2 S.D. Officers Acquitted in Kidnap-Robbery Case

Two San Diego police officers were acquitted Wednesday of felony charges of kidnaping and robbing a group of illegal aliens when a Superior Court jury concluded that the patrolmen were merely following a time-worn police practice of removing undesirable transients from the streets of downtown.

The verdicts, reached after two days of jury deliberations, brought to an end the nine-month criminal case against Officers Lloyd J. Hoff Jr. and Richard P. Schaaf, who were accused of twice rounding up illegal aliens, driving them to a deserted area away from downtown and robbing them of their petty cash.

In lengthy interviews after the verdicts were announced, the two officers, whose police careers still remain in serious jeopardy because of a pending administrative investigation, spoke candidly and harshly about how they were treated by the police hierarchy.

They reiterated their innocence and sharply accused the police Internal Affairs unit and the county district attorney’s office of not having the courage to see there was no merit in the charges. Had they been convicted, the officers could have been sent to prison for life.

“I am very bitter,” said Schaaf, 30, a police officer for nine years. “I am very disappointed with this department. Police departments usually don’t do this kind of thing to their own.”

Hoff, 27, a four-year police veteran, put his feelings this way:

“I’m hurt. I’m not angry, but I’m hurt. I feel like I’ve been left out in the cold. I feel like I’ve been put out like a black sheep. I’m disappointed the department would actually believe one of their officers would do this kind of thing.”

Their defense attorneys said they questioned the jurors after the verdict was reached and were told that many of the six men and six women on the panel believed that officers routinely remove transients from the downtown as part of their job.

Everett Bobbitt, who represented Schaaf, said the jurors told him they did not need to hear the series of police officers who took the stand and testified that they also commonly round up transients and remove them from the downtown corridor.

“They told us we didn’t even need to bring in that testimony,” Bobbitt said. “They told us that they knew that kind of thing went on all the time.”

With that in mind, the defense attorney then lashed out at the district attorney’s office for ever bringing the case against the two officers. He suggested that the district attorney unfairly applies a higher standard of conduct to police officers than average citizens, and that the prosecutor’s office has “been on a mission to get cops.”

Craig Rooten, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, fired back at Bobbitt.

“I think Mr. Bobbitt is making statements without any factual basis at all,” Rooten said in a separate interview. “There’s no vendetta.

“When we issue a case, we have charging standards, and we must believe the defendants are guilty. And it was my belief in this case that those standards were met, and, if a similar case came in tomorrow, we would issue the same charges ,and we would go to trial.

“So it is ludicrous of Mr. Bobbitt to even suggest a vendetta by this office.”

Rooten said he believed his case fell on the credibility of the illegal aliens who alleged they were victimized.

Two of the three Latino men testified they were longtime drug offenders with a history of serving time in jail on a variety of charges. In fact, both were brought from the County Jail to the courtroom to testify, and one was even arrested on outstanding arrest warrants when he showed up to testify in the preliminary hearing.

The third alleged victim has never been located since he complained to police that he and the others were kidnaped and robbed last August.

Rooten attempted to show in the two-week trial that, despite the illegal aliens’ backgrounds, they were indeed taken against their will, that two of them were robbed of their money, and that Hoff swung his flashlight and struck one of the men in the testicles.

But the defense punched significant holes in Rooten’s case, such as the fact that Hoff, who has black hair, was described by one illegal alien as blond, and that the police Internal Affairs unit allowed the alleged victims to later “tramp through the crime scene” without investigators first preserving the area for their own investigation.

In weighing those kinds of deficiencies, jury forewoman Katherine Cunningham said: “I think we all felt something happened, but it wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

At police headquarters, where the not-guilty verdicts were announced over the public address system, Cmdr. Larry Gore said the two officers will continue on voluntary, unpaid leave until an administrative review is completed to determine whether they should be disciplined for violating any departmental policies.

And Gore, in speaking about the practice of police officers rounding up transients off the street, for the first time since the trial began gave the official department version of that policy--and he denied such a policy existed.

He did, however, say that many officers pick up and remove street people and take them to the detox center, to local missions, to jail or to a hospital, but only after the officers have probable cause to believe they have committed a crime or are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

He insisted that officers do not transport people against their will, but also do not hesitate to protect the public from seeing transients urinate and defecate on the sidewalks, sleep in doorways, pass out in the streets, threaten citizens and intimidate people into giving in to panhandling requests.

“Yes, the officers have been very aggressive in taking whatever legal action they can to make sure the law-abiding population is not menaced by these people,” Gore said.

INTERVIEW--One of the officers is ready to quit the force. B1