Case May Show Homeless Get Short End of Nightstick

Cops are an interesting breed of cat. The best ones are wonderful combinations of brains, guts, insight and a visceral desire to help other people. You can have some enlightening conversations talking with cops about the human condition.

Other cops, however, can give you the shivers. Their personal foibles may be no lesser or greater than yours or mine, but we don’t get to carry nightsticks and guns. So, when we see something or someone on the street we don’t like, our options are severely limited.

Not so for the street cop. He has a whole range of exciting possibilities.

I had the unpleasant experience of sitting at home the other night and watching a short videotape that showed four uniformed Laguna Beach police officers standing over a man. The video, shot in June by an unidentified person, shows one of the four officers delivering a few kicks before a fellow officer extends his arm, seemingly to stop the attack. You don’t see who’s being kicked because he’s on the ground, but momentarily a shirtless man with a bloodied face is raised to his feet. The man, Kevin Dunbar, has conceded that he was drunk at the time of the incident.

As in most cases when police are making an arrest, it’s doubtful that Dunbar said: “Good evening, officers. How may I make your job easier?”

So while it’s possible that there’s more here than meets the camera, it’s difficult to imagine anything Dunbar could have done to warrant the assault caught on tape. Indeed, only one of the four officers--the one doing the kicking--seemed the least bent out of shape.

Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil Purcell had a surprisingly candid reaction. While noting that more investigating is necessary before all the facts are known, he said: “I understand that officers are only human. Sometimes they can lose it.”

The thought of a cop “losing it” when dealing with a defenseless drunk is--if you’ll pardon the pun--sobering. What if the incident hadn’t been videotaped? Would this have been another case where a suspect fell down on the curb and cut his face?

So far, Chief Purcell seems to be making the right moves. At least in his public comments he’s keeping an open mind as to what might have happened. In addition, the district attorney’s office is investigating.

That investigation should answer the question of whether the officer, Keith Knotek, mistreated Dunbar.

But other questions need to be addressed. Dunbar was apparently well known to Laguna Beach police as a homeless person. And while Purcell has discounted any possibility that the incident is tied to Dunbar’s social status, it’s a question worth pursuing.

Many people--cops and citizens alike--don’t like the sight of the street people. They assault our senses and our sensitivities. Some of us want to help them; some of us want to run them out of town.

This is no make-believe issue. The U.S. Conference of Mayors released a report last week citing “increased hostility to the homeless. . . . 80% of the cities reported that public sentiment toward the homeless is changing.”

That was a reference to the public at large. And yes, police officers are trained to handle people based on their behavior, not on their station in life. But they’re also human beings. We remember how all too many of them reacted to “longhairs” of a generation ago.

Public hostility toward the homeless can coexist with public efforts to help them. Just because Laguna Beach or Santa Ana or any other city is helping the homeless doesn’t mean that its citizens or its police force may not have some members who harbor hostility toward them.

The homeless issue is so real that California police officers and sheriff’s deputies receive special training on it, according to Hal Snow, an official with the state commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training in Sacramento.

“I’ve been in groups with law enforcement officers who have discussed this,” he said. “It almost places (an officer) in a situation where he has to be the mediator between the classes in our society. . . . Often, the haves want them out of sight, out of the city, out of the county.

“Here in Sacramento, city police were requested to run the homeless out of our river area that’s also a park. That’s been a place for the homeless for years.”

Steven Brummer of the Bakersfield Police Department prepared a paper a couple of years ago for the Peace Officer Standards and Training state panel, regarding the projected effect of the homeless population on police agencies. A summary of that paper includes: “It was determined that, presently, law enforcement training on homeless issues is generally inadequate, and few enforcement programs are capable of managing the myriad of issues associated with the homeless population.”

The D.A.’s office and Laguna Beach police promise to fully investigate the alleged assault on Dunbar. It surely wouldn’t hurt if they could reassure people that the incident had nothing to do with Dunbar’s homeless status.

If nothing else, it might help the rest of Laguna’s homeless sleep a little better at night.