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1st Place
WEEKEND | 14
GENERAL EXCELLENCE
California Newspaper Publishers Association
FEBRUARY 3, 2017 VOLUME 25, NO. 2
www.MountainViewOnline.com
650.964.6300
MOVIES | 16
Police lawsuit claims department quotas OFFICER SUING MOUNTAIN VIEW OVER 2014 FIRING By Mark Noack
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MICHELLE LE
STUDENTS DIVE INTO STARTUP CULTURE Nithila, left, and Sriya work on a new product during Startup Weekend at Crittenden Middle School on Saturday. The annual, fast paced three-day event is designed to get middle school-aged kids excited about entrepreneurship and new inventions. Nithila and Sriya were part of team MyLine, which eventually won the weekend-long event for their new app, which is designed to reduce wait times at school lunch lines.
lawsuit filed by a fired Mountain View police officer alleges that department officials embraced statistics-based law enforcement, which was tantamount to an illegal quota system. A Santa Clara County Superior Court judge is expected to decide on Thursday, Feb. 2, whether the civil lawsuit over his termination should go forward to a full jury trial. Nicolas Emmerling, 36, filed a lawsuit against the city of Mountain View in 2015 after he was fired in 2014 from the police department, where he worked since 2008. The department has publicly given no specific reason for why he was terminated, but Emmerling and his attorneys argue it came as a result of his service in the California Army National Guard.
Storms bring downed trees and collapsed creek bank COUPLE’S BED DESTROYED AS TREE FALLS THROUGH ROOF, CREEK TRAIL REPAIRS COULD BE MONTHS AWAY By Kevin Forestieri
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ountain View residents Bert and Sylvia Sutherland got a big surprise when they returned home from Seattle last month — a giant hole in their roof. The wet and windy weather caused a large redwood tree branch to split off and come crashing down onto their home on View Street, smashing right into a bedroom inside. It’s a stroke of bad luck, but there’s certainly a silver lining. “We were out of town at the time. If we had not, we would be dead,” said Bert Sutherland,
INSIDE
noting that the bed where they slept had been completely demolished. As the Bay Area gets hit with another series of storms at the start of February, some Mountain View residents are still feeling from the effects of the stormy weather that tore through the region over the last two months. Trees and tree branches throughout the city have come down, and a segment of Stevens Creek Trail will likely be closed for months because of severe bank erosion. All told, an estimated eight trees were downed in the last few sizable storms to come through
Mountain View, and there have been about eight to 10 “large branch failures,” as well as broken and hanging branches, that needed to be cleared out, according to Jakob Trconic, the city’s parks section manager. Several of the trees had signs of decay and compromised root systems. Considering that the city has roughly 28,000 street trees, the wind and rain didn’t cause any sort of havoc for the city, Trconic said. “We had a few emergency after-hour calls, but by no means See STORMS, page 6
VIEWPOINT 10 | GOINGS ON 17 | MARKETPLACE 18 | REAL ESTATE 20
Now nearly two years old, the case and its allegations have brought to light accusations of some questionable operations at the police department. In depositions brought forward by Emmerling’s attorneys, officers indicated the department was running an off-the-books quota system, tying advancement for rank-and-file officers to how many arrests, tickets and traffic stops they were making. In testimony given last February, Officer Ranjan Singh told the court that all officers were aware the department had a “de facto quota” in effect. “They don’t give you a number, but if you don’t write more, your job is on the line,” Singh told the court. “It’s a performance metric. A loan company keeps a loan officer ... who gets See LAWSUIT, page 7
Googlers unite against Trump’s travel ban By Mark Noack
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ollowing a wave of weekend protests at airports across the U.S., Google staged its own political rally Monday in Mountain View to push back against new immigration measures by President Donald Trump’s administration. On Monday afternoon, Jan. 30, an estimated crowd of 2,000 Google employees rallied at the company’s main quad off Charleston Road to protest the new president’s recent executive orders. Those actions include plans for a wall along the Mexican border and the surprise order barring refugees,
migrants and foreign nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries. “So many people were obviously outraged by this order, as I am myself, being an immigrant and a refugee,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin reportedly said at the rally. “I came here to the U.S. at age 6 with my family from the Soviet Union, which at that time was the greatest enemy the U.S. had — maybe it still is in some form.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a memo to employees that more than 100 employees were affected by Trump’s travel ban. Similar protest events were held Monday at Google’s campuses across the country.