A Bumpy Road, but Oliver’s Riding It Out : Law enforcement: The police chief’s aims are being tested--on the streets, at City Hall and in divorce lawyers’ offices.

Police Chief Jerry Oliver strode into Pasadena a year ago, a polished former street cop who, for 20 years, had kept his revolver holstered and his mind open to notions of community sensitivity.

He was going to bring a new style of “community policing” to Pasadena, city officials said, or at least a better version of the sensitive approach that the department already espoused. The city’s ethnically diverse population would see more of a “high touch” side of the department, with real people behind the badges, rather than just “the blur that went by in a police car,” as Oliver put it recently.

After a year on the job, most city officials agree that there has been movement in the direction of community policing, but that Oliver has fallen short of reshaping the department into the kind of law enforcement and human services agency he expects it to be.

He has shuffled staff around and streamlined the department, reducing the number of divisions from five to four, and he has initiated a series of “community partnerships,” as Oliver refers to such pet projects as a late-evening basketball league for youngsters who are inclined to wander the streets at night.

“Law enforcement is only one of the many products we want to sell,” the chief says in the evangelical mode that continues to impress business and community leaders.

But there has been a snakebitten quality to Oliver’s first year: charges of rough stuff by police officers just as Oliver was trying to polish the department’s image, a rancorous dispute with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Mace-spraying of a 2-year-old during a park fracas, the accidental death of a bystander by a police officer’s bullet.

Then, as if Oliver needed a dollop of personal scandal to conclude his first year on the job, there was the messy divorce action by his wife, Jackie, in which she alleged that the chief had physically abused her during their 14 months of marriage.

Oliver is philosophical about what he calls the “celebrated glitches”--unpredictable wrong turns rather than actual mistakes, he contends. “You don’t get headlines when you’re doing something right,” he concedes.

Nevertheless, he passionately defends his troops. “We get more than 100,000 calls for assistance in a year”--actually, 96,662 last year--”and the glitches are a fraction so small they can’t even be counted,” says Oliver, 45.

As for the marital problems, Oliver ducks his head in apparent anguish.

“She has nothing to lose in this,” says Oliver, who claims Jackie Oliver made the charges as a tactical move to extract a lucrative settlement from him.

The tarnish is not going to go away easily, though. Two weeks ago, a group of people demanded at a City Council meeting that the city investigate Jackie Oliver’s charges. Councilman William Thomson offered to launch a city investigation if Jackie Oliver would come forward.

Nevertheless, despite the occasional foul-up and criticism, the innovative style of Oliver, a native of Phoenix, has generally been playing well in the City Council.

City Manager Philip Hawkey gives him high marks for providing “excellent leadership” in the past year.

“He’s earned the right to be called one of the most prominent black public employees in the nation,” Councilman Isaac Richard says. The councilman, though, says there are still too many trigger-happy “cowboys” on the police force, a contention Oliver dismisses.

“If there are cowboys in the community, there are cowboys in the Police Department,” he says.

Mayor Rick Cole critiques the chief as weak on communicating with the City Council, saying he informed City Hall only sweepingly of his reorganization. Nevertheless, Cole is impressed. “He’s one of the rare, charismatic, headstrong leaders in local government who can often be annoying to people, even when they agree with him,” the mayor says.

Councilman Chris Holden, one of the chief’s harshest critics, says he appears to pay more attention to high-profile programs, such as bicycle patrols in the city’s Old Town entertainment district, than to real neighborhood crime problems.

“What I hear from people in the neighborhoods,” says Holden, who represents a portion of predominantly black Northwest Pasadena, “is that everybody knows where the crack houses are, and they wonder why they can’t be gotten out of there.”

Oliver says law enforcement is still his top priority. But so far, there have not been the resources to assign police to neighborhood beats. That will come more slowly, Oliver says.

The council has given the Police Department $28.7 million, a 5% funding increase, for the new fiscal year. Most of the new money, however, will be absorbed by negotiated salary and benefits increases.

Despite Holden’s criticism, community leaders in the Northwest area tend to talk glowingly of the chief.

The department has been more responsive to complaints since Oliver arrived, activist Cheryl Hubbard says. “Before Jerry came, if you had a complaint about a particular police officer, it would have been, ‘So what?’ ” she said. “Now, they’ll sit and talk out a situation with you.”

The chief’s willingness to sit and talk with people--either through a series of community forums or in private meetings with private citizens--is paying off on some of the city’s meaner streets.

“I’ve seen change,” says Tim Rhambo, a gang worker with the Day One program in Northwest Pasadena. “I think he’s trying to blend the Police Department with the community, which is a total change from other chiefs. He’s held town meetings where people came and talked about problems.”

Policing should be more than just arresting wrongdoers, Oliver insists. “We’re just beginning to understand our potential for solving problems,” he says. “Long after the doctors and the lawyers and the other urban healing forces go home, the police are out there, holding the city together.”

Oliver’s idea is to use police officers as troops in a citywide crime prevention effort, as the department itself forms “community partnerships.”

