The First Presidential Debate in 3 minutes

One Bay Area: A Template for Regional Governance Advocated by" Build One America"

Stanley Kurtz book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities exposes the efforts of the administrative state, in conjunction with social equity interests, to regionalize decision making and funding for what in the past have been local government decisions. It includes requiring suburbs to take their "fair share" of all income levels. No where is this more obvious than in the San Francisco Bay Area with the One Bay Area Plan/Plan Bay Area. Regional unelected bureaucrats tell every city in the Bay Area how many housing units they MUST be prepared to accomodate. For many of the small village type towns, this will force their urbanization and destroy their uniqueness. Kurtz identifies an organization called Building One America. Here is a video, in their own words, of their plans.This is a shortened version of a video that was posted on the Building One America website (www.buildingoneamerica.org). The complete video can be viewed here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=...

Terms used by Build One America in the video include:

Zoning out the poor
Affordable housing
Affordable transportation
Livable communities 
Regional Opportunity Agenda 
Combating poverty=controlling urban sprawl
Vestiges of segregation=suburbs
Segregation=sprawl=inequality
Suburbs must do their "fair share"
Metropolitan wide accept responsibility

All these terms and ideas are spread liberally throughout the One Bay Area Plan. MTC-ABAG are the epitomy of regionalization, taking control out of the hands of local city councils and mayors. The Obama Administration is firmly behind this effort through the support of Valarie Jarrett and Ronald Sims. California is one of the initial test cases. 

The Democrats’ Methodist Moment- Hilary Clinton

The Democrats’ Methodist Moment

Young Hillary Rodham saw the church’s social concerns shift from alcohol and gambling to sexism and racism.

ENLARGE
The Clintons at a United Methodist church in Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2015. PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
By
KENNETH L. WOODWARDSept. 22, 2016 7:14 p.m. ET


After Bill Clinton, a Bible-toting Southern Baptist, was elected, I repeatedly tried as religion editor of Newsweek to interview him about his religious beliefs and practices. Ten days before the 1994 midterm elections, the White House offered me Hillary, the sturdy Methodist, instead.

The first lady spoke candidly about her Methodist upbringing, her core Christian beliefs and prayer habits, and how she frequently consulted the latest Methodist Book of Resolutions, the church’s official handbook on social and political issues, which she kept upstairs in the family quarters. Piety plus politics was her message.

I asked her if she ever thought of becoming an ordained Methodist minister once her White House years were over. “I think about it all the time,” she instantly replied. But after exchanging glances with her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, she asked me not to print what she had said because she felt it made her sound much too pious. I didn’t.


I feel free to mention this now because Hillary Rodham Clinton obviously has opted for a career in public service. But for a serious Methodist, public service is a form of ministry. All the more so because, as Mrs. Clinton’s former youth minister told Newsweek with sly self-awareness: “we Methodists know what’s good for you.”

Although religion is not an issue in this year’s presidential election, Hillary Clinton is by far the more religious candidate. What’s more, hers is the more religious political party—even though atheists, agnostics and other religiously nonaffiliated Americans (the “Nones”) now represent the largest bloc, replacing African-Americans, within the Democratic Party. To understand this seeming paradox, we first have to recognize that since its transformation in 1972 under another Methodist politician, George McGovern,the Democratic Party has advanced a righteous politics that mirrors the political righteousness of the United Methodist Church.

Methodists have been zealous monitors of American morals since the middle of the 19th century when, as historian Nathan O. Hatch has written, Methodists operated “the most extensive national institution other than the federal government.”

Their longtime concern with politics is symbolized by the Methodist Building, still the only nongovernmental edifice on Capitol Hill. It was built during Prohibition to house the denomination’s powerful Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals. The building also provided office space for Washington lobbyists representing the other mainline Protestant denominations. Together, they formed a moral Maginot line against the growing political influence of American Catholics as a threat to their vision of a Protestant America.

By the time Hillary Rodham joined a Methodist youth group in the early 1960s, the church’s social concerns had shifted from alcohol, gambling and shopping on the Sabbath to racism, sexism and the war in Vietnam. Thanks in large part to South Dakota’s George McGovern, so would the concerns of the Democratic Party.

