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SC Patch Censors Clean Team Scandal Video Article On Its One Year Anniversary

by Paul Mendoza
This afternoon a short article with a link to the Clean Team Scandal Video was posted on the Santa Cruz Patch's open publishing board which allows any user to post content that appears on its website. Within minutes it was deleted. The Clean Team Scandal Video is one year old this week. The video shows a homeless man being assaulted and harassed in 2013 by members of the Santa Cruz Clean Team while they were on one of their "cleans". Ken "Skindog" Collins is the man poking/assaulting the homeless person with a metal trash grabber, and Kim Gardner of Take Back Santa Cruz has said that Chrissy Brown is the person calling the homeless man a "parasite".
The editors at the Santa Cruz Patch apparently don't recall the history of their own website. The Clean Team Scandal Video was originally posted to the Santa Cruz Patch in a blog post which was promoted by the editors at the time. The video is real and legitimate and Ken Collins has admitted it was he in the video in an interview in the Santa Cruz Weekly ( http://www.santacruz.com/2013/06/11/local_cleanup_group_draws_controversy/ ).

Is this the future of 'news' in Santa Cruz? Will non-local, uninformed editors be the only ones to control what local readers are allowed to read?

The Clean Team still gathers regularly to clean up areas they think are impacted by homeless people, and it is sometimes joined by local politicians for photo-ops. This is the dark side of Santa Cruz politics, which has largely turned anti-homeless due to the rise of the influence of vigilante style community groups like the Clean Team and Take Back Santa Cruz.

The Clean Team Scandal Video can be seen at:
http://youtu.be/NMTYSZocv4k
§Clean Team Video
by Indybay Volunteer
Copy the code below to embed this movie into a web page:
This video was originally posted as a comment to:

Video of Take Back Santa Cruz-supported Clean Team Harassing Homeless Forced Off Internet
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/05/15/18736901.php
§Response from Patch editors
by Paul Mendoza
After the Clean Team article disappeared on the Santa Cruz Patch, I posted a complaint about it at: http://santacruz.patch.com/groups/announcements/p/quick-censorship-at-sc-patch

Two Patch editors responded:

Dennis Robaugh May 14, 2014 at 11:50 PM
Your video post was restored. It was flagged as spam and sat in our moderation queue for a while. Chillax.

Susan C. Schena May 14, 2014 at 11:54 PM
Hi, Paul. I did not remove this, to be sure. There is a posting under Town Square. If that is the same one. There have been problems with Patch sites nationwide being spammed on the Boards. Your post could have been caught up in a spam filter. My apologies.


The original Clean Team post can now be viewed at:
http://santacruz.patch.com/groups/announcements/p/clean-team-scandal-video-anniversary
Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
by google
if one streetviews the guy's house you can see the his own yard littered. he's the only person with a stucco roof in the entire neighborhood...
by shopper
do local clean team supporters still have censorship abilities even though they are no longer paid?
by Paul Mendoza
I'm going to take the current editors for their word and trust that they didn't moderate that article and that it did end up in their spam box (see above). I have had only one other problem with a disappearing comment there since the new editors have taken over, and the moderation policy is applied much more consistently by the new editors than by the old local editors who were fired.

One of Brad Kava's last "public safety" articles on Patch before he was fired was one about the one year anniversary of the Clean Team. Kava did not mention at all the scandal video showing Ken Collins assaulting the homeless person. Kava also neglected to mention that Dylan Greiner, one of the founders of the Clean Team, was arrested for lewd acts with a minor. Here's that puff piece by Kava: http://santacruz.patch.com/groups/volunteering/p/the-clean-team-celebrates-a-year-of-picking-up-hypodermic-needles-and-trash
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