Deputies Feel Rising Tension After Beatings

As he guides his cruiser through the moonlit streets of one of Riverside County’s worst neighborhoods, Senior Sheriff’s Deputy Lee Wagner talks guardedly about the vibes he’s been getting since two colleagues were caught on videotape last week clubbing illegal immigrants with their batons.

It’s the same feeling he got almost precisely five years ago, in his last job, as a veteran Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy on patrol after the televised police beating of Rodney G. King. It’s a palpable tension that comes not from words, but from stares and subtle gestures.

“Some things are hard to describe, but it definitely has its similarities,” says Wagner, a boyish 36. He scans the view from his windshield for signs of trouble as he cruises the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of this ethnically mixed, working-class town not quite rural and a long way from urban. “Everybody is looking at you. The scrutiny, and whatnot.”

As if on cue, Wagner slows the black-and-white Caprice at a red light, and a carload of youths pulls up alongside. Behind the tinted windows are the faces of four young Latinos with gangster crew cuts. And all of them are staring at him, just a little longer and a little more closely than they would have a week ago.

“You can’t always tell what they’re thinking,” Wagner says after a quick glance. “But when you drive down the street, it appears everyone is looking at you a little bit harder.”

Indeed, since last Monday, people have been looking a little bit harder at Wagner and a lot harder at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

Wagner and his 1,200 or so fellow deputies have been under siege, it seems, since TV news helicopters’ video of the beating of two illegal immigrants was beamed throughout the world.

It has been a tumultuous week, of protest rallies and politicians’ calls for reform. The two deputies involved, Kurt Franklin and Tracy Watson, have been suspended, criticized by their own sheriff, and all but hanged in effigy on the streets of Riverside and even Los Angeles.

The beating has sparked criminal investigations by the FBI and others, and civil claims seeking more than $10 million for two of three immigrants who contend they were assaulted at the end of a high-speed, 80-mile police pursuit across the freeways of Riverside and Los Angeles counties.

On Sunday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a “Stop the Violence” prayer service in South El Monte near where the immigrants were struck.

There has been more discussion of police pursuit policies, and of course, what Riverside Sheriff’s Assn. President Daniel Swift calls “the media firestorm.”

Reporters have called from overseas, and flown in from other states, scrutinizing every court record and contact for some insight into the two deputies or some pattern of racism and brutality in the department.

Most of those reporters left before two big pieces of news: the planned release today of dispatcher tapes that could shed light on the beating incident, and official word on whether Franklin and Watson ignored orders to stop chasing the truck full of illegal immigrants.

“It paints the whole department in a bad light,” Wagner says of the fallout, “like people are trying to drive it into the ground. And that’s bad.”

Wagner wouldn’t talk much about Rodney King, but any Los Angeles law officer would recognize the parallels:

Morale has plummeted in some stations. Deputies fret that the incident could taint the force for years with the same rifts and bitterness that some LAPD officers bear. “Everyone’s kind of depressed,” Wagner says. From roll calls to Code 7 meal breaks, “they talk about it.”

On the station’s bulletin board, a memo from Swift, the sheriff’s association president, is prominently displayed. “I don’t think,” Swift says in the dispatch, “that anyone can look at this situation and not say, there but for the grace of God go I.”

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Wagner and the deputies he supervises roll out on dozens of calls this night, and almost everyone, including those they stop and search for drugs and weapons, is respectful and even friendly.

People have nice things to say about Wagner, and deputies David Knudson, Craig Hampton and trainee Matthew McDade--even about Franklin, the bald, veteran deputy seen on the videotape clubbing a woman and shoving her headfirst into the hood of the truck.

“We don’t even have to call him and he comes in here,” says Bobby Denham, the manager of the blighted Avalon Complex in the Rubidoux area. “He is always courteous, always polite, certainly not aggressive or angry.”

