's always the sense that the main LDS wants us to look away.
In Arizona, the Mormons seem to have changed, and of course some of this is seeing things through the eyes of an adult who had been out in the big world, and whose job involves looking under rocks. Still...

Sweet, neat, industrious Mesa has been abandoned to blight, while Mormons with means made an exodus to the sprawl of Gilbert and Chandler and all the "master planned communities." That's sad. What's more portentous is the melding of the Mormons with the agenda of the far right. Given general voter apathy and the dependability of the Saints, this has given the LDS control over the Legislature, which has given them control over the state.
Not for nothing was a trip to Salt Lake City and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles among the first things on Michael Crow's agenda on taking over as president of ASU.

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> The Saints becoming the base of the Arizona Republican Party has resulted in odd outcomes, in some ways different from even Utah and in dissonance with many LDS tenets.
For example, the right in metro Phoenix was apoplectic against light rail, while the church in Utah insisted it be built there.
> The Mormons were always community builders and strong supporters of education. Not in central Arizona, where the right's politics are division and nihilism, if not outright calls for violence.
> Somehow the natural bent of any persecuted religion to tribalism -- uncorrected by pluralism, education and self-interest -- is enhanced by all the walls and gates of the suburbs.
> The virulent anti-immigrant stance of prominent Mormon politicians in the East Valley is starkly at odds with the church's missionary zeal in developing nations and among all people. I have heard through decent sources that the Salt Lake bigs aren't happy with all that the East Valley bigs stand for. Still...

The economic power of the church is one of the great un-done stories by the Information Center (although the Arizona Republic may have examined this years ago, it deserves an update and ongoing scrutiny).
Its vast land-holdings gave, and give, it a major say in the regional economy.
The Mormon farmers of the East Valley got rich selling off the land for subdivisions -- destroying the cooling miles of citrus and fields -- and ensuring the freeway system was built there early and thoroughly.
Yet the chuch has not used its power to build a diversified economy as it has in Utah.
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> On a level that seems smaller, but looms large, are the tribal business ties between LDS businessmen and their patrons or proteges in the state Legislature.
This surfaced momentarily in the infamous "alt-fuels" scandal, where LDS legislators and businessmen appeared to disproportionately profit from the tax-subsidized conversion of vehicles (which did nothing to help the environment). This was quickly swept under assorted rugs, carpets, runners and mats, unhindered by an incurious press.

It is a serious question in the Legislature's ongoing effort to defund the public schools and steer money to favored businessmen in the charter schools racket.
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> Readers of this blog might like to note that Craig Harris has published a series of reports - more than 9 years after Rogue Columnist Jon Talton's Primer that's proving to be prescient about conservative Mesa Mormon Republican Eddie Farnsworth, an owner and operator of charter schools who's making millions . . . In the image above we see former AZ State Senator Bob Worsley and Jerry Lewis , employed by Sequoia Charter Schools and the EdKey Corporation.
In spite of getting endorsed by both former Mesa Mayor Scott and current mayor John Giles to gain a seat on the Mesa City Council, he was defeated in the unsuccessful contest.
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> The LDS was always a big part of Arizona history. Today its power seems even greater. It's too bad that it appears to have veered off track, into an unbreakable veto elite that can stop progress but offer nothing to really address the metro area's monumental challenges, into a too-reliable partner and enabler of extremists, into something that plays into the cabal paranoia of those who fear and hate the Mormons.
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Talton ends that Rogue Columnist post from 2009 on an optimistic note:
I write this and then am reminded of Ira Fulton. Although he did his share of sprawl, he is among metro Phoenix's greatest philanthropists -- and at a time when fewer and fewer existed. He's given away hundreds of millions of dollars. A few years ago, I asked him why more of Arizona's most powerful people didn't do the same, how much of a difference it would make. Standing strong despite his cane, he said in a folksy voice, "Well, we're going to make that happen." Maybe so. The company he started ended up in bankruptcy court, another casualty of the crash. The good he built in the community, such as at ASU, endures. And it reminds us that the Saints shouldn't be pigeon-holed. It makes me long for more of their old independence."
Think "there's no history here"? Read the Phoenix 101 archive.
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Viva La Cultura Hecho Aqui En Mesa! For Everyone In A Public Park

