Jacobs Supported Use of Slurs as Last Resort, Police Record Reveals

San Diego Police Agent Donovan Jacobs told three of his training officers in 1978 that he would resort to using the word nigger and other epithets “if all else fails and I thought that would be effective,” according to court documents released Monday.

Numerous witnesses in the Sagon Penn police murder trial testified that Jacobs, after trying to subdue Penn with fists and night sticks, told the 24-year-old black man: “You think you’re bad, nigger . . . I’m going to beat your black ass.”

Jacobs testified during the trial that he had never said nigger and the word was not in his vocabulary.

Penn was found innocent last month of murder in the March 31, 1985, shooting death of Police Agent Thomas Riggs and attempted murder in the shooting of Jacobs. The jury was deadlocked, 11-1, in favor of acquittal in the shooting of Sarah Pina-Ruiz, a civilian ride-along.

During the trial, defense attorney Milton J. Silverman portrayed Jacobs as a “Doberman pinscher” who provoked Penn with a racist attack.

The 1978 counseling session was triggered by instructors’ concerns about remarks Jacobs had made during his training. During the counseling session Jacobs asked his academy instructors, “You two feel that I’m a bigot?”

Jacobs continued: “I really do believe I got a good attitude. It’s just that I come across poor because I’m termed a smart-ass.”

Prosecutors said they learned of the document after the case went to the jury. Silverman had attempted to introduce the 11-page transcript of the conversation between Jacobs and his academy instructors as new evidence in the trial. But Superior Court Judge Ben W. Hamrick ruled against the defense motion because he did not want to interrupt jury deliberations.

Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller is expected to announce this week whether his office will retry Penn on the undecided charges, including voluntary manslaughter of Riggs and attempted voluntary manslaughter of Jacobs. On both charges, the jurors were divided, 10-2, in favor of acquittal.

On Monday, Hamrick unsealed all confidential documents and transcripts of closed hearings in the case. They included defense charges that the district attorney’s office had engaged in “outrageous governmental misconduct” by withholding the Jacobs transcript for 12 days before turning it over to Hamrick.

In court papers unsealed Monday, Silverman argued that the transcript of the Jacobs interview is “the single most important piece of evidence” in the Penn case.

“It cuts to the very heart of the central issue in the case: the character traits of Donovan Jacobs for racial bias, hostile and aggressive conduct, and disregard for and insensitivity to the rights to others,” Silverman wrote.

Steve Casey, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said Silverman is again making unsubstantiated charges against Jacobs in interpreting the significance of the document.

“The way I read it is that Jacobs is saying in a role-playing situation that he would not rule out the use of . . . ‘professional profanity’ (a term used by Jacobs in the transcript) under all circumstances,” Casey said. “But he himself would never use trigger words.”

Casey said he felt Jacobs was just trying to be funny in his remarks regarding the treatment of homosexuals.

“One gets the impression he was trying to be flippant in class rather than going on a racial tear,” Casey said.

Jacobs was unavailable for comment Monday. In an interview last week, he said the transcript would have a “relatively harmless” effect on a jury. The officer said the fact that he graduated from the academy and was later promoted to agent indicates that he became an outstanding officer.

Silverman said the serious concerns expressed by academy instructors in the 1978 transcript regarding Jacobs’ attitude are “sadly and eerily prophetic” in light of the tragedy involving Penn seven years later.

The training officers--Tom Hall, Dave Hall and Richard Bennett--are not identified individually in the transcript. One of them told Jacobs:

“My feelings right now are that with your present value system, and I think there is an immaturity factor involved here also . . . you’re not going to fit well into the San Diego Police Department’s philosophy of how to treat the general public. Unless you show some considerable changes . . . we don’t want you because you are going to do nothing but create problems for yourself, for the public and for the department.”

At another point, an instructor admonished Jacobs: “And there’s something about this job, Don, that catches up with you. It’s the frustration. If you can’t deal with it, you’re only going to cause yourself some harm as well as other people. . . . It’s still going to manifest itself somewhere, in stress, in a fight, or in a situation that really ticks you off and . . . you’re going to have the community coming all over you as well as the department.”

Police relations with the black community in Southeast San Diego were strained after the Penn shootings, partly because Jacobs mistook Penn for a black gang member when he pulled him over for a traffic stop.

Silverman said the pivotal point during the stop came when Jacobs refused to take Penn’s driver’s license unless it was taken from Penn’s wallet. Jacobs reportedly then told Penn: “Listen, boy, I’m gonna tell you one more time or you’re going to get hurt.”

Silverman pointed out that, in the transcript, Jacobs responded to an instructor’s question with similar phrasing.

Instructor: Say you got a group of 25 people that . . . have refused your orders to disperse and now you are telling them in no uncertain terms to get out. It’s reached that point where they’re not leaving, they’re not obeying your orders.

Jacobs: OK, I would say something like, “Listen, God dammit, I’m going to tell you one more time. If you don’t leave now I’m going to arrest you.”

The academy counseling session was prompted by Jacobs’ support of a police training film in which officers used the word faggot to disperse a crowd of homosexuals.

“The way it was handled by that officer gave such a . . . negative effect on the homosexuals that they were not going to return,” Jacobs told his instructors. “And, if that was the purpose of the stops for them not to come back, then I think he got his point across very well.”

The training officers said in the transcript that they took the extraordinary measure of arranging a counseling session because they were concerned about Jacobs’ statements endorsing the use of epithets and aggression against minorities.

“Well, sometimes you’ve got to resort to that, I feel, if that’s the way the job can get done,” Jacobs told his instructors. “Like I said, I personally wouldn’t do it and I really don’t agree with it, but if he does the job . . . “

But later in the interview, Jacobs supports using the word nigger and other epithets to “get the job done.”

Instructor: What if you had a group of blacks. Do you think that, to lend emphasis, that you could use the word nigger or some word like that, a trigger word?

Jacobs: No. Like you said, it’s a trigger word. Maybe I was wrong in saying that using derogatory remarks, like racist remarks, stuff like that, maybe that would be wrong. But I don’t know. Maybe there would be a situation where it wouldn’t be. But I doubt it because if I was in her position (an officer confronted by an angry crowd) it would be a trigger word and I would be very angry.

Instructor: However, if all else fails, do you think it would be something that would be resorted to?

Jacobs: If all else failed and I thought that it would be effective, yes.

The instructors also made a variety of critical observations about Jacobs’ performance in the early stages of the academy:

- They were concerned about his statements that he would take a drunk to the county hospital and say he was on drugs as an excuse to force the hospital to accept the person.

- During an objectivity and ethics class, Jacobs made “some very, very strong comments about making dates on duty,” one instructor said. Jacobs explained that he felt it was acceptable for a uniformed officer to arrange dates with women as long as he didn’t use his badge or city time.

- Instructors were bothered by Jacobs’ suggestion that his fellow cadets considered him a “smart-ass.” Jacobs said he didn’t plan on doing anything about the perception because people did not react negatively to it.

An instructor ordered Jacobs: “Change. Because if I see it, I ain’t gonna tolerate it. OK?”

- One instructor said he could tell Jacobs lacked self-discipline by the way he shined his shoes.

“Your shoes are deplorable,” he said. “The heels are broken down. If you can’t shine your shoes, how can you do anything else? I mean, that’s starting with the basics. Some people think that it’s nothing, but it shows us something. It shows us an attitude.”