Riverside Police Have Reformed

The Riverside Police Department has fulfilled the court order for reforms prompted by the controversial shooting death of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller in 1998, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer announced Thursday.

Miller’s death made national headlines and provoked demonstrations by African Americans in Riverside, where tensions with police had simmered for years.

The reforms were ordered after a state investigation revealed widespread civil rights violations by police officers and concluded that the department had failed to uniformly enforce the law. In 2001, the city agreed to place the Police Department under state oversight for five years and aggressively increase training, supervision and monitoring.

Members of the public and law enforcement greeted Thursday’s milestone with a mixture of anxiety and relief. Some are eager to shed the stigma of the state order, while others worry what will happen without official monitoring of the department in a fast-growing, diverse city.

“Progress has been made,” said Miller’s uncle Ronald Butler, 49, a Rialto exterminator. But “it’s kind of scary now that it’s going away. The watchdog is not going to be over their heads in Riverside; it might lapse into what it had been before.”

Four Riverside officers shot Miller to death in December 1998 after finding her passed out in a locked and idling car with a gun in her lap. The officers said they fired when they saw her reach for the gun.

Racially insensitive comments overheard at the crime scene stoked community anger against the four white officers and their sergeant, which drew civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to Riverside for rallies demanding that the officers be prosecuted.

The officers were dismissed but cleared of criminal charges in local, state and federal investigations. Three of the officers later won settlements in wrongful-termination lawsuits against the city.

Since Miller’s death, under the leadership of a new chief, the department has beefed up the force by close to 20%, increased the ratio of supervisors to officers, revamped training and personnel evaluations, and introduced technology such as digital audio recorders and video cameras in patrol cars.

Chief Russ Leach, a veteran of police departments in Los Angeles and El Paso, took charge of the Riverside force in 2000 to implement the reforms.

State officials credit the department’s progress in large part to the tough, clear messages from Leach to the rank and file, and willingness to discipline officers.

In 2000, the city formed a Community Police Review Commission, which reviews complaints of police misconduct and issues reports. The officers union has voiced opposition to the panel.

There was “obviously a high level of mistrust between the minority community here and the Police Department and the city,” Leach said.

He recalls taking charge of a “completely dysfunctional” force, in which officers would make racist jokes during roll call, under scant supervision.

“There has been a steady evolution” since the start of the agreement in March 2001, said Joseph Brann, the independent consultant for the attorney general’s office who submitted a 28-page final report on the Police Department in February.

While concluding that the police force was “vastly improved,” Brann still found problems. He said the department had difficulty maintaining the required 7-to-1 ratio of officers to supervisors, as well as having an experienced lieutenant on watch.

The city was threatened with a lawsuit if it did not comply with the state monitoring. Local officials and police initially chafed under the supervision, Leach said.

The leader of the city’s police union heralded the end of the state decree.

“It’s kind of a blemish,” said Det. Ken Tutwiler, president of the 330-member Riverside Police Officers’ Assn. “We would like to put this behind us so that we can move forward.”

In five years, the department has struggled to recruit minority officers. Latinos accounted for 15% of the sworn officers in 2000 and 19% last year. The percentage of African American officers has hovered around 6% during those years, according to the department. U.S. Census figures from 2004 put Riverside’s black population at 8% and Latinos at 45%.

Brann and other officials emphasized a need for the city government’s financial and political support to keep the department running smoothly and staying receptive to public concerns.

“The city has committed to continuing the objective and the strategies” of the state agreement, said Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge. As part of the court order, the Police Department drafted a five-year plan, lasting through 2009, to help keep police leadership accountable.

Overcoming residents’ dislike and distrust of the department has been the greatest challenge, Leach said.

“We certainly don’t want to be an occupying force, don’t want to instill fear in people,” he said.

While the chief has made a good-faith effort to change the department, “the agreement itself has not eradicated everything,” said the Rev. Paul Munford, 56, of New Joy Baptist Church in Riverside. Munford is a former coordinator of the Tyisha Miller Steering Committee, an activist group created after Miller’s death and led by local black clergymen.

“There were many police who were indignant and had an attitude ... [and] never accepted the spirit of the [agreement], just went along with it.”

Activists convened meetings this week to discuss concerns about the future of the force.

“There have been some improvements and some progress; there’s still a lot to be done,” said Jennifer Vaughn-Blakely, 57, a Riverside management consultant and chairwoman of the Group, an organization focusing on issues affecting the black community, at a rally Tuesday in downtown Riverside. “What we’re trying to do is to be proactive, not wait until something tragic happens.”

Nine people have been fatally shot by Riverside officers since Miller’s death -- one in the last year, according to a department spokesman.

Last year, racist comments allegedly made by several officers on a local activist’s police-watchdog Web page cast a shadow on the department’s progress in ending state oversight.

“There’s still a racist, sexist, cowboy culture” among the police, said resident Mary Shelton, who operates the website.

The department is investigating the postings, which the chief describes as the work of “one or two knuckleheads.”

The department’s success will rely on public involvement, said activist Chani Beeman, who helps run the chief’s community advisory committee and sits on the city’s Human Relations Commission.

“We knew from day one five years was not going to be enough.... There’s some pretty bad blood, bad history between the police department and our community,” Beeman said.

The force continues to decentralize management and hopes to improve contact with all neighborhoods, Brann said.

“Things are not going to go back to the way [residents] perceived them several years ago,” Leach said. The agreement’s dissolution is “a continuation. It’s not an ending.”