Ben Clark, 78; Popular Riverside County Sheriff Was Committed to Police Training

Former Riverside County Sheriff Ben Clark, who was instrumental in establishing formal, standardized training for all peace officers in California, has died. He was 78.

Clark, who served as Riverside County sheriff for 23 years and retired in 1986, died of pancreatic cancer Friday at his Riverside home.

Clark worked in the department for 36 years, won five elections and gained popularity among voters and his employees with his strong, plain-spoken opinions, honesty and foresight, said his successor, retired Sheriff Cois Byrd.

“He was a man with absolute moral values, and he applied logic to all of his decisions,” Byrd said. “You wouldn’t agree with everything he did, but ... as time went on, you usually looked back on the issue and would say, ‘He was right.’ ”

While serving as undersheriff in the 1950s, Clark led a drive to make police training consistent throughout the state. Working with law enforcement agencies across California, Clark convinced state lawmakers to provide state funding for training.

He sat on the state’s first Peace Officers’ Standards and Training Commission, which has been emulated by every other state, Byrd said.

“Law enforcement was in need of professionalization,” Byrd said. “In 1959, I was hired and, without a review of basic skills, I was out in a patrol car for six months. These were the days when there weren’t a lot of lawsuits, and [deputies] could be fired on the spot for not using common sense. Ben saw the future. He knew law enforcement training needed to become standardized and certified.”

In 1997, a massive police training center on the former March Air Force Base was dedicated as the Ben Clark Training Center.

Clark also successfully pushed for the construction of the Riverside County Jail in downtown Riverside, known as the Robert Presley Detention Center.

While in office, he refused to abide by a court ruling that allowed jail inmates to view magazines with sexually explicit photographs of nude women, arguing he didn’t want to “stir up” the male population.

Bob Doyle, the current Riverside County sheriff, said Clark’s “passing of the value system within the organization and his ability to look at everything with reasonableness” remained Clark’s lasting, most important contributions. Doyle was hired while Clark was sheriff in 1975. Clark promoted Doyle to sergeant six years later, with Doyle describing his boss as the man “I aspired to be.... He represented everything positive my parents instilled into me.”

Values that Clark instilled, Doyle said, affected the department’s handling of a recent string of cases involving deputies who have allegedly been linked to stolen drugs, sex with inmates and sex crimes against a female motorist.

Clark, a native of Milwaukee, earned his bachelor’s degree in police science and administration in 1958 at what is now Cal State L.A.

He was married for 50 years to Mollie Clark and was the father of seven children. He maintained a low profile after leaving office, spending time with his 14 grandchildren, cooking holiday meals, woodworking and traveling.

In the fall, doctors told Clark he had six months to live.

“A lot of his guys came by the home after the prognosis, inundating us with visits and showing us what he meant to them,” said Clark’s daughter, Anita Riddle. “He loved seeing them. He loved his job and the people he worked with.”