Brutality Complaints Tarnish ‘Nice Guy’ Image of Police : Reports Soar After Officer’s Death

The San Diego Police Department enjoys an almost impeccable reputation. It is regarded by most who observe it as community-oriented and humane, unlike the paramilitary style of law enforcement practiced in some cities.

Indeed, in the wake of a soaring police mortality rate, some officers have suggested that San Diego’s finest may be “too nice.”

Yet despite the inroads it has made in community relations, the San Diego Police Department is quietly plagued by a problem common among other, less respected police agencies: brutality.

In contrast with its empathic image, San Diego’s 1,300-member Police Department has its share of badge-heavy bullies short with their tempers and quick with their night sticks.

Last year there were 684 citizens’ complaints against the department, about one for every two officers in the department. Internal investigations determined that 137 of the complaints, ranging from rudeness to brutality, were valid.

There were also 488 “administrative” claims filed in 1984 against the Police Department--113 more than were filed in 1983. Each claim seeks reimbursement for allegations of police abuse and is the first step toward suing the department. Many of the cases involve allegations of brutality, including beatings.

“The idea that the San Diego Police Department is ‘too nice’ is (ridiculous),” said attorney Dave Perry. “What you have out there today in many cases are ill-trained, inexperienced officers who go around just waiting to hit somebody because they think they have something to prove.”

Perry should know. He was fired by the department in 1969 for punching a belligerent, drunk motorist.

Each year, there are scores of claims and lawsuits filed by people who contend that they’ve had their heads, arms, legs or noses battered or broken by overly aggressive police officers. Some have suffered permanent injury.

They include young and old; some with long criminal histories, others who have never received a parking ticket. Recently, they’ve ranged from an 81-year-old retiree who claims that he suffered a stroke after he was slammed into a door by a patrolman, to a Superior Court judge’s teen-age nephew who says his teeth were knocked out when he was punched in the mouth by an off-duty officer.

Nearly all contend that they were set upon without provocation or good cause. Many who claim that they were beaten up are never charged with breaking the law, or charges are dropped before the case gets to court.

Those who formally complain of brutality are not limited by racial or ethnic group. However, San Diego’s black leaders reported Friday that, since the March 31 killing of a police officer in Southeast San Diego, instances of excessive force reported to the Urban League have increased tenfold from the same period last year.

Department administrators insist that they are quick to thoroughly investigate such incidents and are swift to punish guilty officers. And while they won’t provide figures or discuss specific cases, department administrators say that each year they discipline and occasionally fire officers for brutality.

But records show that in the vast majority of cases, internal police investigations side with the officers and find that they were justified in using force.

Consequently, the city rarely pays the medical costs of those injured in police confrontations. Rarely have victims alleging police brutality in San Diego won their lawsuits against the department.

Police Chief Bill Kolender concedes that acts of excessive force continue to occur within his department, but only, he said, on an “irregular basis.”

“We expect the officers to be aggressive, expect them to take action and to do something,” Kolender said. “We also expect them to treat people with dignity, and there is no way I would ever sacrifice that in the name of law and order. . . . The officers can’t use force that goes beyond that which is reasonable.”

Kolender said he believes there are few police departments more zealous than his in stamping out acts of police brutality.

His administrators point out that the average two to three citizens complaints the department receives daily are no more than one-third of the number of letters and calls of appreciation that arrive each day.

“I think our officers know that they are generally trusted and respected by a vast majority of people in this city,” said Deputy Police Chief Norm Stamper. “For the most part, our officers are very appreciative of that.”

However, 1984 statistics gathered by The Times show that, per officer, the San Diego Police Department’s record of citizens complaints was the fourth highest among California’s 10 largest police departments, behind San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Ana.

San Diego’s complaint rate was five times the rate of complaints reported by the Los Angeles Police Department. There were five times as many citizen complaints “sustained”--or proven--in San Diego as in San Francisco.

The San Diego Police Department, like most others in California, conducts its investigations of allegations of police brutality and excessive force behind closed doors. All but the most serious cases--those that are sent to the district attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecution as suspected felony violations of the law--are handled as private personnel matters.

