Activists, Anaheim Police Forge Trust

Not long ago, the suspicion among minorities in Anaheim was that police were giving traffic tickets for “driving while Latino.”

Police officials would respond to complaints from the City Council, but they refused to sit down with critics from the Latino community.

“The department simply had a closed-door policy. There was no cooperation, there was no collaboration. Maybe it was self-protection, self-preservation, but real problems were never addressed,” said City Councilwoman Lorri Galloway. “This is something that Anaheim was, sadly, known for.”

A few weeks ago, however, some of Anaheim’s most outspoken Latino activists sat in a restaurant booth to sign a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit against the Police Department for $50,000, symbolically ending more than three decades of confrontation.

Activists said in interviews later that their perception that the department’s attitude toward Latinos -- now half the city’s population -- had changed so dramatically that the decision to settle was an easy one. They even said they were ready to give an emphatic vote of confidence for a department they had once viewed as a steady source of unfair treatment.

“There is a different attitude in that whole department. We are so delighted and really emotional about this,” said Amin David, one of three plaintiffs in the suit, and perhaps one of the most unexpected people in Anaheim to be praising the police.

David, an activist since 1969, focused from nearly the beginning on the police. He said that for decades the department roughed up Latinos during arrests and unfairly targeted them, particularly for traffic stops.

Over the years, police actions reinforced that view. Perhaps most striking was the beating by police officers of partygoers at a 1978 community picnic in Little People’s Park.

It was compounded by an article coauthored by Sgt. Jon Beteag in the Hot Sheet, the internal publication for the Anaheim Police Assn. Beteag described the surrounding Latino neighborhood as “a gang of thieves, dopers and gunsels who staged an annual end-of-summer let’s-brain-a-pig-with-a-brick festival.” He was not disciplined despite at least two years of protest by David and others.

Things got worse when David and fellow activists Francisco Ceja and the late Josie Montoya discovered in 2001 that former Chief Roger Baker had investigated their personal and professional relationships, prompting the civil rights suit. To them, it seemed to be retaliation for the criticism.

The state attorney general concluded in July that there was no evidence that police had spied on residents, but the report criticized Baker for using “extremely poor judgment.”

Baker said at the time that the probe was innocuous information gathering. After he retired, Capt. Marc Hedgepeth said that Baker was attempting to link the three activists to convicted felons in an effort to discredit them before the City Council. Baker, now police chief in Des Moines, Wash., did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Since taking over in early 2004, Chief John A. Welter was given a mandate by the City Council to improve the department’s relationship with Latinos. The San Diego police veteran was adept at communicating across racial and ethnic lines. He acknowledged past problems. But one of the first rules he established to rehabilitate the department was that discussion of the past was off limits.

“I think they were throwing a lot of rocks at the Police Department over the years,” Welter said. “I mean, they were bringing up things from the 1970s. To me, that’s ancient history. When I came here, I said, ‘Judge me from this point going forward.’ ”

Welter made it clear that everything else was fair game for conversation.

He rode his police motorcycle to many of the weekly breakfasts held by Los Amigos, David’s influential kaffeeklatsch for civic leaders to discuss issues of concern to Latinos.

“When I first went there, someone said, ‘I hope you’re the police chief we’ve been looking for,’ ” Welter said. “I said, ‘I hope you’re the community I’ve been looking for.’ ”

In exchange for increased access and responsiveness to complaints, Welter said he wanted his critics to take their share of responsibility for fighting crime in their neighborhoods. “I have too few cops to fight all the crime myself,” Welter said. “If we truly ever tap the strength of our neighborhoods, we will be the safest community in America.”

Anaheim’s crime levels have remained unchanged under Welter. However, it is clear that police have become allied with pockets of the community they previously had sparred with.

One area was the two-block radius around Beacon and Walnut streets in West Anaheim where at least three men were gunned down over the last five years without arrests.

“We constantly reminded the police of the unresolved murders, but nothing happened,” said Robert Luna. But after years of complaints, Luna and another activist were invited to the chief’s office. They pressed their case and offered leads. At least one arrest followed.

David is now on the chief’s advisory committee and presses his views from within the chief’s office rather than from a megaphone outside. He has been issued an identification card that allows him to come and go inside police headquarters unescorted.

Partly because of the improved relationship, both sides said they were able to work together when an Anaheim police officer was arrested last year for allegedly molesting a Latina illegal immigrant. The incident might once have sparked protests, but David said the department had handled her case fairly.

Galloway, one of three Latinos elected to the City Council since 2002, joined colleagues to unanimously approve the recent settlement. “It took us a long time to get to this point. I’m glad we finally did it,” she said.