Police Win Praise in Riverside

Two years after California’s attorney general ordered the Riverside Police Department to fix a variety of serious problems, the agency is earning high marks for improving training and supervision of officers and developing a system for tracking problem cops.

Although the reforms have yet to be fully tested, Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said he is pleased with the progress and hopes Riverside’s efforts will serve as a model for other departments struggling to eliminate civil rights abuses.

“They are making a difference in reforming the department,” Lockyer said. “You can see it in a lot of different ways.”

Lockyer issued the reform order after an investigation of the police shooting of Tyisha Miller uncovered “defective and inadequate policies, practices and procedures” in the Riverside Police Department.

Miller, 19, was killed in December 1998 when police fired a barrage of bullets into the car in which she had been sleeping. Officers had been dispatched to a service station where Miller had locked herself in her disabled car and passed out with a gun in her lap. When the officers broke a side window of the car, Miller awakened with a start. Officers then opened fire because, they said, they feared for their lives. Miller, who was shot 12 times, did not fire her gun.

Lockyer’s order was the first in which the state directed a law enforcement agency to make changes as part of a consent decree. The Los Angeles Police Department is under a far more restrictive order with the U.S. Department of Justice, which demanded a wide range of reforms after investigating the Rampart corruption scandal.

According to Lockyer and other close observers, Riverside officials have embraced the attorney general’s demands, spending $7 million over the last 21 months on training, education and equipment for their officers.

“We see this as a very good thing,” said Police Chief Russ Leach, who took over as head of the department shortly after the Miller shooting. “We’ve got the tools and the training in place. We’ve got motivated officers and a commitment from the political establishment. Now we need to put it all together to move the department forward.”

Leach recently appeared before the Riverside City Council and assured the community that his department of 362 officers is far different from what it was when Miller was killed four years ago.

His words helped temper the anger felt by some community members when they learned that the U.S. Justice Department had decided not to prosecute the four officers involved in the shooting. Federal officials concluded that any negligence, poor judgment or mistake by the officers had not been enough to warrant criminal charges.

“The city is trying,” said the Rev. Paul Munford of the New Joy Baptist Church. “We have a new chief who is committed to complying with the consent decree. Still, one of my concerns is that we are doing fine now without any major confrontations or tragedies. Hopefully, we won’t have to be tested with another tragedy to see if we really have reform.”

Shortly after the shooting, Lockyer’s office looked into the officers’ conduct but also declined to file criminal charges, citing many of the reasons given by federal authorities. Nevertheless, Lockyer ordered a deeper probe into department practices.

Attorneys in Lockyer’s newly formed civil rights division spent two years investigating the operations of the Riverside Police Department. They found that inexperienced officers were working the most dangerous shifts with little supervision; citizen complaints were often ignored; annual performance reviews were rarely done; and officers used their roll-call sessions to argue and tell offensive jokes.

“It became obvious that there was a lack of training and professionalism in the department,” the attorney general said.

After finishing their inquiry, Lockyer’s lawyers summoned Leach and four members of his command staff to a meeting at the attorney general’s Los Angeles office, where they presented their findings at length.

Leach, who was new to the department, said the state attorneys told him bluntly that the people of Riverside didn’t trust their own Police Department. “It was devastating,” said Leach, who spent 20 years with the LAPD .

Lockyer said he warned the department that it must enter into a legally binding agreement to make reforms or face a lawsuit.

In the weeks that followed, a team of Riverside officials worked out the terms of the consent decree with Lockyer’s office. Unlike the LAPD federal consent decree, which is more than an inch thick and outlines new policies and practices in exhaustive detail, the state document was only 17 pages long and gave the department some latitude in how to implement the fixes over five years.

Riverside was already voluntarily collecting data to determine whether officers engaged in “racial profiling” during traffic stops. The department in recent months has begun turning that information over to the attorney general’s office for review.

As required by the decree, department officials moved more seasoned officers to the night shift and implemented sensitivity training designed to give officers “cross-cultural awareness.” Also, recruits are now hired and evaluated, in part, on the basis of their “sensitivity to all segments of the community.” Police supervisors are required to take leadership training.

The department has installed video cameras in roll-call rooms to monitor officers’ comments and conduct, and outfitted officers with tape recorders to monitor their interactions with the public. In coming months, the department will install video cameras in all squad cars.

To comply with an order to track problem officers, the department has established a computer system that monitors complaints and alerts the command staff when an officer has been engaged in two questionable incidents.

Police also have expanded their arsenal of nonlethal weapons to include more Tasers, pepper spray and guns that fire sponges instead of bullets.

Joseph Brann, who headed the Justice Department’s community policing efforts under President Clinton, was chosen to oversee the Riverside department’s compliance with the requirements. He makes quarterly reports to Lockyer.

“In a nutshell, they are doing extremely well,” Brann said in an interview last week. “In the overwhelming majority of cases, they are definitely on track and progress is being made. In many instances they are ahead of schedule.”

Brann and Lockyer say much of the success is the result of the welcoming of change by Riverside Police Department brass, union leaders and sworn officers.

“We have accepted it,” said Patrick McCartney, president of the Riverside Police Officers Assn. “The mandates have a lot of benefits: more supervision, more training, better equipment. It’s going good.”