San Clemente Police Protests Result in Furlough of Chief

San Clemente Police Chief Kelson McDaniel was placed on paid administrative leave by the city manager Tuesday in reaction to an overwhelming “no-confidence” vote by his officers, who have demanded his firing.

Shrieking and even weeping at points during a volatile morning meeting in City Council chambers, about 50 Police Department employees and a few of their relatives presented the no-confidence poll to the mayor and the city manager.

“We just want to be treated like human beings!” one officer yelled over a din of voices.

McDaniel was placed on leave amid charges Tuesday by the San Clemente Peace Officers Assn. that the chief has created intolerable working conditions and poor staff morale by instituting policies that amount to setting ticket and arrest quotas.

Negotiation for Contract

Association members, whose two-year contract expires at the end of June, are negotiating with the city for a new contract, but Lt. Al Ehlow, named acting chief in McDaniel’s absence, said he thought the talks had “absolutely nothing” to do with the no-confidence vote.

In a prepared statement Tuesday, City Manager James B. Hendrickson, who hired McDaniel in October, 1985, said he had employed a consultant to “review the effectiveness of city Police Department operations.” He promised speedy action on the situation, which officers said had built like a drum roll, but had reached an explosive level over the Memorial Day weekend.

This Friday, the consultant, James S. Mocalis, a former San Juan Capistrano city manager now living in that city and working as a reserve patrol deputy for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, is to report his findings to city officials.

The City Council is expecting to meet Saturday to discuss those findings.

McDaniel, a San Clemente resident, did not return phone calls.

McDaniel’s former boss, Los Alamitos City Manager Michael A. Graziano, said Tuesday that he felt stunned. He said McDaniel had stirred “no problems worth noting.”

“He left in the fall of 1985. In fact we threw a big farewell party. And not because we wanted to see him go. . . . He was very sensitive in his social relationships. He was very popular in town.”

For six hours on Tuesday and 10 hours today, Mocalis was to meet at the Ramada Inn in San Clemente for 20-minute sessions with each of the 40 police employees who cast no-confidence ballots Friday.

“I think he will use the interviews for a great deal of his recommendations, . . . and part of that assessment will be what the other police departments in Orange County have for a philosophy,” Mayor Holly Ann Veale said Tuesday.

She described the morning meeting with police staff and their husbands and wives as “very touching and heart wrenching. . . . My heart goes out to them. They’ve suffered 18 months.”

Ballots were circulated late last week among all 50 union members in the 60-person department: sworn and non-sworn officers, detectives, secretaries, dispatchers and clerks.

The votes were counted Saturday in the presence of Veale and Councilman Tom Lorch. The results, said Detective Russ Moore, president of the association, were 40 votes in favor of a no-confidence vote, 4 votes against it and 6 abstentions.

“There will be an uprising if he isn’t fired,” Moore said Tuesday.

McDaniel started his police career in Newport Beach nearly 20 years ago. Union officials said his application to become that city’s police chief only a month after arriving in San Clemente marked the beginning of distrust and low morale among the department’s employees.

‘Building Gradually’

“There is just overwhelming unhappiness with this chief, with his policies and with him personally,” Moore said, “and it’s something that has just been building gradually” since he arrived from Los Alamitos.

A native of Indiana, McDaniel spent 17 years as a Newport Beach police officer, then applied but was rejected for San Clemente police chief in 1977. A year later he was hired as Los Alamitos police chief, where he remained until 1985. He was chosen from 113 candidates to run San Clemente’s department at an annual starting salary of $54,300.

“A lot of it is the style of the police work,” said Moore, a narcotics detective who has worked for the department for nine years. “You can’t come in and try and run a Newport Beach style of police work in San Clemente.

“We’ve tried to say that, and we’ve been told, ‘Too bad, that’s how I run things.’ ”

Moore characterized McDaniel’s style as “kick ass and take names.”

Moore said one of the department’s 33 officers has quit after nine years rather than work for McDaniel. That officer called for the no-confidence vote as he departed. Five or six “senior officers” are considering resignations, Moore said, and others have applied to other departments.

The exodus, said Moore and officers interviewed Tuesday, is a result of mounting unhappiness with the chief.

“Under Gary Brown (McDaniel’s predecessor), the philosophy of law enforcement was to enforce the spirit of the law,” Moore said. “The people who needed to go to jail did; those who didn’t, didn’t.

“Under McDaniel, it’s black and white. Everybody gets a ticket, everybody goes to jail. Officers have actually been told from the chief to the lieutenant to the sergeant to them: ‘You are not producing enough arrests, you will write more arrests, and if you do not do that, your evaluation will reflect that.’ It has become a game of statistics rather than a people game. Which is why I became a cop. Some people just don’t deserve to be arrested.”

Justification of Tickets

He said that McDaniel told officers that “if we didn’t write $200,000 worth of tickets like last year, we probably would have had to fire three officers. Therefore, we had to write more tickets to keep officers employed.”

Tuesday, only union leaders would allow their names to be used for publication. Other officers refused to give their names for fear of reprisals.

An officer in his early 20s, exiting the second-floor hallway of the Ramada Inn, said: “I’ve been through an emotional ringer. . . . If he stays, I’m leaving.”

A patrol officer waiting to talk to Mocalis said McDaniel has set quotas for arrests and ticketing.

“You gotta have two moving violations a day and three bookings a week,” the officer said, even those sworn officers who are not assigned to traffic or patrol.

“We’re fearful that without these traffic statistics we’ll be reprimanded.”

Hendrickson, the city manager, did not return phone calls Tuesday.

Times staff writer Gordon Grant contributed to this story.