Police, Cultures in O.C. Don’t Always Mix : Relations: Many in minority groups say they are subjected to harsher treatment than whites are.

Crecencio Ruiz just needed a ride to the neighborhood market in 1990. But when a friend who offered him a lift rammed into a car driven by an off-duty cop, the ride turned into what some among minority groups would call a typical nightmare.

The driver sped away from the scene, the 55-year-old Ruiz still buckled into the passenger seat. Once police cornered the getaway car a few blocks away in Santa Ana, sworn witnesses said that at least one officer--without any apparent provocation--pulled Ruiz out of the car, kneed him in the gut, and began hitting his head against the trunk of a car at the scene.

The final insult, Ruiz’s lawyer claimed, came when the slight immigrant was put in a black-and-white squad car and, still bleeding, vomited in the back seat. Police had him clean up the mess with his own shirt and then left him curbside as they pulled away from the scene, according to court depositions.

There were no racial epithets slung at Ruiz, just knees and arms, his lawyer says. No one made mention of his status as a non-English-speaking immigrant or his ethnic background. But left unstated in the case was a question that members of minority groups have begun to ask with increasing stridence: Does the color of a resident’s skin influence treatment by police?

Santa Ana city officials deny any racial bias in the case and say they are unsure if the $8-an-hour electrician suffered his injuries in the car crash or the arrest. Rather than risk a large jury verdict, however, the city agreed to settle the case earlier this year and pay $200,000 to Ruiz, who had to undergo removal of his spleen after the incident.

But Ruiz said deeper scars remained, leaving him fearful of encountering police again. “I do not go out like before. . . . I’m scared of even going to church,” he said through a translator in a court deposition. Soon after the settlement, he returned home to Mexico.

Amid a notable increase in both ethnic tension and concern about crime in Orange County, the relationship--and frequent mistrust--between police and minority members has become a focal point in the debate over the county’s changing demographics. Police officials say they have made inroads at sensitizing officers to potential pitfalls in dealing with minority members. But minority groups allege they are subject to different standards of police treatment, and both sides say the problem often appears unsolvable.

“Anyway you want to cut it,” said Westminster Police Chief Jim Cook, president of a countywide association of police chiefs, “when you change the ethnic mix of a community, you’re going to have more friction, and it’s going to be more difficult for everyone to live together in the melting pot. And anyone who says different is not telling you the truth.”

The signs of such friction have filled news pages in recent months.

A group of Latino activists persuaded a U.S. Civil Rights Commission panel to open an investigation into charges of racial bias and harassment by various arms of local government, including police departments.

A Santa Ana bar owner took the city to court but lost in her bid to show that police had singled out and harassed her customers--mostly Mexican immigrants--with drug searches.

An Orange County appellate court ruled that a widely used police policy of stopping suspected gang members--many of them minority members--and taking photos of them for police files represents “an intrusion on individual liberties” forbidden by the Constitution.

The city of Westminster sought to ban several dozen local youths--virtually all of them Latino--from congregating in certain parts of the city.

And a UCI librarian created a new countywide citizens’ group to explore charges that Orange County police agencies have harassed and discriminated against Asian Americans and to push for greater diversity on local police forces.

The librarian, Daniel Tsang, said that many Asian young people won’t enter certain Orange County cities for fear of harassment and false arrest by police who wrongly accuse them of being gang members.

“It’s intimidation,” said Tsang, co-founder of Alliance Working for Asian Rights and Empowerment, or AWARE. “And it’s mainly people of color who are being stopped--I don’t see them stopping white people who are wearing baggy pants. . . . And there’s always the danger of misidentification because the majority population thinks we all look alike anyway.”

Many law enforcement officials say they have seen no sign of any pattern of abuse toward those in minority groups.

In the district attorney’s office, which reviews all officer-involved shootings, Assistant Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade said: “I’ve never really looked to see. . . . But it certainly hasn’t struck me, in reviewing these cases on an occasional basis when a file comes through, that there’s any particular racial animus or factor involved (in such shootings).”