The events of 1972 inaugurate what I call the Methodist Moment in Democratic Party politics. That was the year McGovern won the party’s presidential nomination—and, coincidentally, the year former Republican Hillary Rodham became a Democratic Party activist. McGovern was the son of a Methodist minister, grew up in a Methodist manse, graduated from a Methodist college, studied for the Methodist ministry before taking a doctorate in history, and taught at his Methodist alma mater before accepting the challenge of rebuilding South Dakota’s moribund party. His stump style was prairie preacher; his reformer’s rhetoric Methodist to the core.

In 1972 the United Methodist Church, as it was by then called, held its quadrennial General Convention—the church’s highest legislative body—as it does every presidential election year a few months prior to the national political conventions. A review of the positions taken by the church reveals remarkable congruence with the Democrats’ subsequent party platform. Both opposed the war in Vietnam and called for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. Both framed the nation’s economic ills as “systemic” and proposed wholesale transformation of political, economic and social institutions.

What is truly astonishing is the way that the Democrats’ planks on emerging culture-war issues echoed the (often more radical) stands adopted by the Methodists. Among the rights of children, for example, the Methodists included the right “to a full sex education, appropriate to their stage of development.” Affirming the rights of women, the Methodists supported full equality with men and demanded and end to “sex-role stereotypes.”


To counter overpopulation, the convention recommended the distribution of “reliable contraceptive information and devices.” Less than a year before Roe v. Wade, the convention urged “removal of abortion from the criminal code” but stopped short of approving abortion on demand. Finally, the Methodists embraced affirmative inclusion by reserving 30% of seats on all church boards and agencies for nonwhites, even though barely 6% of church members were African-American.

The events of 1972 also hastened the steady decline in membership and influence among the liberal mainline churches. Before the 1970s were out, the politically and socially conservative Southern Baptists superseded the United Methodists as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. As one generation gave way to the next, more and more young Methodists, Presbyterians and the like grew up to become religiously something else or—especially among millennials—nothing at all.

In sum, many of today’s Nones have retained the Methodists’ ethos of righteous politics while jettisoning the beliefs, behavior and belonging that made righteous Methodists Methodists in the first place. Many Jews and Roman Catholics can and do find in progressive Democratic politics aspects of their own social-justice traditions.

But the emergence of the Nones shows us that anyone can think and act like righteous Methodists just by being a liberal Democrat.

Mr. Woodward is the author of “Getting Religion: Faith, Culture and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama,” just published by Convergent Books.

California’s road to leviathan: Joel Kotkin

California’s road to leviathan: Joel Kotkin

France's Louis XIV: a new model for California's centralizing governance? (Getty Images)

By Joel Kotkin

At a time when technology and public opinion should be expanding the boundaries of innovation and self-expression, we appear to be entering a new era of ever greater economic and political centralization, Wendell Cox and I suggest in a new paper.

The trend to a more centralized economy is particularly evident in the information and media sectors, once hotbeds of entrepreneurial opportunity but now dominated by a handful of leviathan firms who gobble up competitors and often control markets at will. This trend is also evident in Washington, which increasingly regulates all aspects of our life, under an unprecedented welter of presidential and regulatory decrees, often bypassing the legislative process.

But nowhere is the centralist leviathan being incubated more than in the once fiercely individualist state of California. President Obama’s centralizing can be at least partially justified by the antics of an obstructionist Congress which has shown little desire to work across party lines. But that’s not the case here in California, which functions largely as a one-party dictatorship of crony business oligarchies, an aloof and arrogant bureaucracy, the green lobby and public-sector unions.

FROM “SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL” TO “L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI”

In his quirky first term, Jerry Brown was skeptical of central control and an open adherent of the decentralist, “small is beautiful” philosophy of the late British philosopher E.F. Schumaker. Now he seems to be enamored with creating a “coercive state” that would have fit better during the reign of France’s “Sun King,” Louis XIV.

California already leads the country in imposing state regulations and laws on everything from gender rights, to cow flatulence, to fair pay, to new licensing requirements for a never-ending panoply of professions. This huge extension of government has already reshaped the cost of such essentials as energy, particularly on the state’s impoverished, heavily Latino interior, and seems likely to escalate already inflated property values to even more absurd levels.

