Latino Officer Gets Community Relations Post

City Manager James M. Rez has appointed a 22-year veteran police officer to the newly created position of Glendale community relations coordinator, a job he says will help improve race relations citywide.

However, Rez said, he has yet to determine the duties of Richard M. Reyes, 50, a Latino who will assume the $39,054-a-year job later this month.

The new post has led one minority-rights activist to speculate that the position was created simply to placate critics of race relations in Glendale.

“My personal feeling is that it is just fluff,” said Ray Reyes, a counselor for low-income and minority students at Glendale Community College. He is not related to the appointee.

Ray Reyes said Glendale needs not so much to improve race relations among the city’s varied cultures, but rather to eradicate what he says is “institutionalized racism within government.”

Rez said he established the position in response to a recently released report on alleged racism in the Glendale Police Department.

That court-ordered report was written by Los Angeles attorney Herman Sillas, who was hired by the city in January, 1987, to investigate charges of racism in the department.

Sillas, who did not go so far as to label the city racist, included in his two-volume report more than a dozen recommendations for improving race relations within the Police Department. Included in the recommendations, all of which were accepted by the city, is the hiring of a full-time employee to oversee a 15-year-old affirmative-action hiring plan that never has been implemented. That post has yet to be filled.

Goes Beyond Recommendations

Rez said creation of the community relations post goes beyond Sillas’ recommendations and displays the city’s commitment to improving relationships with ethnic groups in the community.

“The biggest thing it would accomplish is we would maintain a close contact with various groups within the city that we now have no contact with,” Rez said. “. . . For a long time, I thought there needed to be someone in this office who will be a contact person for a whole variety of people in this town.”

Rez, who will retire within two months, said Richard Reyes first would be assigned to identify the leaders of the city’s ethnic communities. As to what Reyes will do after identifying them, Rez said: “I don’t know. We’ll be feeling our way along.”

Ray Reyes said the city could improve its relationship with Glendale’s minority populations and better spend its money by working to increase the number of minority managers in city departments.

“I’m not saying they shouldn’t hire this guy, but I don’t think it addresses the initial issues--the hiring of minorities in the Glendale Police Department,” he said. “They announce this thing, but it is not related to the original issue.”

Sillas’ investigation into the charges of racism was ordered by a federal judge who ruled during a 1986 trial that the Police Department had discriminated against a Latino officer by passing him up for promotion in favor of less-qualified Anglo officers.

Since March, 1987, three black officers who provided key testimony against the department in that trial have filed discrimination claims and lawsuits against the city.

Rez said Richard Reyes may help the Police Department implement Sillas’ recommendations, but added that the post will be structured mainly to address communitywide racial concerns.

“I think this is a community in transition,” Rez said. “There is an increase in diversity of its population, and I think we need to know how that’s occurring and understand and know if there are any problems that are real or potential.”

Richard Reyes joined the Glendale Police Department in 1966. For 18 years he has worked as a school resource officer at Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School. In that capacity, he has developed a “strong rapport” with residents in the largely minority neighborhoods of south Glendale, Rez said.

First Priority

In an interview, Richard Reyes said his first priority will be to find whether highly publicized racial incidents, which included anti-Semitic graffiti painted on a Jewish temple and the appearance of a notorious racist as a speaker in town, are isolated incidents or whether they indicate a “major” citywide problem.

“I don’t think it’s like what we’ve been hearing--that it’s the hot seat of racial strife,” he said of Glendale. “But we do need to educate people about people. We’re getting a lot of people from different walks of life and ethnic backgrounds.”

Reyes, like Rez, said the duties of the new job will be defined in time.

“Each day, I’ll see what type of problems arise that I could possibly get involved in,” he said. “It’s going to be an educational process, and we’re going to be more sensitive. The city of Glendale is committed to working with the community.”