Police Cope With Year Under Gun of Controversy : Crime: Once-exemplary San Diego department is dealing with internal investigations on prostitute murders and police shootings, as well as a frustrating manhunt.

Long viewed as a model for effective crime solving, exemplary police programs and uncommonly friendly community ties, the San Diego Police Department this year finds itself struggling to overcome allegations of corruption and incompetence.

All within the year, the department has had to cope with the largest--and so far unsuccessful--police manhunt in city history, an investigation into charges that officers may have taken part in the murders of prostitutes, and the fatal police shootings of nine people, most of whom were not carrying guns.

Taken together, these three events have caused the department’s morale to plummet even lower than in 1985, which Police Chief Bob Burgreen recalls as the lowest point in his 30-year career in the department until this year. In 1985, Sagon Penn killed one police officer and wounded another; Penn eventually was acquitted in two separate trials, leaving police officers bitter and angry and fueling racial tensions in the community.

Concerned about the effect the latest series of events was having on his staff, Burgreen videotaped a message to his 1,850-member department two weeks ago that addressed the serial killings, prostitute murders and police shootings.

He reaffirmed the agency’s accomplishments. He suggested that the San Diego media had taken a sensationalist approach to police news. He asked his officers to be proud of the department.

But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that his department’s image is tarnished.

“Our department has a national reputation for honesty, for a lack of corruption and for being a law enforcement agency at the forefront,” Burgreen said. “But our police officers are walking around and people are beating us up. We’re hanging our heads a little bit. This is a time of crisis right now.”

Seldom have there been tougher times for a police force that boasts public cooperation unusual in most major cities. When the department needs new equipment, it can call upon any number of private contributors eager to provide cash donations. It can count 4,200 neighborhood watch groups throughout the city.

Fifteen years ago, the San Diego Police Department was among the first in the country to experiment with a law enforcement approach called “community-oriented policing,” which sought to establish police storefronts throughout the city and have officers work more closely with neighborhood associations. And despite having a force with the smallest number of police officers per 1,000 population of any of the country’s 10 largest cities, it has kept crime rates relatively low.

The department’s clean reputation took a beating last month when a task force investigating the deaths of 43 prostitutes and transients asked the state attorney general’s office to split from the group and concentrate solely on allegations of police corruption.

At least five police officers and one former member of the department are under investigation by the task force for their ties to two prostitutes, one of whom was murdered in 1985 and one who disappeared in 1986. Both were police informants.

“The idea of police corruption is foreign to us,” Burgreen said. “These things are taking up all of our attention. We just have to suck it up and keep going.”

Burgreen has responded aggressively and candidly to the questions of corruption raised by the investigation. He ordered an analysis of how the department is managed and added rules governing police contact with prostitutes to a broad ethics review his department is conducting.

The ethics panel is considering a number of changes, including the creation of a special corruption unit and the rotation of officers who work in sensitive units.

But critics say that if Burgreen really wanted to clean up his department, he would call in federal law enforcement officials to investigate possible corruption rather than let the state attorney general’s office work with police investigators in trying to sift through evidence.

Burgreen said he is tired of such talk.

“We are not foxes and this is not a henhouse,” he said. “This is a local problem. There is nothing to suggest that this investigation is being run in anything but a competent fashion.”

Some also question Burgreen’s ability to get to the bottom of problems that they say he should have been aware of in the decade he served as assistant chief to William Kolender, the city’s police chief for 13 years.

Kolender’s early years as chief, which began in 1975, were marked by innovative programs and improving relations with the minority community. By the time Kolender left in 1988, to take a job as an executive with the Union-Tribune Publishing Co., his department had been rocked by a ticket-fixing scandal, the Penn incident and controversial shootings.

Burgreen, a 30-year veteran, and Kolender received written reprimands by City Manager John Lockwood in 1986 for personally fixing hundreds of parking tickets and dozens of traffic citations for friends, family members, influential San Diegans and media representatives. They also were reprimanded for using a uniformed officer to run personal errands on a daily basis.

That same year, Burgreen, then the assistant chief, admitted using police video equipment to film a personal fishing trip at Lake Powell.