Critical to the California regulatory tsunami is the unraveling of any semblance of local authority. Brown’s bureaucratic phalanx, led by the California Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Planning and Research, and the California Natural Resources Agency, has recently advocated a new state-directed planning policy that essentially all but prohibits new greenfield development, something generally required for keeping housing costs down.

In the process, the state is poised to seize control of the most basic local functions — such as zoning — potentially under the auspices of new, unelected regional governments that would be as remote from local concerns as the European Union’s increasingly detested autocrats are to many residents of the continent, and, before Brexit, to the United Kingdom.

Another centralizing bill, by Santa Monica Democratic Assemblyman Richard Bloom, would deprive local municipalities of the right to review and oppose high-density projects. This reflects the state’s latest climate-change driven obsession, although such developments are widely opposed in many affected communities in California.

This approach rejects essentially all grassroots solutions to pressing environmental challenges. There is little or no interest in internet-based solutions like dispersed work, or telecommuting — despite the fact that in Southern California more people already now work at home than take transit, according to the recently released American Community Survey data. The problem, perhaps, is that people who work at home don’t hand over big contracts to engineering construction firms or provide the rationale for real estate speculation.

OVER OUR LIVE BODIES?

These policy agendas likely do not reflect public opinion or preferences. Most Californians, like their fellow Americans, overwhelmingly prefer local control. And they don’t show much enthusiasm for the dense environments that are being imposed on them. Between 2000 and 2012, population growth in the Los Angeles metropolitan area urban core was all of 9,500 people, while the surrounding inner ring added less than 14,000 residents. In contrast, the suburban and exurban areas added well over 675,000 people.

Ultimately, the attempt to impose state planning amounts to nothing more than social engineering by a centralizing elite who want to change the way most Californians live, including those who continue unashamedly to “live large.”

Centralization is already spawning a backlash, mainly focused on forced densification in communities like Marin County, Los Angeles and Assemblyman Bloom’s Santa Monica, which are as blue as indigo. But community groups, even if well organized, are often no match for the power of regulators, the green lobby and what “The Nation” contributor Zelda Bronstein calls “real estate Democrats.”

In a healthy political culture, such controversial policies would be altered by popular demand. But in one-party California, where the Republican presence is largely vestigial, those hurt by such moves, particularly blue-collar workers and prospective homeowners, are routinely sold out by their representatives, often funded by green billionaires like Tom Steyer. With no organized alternative in one-party California, there is no recourse to punish legislators. Many traditional industries, from energy to homebuilding, which might be expected to speak out, are increasingly powerless or intimidated by the threat of inciting centralized bureaucratic and gubernatorial wrath.

As a result, California, once seen as the fount of innovation and individuality, is beginning to resemble something of a bizarre mix between crony capitalist concentration and taxpayer-funded socialism. The nightmarish consequences could mean the continued ascendency, and not only here, of an ever more centralized and authoritarian state.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

The Top 5 Issues Facing Black Americans

The Cross Family Story - Washington Dept of Ecology harassment

In 2016, the Washington State Department of Ecology began a targeted harassment program accusing small farmers and property owners of having a "potential to pollute" the watershed because they have an animal on their property. In Whatcom County alone, many people were forced too euthanize or give away their pet goats, sheep, horses, llamas, or other farm animals to avoid the targeted legal and financial threats from the Washington State Department of Ecology. This agency never provided any evidence of pollution or real problems. The agency just said that a "potential to pollute" existed

Suddenly, a Pension Shifting Paradigm?

California Watch

Suddenly, a Pension Shifting Paradigm?

Steven Greenhut for the American Spectator

 

September 22, 2016, 12:15 am

The public employee rich could be finding it harder to get richer at public expense.

Sacramento

Last month, I wrote a dour column for the Spectator doubting that a significant new appeals court decision in a major pension case would ultimately change the financial trajectory of our state’s pension systems. Bottom line: A court finally agreed that oversized pensions for public-sector workers could be cut going forward, just as is allowed in the private sector.

It was great news, given the so-called “California Rule” has left cities with no choice but to slash public services and raise taxes to pay pension benefits that typically are reserved for multimillionaires. (That’s no exaggeration. One would need millions of dollars in the bank to have a guaranteed six-figure, cost-of-living-adjusted salary for life.)

