L.B. Rejects Review Panel for Fired Cops

The City Council refused Tuesday to set up a special panel to determine whether two fired Long Beach police officers were victims of a vendetta by a former police chief as their attorney alleged in a rare, out-of-court appeal to the council.

On Wednesday, the former officers, Scott Chrisman and Samuel Zavala, formally notified the city that it would be named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit to be filed today. The suit will claim that their constitutional rights were violated by Police Department investigators and former Chief Charles B. Ussery when they were fired in 1983.

The internal affairs investigators withheld key evidence that would have discredited witnesses identified in court documents as former prostitutes, who testified that the officers sexually harassed them, attorney Samuel (Skip) Keesal told the council.

Ussery, who retired last November, ignored a suspension recommendation by a deputy chief and recommended that the officers be fired about three months after Chrisman confronted Ussery with evidence that the chief’s maid was a heroin user, Keesal said.

The officers were fired, Keesal said, because “nobody took the time or had the nerve” to tell the Civil Service hearing panel that the officers “had arrested Chief Ussery’s maid for being under the influence of heroin.”

In an interview, Ussery said there was no relationship between the arrest of his one-time employee, his discussion of the arrest with Chrisman and the officers’ firing. “I did not initiate that investigation,” he said.

Ussery acknowledged recommending to the city manager that the officers be fired, even though other police officials had recommended suspension. He would not discuss what influenced his decision.

“I performed my duties as was appropriate for me as chief of police, and as far as I’m concerned the matter is closed. I have no further interest in it,” Ussery said.

Lee T. Paterson, the city’s special counsel in the case, said the Police Department had investigated Keesal’s allegations last fall and found no connection between the maid’s arrest and the officers’ dismissals. Nor had the department found any wrongdoing by its Internal Affairs division, he said.

Keesal, a senior partner in a large Long Beach firm that specializes in maritime law, told the council he realized his direct plea was unusual. But Keesal, who the fired officers said was working without pay, said he had never seen such a miscarriage of justice.

“If this is a day in court, I hope it never happens to any of us . . . . It was just a nightmare from start to finish,” he said.

Keesal said the officers had agreed not to sue the city if the council would grant a one-time unappealable review by a special police panel.

Brief Closed Session

Council members, several irritated because they were being asked to intervene publicly in a personnel matter that could lead to civil lawsuits, met briefly in closed session before refusing to set up the police panel.

“I think he’s out of order here to be discussing this case. . . . It’s totally out of order,” Councilman Thomas Clark said of Keesal.

City Atty. John Calhoun said Keesal had a right to speak, but Calhoun recommended that council members make no comments or ask any questions. And they did not.

Chrisman and Zavala, both 32, originally appealed their dismissals to the Civil Service Commission, which found that the officers had sexually harassed women they had arrested and, in 1982, had incited a fight between a prisoner and jail security guards.

In March, 1985, Long Beach Superior Court Judge Norman W. Gordon upheld their appeal and ordered them reinstated. He said the “weight of evidence” supported the city’s findings but found the penalty too severe.

Last June, a state Court of Appeal panel overturned Gordon’s decision in the Zavala case, saying the judge had overstepped legal bounds in ordering reinstatement. The Chrisman case is still pending.

Keesal, who said in an interview that he had become friends with Chrisman over the last three years, asked the city to reopen the officers’ case last fall after he discovered that evidence he thought important had not been considered by either the Civil Service panel or the courts.

And in an Oct. 15 letter, Keesal asked the county district attorney’s office to investigate whether former Internal Affairs Sgt. Robert Gillisie had warned a defense witness not to testify. The woman, who Keesal said would have discredited a key prosecution witness, had failed to show up for the Civil Service hearings.

No Basis Found for Charge

The district attorney’s Special Investigations Division concluded, however, that “there was no factual basis” for the charge against Gillisie, it said last week in a letter to Keesal.

The letter said the defense witness, identified as a prostitute, told both district attorney and police investigators last November that Gillisie had warned her not to testify if she “knew what was good for her, and if she wanted to remain in Long Beach.”

