Court Rejects Blacks’ Harassment Suit Against Beverly Hills

A federal court of appeals has ruled in favor of Beverly Hills police and city officials in a suit accusing them of allowing police harassment of blacks to go unchecked.

The ruling filed Friday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a summary judgment in favor of Councilwoman Vicki Reynolds and former Mayor Allan Alexander and overturned a ruling that Police Chief Marvin Iannone and Police Capt. Robert Curtis had to face a civil trial to determine the validity of the accusations.

The federal civil rights lawsuit was filed two years ago by six blacks--five of them teenagers who lived in Beverly Hills and attended city schools, and the sixth a maintenance man at a Beverly Hills church.

The suit contended that police in the upscale community stopped and harassed blacks “without reasonable suspicion,” often pulling over black motorists for relatively trivial violations and detaining black minors who were out past the city’s 10 p.m. curfew.

The plaintiffs--who said they had been stopped more than 30 times in 18 months without being arrested or charged--said the four defendants had “engaged in a conscious policy of deliberate indifference” by allowing such alleged police abuses to go unchecked.

“We’re confronted here with racism masquerading as law enforcement,” Robert K. Tanenbaum, the former Beverly Hills mayor who represented the plaintiffs, said at the time.

The defendants denied the accusations. A spokesman for the department, Lt. Frank Salcido, said Beverly Hills officers use the same evenhanded approach with all people and “meticulously respect the constitutional rights of the individual.”

Skip Miller, an attorney representing the city, said Alexander and Reynolds moved for a summary judgment exonerating them.

Last year, Miller said, U.S. District Judge William Keller granted the summary judgment for the two city officials, but Keller ruled that in the case of the police officials there were issues of fact that had to be tried.

The plaintiffs appealed the exoneration of Alexander and Reynolds. Meanwhile, the defendants appealed the decision that they had to face a civil trial.

In the ruling, the appellate judges said the record shows that Alexander and Reynolds had reacted appropriately to the allegations of racial harassment, reviewing the Police Department’s investigation of the complaints and directing City Manager Mark Scott to conduct his own independent investigation.

“The council members did not act with deliberate indifference to the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights,” the appellate court said.

The appellate judges said the plaintiffs offered no evidence that the city and police investigations of their allegations were inadequate.

“Each of the investigations resulted in findings that were supported by the statements of the officers involved, or by third-party witnesses, or both,” the appellate court said. “Plaintiffs have not pointed to any inconsistencies or ‘holes’ in the investigations that should have put a reasonable supervisor on notice that the investigations were a sham.

“Furthermore, there is no evidence to indicate that Beverly Hills Police Department investigations always resulted in the exoneration of the police officers,” the court said. “In at least two of the investigations that are part of this record, the officer under review was found to have acted improperly in some regard. . . . The record cannot reasonably support a finding that the defendant police supervisors acted with deliberate indifference.”