Riverside Sets Up Strong Police Commission

The black woman was passed out in a Nissan Sentra, radio blasting, doors locked, a pistol on her lap. When four white police officers tried to wake her, they saw a sudden movement. “It scared the hell out of me,” one officer recalled later.

They fired 24 times at Tyisha Miller. Twelve bullets found their mark.

The sudden and violent death of the 19-year-old that night in December 1998 seemed to rip the city apart, and drew national attention to criticism from minority community leaders that the Riverside Police Department is riddled with racism.

More than 18 months later, hard feelings linger, and a civil rights lawsuit and two federal investigations still loom over the city. But Riverside has begun to shake its image as a racially divided city with a series of police reforms that even critics grudgingly praise--and on Tuesday its leaders took what may be the most crucial step yet.

On the seventh floor of City Hall, City Council members snapped into place one of the final pieces of that reform plan, naming nine community leaders--two of whom are black--to a newly created Police Review Commission.

The commission will address grievances brought against the force, including complaints from minorities who believe they have been victims of racial profiling or abuse. It will evaluate overall police conduct as well as specific allegations of excessive force, sexual harassment, improper use of firearms, illegal searches and false arrests.

Modeled in part on commissions in Long Beach, San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland, the group will have a relatively small budget at first--about $185,000, including the salary of an executive director who will be hired in August.

But it is seen as a seismic shift in Riverside and its impact will be immediate, officials said.

The commission has the power to subpoena witnesses, officers and city documents. It will investigate claims against the department and recommend to police officials whether they should take such actions as disciplining an officer. The board can appoint independent investigators if commissioners suspect that the department’s internal affairs officials lack objectivity.

“This is a commission that actually has some power,” said Najee Ali, the executive director of Project Islamic Hope, a Los Angeles civil rights group that has been monitoring the aftermath of the Tyisha Miller shooting. “That’s very important. This city is moving in the right direction.”

Suddenly, instead of being a petri dish of dissent, Riverside is a “model for other cities across California,” Mayor Ron Loveridge said. “As a result of the Tyisha Miller death . . . we will be a better and safer city.”

Tuesday’s vote follows a series of reforms, most recommended by a panel that Loveridge assembled after the shooting and implemented this summer. The city has:

* Hired more female and minority police officers.

* Placed more veteran and experienced officers on late-night shifts once filled by young officers. The four officers who shot Miller had a combined seven years’ experience on the force.

* Begun teaching officers to use nonlethal weapons that can subdue suspects.

* Implemented community policing tactics that target the causes of crime as well as crime itself.

Soon, perhaps by the end of the week, the city will hire a new police chief. Officials, protecting the confidentiality of applicants, would not reveal the names of finalists. But Loveridge said the top candidate is one of the state’s leading proponents of community policing, which has been used in other cities to improve relationships between police and minorities.

In the weeks that followed the shooting, black neighborhoods in Riverside were convinced that the white police officers who shot Miller were motivated by race.

The shooting prompted criticism of the department by a county grand jury, and a black police officer called to the scene after the Miller shooting filed a civil rights complaint alleging pervasive racism on the force.

Miller’s survivors, meanwhile, also have filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city.

The legacy of that night, however, may be the comments that rolled famously and callously off the lips of police officers as Miller lay dying.

“Watts death wails,” one officer called her relatives’ cries of grief, according to witnesses and investigators. Another said the relatives were “animals” celebrating Kwanzaa.

“Those comments really alienated the [black] community from the Police Department,” said William L. Howe, one of the nine residents appointed to the review commission Tuesday. “I knew then that it was going to be a long road back.”

Howe, who is black, remembers a real estate agent steering him into the city’s predominantly African American east side neighborhood when he moved to Riverside in 1961.

Much has changed since those days, said Howe, who retired in 1988 after a lengthy career in law enforcement that included a stint as the UC Riverside police chief. Today, he lives in a diverse neighborhood on the city’s western end.

But Riverside, he said, remains divided along racial lines.

After the Tyisha Miller shooting, Howe worked with other leaders to “keep a lid” on anger in the black community, which threatened to turn into violence in the streets, he said. He was not convinced that the city would recover from the shooting.

“Change had to come, though, because it couldn’t get any worse,” he said. “I’m not satisfied yet. But this is another step--and a very important one. This community has turned things around.”

The city’s struggles are not over.

Though local prosecutors declined to file charges against the four officers, federal prosecutors may soon weigh in.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles has for the last year been conducting a “pattern-and-practice” investigation into the department.

A federal grand jury also could indict the officers, though the U.S. attorney’s office has not commented publicly on those prospects.

And not everyone is praising the city’s reforms. The Rev. Bernell Butler, Miller’s cousin, sees many of the reforms as window dressing. If the city truly wanted to heal the community, he said, it would settle the Miller family’s lawsuit.

“We want to make it a settlement where it hurts the city to the point where they won’t soon forget,” he said.

Riverside City Councilman Ameal Moore, the only African American council member, said the lessons of Tyisha Miller won’t soon be forgotten. The Police Review Commission, he said, should make sure of that.

“Because of Tyisha Miller, we’ve had a chance to look at ourselves and see some areas where we had shortcomings,” Moore said. “I’ve been in this city for 40 years, and basically it’s a good city. . . . But a lot of trust in the Police Department has been lost in the last couple of years. This is going to be good for the community and the Police Department.”