San Diego’s Love Affair With Police Hits the Skids : Crime: The once-popular department is rocked by charges of corruption and incompetence. Officers are suspects in the murders of prostitutes, and a serial killer is on the loose.

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.

These events have caused the department’s morale to plummet even lower than in 1985, which Police Chief Bob Burgreen recalls as the previous low point in his 30-year career in the department. 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 recently videotaped a message to his 1,850-member department 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 an 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. Despite having 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 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 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 and Kolender received 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 assistant chief, admitted using police video equipment to film a 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 patrolmen 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. But 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 also has endured criticism of its search for a serial killer who has murdered five women since January, all within the same three-mile area.

In the weeks after the last two murders in mid-September, women in the University City and Clairemont areas approached 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 about 2,000 tips in the case.

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 department.

“Never have I dealt with anything as frustrating as this,” Schultz said. Burgreen said that he sympathizes with family members and that his investigators “want this guy more than anybody they’ve ever gone after.” They are doing all they can to catch the killer, he said, although “no arrests are imminent.”