When an apple orchard goes bad

There's trouble in Maywood, a city in Los Angeles County involving its police department.

Only 37 officers on the force, but many of them were either fired for prior misconduct or had failed to satisfactorily complete training programs while at other law enforcement agencies before coming to Maywood, according to an article written in the Los Angeles Times.

About one-third of the department's officers have gotten into trouble before being hired and several officers have been charged with criminal offenses after being hired by the city. This article should be must reading for everyone because it truly is the most pathetic account of a law enforcement agency gone amok because it hired people to be officers who should never have been hired. It doesn't get much worse than this. At least, not since the shutdown of Adelanto's police department in the 1990s.


Maywood hire police with past troubles


Officers coming to Maywood were fired by other Los Angeles county agencies including the Los Angeles Police Department for among other things, driving drunk and shooting their firearms in a negligent fashion or beating inmates in the jails. Even the current chief of the Maywood police department was fired from another police department after getting convicted of verbally threatening his girlfriend. This was of course after he had been convicted by a jury for battering the same girlfriend, but the case was overturned because of issues with the jury deliberations. Still this chief heads an agency that is filled with officers who had previously been fired for engaging in one form or misconduct or another which had led to it earning the nickname, the "department of second chances".

Unfortunately, many of these officers have been using these second chances to get into further trouble in their new jobs.

The city officials in Maywood seem nonchalant about their police department's history.


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"Are there things that are bad in our department? I would venture to say that there are," said Maywood City Councilman Samuel Peña.

"But I think you would find bad things in other departments if you looked closely at them…. There are bad apples in every department."



Of course, if it's true that every law enforcement agency has its "bad apples", it seems that Maywood Police Department has a whole orchard of them. Not surprisingly, the department has attracted the attention of investigators and agencies from all over and they are all lining up to conduct probes of this department. The interested agencies at the moment include the FBI, the State Attorney General's office and the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office.

State Attorney General Jerry Brown opened a pattern and practice investigation into the department to address allegations of racism, sexual harassment and excessive force. The Los Angeles Times covered this announcement in an article earlier last month. A similar announcement had been made about Riverside's own police department eight years earlier.


State Attorney General Jerry Brown to probe department from "top to bottom"



Not surprising given the backgrounds of its officers, the Maywood Police Department currently has allegations of misconduct surfacing as well by the dozens.

Here's a litany of the latest scandals to rock the Maywood Police Department which will keep all three of these agencies quite busy in conducting their investigations.


(excerpt)


The brewing scandal has included accusations that police and city leaders were on the take from the owner of a local tow company;

that a longtime officer was extorting sex from relatives of a criminal fugitive;

that a police officer tried to run over the president of the Maywood Police Commission in the parking lot of City Hall;

that an officer impregnated a teenage police explorer;

and that officers had covered up the truth surrounding a fatal police shooting that resulted in a $2.3-million legal settlement.



It gets even better. The chief has been a no-show at the office since late last year, and the officer hired to replace him is currently under investigation for misconduct as well. The current acting chief has criminal conduct in his own background. And so on, and it does go on and on, because also in the cast of misfits in this law enforcement agency are officers who were turned down by 25 other police departments for past criminal conduct and at least one former LAPD officer who was busted in the Rampart scandal. Officers dismissed by other departments for exhibiting "bizarre behavior" and trying to scam the workman's compensation system have also found jobs in Maywood.

It's like if you invited a reunion of police officers who had either been fired or flunked out of other law enforcement agencies, Maywood would be the venue. Now, even the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has woken up and is starting to ask questions about how so many officers with histories of serious problems ended up in one place.

Attorney Merrick Bobb, the president of PARC who often has worked with representatives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, had strong words about the mess that is the Maywood Police Department.

(excerpt)


"Everything that could go wrong seems to have gone wrong at Maywood," said lawyer Merrick Bobb, a law enforcement expert who has consulted with the U.S. Department of Justice on policing practices. "This department needs to be put into receivership."


It probably will be, once the multitude of investigations are completed, or it may wind up contracting its services from the county's law enforcement agency much like Compton did several years ago when its department faced serious issues of its own.

Bobb said that what had happened in Maywood was the strongest argument so far as to why it was important to revisit the issue of the California State Supreme Court's ruling on the Copley court case, something that the state legislature will be doing this month.


(excerpt)


"The phenomenon of misfit cops going from agency to agency is a terribly serious one," Bobb said. "It makes for one of the strongest arguments for public access to discipline records of police misconduct."



