State Steps Into Police Reform in Riverside

Exercising newfound power to reform troubled police departments, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer is forcing this city to confront its past--good cops, bad cops, blacks and whites--and its future.

Lockyer, allowed under new legislation to impose on local law enforcement agencies rules protecting civil rights, has proposed a series of reforms for the Riverside Police Department.

The attorney general’s move is one typically reserved for the federal government. Targeting excessive force, false arrests and improper searches, the U.S. Department of Justice has imposed police reforms in cities including Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

Riverside officials, still smarting from the aftermath of a 1998 police shooting that exposed deep racial divides, support the reforms but are bristling at the prospect of state intervention.

Lockyer’s proposal, spelled out in a 25-page document delivered to the city last week, is designed to help Riverside heal scars from the December 1998 shooting of Tyisha Miller, a black woman, by four white police officers. Lockyer said he will take the city to court if Mayor Ronald O. Loveridge and the seven-member City Council refuse to adopt the plan.

So far, Riverside’s response has been tepid at best. Approval of the plan--a public hearing will be held Tuesday and a vote is expected Feb. 27--is far from certain.

“I support the reforms,” Loveridge said. “But we think we’ve taken a number of very important strides. Things that have been identified are things that we are already doing.”

The killing of Miller, who was passed out in a friend’s car with a pistol on her lap, ripped at the seams of Riverside.

Community leaders complained of racism after reports that police officers were overheard referring to the cries of Miller’s relatives at the scene as “Watts death wails,” and the killing stirred a national furor among civil rights leaders.

The shooting and its aftermath prompted a series of state and federal investigations into the practices of the Police Department. Lockyer’s plan is the result of those investigations.

Several factors played into the unusual role that the state, rather than federal government, is taking in seeking to impose reform.

Recently approved legislation explicitly gave the attorney general for the first time the authority to reform police departments against which civil-rights complaints have been made. And some officials privy to the negotiations in recent weeks say the U.S. Department of Justice--which has a new boss, President Bush--is less certain that it will have the backing of the White House when it attempts to reform local law enforcement.

That left Lockyer as the logical reformer in this case. Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, said the proposal would “eliminate the need for federal intervention”--provided that Riverside follows through on the reform package. Federal officials were involved in the negotiations that led to Lockyer’s proposal.

The plan, filed last week in Riverside County Superior Court, charges that the Riverside Police Department has “failed to uniformly and adequately enforce the law” because of poor supervision, monitoring and training of officers. The agreement would require Riverside, among other steps, to:

* Train sergeants and other supervisors on the city’s policy for receiving citizen complaints.

* Improve procedures for documenting and investigating all uses of lethal force, and develop a plan for drawing lessons from each incident.

* Install video monitoring of roll calls and implement “zero tolerance of racial, ethnic or sexual jokes.”

“I think I have a duty that is clear,” Lockyer said. “I want to see that people aren’t deprived of their civil rights.”

City officials say that is what they also want--but few of them are eager to yield authority over their Police Department to a state agency. Los Angeles officials showed similar resistance last year to a federal consent decree imposing reforms on the LAPD, an order that has yet to be formally enacted.

City Has Launched Reform Efforts

City officials have taken substantial strides in recent months in an effort to reform the Police Department and heal the wounds of the Miller shooting.

In July, the City Council named nine community leaders, including two African Americans, to a new Police Review Commission. The group has begun addressing grievances brought against the force, including complaints from minorities who believe they have been victims of racial profiling or abuse.

And in August, Riverside hired LAPD veteran Russell Leach as its police chief, largely because of Leach’s devotion to community policing tactics designed to improve relations between street officers and residents, especially minorities.

Most city officials believe they are on the right path, and many residents are starting to agree. So they aren’t sure the city should abide by Lockyer’s demands, if for no other reason than to avoid what Ameal Moore, Riverside’s only African American council member, calls the “stigma” of entering into a reform agreement with another agency.

“We’ve come a long way with the Police Department. The types of things that are in the agreement are types of activities that we would do,” said City Manager John Holmes. But if the city rejects the plan, Holmes said, “it would be years of litigation versus an agreement in which we would move on with reforms.”

Though the city assisted Lockyer in piecing together parts of the proposal, many city officials believe its conclusions are based on an obsolete portrait of the Riverside Police Department.

“It’s written in the present tense,” said city spokeswoman Laurie Payne. “It’s written as if all those things are happening now, and they are not.”

Realistically, however, Riverside may not have much of a choice.

“Part of me wants to move on. It’s time to focus on tomorrow,” said Leach, who celebrated his five-month anniversary with the Police Department the same week Lockyer arrived to deliver his proposal to the city.

“But they looked me in the eye and said: ‘We will sue you.’ They are serious about taking us to court, and they are serious about wanting us to agree to this settlement.”

That’s why Moore, a leader of the African American community, plans to vote for the plan.

Oddly, a key sticking point appears to be what to call the proposal, which has so far been labeled a “stipulation” in court documents. “By and large, everyone supports the list of recommendations,” Leach said. “But there are no corruption issues here. There has been some mismanagement. So what do you call it? Can you call it a contract? A memorandum of agreement? Can you call it something other than a consent decree?”