By Terry Miller
NAACP President in Pasadena, Joe Brown, told Beacon Media “ these are troubling times” minutes after he was at a closed to the press meeting about the incident which left one man dead in Pasadena Saturday as a result of Pasadena Police officer’s bullets.
The meeting originally scheduled to be at NAACP headquarters was quickly changed to the Police Dept. and subsequently the media was essentially locked out of the conversation.
However, Beacon Media has learned from an anonymous source that one Joe Hopkins, Publisher of a local newspaper – The Pasadena Journal-, was, in fact, present at the meeting Tuesday afternoon.
As a result of the Leroy Barnes shooting a few years ago in 2009, the police dept. in Pasadena was ordered to follow a strict set of guidelines from an independent review – OIG.
Chief Phillip Sanchez was very “forthcoming and transparent and promised a full investigation,” according to Joe Brown.
The meeting took approximately an hour Brown said but no new information was disclosed other than has already been printed in this and other newspapers.
Joe Brown said the trouble really began with the police dept. when they opted to go to an encripted scanner system whereby local media could no longer monitor police traffic on their scanners as on January 3. There have been constant requests by this and other paper to change the system but to date all police scanner activity is not available to anyone but the dept.
Brown said the “community wants to know” about this latest shooting and feels a meeting will take place soon where media and the community at large will be included. “ We’re feeling the pressure to get some answers,” Brown said in a telephone interview.
