Retiring Simi Valley Police Chief Looks Back at 12 Years : Law enforcement: Former street cop is credited with whipping the once problem-plagued force into shape.

When Lindsey Paul Miller was named Simi Valley police chief 12 years ago, the department was a mess, hip-deep in allegations of brutality, misconduct and disorder.

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It was under investigation by the Ventura County district attorney, under scrutiny by the county grand jury and under attack by the American Civil Liberties Union.

By all accounts, Miller whipped his department into shape.

This stolid former street cop, a 20-year veteran Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who once studied for the Presbyterian ministry, ordered that bad policies be changed, bad officers fired and bad equipment replaced.

Just three years later, the grand jury commended Miller for helping his department make “a dramatic turnaround” from conditions it had suffered under the direction of his predecessor, Chief Donald E. Rush.

“As a deputy chief here, I really didn’t see his interaction with the city,” Miller recalled last week. “What I really picked up on was the concern in the community and the concern in the department that things weren’t what they should be.”

Today, some department insiders hint that festering internal problems in the Simi Valley Police Department are proof it is time Miller gave the reins to someone with a tighter grip. He is due to retire Feb. 11.

But many inside the department and out praise Miller for having turned it into a smooth-running, well-respected force that helps keep Simi Valley one of the safest small cities in the nation.

Without him, they say, Simi Valley might have folded its own department and become just another contract city protected by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Miller’s leadership kept the peace around the Simi Valley courthouse after the 1992 acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney G. King, Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter said.

“When the potential for civil disturbance was high around the Simi Valley courthouse and we had various demonstrations from hate groups, Paul’s responses during the time were measured,” said Carpenter, whose department helped with “Operation Gatekeeper.”

“He did not overreact,” Carpenter said. “He got the job done with a minimum of fuss or disturbance, and I think that speaks to Paul’s nature. . . . He’ll be a loss to the law enforcement administration field here in the county.” Today, Simi Valley arrests are far more likely to reach court than those filed 12 years ago, Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said.

“The guy is absolutely top-flight. . . . He’s a very good administrator,” Bradbury said last week. “When he took over, the quality of cases coming from Simi Valley improved dramatically. At one time it was absolutely the pits.”

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Finally, Simi Valley’s ranking for the past three years among the top four safest cities of more than 100,000 is solid proof Miller runs a good department, said Nancy Bender, executive director of the Simi Valley Chamber of Commerce.

“I can’t emphasize how important it is to us to have that safe-city status. It’s important in attracting business to the community,” Bender said. “We’re certainly proud to be one of the safest cities in the U. S., and that reflects very well on our leadership here.”

Miller did not set out in life to be a cop.

He is an intensely private man, hesitant to reveal much about his personal life beyond the fact that he married his wife and former secretary, Connie, last spring and that he has two grown children by an earlier marriage.

But he allows he was raised in the Pico/Fairfax district of Los Angeles, the son of an auto mechanic father and a mother who taught elementary school.

He attended Hamilton High School, enrolled in the ROTC program and graduated in 1955, entering UCLA on his way to a bachelor’s degree in religion in 1959.

Although he went to church every Sunday and studied religion in special programs at the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, Miller cannot say what made him decide to become a clergyman.

“I wasn’t walking down a pathway and all of a sudden a light shone down on me,” he said. “I felt at some point I should go into the ministry.”

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Then in 1959, when Miller was one semester shy of graduation, his father died of a heart attack. A few months later, unable to deal with her grief, his mother took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills.

After less than a year of graduate work at California Baptist Theological Seminary in Covina with less than satisfying grades, Miller lost interest in his religious studies and left.

He got work installing air-conditioning systems in cars for $30 apiece, and “ended up with a sore back and grimy fingernails, but it was a good job,” Miller recalls.

Then inspiration struck in the form of a newspaper article he read about the San Dimas station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

After trying out as a reservist for about eight months, he decided he liked police work and entered the academy, launching a 20-year career as an L. A. County deputy.

The work was not too different, he reasons now, from a career in the church.

