LAGUNA BEACH : Training Officers Say Kicking Justified

Two police training experts who reviewed a videotape of a Laguna Beach police officer kicking at a man concluded that the kicking was justified and appropriate, according to the officer’s attorney.

Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil Purcell fired Officer Keith R. Knotek on May 31 after an internal Police Department investigation of the kicking incident. Knotek’s attorney, Gregory G. Petersen, has argued that Purcell had no factual basis to fire the officer. He provided the training officers’ statements to support that position.

The district attorney’s office and grand jury reviewed the kicking incident and concluded last month that insufficient evidence exists to file criminal charges against the officer.

The one- and two-page interviews of the training experts are part of a thick internal investigation report prompted by the videotape and a $10-million claim filed with the city in connection with the incident.

The tape, released last December, shows Knotek kicking three times at a man lying on a sidewalk surrounded by other officers. The man, Kevin A. Dunbar, was being arrested on misdemeanor warrants after police questioned him at a wild party last June in South Laguna, where three other people were arrested after officers said they were attacked and pelted by bottles and cans.

In one of the interviews with the Laguna Beach investigator, a 21-year veteran of the Santa Ana Police Department said that “Knotek’s kicks were legal, justified, appropriate and not excessive.” The interview report concludes that the training officer would be willing to testify to that effect in court.

The second training officer, an 18-year veteran of the Westminster Police Department and one of Knotek’s former instructors at the police academy, told the investigator that, in his opinion, “Knotek used an appropriate technique at an appropriate target, and it was not an excessive force.”

Petersen made the two documents of the internal police report available on the condition that the names of the two Golden West Police Academy training officers not be revealed.

Knotek has appealed his termination to the city’s personnel board, a three-member residents’ panel. The board probably will hold its hearing later this month or in early July, City Manager Kenneth C. Frank said Friday. The board will make its recommendation to Frank.

Purcell reiterated Friday that he fired Knotek because the officer’s kicking was “totally inappropriate and excessive” use of force, considering the circumstances involved in the arrest.