Hawthorne Police Chief Stonebraker to Retire Next Year

The same day he asked the Hawthorne City Council to increase the city’s police force by 19 officers, Police Chief Kenneth R. Stonebraker was privately telling city officials that he plans to retire next July.

Stonebraker, 55, who has spent 30 years with the Police Department, the last eight as chief, indicated that he wanted to ensure that the city had enough officers and enough time to select a chief to lead them.

He told City Manager R. Kenneth Jue before Monday’s council meeting that he had decided to retire from his $74,000-a-year-job because he is ready for a life of leisure.

“I’ve been at this police chief thing now for eight years, and it’s a rough job,” he said. “It’s not as though you answer calls on robbery suspects or shootings, but there is a lot of pressure on you all the time. . . . I guess you just get tired.”

Stonebraker said he has no plans to continue doing police work.

Mayor Betty J. Ainsworth said she will be sorry to see Stonebraker go because he has worked tirelessly and has done an outstanding job. In particular, she cited the way he organized a gang detail and a truancy abatement program without adding personnel.

Jue also praised Stonebraker’s work: “He has done a very capable job under some very tough circumstances.”

Stonebraker joined the department in 1958 as a reserve officer and was sworn in as a regular policeman three years later. He moved up through the ranks and was appointed acting chief in November, 1980, when Chief Colman Young retired. Stonebraker was named chief in April, 1981.

In an interview Thursday, Stonebraker said his administration has been marked by accomplishments and problems.

He pointed with pride to a computerized criminal investigation system, containing a bank of fingerprints and facial pictures, that has speeded identification of suspects. The program has been so successful that several other South Bay police departments, including El Segundo, Hermosa Beach and Gardena, are using it, he said.

But Stonebraker acknowledged that in recent years the Police Department has been accused of brutality and racism.

He said his department has vigorously investigated the brutality claims against it and has turned over to the district attorney a few cases in which the claims were deemed legitimate.

And he said an apparent surge of brutality claims in the early 1980s was due to a more scrupulous reporting system he installed when he became chief.

Of 26 claims of police brutality against Hawthorne police that were investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice over a 2-year period in the early 1980s, Stonebraker said, only one was found to have legal merit, and the Police Department had already conceded its validity and submitted it to the district attorney’s office. In that case, Jue said, the city was ordered last October to pay the victim $260,000 in damages.

More recently, Jue said, there has been another upswing in police brutality claims, with two filed in separate incidents in the last year.

But city officials this week pointed to a third incident, in June, as an example of the department’s vigilance against police abuses.

In that incident, Officer John Garza, 25, has been accused by fellow officers of assaulting a 17-year-old suspect. Garza, who is on paid leave, was arraigned Thursday on two felony assault charges.

Charges of racism have also been publicly leveled at the department by Hawthorne police Sgt. Don Jackson.

Stonebraker denied that racism is any more prevalent in the Hawthorne department than anywhere else in the nation. “We are no different than any other police department or any other business (in respect to racism),” he said.

Despite these problems, Ainsworth said Stonebraker has the council’s full support for his plan to expand the police force from 85 sworn officers to 104. She said the council will consider putting a tax measure on the November ballot to raise funds for the expansion, which would cost about $2.5 million the first year.

Stonebraker said he hopes to increase the force so that it can better deal with increasing gang- and narcotics-related crime. In the last decade, Hawthorne’s population has grown by 11,000 to the current 67,000, but the city has fewer police officers now than it had a few years ago, he said.