Dirty cops always lie. They know lying is an automatic way to get fired, but they lie anyway. This is where retired Sacramento Police Capt. Kevin Johnson comes in.
Johnson, who runs a business called Command Strategies Consulting, works for police departments across California. He breaks down the blue wall of silence and catches lying cops.
Running should be among the safest of pandemic sports. Open trails. Space for social distancing. Virus loads diluted by fresh air. Fit and healthy runners. If two sturdy legs and a decent pair of running shoes don’t guarantee immunity, they help the odds.
But what happens when 800 or 1,000 runners congregate for a Sunday race? Or when 29,000 show up for the Thanksgiving Run to Feed the Hungry? Health officials don’t want to think about that. In mid-March they banned organized races until further notice—a prohibition that wiped out the running calendar and threatens to linger into next year.
Katie Valenzuela won’t join the City Council until December. But she is already learning how she won’t fit in. Steve Hansen, the two-term councilmember Valenzuela defeated in March, won’t speak to her. Other members smile and offer congratulations, but the words carry little weight.
At first, this bothered Valenzuela. “I was pretty depressed when the pandemic started,” she says. Sheltered in her Boulevard Park home with her two rescue terriers, socially distanced from work and friends, months from being sworn into office, Valenzuela felt disconnected from the motivations that propelled her run for office.
Inside Sacramento is looking for a few good community journalists. But not just from any community. We are interested in writers from neighborhoods that historically don’t get much attention from traditional media—unless the news is bad.
We want to see Sacramento’s underserved communities from a different, deeper, more personal perspective. This means we want stories by and about people who really know the neighborhoods.
Turns out City Hall cares about motorists who fly down the Florin Road West ramp from Interstate 5 and speed through the wide intersection at Greenhaven Drive. There are high-level concerns about access to schools such as Martin Luther King Jr. K-8, which lacks easy access to bike trails and forces kids to cross Rush River Drive.
After years of promising to improve traffic conditions and connectivity in Greenhaven and Pocket, the City Council has decided to act. Prodded by Councilmember Rick Jennings, the city hired a consultant to examine the community’s unique traffic culture—the architecture, landscapes and engineering that allow people to move from Riverside Boulevard to Pocket Road and points in between.
Summertime in Sacramento and the streets sizzle. After months of coronavirus and social upheaval, my thoughts naturally turn to sports. Specifically, ice skating.
Imagine the joy of heading to Del Paso Boulevard and cooling off with a few spins around the frozen pond at Iceland. But skating is impossible at Iceland. The ice is gone.
