2 Stations Led by Baca Known for Problems

The Los Angeles County sheriff’s stations with the worst records of police brutality, racism and resistance to female and black deputies were supervised for most of the past four years by the man who is soon to be responsible for all of the department’s operations--Sheriff-elect Lee Baca.

As the regional supervisor responsible for the troubled Century and Lennox substations, Baca said, his efforts to make changes were frustrated by the department’s bureaucracy.

Now, Baca says he will turn the tide of excessive force lawsuits, send women and blacks to Century, and undertake a 30-day investigation into the prevalence of racism in the jails and all 23 sheriff’s stations. He would like to institute a new personnel system that judges deputies on their ability to work with female colleagues and those of other races. He already has proposed the appointment of a civilian inspector general.

“I want to straighten this out as quickly as I can,” Baca said. “You’ve got to be a good internal watchdog. Because if we don’t do it for ourselves, someone is going to come in and do it for us. We can definitely improve and cut down on the number of lawsuits.”

Lawsuits and citizen complaints are considered an index of excessive force, just as police brutality is viewed as a trigger of riots and civil disturbance--two factors that make Lennox and Century, which police predominantly Latino and black areas of south-central Los Angeles County, a cause for concern.

According to the latest report by Merrick Bobb, who monitors the sheriff’s progress on departmental reform for the Board of Supervisors, the Lennox and Century stations accounted for nearly 70% of the 70 pending misconduct lawsuits filed against the department in the first half of 1997. Incidents involving deputies at the two stations cost 60% of the $1 million the county paid to settle excessive force cases in the last half of 1996, the June report said.

Although the number of homicides and aggravated assaults in the area patrolled by the Century station is roughly the same as the Watts southeast division of the LAPD, the sheriff’s deputies had more than three times the number of officer-involved shootings in 1996, according to the June report.

In post-Rodney King Los Angeles, “the shootings awakened concern about the increasingly serious problems of excessive and deadly force that were plaguing the Sheriff’s Department,” Bobb said.

Baca, who had no comment on the report when it was issued, now says he is in a position to address its concerns.

“I can command the solution as a sheriff that I could not command as a chief,” he said.

Disbelief and Complaints

Joe Scott, campaign spokesman for the late Sheriff Sherman Block, disputed the contention that Baca’s power was circumscribed when he supervised Lennox and Century.

“I find it hard to buy,” he said. “It’s hard to pass the buck. The question is, who is he blaming?”

Two lawsuits filed during the sheriff’s runoff campaign underscore the types of complaints from citizens in the south-central section of the county.

Gardena shopkeeper Rafael Navarro says Lennox deputies insulted him with a racial slur and bashed his head through the wall of his store in front of his wife and daughters Sept. 3. He is suing for $100 million.

Dwayne Nelson died in the back of a Lennox deputy’s patrol car a week later, restrained in a manner critics call hogtying--a practice prohibited by the Los Angeles Police Department because it can lead to asphyxiation. His family filed suit for $50 million.

Department spokesmen point out that litigation payouts have declined in recent years, from $17 million in fiscal 1995 to $3.7 million in 1996 and $1.6 million in 1997.

Earlier this year, however, the county was ordered to pay a breathtaking $23 million in damages for a lawsuit charging that deputies from the Lakewood station beat up a group of Samoan Americans at a 1989 bridal shower. The award, the largest ever assessed against an American law enforcement agency, was nearly six times what the city paid Rodney King.

A Warning for the Future

None of the 28 deputies sued has been disciplined by the department. Three of the 14 still on patrol have been promoted to sergeant, and others have become detectives and members of elite units--a state of affairs that civil rights experts say lends little credibility to the department’s claims that it is serious about weeding out abusive deputies.

“That many deputies reacting so inappropriately should have been a clear signal that some deep cultural issues need resolving,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer who is the former regional director of the Los Angeles office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal defense fund.

“When you’ve got that level of denial, that’s a very clear signal that that force can’t change itself,” she said.

Law enforcement and race relations experts repeatedly warn that perceived incidents of brutality have been a catalyst for civil unrest and riots, from Miami to Los Angeles.

“It builds up,” said Sandra Moore, an advisor for the California chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality who marched last month with hundreds of others in a downtown protest against police brutality. “There are warning signs, and people don’t seem to heed them. You increase pressure, and sooner or later it spills into the streets.”

In response to the concerns, Baca promises better diversity training and “non-English communication” with the community, as well as studies of the use of force and a reevaluation of controversial restraint procedures.

Tough Area to Patrol

“Every deputy must bond with the community,” Baca said. “There can’t be an occupation mentality, which some people have.”

Baca said he has “known of situations and examples of racism--individuals who demonstrated extreme insensitivity to other people. If I know of individual incidents, I know it can go on.”

In his 30-day investigation of racism, he said, he will visit all 55 command stations--stations, jails and other centers--to “talk about how to deal with the problems that are commonly described as racism.”

“Our society demands that we represent and serve everyone equally, and if that’s not being done, I want to find out about it,” Baca said.

The Sheriff’s Department has always blamed the high crime rate in areas patrolled by Lennox and Century for the complaints, along with an increasingly litigious society and the difficulties particular to law enforcement jobs.

Critics, however, say there are signs of a troubled police culture.

