Lockyer’s Top Cop Eager to Help ‘Our Customers’

It was time to play Meet the New Boss, and the grizzled veterans of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement--pony-tailed 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 at their Riverside headquarters 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. And afterward, during a private meeting with a low-paid new recruit, Staveley uttered four words not often heard by a public official: talk to your union.

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.

In doing so, he vaults from a 121-employee department in a city where residents often grew up with their local cops, to a scattered state bureaucracy with 1,068 employees and a mission to support police agencies throughout California.

Staveley, the son of a Covina ice cream vendor, learned while growing up in the family business and restocking Fudgesicles on grocers’ shelves that customer service is essential to almost any successful endeavor.

“There were a lot of independent dairies then, family businesses,” 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.”

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

“He is one of those rare leaders,” Riverside police Det. Rich Baylor observed after the Riverside pow-wow. Baylor, who is working with Staveley’s 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.”

Staveley will confront one immediate, sure-fire problem: reinvigorating a department that hasn’t seen pay raises in five years. That, he said, engenders an attitude 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 of Staveley’s investigative, political and diplomatic skill to deal with an even more high-profile problem if he inherits it: the investigation into allegations of excessive force against inmates by state prison guards, whose union wields considerable political pressure. Lockyer has vowed to create a unit to tackle the case, and if lawyers conclude that the matter needs further probing, it could fall under Staveley’s umbrella.

“If anyone can pull that off,” said Buena Park Police Chief Richard Tefank, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn., “it is Steve.”

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, called special agents.

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. Large counties in Southern California such as Los Angeles and Orange have their own crime labs.

The division’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement has about 500 agents who investigate mid-level and large-scale illegal drug 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 empathizes. Nothing made him angrier “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 Riverside 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 is 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.”

His job move to Sacramento has proven hard on his family in Anaheim, to whom he returns on weekends. Neither his high school sweetheart and wife of 31 years, Dani, nor their son, nor their friends, wanted him to take the job.

Staveley had already reached the age where he would not make more in retirement by continuing to work. But friends of Staveley 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.

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. Last fall, he was asked by the teachers union, parents and the district administration if he would consider running for school board president. He won.

The hometown feel of La Habra, Staveley said, he will genuinely miss. When an officer was struck and killed by a drunk driver a few Halloweens ago--probably saving several costumed children--the center divider of the street was blanketed with bouquets, as was the police station lobby.

“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.

“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.”