U.S. Launches Probe of Police in Riverside

Spurred by the fatal police shooting of black teenager Tyisha Miller, federal authorities launched a civil investigation Thursday into the Riverside Police Department’s use of force and treatment of minorities.

The probe coincides with an FBI criminal investigation into the death of Miller, 19, who was shot and killed by police when she allegedly reached for a gun after they attempted to rouse her in her locked car.

The new inquiry is being conducted under a 1994 law being used with increasing frequency in high-profile cases across the country.

It allows federal officials to investigate whether a police department’s “patterns or practices” deprive people of their civil rights. If so, the government can seek a federal court order forcing reforms.

Investigations are underway in New York in connection with the precinct-house torture of Abner Louima and the fatal shooting of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo, and in New Jersey, where state troopers have been accused of targeting black motorists for traffic stops. Threatened with a lawsuit, New Jersey recently agreed to negotiate a consent decree with the Justice Department.

Some federal officials say the law is more effective in bringing about reform than criminal prosecutions of police officers, which typically are hard to win.

At a news conference announcing the civil probe, Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and Alejandro N. Mayorkas, U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, declined to discuss specific allegations of racism made against Riverside police.

But Mayorkas said both the “quantity and quality” of the charges more than justify the investigation, which is being conducted jointly by Lee’s civil rights division and the U.S. attorney’s office.

Riverside Mayor Pro Tem Maureen Kane and Police Chief Jerry Carroll issued statements promising full cooperation. The chief expressed confidence that the probe will show his department “neither practices nor condones unprofessional behavior or racial discrimination in any form.”

Carroll added: “I’m asking them for balance and fairness, and that they look at us as a whole, and all the good things we’re doing.”

The officers involved in the shooting have been told they will be fired for allegedly violating department guidelines.

The Rev. Bernell Butler, a cousin of Miller, said the family was celebrating Thursday’s announcement. “We didn’t think it would happen, but thank God it is,” he said. “I hope and pray they do an objective investigation and, if they do, they’ll find wide-scale wrongdoing throughout Riverside.”

Mayorkas also announced the formation of a civil rights section in the Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office, composed of four lawyers and headed by a veteran civil rights prosecutor, Michael Gennaco. Mayorkas said the expansion was prompted by an increase in civil rights complaints.

The Miller case is the subject of a separate criminal probe by a team of 12 FBI agents who have been looking into the conduct of four white officers involved in the shooting.

Miller, who had passed out in her locked car at a 24-hour service station, died in a hail of police bullets when she allegedly reached for a gun after officers smashed the driver’s-side window.

Her family and supporters contend that the four white officers at the scene acted recklessly without the care they would have shown for a white woman in distress.

Allegations were also made that, after Miller was shot, other officers sent to the scene uttered racial slurs. One was said to have described a knot of mourning relatives at the scene as a “Kwanzaa gathering,” a reference to the African American cultural holiday. Another officer reportedly referred to a “Watts death wail” when people showed up crying.

Carroll said Thursday that he believed the alleged slurs figured in the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the department.

There are also disputed reports that the four officers who did the shooting exchanged “high-fives” after they shot Miller. An attorney for the officers said they were not the classic sports-team “high fives” but merely a tapping or slapping of hands at waist level, a demonstration of relief that none of them was hurt in the gunfire.

The Riverside County district attorney and the state attorney general concluded that the officers exercised poor judgment but committed no crimes, and they found no evidence of racism in the officers’ conduct.

Despite the announcement that the officers will be fired, racial tensions continue to run high in Riverside, a city of 250,000 where whites constitute about 53% of the population, Latinos 33%, African Americans 7% and Asians 6%.

Eighty percent of the Police Department’s 326 sworn officers are white. Latinos make up 13%, blacks 6% and Asians 1%.

There had been some isolated cases in recent years in which Riverside officers, either in internal affairs reviews or in criminal prosecutions, were found to have used excessive force against minorities. But not until Miller’s death on Dec. 28 were allegations of departmental racism voiced loudly by African American residents.

Ameal Moore, the only African American member of the Riverside City Council, said he was unaware of the widespread anxiety among minorities until his own sons informed him, after Miller was killed, of their unsettling encounters with police.

In public meetings called in the wake of the Miller shooting to discuss excessive use of force by police--one sponsored by the city and others by local churches--few critics offered specific examples of the problem. Many spoke instead of “racist attitudes” displayed by police officers in general.

The absence of specific police criticism at public meetings was a symptom “of the [minority] community’s lack of trust with the Police Department,” said Alfredo Figueroa, a local Latino activist who sat on a panel that hosted one such meeting. “People don’t come forward because they don’t know what good it will do.”

But minorities’ trepidation about police has increased in recent days because most of the city’s rank-and-file officers have cut their hair short to protest the firing of the four officers who shot Miller.

Many people, including Councilman Moore, have said they find the haircuts--some down to the scalp in skinhead fashion--intimidating.

Until the Justice Department’s announcement Thursday, there had been no overarching external review of police misconduct in Riverside, just individual cases litigated in court, said Andrew Roth, who has practiced law in Riverside for 25 years and has handled a number of police abuse cases.

Any abuse will be difficult to root out, he said, “unless they find some courageous police officers--not necessarily minority officers--who are willing to come forward and say what they know.”

He said he knows of minority police officers, past and present, who can tell stories of institutional racism within the ranks. “But they’re reluctant to come forward,” he said, “because they fear for their lives, whether that fear is real or perceived.”