A speaker seeking to address the Board of Supervisors Tuesday was forcibly ejected from the chamber by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies on the orders of a supervisor, who found his behavior objectionable.
The resident, who submitted only his first name — “Eddie” — on a board meeting speaker card, had signed up to address three separate policy agenda items, all related to sheriff’s operations, at the same time.
One item concerned a federal grant award for eradication of illicit cannabis grows, another was a single-source no-bid agreement with a company to provide deputies with a smart phone app, and the third was a memorandum of understanding on inter-departmental communications regarding subpoenas.
When Eddie’s name was initially called shortly after 11 a.m. Tuesday, he was not in the chamber, visibly irritating board Chair Karen Spiegel, who called for him several times. When he casually walked into the chamber from the lobby, Spiegel firmly recommended that in the future he stay “in the room” when he’s aware that items on which he’d sought to speak are imminent.
“What? I didn’t hear anything you said,” Eddie replied.
Spiegel repeated herself, and when Eddie, dressed in a light-colored two-piece suit, again indicated he didn’t hear everything, the chair retorted, “I’m not playing games.”
He appeared unperturbed but unreceptive, and there was a moment of further dialogue with the chair when he asked whether he would receive nine minutes — three minutes for each item pulled on the agenda, which is typical — to speak.
“Your time has started,” Spiegel said.
“I don’t give a (expletive),” he replied, briefly walking in a circle behind the podium, looking into the spectator gallery.
When Spiegel indicated that he was wasting the board’s time, Eddie asked whether he could ask questions, and the chair told him to proceed with his comments on the three items pulled, at which point he retorted, “I suggest you stop talking.”
The speaker, who is in his mid to late 30s and has appeared before the board at various times over the last four years, identifying himself during public comments as a business owner, then turned his attention to a sheriff’s representative seated in the back of the room. He asked him whether “industrial rape” was a formal policy that had been implemented by the department, implying that it had been used by deputies for “intimidation, coercion, punishment” and other offenses.
“Don’t answer that,” Spiegel instructed the sheriff’s administrator.
“Don’t tell him what to do,” Eddie shot back. “You can’t tell him what to do. That’s illegal. It’s in the Constitution.”
That interaction immediately elicited a directive from Supervisor Manuel Perez to the four deputies standing watch in the chamber to “remove him from the room.” Perez is not the vice chair, and Spiegel herself did not order the speaker’s removal, but the deputies acted.
When Eddie demanded to know why he was being ejected, Perez replied, “because you are disturbing” the meeting.
Eddie initially resisted being forcibly escorted from the chamber and pushed away a deputy’s hand when he placed it on the speaker’s shoulder but ultimately walked into the lobby on his own, with the four deputies in trail. The board then resumed hearings on other matters.
The man was not arrested or detained.
Ejections from board meetings are very rare and are generally the prerogative of the chair.
The last memorable removal occurred when the late Roy Wilson was chair, and a homeless woman in a wheelchair was forcibly rolled out of the chamber by a deputy when she continued to speak, vociferously, at the podium well after her three minutes had elapsed.
During several meetings amid the state-imposed COVID lockdowns, when speakers appeared before the board in large numbers to heatedly protest the pandemic restrictions, there were occasions when Perez, who was then chair, appeared ready to order the entire chamber cleared, but didn’t. He did, however, jump up and desert the dais twice when streams of critical remarks were directed at the board.