Wagner prefers amiability and respect to force and intimidation; he says please and thank you, and calls people by their first names. His laid-back nature, sandy brown hair, blue eyes and mustache make him come across more like an effective Scout leader than a police commander of a troubled area.

“Everybody here in the minority community really likes Officer Franklin,” says Denham, who like most of his tenants is African American. “He is a good deputy. I saw the video and I thought, there must be more to it than that.”

That’s what Wagner and many of his fellow deputies are hoping. In the meantime, they have little comment on the incident. The subject arises only rarely on a night busy with patrol stops, searches, polite scoldings of drug addicts and petty crooks, and even the dispensation of some fatherly advice.

But still, there is that tension. “A lot of people are nice to you to your face,” says Jamison Cole, a community officer trainee, as Wagner searches a suspected truck thief. “But we don’t know what they’re saying behind our backs.”

No one, says Wagner, is exactly saying anything negative, but the body language, especially among teenagers--a little slower to comply, a little foot dragging, a little more swagger--tells Wagner that they know and that they are letting him know they know.

As deputies walk through the Avalon complex, two young Latino toughs in gangster garb ride by on expensive bikes, and Wagner and Knudson stop them. As the good-natured conversation progresses, the deputies peer into the young men’s eyes with their Mag-Lites, and check their pockets for weapons and drugs. The youths don’t protest at all.

Wagner puts two fingers to the neck of one to feel his pulse. It is racing. “When is the last time you did speed?” he asks, nicely. Silence. “Be straight with me. I’m being cool with you. I’m not going to arrest you. I just want to know.” Yesterday, the kid replies, a clear untruth. Riverside County is the speed capital of the nation, Wagner will say later, and by the end of the night, he would meet a dozen more people tweaked on the drug.

He takes the kid aside; he knows him, knows his parents. He asks how his family is doing, what he does for a living, and why he dropped out of school. There is a fatherly tone to his questioning--Wagner is married, with two children--and the youth answers, honestly this time. He got his girlfriend pregnant, they moved to Texas and broke up. Now he’s back here, fixing bikes for a living.

“You’re 19 years old,” Wagner says. “Don’t you want to have a future? Do you want to live in this apartment the rest of your life?”

The deputies move on, and through the night, repeat the scene with several other teens, an obviously ill homeless woman named Sandra, and a junkie who is found nodding off from methadone and beer in his pickup truck.

Sitting on the tailgate of his truck, the junkie is questioned casually about his prison tattoos. As they talk, Wagner and Knudson go through the man’s pockets and, finding no drugs or weapons, tell him to park the truck and sleep it off.

He tells Wagner that he and his wife are having a baby and hunting for a nice home and a HUD mortgage. With that and with methadone treatment, he is trying to turn his life around, the man says. “Cool,” replies Wagner, smiling broadly. “Good for you.”

“Take it easy, my man,” Knudson adds, extending his hand for a goodbye shake. “Good luck, dude.”

Even tenser moments--when Wagner tells an accompanying reporter to stay back in the car until he has sized up the situation--are handled with civility. Wagner passes a U-Haul truck on a darkened side street, a driver and two passengers in the cab. He circles, bolts out of the squad car and orders all three to place their hands on the dashboard in plain sight.

A moment later, his backup arrives and Wagner takes control. Deputies search the other two, and Wagner searches the driver, asking, “Remember me? I arrested you five years ago for stealing a rental truck.”

“Damn,” says the driver, suddenly stunned. “You got a helluva memory.”

The truck’s plates show that it is not stolen. Wagner tells the three they’re free to go. As he is leaving, the driver stops and turns to look at him again. “Hey,” he repeats. “You got a helluva memory.”

Wagner will have only memories in a couple of weeks, when he leaves the streets for a promotion to sergeant, and a desk to go with it. He won’t be sorry to leave the mistrust and the second-guessing that his colleagues will still be feeling.

“I’ll miss being out here,” he says. “We have some really good people out here. Excellent, in fact.”