LeBaron: 165 years of looking for a better way
Just last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the new sheriff of New Sublette County, Wyo., has outlawed cowboy hats on deputies.
This is not only an indication that the Wild West may be dead and gone; it is a metaphor for change.
It happened here in Sonoma County more than 50 years ago when a new sheriff, former Sebastopol Police Chief John Ellis, not only decided to get rid of the Stetsons and business suits deputies had worn forever, but to put his officers in uniforms. Uniforms!
One might suggest that it was the beginning of the end for our cow county image.
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What we are really talking about is not hats, but change. It can come in small increments, like losing the sombreros. Other times it comes in big gulps, like what is happening here and now with the community task force charged with finding the best way to achieve a safe and peaceful citizenry.
Oversight is the issue. It has always been the issue.
So the question debated by this citizens group is: What kind of checks and balances will work best to assure everyone is treated equally under the law?
The current proposal is to create a citizens review body to be known as the Office of the Independent Auditor. Committee members see it as a way to assure the public that justice is always done. A tall order, and a problem that people have wrestled with as long as there have been governments.
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We obviously are in for a change. And this news seems to warrant a look into Sonoma County’s yesterday - to see how it used to be and to think about how and why it has changed from the paternalism that ruled in the 19th and 20th centuries to the current social and political climate.
Obviously, the system wasn’t perfect. But it seemed to work for as long as the county and its towns were run by community leaders who were, in general, well respected and well educated by the standard of the times.
This is one more of those barometers by which we measure change - change in procedures, change in laws, change in attitudes.
Take the grand jury. We still have a grand jury. It still hears citizens’ concerns and watches over local government. But it has changed from the days when the Superior Court judges - there were no more than two in the early years, expanded to three in the 1960s - nominated all prospective grand jurors. It was considered a great honor to be asked.
The names were placed in a bowl, and there was a ceremonious drawing in the presiding judge’s courtroom. Friends and family attended. The public was invited. The press was on hand, pencils ready. The names of the lucky citizens selected constituted big news and enormous responsibility.
The selection process changed sometime in the 1970s or early ’80s when the Supreme Court ruled that the selection process had to be inclusive and citizens were encouraged to apply for the jury lottery. Change was welcomed by an increasingly activist population that was discarding the very notion of paternalism at every turn.
In our first 100 years, the grand juries were the primary guardians of governance and citizen well-being and, yes, even politics.
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In the first quarter of county history, according to Dee Blackman’s research for “Santa Rosa, a 19th Century Town,” the grand juries told the supervisors and city councils what needed to be done.
When an inspection of the hospital revealed maggots, when the roads were “mud holes,” when the courthouse was “miserable, dilapidated and a disgrace,” when it was just too easy to escape from the jail, grand jury reports brought it all to the attention of the public.
As a result of these widely discussed reports, with few exceptions, buildings were replaced, streets were graveled, the infrastructure improved. The grand jury said, “Fix it!” It was done.
While the system seems to have been effective, it was far from perfect. Politics was ever-present. Republican leaders once asked that the entire grand jury be “impeached” for “covering up for Rebel sympathizers” - 10 years after the Civil War ended. While that charge went nowhere, it didn’t stop irate readers from asking another year’s grand jury to investigate the editor of The Sonoma Democrat for “maladministration” because of his Democratic views.
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There were instances when the grand jury was called upon to act as a criminal grand jury, something that happened relatively often in the frontier days. There were indictments, resultant punishments. Or not.
An 1867 case, described (erroneously) as the “first murder in Santa Rosa,” indicted one Byrd Brumfield for killing John Strong in a saloon fight. It was chronicled with dramatic illustrations in the California Police Gazette, published in San Francisco. But a trial jury found Brumfield not guilty. He lived to be killed several years later in a gunfight in Healdsburg.
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