Century has a reputation for resisting the integration of female and black deputies and officers, according to the Bobb report. It said women and blacks in the department “may avoid” Century. Some black deputies, it said, “fear that they will not get a ‘fair shake’ at Century,” and some female deputies “believe that male deputies at Century do not want them there.”

Low Tolerance for Blacks, Women

If deputies display bias against their own colleagues, how can they be expected to police an increasingly diverse community? critics ask.

“If you’ve got a station where black and women deputies won’t go, where there are ‘no trespassing’ signs, you’ve got a deep problem,” Rice said. “You’ve got to have a really aggressive system of accountability, based on promotions and perks. And if the dinosaurs won’t change, you’ve got to give them an exit.”

Baca said he would like to see deputies graded on their acceptance of diversity in the ranks. If the union accepts it, the department will adopt a new personnel evaluation form that will judge teamwork skills partly on that basis.

He said he once ordered a woman to be named a supervisor at Century “and I was undermined by other commanders. That upset me very much.”

On Saturday, Baca visited Century and told deputies of the need to diversify the office. He visited Lennox on Monday.

Baca said he told deputies that he wanted their staff “to be representative of the area where they were working,” said Lt. Paul Tanaka, an aide who was present.

A shortage of Spanish-speaking officers is another problem at Century because more than half of the community speaks only Spanish with any fluency, according to Bobb’s report. Although 31% of Century’s deputies are Latino--the highest percentage of any sheriff’s station--only a few speak Spanish, it said.

At Lennox--which made headlines eight years ago when deputies there were indicted for stealing $1.4 million in seized drug cash--there is a gang of male deputies known as the “Grim Reapers,” according to a sheriff’s deputy and testimony in lawsuits and before the Civil Rights Commission in Washington.

The deputy said members have an ankle tattoo of a skeleton with a hood and scythe. In a 1994 court deposition, former sheriff’s Lt. Roger Clark said he had seen the tattoo.

“What you’re seeing at Lennox is a lot of young deputies with the good old boys mentality,” the deputy said. “The cowboy gunslingers are at Lennox.”

A reported member of the Twin Towers deputy “posse,” who was allegedly involved in the altercation that ended with the death of handcuffed prisoner Danny Smith--the subject of a $65-million lawsuit--sometimes went on nighttime “ride-alongs” with members of the Grim Reapers as they patrolled their neighborhood, the deputy said.

Some experts see a disturbing history behind the deputy gangs and the type of behavior the department has been ordered to root out.

The stations that Century replaced, Lynwood and Firestone, were alleged to have a history of a rogue sheriff’s deputy gang, the Vikings, which one federal judge called a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.”

Even though the Vikings cost the department $7.5 million in a lawsuit, many Vikings were not dismissed. Instead, they were transferred to other stations where deputies say they encouraged the heavy-handed behavior, giving an impression that department leadership tacitly tolerated such gangs.

One transferred Viking proudly displayed his tattoo and bragged about his Viking membership at his new station in Pomona Valley in 1993, according to a former deputy who requested anonymity. The deputy said it was such behavior that prompted him to retire early.

“If you don’t beat the crap out of people, the deputies who do [will] ride you and demean you,” the former deputy said. “If you don’t and they do, they can’t trust you because you can dime them off [inform] because you’re not dirty. You become an island and you keep your mouth shut.”

The victimization of non-abusive officers is a classic result of a promotion system that has failed to punish abusers, Rice said.

Abusers “know they won’t get punished,” Rice said. “Instead of forcing cops to bond on misconduct--they’ve all gotta be dirty so everyone is loyal and silent.”

Residents concede that deputies in the crime-ridden Lennox area have a tough job.

But they say some officers are notorious for creating incidents or escalating routine encounters into dangerous confrontations. They said some white and Latino deputies commonly address citizens with racial slurs.

Citizen complaints--like deputies’ personnel records--are secret under state law.

The few complaints The Times was able to obtain about Lennox involved everything from evidence planting to false arrest and racist language.

One of the deputies named in the complaints, Alfred Alvarez, is named with four other officers in a $17-million lawsuit that alleges the five victimized two black men, Barry Bryant and James Dailey, “in part because of their African American race.”

Computer student Gloria Wise says she was pulled out of a birthday party for her little boy by Alvarez and another deputy, Laughn Barth, after the deputies showed up to question a man in her front yard in 1997.

“I think he was looking for drugs and guns and she didn’t have any on her and he got upset,” said Randolph Ford, her uncle, a retired janitor who obtained the deputies’ names and lodged the complaint.

Wise said Alvarez led her to the patrol car and slammed her down on the hood.

Alvarez “was cussing me. He was like, ‘Shut your black a-- up,’ ” Wise said.

The officers handcuffed her and drove her around for at least two hours while they made their rounds--without calling in to notify the station that she had been arrested, she said.

“I was scared. I thought they were going to take me somewhere and do something to me,” Wise said.

At the Lennox station, she was strip-searched, and a black female deputy whispered to her to tell the deputies she is studying because they are suspicious of unemployed blacks, Wise said. Wise said she was told she would be held for two hours “so they could see if I was wanted by the FBI.”

Instead, she slept overnight on a cold concrete slab, she said. In the morning, she was told she had been charged with drinking alcohol in public, she said.

But the judge dismissed her case, saying the “offense” described on the police report--drinking beer on her porch--was not a crime, she said.

“Who are they serving and who are they protecting?” Wise said of the deputies who arrested her.

Researcher Robin Mayper contributed to this story.