Complaints About Force, Bias Leveled at Deputies

In a tiny no-man’s land of a neighborhood in the center of the San Gabriel Valley, a battle is raging between Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and dozens of residents over the level of force being used to fight crime in the low-income, mostly minority community.

To officers, this half-square-mile unincorporated pocket--unclaimed by the surrounding cities of Monrovia, Duarte, Arcadia or Irwindale--is hostile turf.

Cocaine dealing is rampant, street gangs have spray-painted graffiti threatening police and twice this summer deputies have had to dodge gunfire. They have responded with predawn raids, beefed-up patrols and frequent stops of anyone deemed suspicious.

But many residents of the squat stucco homes and narrow, tree-lined streets contend that the Sheriff’s Department is waging war against an entire neighborhood. The area’s large black population, in particular, has complained about harassment, racial slurs, false arrests, illegal searches and unprovoked beatings.

In the last three years, six black residents and one Latino have filed lawsuits or claims charging deputies with excessive force, according to court records and interviews with their attorneys. Their allegations range from cracked ribs to busted heads to being shot in the genitals with an electric stun gun.

At least a dozen other residents of the neighborhood, sometimes known as unincorporated Duarte, say they are angry about a 5 a.m. raid on June 6 that they contend left homes trashed, possessions destroyed and families shaken.

“It was humiliating,” said Terrence Lee, 29, who appeared half-naked in photographs plastered on the front page of a local paper as he was led handcuffed from his home. He said he spent a night in jail on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder and was released without charges the next day.

“I got kids, I’m a family man and I’m a taxpayer,” said Lee, a part-time junk hauler who acknowledges that he has a criminal record. “Just because I’m black and live in this neighborhood I have to be subjected to things that citizens in other communities don’t have to.”

Few of the suits have been resolved, and the department has denied that the accused officers acted improperly. Sheriff Sherman Block has repeatedly defended his deputies against such charges, attributing the allegations to an increasingly litigious and violent society.

In fiscal 1988-89, the last year for which figures are available, 275 major crimes were recorded in the neighborhood--a number equal to nearly seven felonies per block.

But black leaders and attorneys say the neighborhood has become a microcosm of the strained relationship between the Sheriff’s Department and minority communities throughout the county, where 151 excessive-force lawsuits were filed against deputies last year and $3 million was paid out in jury awards or settlements.

“They come in here with this Gestapo-type, blanket approach . . . like they’re going to an all-out riot,” said David Hall, president of the local chapter of the NAACP.

Officials at the sheriff’s substation in Temple City, which has jurisdiction over the community, said last week that they were unaware there had been so many complaints.

“We don’t want to alienate the good people down there,” said Sgt. Eugene Leslie, who heads the station’s new anti-gang unit. The unit targeted the neighborhood when it began operations Aug. 1. “If we’re not meeting our mission, then we need to maybe make some changes.”

Sheriff’s Division Chief Roy Brown, head of field operations for the region that includes the Temple City substation, said he was disturbed that residents had not first talked with the department before airing their grievances in court and in the press.

“If what you are telling me is true . . . then, yes, I’m concerned,” Brown said. “That isn’t the kind of policing we want to do. But unless someone tells us, we don’t know what they’re thinking or what their perception is.”

Some residents say they have been reluctant to complain because they do not believe that it will do any good. Others, such Geraldine Monroe, 54, say they have tried but were discouraged by desk officers at the Temple City substation.

“The man on the phone just told me, ‘Whatever happened that day, you deserved it,’ ” said Monroe, who contends that as part of the June 6 raid, deputies broke into her house, scattered her clothes on the floor and dumped canisters of sugar and flour on top. “Then he hung up.”

Like many high-crime pockets of suburban Los Angeles, the transformation of this corner of town has been relatively sudden, officials in neighboring cities say.

In the 1950s, the area’s 214 acres--bounded roughly by California, Euclid and Mountain avenues and Van Meter Street--were home to little more than orange groves. The subdivisions that came after the Korean War provided attractive, high-quality housing for more than 1,000 middle-class families.

But with time, the community followed a typical pattern. Absentee landlords allowed properties to deteriorate; poorer, mostly minority families bought up the homes, and more-affluent white residents fled.

The result, city officials say, is an isolated corner of county land that lacks needed public services and that nobody wants to annex.

“Much of this area feels like it has fallen between the cracks,” said Donald Hopper, the director of community development in neighboring Monrovia. “It must be very frustrating to the upstanding, law-abiding citizens there who would like to have the quality of neighborhood they see all around them.”

Many of those residents say tensions have been high since 1982, when a sheriff’s deputy shot a pregnant woman named DeLois Young during an illegal raid on her house a few blocks across the city line in Duarte. Young, then 22, survived, but her 8-month-old fetus was killed.

The deputy, Robert E. Armstrong, was found guilty of second-degree murder, but his conviction was reduced to involuntary manslaughter by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. Although an appellate court later reinstated the murder conviction, Armstrong served just eight months in County Jail.

Young and her family, who filed a $10-million claim against the county, settled the suit for $350,000.

“From that point, everything’s been going progressively downhill,” said Don Baity, 49, a longtime resident who served on the short-lived Community Awareness Committee, formed after the shooting to smooth racial tensions.

“Even if a portion of what they’re saying is true, it’s as if the community is under siege,” said Thomas J. White, an attorney representing another alleged beating victim. “The officers are over-zealous in whatever they’re doing, and even presuming what they’re doing is legal, the force they use is definitely unreasonable.”

The county counsel’s office, responsible for defending the Sheriff’s Department, declined to discuss the specifics of any case. But the office usually maintains that any injury to a suspect was due to his or her own reckless or unlawful behavior, not that of a deputy.

“Generally speaking, if there was an altercation of some type, the position of deputies is that only necessary force was used,” said Louis V. Aguilar, principal deputy county counsel.