Even when a citizen complaint is proven, there is no assurance that the officer involved will be punished or that the victim of that officer’s excesses will be compensated.

Administrators refuse to discuss which complaints are proven true, or which officers are involved. To regularly reveal that information publicly, they say, would violate an officer’s right to privacy. Unlike many criminal investigations, such personnel inquiries are not subject to public scrutiny under California law.

San Diego police administrators insist that the number of citizen complaints logged by the department may be misleading because what is recorded and investigated as a citizen complaint in San Diego may simply be dismissed as a crank call by another police department.

That is the explanation offered in San Francisco for the high rate of complaints, where “everything that comes in the door, including information from crazies,” is recorded as a complaint, said Frank Shober, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s Office of Citizens Complaints.

San Diego has no such office, but a person can complain about a police officer here simply by telephoning the department, according to Cmdr. Jim Kennedy, whose responsibilities include supervising the Internal Affairs section.

Each complaint goes through the chain of command and remains in an officer’s file for five years, even if it is proven groundless.

The San Diego Police Officer’s Assn. (POA), which represents all but a few of San Diego’s law enforcement personnel, is resentful of what it regards as the department’s liberal attitude toward citizen complaints.

“A number of these complaints have to rest with (the department’s) policy to encourage people to file complaints against officers,” said Sgt. Ty Reid, the POA’s president. “In fact, we get many bogus complaints, and our hands are tied. We’d like to see a law that would make it a crime to file a false report against an officer.”

But among some San Diego police officers, having many citizen complaints in their file is a subject discussed with certain pride.

“I once got 36 complaints in 18 months,” said one veteran officer who now works in an administrative role. “It was a little of this, a little of that--some excessive force. Listen, if you’re doing your job, you’re gonna get complaints.”

Defense attorneys complain that despite its image of openness, the Police Department is hardly forthcoming in providing information about whether individual officers have a history of using excessive force. When pressed in court to reveal details of brutality complaints, the department in some cases has instead dropped the charges brought against the purported victims, according to several lawyers.

That’s what happened to Frank Pernicano, 46, a non-practicing lawyer who is also a former San Diego policeman.

One night in February, 1984, as he was heading home after closing the pizza parlor he runs on Midway Drive, Pernicano spotted the flashing red and blue lights of a police cruiser in his car’s rear-view mirror. He pulled to a stop and got out.

According to Pernicano’s version of the story, he stepped out of his car, and the officer asked him how fast he had been driving. Pernicano guessed 60 miles per hour. The officer insisted it was 70.

Pernicano said that when he was ordered to “say the ABC’s”--apparently to determine sobriety--he questioned the officer. The officer, after Pernicano refused a second time to recite the alphabet, ordered him to turn around and place his hands behind his back.

Instead, Pernicano climbed back into his car. He said he told the officer to summon a police supervisor.

“I told him that something was very wrong with what was going on,” Pernicano recalled. “I hadn’t had a drink in months, and this guy was acting very strange. He was very angry.”

Pernicano said that the officer sprayed Mace at him. Then two other patrolmen arrived, and they pulled Pernicano out of his car feet first. As Pernicano was being pulled, the officer who had stopped Pernicano hit him repeatedly with his baton.

“One of the first blows was right on the top of the head, and all I saw for a minute was a white flash,” Pernicano said. “I kept thinking, ‘Where am I? This can’t be happening in America.’ We didn’t treat people that way when I was a police officer.”

Pernicano spent the night in the County Jail. A blood test showed that he had no alcohol in his blood, but he was charged with resisting arrest.

He was released from jail the next day and went to a hospital emergency room, where doctors discovered he had a concussion and a fractured rib. Pernicano also had deep bruises scattered from his neck to his feet.

Under law, before a person can sue the Police Department, he must file an administrative claim against the city within 100 days of the incident in which the injury or property damage occurred. The city’s department of risk management has 45 days after the date of that filing to either reject or grant the claim.

Pernicano’s claim was rejected. He immediately sued the city.

His attorney, Dave Perry, said that when he sought the officer’s work record in court, the Police Department indicated that the officer had a record of seven citizen complaints of excessive force or violence. When Perry pressed the department for details on those complaints, the resisting arrest charge against Pernicano was dropped.

