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new crime when he said he gave me a jail sentence of one day because I was "arrogant". It is my contention that the executive branch of the county is out to railroad me among things, for being an activist or as the papers call it a "county watchdog", and 1 think that you as legislative branch of the county ought to be made aware of the vindictive actions by police and prosecutors against me, and in this regard I think it is apropos to remind you of a recent issue before you where you allowed the public, especially women who work at night, to carry pepperspray for self defense. Since I strongly advocated that decision 1 have received many crank phonecalls and have repeatedly been reproached by local police who most apparently feel threatened by the public having pepperspray, while it is the police that have repeatedly abused its use. I enclose a newspaper article, marked Exhibit C about such hon'ifying abuse of innocent people with pepperspray, smeared in their eyes by police in California, that you may already have read. It is a typical example of police brutality that is rampant in many states, also here, that of course is not limited to just pepperspray, as we all know from the Rodney King case, and I remind you of the widely published Wanjen case and also a recent Fragiau case, where the police of this county used pepperspray in people's face, at far less than the minimum distance of 2 feet, as mandated by the chief in his general order No. 805. It is therefore my opinion that police, who must set an example, should henceforth be punished with double sentences and fines when they abuse the public that they must by law protect. I have read statistics that show that criminality in the ranks of police on average is percentage-wise greater than that of the general population. I have heard in the Hilo police station how a policeman on the police radio objected to certain instructions saying: "I have to cover my own ass first". That is not what the law mandates, the law mandates the police sin- gularly to protect the public, for which they are paid extravagantly compared to other govern- ment jobs: call it danger money. Our military in Somalia and Bosnia are in far greater danger and do not get half the pay of most police. We have a Police Commission, that by law must control and critically evaluate police behavior. Instead, in meeting after meeting, we find a rather cosy interaction between the commission and the police before them, an attitude of - never mind the public, where the commission and the police praise each other and themsel- ves,instead of promoting a balanced adversary climate where the commission shows who is boss, as mandated in the County Charter; all to the chagrin of the general public that gets 6 minutes allotted to speak even if there is only one person testifying, while the police without time limit reads dull statistics of its good pertormance into the record, that had already been published in the newspapers. The commission then sometimes applauds these recitations of good behavior. With few exceptions the general public has obviously given up on going to commission meetings where little more is accomplished than pleasant exchanges of a public relations nature between police and the commissioners, and an overindulgeance in time con- suming illegal discussions of non-privacy matters in executive sessions, instead of a serious attempt by the commission to exert rigorous and meaningful oversight of our county police. To illustrate the above I attach in Exhibit D, a letter to the editor in the Tribune Herald of 21 November 1997 by Michael Schiszler of Pahoa, whom I do not know or ever heard of. He finds fault, as I do, while new police recruits are psychologically tested and must pass lie detector tests, with a failure rate of 40 - 50%, all other police on the force are not and never were tested. In my opinion that points to potentially even a higher deficiency rate in that group, because many good police have left the force out of disgust . Md I want to add that at least all policemen considered for promotions should be subjected to the above tests. 2