He tells of his own experiences as a beat officer in Phoenix, where certain families or individuals were the subject of regular police calls on Friday nights.

“You could set your clock by it,” he said.

Oliver wants his own department to deal with such problems in a different way. “Shouldn’t we be more than just responding every weekend? You have to do the necessary paperwork, alert other agencies in the community about the problem, not just apply a Band-Aid on Friday night.”

Oliver arrived in Pasadena on July 1, 1991, after a lengthy effort to find the best person to head the city’s Police Department of 216 officers and 88 support staff.

An up-from-the-streets assistant chief in Phoenix and the former head of the Memphis Office Of Drug Policy, Oliver became the first outsider to head the Pasadena Police Department in 50 years.

The outsider status has been somewhat of a hindrance, city officials say, both in terms of swaying the rank and file of the department and in terms of smoothing over some rough spots in dealing with the Sheriff’s Department.

According to one council member, a name-calling dispute last year between the City Council and Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block about alleged “neo-Nazi” sheriff’s deputies could have been smoothed over by a police chief with a longer relationship with Block.

Oliver, as the city’s top law enforcement officer, became the hapless messenger between the two sides. “He got leaned on pretty heavily by the upper echelons of the Sheriff’s Department,” Councilman William Paparian said.

Some officers under Oliver’s command remain skeptical about his innovations, such as appointing civilians to disciplinary review boards. “It’s not that they’re resistant,” insists Pasadena Police Officers Assn. President Dennis Diaz. “It’s just that there’s no plan. We haven’t seen anything that says, ‘This is how we’re going to formulate the plan.’ ”

Oliver is often an impatient man, seeking to forge ahead by trampling obstacles underfoot, particularly in some of his moves to streamline the department, some city officials say. For example, there were raised eyebrows among some police veterans when Oliver appointed Mary Schander, a civilian community relations specialist, as one of his four commanders.

“He has a tendency to want to run over people, and people resent that,” Cole says. “They say, ‘Who died and made him king?’ even when they agree with the direction in which he’s going.”

“There’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of skepticism,” says Oliver, a trim, well-tailored man with hair so closely cropped it’s almost gone. “But it’s like a law of physics--to overcome the inertia of an organization, you need a certain kind of force.”

Oliver may be slow in establishing bonds with his employees, but he has quickly immersed himself in new programs. He is in the midst of helping to set up two Boy Scout troops in Northwest Pasadena, to be co-sponsored by a pair of churches and the Police Department. The emphasis will be on “how Scouting fits into the urban setting,” Oliver says.

“Going to camp is fun,” he explains, “but you’ve got to come back and deal with some harder issues.”

The Police Department is helping to produce a performance of “Graffiti Blues,” a rap opera by actors Ron Mokwena and Misha McK, addressing such issues as hunger, gangs and family breakup in downtrodden neighborhoods. The performance, with a cast of Pasadena youngsters and underwritten by a foundation, is scheduled for November at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

The payoff to Oliver’s efforts was probably most apparent in April and May, after the not guilty verdicts for four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King.

Like Los Angeles itself, Pasadena was almost immediately in a state of rebellion. Unlike his Los Angeles counterpart, Police Chief Daryl Gates, however, Oliver had his department on alert within an hour of the verdict. Then he met with black community leaders and encouraged them to spread out through Northwest Pasadena to try to calm tense situations.

For the most part, the approach worked. There was one major fire on Villa Street and Allen Avenue, and there were five riot-related injuries, including four apparently random shootings in the hours immediately following the verdicts. But dozens of little flare-ups were doused with gentle persuasion, community leaders say. “I’d like to express my appreciation for what didn’t happen in Pasadena,” one grateful resident told the City Council in the aftermath of the disturbances.

But the triumphantly low-profile approach was sullied by one of those snakebites. In the midst of neighborhood tensions in Northwest Pasadena, a bystander was killed during a shootout between police and youths on Los Robles Avenue, apparently by a ricocheting police bullet.

Oliver’s handling of the incident may best illustrate what is new in the top brass of Pasadena’s Police Department. He said the death of Howard Eugene Martin, 22, still troubles him. With the shooting still under a departmental investigation, Oliver defends his officers without commenting on the shooting itself.

“There was gunfire, confusion, people on the edge of riotous behavior,” he says. “I guess it was predictable. That’s not to say we don’t need to be better.”

Though Martin’s family has filed a $1-million wrongful death claim against the city on behalf of Martin’s 2-year-old son and expects to initiate other legal action, Oliver sought to repair some bridges when he attended Martin’s funeral in a Northwest Pasadena church, reaching out to concerned members of the community and talking to members of Martin’s family.

“It was a little touchy, because of the shaky way the shooting happened,” Northwest Pasadena activist Darlene Locus said. But Oliver demonstrated unusual courage that day, she said. “It took a lot of guts (to go to the funeral),” she said. “But he was sincere (about his concern). He meant it. A lot of people there were very angry. I take my hat off to him.”