Nonetheless, Pernicano has refused to drop his civil lawsuit against the city. The case is pending.

“There would be a lot more instances of police brutality if citizens in this city stood up for their rights like Frank,” his attorney said. “People believe that they have to do everything and anything a San Diego police officer says. . . . What I think is happening in the city right now . . . is a serious deficiency in training and philosophy among our police officers. They have to recognize that they are servants of the people, not the other way around.”

After the March 31 shooting death of patrolman Thomas E. Riggs--the third officer killed in seven months--department administrators decided to take a hard look at police policy, training and equipment, among other related subjects. The department formed a task force, headed by Deputy Chief Norm Stamper, and set about trying to determine why San Diego’s police mortality rate has become the highest among large U.S. cities. The task force’s final report is due in early October.

In the meantime, it has become fashionable within the ranks to wonder aloud whether department policy has forced patrol personnel to become too public-relations conscious--”too nice”--and therefore increasingly vulnerable. Even a national television network, NBC, recently devoted a special news segment to the San Diego Police Department, asking the question, “Does kindness kill?”

Stamper said that in the wake of San Diego’s most recent police killings, officers have become more guarded and, at times, fearful that “anyone at any time can blow one of us away.”

It is the inability to cope with that fear that may contribute to an officer using brutality on the street, Stamper said.

“Police officers who are scared and lack self-confidence” are more inclined “to be involved in patterns of excessive force,” Stamper said. “We don’t want heavy-handed cops, cops given to excesses, but we sure as hell want, and the community needs, cops who can handle themselves.

“We expect our police officers to behave professionally, to treat citizens with dignity and not abuse them. At the same time, our officers are not here to take abuse. . . . It can be argued that officers who take abuse have violated their basic trust to protect lives and property. If they’re weak or nervous or fearful or incompetent, they can’t very well do that.”

San Diego police officers are instructed that they can and are expected to use force in restraining criminal suspects, but only as necessary and appropriate. Under department policy, an officer can use lethal force if he fears that his life or the life of a citizen is threatened by an overt act of hostility.

“We have a policy to use everything from verbal persuasion to bullets to protect citizens and ourselves,” Stamper said. “As with all policies, once you get out on the street, a number of questions arise daily as to the interpretation of that policy.”

While they are told not to tolerate actual or intended physical threats, San Diego police officers know that “part of their salary is there to (tolerate) some of the verbal attacks” to which officers are frequently subjected, Stamper said.

However, interviews with more than 20 people who have recently alleged police brutality, or their attorneys, revealed a pattern in which some officers, many of them young, react violently when their authority is merely questioned.

Citing privacy-related regulations, Police Department personnel declined to discuss any recent cases in which brutality or excessive force was alleged.

- One case involved Aaron Lee Moore Jr., 23, a Navy petty officer, who was with a few buddies celebrating on New Year’s Day at a South San Diego nightspot when two men in civilian clothes crowded into their booth. The men, according to Moore, said that they were police officers and asked Moore’s group to produce identification.

The group was suspicious. One of Moore’s friends asked the officers to show proper identification.

“It seems that when they requested to see I.D., that was interpreted by the officers as not being properly submissive, and things just seemed to break down at that point conversationally,” said Moore’s attorney, Franklin Geerdes, who was a National City policeman for nine years.

One of the officers attempted to hit Moore, who ducked away, Geerdes said. Moore was handcuffed with his arms pulled behind his back, and he was told to kneel.

While he was on his knees, an officer shoved Moore, who fell forward on his face, breaking his nose, Geerdes said. “The evidence would indicate that it was very deliberate,” he said.

Moore was never charged with a crime.

His claim against the city was rejected. He has sued for $30,000.

- Charles A. Boleky, 81, was asleep in his East San Diego home on New Year’s Eve, 1984, when a police officer arrived to investigate a complaint of malicious mischief. Boleky’s tenant had called the Police Department to report that Boleky had intentionally severed a television cable.

Boleky said the officer appeared at the front door, announced, “You’re under arrest,” and pushed his way in. Boleky, who had been standing in the doorway, said that he was slammed into the door frame by the officer and that his head struck the doorjamb.

