Oakland Jittery as Police Trial Drags On

In this heavily African American city plagued by spiraling crime and a record murder rate, the yearlong trial of three veteran police officers accused of beating and framing black suspects has set residents, civic leaders and police on edge.

The trial of the officers -- nicknamed the Riders -- has lasted so long that one juror and the wife of one of the defendants became pregnant and gave birth. And still the lawyers battled. The seven-man, five-woman panel, which has been deliberating since May, has become the longest-sitting jury in local history, and it has sent scores of notes to the judge seeking judicial guidance.

Jurors returned to court last week deadlocked on 27 of 35 charges but Alameda Superior Court Judge Leo Dorado ordered them to return to their task -- causing one female juror to burst into tears. Frayed tempers among the panel had already prompted Dorado to warn against “name-calling, rudeness or antisocial behavior.”

At issue are the actions of a clique of four graveyard-shift police officers who, over 10 days in the summer of 2000, made a series of allegedly illegal arrests in the city’s tough northwest corner. The case has been compared to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart corruption scandal. But Riders prosecutor David Hollister has his own analogy: He likens the officers’ conduct to “characters in a Dirty Harry film.”

All the officers have been fired. Three -- Matthew Hornung, 31; Clarence Mabanag, 37; and Jude Siapno, 34 -- are being tried on charges including kidnapping, falsifying arrest reports and assault. They have been accused of beating a handcuffed suspect in the face, stomach, back and legs. They face lengthy prison terms if convicted on even some of the charges. Frank “Choker” Vazquez, 46, the alleged ringleader of the Riders, has fled and is being sought by the FBI.

The three Riders were arrested in November 2000 after 23-year-old Keith Batt, a rookie officer who was teamed with Mabanag for field training, quit the force and reported the alleged incidents to police officials.

The three officers pleaded not guilty and their lawyers claimed they were essentially good cops, undermined by Batt, whom one attorney referred to as a “sniper,” a barely competent officer who feared he would be fired and betrayed his fellow officers to secure favor among department brass.

Batt, now an officer on a small suburban force in nearby Pleasanton, declined to comment.

And still Oakland waits. Even city bus drivers passing the courthouse throw open their doors and inquire about a verdict -- calling the news back to waiting passengers.

With a decision expected within days, police worry that not-guilty verdicts could spark riots.

Police have asked nearby departments to provide reinforcements if needed and Chief Richard Word has approached community leaders for support. Dorado has sealed the eight verdicts reached by the jury so far.

For some, race has played a key role in the trial. While none of the officers charged is black, all of the victims are. And in a city of 395,000 residents -- nearly 38% African American -- no blacks sit on the jury.

Officials say the panel was drawn from Alameda County, whose population is 14% African American. But the racial makeup of the panel -- which includes a nuclear physicist, a law student and a university librarian -- has further fueled speculation that not-guilty verdicts could be met with violence, officials say.

Legal experts say the case has national significance.

“It is an enormously important trial for California and the nation,” said Peter Keane, dean of Golden Gate University Law School. “Any time you have outlaw cops, particularly as they’re alleged to be in this situation, it is vital for the integrity of the justice system to go ahead and punish them or come up with a result that says it didn’t happen.”

With budgets already stretched and homicides up 10% over last year, the city was sent into further disarray by the allegations of police wrongdoing. Prosecutors were forced to dismiss charges against 100 people arrested by the Riders. Earlier this year, the city paid $10.9 million to settle a civil lawsuit filed by 119 people who were allegedly beaten and falsely arrested by the four officers.

In an interview, Hollister speculated that the jury may have become stymied over the issue of “noble cause corruption.” In a city battling rising crime, he said, the jury may find it hard to convict officers who employed “street justice” to make arrests. Rather than personal gain, the theory goes, the officers acted in an overzealous manner to carry out orders of reducing street crime.

“Our victims in this case were not going to church at 2 a.m.” when the arrests took place, said Hollister, now a prosecutor in Plumas County. “They were doing things -- possibly illegal things.” To make sure the arrests stuck, he said, the officers doctored reports to make sure they got convictions.

“Understanding the crime rate in Oakland, some people may be inclined to look the other way,” Hollister said. “That’s been the battle from Day 1 and it’s probably the battle in the deliberation room right now: Do the ends justify the means?”

Keane, however, downplays the importance of the street justice argument.

The jurors, he suggested are more engaged in “a battle over credibility, between police officers who generally are seen, hopefully, as paragons of the community and people with felonious backgrounds.” Jurors, he said, “put a lot of weight into the character of witnesses, especially when police have engaged in [actions contrary to honest police work]. It’s a real struggle for jurors.”

That the panel’s deliberations have stalled neither surprises nor displeases defense attorney Mike Rains, who said that he and the other defense attorneys selected “smart, strong-willed persons” for the jury.

Alameda County jurors “are not terribly trusting of police officers,” said Rains, Mabanag’s attorney. “A lot of them find it easy to believe a prosecution’s case.” Given that attitude, the defense hoped strong-willed jurors would not just side with the prosecution but with the defense. Said Rains: “We thought the best we would do is that the jury would acquit in some things and in others, the best we could do was a hung jury.”

Rains acknowledged that the defendants “were not choirboys.” Given what he said was a mayoral mandate to reduce crime by 20%, the officers “took down the drug dealers,” he said. “These guys were tough, aggressive and running on the edge of probable cause every night and everyone did it and everyone knew it.”

Hollister painted a different picture of the Riders: that of four officers who were ostracized by their peers for their aggressive tactics. “All this happened at a time when Oakland was focused on fighting crime and those who produced high numbers were being noticed by the department,” he said.

Witnesses described a “locker room bravado” that developed among the officers as their arrest totals mounted. At trial, Hollister said, he compared their actions with those of the Enron Corp. defendants. “Their numbers at the end of the year looked great, but no one was looking at how they were getting those numbers.”

One Oakland civil rights lawyer also doesn’t buy the concept of “noble corruption.” John Burris said the four officers profited personally from their illegal conduct because the more arrests they amassed, the faster they would be promoted.

He added that the alleged crimes of the four officers were made possible by a Police Department that treated the city’s black residents as second-class citizens.

“You have to hold the entire department accountable for allowing these officers to run roughshod over the black community,” said Burris, who helped win the civil settlement in a sweeping class-action lawsuit filed by residents who said they were victims of the Riders dating back to 1995.

As part of the consent degree reached in that case, Oakland police have agreed to enact a series of reforms that include developing an early-warning system to target problem officers and appointing an independent monitor who will report to a federal judge.

But Burris worries that not-guilty verdicts would jeopardize those reforms.

“It will confirm the view held by blacks that there is no real justice and fairness when you deal with the police,” he said. “And it will reinforce the stereotype that all African American men in high drug areas are criminals and whatever the police have to do to get rid them is OK, even if they cross the line.”

Meanwhile, in the three months that the Riders jury has been out, Dorado has heard three felony cases in his courtroom.

And still he waits.

Judge Harry R. Sheppard, presiding judge of Alameda County courts, recently asked the question he said is on everyone’s mind: “When is it going to end?”

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Times staff writer Lee Romney contributed to this report.