FBI Probes Police in Huntington Park

The FBI has launched a civil rights investigation into the Huntington Park Police Department after receiving complaints about alleged police abuse of minorities from local activists and former police officers.

The investigation began shortly after FBI agents met two weeks ago with former Huntington Park officers and leaders of the state branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, to discuss an alleged pattern of police abuses against Latinos and blacks, an FBI spokesman said Monday.

But FBI spokesman Matt McLaughlin said he is forbidden by bureau policy to elaborate on the investigation.

Huntington Park officials dispute the allegations, saying they welcome an investigation to clear the city’s name.

“I cannot wait until we go through the whole process and we are vindicated,” said Councilwoman Rosario Marin.

Sandra Moore, vice president of the CORE branch, said she asked the FBI to meet with several former Huntington Park officers after the officers told her about alleged abuses and racism.

One former officer who attended the meeting told FBI agents that a group of Huntington Park police officers wear tattoos of the grim reaper bordered by the letters HPK, which the officer said stands for Huntington Park Killers.

Police Chief Randy Narramore said many of the charges raised by the former officers refer to incidents that allegedly took place years ago, long before he took office in 1995.

“All this stuff is old,” he said. “This is the stuff I was brought in clean up.”

The chief acknowledged that the department once had a group of officers wearing grim reaper tattoos with the initials HPK, which he said is a police radio code for Huntington Park. But he said most of those officers have left the department.

“No one has gotten [those tattoo] since I’ve been here,” he said.

Narramore and Marin say the charges have been raised by a few disgruntled former officers who waited until after they left the department to make the allegations.

Claims of police brutality strike a nerve in Huntington Park because the city has been trying to improve community-police relations since 1987, when two police officers were convicted of torturing a burglary suspect with a stun gun to extract a confession. The suspect was a 17-year-old Latino youth.

One officer served 64 days in County Jail and the other served about a year in state prison as a result. The city paid $300,000 to settle a lawsuit resulting from the incident.

One of the two former Huntington Park officers who met with the FBI at CORE’s offices said in an interview that he told the agents that he was an eyewitness to a series of incidents involving obstruction of justice and the mishandling of evidence.

“It’s a police force that acts more like an occupying army than a police force,” said former Officer John Malley, who retired from the department in 1992.

Malley alleges that in 1992, five officers got drunk at the department’s automobile impound yard and fired dozens of rounds from their service revolvers into the air.

Malley said the officers were suspended one day each, though the average citizen is routinely charged with a felony for the offense.

“They act like they are above the law,” Malley said.

City officials said they did not recall that alleged incident.

Moore, a longtime activist in South Los Angeles, said she was most upset about hearing from Malley and other former officers about an elderly black man from South-Central Los Angeles who died of a heart attack in 1994 after he was arrested by Huntington Park police.

She alleges that police refused to call an ambulance for the dying man because he was black.

“They will not get away with murder under the color of law,” Moore said.

Moore was referring to Erie Timmons, who died in his driveway after he was handcuffed by Huntington Park police investigating a stolen credit card operation. The city reportedly paid Timmons’ family $65,000 to settle a lawsuit.

But Narramore said police did, in fact, call paramedics to help the dying man and paid the settlement only because it would have cost more to fight the lawsuit in court.