“The thought of doing something positive for people--I transferred these feelings . . . very easily to law enforcement,” he said. “As a deputy sheriff you could help people at very difficult moments in their lives.”

Miller also saw similarities between the laws of God and the laws of man.

“They’re not all that different,” he said. “Whether you’re talking about the Bible or the penal code, it’s about dealing with human behavior.”

Miller reckons he tackled 15 or 16 separate assignments in 20 years. He patrolled the streets of East Los Angeles and joined the thousands of officers quelling the 1965 Watts riot, where he remembers the hellish smell of meat rotting in freezers idled by a power failure.

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He rose to lieutenant, writing a federally funded career-development manual for the department and a five-year plan for automating the department’s records system.

He worked as a watch commander in Altadena and as operations lieutenant at the Inmate Reception Center, the gateway to the county’s jail system.

“We’d book on one end 300 to 500 people a day, release 300 to 500 people a day on the other end and then send out 800 to 1,000 inmates to courts all over the county, and we’d get them all back at the end of the day,” Miller recalled. “On a Friday night when the computer went down and you had 300 people sitting there, it’d get a little dicey. That was a challenge.”

In 1981, he saw a chance for a change--Simi Valley was looking for a deputy chief of police. Miller applied and got the job.

“I’d done a little homework” on the department, he said. “Nationally, it had a reputation as being an innovative department. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the problems” the department was suffering.

True, the Simi Valley department in its first, most experimental and Populist phase called its police officers “community safety officers.”

In July, 1971, the first of them were sent on patrol in white cruisers, outfitted in green blazers and white shirts, with their guns, nightsticks and handcuffs tucked out of sight.

But eventually they reverted to standard uniforms after some residents refused to take them seriously, and some officers believed that the false start set the stage for the trouble that was to come.

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In the late 1970s, increasing numbers of residents filed complaints about rough treatment by Simi Valley police--including 50 people who filed a lawsuit complaining of brutality by officers who broke up a 1976 Bicentennial party attended by hundreds of teen-agers.

Then came the rough spring of 1982, and a quick succession of events that led to then-Chief Rush’s ouster:

* Bradbury’s office issued a report saying that a 23-year-old drunk-driving arrestee who was blindfolded and raped in a Simi Valley jail cell the previous June had “probably” been assaulted by a police officer. No one was charged in the case.

* Three officers were disciplined for roughing up an outlaw motorcyclist and cutting off his ponytail with his own knife.

* City officials admitted that more than 200 guns, jewelry, drug stashes and other evidence were either missing or stolen. Only after a yearlong audit did they announce that most of it had been mislabeled and later recovered, except for several dozen items, including five rings valued at $20,000.

* And two more brutality suits were filed, raising the tally then to 14 pending claims accusing Simi Valley officers of excessive force.

“The operation was a little loose,” Miller recalls now in his characteristically understated way. “The patrol cars looked a little shabby and beat up . . . and there was a lot of public controversy.” At the time, sources told The Times that the City Council was planning to demand Rush’s resignation, but he quit first, citing “the best interests of my family.”

Miller was named acting chief. Then in October, after Rush’s appointed replacement was rejected because of inconsistencies found in his background check, Miller was named chief.

Within 17 months, Miller had fired two officers for misconduct, another seven retired and six quit to work for other police departments.

He has proven to be everything the city had hoped for and more--a stabilizing influence who would revamp the general orders governing the department and improve relations with the public, City Manager Lin Koester said.

“We had a significant amount of complaints. . . . At the time we hired Paul we were looking for someone to come in and stabilize that,” Koester said. “He had shown here that he was very astute at dealing with the issues, he was well-liked in the department, he had experience with the L. A. sheriffs . . . and he seemed to be an outstanding choice at the time to come in and upgrade the department.”

Under Miller’s reign, the department grew and improved. It upgraded equipment, established anti-drug and anti-gang programs, and set up a drug assets forfeiture program that netted $6 million for the city.

The department gained special weapons and hostage negotiation squads and Simi Valley gained a citywide emergency plan under Miller’s direction.

