Editorials

Note: This first appeared on Friday in the previous issue, but has been updated for this one.

On Tuesday I received one of the increasingly frequent press releases that the Berkeley Police Department has been sending out. Many if not most are trivial feel-good PR: “Coffee with a Cop” and the like, so I tend not to read them. But from time to time these press releases are entitled “Cases of Community Interest” and I do check those out.

Most of the time, they amount to nothing more than a laundry list of unsubstantiated allegations, though some do result in charges by the District Attorney’s office and once in a while even convictions.

This one caught my eye on Tuesday: “January 26^th at 4:31 pm, a resident was inside his home on the 2600 block of Sacramento Street when he was startled by the sound of something thrown at his front door. When the resident went to investigate, he saw that there was a package at his door. Seeing the postal carrier now across the street, the resident walked over and asked the postal carrier not to throw his packages. The postal carrier responded by cursing and threatening the resident, who ran back to his home and called 911.Officers located the postal carrier (Lamonte Travoy Earnest, Male, 44 years old, Berkeley, CA) a block away and arrested him on suspicion of making criminal threats as well as an outstanding arrest warrant for animal cruelty.”

LaMonte Earnest, the disputant named in this BPD press release, is a family friend, and I was pretty sure that there was something wrong with this picture.

Let’s just deconstruct this police account, shall we? 

“a resident was inside his home on the 2600 block of Sacramento Street when he was startled by the sound of something thrown at his front door. When the resident went to investigate, he saw that there was a package at his door. Seeing the postal carrier now across the street, the resident walked over and asked the postal carrier not to throw his packages.” 

Already, this seems to be the kind of classic “he said, she said” account beloved of law school professors trying to teach students how to evaluate evidence. Two participants in a dispute give conflicting accounts, and there’s no third party to say which one is telling the truth. What actually happened? 

How do we know whether the package was actually thrown, or if the resident was simply startled out of a nap by the package being dropped on the porch? What did the postal carrier say about what happened? If the package was actually thrown, was the porch easily accessible, or was there some impediment? 

The postal carrier responded by cursing and threatening the resident, who ran back to his home and called 911.  

Says who? Shouldn’t it say instead “the resident claimed that the postal carrier …..” 

“Cursing and threatening”? As we know, there are all kinds of curse words, and the First Amendment protects our right to use most of them most of the time. What exactly did the resident allege was said? 

“Seeing the postal carrier now across the street, the resident walked over and asked the postal carrier not to throw his packages.” This sounds to me like the resident provoked a confrontation as the postal carrier was walking away. Did he ask politely or was his request couched in provocative language? 

While inside his home calling 911, the postal carrier entered the residence and started recording him with his cell phone—threatening that he now knows who he is.” 

This sentence is very hard to understand because it’s grammatically challenged, but the writer seems to be saying that the postal worker forced his way into the resident’s house. Really? 

If he’d done that, shouldn’t he have been charged with some more serious crime, like trespassing or assault or burglary or something? 

Officers located the postal carrier (Lamonte Travoy Earnest, Male, 44 years old, Berkeley, CA) a block away and arrested him on suspicion of making criminal threats … 

Here’s a good little primer on the “crime” of making criminal threats: 

https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html#1.2 

A pertinent warning from this site: 

 

 

“Because there is no requirement that the victim suffers any physical injury, criminal threats is a crime which is ripe for false accusations. Anyone who is angry, jealous, vengeful, spiteful or trying to escape his/her own criminal liability could easily falsely accuse another person of this serious crime. This is especially true when the accusation is of a verbal threat, with no written or electronic recording.”  

 

 

Remember, no witnesses, no recording. Why should the resident be believedl? 

 

 

And how about this? “ …an outstanding arrest warrant for animal cruelty.” 

Postpersons and dogs: traditional adversaries. We have a fluffy little yellow rescue dog who devoted years of his life to waiting for the postal worker to show up every day so he could defend the house by furious barking. Cute, but if he were instead one of those pit bull mixes beloved of paranoid residents, postal workers would be justifiably afraid of him. The USPD gives employees a spray canister to use in such situations, which might look cruel to the dog owner, who might well file charges. 

And in fact, that’s exactly what LaMonte Earnest says happened. Three years ago he sprayed a dog which attacked him while he was delivering mail in San Mateo. The dog’s owner, a policeman, managed to get a warrant issued for LaMonte's arrest which he’d never heard about until the Berkeley police pulled it out of a computer when they detained him on Tuesday. 

Yes, reader, I actually called LaMonte and asked him about the report. Not only that, I talked to his wife, criminal defense attorney Kate Hallinan. [Full disclosure: she’s the niece of Planet columnist Conn Hallinan and the granddaughter of my friend, Berkeley Arts Festival founder Bonnie Hughes.] 

As it happened, Kate and LaMonte were in the process of putting together a press release giving his side of the story. We’ve reprinted it here in full, clearly labelled as such. 

Why did they have to issue a press release denying the charges? Because a local “news source”, whatever that might mean, had published the police press release as part of an article, to which they added LaMonte’s booking photo, which shows clearly that he is, yes,African-American. (Why are we not surprised?) 

And now we come to our main beef with this story as it’s been reported. It is accepted good journalistic practice to clearly label accusations as such. Here’s the story as written by experienced reporter Jeff Shuttleworth for rock solid Bay City News, to which we subscribe: 

Jan 29, 2019 - BCN37:BERKELEY: POSTAL CARRIER ARRESTED FOR ALLEGEDLY THREATENING CUSTOMER 

BERKELEY (BCN) 

A postal carrier has been arrested on suspicion of making criminal 

threats for allegedly threatening a Berkeley man who complained when a 

package was thrown at his door, police said. 

