2nd UCLA Officer Sues Alleging Discrimination : Campus: In the latest complaint, a Latino sergeant charges his career advancement was thwarted by superiors. Chief disputes accusation and cites diversity of the staff, but more lawsuits are expected.

A second campus police officer has sued UCLA for discrimination, charging that the chief of the force and other high-ranking officers have thwarted his career on racial grounds.

The complaint by Sgt. Richard A. Sanchez soon may be followed by others. Two more Latino officers and one black patrolman on the 57-member force expect to file similar suits within a few weeks, said their attorney, Patrick McNicholas.

An Anglo officer filed similar charges earlier this year, saying that he was discriminated against because he spoke up for minority group members who were mistreated by the department.

Campus police Chief John C. Barber disputed the charges, saying the UCLA force is one of the most ethnically diverse law enforcement agencies in the state.

He offered an ethnic accounting of the departmental roster. Of two assistant chiefs, one is Latino; of five lieutenants, one is black; of 10 sergeants, three are black, two are Latino and one is Asian; of 39 officers, 10 are black, five are Latino and two are Asian, according to Barber.

Barber, 57, who has headed the department since 1978, recently announced plans to take early retirement from his $87,000-a-year job in November. He said his decision is not related to the lawsuits; by leaving now, he will benefit from a five-year pension enhancement, he said.

In the latest action, filed in Santa Monica Superior Court, Sanchez said that unlawful discrimination was to blame for his reassignment from acting lieutenant to senior sergeant. The 22-year veteran of the security force also claimed that some of his supervisors called his mail slot the “Taco box.”

Although he declined to comment on the lawsuits, Barber said Sanchez was returned to his previous rank after failing a promotion exam.

Sanchez named Barber, the regents of the University of California and several campus police commanders in his complaint. A similar suit was filed earlier by Charles A. Harold, an Anglo officer, who has been on paid leave for nearly a year.

In a recent interview, the chief said he has made it a point to recruit Latino, black and other minority officers and to see that they move up in rank.

“I’ve always thought it was a conscious effort on my part (to diversify the staff),” he said.

Of police agencies throughout California, only the city departments of Compton and Richmond and the campus force at UC Berkeley are more diverse, Barber said.

Despite that, McNicholas said his clients were the targets of discrimination because of their race or their views on racial matters.

“They were subjected to retaliation and general harassment when they made complaints or filed a grievance, and when they did, they weren’t given a fair shake,” McNicholas said.

Sanchez, who is still on duty, declined to comment. But Harold said that Barber’s response showed that he fails to understand the issues at stake.

“I’m not arguing that they don’t hire minorities or that sort of thing,” he said. “The point is that there are certain individuals in that department that they single out and discipline. People aren’t numbers or statistics. They are human beings and they have issues that have to be addressed.”

The university’s attorney, Bruce D. Praet, said he has asked the court to drop Harold’s case because he has no standing to claim discrimination under civil rights laws.

The litigants--and others who have since left the department--say the department has suffered in recent years as Barber was distracted by outside work. Meanwhile, they said, senior officers pamper favorites and penalize others.

The complaints are not unprecedented. In the mid-1980s, UCLA Police Officer Robbie Christina Zeigler, a black woman, filed charges of racial harassment and ended up taking medical retirement at half-pay. She is now a mortgage broker and business owner.

“You find racism everywhere, but you find a lot of it at UCLA,” she said in an interview. “Not just at the Police Department, but that’s where I experienced it firsthand.”

Zeigler said her commanders, including some of the men named in Sanchez’s and Harold’s complaints, overloaded her with calls, switched her shifts to interfere with her law school studies and made nasty cracks about her Beverly Hills address and choice of car--a Rolls-Royce. A lieutenant who she said was particularly combative was recently demoted after a university investigation prompted by Harold’s complaints.

Jack Dahl, a former sergeant who once headed the department’s Police Officers’ Assn., gave Barber credit for the department’s ethnic mix. “I never saw any management discriminate or take action against anybody because of color or race,” he said.

But he said the department can be an unpleasant place to work, regardless of race. “If you’re not in the in-crowd, it can be very vindictive,” said Dahl, now a private investigator. He is not involved in the suit.

Barber’s critics said that in recent years, the chief was often not available because he was administering drug tests as a consultant to the National Football League or helping out at Staffpro, a private company that does occasional security work on campus.

John Curry, UCLA’s administrative vice chancellor, said he has no problem with a campus official doing outside work on his own time.

“The consulting one does can benefit the institution,” he said.

Barber, who also serves as assistant vice chancellor in charge of community safety, said his outside work is done on vacation time. “I don’t own any of these companies,” he said. “I wish I did.”

Although Barber said he was disappointed by the complaints, they did not come as a surprise. Morale among police officers in general is the lowest it has been in his 37-year career, he said, and the UCLA force is not immune. He cited budget cuts, the effects of the Rodney G. King beating incident and the conviction of corrupt deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as major contributors to the pervasive morale problem.

The UCLA department--composed of sworn peace officers who patrol the campus, the UCLA Medical Center and off-campus student housing complexes--has been well below its authorized level of 70 officers since shortly after the 1984 Olympics, when the university was a major venue for the games.

A recent survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education showed the Westwood campus to have a high incidence of property crimes compared with other universities, including the highest number of vehicle thefts of any campus in the nation.

Crimes against property have increased by 50% in the last four years, with burglary cases more than doubling, from 291 in 1989 to 660 in 1992.

Barber said almost half of the reported burglaries were automobile break-ins, adding that as many as 40,000 cars are parked on campus on a busy day.

“If it’s your car (broken into), you’re angry as hell, but for the amount of people that park here, (it’s) not a lot,” he said.

Barber also said the figures suggested a worse situation than actually exists because thefts of notoriously non-secure mopeds were included in the total.

Vice Chancellor Curry said it was more significant that violent crimes were cut by half last year. In 1992 there were no homicides, three rapes, 17 robberies and 11 aggravated assaults, for a total of 31, compared to 60 the year before.