3 Former Santa Ana Officers Charge Racial Slurs as Rights Trial Opens

Little more than a month after he joined the Santa Ana Police Department in 1975, Jesse J. Sanchez complained at a meeting of new officers about racial slurs he was hearing from fellow officers.

But his complaints and those by other Latino officers in the late 1970s went unheeded, he claims in a civil rights lawsuit that went to trial Friday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Moreover, the 1979 suit charges, Police Chief Raymond C. Davis and 15 of the supervisors under him essentially encouraged the racist attitude in the department.

Sanchez and two other former officers, Victor Torres and Robert Caro, claim that racial and ethnic slurs and jokes were so pervasive in the department and in public that they constituted a discriminatory policy and violated their civil rights.

They also contend that their complaints simply led to punitive action against them in the form of lower evaluations, reprimands and departmental rules enforced closely on them alone. Sanchez and Torres say they were forced to resign; Caro charges he was wrongly fired.

The city denies that it maintained a biased policy. It claims that the three former police officers were fairly treated.

The city and the 16 defendants contend that Caro was properly fired for filing a false report about another officer using excessive force to arrest a Latino, that Torres left voluntarily to help his ailing parents with their business and that Sanchez resigned because Davis refused to reinstate merit pay that he took away after a poor performance rating.

As the first witness, Sanchez recalled some of the ethnic remarks that he said many non-Latino officers made frequently from the time he joined the force until he resigned in September, 1979, after a six-month, stress-related leave.

One police officer, he said, told him that he thought Mexican woman “were all whores.” Another officer, he testified, complained at a meeting about a constant jam of voices over the police radio by referring to “six little greasers” he kept hearing.

Sanchez said the comments infuriated him, prompting him in the first case to retaliate with a slur on white women.

The racism was not directed just at Mexican-Americans, Sanchez said. He and others took offense, he testified, at a cartoon photocopied from a magazine and posted on walls and bulletin boards shortly before Christmas of 1977.

The cartoon, depicting a black Santa Claus burglar, contained racial slurs and was entitled, “Santa Coon.”

“This cartoon was insensitive--really bad,” Sanchez said. “It was derogatory towards blacks.”

Sanchez will resume his testimony Tuesday in the trial, which is expected to last 11 weeks. The former officers are seeking $3 million in damages and changes in departmental policies. The city reportedly has spent more than $400,000 in legal fees on the case so far.

In opening statements, plaintiffs’ lawyer William A. Snyder of Newport Beach pointed out that the arrival of Sanchez in 1975 and of Torres and Caro in 1976 were part of a minority-recruiting effort by the City of Santa Ana, which was found in a 1976 federal court ruling to have systematically discriminated against Latinos.

Latinos constituted about 26% of the city’s population at the time, but only about 9% of the police force, Snyder said.

Not only were Sanchez, Torres and Caro victims of pervasive discrimination that hindered their work and promotion possibilities, the lawyer argued, but they also were ostracized from the police clique because they broke the unwritten code of silence by taking their complaints outside the normal chain of command.

Sanchez, for instance, took the cartoon to the city’s affirmative action officer, whose job was later eliminated in what Snyder called a firing orchestrated by Davis. Sanchez was reprimanded for his action.

In his opening remarks, Deputy City Atty. Charles Matheis pointed out that five other officers and a clerk-typist were suspended or reprimanded for their roles in posting the cartoon. He said Davis vigorously opposed racism and told officers at meetings that they should not be making ethnic or racist slurs or jokes.

Matheis said that firing the officers involved in the cartoon incident, as some in the community were urging, was not warranted. “The purpose of discipline in the work place is not to punish but to correct behavior,” he said.

Times staff writer George Ramos contributed to this story.