Shedding Light on Brutality Suit : Litigation: Two were arrested when a flashlight beam was pointed at a police helicopter. They file a lawsuit against Oceanside and its officers.

To this day, James Jensen does not fully understand his arrest two years ago on suspicion of obstructing justice and assaulting an officer. Not when the Oceanside police were hovering 800 feet in a helicopter over his home at the time and his “weapon” was a flashlight.

It was three weeks before his wedding. Then 35, Jensen was so upset with the steady, all-hours whirring of chopper blades over his house that in the midst of a chicken and rice dinner with his fiancee and two neighbors, he aimed his xenon bulb Spotliter and middle finger in the air.

“This was a protest that I didn’t think would be witnessed by anybody other than the three people on my deck,” said Jensen, a project manager for an architectural firm.

Within 10 minutes, two officers walked into his yard and drew their guns, ordering him to drop the flashlight. Other squad cars appeared. Pretty soon, the place was swarming with 14 officers.

The confrontation kept building. Mili Smythe, Jensen’s girlfriend, walked into the crush of officers and tried to get some answers. An officer grabbed Jensen and four, five and then six officers pushed into his house, with Jensen ending up beneath the pile. One officer allegedly belted him with a baton.

“I remembered thinking: ‘Don’t move and they won’t hit you anymore. Stay perfectly still,’ ” he said.

His feet bound, hands cuffed and a police baton slipped in between, Jensen was carried from his home like a roped steer, apologizing to neighbors along the way before he was dumped onto the back seat of a patrol car.

Much later, after being dropped three or four times on his chin--the police say accidentally--and sitting in a jail cell for hours, he was released and the district attorney decided not to charge him with assaulting and obstructing officers. Smythe, who had been arrested on suspicion of obstructing justice, also was permitted to leave jail and no charges were filed.

“Unfortunately, there is no crime for someone shining a light up at a police helicopter,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Bell ruled. “Therefore, since the suspect had not committed any criminal act, there was no cause for the officers to go in after the suspect.”

Smythe, Bell wrote, was “passive. (There was) no assault on the officer. Case is not criminally prosecutable and will not be filed (per) prosecutorial discretion.”

That was September, 1990, and at least two things are different today. The helicopters, whose din irked many Oceanside residents, are no longer in operation after a change in city elections. Jensen, 37, and Smythe, 33, a graphics consultant, are married and negotiating a commuter marriage between Hollywood and Oceanside, where they own homes.

But that horrific scene, replayed hundreds of times in their minds, remains vivid.

“I think we have this illusion that this kind of thing happens to people who deserve it,” Jensen said. “That illusion was just shattered. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is, it can happen to you and you are constantly aware that it can happen again.”

Smythe says she feels paranoid and powerless, especially when she sees police officers.

“I used to feel really safe because the police were here to protect me and help me,” she said. “But to go through this is to know that is not the case. It has sort of shattered my feeling of security in this world.”

Their thoughts are now on a lawsuit they filed against Oceanside, former Police Chief Oliver Drummond and 14 of the 16 officers involved. The couple allege that they were victims of battery, false arrest, unlawful seizure, excessive force and invasion of privacy.

Oceanside police say that what they did that night of Sept. 8, 1990, was within department policy.

“I looked at the light and was momentarily blinded,” Officer Les Lang, the helicopter pilot, said in his police report. “It was much like looking into a flashbulb on a camera. There was a dark spot in the center of my vision.”

Officers E.J. Luarca, one of two officers who were first to arrive at the house, said Jensen spun around and fixed his flashlight on them.

“The beam of light was so bright that it became necessary for me to turn my head and compromise my officer safety,” Luarca wrote in his report.

The trial is to start Sept. 8, the two-year anniversary of the helicopter incident, said Tom Adler, attorney for Jensen and Smythe.

Last year around that date, Smythe started having disturbing dreams and described them to a friend, she said. She was asked if anything traumatic had happened the year before.

“I was having all these weird scary dreams about being shot by storm troopers,” she said. “After I figured out the date, it all started making sense.”