But unions here control almost everything and past experiences gives us little reason to think such a sane decision will survive its many hurdles. I stick with my pessimistic assessment, but in recent weeks, the cold, hard actuarial reality has set in as the state is being forced to spend such a significant amount of money to plug its gaping pension hole.

Even the mainstream media are noticing. On Sept. 17, the New York Times published a lengthy article about California’s ongoing pension woes, “A Sour Surprise for Public Pensions: Two Sets of Books.” It reported on a tiny pest-control district in the Southern California desert that serves a mere six people. The Citrus Pest Control District No. 2 was trying to convert its employees to a 401(k) plan from its existing defined-benefit plan and was slapped with a massive exit fee from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest state pension fund.

Per the Times:

It turns out CalPERS, which managed the little pension plan, keeps two sets of books: the officially stated numbers, and another set that reflects the ‘market value’ of the pensions that people have earned. The second number is not publicly disclosed. And it typically paints a much more troubling picture, according to people who follow the money.

This “two sets of books” issue is significant. I reported on it in 2011, in fact. For the sake of public consumption, CalPERS says there’s little problem because it expects a rate of return on its investments of 7.5 percent (lowered from 7.75 percent). If it gets that return every year, there will be plenty of money to pay all the promises into the future. CalPERS says the public can rely on this “official” number, but its “market” statistics tell a more dismal story.

Here’s what I found in my 2011 Orange County Registercolumn:

When the taxpayer is backing up the entire liability for the pensions received by members of the California Public Employees Retirement System, then CalPERS officials are exuberant about the stock market. They insist that a predicted rate of return of 7.75 percent is perfectly realistic. When their own funds are on the line, however, CalPERS can be extremely conservative as it embraces one of the lowest annual return rates imaginable: 3.8 percent.

At the time, some cities were trying to exit the pension fund, just as the little pest-control district was trying to do in the New York Times profile. Here’s the Times:

CalPERS says it must bill departing governments for every penny their pensions could possibly cost because once they cash out, CalPERS has no way of going back and getting more money from them if something goes wrong.

Well, exactly. As I had opined, this second number proves pension critics have been right all along. When taxpayer money is on the line, CalPERS is a big spender. Only the finest and highest pension formulas will do for its public workers. They deserve it. Don’t worry. It will all pay for itself, which is what CalPERS argued in the Legislature when it was championing the 1999 pension legislation that started the ensuing pension-spiking spree.

But when its own money from its own investment pool is at stake, the agency suddenly gets very conservative. In 2011, it was using the 3.8-percent rate-of-return number. Lately, according to the Timesarticle, it is using a measly 2.56 percent rate of return. The lower the return, the higher the unfunded pension liabilities, or debt. Using the “official” numbers, CalPERS has a big debt problem. Using the “market” numbers it has a potential catastrophe on its hands.

Don’t expect the state’s coddled class of union workers to figure out what this means, but unless something dramatic changes, they might not get everything they were promised in their retirement years. On Tuesday, Service Employees International Union 1021 members “shut down the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors evening work session on public safety, demanding higher wages,” according to a Stockton Record article. They’re unhappy with a 6 percent proposed raise over the next three years.

Here’s the rolling-on-the-floor-laughing moment. The lead union negotiator was quoted as follows: “The county has the money to solve this, but instead, they choose to put that money into its pension fund.” Well, yeah, the county has to put in money to prop up the underfunded pensions union workers will receive. It’s still going to their compensation. This county is home to Stockton, which recently emerged from a bankruptcy due in part to the garish pension formulas and “Lamborghini-style” health plan it gave to employees.

On Sept. 18, The Los Angeles Times published a CALmatters piece about the above-mentioned 1999 pension deal (S.B. 400) that retroactively increased pensions for the California Highway Patrol; the measure also gave a green light for agencies across California to do the exact same thing. I’ve been screaming about that ramrodded travesty for years, but recognition in the major media of the mess that bill caused is nevertheless encouraging.

“With the stroke of a pen, California Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation that gave prison guards, park rangers, Cal State professors and other state employees the kind of retirement security normally reserved for the wealthy,” according to the report.