It also grew, amassing by this year a $13-million budget and a staff of 156, including 109 sworn officers.

Miller buffed the department’s image and professionalism and helped keep the crime rate low, Koester said.

“He’s done an outstanding job for the city,” Koester said. “And the internal little problems that exist I hope would not detract from the outstanding job he’s done for the city for 12 years.”

But the Simi Valley department’s internal problems have been growing in recent months.

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Two investigative units have been bumping into each other on narcotics cases because management has failed to order the units’ leaders to resolve the wasteful duplication of duties, union officials say.

And a personal dispute between some of the department’s radio dispatchers and officers who command them apparently has boiled up and spilled into residents’ personal lives:

Late last month, 26-year-old Samantha Huntley of Thousand Oaks was killed in a fiery car wreck believed caused by a drunk driver.

Six days later, someone claiming to be a Simi Valley police officer anonymously called Huntley’s boyfriend, David Duntley, said his father, John Duntley.

John Duntley said the caller told his son that Huntley’s life could have been saved, but that a supervisor wanted to flex his power over the dispatchers and called off a cruiser that they had sent to the crash scene.

But the supervisor denied the accusation in an interview with The Times, and a review of police dispatch records and tapes found no evidence he had canceled the dispatch order.

Department officials said they suspect the allegation sprang from the personal dispute involving the dispatchers.

The festering nature of these internal disputes and others show weak leadership on Miller’s part, said Sgt. Gary Collins, the police union head.

Collins also blamed Miller for not moving to answer complaints that led to a discrimination lawsuit filed by an African American sergeant who claimed racism had blocked his promotion, and for not bringing a swifter end to the yearlong investigation into conduct by now-retired Lt. Robert Klamser.

Klamser was ordered to retire in November for reasons officials have refused to explain publicly.

Klamser then sued the city and Police Capt. Richard Wright, who conducted the investigation, alleging they conspired to oust him and demanding back pay and damages.

The suit in Ventura County Superior Court contends that Klamser was singled out for retaliation for protecting female victims of sexual harassment by male officers, and reporting an officer he believed was involved in drug trafficking. City officials have vowed to fight the suit.

“The head man’s got to be responsible for what goes on in his organization,” said Collins, president of the Simi Valley Police Officers’ Assn.

“When he came in (in 1982) we were in the middle of turmoil that we, the department, managed to solve ourselves,” Collins said. “He’s a good listener . . . and his ability to listen to us helped us solve a lot of problems. However, his listening near the end of his time didn’t lead to action, and that’s leaving us in a bind now.”

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Koester said he believes Miller would have corrected the problems had he stayed, and the city manager’s office is looking into the allegations against the supervisor accused of interfering with dispatchers.

As it is, Koester said, city officials plan next month to make all police employees undergo training on how to handle personality, harassment and communication problems, Koester said. “No city likes to see problems in Police Department personnel,” Koester said. “We deal with those problems as we become aware of them.”

Miller said none of the incidents has impaired the department’s work. He chalked them up to the “ebb and flow” of personal relationships inside any large organization. “Whenever I get together with my fellow chiefs, they say they have basically the same things in their department. Sometimes you have a basic peace for a while. And then it flares up, and it’s like the flu and it has to run its course before it dies down again.”

As for the union’s criticism of his leadership, Miller said, “They are not privy to all the details as to what’s going on, so that perceptions may not be based on a full knowledge of the facts,” particularly on the Klamser case.

“The case was wrapped up as quick as it could (be) by the Police Department,” he said. “It then was required to be reviewed through city processes,” which took additional time, he said.

“I think the results speak for themselves,” Miller added. “They can say all they want about how they feel on the issues. But the bottom line is that this department delivers excellent service for the community. We’re held in high regard, and we’ve got the support of the citizens and the City Council and that’s been my goal all along.”

Police response times have improved under his leadership, as has the department’s relations with residents, Miller said.

Pondering whether to write, hoe his yard or ride his Harley-Davidson around the Southwest in retirement, Miller said he is keeping his options open.