LAPD Reprimand Raises Questions : Police: The FBI and the owner of a stolen car praise Officer Dave Bergstrom for catching a suspect after a high-speed chase. But his superiors have given him a 66-day suspension for disobeying orders.

To Evan M. Forster, Officer Dave Bergstrom is nothing short of a hero, an exemplary police officer who “went beyond the call of duty” to recover Forster’s stolen car and restore his faith in the Los Angeles Police Department.

The Los Angeles office of the FBI also has kind words for Bergstrom, whose off-duty efforts helped agents identify a man who is believed to have committed at least 15 recent Southern California bank robberies.

But in the eyes of the LAPD, Bergstrom is an insubordinate cowboy who is barely entitled to have a job. A board of LAPD commanding officers unanimously agreed last week that Bergstrom deserves neither commendation nor praise for catching the thief who allegedly stole Forster’s car--a man who also turned out to be an escaped federal prisoner, a bank robber and a suspected drug abuser--after a 1992 chase.

“We believe that you should not be terminated but that your penalty should be severe,” the board ruled after finding that Bergstrom had failed to heed the direction of several sergeants who were watching the chase on television or listening to it on their police radios. The board suspended Bergstrom for 66 days for failing to obey orders, calling the penalty “as severe as necessary but as light as possible.”

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News of Bergstrom’s punishment, which he is appealing to Chief Willie L. Williams, spread quickly through the LAPD ranks this week, stoking a debate about what many police officers and some department observers see as disturbing flaws in the LAPD disciplinary system. Although reluctant to comment on individual cases, department commanders emphasize the importance of discipline and note that punishments take into account an officer’s entire record, not merely a single incident.

Moreover, they note that vehicle pursuits are dangerous situations--on Tuesday, a 12-year-old boy was killed after a police pursuit in the San Fernando Valley. “The department is very sensitive to all the related issues when it comes to use of force and pursuits,” said Cmdr. David J. Gascon, a department spokesman. “It carefully scrutinizes all aspects of these cases.”

Still, some critics charge that the department seems more intent on punishing officers who embarrass their bosses than those who harm the public. In addition, some officers complain that the department’s demand for “unquestioned obedience (to) a superior’s lawful command” has created difficult questions about what orders to obey and when to obey them.

Sgt. Stacey C. Koon ordered Officer Laurence M. Powell to beat Rodney G. King. Powell did, and he is serving time in federal prison--although the jury verdict in the civil rights trial showed that jurors concluded that his intent was to hurt King, not just to obey his sergeant’s orders.

Officer Bergstrom, a 12-year veteran who had a previous four-day suspension for failing to heed a supervisor, took the opposite tack. He disobeyed his sergeants’ orders. For that, he hasn’t had a paycheck since Oct. 2, and he won’t get his job back until next year.

“The message the department sends is: ‘Don’t do police work,’ ” Bergstrom said in an interview this week. “If you don’t get involved in police work, you don’t get complaints and you don’t get in trouble. You only get in trouble if you care.”

Bergstrom’s trouble started just before 9 p.m. on Oct. 30, 1992. He and his partner, a young officer who had graduated from the Police Academy three months before, were on patrol that evening in the LAPD’s Rampart Division when they received word of a pursuit in progress.

Joseph Diaz, an escaped federal prisoner, had allegedly stolen Evan Forster’s car in West Hollywood and had fled when police officers tried to pull him over. Bergstrom and his partner joined the pursuit after it already was under way and was passing through Downtown.

They saw a red Mitsubishi Montero pass them with a black-and-white in pursuit. They joined the chase as it passed south on Olive, and a few minutes later, as the driver of the stolen car pulled an abrupt U-turn on Figueroa Street, Bergstrom came face to face with the driver.

“I could see that this was no pimply faced 17-year-old,” Bergstrom said. “He’s not scared. He’s cold, callous, methodical. He knows what he’s doing. He’s a predator, a bad guy.”

After that brief glimpse, the driver took off again, and from there began what records and interviews reveal was a series of near-comic mistakes and mishaps as the LAPD and the California Highway Patrol attempted to bring the pursuit to a successful conclusion.

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The driver began by heading south on the Harbor Freeway with a Central Division police car directly behind it and Bergstrom’s car behind that one. As they drove, Bergstrom and the Central Division officers used their radios to discuss tactics--how they hoped to bring the driver to a halt, what they would do when the chase ended. The man was driving fast but not recklessly, the officers say, and they did not believe the pursuit was putting anyone at risk.

