By Doug Miller
After nearly four hours of grievance-airing, it was well bent.
The Democrats, joined by two holdover Republicans who claimed they hadn't been invited but crashed the meeting anyway, were called to the carpet on an agenda of 16 items, nearly all of them volatile and race-related.
Members of the North Park community complained that the Long Beach police have spent months boasting of their felony drug arrests but can not boast of a single black officer among their ranks.
There were howls of anger as Democratic city officials, led by City Manager John Laffey and City Council President Leonard Remo, defended their decision to hire Kiera Cohen as secretary of the Civil Service Commission over Runnie Myles, a black man who had been groomed for the position by former City Manager Charles Theofan. Cohen was promoted to the position from the job of benefits coordinator. Before she began working for the city, she was former Democratic City Councilman Dan Kearney's secretary.
Laffey said the decision to hire Cohen was made by the three members of the Civil Service Commission, but Republican Councilman Tom Sofield Jr. claimed that Laffey told the commissioners he would eliminate the position if the job weren't given to Cohen, a charge Laffey strongly denied. "I didn't threaten anybody," he said Monday night. Laffey insisted that Cohen was more than qualified for the position, and that she had greatly impressed him and the members of the commission during their recent interview process.
Deloris Smith, chairwoman of the North Park Neighborhood Association, who moderated part of the meeting, reflected the mood of the room when she said the answer wasn't good enough. "Something is not right," she said over shouts of approval from the crowd of about 60 packed into a small classroom in the city's Martin Luther King Jr. Center. "Our eyes are going to be on City Hall. We have the power in these five fingers when we pull that [voting] lever."
Her sentiments were seconded by the Rev. Delores Miller, pastor of Evangel Revival Community Church, who gave a 10-minute, show-stopping oration that had members of the audience swaying and shouting out in support. Miller claimed that her support of the Democrats in the last election was being tested by the Cohen episode, and confessed that she may have "misjudged" the Republicans, particularly Jim Hennessy.
"I stand for righteousness and what is right," she shouted. "We done went through hell in Long Beach all these years. We done suffered at the hand of Pharaoh, at the hand of Hitler, whatever you want to call him, we have suffered here. ... And there is a lot of stuff going on at City Hall that I'm saying - and not behind your back; I'm not a back-biter. ... If what I heard is true, then you all need to go and straighten this out."
When Miller finished, someone shouted, "Put that in the Herald."
The atmosphere of the discussion did not improve when the topic turned to the Long Beach police.
Last year, Acting Police Commissioner Tom Sofield Sr. appointed Lt. Bruce Meyer to lead the effort to diversify the department, a push that led to the hiring of several Hispanic officers and one of Chinese heritage, Officer Andy Ng.
The police test was given in December 2004, and in July 2005 the department hired six new officers: four white males, a Hispanic woman and Ng. The police test was given again last December, and several hundred North Park residents took it, but the results will not be available until April.
The department, however, hired two more white male officers on Dec. 22, bringing its strength to 76 members.
Laffey said the department is designed to include a maximum of 80 members, and that the remaining four slots would be filled if the budget allowed, but that the law forbade the department to hire based on race.
"We've been trying to diversify, and I think the community knows that," Sofield said on Tuesday. "That's the reason we gave another exam, to get the best and the brightest through diversity. It absolutely helps in our policing if it gives the community more confidence in us."
The Rev. Carleton Mobley, pastor of the Christian Light Missionary Baptist Church, pointed out that it has been 40 years since the department hired a black officer, and that many qualified black people had come and gone since then. "I'm an educated black man," Mobley said. "Dr. Martin Luther King was an educated black man, and he was a little older than me, so there have been many, many educated black men between his time and mine."
The spate of drug arrests last summer and through the winter continued to be a sore point among several meeting attendees, who complained that there are just as many drug dealers in the bars in the West End of Long Beach.
One of the new minority hires, Officer Judy Arroyo, was present Monday night and sat stoically to the side during most of the discussion. But her face betrayed a hint of surprise and anger when one young man complained that she looked too white. "They're not going to see her as a minority around here," he said. "She looks like a white person."
The man was corrected by James Hodge, a neighborhood association official who moderated part of the meeting. "Judy is Puerto Rican."
"That's not the point I'm making," the young man continued. "Look at her skin. What is her skin complexion?"
"Her skin looks like what a Puerto Rican would look like," Hodge said.
Other issues discussed on Monday included the crumbling MLK Center, which the city owns and maintains but is run by a locally appointed board of directors. The building, which houses the neighborhood's day care center as well as several neighborhood activities, lacks proper air conditioning, according to several who were in attendance.
Laffey said he was scheduled to tour the building with City Engineer Rob Raab on Wednesday morning to develop a strategy for the building's rehab.
And city officials said they were happy to look into the association's request to rename Riverside Boulevard after Martin Luther King Jr., as Hodge put it, "from Pine Street to the Boardwalk."
Comments about this story? DMiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