The man was inside his home in the 2600 block of Sacramento Street 

at about 4:30 p.m. on Saturday when he was startled by the sound of something 

thrown at his front door, according to police. 

When the resident went to investigate, he saw that there was a 

package at his door, police said. 

The man also noticed that the postal carrier was across the street 

so he walked over and asked the carrier not to throw his packages, according 

to police. 

But the postal carrier responded by cursing and threatening the 

man, who ran back to his home and called 911, police said. 

While the man was inside his home calling 911, the postal carrier 

entered the residence and started recording him with his cellphone and 

threatened the man by stating that he now knew who he was, according to 

police. 

Officers located the postal carrier, who was identified as 

44-year-old Lamonte Travoy Earnest of Berkeley, a block away and arrested him 

on suspicion of making criminal threats as well as an outstanding warrant for 

animal cruelty, police said. 

 

Note Shuttleworth's liberal use of qualifiers like “allegedly”..”police said”…”according to police”….etc. 

That’s how real professionals do it. 

So I called Officer Byron White, BPD’s current public information officer, who sends out these releases. I asked why only one person was arrested in what seemed like a “he said, she said” two-person dispute with no impartial witnesses. He told me it was a “private person’s arrest”, that is to say a signed complaint made by one person against another. He said that in a case like this “we are legally bound to take him into custody”. 

I asked him what allegedly had been said which would constitute “making criminal threats.” He said that the accused suspect had called the other guy “a swear word” and said he knew where the guy lived. I told him I was an adult and could stand to hear the actual language. He said the postal worker called the resident a “motherfucker”. 

Of course that’s a word you can hear on any middle school playground any day of the week, and of course LaMonte knows where the resident identified as the victim lives because he is his mail carrier. Even if the accuser’s account is true this doesn’t seem to add up to much of a credible lthreat. And it probably isn’t true. Again, no witnesses or recording. 

I asked him why BPD had released LaMonte’s booking picture. He said a news organization had asked him for it, and if they asked BPD was legally required to give it out. 

Who asked for it? Berkeleyside.com, he said. 

He told me these press releases (formerly known as “the police blotter”) are a selection by the BPD of some of what’s been happening locally, not everything. 

One might question the judgment of whoever selected this particular item for BPD to publicize, but you can certainly question the professional judgment of any news organization which publishes unsubstantiated allegations like this, including LaMonte’s name and photo, without doing the minimal due diligence of getting both sides of what was clearly an argument between two annoyed individuals at worst. 

It seems highly unlikely that the Alameda County District Attorney will file any charges in this shaky case. If that happens, someone owes LaMonte and Kate an apology, at least. 

 

 

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UPDATE: After I posted the above on Thursday, I obtained a copy of the resident’s 911 call from the Berkeley police. What I heard was a genuinely terrified man, who seemed to think that his mailman was coming to get him. From the context I couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on, but I never heard him say “the postman is inside my house”. It sounded more like he was saying he was afraid that would happen. 

 

 

 

You be the judge. Here’s the recording:  

 

The resident’s name was included as part of the legal filings. Let’s just call him Mr. L. 

Today (Friday)I got his phone number from the internet and called him to ask for his side of the story. He did tell me clearly that he thought the mailman had come into his apartment through the front door which he’d tried unsuccessfully to slam shut, but when I pressed him on details and timing his answers were not precise. 

All this puts me in mind of the classic law school evidence class stunt, where the professor hires actors to enact a crime in front of the class and asks the students to recount what happened. Inevitably their stories are widely divergent—eyewitness testimony is amazingly unreliable. 

I’m willing to believe that both LaMonte Earnest and his customer Mr. L. are “telling the truth” as they see it. But this does make me wonder what prompted the Berkeley police to take custody of one and not the other. We should not discount the role of unacknowledged racial stereotyping in the BPD decision about whom to blame, or in prompting Mr. L.’s panicky 911 call. 

The BPD’s public information officer said the officers were simply taking custody of Earnest after the resident had arrested him. As it was explained to me, the police were acting according to a legal theory called “private person’s arrest”. This one’s new to me, but if you’re interested the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office has posted a discussion of it on their web site  

So I asked Mr. L. if he remembered arresting Earnest himself. It didn’t seem to me that he understood or remembered what had happened with the police, or that he had intended to make a “private person’s arrest”.. 

He told me he was just very, very scared—sitting on the steps weeping when the police came, almost ready to wet his pants, he said, even though Earnest had moved on and was delivering mail elsewhere. The next day, he said, he had to go to the emergency room with another panic attack. 

Kate Hallinan told me that by the time she arrived on the scene there were five police cars there with attendant officers. Her husband was taken away in handcuffs about an hour later. 

So what really happened? We’ll never know. Mr. L assured me that he’s a very ordinary, dull, mild-mannered fellow, a software engineer raised Catholic whose hobby is studying theology. I believe him and feel sorry for him, but inadvertently he’s caused LaMonte and Kate a world of woe. 

Two guys in a stupid shouting match over nothing, and one panics and calls 911, even though there’s no proof he was actually in danger. Were five police cars needed to arrest the other one on “suspicion of making criminal threats? 

The more I learn about this situation the more I can’t help thinking that it represents a tremendous waste of public resources to handle it through the criminal justice system. 

Truthfully, I think the best outcome would be for them all to sit down together with a trained mediator and talk through what’s happened, instead of taking it to court. 

None of the three—Kate, LaMonte and Mr. L.—should harbor any long term ill will toward the others. 

Reconciliation is what’s called for, not legal revenge. How can civil society help them with that? 

I’d be happy to take them all out for coffee to talk it over. 

 

 

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