Complaints by Public About Police Conduct Show Marked Decline

Citizen complaints about police conduct have dropped sharply from a year ago, and a senior San Diego police officer Wednesday attributed the decline to more thorough training of officers in the wake of the Sagon Penn case.

The department received 301 complaints about its employees in the first half of this year, or a projected total of 602 for the entire year, according to a report presented Wednesday to the City Council’s Public Services and Safety Committee. If the current rate holds, that number would be down sharply from the 809 complaints received during 1986.

But the number of serious complaints--those alleging improper use of force, false arrest, discrimination, criminal conduct or ethnic and racial slurs--is running almost exactly even with last year’s pace. The department received 47 such complaints between January and June of this year, about half of the 93 such complaints in 1986.

Progress has been made in the number of less serious allegations--those of conduct unbecoming an officer, improper procedure, poor service and discourtesy--which totaled 254 complaints in the first half of this year but accounted for 716 in 1986.

Assistant Chief Bob Burgreen said that the department has reduced the number of complaints in the second category through a recent training program with phone operators and dispatchers, who are frequent targets of discourtesy grievances that make up 10% to 20% of the department’s total complaints.

Crime Rate Jumped

“Those kinds of complaints have been almost eliminated,” Burgreen said.

In a separate report, Police Chief Bill Kolender told the committee that the city’s crime rate jumped by 9.3%, but that the number of homicides, rapes and robberies was down when compared with figures from a year ago.

“When you see crimes like homicide, rape and robbery down, that’s a good sign,” Kolender said. “Even though there’s an increase in the statistics, I think the picture looks pretty good.”

The crime report, which compared the first nine months of this year with the first nine months of 1986, showed a 3.7% drop in homicides, a 3% drop in rapes and a 12.4% decline in robberies. The number of aggravated assaults was up 36.7%, largely as a result of more stringent reporting requirements of domestic violence incidents, Kolender said.

Car Thefts Blamed on Gangs

Kolender attributed an increase of 38.1% in auto thefts to “loose-knit gangs” using cars for joy rides and to commit crimes, thefts by illegal aliens and alien smugglers and the city’s large number of transients.

Kolender also promised to reinstitute sobriety checkpoints for drivers during the holidays. The state Supreme Court upheld the legality of such checkpoints in an Oct. 29 decision.

The police conduct report, the first of its kind, was prepared by police at the suggestion of the new Police Community Relations Advisory Board. Kolender and City Manager John Lockwood appointed the board in the wake of the Penn case and other incidents that have embarrassed the department.

During two trials Penn was acquitted of major charges for the killing of police Officer Thomas Riggs and wounding Officer Donovan Jacobs and civilian ride-along Sarah Pina-Ruiz. Both juries concluded that Jacobs provoked the incident by beating Penn and using racial epithets.

Last December, the department again came under fire for insensitivity when two officers handcuffed a black suspect and led him through a Southeast San Diego neighborhood by a rope attached to the saddle of one of the horses. The man had been arrested on suspicion of walking his dog without a leash and giving police a false name.

3 Complaints Sustained

The report showed that just three of this year’s serious complaints against police employees were sustained in investigations by internal affairs officers, five were not upheld because of insufficient evidence, six were judged to be proper actions and 33 were dismissed as unfounded.

In 1986, only four of the 93 serious grievances were sustained, while 69 were dismissed as unfounded.

The 1986 and 1987 figures are smaller than the number of sustained complaints in previous years. Police sustained 11 of 133 serious complaints in 1985; 14 of 188 in 1984; 28 of 225 in 1983; 24 of 149 in 1982; and 23 of 182 in 1981.

Burgreen said that the average officer’s human relations training at the Police Academy has been increased from about 12 total hours a year ago to more than 100 today, mostly because of the Penn case. All department members, from Kolender on down, are receiving special four-day seminars on cultural awareness, interpersonal skills and other human relations subjects, he said.

“What we’re trying to tell them is . . . to treat all people with dignity at all times,” Burgreen said.