The policeman remained in the house for about 45 minutes questioning both Boleky and his son. Then, according to Boleky, the policeman’s hand-held communications radio announced a nearby robbery, and the officer left abruptly. Boleky was never charged with a crime.

That night, when the son returned from a New Year’s Eve party, he found his father unconscious. Boleky was rushed to Hillside Hospital, where doctors determined that he had had a stroke.

Boleky contended that the trauma was a result of his hitting his head when the officer entered the house. The city, however, rejected his administrative claim. He is now considering filing a lawsuit against the Police Department.

- Andrew W. Johns, nephew of Superior Court Judge Kenneth A. Johns, was camping July 10, 1983, unknowingly on private property in El Cajon with a friend when the landowner, accompanied by an off-duty San Diego policeman, approached.

Johns and his friend were ordered to lie face down on the ground. When Johns asked the officer what they had done wrong, the officer and the landowner “literally beat the hell out of the kid,” according to his attorney, Patrick Frega. Johns was bruised and lost “a couple of teeth,” Frega said.

Charges of trespassing and resisting arrest eventually were dismissed, and the officer involved in the incident was later reprimanded, but Johns’ administrative claim against the city was refused nonetheless.

It was never made clear what the relationship was between the landowner and the off-duty officer, Frega said.

“It’s a tough job being a cop,” Frega said. “Sometimes they go too far and go off the deep end. I don’t think it’s the norm, though.”

- On March 10, Terry Simmons was driving home on Euclid Avenue in Southeast San Diego when he topped a slight rise and spotted a San Diego policeman standing in the road, away from his patrol car. The officer motioned him to stop, and Simmons, 37, a Pacific Bell employee, complied.

Simmons said the officer asked him how fast he thought he was going. “I said, ‘Since you stopped me, why don’t you tell me,’ ” Simmons recalled. “He kept persisting. Finally, he said, ‘You were doing 45.’ I knew it was a speed trap, and I knew he wasn’t anywhere near his radar gun to actually see how fast I was going.”

Grudgingly, Simmons signed the speeding ticket and drove the four blocks to his home. He found his 35-mm camera, snapped on a zoom lens and went back to the scene to take photographs so that he might better argue the citation in court.

As he was shooting pictures at what he estimated was 75 yards from the police, Simmons was approached by two other officers who apparently had also been citing passing cars.

Simmons said one of the officers asked to see his identification. He said he asked the policeman why. Then the officer asked that Simmons hand him his camera. Simmons said he refused.

Simmons said that, as one of the officers pulled on the camera strap around his shoulder, the other officer put him in a wrist lock, bending his arm behind his back. They marched him to a police car, leaned him over the hood and removed his wallet from his hip pocket. They also took his camera.

Simmons was released without explanation a few minutes later. When his camera was returned, it was missing the roll of film that Simmons had shot of the officers at work.

Simmons filed an administrative claim against the city. He was awarded $5,000.

“I think they have a lot of inferior officers on the Police Department,” Simmons said of the episode.

The outcome of Simmons’ case was a rarity. Of the 1,679 administrative claims filed against the Police Department between 1981 and 1984 (488 were filed last year), only a handful were upheld.

One attorney, William A. Fogel of San Diego, estimates that fewer than 10% of all excessive force lawsuits filed against the San Diego Police Department prove successful. Most rulings are based on testimony or statements from the accused officer, whose version and presence in court frequently are more credible than than that of his accuser. In many cases, the officer’s observations are corroborated by other officers who may have been the only witnesses present.

Given the odds, some lawyers are hesitant to take on cases in which police abuse is alleged.

Fogel was skeptical when Morrieau A. Kennedy, 23, came to his office and claimed that he had been beaten Oct. 21 by policemen at a San Diego Chargers’ football game. But when Fogel interviewed eight witnesses to the incident, he changed his opinion.

Kennedy, then employed as a stadium parking lot attendant, said that he had received permission from his supervisor to enter the stadium and watch the Chargers play the Los Angeles Raiders. He said he crouched down against a concrete pillar in Section 1 of the stadium so as not to block the view of those behind him.

