10 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY may 4-10, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com news On July 6, 2016, Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled over 32-year-old Philando Castile for a broken taillight near Minneapolis. The officer asked Castile for his license and registration; as he reached, Yanez shot and killed Castile. After that tragic, fatal confrontation, the board of a Minneapolis nonprofit called MicroGrants hatched an idea: What if they teamed up with police officers to pay for simple vehicle repairs, potentially minimizing deadly encounters on the streets? The Lights On! initiative launched and has since provided thousands of vouchers to partnering law enforcement agencies; those officers then distribute the vouchers, and people can turn them in at participating auto shops for fixes to lights—the auto shop then bills Lights On! directly. The next agency to join in, and the first in Northern California, is the Seaside Police Department, which will launch its Lights On! program May 19, paid for with $4,600 in state grant funds. Police Chief Nick Borges has partnered with five auto shops and counting that will accept the vouchers; he’s ordered 100 to start. Unlike a “fix-it ticket” that requires police officer signoff, these vouchers allow recipients to go directly to a shop. First on the priority list will be Seaside residents. “Although this really helps people of low income, it helps all people remain safe,” Borges says. “If your lighting equipment is working, you are going to be a safer vehicle on the roadway.” Borges will also pitch the idea to all Monterey County law enforcement chiefs at a meeting in late May. “It would be a great initiative if we went together as a county,” he says. Lights On Seaside Police Department will launch a program to pay for vehicle repairs in lieu of tickets. By Sara Rubin That there are military students at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey who think about or attempt suicide was publicly acknowledged by U.S. Army command staff in October 2020, after an increase in suicide-related incidents that first year of the pandemic. It turns out students are not the only ones at risk. Last year, DLI experienced three deaths by suicide among its nearly 1,600 instructors. There was also an attempted suicide by an assistant professor at a DLI satellite campus. Death certificates signed by the Monterey County Coroner’s Office provide details on the three deaths, two in July less than two weeks apart and one in November. Two of the people were in their 50s and one was in their 30s. Two were military veterans. (The Weekly is not identifying them to protect family privacy.) Monterey County’s suicide rate from 2018-2020 was 9.6 deaths per 100,000 residents, according the California Department of Public Health; California’s rate was 10.5. Three in a community of DLI’s size is a rate of 187.5 per 100,000. What led to the educators deciding to end their lives is not exactly known. And while DLI cannot be directly blamed, current and former DLI colleagues say they are not entirely surprised. They describe the school as a high-pressure and toxic work environment, where instructors—most are from other countries with few local job opportunities beyond DLI—live in fear they will lose their limited-term employment contracts based on negative evaluations or if they raise objections to employment issues. (Sources asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.) “There is a lot of stress among the workforce writ large across the U.S.,” says DLI Chief of Staff Steven Collins. While workplace issues could play a role in suicides in general, he says, there are “cascading” issues—including relationships, finances, physical health and mental health—that could also play a role. Collins says the Department of Defense mandates annual training on suicide prevention and that DLI devotes the month of September to the issue with lectures and events. Collins also details a list of initiatives promoting physical and emotional wellness among civilian staff. “If you look at larger employers on the Peninsula, I don’t know of too many that are putting more of an effort into it than we are,” he says. The assistant professor who survived his attempt at the satellite location in March 2022 put the blame for his mental state on a “toxic and hostile work environment” and says he was not offered help. He resigned from his position. One source who knew one of the three who died says supervisors “aggressively suppressed” any reference to suicide. “It became a very touchy subject right away and there was a zero-tolerance policy of discussing the suicide,” they say. The result was a feeling that leadership didn’t care about the emotional health of employees: “We now understand pretty explicitly that they don’t care about our problems. They’re not going to address them.” Collins calls the accusation “ridiculous,” and suggests that supervisors may have been telling people to not speculate on a cause of death before a death certificate was issued. “We care deeply about each and every individual,” he says. “We don’t take these things lightly.” One DLI source says “morale was already in the gutter” before three separate suicides. A DLI official contends they offer numerous programs to help employees. Sad Farewell The Defense Language Institute saw three educators die by suicide in 2022. By Pam Marino In a typical year, Seaside PD gives out about 50 tickets for vehicle lights. (Additional related stops might end in arrests on other charges.) They will start with 100 vouchers worth up to $250. “They don’t care about our problems.” Daniel Dreifuss Daniel Dreifuss
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