Racial Slurs Banned, Santa Ana Chief Says : Davis Testifies in Lawsuit Filed Against Police Department by Three Former Officers

General orders in the Santa Ana Police Department forbid “improper comments” against anyone, and Chief Raymond C. Davis testified Wednesday that such forbidden language includes racial or ethnic slurs and jokes.

But Davis acknowledged in a U.S. District Court trial in Los Angeles that he did not know of any departmental memos sent to patrol officers advising them to curtail their racial and ethnic remarks.

Instead, he said, he made his interpretation of the rules known verbally to supervising officers and, on occasion, to sergeants and patrol officers.

Davis began his testimony Wednesday in a $3-million lawsuit brought in 1979 by three former Santa Ana officers who claim that racial and ethnic attitudes in the department in the mid- to late-1970s constituted a discriminatory policy that violated their civil rights and forced them off the force.

Second Witness

Davis is the second witness in a trial that started Feb. 15 before U.S. District Judge David Kenyon and is expected to last another two months. Davis will resume his testimony today and is expected to continue it next week.

Facing the jury as he explained various departmental procedures and actions, the police chief calmly insisted that racial slurs and jokes are “not tolerated” on his police force and that his supervising officers have a duty to discipline violators.

“I’ve broken an Anglo sergeant to a patrol officer for using racial slurs,” he said.

Davis also criticized officers who take their complaints about internal affairs outside the department, as at least one of the plaintiffs, Jesse J. Sanchez, did.

Procedure Outlined

The chief said that work-oriented grievances, including discrimination complaints, should be filed with the complaining officer’s immediate supervisor or, if that supervisor is the object of the complaint, with the next supervisor in the chain of command.

A complaining officer would need “severe justification” for taking a complaint out of the chain to the department’s affirmative action officer, he said.

Sanchez took his complaint about a racist cartoon posted on walls and sent to officers completely outside the department. Claiming the discrimination was tolerated or even generated by supervisors, Sanchez went to an affirmative action officer in the city’s Personnel Department, an action that brought Sanchez a reprimand from Davis.

In his testimony, Davis also criticized Personnel Department members for interfering with his operation of the Police Department by trying to change the rules of a sergeants’ examination and by meeting with disgruntled officers when the officers were off-duty.

Complaints Told

He claimed the Personnel Department wanted to eliminate the written exam for sergeants so that more minority officers could be eligible to take the oral exam. He also claimed that the Personnel Department’s affirmative action officer at the time was undermining grievance procedures and the chain of command, and was creating “distrust” in the police force by meeting with officers to discuss discrimination complaints.

Besides claiming that their civil rights have been violated, Sanchez and his two co-plaintiffs, Victor Torres and Robert Caro, contend that their complaints simply led to punitive action in the form of lower evaluations, reprimands and a stricter enforcement of departmental rules against 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. The city, Davis and 15 other current or former police officers who are defendants claim that the three former officers were fairly treated.

The 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 had been taken away from him after he received a poor performance rating.