Burgreen said in a recent interview that he accepts blame for any misconduct or corruption that may have occurred while he was running day-to-day operations for Kolender.

“I am not shunning any responsibility for what may have happened,” he said. “There is nobody who wants to get to the bottom of this case any more than I do. I am looking for a defendant or defendants to bring to justice.”

Another of the department’s problems is police shootings. Police have shot 23 people--nine fatally--this year, which is one lethal shooting away from tying a department record.

The district attorney’s office, which reviews dozens of cases involving fatal shootings each year, has not filed criminal charges against a police officer since 1984.

Anita Wucinic-Turner of Mira Mesa expressed what many citizens felt when she wrote to Burgreen, the district attorney and city officials: “It seems that we have built . . . some type of halo, some type of mystique, some type of notion of infallibility around police officers that implies they are different from the rest of us.”

Several cases have drawn specific public ire.

In May, a man wandering among cars through morning rush-hour traffic on Interstate 5 and waving a cement trowel at a police officer and two highway patrolman was shot and killed. The officer said he believed the suspect was about to attack him or turn on the motorists.

Some witnesses to the incident suggested that officials could have subdued the man in some other way than shooting him. The district attorney ruled the shooting justified.

In June, police shot and killed a man wielding an aluminum baseball bat. Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller ruled that the officer acted in self-defense.

Four days later, a former attorney who was smashing car windows in Mission Beach was shot to death after he threatened police with a bat and a pair of scissors. The district attorney has yet to rule on that case.

In August, a police detective shot an unarmed man who was sitting in a borrowed Cadillac outside a Mission Valley Denny’s restaurant after the man made a “furtive movement” between his legs. No district attorney’s decision has been filed.

Burgreen has defended his department’s use of force in all but the Mission Valley incident--about which he declines to comment--by saying that officers’ lives were being threatened.

A public police review board has asked to review all shootings since late last year. Burgreen established his own internal review panel last month to look at the agency’s use of deadly force and put Deputy Chief Mike Rice in charge.

But Rice had to resign from the panel when his son, a police officer, shot a man carrying a 3-foot-long stick last month. Burgreen took over the panel.

The department has also endured criticism of its search for a serial killer who has murdered five women since January, all within the same 3-mile area.

In the weeks following the last two murders in mid-September, women in the University City and Clairemont areas approached near panic, cleaning hardware stores of locks and keeping baseball bats beside their beds.

A team of 27 investigators and seven administrators--the largest assembled in the city’s history--is reviewing some 2,000 tips in the case.

“People are so dedicated to this case that we have to send them home from work. They’re working on their days off,” Burgreen said. “Different people from the department are offering every resource they have: officers, secretaries, offices.”

That has not stopped some critics from wondering why police didn’t place more detectives on the case after they identified a serial killer in April, when the third stabbing occurred.

And it has not kept the parents of the first victim, 20-year-old Tiffany Schultz, from asking why police delayed sending skin samples--possibly from the serial killer--to a DNA lab for six months.

In an interview with The Times last month, Willard (Bill) Schultz, Tiffany’s father, said he was exasperated with the Police Department.

“I’ll tell you honestly, I’ve had to deal with a lot of things, but never have I dealt with anything as frustrating as this,” Schultz said. “Absolutely, I’m angry with them.”

Burgreen said he sympathizes with family members, but that his investigators “want this guy more than anybody they’ve ever gone after” and are doing all they can to catch the killer although “no arrests are imminent.”

These days, Burgreen says, everyone wants to bash the Police Department.

“You’ve got to realize that there are always going to be people, from the day you become police chief, who think you ought to be fired,” he said. “This is a time of crisis right now, but . . . we’ll come through this.”

Police critic John Slotten said that ever since Sagon Penn, one controversy after another has surrounded the Police Department and has eroded public confidence.

“I think Chief Burgreen’s on alert,” Slotten said. “His police department is under fire and he has to plug holes. I think he has support from community organizations, such as business and church leaders, but as far as the grass roots community is concerned, the police don’t have the public’s confidence to turn this thing around.”