Early in the pursuit, an LAPD sergeant ordered Bergstrom to discontinue the chase as soon as possible. Bergstrom says he took that to mean he should break off as soon as a backup unit arrived to replace him.

None arrived, so Bergstrom and his partner continued to follow the Central Division officers as they headed south on the Harbor Freeway before turning north on the San Diego Freeway. About that time, a sergeant named Donald Linfield pulled up behind two patrol cars that had been sent to replace Bergstrom and the Central Division officers. Although Linfield was actually far behind the suspect, he thought he was in the heart of the pursuit.

Mistakenly thinking he was on Bergstrom’s tail--when in fact he was about two miles back--Linfield ordered him out of the pursuit.

At about that time, the Central Division car blew its engine--an increasingly common occurrence in the dilapidated state of today’s LAPD. That left Bergstrom driving the only police car tailing the driver.

“I have a responsibility to obey any order unless it is illegal, immoral, unethical or may cause harm to citizens or other officers,” Bergstrom said, adding that he felt the orders were confusing, not making clear how officers were supposed to end the pursuit in light of the fact that no CHP cars were on hand to take it over. “In my heart, I knew what was right: We were not going to give this guy up as long as it was not a danger to the public or to the officers.”

Finally, after the driver reversed direction one more time and just as Bergstrom says he was preparing to back off because his brakes were overheating, the chase abruptly came to an end at the Arlington Avenue off-ramp of the Santa Monica Freeway. After evading officers for nearly an hour, the stolen car ran out of gas and drifted harmlessly to a stop by the side of the road. Bergstrom made the arrest.

He was accused of eight department violations--four relatively minor charges and four counts of disobeying orders from his superiors. He was taken out of patrol duties and assigned to a desk, where he worked for most of the last year, impatiently biding his time while the department spent 11 months investigating his conduct during the 47-minute chase.

Then, on Oct. 2, Bergstrom was suspended without pay pending the resolution of his case. That gave him some free time, so in preparation for his disciplinary hearing he decided to do some checking on the man he had arrested at the end of the fateful chase.

He discovered that Joseph Diaz had escaped from federal prison about a month before the chase. Bergstrom took a copy of Diaz’s mug shot to the local FBI office, and, working with an agent there, matched Diaz to surveillance photos from two Palm Springs banks that authorities believe Diaz robbed after escaping from prison.

Diaz was sent back to prison after Bergstrom arrested him, but he was released on parole this fall. He was arrested again soon after, this time on drug charges. Armed with Bergstrom’s information, FBI agents say they believe Diaz is responsible for at least 15 Southern California bank robberies. Today, Diaz is in custody.

The LAPD disciplinary board credited Bergstrom with helping to take a bank robbery suspect off the streets but nevertheless found him guilty on three of the four insubordination charges.

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Members of the board agreed that Bergstrom was a “highly productive officer,” but they questioned his willingness to defer to authority. Bergstrom had previously been suspended for four days in 1990 for refusing to write a report in a way suggested by a supervisor, and department insiders say he has a reputation for bullheadedness. Most important, the board sternly condemned Bergstrom’s disobedience during the chase.

“We do not and cannot condone the actions of an officer who chooses to disregard the lawful directions of a supervisor to such a critical situation as a vehicle pursuit,” the board found, adding that his actions were enough to justify being fired. The board handed down its 66-day sentence--one of the stiffest punishments the department can impose short of firing.

That suspension will cost Bergstrom about $14,000 in lost income and medical benefits. It will put a permanent blot on his record and could knock him out of contention for a sergeant’s post.

All of that has left him angry, discouraged and confused. “On the LAPD these days, following orders gets you in trouble if someone decides later that the order was wrong,” he said. “And disobeying an order that is confusing, that I think is wrong, that I think could endanger the public, gets me in trouble.”

Forster--who saw only the results of Bergstrom’s work, not the flurry of LAPD activity that surrounded it--is even more dumbfounded. Shortly after the incident, Forster wrote to LAPD commanders, including Williams, to praise Bergstrom’s work in recovering his car. He wanted the LAPD to commend the officer, not discipline him.

“Officer Bergstrom made a choice. He didn’t harm anybody. He didn’t do anything except help. For that they punish him?” Forster asked. “I believed that what the officer did was follow through on his commitment to uphold the law. That’s it. End of story.”