(Burn Fresno) Today six lawsuits were launched against Greyhound for the incident last weekend in the Tower District/McKinley and 99 that left 6 people dead. The car was all black and had been turned over in the road by the driver, who was legally drunk. The taxi driver (who the CHP has said is the best witness) said it would have been impossible for the bus to avoid and that the driver paid with the ultimate price: his life. The cab driver also mentioned he was in the lane moments earlier and would have hit th Greyhound himself if he had not chosen to switch lanes out of pure coincidence.

My opinion: the drunken female driver was at fault and if anyone faces the suit it should be the person or restaurant that served her the alcohol, being that she was not 21.

(Burn Fresno) Yesterday it was announced that as part of Ashley Swearengins new budget, she will be cutting out the only AIDS clinic and recovery center in the Fresno area. The Living Room is a place where people with AIDS can get together for support and treatment, and more importantly keep them off the street and from further spreading this terrible immune system disease.

The facility is used by 1,700 patients and only costs the city $69,000 per year – that’s $40 per person, not exactly major money when it comes to the massive amounts of debt the City of Fresno currently carries. Westcare (a local drug rehabilitation organization) also works with The Living Room in helping them to get their supplies and at times to cover other monetary needs.

Let’s face it, drugs are pretty much the worst thing happening to the youth of our city right now – and this isn’t the 60′s where everyone is smoking pot and tripping on LSD – this is 2010 Fresno, where unfortunately the drugs of choice are often Methamphetamine, Oxycontin/Heroin, or Cocaine/Crack. Throw this into the mix with the total absence of quality drug education (which should begin as soon as a child is old enough to understand the concept) and you have the recipe for breeding an entire generation of drug addicts and criminals.

By closing down The Living Room they are only furthering these problems, and I’m sure Ashley Swearengin and the rest of the Fresno City Council know this. They also know they won’t be in office when the effects are finally felt.

Ashley Swearengin is the queen of trading short-term gains for long-term consequences that will be felt LONG after she has ended her reign.

Hey Ashley, here’s an idea for you: How about instead of turning off our streetlights (I bet the ones in your neighborhood are on!) and closing facilities that are bettering Fresno you instead cut out some of our bloated and overpaid police force?

I mean do you really need to send two undercover officers and a sheriff to deliver a BUSINESS CARD? I witnessed this happen in the past week, and after talking to my neighbor found out that they were simply looking for tips. This is what the tip line is for.

Or you could just fire Jerry Dyer and use his salary to keep The Living Room open, since everyone knows he’s a useless PR drone thats simply likes parading in front of the media. That is, when he’s not hiding from the press due to his nephew Damon Dyer selling large quantities of drugs out of Jerry’s sisters house (who is also a Police officer).

(Burn Fresno) – If you remember, back in late December and early January, a young man robbed several pharmacies across Fresno and Clovis. He was referred to as “The Oxycontin Bandit” by many and police enlisted the help of the public in attempting to capture him. His photo was displayed around town (a poorly angled shot of a man in a hat), but no one ever came forward (publicly at least).

My question to the Fresno Police Department is: what happened with this? Did this guy get away?

If that’s the case then I understand why they’re being so quiet about it: they don’t want to encourage similar behavior. They also know the only way that we can truly solve the problem is through hard work and community outreach and education. Oxycontin has hit this town very hard in the past few years, and the problem only seems to be getting worse. The FDA recently approved a new reformulation of the drug, but it can still be abused orally as there is no way to prevent someone from simply taking more pills.

The source of all of this Oxycontin is crooked doctors. Doctors that exist in Fresno, Clovis, and other surrounding communities. They charge a cash only visitation fee and often prescribe a milder painkiller for the first few visits to establish an air of legitimacy. These crooks move from office to office to avoid detection, and Fresno is not the only community that has been hit. South Florida is filled with “Pain Clinics” where one can easily procure a prescription from multiple sources.

What amazes me is that these doctors spent all that time going through medical school only to throw it all away.

What exactly is going on with the Fresno Police Department lately? First there was the narcotics officers luring drug dealers to town in order to steal their cars, resulting in the Major Narcotics Unit being temporarily shut down. Then officers decided to issue an unwarranted beating on a homeless gentleman who had done nothing wrong. Now a 23 year old man was killed in a hail of 35 bullets after being confronted by police while pulling his handgun from his trunk after a day of target shooting.

To me it seems as if the Fresno Police Department no longer knows how to do actual police work. They also seem to have forgotten that their motto is “to protect and to serve”, as it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cop from Fresno do either of these things. The modern Fresno Police Department has transformed itself into more of a business than a police department, which is quite obvious if you’ve driven much around Fresno. Officers on motorcycles line the streets (I’ve personally seen four of them within a couple hundred feet on Friant next to Woodward Lakes) issuing tickets for every traffic violation, no matter how minor, that they can muster up.

It’s no secret that Fresno can use all of the money it can get its hands on right now, but these problems need to be fixed the right way, not by giving motorcycle cops so much overtime that they make $100,000 per year. I understand being a police officer is a high risk job, but that’s a salary I would expect a tenured FBI agent to make, not a local traffic cop (who may not even see much crime at all).

It’s not surprising that nothing ever gets better within the department, with Jerry Dyer, the Chief of Police, being nothing more than a local celebrity and politician these days. It’s embarrassing to go to an event in Fresno and see Dyer and Mayor Ashley Swearengin parading in front of the press like they’re walking down the red carpet at the Oscars ( I witnessed this myself at the final day of filming for Extreme Home Makeover here in Fresno). 

For the quality of work being produced right now by the department, we certainly shouldn’t be giving them as much money as they are receiving currently. The fleets and fleets of new police vehicles and toys are nothing but slap to the face of local taxpayers in a time when most citizens cannot afford much more than paying their bills.

Even with all the money that the FPD is getting these days, they can’t seem to produce quality officers through their training. In the recent shooting death of Steven Willis by the Fresno Police Department, he was shot at 35 times by two officers after pulling a pistol out of his trunk when returning home to his apartment. That means that the officers actually emptied their clips, reloaded, and continued firing. Steven was hit with 14 bullets, 3 of which hit him in the back. Either these officers are so afraid of the local citizens that they panicked and acted unbecoming of a police officer, or they were hit men killing their target. To shoot that many bullets at someone, let alone in a heavily populated apartment complex, is completely unnecessary and over the top. I would even go as far as to say that those officers posed more danger to the residents of that apartment complex than the criminals located in Fresno ever could.

There has been local calls for hiring someone to audit the FPD, but hiring someone to audit them is just the start. The entire department needs to be reformed from top to bottom, beginning with getting rid of Jerry Dyer. People need to be able to trust the police for them to do their job well, and right now in Fresno that just isn’t possible.