Stephen Cassidy

Stephen Cassidy is the current Mayor of San Leandro. He was elected in 2010 and is expected to run for re-election in 2014. He is a partner at a large class-action law firm, but specializes in public relations.

Cassidy has, overall, been an absent an ineffective mayor. His major focus was on bringing pension reform to San Leandro. He campaigned on a platform of forcing city employees to pay their own share of pension contributions, and thus saving the City $3M a year. While he managed to get the employees to agree to pay their share, they did so in exchange for raises of an equal amount, leaving the City with higher payroll tax obligations but no actual savings.

Cassidy has also been frequently criticized on this blog for his attempts to do away with transparency of City operations. He did away with minutes from City Council meetings, so that now the only way of knowing what was said at a meeting is to listen to the audio recording. The recordings are of such bad quality that they don’t work with transcription software. Cassidy has also consistently violated the Brown Act and, under his administration, the City has started to also violate the California Public Records Act.

Cassidy’s administration has been plagued by examples of Police corruption and abuse, including the conviction of an SLPD narcotics officer for selling drugs to an informant, the persecution of men thought to be seeking homosexual encounters near a public park, the killing of an unarmed mentally-ill man and the growth in surveillance of citizens. Cassidy has a been a big supporter of the Chief of Police and advocated that she be given a large race and multi-year contract.

Cassidy is also criticized for his lack of leadership, his inability to forge friendly relations with City, community and political leaders, and the lack of time and concern he spends on the City.

On the plus side, Cassidy is significantly more intelligent and somewhat less petty than former Mayor Tony Santos, whom he defeated in 2010.

A letter to the City of Oakland: Please Take our Police Chief, Sandra Spagnoli

A letter to the City of Oakland: Please Take our Police Chief, Sandra Spagnoli People, Police No Responses »

Oct 292013

Police Chief Sandra Spagnoli

Dear City of Oakland:

I know you are looking for a new Police Chief. Please take ours! SLPD Chief Sandra Spagnoli doesn’t work cheap and crime may have gone up under her, but she speaks well and smiles enough. Surely appearances do count. She fooled us, she can fool your residents as well.

Spagnoli is a hard worker (sure, she has about 90 days off a year, in addition to weekends, but that’s standard for public executives) and has an unmitigated commitment to social cleansing. She doesn’t discriminate between gays, the mentally ill, blacks, liberals or even gun-advocates – in her book everyone is a criminal that needs to be put down. Dirty cops, however, are to be left alone – at least until they are so overt in their dealings that citizens end up alerting the Mayor and the DA. But if you want your racial tensions – in particular those between blacks and Asians – to rise, she has a recipe for that!

One teenzy weenzy little problem with Spagnoli is that she’s not particularly married to facts. I mean she loves facts, as long as she gets to invent them, but independently gathered and confirmed facts are nasty things that get in the way of actual police work. Police Chiefs’ opinions should be trusted without question, and if reality interferes with your trust, then you really should disavow reality.

Take for example her claim that crime rates have gone up in San Leandro because of the release of prisoners due to re-alignment. It’s a good story, one that she can use to get surveillance cameras that she can use to spy on troublemakers (aka community activists), so why should the fact that there has been no early release of prisoners stop her from telling it? Or take her opinion that marijuana is a gateway drug and that marijuana dispensaries attract crime – sure, the studies that look at the actual data show that those are myths, but shouldn’t her intuition count for more than pesky studies? Her latest kick is surveillance cameras. She knows in her gut that they work and we should believe her despite all the data that shows that they neither prevent nor help solve crimes.

You should also not hold it against her that she often makes false statements to the City Council. It’s not as if the Council would rely on what she says in order to pass the ordinances she advocates, right? For example, can we really blame her for telling the Council her office received one complaint a week about backyard chickens, when in reality they only have records about one complaint being filed in the last two years? She needed the Council to have a good excuse to give the Police access to people’s backyards without probable cause in violation of the 4th amendment, so can she be blamed for a little white lie? And why does the Council need to know exactly how many license plate cameras the Police Department has? So what if it’s 5 rather than the 3 she acknowledged? They’re both single digits, right?

Look, our City Manager, Chris Zapata, is perfectly OK with her “truth impairment” as is our Mayor, Stephen Cassidy. Surely the Oakland City Council and Mayor Quan won’t have higher standards than their San Leandro equivalents.

There are many more things that you can praise Sandra Spagnoli for. She has no patience for street musicians or artists – if you want someone to intimidate your budding arts community, she’s the woman for you. And she has pretty much eliminated all complaints against SLPD officers. Sure, she did it by getting rid of the Internal Affairs Department, but the non-numbers of complaints speak for themselves. Finally, she is so committed to her law enforcement job, that she doesn’t let the law stand on her way. Really, do you want a Police Officer who respects the law or someone who catches others not doing it?

