Jury Award to Ex-Officer Draws Fire by Both Sides

Both sides in the long-running civil suit over treatment of Latinos in the Santa Ana Police Department voiced displeasure Saturday over a jury’s decision awarding $900,000 in damages to Jesse J. Sanchez, one of three former officers who left the force, charging racial and ethnic abuse.

In the federal suit, filed in 1979, the three Latino men said they had been harassed by Anglo members of the force, and, as a result, two were pressured into resigning from the department and one was fired.

“Obviously we’re disappointed,” said Santa Ana City Manager Robert C. Bobb of the Los Angeles jury’s finding that Santa Ana did not properly handle Sanchez’s request for lost merit pay totaling $159 a month.

As a result, the city has been ordered to pay the former officer $400,000 in lost wages and $500,000 for emotional distress, as well as an estimated $50,000 in legal fees.

Stress-Related Leave

Sanchez, 46, was a member of the Santa Ana Police Department from 1975 to 1979, when he resigned after a six-month, stress-related leave. He is now finance manager for a Coachella auto dealership.

“We’ll review the case Monday with the city attorney and the City Council,” Bobb said, adding that the city would probably appeal the award. The city manager said the jury’s verdict would have no ramifications on police department policy.

On the other side, Meir Westreich, one of Sanchez’s two volunteer attorneys, said: “We’re really not satisfied with what we have so far.” The $900,000 award, he said, “is nothing more than an encouragement to all three plaintiffs to keep on fighting. We’re not going to quit.”

Westreich said that he and attorney William A. Snyder were appealing an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon that threw out most of the three defendants’ $3-million lawsuit.

Kenyon, in a July, 1985, decision, called the action “a serious abuse of the judicial process” after 37 days of testimony on behalf of the three former police officers.

Also being appealed, Westreich said, was a ruling by another federal judge that Sanchez, Victor Torres and Robert Caro could not bring a “class-action” suit because they no longer belonged to a “class” of defendants--Latino police officers currently employed by the City of Santa Ana.

Strongest Criticism

This finding, the attorney said, was “substantially weakened by the jury’s verdict” Friday, which tended to support his client’s contention that he was forced to resign.

The strongest criticism by far, however, came from Capt. Paul Walters of the Santa Ana Police Department. He characterized the jury’s verdict as “truly a miscarriage of justice.”

The case “clearly demonstrates that when public employers try to correct improper performance, they can’t, for fear of punishment by the courts,” Walters said in a prepared statement.

Throughout the 1970s, Santa Ana was involved in federal litigation involving employment of minorities. A job discrimination suit, which ended in 1976, found that the city had systematically discriminated against Latinos, who at the time constituted 26% of the city’s population but only 9% of the police force.

Sanchez, Torres and Caro were hired in a recruiting effort aimed at responding to the suit. However, in their subsequent lawsuit, the three men charged that within the department they were the victims of racial and ethnic slurs and jokes.

Within a month of his hiring, Sanchez testified, he complained about racial remarks during a meeting of new officers.

An Anglo police officer told him that he thought Mexican women “were all whores,” Sanchez testified, and a cartoon depicting a black Santa Claus burglar was posted on a bulletin board in the department, with a caption reading “Santa Coon.”

While Caro was still on the force, he filed a complaint with the department charging that an Anglo officer had used excessive force in arresting a Latino suspect.

When an internal investigation determined several months later that the report was false, Caro was fired.

The city has said that the three men did substandard work and that Caro was fired for filing a false report.