Festival of Masks celebrates the diverse cultures that make up our neighborhoods!
Here's your chance - and opportunity - to get more inter-active and engaged in more of the most creative cultural coalitions developing over the years here in Mesa. Everyone welcome

Public &

Hosted by Cultural Coalition, Inc

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Come experience an artistic engagement-family gathering featuring giant puppets, mask performers and celebrating the cultural diversity of our community!
Free and open to all ages!
Local dance, music and theater companies will demonstrate the power of the Mask to transform the actors, as well as the audience.
Performances will include:
-Chinese Lion dancers
-Mexican folklórico dancers and Mariachis
-African music and dancers
-Japanese Taiko and Brazilian Capoeira drummers.

Kids Art Activities and food trucks!
Bring your whole family for an afternoon you won't forget!!
www.culturalcoalition.com
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NOTE: Seeking vendors, performers and artists
If you would like to participate at the festival, please email to >
culturalcoalition@gmail.com

Smart Kid: Patagonia Town Marshall Got Busted by Video Upload

Patagonia Town Marshall
Joe Patterson

Here's a good lesson for all of us: KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
Here's the story from Nogales International via Twitter:

Town says it's 'taken action' after marshal's encounter with young journalist

By Jonathan Clark and Nick Phillips

The young media reporter's video of the encounter with Patterson had generated more than 8,380 views on the Orange Street News YouTube page as of Wednesday evening.

A version of the video posted to the YouTube page of News Now Houston had generated nearly 33,000 views and more than 500 comments.

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The Town of Patagonia says it has taken unspecified action after Marshal Joseph Patterson was video-recorded telling a pre-teen journalist that it was against the law for her to put his image on the internet during an interaction in which he also allegedly threatened to have the girl arrested and jailed.

The video by Hilde Kate Lysiak, reporter/publisher of the website Orange Street News, was reportedly recorded at around 1:30 p.m. Monday while she was biking down Roadrunner Lane in Patagonia in pursuit of a news tip. In a story posted to the site, Lysiak wrote that Patterson stopped her and asked for ID, and she identified herself as a member of the media.

“I don’t want to hear about any of that freedom of the press stuff,” he reportedly told her during a portion of the conversation that does not appear in the story’s accompanying video. Patterson also allegedly told the girl: “I’m going to have you arrested and thrown in juvey."

Federal courts, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that includes Arizona in its jurisdiction, have established that citizens have a First Amendment right to take video of the police in public. In 2016, Arizona State Sen. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) introduced a bill that would have required people to be at least 20 feet away while recording law enforcement activity, but he withdrew the measure following a fierce backlash.

Dan Barr, a lawyer with the First Amendment Coalition of Arizona, called Patterson’s assertion that Lysiak couldn’t post his photo on the internet “complete nonsense.”

“It is perfectly legal to post such a photo online,” he wrote in an email, adding: “I hope this is not reflective of the Patagonia marshal threatening people with other nonexistent criminal violations.”
(Patterson has previously tried to claim legal protection from being recorded while performing his police duties.)

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According to an October 2017 profile in The New York Times, Lysiak, who was 10 at the time, began covering family news on notecards soon after she turned 6. With the help of her father, a former reporter with The New York Daily News, she later began publishing a newspaper focusing on events in her hometown of Selinsgrove, Pa. that inspired a series of Scholastic chapter books based on her experiences.

Almost 4 Years Online / Heading to 222,000 Page-Views

Yup! Really . . . See for yourself
Everyone is invited to enjoy hyper-local news, information and who knows what else on this Table of Contents
Something to tickle your appetites
Side-Dishes, main courses and just desserts right here from Downtown Mesa > Enjoy!

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