Community Policing Advocate Named to Lead Riverside Force

In what is considered the last piece of a campaign to improve relations between police and minorities in Riverside, the city hired LAPD veteran and community policing devotee Russell Leach as its police chief Friday.

Leach, 52, was an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 20 years, working his way up to captain. By the time he left in April 1995, he was the head of the LAPD’s Harbor Division, an area that encompasses diverse communities on the south side of Los Angeles.

He left Los Angeles to become the police chief in El Paso, where he remained until August 1998.

Returning to Southern California to take care of his mother, Leach became a deputy director of Drug Abuse Resistance Education in Inglewood. At the drug fighting organization, commonly known as DARE, he oversees government and military drug abuse prevention programs.

A native of England who came to Southern California on the Queen Mary when he was 9, Leach will be paid $155,000 annually to oversee the Riverside Police Department.

The department has a staff of 534, including 327 sworn officers, and a $45.5-million annual budget. City Manager John Holmes, who said Leach is “recognized nationally as an innovator” in policing, made the appointment Friday. Leach will start Sept. 18, filling a vacancy created in January, when former Police Chief Jerry Carroll resigned after 30 years with the department.

Leach, who could not be reached for comment, said in a prepared statement that he looks forward to “enhancing the community police programs and strengthening the relationship with the city’s residents.”

“I believe in a philosophy of inclusiveness and involving the community as a partner with the Police Department,” he said. “The only way to solve problems in the community is to embrace those who really care about the safety of their families and include them in the team effort.”

The job is dogged by a host of challenges.

Internally, some officers and city officials were upset that the city did not offer the vacant chief job to a local candidate, Riverside acting Police Chief Mike Smith. Those concerns only grew after the city’s first choice, Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters, turned down the job earlier this month.

Externally, it gets worse.

Riverside has not recovered from the December 1998 shooting of Tyisha Miller, a black woman, by four white police officers. The incident further polarized a city that was already divided along racial lines, a place where police officers are often seen as aloof patrolmen in foreign neighborhoods.

The shooting drew national attention and accusations that the Riverside Police Department is rife with racism, as well as a “pattern and practice” investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office and a lawsuit from Miller’s family that is expected to cost the city at least $3 million.

Seeking a Better Standing in Community

The city has aggressively pursued a host of reforms intended to modernize the department and improve its relationship with residents.

Riverside has pledged to hire a more diverse police force, and is teaching its officers to use nonlethal weapons. Earlier this summer, the city named nine community leaders to a Police Review Commission that will investigate complaints against the department, including charges of discrimination or excessive force.

Leach is known as a proponent of community policing, a tactic that fights the causes of crime as well as crime itself, often by fostering better relations between police officers and the people who live on their beat.

That hasn’t always been easy. Leach, for example, was part of the police team that tried to brace Los Angeles for verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

But, also while he was in Los Angeles, Leach helped put together a snazzy police newsletter designed to improve communication between police and residents. He opened three community service centers while directing the LAPD’s Harbor Division.

In El Paso, he initiated more than 20 community programs, including police programs targeting at-risk youths and drive-by shootings.

Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge said the hiring of Leach can be seen as the last step in a recovery process.

“You need a police chief who can take the reforms and move to the next level,” Loveridge said. “He has been tested.”