But the woman then changed her story, according to the district attorney’s report.

In Keesal’s appeal to the council, which was limited to 10 minutes, he said that because of unethical conduct by internal affairs and poor representation by the officers’ attorney, they were denied a fair trial in 1983. He gave the council a list of 19 purported civil rights violations by city employees in the case.

For example, the Civil Service Commission was never told that the two women who said they were sexually harassed faced charges of being under the influence of heroin when they agreed to testify, he said.

A possible 90-day sentence against one was reduced to a five-day jail term before the Civil Service hearing, and three counts against the second witness, each carrying mandatory 90-day sentences, were dismissed while the Civil Service hearing was being held, he said. The city acknowledges that the charges were reduced or dismissed.

Story Allegedly Changed

Keesal also said that Civil Service commissioners were not told that one of the key witnesses changed her story on the witness stand. The woman said during initial interviews with investigators that she was molested on three occasions by both officers, but on the stand she said she had been molested only by Zavala on one occasion, Keesal said. Her story changed again during the new Police Department investigation last fall, he said.

But city lawyer Paterson said nearly all of what Keesal alleges, including Ussery’s purported role in the case, was known in 1983 by the officers’ attorney, who chose not to present it as evidence.

The city made the information available to the defense in its investigative reports and had no obligation to make the Civil Service panel aware of it, Paterson said.

Since important evidence was not introduced at the first hearing, it was not considered upon appeal in Superior Court and probably can not be introduced at the appellate-court level, Keesal said. Chrisman’s appeals attorney, Kent Richland, said he still may attempt through a novel motion to get new information before the state 2nd District Court of Appeals.

Chrisman, who now works in construction, said he will press the issue in federal and appellate courts even though he has already spent $22,000 for lawyers.

The state Supreme Court recently declined to hear Zavala’s final appeal. Now a private investigator, Zavala said he spent $10,000, his life savings, on appeals.

Zavala and Chrisman, patrol partners on the high-crime central city and West Side before they were fired, have repeatedly insisted they are innocent of all charges.

However, the state appeals court, in siding with the city, said in 1986 that repeated misconduct by Zavala showed he was “not amenable to rehabilitation” and lacked the ability to treat prisoners “in a manner becoming a police officer.”

The appeals panel said evidence showed that in November, 1982, Zavala incited a fight between a prisoner and jail security guards and laughed as the altercation took place. One guard was injured. Chrisman was found guilty of the same offense. (City Personnel Director William H. Storey said Tuesday that the jail incident alone would have been sufficient grounds for dismissal.)

Suspect Allegedly Touched

In January, 1983, Zavala patted the buttocks of a woman he and Chrisman had arrested on a narcotics charge, and during questioning “repeatedly made references to her breasts, asked if she was wearing a brassiere and raised her blouse and viewed her bare breasts,” the appeals panel said.

During the same arrest, city prosecutors said in appellate briefs, Chrisman advised the woman that he would help her “have her case dropped.” Prosecutors said Chrisman proposed that she have sex with a guard--who witnessed the fight the officers are accused of inciting--and then turn the man in.

A second woman arrested by Zavala and Chrisman originally alleged that on three occasions in 1982 both officers had made lewd comments to her and fondled her breasts. When testifying at the Civil Service hearing, however, the woman said that only Zavala fondled her, and on only one occasion, Keesal said.

The appellate court also noted, that according to the hearing record, Zavala had been disciplined three other times before his firing.

In December, 1982, he was reprimanded for arresting a suspect without sufficient cause and filing an inaccurate report to justify his conduct. In addition, he was admonished to refrain from physical contact with women prisoners and to watch his language around them.

Zavala was also reprimanded for making negative comments to prisoners about a jail security guard who testified against him in a department investigation, the brief said. Chrisman also received a letter of reprimand for the incident because he “did not attempt to counter (Zavala’s) comments but rather supported them by his demeanor,” it said.

Chrisman was also suspended for two days in September, 1982, for arresting a citizen without proper cause and unnecessarily choking him, according to a city brief.