So in my name and in that of many, many, many other citizens of San Leandro, I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you to hire her and get her off our hands.

Sincerely,

Margarita Lacabe

PS I forgot to mention that Chief Spagnoli is already very experienced with the Oakland crime problem. Indeed, when she’s not blaming realignment for San Leandro’s crime problem, she’s blaming Oakland. She already has a plan to put surveillance cameras aimed at the Oakland border to know which of your miscreant citizens dare to come into our town.

Spagnoli also has a plan to deal with youth crime: eliminate youth. She tried to put it into effect on Halloween when, after promising crossing guards for a Trick-or-Treat events put out by local businesses, she prohibited them at the last minute. Unfortunately for the Chief, nobody got killed, but I know she won’t let that deter her from finding ways to endanger kids’ lives n the future.

Hint to Politicians: You don’t show respect to Spanish-speakers by butchering our language.

Hint to Politicians: You don’t show respect to Spanish-speakers by butchering our language. City Hall, Community, Politics No Responses »

Oct 142013

“Success Here”.

Hint to anyone trying to court Spanish-speaking customers, businesses or voters: if you address us in Spanish, make sure you do it correctly. It can be quaint when a non-Spanish speaker memorizes a short message in Spanish, and we’ll be forgiving, thought it’s overdone and a bit boring. But if you are going to produce Spanish-language materials, get a professional Spanish-language copywriter and proofreader/editor. Or at least, hire someone who has had formal education in the language. Spanish is a beautiful language with rather strict grammatical and spelling rules, you can’t just wing proper writing. When your Spanish-language materials are poorly translated and full of spelling and grammatical errors, the message you convey is that you are going through the motions but you don’t really care about Spanish speakers. Our language, just like us, deserves respect.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is America. English is the dominant language. I don’t expect that everything will be translated. But if it’s going to be, it should be done well.

This has come up twice recently on my Facebook page.

A couple of weeks ago, Mayor Stephen Cassidy touted a new city-issued Spanish language flier advertising no business license fees for new businesses. It was full of grammatical and spelling errors that have not yet been corrected. The Spanish language flier describing the program sounds like it was translated by software, and not only is ungrammatical, but makes little sense.

Today, Congressional candidate Ro Khanna announced a Spanish language version of his website that suffers from the same problems. He assured me that a “professional” had done the translation, but there are so many grammatical and spelling mistakes that it’s hard to believe a human looked at it at all.

Personally, I don’t think either the City of San Leandro or Khanna’s campaign should be excused. The Bay Area does not lack competent Spanish translators and copywriters. With a plethora of universities around us, it cannot be hard to find trained writers and translators. Sure, they may be a little bit more expensive than Google Translate, but using them will assure an end product that actually communicates a message. If that message is worth communicating, then it’s worth hiring someone who can do it.

As it stands, the Spanish translations offered by Cassidy and Khanna look to me like little more than gimmicks meant to say to the community as a whole “look, we care about Latinos”, while telling Spanish-speaking Latinos “don’t mind that, we don’t actually mean it”.

Chief of Police Sandra Spagnoli Gets Caught Lying to City Council

Chief of Police Sandra Spagnoli Gets Caught Lying to City Council City Hall, Police 11 Responses »

Sep 052013

Police Chief Sandra Spagnoli

But will the Council and City Manager let her get away with it?

Tuesday night, San Leandro Police Chief Sandra Spagnoli was caught lying to the San Leandro City Council several times.

Two lies are so blatant, that there can be now wiggle room around them.

1 – She told the City Council that the SLPD only has one police car equipped with license plate scanners mounted on them. But as Mike Katz-Lacabe, my husband pointed out, it has 3. He’s taken pictures of them, in case there are any questions.

2- She told the Council that license plate scanners only get the “photo of the license plate”. Again, a lie, as the license plate picture below shows.

Now, these are by no means the first lies the Chief tells the Council. She’s lied about the effects of marijuana dispensary on crime and she lied about how long license plate information is kept for, for example.

And as Councilmember Jim Prola pointed out when I brought this matter up to him, last night she repeatedly tried to mislead the Council (Prola wouldn’t commit to using the word “lie”) when she claimed that license plate data had to be retained for a year because they are sharing it with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (everyone who drives in San Leandro is a suspected terrorist, it would seem). Under questioning by Prola, the representative from the Center reluctantly admitted the Council could set whatever term in wanted for keeping the data.

