Marin County CCW Corruption
-- Update
by Jim March
jmarch@prodigy.net
December 3, 2001
Hi all,
The official response to the initial Marin
County, California CCW Corruption exposé has been a giant dead cold silence. We find this distinctly non-puzzling.
I will be attending the Marin County Board of Supes meeting on Tuesday
morning at 9:30 at the Marin Civic Center, just north of San Rafael on the 101,
presenting copies of the original report and asking for commentary and
explanations.
The question is going to be "how many of these things CAN be
ignored?". We have a minor pool going -- I'm betting a long-distance
Pizza order on action being taken after expose #6. Nobody has taken me up on
this, because I've got the best idea which targets we're going to hit next.
Following are a few tidbits that will appear in future full-length reports.
Alameda County is home to one of the most committed (or rather, should have
been years ago) gun grabbers, California State Senator Don Perata...or as we
affectionately call him, "Pistol Packin' Perata, The Schumer Of The
West". We already have a short expose online featuring just him:
There's a LOT more going on in Alameda County -- makes Marin look like an
oasis of CCW sanity. We're going to take you on a trip down bad-cop-no-donut
lane you won't soon forget.
Then there's Sacramento...the Colafrancesco affair was mentioned and linked
in the original Marin report. Sacramento may be the biggest CCW snakepit of 'em
all, due probably to it's proximity to the "moron vibes" emanating
from the capitol.
There's Los Angeles County, where Sheriff Baca set up a "celebrity
reserve deputy program" with lowered training and guaranteed CCW, but real
celebs like Jay Leno and Steven Segal turned him down. Oddly enough, 20 of
Baca's top campaign contributors didn't. Stay tuned for the hilarious results
<grin>.
These reports, and the research behind them, will happen at a rapid pace.
We can fight, or we can roll over and agree that "Some animals are more
equal than others", as George Orwell put it in Animal Farm.
Time to fight.
First major fight will be in Santa Clara, over the denial of release of
public record to Nadja. We almost have enough in pledges to cover that -- send
pledges via EMail here: EqualCCW@hotmail.com. We literally can't tell you how critical
that particular lawsuit is, but we're not kidding around -- it could change
everything.
If you can help with cash, please do so. You can also drop us email to learn
how to launch the first stages of an investigation in your county -- we're set so
far in San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno, Santa Clara and Alameda counties.
IF YOU WANT TO VOLUNTEER: Your job will be to file Public Records Act
requests, act as plaintiff of record to sue if that's what's needed to pry the
data loose (legal fees and lawyer lineup handled by myself and others) and would
act as co-author on a CCW exposé in your county. If the copying fees come to any
significant amount over a few bucks, we'll help with that as needed. If you
don't want your name public, we can accommodate that but would prefer people
make a stand -- we believe it's actually safer that way, not that the risk is
significant.
We are particularly interested in the following counties: Stanislaus, Yolo,
Solano, Sonoma, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles (both city and county, both
are big, maybe two volunteers -- one for each). We also want to hit some of the
central valley agricultural counties due to their high Latino population -- that
makes demographics analysis relatively easy.
For the moment, we're going to avoid San Diego and San Bernardino because
they issue a lot of permits and appear to at least be "trying" to be fair.
We're not going to hit Amador, King, El Dorado and a few other
"shall-issue" counties that are playing fair -- if anybody knows of
more like that, drop us a line. We may do a report on one along the lines of
"how to do it right" somewhere down the line but it's not a top
priority...pinning down the very worst before they start circling the wagons is
job one right now.
Let's roll!
