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Cream of the Cops: A Chief From O.C. Goes Statewide

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

It was time to play Meet the New Boss, and the grizzled veterans of the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement--ponytailed narcs in flannel, the rare manager in wingtips and suit--dutifully filed in.

Coffee mugs poised, all 40 of them stuffed into a conference room for the predictable Boss speech: joke opener (self-deprecating is best); show of empathy (the paperwork!--nice and safe); promises to “listen” to the concerns of employees. Blah blah blah.

New guy Steven Staveley certainly trotted out the standards (the word “paradigm” was uttered at least once). As the hour wore on, though, the cumulative effect of the former La Habra police chief’s low-key candor, humor and unpretentiousness mounted. As the newly appointed director of the California attorney general’s Division of Law Enforcement, Staveley brings three decades of smaller-town experience to a big stage.

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In doing so, he vaults from a 121-employee department in a city where citizens often grew up with their local cops to a scattered state bureaucracy with 1,068 employees. Their mission is to support police agencies throughout California, which includes overseeing crime lab work for much of the state. About half are special agents who assist local law enforcement agencies with drug and other investigations.

Staveley is also poised to possibly take over an unprecedented investigation into whether guards used excessive force against state prison inmates.

For now, Staveley plans to commute to his new job, traveling to Sacramento for the work week and home for weekends with his family in Anaheim.

He says the skills he’ll bring to the job have their roots in the family business. The son of a Covina ice cream vendor, Staveley says a boyhood spent restocking grocers’ Fudgesicles on scorching summer days taught him the value of customer service.

“There were a lot of independent dairies [and] family businesses then,” said Staveley, 54, who graduated from Northview High School in Covina, class of ’62. “You developed very close relationships. And that part is not dissimilar to the friendships you make in a city. And now in this job, our customers are city police departments and county sheriffs. . . . But it’s the same value system--providing ice cream or providing crime lab services to a city or county.”

This sensibility was part of what won him the $115,000-a-year job.

“My fundamental notion about the Department of Justice is that we are a service provider to local law enforcement,” said Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, a Democrat elected last fall after two decades as a state senator from Hayward. “So I was recruiting police chiefs because they are familiar with the receiving end and know what we need to be doing better. Staveley worked his way up from beat cop to the chief.”

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And so, after 30 years gradually ascending to larger jobs--most of them in the Republican heartland that is Orange County--Staveley the Democrat is assuming broad statewide influence.

Staveley had supported Lockyer’s campaign, as did the California Police Chiefs Assn., and that group later endorsed Staveley, former president of Orange County’s police chiefs association.

“He is one of those rare leaders,” Riverside Police Det. Rich Bradley said after Staveley introduced himself at the gathering that took place in Riverside. Bradley, who is working with Staveley’s new agency, had been hired by Staveley 18 years ago at the Buena Park Police Department. “He is the opposite of the Peter Principle: He’s gotten better as he rose to the top.”

Political Test May Lie Ahead

Such a pedigree should serve Staveley well as he confronts one immediate sure-fire problem: reinvigorating a department that hasn’t seen pay raises in five years, leaving him with a 25% vacancy rate.

“Their purchasing power is 20% less than it was in 1994,” Staveley acknowledges, “and it [engenders an attitude], understandably, of ‘Nobody cares about us, so why should we care about them?’

“We want to give them hope that their dedication will be recognized.”

It will take all the political and diplomatic prowess Staveley has mustered to date to deal with an even higher-profile problem if he inherits it--that being the watershed investigation into allegations of excessive force against inmates by state prison guards, whose rich and powerful union sometimes makes or breaks a political candidate.

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Lockyer has vowed to create a unit to tackle the case, and if lawyers conclude the matter needs further probing, it could fall under Staveley’s umbrella.

Staveley’s police chief peers said that although the prison guard union exerts formidable political pressure, they believe Staveley to be ethically above reproach. “If anyone can pull that off,” said Buena Park Police Chief Richard M. Tefank, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn., “it is Steve.”

Staveley has been spending most of his time visiting the far-flung bureaus of his new realm, outlining the service mission of the new attorney general and their shared interest in fixing organizational problems.

