Glendale Officials Pledge Efforts to Rid Police Force of Discriminatory Practices

After receiving a court-ordered report on racial incidents in their city’s Police Department, Glendale officials pledged Tuesday to improve the hiring and promotion of minorities in all city departments.

“The (city) personnel director will have one person in the department who will be spending a lot more effort on minority recruitment,” City Manager James Rez said.

Rez said Glendale will begin enforcing its 15-year-old affirmative action plan, which a consultant said “sounds good on paper,” but was “never really carried out.”

The report noted that there is only one black officer among the 183 on the police force.

The consultant, Los Angeles attorney Herman Sillas, was hired by the city in January, 1987, after a judge found that a Latino officer had been improperly refused promotions.

Sillas’ two-volume report, released Monday, identified 50 racial incidents within the Glendale Police Department since 1979. The majority of them, it stated, “were the result of the exchange of joking between competing wits or jaded senses of humor.”

That category included a number of cartoons and drawings posted in the Police Department depicting the department’s black officers as apes and in other derogatory manners.

Sillas, who interviewed 60 present and former members of the police force, reported that half of them said that “there are racial and ethnic problems within the department.”

He made more than a dozen recommendations for improving race relations within the department, the first being that someone be hired to implement the city’s affirmative action plan. Other recommendations include establishing a procedure for employees to report racial incidents without having to notify a supervisor, including a program on race relations in the orientation of new officers and requiring a written explanation whenever an eligible minority officer is bypassed for promotion.

Rez said the city will adopt all of Sillas’ recommendations.

The investigation was ordered by U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian Jr. after he ruled in October, 1986, that the city discriminated against Latino officer Ricardo L. Jauregui by repeatedly passing him up for promotion in favor of less-qualified Anglo officers.

Tevrizian ordered Jauregui, a 12-year veteran of the force, promoted to sergeant with back pay at that rank to February, 1985. The city has appealed that decision to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Since March, three of the department’s four black officers who provided testimony against the department have filed separate racial discrimination claims against the city. One of the officers has since been fired and the other two have left the department.

However, Sillas said, the climate inside the Police Department has become more favorable to minorities.

“I don’t think there’s racial insensitivity at this point,” he said. “It’s just a question of trying to work it out. . . . It will be a 24-hour job trying to integrate the department.”