The Claremont Courier last week had a two-part series by Tony Krickl examining the 10th anniversary of the 1999 Irvin Landrum shooting, an incident that split the Claremont community, leading to deep soul-searching among some and outright denial in others. (Unfortunately, the Courier didn't post the articles on their website, which seemed a bit of an oversight considering the importance of the issue to the community.)
The incident became what some might call a transformational moment in Claremont's civic culture. In March, 2001, Llewellyn Miller, Claremont's first African American councilmember, was elected in the aftermath of the shooting; and, in 2003, Peter Yao became the City's first Asian councilmember.
The incident also caused a good many people to examine the city's management culture, one embodied by former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard and endorsed by the city fathers and mothers, the so-called Claremont 400. Many of these people refused for years after the shooting to acknowledge the possibility of any imperfection within City Hall and allowed Southard and his faithful assistant, current City Council candidate Bridget Healy, to run roughshod over state open government laws and to treat the non-Claremont 400 public with open contempt.
In our view, this Southardian management culture lay at the heart of the Landrum matter. What happened on Base Line Rd. on the night of January 11, 1999, will never be fully known. But what we do know is that the City Council and Southard committed misstep after misstep, mostly because of their collective arrogance as well as the sharp disconnect between their egos and the values of a majority of voters.
The sense of the majority of voters that the Council was horribly out-of-touch with reality was what did in incumbents Karen Rosenthal and Al Leiga, and what forced Paul Held and Sandy Baldonado to not seek re-election. It was also what swept Miller, Yao, Jackie McHenry, and Corey Calaycay into office. (The sword cuts both ways, though. Miller and McHenry both lost their re-election bids in a particularly ugly campaign in 2005, and it remains to be seen whether or not Calaycay will break the string of incumbents either stepping down or getting voted out.)
A reader wrote in after the first of Krick's two articles appeared on Saturday, January 31st. The reader was bothered by something we also noticed about the article:
DATE: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 12:35 PM
SUBJECT: Landrum article from Saturday's Claremont Courier
TO: Claremont Buzz
Hi,
I wondered if I was the only person who read the article in Saturday’s Claremont Courier by Tony Krickl about the Landrum shooting and who didn’t recognize the Karen Rosenthal quoted therein. My recollection of the events surrounding the Landrum shooting are that then-mayor Rosenthal, with her tin ear and foot in mouth, exacerbated a difficult situation no less than Glenn Southard. And I cannot remember, nor can I believe, that she took down the award plaques given to officers Hanna and Jacks. Certainly, she could not have spoken to Glenn Southard about the awards in the way described in the article. Part of the reason that she lost so badly (finishing in last or next-to-last place) in the next City Council election is that the Council would not rescind the awards, muzzle the embarrassing city manager, or consider doing so.
She was simply “inexperienced”—certainly not arrogant, insensitive, and certain of the city manager’s rightness. Revisionist history at its finest.
Yes, dear reader, Official Claremont's habit of forgetting and erasing the inconvenient parts of the past is nothing new, as we once said a couple years ago, Chicken Creek may be long gone from Claremont, but the River Lethe flows strong through the heart of town. Drink, Claremonsters, and forget.
The reader's note alluded to study circles. This, you might recall was Ellen Taylor's way of trying to take credit for "healing" the city by organizing the study circles without actually having to trouble citizens with of any sort of real self-examination. It was simply enough to have Queen Ellen declare victory over the guilt the Landrum matter created among Claremont's progressives for the self-congratulatory back-slapping to begin, followed quickly by the forgetting.
All that remains now is a sort of faux-history, complete with a false set of recollections, tenderly evoked in Krickl's two articles by the people most responsible for trying to preserve Southard's job (hence, Preserve Claremont):
- Former Mayor Karen Rosenthal, currently agonizing over Southard's awarding Employees-of-the-Year awards (with $1,000 bonuses) to the two officers involved in the shooting, claims to have ordered Southard to take the awards down from the walls just outside the Council Chambers - a detail Rosenthal brings to light 10 years after the fact, if it ever really happened at all.
- Taylor expressing sympathy for Landrum's family: "....[Southard] refused to release information about the shooting to the family. If that were my child, I would want some answers. The protests happened because the family felt they had to protest to be heard." So where were Ellen's sympathies 10 years ago? Why, if she were so concerned about the Landrum family, was Taylor not out at City Hall leading the protests or meeting with the Tracy Lee, Irvin Landrum's mother?
- Taylor's eventual campaign manager (and Bridget Healy's de facto CM as well), in Krickl's second article last Wednesday claiming a healing victory through the creation of Claremont's Police Commission: "In 2000, the city set up a Police Commission to 'give the community a forum if concerns came up with the Police Department,' said Helaine Goldwater, former chair of the Police Commission.
Goldwater conveniently forgets (that word again) to mention her role in neutering the commission so as to shackle its effectiveness, or Healy's role, beginning on 9/5/02 (the first meeting after Goldwater's commission term expired), as the staff member assigned to keep watch over the Police Commission to make sure they didn't stray too far off the reservation.
Click to EnlargeIn our view, Krickl's blog post on the subject gets closer to the truth of the matter than the two articles:
I interviewed Karen Rosenthal, who was not mayor when the incident happened but was throughout much of the aftermath. As the voice of the city, Rosenthal was certainly in a difficult position and struggled with being thrown into that role during the crisis.
Rosenthal cried while I interviewed her. Her emotions, which still exist today, personify how lasting an impact the incident had on the community, and all the raw emotions that it invoked.
The greatest criticism of Rosenthal throughout the aftermath was for being insensitive to Landrum and his family and making public statements about his character and personal life that many felt were irrelevant.
Does it matter that he fathered 2 children to 2 different women at the age of 18, as she brought up during our interview? Even going so far as to call him a “rapist, by the legal definition” because the women were underage.
....When Glenn Southard named the officers Employees of the Year award and released the criminal record of Obee Landrum [Irvin Landrum's uncle -ed.], he displayed his intent to take an extremely defensive stance over the issue. This did not sit well with those close to him and observers in the community.
With all the poor decisions that he made during the crisis, it calls to question his decision-making abilities on other, less important issues. The city of Claremont may very well be better off without him.
Claremont, as Krickl notes, is a better place now. But it is not because of Karen Rosenthal's retroactive compassion or Ellen Taylor's study circles. It's because there has been a bit of a shift in thinking in City Hall, a little more openness, a slight willingness to take the risk of making information easily available to the public. Televising and streaming Council meetings has helped, too, if for no other reason than the Council's fear of the camera has eliminated the eyerolling and sighing that confronted people questioning the Council on their decisions.
It's a quieter town, a less contentious town, than it was 10 years ago. The question should be, why did it take a shooting to set into motion the six-year-long chain of events that led to Southard's leaving? And, maybe, a second question: Why in the world would any sane person want that way of thinking back?
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