According to Fogel, what Kennedy didn’t know was that minutes earlier, in the same section, a San Diego policeman had had a verbal confrontation with several fans. The fans had complained that the officer was blocking their view of the field and asked him to move. There were words exchanged and, after the officer interrogated three of the fans, he left to return later with other officers.

“So here’s my client, scrunched down against the pillar, watching the game, and then suddenly, from behind without any warning, without any explanation, an arm appears around the pillar and snatches the kid back,” Fogel said.

The arm, according to witnesses, belonged to a San Diego police officer who Fogel said had approached from behind the pillar to put a choke hold on the 5-foot-3, 135-pound Kennedy. Kennedy would insist later that he had no idea he was being restrained by an officer.

“My client was picked up by his neck; his feet were kicking out and he was totally suspended in the air,” Fogel said. “The kid’s eyes were glassy, his tongue is hanging out, and he’s reaching with his free arm trying to get free and hits another officer in the nose. Two other officers converge and one of them kicks the kid in the groin.

“All of the witnesses are season ticket holders--they’re all white and the kid’s black--and they were all absolutely adamant that it was brutal, excessive force. The kid was never asked to identify himself or move . . . The witnesses all figured that (the officer) had done something to the kid because he couldn’t do something to the fans who told him to move.”

Kennedy spent the night in jail on suspicion of resisting arrest and battery on a police officer. Charges were never filed against him.

He filed an administrative claim against the city. It was dismissed.

Fogel said that soon after the Kennedy incident, one of the witnesses received a call from a police sergeant conducting a departmental investigation of the matter.

The sergeant “called one of these (witnesses) and the person told (the sergeant) what he told me,” Fogel said. “The sergeant started screaming at him, saying, ‘How could an officer do something like that?’--like something like that could never really happen.”

Electronics technician Robert Spahle, a die-hard Padres’ baseball fan, had similar thoughts on Oct. 7, when he went to Pacific Beach to celebrate the Padres’ playoffs victories with thousands of other fans who had gathered on the street that night.

Spahle, 29, said he was on the edge of a crowd of people on Mission Boulevard, when he was pushed by someone he said he didn’t see.

Spahle said he reflexively pushed back and was grabbed by two police officers who were among several attempting to clear the street.

The officers dragged Spahle to a police cruiser and pushed him in, twisting his left knee. Spahle said he was kept in the back of the cruiser for nearly an hour, then driven several blocks away and released--without ever being charging with a crime.

His knee throbbing, Spahle said, he asked the officers for a ride back to his truck, nearly a mile away. He said the officers responded, “This isn’t a taxi service.”

So Spahle walked.

That night, after he had returned home, Spahle’s leg stiffened and would not bend. He would undergo knee surgery that week and miss the next three weeks of work. He would spend three months undergoing physical rehabilitation.

“There were a thousand people blocking the whole lane of traffic that night,” Spahle recalled. “The police should have done something over the bullhorn, given people a little warning instead of just moving in and start pushing.

“If I was drunk and being a jerk, I wouldn’t have any complaints. But I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t putting up any resistance. I wasn’t a jerk.”

Spahle filed an administrative claim against the city. It was rejected.

He has sued for $100,000.

CITIZEN COMPLAINTS FILED AGAINST CALIFORNIA’S 10 LARGEST POLICE DEPARTMENTS

City Police Citizen Complaints* Filed/ Filed/ Complaints per Sustained Sustained 100 Officers (1983) (1984) (1984) Los Angeles 6,996 707/159 697/NA 10 San Francisco 1,926 2,400/150(est.) 2,300/26 119.4 San Diego 1,378 783/230 684/137 49.6 San Jose 919 156/29 160/8** 17.4 Oakland 621 615/80 479/66 77.1 Long Beach 597 78/54 NA 13.1*** Sacramento 501 107/23 115/18 23 Fresno 351 65/28 108/28 30.1 Anaheim 318 61/9 69/5 21.7 Santa Ana 315 210/29 176/37 55.9

* All complaints, ranging from rudeness to brutality. Standards for logging citizens’ complaints vary widely among departments. ** Eleven cases still under review. *** Based on 1983 complaints. SOURCE: Each department