Lawsuit Names Los Alamitos, Ex-Police Chief

A one-time Orange police chief is suing Los Alamitos and its former top cop, who he says defamed him as part of an effort to get him fired.

Dean Richards, a longtime Orange police captain who served as interim chief last year, accuses former Los Alamitos Chief Michael Skogh of calling Orange Mayor Joanne Coontz to say that Richards was a “dinosaur” and “incapable of [doing] the job.”

In a deposition last month, Coontz said Skogh spoke to her in a threatening manner during the phone call and told her he would be “watching” her.

The suit seeks a total of $6 million in damages from Skogh, who now heads the Gardena Police Department, and the city of Los Alamitos, where officials were allegedly told of Skogh’s behavior by Orange officials but did nothing.

Skogh’s attorney, Harold Andrew Bridges, strongly denied that his client did anything wrong, noting he was simply exercising his free speech rights as an Orange resident. The purpose of Skogh’s call, he said, was to persuade Coontz to reinstate his longtime friend, John Robertson, as Orange’s police chief.

“It was his constitutional right to do so,” Bridges said, “and he was joined by many others in the city of Orange.”

Robertson was removed from his post by the City Council in October 1997 after being accused of insubordination and poor judgment. But Robertson’s supporters maintain his ouster was retaliation for probing the role of city officials in a scheme by Orange’s trash recycler to misappropriate municipal funds.

The Orange County district attorney’s office last year charged the head of the recycling company, Jeffery Hambarian, with bilking the city out of $4 million. No city officials have been charged with wrongdoing.

After Robertson’s ouster, Richards served as interim chief until retiring in July 1998. He currently lives in Northern California.

His attorney, Bradley C. Gage, said Skogh took improper advantage of his position to influence Coontz before an important vote on whether to reinstate Robertson.

“It’s a shocking revelation that a police chief would abuse his power to threaten Mayor Coontz to vote one way,” he said.

The lawsuit was filed last year as part of a broader harassment and defamation complaint brought by Richards and four other former and current officers from Los Angeles and Orange County police departments against Skogh and two other defendants.

But Bridges called the allegations “ridiculous.” He noted that Coontz, in the deposition, did not say that the alleged threats were physical in nature.

He added that even if the allegations were true, Richards suffered no damages because his career was nearing its end. Richards came out of retirement to take the interim job and retired soon afterward to remain eligible for a pension.