Officer Who Was Shot by Penn Testifies He Kept File on Gangs

In a hearing for accused murderer Sagon Penn, Police Officer Donovan Jacobs testified Friday that he formerly kept a file on suspected black gang members, a practice the former head of the Police Department’s gang detail later testified was not authorized.

The attorney for Penn, who is charged with murder in the death of Police Officer Thomas Riggs, has alleged in court motions that Jacobs kept illegal dossiers on blacks whom he had targeted for arrest while working in the Police Department’s Southeast substation. Penn, 23, shot Riggs; Jacobs, 29, and a civilian who was in Riggs’ police car on March 31 after being stopped by Jacobs in Encanto.

Jacobs, testifying in Penn’s pre-trial hearing, said the file he kept included photos of suspected gang members, some taken by him and some taken by other officers and given to him. “It was my idea to start a gang file for Southeast . . . I was responsible for keeping it up to date,” he said.

Jacobs, a seven-year veteran of the department, said that he began the file after getting approval from the district attorney’s office, the head of the gang unit and his immediate superiors. However, he testified that he could not remember the names of the people who authorized him to start the file.

But Sgt. Henry Olias, who headed the gang unit at the time Jacobs began the file, testified later in the day that to the best of his knowledge Jacobs was not authorized to maintain separate gang files at the Southeastern sub-station. Olias said that departmental policy authorizes only the gang unit, which works out of the downtown station, to maintain gang files.

“Southeastern command had their own gang files. That’s a no-no,” said Olias, who is now a homicide detective. “Information was circulated throughout the department in ’82 or ’83 that the gang detail would be the only repository of gang files . . . (This was done) through a training bulletin circulated to all sworn members of the department.”

Olias said that he confiscated Jacobs’ gang file “sometime between May and August,” after he learned of it. Of the “50 or 60” files kept by Jacobs, “at least one or two were documented gang members,” said Olias. The remaining files “were just cards with (names) and photographs,” he added.

Olias testified that the gang unit does not have any information to indicate that Penn is a gang member. He said the department does not keep photos of suspected gang members, only of known gang members.

The list of allegations contained in defense attorney Milton J. Silverman’s motion included a charge that Jacobs and a fellow officer had stopped, detained and photographed as many as 500 young black men whom they suspected of being gang members. Silverman filed the motion in an attempt to get information about these and other incidents that he said was being withheld by the Police Department. On Friday, Superior Court Judge Kenneth A. Johns denied most of Silverman’s requests on the grounds that he failed to substantiate the allegations during the three-day hearing.

Also on Friday, Silverman questioned Jacobs about whether he had participated in paramilitary and white-supremacist activities. Jacobs denied it but admitted under questioning that he had participated with other police officers in a weekend of “Soldier of Fortune” activity in the desert. The weekend outing was described in a 1983 report written by homicide Detective Paul E. Olson, who was conducting an unrelated investigation.

Jacobs, who is still recovering from his wounds, testified with his left arm in a sling. He denied ever being a member of a white-supremacist group and an allegation that he once walked into Northern Substation wearing a T-shirt that showed a Third Reich eagle grasping a Nazi swastika in its talons.

Silverman had alleged in a motion filed two weeks ago that Jacobs had participated in paramilitary activities with white-supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Brotherhood, and with a Palestinian group called Black September.