Intercity Flap Over Traffic Stop Finally Ends Amicably

For four days last week, neither the Persian Gulf crisis nor Gov. Pete Wilson’s inauguration was the biggest news in Glendale. The hottest scoop stemmed from a routine traffic stop.

Trouble was, the driver pulled over by Glendale police officers turned out to be the police chief of neighboring Pasadena.

Before the flap was over, triggered by a local columnist who surfaced late in the game, Pasadena Mayor Jess Hughston had charged that Glendale police officers were racially motivated because his police chief’s passenger was a black woman.

An indignant Glendale Mayor Larry Zarian then accused Hughston of making offensive and irresponsible statements. “I feel the mayor of Pasadena owes the city of Glendale an apology,” he said.

But after a meeting last Thursday morning, the bickering mayors called a truce and issued a joint statement blaming the media for inflating an administrative dispute into an embarrassing public spat.

“Pasadena Mayor Jess Hughston expressed his regret at the misrepresentation of his remarks by the media,” the statement said. It said Hughston “fully supports” his police chief “but also acknowledges that he is unable to continue to characterize the incident or the officers as racist.”

Zarian, who had expressed his outrage through news reports, said in the statement that “name-calling through the press accomplishes nothing. Instead, we need to be focusing our energies on a wide variety of mutual interests.”

So ended a brief and unexpected intercity war of words. It concerned a five-week-old incident that had resulted in neither an arrest nor a citation.

“It was totally a teacup affair that became a tempest,” Hughston said after the dust had settled.

According to Glendale officials, Pasadena Police Chief Bruce Philpott, who lives in Glendale, was pulled over about 11 p.m. Nov. 30 near Grandview Avenue and Glenoaks Boulevard. They said gang-detail officers in an unmarked car stopped Philpott’s Mustang because it appeared to be moving at an unsafe speed, with the radio blaring.

Philpott argued with the officers about their reasons for stopping him, Glendale officials said. After Philpott identified himself, a Glendale police supervisor was summoned, and the chief was permitted to leave.

Later, Philpott complained to Glendale Police Chief David Thompson that the traffic stop was racially motivated and that he was roughed up by one of the officers after he left his car, Glendale City Manager David Ramsay said.

Ramsay said his Police Department conducted a thorough review of the incident “and determined it was handled appropriately.”

For weeks, Philpott’s displeasure over the traffic stop was kept behind closed doors within the two city halls.

But on Jan. 7, the cat scrambled out of the bag, thanks to the delayed reaction of a newspaper columnist who was riding with the officers when the incident occurred.

Soon after witnessing the traffic stop, the columnist wrote a five-page account of the incident--not for his readers, but for Glendale’s police chief.

“I voluntarily sat on the story,” Allen Brandstater, a publicist and political consultant who writes a weekly column for the Glendale News-Press, said Friday. “I was hoping it would blow over and that nothing would come of it because essentially it was a non-story.”

Brandstater, a strong supporter of Glendale police, added that he kept quiet “for the sake of collegiality and good relations between the two departments.”

But such warm relations rarely exist between newspapers, and that finally caused the columnist to go public. Because he believed that a rival paper was about to publish an account of the traffic stop, Brandstater told the News-Press about it Jan. 7, he said.

The newspaper’s first story questioned whether police collegiality had gone too far because Philpott was released without being cited or arrested. The next day, it raised and rebutted the racism charges in banner headlines:

“ ‘It’s racism,’ Pasadena’s mayor charges.

“Not so, say Glendale police. . . .”

On Friday, beneath smiling portraits of the two city leaders, the newspaper reported: “Mayors make up.”

Brandstater was chagrined that an intercity squabble grew out of the disputed traffic stop. “It’s mushroomed into an issue that wasn’t an issue in the first place,” he said.

Staff writer Vicki Torres contributed to this story.