Category: Current Affairs

(Press release) Patti Pape – mother of recently-deceased UC Davis student Eric Pape – wants answers about why the Yolo County D.A.’s office pressed serious felony charges against her late son for an incident that occurred when he was having a panic attack while receiving treatment in a hospital.

“The D.A.’s office should have realized that this was a mental health case and should never have charged my son. I believe that the stress of his felony trial contributed to his eventual suicide,” she said.

Ms. Pape and a few others will make brief comments at rally this Thursday, May 17 at Noon at the UC Davis MU Patio.

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In a recent post, Jon Li decried the process used by "Downtown Davis Plan Team Participatory Design Workshop." In addition to those concerns about process, in his view the right solution to Davis's economic problems is to turn the Downtown into 10,000 residences by building six stories, and higher, and having jobs and housing downtown."

In reply, one commenter thought that "the charrette consultants went straight to tall, dense downtown buildings as a first solution" and that that "would probably gentrify downtown to the point where all the small independent businesses would be forced out because rents would go too high."

Interestingly, then, we have agreement that there were problems with the process, but disagreement with the desired outcome: a tall, dense downtown.

Would a tall downtown in fact improve Davis's economy?

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By Jon Li

Do you wonder about the empty stores in Downtown Davis? Don't you wish there was somebody on the City of Davis Staff who is responsible for improving our local economy?

Last week, the City of Davis held its "Downtown Davis Plan Team Participatory Design Workshop" for four days. It was lectures by highly paid outside consultants mouthing what the Davis Staff has decided is going to be in the Downtown element of the new Davis General Plan.  State law says ours is out of date now and must be updated. Davis Staff set up a process with as little public input as possible. They only want to legally check off the box "public input."

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By M E Gladis

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(Press release) Yolo County Deputy Public Defender Dean Johansson, a candidate for Yolo County District Attorney, Tuesday was among the first candidates for public office in the region to support state legislation introduced today to restrict when law enforcement officers could shoot suspects.

The measure would modify the standard officers use to fire their weapons to "necessary force" from the current "reasonable force," which has led to 162 killings by California peace officers in 2017 – more than half of those killed were unarmed.

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(Press release) Yolo County ACLU* board member Dean Johansson – now a candidate for Yolo County District Attorney – played a leadership role in developing the surveillance ordinance passed unanimously Tuesday, March 20, 2018, by the Davis City Council.

The ordinance – which regulates city departments’ use of surveillance technology, building in safeguards to protect civil liberties – was the result of a year and a half of collaboration between the Yolo County ACLU, ACLU of Northern California, Davis City Council, Police Chief Darren Pytel, and Brian Hofer, Chair of the City of Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission.

Other community groups, including the Davis Human Relations Commission, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, ACLU People Power, and the National Lawyers Guild supported the development and passage of the ordinance.

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