The state Division of Law Enforcement is sometimes compared to the FBI because both are big government helping littler governments in police work.

The overarching role of the Division of Law Enforcement is to help city and county police agencies. It runs on a $127-million annual budget and employs about 500 law enforcement officers.

Staveley oversees the agency’s 11 crime labs, including a highly regarded DNA lab in Berkeley, where the science of police work is conducted. The state labs serve 46 of 58 counties in California--or about a quarter of the population. The larger, urban counties, including Los Angeles and Orange, have their own labs.

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The division’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement has hundreds of agents who conduct investigations of mid-level and large-scale illegaldrug enterprises in cooperation with local police agencies.

The mushrooming of illegal methamphetamine labs has particularly taxed local law enforcement. The cost of a meth lab cleanup can exceed $10,000.

Another ticklish if long-standing problem Staveley must contend with is the friction that sometimes develops when his agency steps in to assist smaller and usually more rural agencies. As a career local police official, Staveley expresses the greatest of empathy.

Nothing annoyed him more as a police chief “than to have a sheriff or state agency show up and say, ‘We’re here to save you,’ ” Staveley told some of his agents in the Riverside Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement office last month. “Our role is a support role.”

In this Staveley will be served by what veteran police officers say is his affinity for the front-line cop. As he climbed through the ranks to administration, they say, Staveley still went out at least once a month on patrol, wearing the uniform. He knew what it was like to work graveyard, Christmas. “Halloween was the one I feel the worst about,” he said a bit wistfully. “Never getting to go out trick-or-treating with my son. He said he thought everybody only went out with their mom.”

Moving Up Means Moving Out Too

Indeed, his job move to Sacramento has proved hard on his family. He commutes south on weekends, where his high school sweetheart and wife of 31 years, Dani, holds down the fort. Neither she, nor their son, nor their friends wanted him to take the new job.

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Staveley had already reached the age where he would not make more in retirement by continuing to work. But friends of his said they knew, as did his wife, that he wanted to contribute to a department whose reach could help cops and citizens throughout the state.

On the other hand, Staveley lucked out in a way. He has a widowed aunt with a spare bedroom and bathroom in her Sacramento home, so he hasn’t had to sell his Anaheim home of a generation.

While he believes he will still be able to throw money at hobbies like race car driving, one long-standing passion may not survive the north-south commute.

For years, Staveley has quietly served on his Anaheim neighborhood’s elementary school board. He has sat on the Magnolia School District Board with only one break, after he left the Buena Park Police Department to become police chief in Belmont, a city about the size of La Habra, halfway between San Jose and San Francisco. He returned south to be police chief in La Habra, population 55,000, in November 1990.

Last fall, Staveley was asked by the teachers union, parents and the district administration if he would consider running for school board president. He won. Supporters say he is a good leader but also endears himself by taking the time to know the people working for him.

“Steve is an absolutely incredible and wonderful guy,” Magnolia Superintendent Paul S. Mercier said. “The board recognizes employees [at meetings], and Steve will find great quotes from historical figures that fit perfectly with the employee or their job. . . . The president and vice president of our teachers union were just saying they hope the new job doesn’t mean we will lose him because he’s so smart and so fair. And I mean, this is the union! Talking about a board member!”

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The hometown feel of La Habra, Staveley said, he will genuinely miss. When rookie Officer Michael Osornio was struck and killed by a drunk driver on Halloween 1994, the center divider of the street was blanketed with bouquets, as was the police station lobby. The on-duty death of the officer was the first in the close-knit department’s 71-year history.

“We had to make a point of going out in the community to talk to people,” Staveley recalled of the need to console people and comfort themselves. “There is nothing harder than losing an officer.”

It was Staveley’s grass-roots community work that Lockyer said impressed him as much as his leadership and experience in tackling big issues of urban police management--diversifying staff, community outreach, sexual harassment prevention, the works.

“A lot of chiefs talk about the need to have strong law enforcement prevention early in the schools,” Lockyer said. “And here was a police chief who was actually practicing what he preaches.”

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