Proponents sold the measure in 1999 with the promise that it would impose no new costs on California taxpayers.… They were off — by billions of dollars — and taxpayers will bear the consequences for decades to come. This year, state employee pensions will cost taxpayers $5.4 billion, according to the Department of Finance. That’s more than the state will spend on environmental protection, fighting wildfires and the emergency response to the drought combined.

And the state general fund’s contribution is a pittance (proportionally) compared to what it is doing to counties and cities. Many localities now face “service insolvency,” meaning they can pay their employees and retirees, but not offer much in the way of services.

Since passage of that fateful law, California has been engaged in an unparalleled effort to transfer as much private-sector wealth as possible to public-sector employees. There’s a reason cities open arenas to handle applicants for a handful of firefighting openings. Consider this new statistic from one Orange County suburb. The average compensation for a Costa Mesa firefighter: $241,000 a year. It’s typical and includes a guaranteed pension of 90 percent or more of their final pay beginning at age 50.

There’s a quasi-serious term called the “Viagra Effect.” Public employees are retiring at such early ages that many of them are hooking up with young new spouses. So if Bob the firefighter retires at 50 with a $225,000 a year payday and then marries 32-year-old Mary, the actuaries have to figure out how the taxpayer-backed system is going to pay that amount until Mary joins Bob in that big firehouse in the sky. CalPERS statistics, by the way, show that the best-pensioned employees (cops and firefighters) live the longest — well into their 80s.

I wish everyone a long and happy life and plenty of Viagra if needed, but it’s time that we, the taxpayer, stop getting screwed by all of this. I’m a little less dour than last month. When this greed mongering gets prominent coverage in such important mainstream sources, it seems likely the paradigm is shifting. Maybe there’s hope for ending the California Rule, after all.

Editor's Note:  Marinwood CSD has a huge underfunded pension problem today. Marinwood CSD director Jeff Naylor has spearheaded a drive to set aside money in a "irrevocable trust" to lessen total liability.  This sounds great but what happens if the pension rules change?  Our taxes will be gone forever and our liabilities for other necessities such as maintenance and capital improvements will be threatened.   

Modern Swing Bands

Naked Mike Rowe pulls a Shotgun to Shoot a Drone out of the Sky

Leave Me Adrone! 

Everybody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own homes.

Early this morning, deep in the middle of some sort of strange gardening dream, I was awakened by the sound of a giant bumble bee, hovering a few inches from my ear. As I slowly entered a more conscious state, I realized the sound was not coming from a bee in a dream, nor for that matter, a bee in reality. It was coming from something much larger, just outside my bedroom window.Dressed in my favorite pair of non-existent pajamas, I leapt from my bed and pulled the drapes aside. There, not three feet in front of me, was a camera, dangling from the underside of a drone. The red light was on, and the camera was rolling.
I was slow to react, partly because I was still waking up, and partly because my first instinct when confronted with a camera is to say something pithy. I can’t help it. I’ve been saying pithy things to cameras for the last thirty years, and old habits die hard. Well this morning, I had no words for the outrage I felt at such an intrusion. I was incensed, and as Freddy egged me on with a chorus of snarls and barks, I moved onto my second instinct - an irresistible urge to blow the contraption out of the sky.

Everybody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own homes.

Seconds later I’d pulled the Mossburg 12-guage from under my bed and grabbed the cellphone from the bedside table. In no time, I was out on the deck downstairs, about fifteen feet below the electronic Peeping Tom. The drone had moved even closer to my window. I could see the camera panning left to right, and I could hear my dog unleashing a level of indignation usually reserved for raccoons and feral cats. Somewhere, in the logical part of my brain, it occurred to me that nothing good can come from an angry B-list celebrity standing on his deck with no clothes and a loaded shotgun, but I was not really in touch at that moment with the logical part of my brain. I was focused only on the joy that would follow the roar of the Mossburg, and the satisfying sprinkle of cheap plastic that would rain down upon my deck in the aftermath. 

