If the DOJ holds a listening session and few show up, do we make a sound?

It’s hard to know why the U.S. Department of Justice’s “listening session” in Salinas June 30 at Sherwood Hall was so poorly attended. The idea was for citizens to air their thoughts about the Salinas Police Department. Was the turnout so low because the DOJ botched getting the word out, or because most Salinas residents are satisfied with the way things are?

There’s no disputing the former. DOJ press secretary Mary Brandenberger tells the Weekly the public was invited through outreach to several community groups and advocates (her word), distribution through the school district via the superintendent (which of Salinas’ four school districts, all of which are now on summer break, she didn’t say) and what she called “other” marketing means. But media weren’t alerted until the day before the event, meaning we couldn’t alert the public until the day before the event.

A source with inside knowledge tells me the DOJ screwed up in reaching out to the community. It was either a turf war between the press office in D.C. and press people on the ground in California, or someone forgot to hit the send button on the email. I’ve asked for specific details on how the outreach was done and, so far, have been met with dead silence.

The room at Sherwood Hall was set up for about 500 people, but in the end, about 80 showed up. Most were the usual 80, the same ones who show up to every meeting. There was the bombastically awful Salinas man whose every speech includes lines about “sending them all back to their beloved homes, south of the border, down Mexico way,” (regardless of whether they were born here or have become naturalized citizens), then ended his rant by calling Police Chief Kelly McMillin “the prick in the blue uniform.” There was the other awful Salinas man who sat in his seat and muttered about the liberal media and wondered aloud if this was a social services meeting, prompting the more unfiltered me to turn around and say, loudly, “You know I can hear you, right?” There was the teacher who refuses to speak to the Weekly and called for McMillin’s immediate ouster and public trials for all police involved in violent confrontations with Latinos.

For his part, McMillin requested the presence of the DOJ’s COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) office following four fatal officer-involved shootings in 2014. The COPS office has no enforcement abilities, can’t open cases and can’t bring prosecutions of anyone. Their eight-month “investigation” will examine patterns of excessive force, police policies, strategies, training tactics and accountability; they’ll issue a few reports, hang out and see if anything comes of those reports and that will be that. No police were allowed to attend.

But as much as the meeting was dominated by the usual suspects, there were a number of bright moments. There was a young man who wondered why there was no representation of the ag industry at the meeting, and what would happen if ag labor just stopped showing up in the fields. “What would their economy look like?” he asked. He requested more funding for mental health services, because most of the men involved in fatal or violent encounters with Salinas police were mentally ill. “We haven’t seen bold action take place, literal bold action, something that would demonstrate that our city government would take some kind of move with our future in mind, the future of our community and our children.”

And then there was Yolanda Perez, who started her comments one way, then took the audience in a completely different – and astounding – direction. She talked about growing up in poverty in East Salinas, where her brothers taught her to believe the police were always after the poor minorities.

“In my day, police were called pigs,” she says. “What a terrible name to call the police.”

And she continued: “A lot of parents are remiss today in bringing up their children, especially in Salinas where parents go to work at 4 in the morning and aren’t home until 6 at night. We need to teach our children, our youth and those coming into our country how to behave. When the police say stop, you stop.”

Perez was shouted down. Few people – at least few of the few people in the audience – wanted to hear what she had to say.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan