Salinas’ toothless police advisory group is the county’s only such group.

In Salinas, a city-sanctioned Police Community Advisory Committee is supposed to meet the last Wednesday of every other month. In 2019, that group met just twice (April and July) while two other scheduled meetings (January and October) were canceled due to a lack of quorum. At the April meeting, the four committee members (at the time, three seats were vacant because their respective councilmembers hadn’t appointed anyone to them) received updates on traffic enforcement, homeless outreach and collisions.

There aren’t many details about those reports online, although there is video of the meeting. Nobody offered public comment and it was over 58 minutes after it started. At the July meeting, the committee received a report on purchasing, staffing, the department’s “Enduro” unit (dual-purpose motorcycles) and an award the department was to receive from the Department of Homeland Security. No video is available of this one, so it’s unclear if anyone showed up to comment.

The advisory committee is a well-meaning group totally lacking in teeth, although the city’s website says the committee reviews and makes recommendations on police department policies, procedures, enforcement and community relations strategies. And maybe a toothless committee is better than no committee: Salinas is the only city in Monterey County to have any semblance of a formal citizen’s group interacting with its police department. King City has an advisory board, although it seems to be an informal group chosen by the chief.

If Seaside City Councilmember Jon Wizard has his way, his city could see a different type of police committee altogether – one with the power to fire problem officers.

Wizard isn’t saying Seaside has problem officers, mind you, but in the wake of comments he made at the May 30 Black Lives Matter demonstration, the Seaside Police Officers Association has made a metaphorical declaration of war on him anyway, accusing him of sedition with a speech he gave questioning what would happen if crowds started showing up at council meetings and asking tough questions of their elected officials. (And in a cringeworthy, mean-girl moment, the union’s statement deems Wizard’s own career as law enforcement officer as too short-lived to be relevant – Wizard, who blew out his knee serving a search warrant, left the profession several years ago.)

“I see it as a call to action to engage in a democratic process, they see it as a violent overthrow of the government,” Wizard says. “I want an oversight commission with the authority to fire a bad cop. If an officer walks up to someone on the street and smacks them with a baton and their body cam wasn’t on and there are witnesses and cell phone footage, there shouldn’t be a months-long process to try to convince someone to do the right thing.”

Wizard is one of the few black electeds in Monterey County. In another cringeworthy moment, the Seaside POA conflated statements he made with statements made by Tyller Williamson, another black man who serves on Monterey’s City Council. Williamson is having his own issues with Monterey’s Police Department; at the BLM demonstration, he praised the city’s professional policing, and called for defunding the PD. Chief Dave Hober told him his words had wounded the department.

“It’s been very emotional because of the context of how pissed off I am at how society is handling its response to black people,” he says. “And it’s frustrating in that Monterey is a mostly white community and they think we don’t have to do anything because we don’t have those problems here. And my colleagues aren’t willing to take a stand and do the advocacy.”

Wizard is waiting to find out if the oversight committee idea will make it to the council’s agenda; Mayor Ian Oglesby has said he wants it there, but it’s not currently on the June 11 agenda. And Williamson says if his fellow Monterey electeds won’t do the work, the community is willing to do it for them.

“Community members have reached out in droves and they’re deep into taking this on,” he says. “It’s probably appropriate to do it that way and I hope my colleagues are willing to engage in that dialogue.”

MARY DUAN writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan