Deputy, Ex-Policeman Tangle in 5th District

Councilman Les Robbins, a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff for 15 years, doesn’t even bother to knock on the doors of Long Beach police officers’ homes when he goes campaigning in his district. In this election, he knows they are the enemy.

Robbins may be a working police officer and the former president of the deputy sheriffs’ union, but most of the police in his district consider him a traitor. He sided with management in the city’s long and bruising police contract battle, and the police are not about to forget it.

Robbins is one of two incumbents targeted by the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. in this year’s council races. His sole opponent is a former union board member whose major financial contributor is the union.

“I have a lot more time to devote to the city than Mr. Robbins,” asserted retired police Sgt. Max Baxter, a four-year union board member who is challenging Robbins with a skimpy campaign budget and criticisms that Robbins doesn’t tend to his constituents’ problems.

“I don’t believe that there are many issues that we differ in,” said Baxter, a 56-year-old with an easy smile. “However, I do not perceive Les Robbins to be a fighter for the constituents of this district.”

The 5th District sprawls across northeast Long Beach, solidly middle-class and suburban in taste and character. Residents worry about such things as airport noise, parking and traffic problems.

“They want things to stay the way they are,” said Robbins of his constituents, dismissing Baxter’s charges of neglect as “trying to make chicken salad out of chicken feathers.”

“I have two full-time staff people to help. They do an outstanding job of responding (to constituent calls) and I have the records to prove it,” he added.

Robbins points as an example to his work in the controversy surrounding a commercial nursery that was the source of numerous complaints from residents. The nursery wound up signing an agreement, approved by the council, that restricted the nursery’s hours, pesticide spraying practices, and use of trucks.

“I was born and raised in this district and have lived here all my life. I understand the people who live here. I know their problems. I can relate to them,” insisted Robbins, a 41-year-old patrol sergeant who cruises the streets of East Los Angeles between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

With an estimated campaign budget of $70,000, Robbins is not taking Baxter’s challenge lightly. “No way I’m going to be beat,” declared Robbins, who took six weeks off from his job to devote to his campaign. “I’m on vacation,” he noted with a roll of his eyes during an interview in his council office on the top floor of City Hall.

Robbins won the seat two years ago in a special election to replace Ernie Kell after Kell was elected the city’s first full-time mayor. Kell helped Robbins into office and Kell supporters have continued to contribute extensively to Robbins in this campaign, with his money going to lawn signs, mailers and polling.

Baxter, saying he finds fund-raising demeaning, expects to get through the campaign on a budget of about $5,000. “I’m bashful. You probably haven’t met many cops who are bashful,” quipped Baxter, who teaches criminal law and evidence for nine hours a week at Long Beach City College.

A Long Beach police officer for 28 years, Baxter earned a law degree in night school, but despite four attempts, never passed the bar exam.

On police matters, Baxter said he had favored the June ballot proposal to create a $7.3-million-a-year property tax levy to hire 75 more police officers, but has now changed his mind.

“They’re just going to have to bite the bullet and hire so many a year,” Baxter said, arguing that there is money in the existing budget to hire perhaps as many as 15 more officers a year. He also complained that the Police Department places too many officers in administrative positions and not enough out on the street.

Robbins supports the ballot measure, saying there is no money to hire police officers without creating a new revenue source.

As for why he endorsed contract positions that were bitterly opposed by the police union, Robbins says the personnel changes outlined in the recently approved contract were necessary to make the department more efficient and bring it in line with the policies of most other police departments.

“Now we’re running a lean, clean, mean machine,” Robbins said.

In his first term, Robbins’ voting record has tended toward the middle of the road. He voted to ban the local sale of assault rifles, to prohibit discrimination against AIDS carriers, to reduce density in a number of residential neighborhoods across the city and to increase density on the site of the old Pike Amusement Park to allow for a massive new commercial and residential development south of downtown.

He opposed an upcoming ballot proposal to create a citizen police complaint board to review brutality complaints and changed his mind about whether the city should defend Police Officers Mark Dickey and Mark Ramsey against charges stemming from an alleged brutality incident involving activist Don Jackson. At first he voted against a city defense, then in favor.