Police officials say they have made strides to hire more minority personnel and win over the confidence of ethnic communities, but some minority advocates are skeptical.

Harassment may be unintentional, says Meir Westreich, a lawyer who regularly handles complaints against police in Orange County. But the “wars” against crime and drugs have produced a “battle mentality” among police, Westreich insists, and minorities in low-income neighborhoods have become unwitting targets.

“The police act like an occupying army in a lot of these immigrant neighborhoods,” he said.

Mervyn S. Lazarus, a Santa Ana lawyer who also handles claims against police, agrees that police adopt a different attitude in lower-income areas of the county than they do in Irvine, for instance. “The officers are just more hyped up in those areas and I think are harsher in their treatment as a result,” he said.

Such attitudes are underscored by a recent Los Angeles Times Poll finding that Orange County minority group members held notably lower levels of trust in police than did whites. While 52% of whites polled said they had “a lot” of confidence that their local police would protect them, only 37% of Latinos and 27% of Asians gave that same answer.

In addition, 15% of the Latinos interviewed claimed they had been the victims of “police brutality in Orange County”--most often through what they considered unnecessary searches--compared with 5% of the respondents among both whites and Asians.

“If you are not American, they don’t care about you,” said poll respondent My Nguyen, 33, of Stanton, a laid-off McDonnell Douglas electrical worker who has two children.

A native of Vietnam, Nguyen said she was so unhappy with the way police responded to problems at her home in the past that she didn’t even bother to call them when someone broke into her husband’s car. “Sometimes, because English is your second language and you don’t speak well, they don’t have patience. They don’t even try to understand you,” she said.

But weighing claims of whether minority groups are subjected to different police treatment than whites is a murky area.

Local departments and police associations say that despite rising concerns over minority issues, they do not maintain reports or statistics specifically on the treatment of minorities by police. And attempts by the public to explore such issues are made more difficult by state law that deems complaints against officers to be part of “confidential” personnel reports that can only be released in the course of certain types of litigation.

Even lawyers for people bringing accusations against the police--whose claims may be bolstered by showing a pattern of abuse by officers--complain that getting department records to make their cases often proves difficult both legally and financially for their clients.

“Legally, it’s very burdensome,” said Rudolfo Ginez Jr., a Santa Ana lawyer who has filed many police abuse cases on behalf of Latino clients. “I think (misconduct files) should be disclosed to the public and open to scrutiny. . . . Most often, they’re not.”

The city of Anaheim, with one of the largest police departments in the county, offers a case in point.

Officials initially told The Times that they could easily provide access to computerized data tallying claims against the Police Department--as available in some other cities. But the city ultimately refused access. Senior Assistant City Atty. Eleanor Egan later said that the city is not required by state law to provide any such compilation of claims and payouts.

Anaheim has been the recent target of some of the more public questions over alleged police wrongdoing in Orange County. One officer, Lee Smith, was involved in four fatal shootings in four years, and a U.S. Department of Justice spokesman said last week that it is continuing to investigate three of the shootings to determine whether Smith violated the civil rights of any of the victims. One of the three cases under investigation involved a Latino.

Anaheim and all other cities in the state are required by law to provide an annual report to the Justice Department in Sacramento on citizens’ complaints against officers, but state officials said they are precluded by department policy from releasing those filings.

In Santa Ana, where officials provided access to claim logs, a review by The Times found that the city has spent more than $4.9 million on payouts and related legal expenses in claims against the Police Department over the last five fiscal years.

The claims run the gamut, alleging that officers wrongfully kicked in doors, used their nightsticks needlessly to subdue suspects, harassed bar patrons and even shot and killed city residents. But many of the cases are still open and remain unproven.

Offering some support for the claims of minorities, Santa Ana city records show 80% of the more than 50 excessive force and related civil rights claims against officers since 1988 were brought by people with Latino or Asian surnames.

Those two groups make up 74% of the city’s population.