I pumped a shell into the chamber, enjoying the “crunch-crunch” sound that makes shotguns worth owning. I had a clear shot - nothing but blue sky above - and more than enough umbrage to justify the destruction I was about to unleash. But then, as I was literally squeezing the trigger, I saw the camera tilt down. It was pointed directly at me, and in that moment - I froze.

I’d like to tell you I stopped because I realized that discharging my weapon in such a fashion would be frowned on by the local constabulary. But really, what stopped me was the realization that somewhere nearby, a drone operator was staring at his monitor, pondering the image of a very naked guy with a very familiar face, pointing a shotgun into the lens of his Go Pro and looking every bit as crazy as Gary Busey and Nick Nolte at the nadir of their careers. I froze, because I could see the video that might very well appear on the local news, (with considerable blurring, naturally.) The same video that might soon appear on my mother’s computer screen, along with the headline - “Dirty Jobs Guy Totally Loses It - Gets Naked and Shoots Drone From San Francisco Skies.”

When the moment passed I put the shotgun down and reached for my phone instead, just as the wicked contrivance bugged out for the Wild Blue Yonder. The attached photo is all I have in the way of proof, and I hope to God that’s all the proof you’ll ever see. Because honestly, I have no idea who is in possession of the footage I’ve just described. Nor do I have any idea if it will appear in your news feeds later this week. I sincerely hope not, but I know it’s out there, and there isn’t much I can do about it but make sure - if the unthinkable occurs - that you can all say you heard it here first…

Mike


Editor's Note:   Although public figures surrender some privacy for fame, even they deserve privacy in their homes.  The real issue is the loss of privacy from government who can use the same technology to monitor us. 

Marinwood CSD meeting September 13, 2016

S

Someone is being mean to me on the Internet.

ACLU: Connecticut State Troopers Caught On Tape Fabricating Charges Against Protester

ACLU: Connecticut State Troopers Caught On Tape Fabricating Charges Against Protester

“Gotta cover our ass.”


C.J. Ciaramella|Sep. 21, 2016 9:15 am

One Friday evening last September, Connecticut resident Michael Picard was doing what he usually does: standing on a strip of grass by an Interstate onramp and protesting the government.

Picard, a local privacy activist, often protests police DUI checkpoints, which he believes are unconstitutional and a waste of money. That night he was holding a sign warning motorists of a DUI checkpoint farther up the road. Picard, like any good protester these days, also had a camera to document his interactions with police.


What he ended capturing on video is now at the center of a civil rights lawsuit filed Monday on Picard's behalf by the Connecticut ACLU against three state troopers, whom Picard claims illegally seized his camera and then conspired to fabricate charges against him. Unbeknownst to the officers, though, the camera was still recording.

According the lawsuit, Connecticut state trooper John Barone confronted Picard, saying he had received complaints from passing motorists that Picard, who also open-carries a handgun, was waving his gun in the air. (The ACLU says there were never any such complaints and that Picard kept his gun holstered at all times.) After claiming it was illegal for Picard to film him, Barone snatched the camera and put it on the roof of his police cruiser while he and other officers discussed what charges to hit Picard with.

"You want to punch a number on this either way?" Barone asked one of his supervising officers, police slang for opening an investigation and entering a case number. "Gotta cover our ass."

"We could hit him with reckless use of the highway by a pedestrian and creating a public disturbance," Sgt. John Jacobi suggested.

"And then we claim in backup we had multiple people who stopped to complain," Master Sgt. Patrick Torneo added later in the conversation. "They didn't want to stay and offer a statement, so we took our own course of action."

The officers ticketed Picard, returned his camera and gun, and told him to protest in another location. It took Picard more than a year to get the criminal charges against him dismissed.

In the lawsuit, the ACLU says the three state troopers retaliated against Picard, violating his First Amendment rights to protest and film the government, as well as his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

"Community members like me have a right to film government officials doing their jobs in public, and we should be able to protest without fearing political retribution from law enforcement," Picard said in a statement. "As an advocate for free speech, I'm deeply disappointed that these police officers ignored my rights, particularly because two of the troopers involved were supervisors who should be setting an example for others. By seeking to hold these three police officers accountable, I hope that I can prevent the same thing from happening to someone else."

A spokesperson for the Connecticut State Police said the issue was subject to an ongoing investigation and declined to comment.