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Citizens' Oversight Projects (COPs)

The mission of the COPs program is to enable and encourage participation by citizens in the job of overseeing the government. As a citizen in a democracy, it is your responsibility and duty to oversee the entire government. A large task, to be sure, but if many citizens volunteer to observe one or two meetings per month, we can make a huge difference. See COPs Program for more information

COPs Success Stories

• Government Access Channel - Got religious and partisan (Republican) videos pulled from the Government Access channel in El Cajon. These played for four years daily. It took one letter to the City and they were glad to do it. Staff never wanted to run those and they were happy that the public finally spoke up. I realized that we could have stopped this four years earlier had we been watching.
• Got the City of El Cajon to publish their full agendas on their web site so we could review it for free (instead of $22 a pop). That took about six months.
• Forced appointee to the Gillespie Field airport commission (Jeff Hurley) to resign after he did not submit financial disclosure forms.
• Worked to keep the ECPAC theater open, despite the fact that it was given to Christian Community Theater as a gift of El Cajon City Council idiots. Now it is closed for another 2 years and we are really putting pressure on this. Will protest in the street on Jan 21st, please join us.
• Improved the set up of Potrero Planning Group meetings to allow the public to face the board and allow easier video recording.
• Fingered Blackwater Attorney Lori Spar who got a job with the County Planning and Land Use on the Blackwater Project.
• Worked with the Potrero community and many other activist groups to Stop Blackwater from opening their 824-acre mercenary training camp in Potrero. This was a huge project and arguably resulted in the partial demise of Blackwater, and even kicking Blackwater out of Iraq. Our citizen activism was covered internationally and was the most important action we could have taken. But our work is not done. I am working on this tonight to respond to aborting the trial of the Blackwater mercs involved in the Nisour Square massacre and hopefully move this up to the next level.
• Delivered about 8 tons of supplies to the community of Potrero after the Harris Ranch wildfire in 2007. Potrero was cut off for nearly a week, even after evacuees were returning to other areas, and the only supplies available were from the back of Blackwater's white Hummer. I rented the largest U-Haul truck I could find and loaded the relief supplies from a warehouse in Escondido, and then drove the truck out to the Potrero volunteer fire dept.
• Exposed Common Blackwater Otay Mesa? and coordinated press conferences and protests to highlight the actions of Blackwater to subvert public scrutiny of their mercenary training facility.
• Got the Grossmont Healthcare District Board to place agendas on their web site and to announce meetings on the site.
• Requested the attendance of Grossmont Healthcare District Board members at the Grossmont Sharp Hospital Corporation Board meetings and documented inadequate attendance. You can bet they are attending now.
• Worked for 10 months to get the contract between Blackwater and Southwestern College pulled. Success!
• Worked with Citizens Against Private Armies in Riverside County to push against the Procinctu training camp. Still in progress.
• Worked with locals to expose the travesty of the Sunrise Powerlink. This work is still ongoing.
• Video recorded dozens of public meetings to document what is going on and put pressure on local bodies to do the right thing.
• Published video specials to Public Access TV on 9/11, Sunrise Powerlink, Monetary Policy, etc. (Zeitgeist, for example).
• Working with Imperial Valley activists against the Wind Zero merc-type training camp just east of the San Diego County line in Imperial County.
  • Pushed Imperial Valley College to pull their endorsement of the project and was threatened with arrest by the college president.
• We have been finishing a multi-year investigation into the Registrar of Voters and their sloppy handling of our ballots. This is essential to get right or we may as well throw in the towel on voting at all. Our report was released on 2010-02-11. See it here: COPs Rov Report

Citizens' Oversight Projects (COPs) Organization

One of the projects of this organization is to create a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation and apply for grant funding for our work. To do so, we must complete the following tasks:

• Form a corporation suitable for nonprofit status
  • Articles of Incorporation
  • Federal EIN
• Apply for nonprofit status with IRS
  • Must be done in a timely manner so Corp. can be abolished if status is not accepted by IRS.
• Make a list of grant providers
• List projects appropriate for grant funding
• Apply for grants.

Citizens' Oversight Projects (COPs) Handbook

We've been quite successful at putting pressure on our elected officials as well as the corporate world. But we can't do it alone. We need your help. One of the key tools to getting other citizens started with their work is a general-purpose reference handbook to make activists aware of tools available, and how to go about your work.

• Citizens Oversight Projects Manual - Deprecated topic
• Cops Handbook? - Final published handbook topic.
• Cops Handbook Source - Source files for the handbook
• Publish Cops Handbook - Topic to publish the handbook based on Cops Handbook Source to Cops Handbook?

COPs Issues tracking Database

The COPs program is relatively new, and we are still getting a good feel for what is required to perform our oversight duties. One of our first observations is that the laws and traditional operation of these bodies obfuscate as much as possible. As a result, it is necessary to continually drill into questions that come up and to follow up. They always count on the citizen forgetting what they are doing or giving up before the work is completed.

To help us with this work, we've constructed a database and tracking system to help us deal with the many issues that are pending. This system will help us continue to consistently monitor and request information when it is needed for our projects.

• Cops Tracker - Tracking database. (DEPRECATED) see COPs Program instead.

Election Integrity Audit Database

This database is used for the Election Integrity Project to review the canvass performed by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters. See San Diego County Canvass Procedure for the project page. This web contains only the raw data.

• Data Collection Procedures - Instructions for this work

• All Precincts - A list of all precincts and the data collection status in the precincts from the 1% manual tally and another 4% randomly selected.
• Election Summary - Summary of the election from scanner tapes for comparison with official results.
• Infrastructure -- Precinct Data Form, Precinct Topic Template, Precinct Topic Header, Race Topic Header

• Collection Center Logs - Scans of collection center log sheets.
• Street Rosters - Scans of the rosters used at the precincts. These are unreliable because they are incomplete.
• Ballot Statements - Sign-in roster summary sheets prepared by poll workers for our 5% sample.
• Canvass Reports - Final certified election results as reported by the Rov for our 5% sample.

• All Races - Collect all precincts and total for each race.

• Tools and Commands
  • Precinct Seq List - Just the sequence numbers of the precincts involved in the 5% sample.
  • Command Generation - command line scripts to generate and extract

Current Status on this project:

Lisa said:
I just finished entering the last record from the data tapes. One record (1425) I couldn't read good enough to enter; maybe someone else with better eye sight can read it, but it may need to be recopied. Also, the very last one I did (1627) took a LONG time to save at the end, and then it showed some race data from 005 and 015 kind of "mixed up" with each other and sitting at the top of the record, right under the Sequence Number title line, not even in a proper data entry spot. Don't know why, but you might check it from your end and see if it got scrambled up some how

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