And she’s lied directly to the community about things such as how realignment works.

But the thing about these two lies last night is that there is no room for ambiguity. Either license scanners only take pictures of the license plates as she claims or they don’t, as the picture shows. Either there is one car with a scanner or there are three, as the other photos we have show.

The City Council knows now without a shadow of a doubt the the Chief of Police has so little respect for them that she will lie and lie to their faces. Meanwhile, she asks them to “trust her”.

Mayor Cassidy wanted to see one of the “audits” on the Police Department, done after an SLPD narcotics officer was convicted of selling drugs to an informer. The Chief denied him access to it, claiming it has sensitive information. “You have to trust on your Chief of Police” she said. But how can the Council – and the citizens of San Leandro – trust a Chief who has repeatedly been caught lying?

I don’t have much admiration four our City Council. But do any of them have any self-respect? They must know the Chief doesn’t have any for them – otherwise she wouldn’t lie – and yet they let her get away with this type of behavior.

I have a call to the office of City Manager Chris Zapata for comments. Zapata is ultimately her boss. Is she lying with his knowledge? His approval? Is she completely insubordinate?

I have also contacted the Mayor and City Council for comment. I will update this article if I hear back.

Activists Publish Home Addresses of Oakland Councilmembers

Activists Publish Home Addresses of Oakland Councilmembers City Hall, Police No Responses »

Aug 172013

Should San Leandro Council Members be next?

As you know, a couple of weeks ago the Oakland City Council voted to create a “Domain Awareness Center” to pull together the feeds of surveillance and license plate scanners throughout town, so as to be able to track the movements of anyone who goes to Oakland. In other words, they agreed to be the eyes of the NSA on the ground.

Now, Oakland activists are tacitly challenging other Oaklanders to give City Council members a taste of their own medicine. They’ve started by publishing the addresses of the Councilmembers. This is public information, after all.

Not yet on the site but also public information (if obtained through licit means): their phone numbers, their e-mail addresses, photographs of themselves, their homes, their cars, their license plate numbers.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if these were published and people started taking pictures of their cars and where were parked when they chanced upon them. Surely the Council members would welcome having their every move be recorded and made public. I mean, surely they don’t expect more privacy than what they’re willing to grant anyone else living or driving through Oakland.

But why should we just focus on Oakland? Sure, the San Leandro City Council did not pass a resolution authorizing a similar policy, but they haven’t done anything to stop the Police from determining that every person who drives a car in San Leandro is a potential terrorist and sharing information about their movements with the Feds.

So, shall we start publishing the personal information of our own City Council members? I have asked them and await answer to this question:

Should your privacy be given any more consideration than ours? I mean, if we don’t watch you all the time, record your movements and share them with others over the internet, how can we possibly know you are behaving yourselves? Surely, if we as citizens cannot be trusted, neither can you. Right?

Petty or just pitiful? Stephen Cassidy bans opponent (moi) from following him on Twitter.

Petty or just pitiful? Stephen Cassidy bans opponent (moi) from following him on Twitter. City Hall, Media, People, Politics, Transparency No Responses »

Aug 132013

Mayor Stephen Cassidy

Mayor Stephen Cassidy seems to be getting very nervous. He stopped me – and only me – from being able to post comments to his notes on his Mayoral Facebook page after I started writing about his lack of integrity and his repeated violations of open government laws. He seems to be getting pettier and more fearful, though. His latest stunt is to ban me from following his official Mayor account on twitter.

A twitter ban doesn’t stop you from reading someone’s tweets or replying to them – it just stops you from re-tweeting them. So it would seem that Cassidy is afraid that he will tweet something really stupid and that I’ll re-tweet it before he has a chance to delete it.

More, of course, is going on. About a month ago, I wrote an article explaining how Cassidy has done such a dismal job as mayor that I was even considering running against him myself, if nobody better jumped into the fray. He definitely seems not pleased at the prospect.

More to the point, a few weeks ago I filed a complaint with Mayor Cassidy, the City Manager and City Attorney Richard Pio Roda about the San Leandro Police Department’s violations of the City’s social media guidelines. The SLPD has been posting photographs of people on their facebook and twitter feeds without their consent, and they have removed comments that they do not like but otherwise do not violate the guidelines. This complaint would apply just as well to Mayor Cassidy, who also has many photographs on his official facebook page that show people that can be identified and for whom he’s unlikely to have signed releases.

My guess is that the Council will rewrite the social media rules – they seem to have been removed them from the City’s website -, but until then Mayor Cassidy probably doesn’t want me to call him on how he’s breaking them.

Alas, there is no better way to saying “I have something to hide” than to telling someone “you can’t look here”.

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