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[Picture from the Ukiah Police Department website] 
Michael Frick, the author of this Letter to the Editor [Picture provided by Michael Frith]
According to a 2020 story from National Public Radio, in 2019 taxpayers nationwide footed a $300 million bill for settlements and court awards in lawsuits filed over cases of police use of “excessive force,” and other civil rights violations. That may not seem like much in the aggregate, but if officers of the Ukiah police department persist in acts of violence like that perpetrated against Gerardo Magdaleno on April 2nd, our town may wind up paying a cripplingly high proportion of 2021’s total. How can a city that can’t properly maintain its streets and roads or deal effectively with dual crises of chemical dependency and homelessness reasonably persist in exposing itself to the liabilities that attend reprehensible and idiotic policing?
I appreciate that there’s not absolute unanimity about the ethics of brutalizing and killing our fellow Americans on our streets. I understand that what looks to me—and a majority of our fellow Americans—like sadism and berserk behavior can look to police sympathizers like good, but inelegant work. Eric Nelson, accused killer Derek Chauvin’s attorney, says that police use of force isn’t always “pretty.” I suspect that disproportionate police violence will continue to seem controversial for years to come. Nevertheless the truth is that a growing movement of racially and economically diverse Americans of all ages agrees: Unjustifiable and unjust police violence must end. As a consequence of the notoriousness of a handful of mortifying events—particularly the deaths of Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, and George Floyd—consciousness of this fact has dawned on tens of millions of Americans quickly and completely. A number of hardcore dead-enders will persist in defending the most heinous police acts in the name of law and order, but their relevance is further marginalized every day.
Small towns like ours don’t have years to debate a question that’s all but settled. As cellphone camera lenses have become ubiquitous and captured better and better images juries have found the pleas of victims of police violence more and more sympathetic, as demonstrated by the number and size of settlements and awards. With yet another costly legal settlement or court-decreed restitution on the horizon, the City of Ukiah needs to take immediate, sensible, and substantive steps to curb police violence that burdens our community with shame and grave monetary expenses.
It’s too late to undo the harm that police have done to Gerardo Magdaleno, and the consequent harm they’ve done to the character and reputation of our community and to the budget of our city. There’s an opportunity, though, for city officials to take decisive action to reduce the probability of such a shameful act in days to come.
I am urging Chief Justin Wyatt to follow the example of Minneapolis police Chief Medaria Arradondo. Within days of the death of George Floyd at the hands of officers of his department, Arradondo fired the men responsible. All the officers, of course, had recourse to their union for appealing any decision that they viewed as unfair. The police involved in the brutal gang attack on Mr. Magdaleno will enjoy the same recourse if Chief Wyatt does what’s right and expresses our community’s abhorrence of their depravity by dismissing them.
Let Chief Wyatt set an example in this case: Ukiah won’t shield gang violence with police badges.
And we don’t want to pick up the tab for it.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Frick,
Ukiah
When you curb police violence, you endanger every man woman an child, in your town. You gonna tie a hamburger on a stick an lead a perp to jail, or talk sweet . better yet put a gun in that perps hand an see how many people will change their mind about FORCE!
Hmm how we can sustain and actually start repairing our local infrastructure, streets and every other problem is by electing people who actually care more about the city conditions, and the citizens, and what’s done with their tax money…more than their own paychecks. And bonuses. And stipends. And raises.
Speaking of gang violence, Ukiah is FULL of it. Gangs all around us, nearly all the shootings are between gangs, including in our own neighborhood people shooting into cars and houses. Funny isn’t it you never see a letter from a concerned citizen. Never a peep. Even when you bring it up, people don’t say much. But a few police officers take down a drugged up aggressive man? Shout it from the rooftops.
Know those rapes we see reported more often than we’d like? Mostly from gang members. Shootings? Gang members. Stabbings? Gang members. Car thefts? Mostly gang members. Robberies? Violence? Gang members.
Not a peep from the citizens who rant and rave at any given chance about police “violence”. Isn’t that strange?
Women being raped? No biggie. People’s homes being shot into where children are sleeping. Pfft…no biggie. Police take down dangerous criminals? What?!??! DEFUND!!! TERMINATE!!!
Living for decades in a once-great (and still pretty good) neighborhood here in Ukiah, while watching over the last 10 years one shooting after another: Hearing it from your living room, hitting the floor to duck any stray bullets. Hearing women scream because the latest gang member hood just shot up a party…nothing feels better than hearing those sirens as the police rush over. Putting themselves in danger. Risking their lives. To save us. To save anybody in the line of fire. To stand between the people targeted and the shooter and say, “I’ll take that bullet instead of you, to save your life, and take out the criminal endangering you, your children, your family, your neighbors”.
Thank God for the police. I would absolutely love to see the local police-haters do that. Can you imagine? Any one of these defund-police type people hopping in their car at 2am…rushing to your neighborhood….jumping between you and the shooter? Putting your life before their own. Showing that kind of selflessness?
Yeah…neither can I imagine it. Perhaps that’s why they get so little respect and the vast majority simply ignore their rants and protests against police.
“Virtue signaling,” eh?
It’s more dangerous to be a teacher than to be a cop. Look it up. It’s true. And yet we can’t seem to ask these ‘peace officer’ public servants to talk down an obviously unarmed and completely naked man. The guy wasn’t even wearing shoes, for goodness sake. Why were police even sent? This job was out of their experience and should have been a job for mental health professionals. Shame on the peace officers for multiply tasing an unarmed, unthreatening, completely naked, mentally disconnected man. Shame.
MENTAL HEALTH
The cops are not mental health care stewarts.You must remember that that their job is to keep the public safe. if the public is not safe then you must form a vigilante committe amoungst yourselves, When the cop invited the naked nut, to step into the police car, an he refused, that is resisting , i dont know if its a felony but a misdemeanor anyway, this alone is stopping a cop in the line of duty. You need to go on a ride along, this will change your mind 100%. instead sniveling about somebody elses job you cant do.
“Sniveling”?