Advocates Warn of Increasing Numbers of Problems in the Yolo County Family Court System
This Weekend’s Child Sexual Abuse Conference in Davis Focuses on Courts Endangering Children’s Safety – Over the course of the last several years, the Vanguard has received a number of complaints about the Yolo County Family Court system, where the complainants allege that local judges have put young children into homes of known sex offenders or otherwise have endangered their welfare.
According to these complaints, the Yolo County Family Court does not consistently ensure the physical and sexual safety of children in custody, nor make good visitation decisions.
By Antoinnette Borbon
A look at the Public Safety Exception to Miranda – It was a long and traumatic week for the country last week – a week that began with the tragic bombings and ended with the dramatic capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Once captured, alive but badly injured, the question turned to how to prosecute the US citizen.
by Alexandra Rose 
You will not find many more critical of this District Attorney’s office than this site. However, we believe that the District Attorney’s office deserves real credit for taking a program that has worked successfully in San Francisco, adding true restorative justice components to it, and then planning to implement it in the city of Davis, for starters, as a pilot program.
Last week we reported on the allegation by John Munn, the listed plaintiff in the lawsuit against the city’s water process, who wrote an op-ed a week ago arguing that “the election outcome was influenced by Yolo County Elections Office mailing procedures.”
This week, lost in the furor over the Boston Marathon Bombings and the captivating manhunt on Thursday night and Friday, was the fact that Senators caved on simple legislation that nearly 90 percent of the population, including many members of the NRA, support: background checks.
The Davis firefighters’ union, in a recent video, touts the fact that they get 4500 calls for service in a given year. What they fail to differentiate is how many of those calls for service are fire versus medical. The reality is that, from almost all municipalities, firefighters these days primarily deliver paramedic rather than firefighting services.
During the long and protracted debate over the surface water project, one of the chief concerns of most – regardless of which side of the issue they found themselves on – was the cost of the water project and the impact on water rates.
“In an effort to change the culture of Picnic Day, city and university officials, along with both police departments and community members have been working to prepare for the April 20, 2013 Picnic Day,” a press release from the Davis Police Department reads. The city council has renewed the “Safety Enhancement Zone” for the downtown core area for Picnic Day 2013.
Hopefully you caught PBS’s Tuesday night broadcast of the Central Park Five – if not, I highly recommend it. Ken Burns remains among the finest contemporary documentarians, presenting the story of five teenagers in late 1980s New York who were railroaded into providing false confessions and ultimately wrongfully convicted of committing one of the most horrific non-murders one can imagine.