The figures grow slightly higher when money is factored into the equation: Of more than $1.1 million spent on payouts and related expenses for these claims, more than 82% was spent on cases brought by members of minority groups. These included several six-figure payouts.

But Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper, whose office handles claims against the city, said the prevalence of minority members claiming abuse by the police has never been an issue. “I’ve never seen a problem with that. No one’s even mentioned that kind of claim,” he said.

Placentia Police Chief Manuel Ortega, who serves on the county’s Human Relations Commission, says that if minority members do in fact have more run-ins than other groups have with police, it is largely a reflection of crime patterns--not of racial motives.

“People may get the impression we’re focusing on them, but it’s because that’s where the crime is,” he said.

In Ortega’s city of Placentia, 10 of the 29 citizens’ complaints of police misconduct in the last five years--or 34%--came from people with Latino surnames, police officials said. In the city as a whole, 24% of the population is Latino.

Two of the complaints were deemed to be well-founded--one on use of excessive force by an officer and the other on abusive language--and the officers were disciplined.

The key to reducing friction and changing public perceptions of police, Ortega said, comes in hiring more minority officers, training police to “relate” to the communities they serve and doing a better job of “marketing ourselves” in the public eye.

While local police associations say they do not maintain ongoing records of minority hiring practices in Orange County, a review two years ago found that 645 of the 3,919 sworn officers at municipal agencies and the Sheriff’s department--or 16.5%--were members of minority groups. That represented less than half the percentage of minorities in the county’s general population.

Police officials say they are stepping up minority hires, but they acknowledge obstacles.

Chief Cook in Westminster said that Asians are “very, very hard to recruit. . . . Culturally, they’re taught police aren’t to be trusted--that being a police officer is one step below a garbage collector. It’s not an honorable profession.”

Lt. Steve Carroll, commander of the Orange County Sheriff’s Academy, which graduates about 80 to 120 trainees a year for work in area police forces, said the county’s changing ethnic mix--and the Rodney G. King beating case--have meant big changes in how trainees are taught.

“We give quite a lot of training now on the relationships between Hispanic cultures--not just Mexican, but Central American cultures--and a lot with the Vietnamese,” he said.

Within the last two years, the academy has added 50 hours of training in cultural affairs and related issues, taking trainees into Little Saigon and other ethnic neighborhoods to work with the community and learn its customs, Carroll said.

The training is aimed as much at community members as prospective officers, he said. “A lot of (minorities) come from different countries where the police have been corrupt. The people have been distrustful of police because they’re not there to serve and protect, as the saying goes. But you have to change people’s attitudes, and that takes time,” he said.

“The bottom line,” Carroll said, “is that they’re all citizens, even though they may not speak English. We’re everyone’s police.”

But not in the view of some members of minority groups, such as Robert Garcia, 28, a painter from Santa Ana.

Garcia said he thinks the majority of the police force consists of “good cops,” but he still remembers with bitterness a run-in he had with police about a year ago in front of a friend’s house. He says police wrongly accused him and his friends of being gang members. “Police harassed me and my friends when we were a little drunk one day. They were yelling and kicked my friend,” Garcia said. “I filed a complaint but they tried to change the story all around.”

For 15-year-old Guadalupe Cruz, a recent run-in with police proved even more befuddling.

A high-school student in Santa Ana, Cruz said he and a cousin were walking to school one day before 7 a.m. when a police car approached and an officer told them to stand against a wall. The youth learned later that the police were looking for someone in a blue shirt and blue pants, and he fit that description. But at the time, he said, he had no idea what he had done.

“When I was at the wall, I asked them, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And he just answered me with a blow of the baton to the stomach,” causing a bruise that remained for three days, Cruz asserted. “I didn’t want to cry when (the police officer) was there ‘cause then he’d see I was a girl. But then when my mom got there, I started crying ‘cause it hurt so much.

“I just didn’t get it,” he said. “Why’d they think I was the bad guy?”