Disparaging Note at Sheriff’s Post Offends Latino Officers

A memo ridiculing Latinos and encouraging San Diego County sheriff’s deputies to drive around with undocumented workers with “baseball caps and plastic shopping bags” in the trunks of their patrol cars was written on county stationery and posted in the sheriff’s station in Poway last month.

The memo was tacked up for about a week in the station’s squad room before it was taken down and a copy sent by an outraged deputy to the national Latino Police Officers Assn.

That deputy, Sgt. Joseph Lopez, said Tuesday that he has been transferred out of Poway and reassigned to the overnight shift in the Lemon Grove area as punishment for sending the memo to the LPOA. His superiors, however, said he was transferred because of unrelated personality conflicts.

According to sources within the LPOA and senior officers at the Poway station, the memo was tacked to the bulletin board during the first week of October and remained there for up to 10 days.

Addressed to “all sworn personnel” in the “Poway Sheriff’s Station,” the memo stated:

“Please inventory your assigned patrol vehicles for aliens.

“The city of Poway has been generous enough to see that each vehicle is equipped with three (one tall, two short), and they should be alpha-numerically designated per your unit number, i.e., 495-a, -b, and -c.

“Please check your vehicle and make sure all three aliens are present and properly numbered. They should also be fully equipped with baseball caps and plastic shopping bags.

“In addition these aliens are to be carried only in your vehicle’s trunk; under no circumstances are they to be put in the console or glove compartment.”

Attached to the memo was a photograph of a group of undocumented workers; three wearing baseball caps and one carrying a shopping bag.

Local and national leaders of the LPOA, angry about the insensitivity of the memorandum, said the incident appears to fit a pattern in Poway, where sheriff’s deputies have been sharply criticized this year in allegations of harassment against Latino immigrants.

“This is very much a racist document,” said Louis Quijas, national president of the LPOA and a captain on the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department.

“When those kinds of comments appear on a bulletin board in a police station, that scares me. Those are the people that are out there protecting our lives, and then to allow this to be on the board?”

Capt. J. C. LaSuer, commander of the Poway station, conceded Tuesday that the memo was indeed posted. But he also stressed that, although the memo was in bad taste, it was not at all indicative of the hard work his staff is doing to improve relations between the Sheriff’s Department and the Latino community in Poway.

“It’s a shame because we work so darn hard to try to get positive things going with the migrants up here,” he said. “We work so hard to establish relationships and investigate things and make things right for the people and migrants who work here.

“I hate this. This is something that should not have been done.”

The memo carried the signature of Douglas Walters, the station’s administrative sergeant. But Walters denied Tuesday that he wrote the memo. Instead, he said, someone must have taken his signature from a legitimate memorandum.

“It is my signature,” he said. “But someone cut it out of another memo and stuck it on that one.”

Why?

“Who knows?” he said. “A joke probably.”

Walters and LaSuer said they believe they know who actually wrote the memo and posted it on the board, but they would identify the perpetrator only as someone who works at the station. They both cited the fact that the internal affairs investigation, although completed this week, has not yet decided what, if any, punishment is in order

The internal investigation was aimed at finding who wrote and posted the memo and whether Lopez violated any department policies by sending a copy of the memo to the LPOA.

Sheriff John Duffy, who has ultimate authority over any discipline, did not return phone calls Tuesday.

Officers with the LPOA, both in San Diego and nationally, said some sort of discipline is warranted.

“We are incensed about the memo,” said Lupe Avalos, a California Highway Patrol officer and newly elected president of the LPOA’s chapter in San Diego County.

“We are disgusted with it. It creates a negative stereotype. It’s an embarrassment to us and to the entire Hispanic community.”

Avalos and other LPOA leaders said they are particularly concerned because the incident follows a pattern of allegations of episodes between sheriff’s deputies and Latino migrants in the Poway area.

Earlier this year, sheriff’s deputies were chastised for rounding up scores of illegal aliens following a 15-year-old girl’s allegations that she had been raped in Poway.

As it turned out, the girl’s parents worked for law enforcement agencies, and Poway deputies were criticized for overreacting. Although 80 undocumented workers were detained, charges were filed against only six. The charges were later dropped, and a half dozen of the migrants have since filed lawsuits alleging their civil rights were violated.

More recently, Roberto Martinez, president of the Coalition for Law and Justice, held a news conference in front of the Poway City Hall and alleged that undocumented workers were being shot at and harassed by bands of white youths. He said sheriff’s deputies were not doing enough to stop the violence.

He held that news conference the week after the racist memo was tacked to the bulletin board at the Poway station.

Asked to comment Tuesday about the memo, Martinez said:

“It’s insulting and an affront to the Hispanic community. It’s indicative of the mentality that’s pervasive in the North County, of the anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant sentiment.

“And it’s spreading all over North County. That’s what’s alarming to us. It’s really hard to control it any more, especially now if it’s existing in law enforcement too.”

Although acknowledging that there have been problems between police and undocumented workers, Walters and LaSuer said the Sheriff’s Department is striving to improve that relationship.

He said, for example, that he and other deputies at the station are working on a project to raise funds to buy a patrol car and other equipment for police in the Baja California town of San Felipe.

Indeed, he said, he was in San Felipe the week the memo was attached to the bulletin board, a fact confirmed by his superior, LaSuer. The captain said that Walters never saw the memo and was first told that it carried his signature at a meeting in LaSuer’s office.

“We called him in and asked him about it,” said LaSuer, adding that the command staff is confident that Walters did not write, sign or post the memorandum.

The LPOA printed the full text of the memorandum in the October issue of its 7,000-circulation monthly newspaper, “Badge 911,” also known as “El Puente.” The newspaper also carried an Editor’s Note:

“As of October 8, 1989, this official memo from a sergeant was hanging on the briefing board at the Poway sheriff’s station. Information has it that this type of unprofessional communication is commonplace.

“It is very unfortunate to hear that this type of activity exists and apparently is not only condoned but is initiated by some members of the supervisory staff.”

Walters said he wrote the newspaper a reply, blasting Latino police officers for publicly criticizing their law enforcement brethren by reprinting the memo and the accompanying editor’s note.

“For your information,” his letter said, “squad room humor, practical jokes, one-upmanship, etc., is standard procedure in every police squad room in the world. Some of it is tasteless, pointless, funny, degrading, racist, political, sacrilegious, and even down-right stupid.

“But it should stay in the squad room. It should not be sent to local or national media sources in anonymous or non-self-addressed envelopes.”

Lopez said he sent a copy of the memo to the LPOA newspaper because he was embarrassed at seeing the memo on the board and grew impatient when it remained there for 10 days before anyone took it down. Lopez said he didn’t take the memo down himself because he wanted to see how long it would stay up.

He said that, within two weeks of telling internal affairs investigators that he sent the copy to the LPOA, he was transferred to the 11 p.m. shift in Lemon Grove, despite his longstanding request for a transfer to Santee.

He believes the transfer was in retaliation for his sending the memo to the LPOA rather than complaining directly through his normal chain of command.

“The transfer was too coincidental,” he said. “It was to get me out of there. They think I’m too vocal, but I always stand up for what I believe in.”

But Sheriff’s Department officials say that Lopez’s transfer was in no way related.

“I wouldn’t transfer anybody for something like that,” LaSuer said.