Maywood is probably among the worst examples of a problem that is hitting nationwide involving small and medium law enforcement agencies that have been hiring police officers who had been fired from other departments for misconduct including criminal behavior. Other police officers gone bad came into their positions without prior law enforcement experience but still had criminal records anyway.

A small law enforcement agency in South Carolina discovered last year that one of the police officers it had hired was a registered sex offender. That wasn't an anomaly because in Alabama, a police officer hired by the Blountsville Police Department also turned out to be a registered sex offender.


Former police officer pleads guilty to violating sex notification law



Officer John Langston had already been fired from another agency after he was convicted of molesting a young girl. He was hired by another police department and worked there for several months amid protests before finding employment in Blountsville. He was recently sentenced to probation for failure to notify the city that employed him to police its streets that he was a registered sex offender.


The incidents in Maywood, Blountsville and other cities and towns show what happens when there's a complete lack of accountability over a law enforcement agency's operations including its hiring practices by the department's management and the city that oversees it. These agencies lack the mechanisms in place to steer them on courses that don't descend into chaos and create a "free for all" atmosphere where officers become cowboys who do what they please even if that involves committing crimes or abusing members of the public which officers in Maywood clearly did.

And like with any poorly run law enforcement agency that has a dysfunctional relationship with its local government, all the checks and balances had to come from outside agencies attracted by the litany of scandals from a department that employs less than 50 police officers. Before the city of Maywood starts crying about "outside agitators", its leadership should ask itself why it was apparently asleep at the wheel when all this corruption and misconduct was going on.

Still, the sad episode involving Maywood also should shed light on a growing problem in this country involving small and medium sized law enforcement agencies in terms of the problems they have filling their ranks with qualified individuals.

In fact, most small and medium sized agencies continuously struggle to hire enough officers to staff them and they often fail to find qualified applicants because most of the best prospects are seeking employment with larger law enforcement agencies that can pay them higher salaries and offer better employment benefits than their smaller counterparts.

In addition, the recruiting wars between the larger agencies within a specific region often bleed the few experienced and qualified officers that these smaller law enforcement agencies existing within that same region, employ. In Los Angeles County, it's the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who are spending thousands of dollars trying to fill their ranks with the best qualified applicants they can find.

Many smaller departments have seen officers in their ranks jump ship in groups and then have been left with the arduous and expensive task of trying to replace them.

Many of these departments relax their hiring standards including the practice of conducting background checks, which can be expensive and time-extensive for law enforcement agencies to do. However, in the long run, it's more expensive for the cities and counties that oversee these departments when these checks aren't properly conducted.

Slacking on the background checks makes it easier for registered sex offenders and other individuals with misconduct on their records to get jobs at these departments. Not that it appears most of these departments care either way.

Even when corrution's not a serious issue with police departments, they still struggle with keeping their numbers up and their officer to citizen ratio low.

UCLA's police department hired Officer Terrence Duren after he had been fired from Long Beach Police Department for failing to pass the probationary period. Soon enough, Duren was involved in an onduty shooting, an onduty assault which led to his second firing(though he was reinstated in the courts) and finally, his controversial tasing of a UCLA student last year.


Locally, Oceanside's police department had the lowest ratio of police officers to city residents in San Diego County, because it was losing many of its experienced officers and detectives to larger police departments and was having a difficult time replacing them. In fact, several years ago, four of that agency's officers lateraled to the Riverside Police Department where they were paid higher salaries, even though several of them were demoted to the officer level during the process.

(excerpt)


In the last four years, Anderson said, at least 14 experienced officers have left Oceanside for other law enforcement agencies in North County and Riverside County, seeking better pay, shorter commutes, and an environment with higher morale. The department, he said, normally loses about two to three officers a year to other agencies.

Last year, seven veteran officers left, leaving the department with no choice but to fill their vacancies with inexperienced officers, Anderson said. Those include Officer Julian Hutzler, a former president of the Oceanside Police Officers Association, who left last year for the Riverside Police Department.

Three former Oceanside detectives ---- Aaron Miller, Mike Barney and Chad Milby ---- all with six to eight years of experience, joined the Riverside Police Department last year as patrol officers for higher pay and better morale, Milby and Barney said. Those former detectives are paid between $36 and $39 an hour in Riverside, which is the same pay as a sergeant in Oceanside, Anderson said.



Five departures might not seem like many to a larger police department but to a smaller one, they can be devastating.

Though hiring officers from another agency can be a two-way street for difficulties.

The hiring of lateral officers is often fraught with difficulty even for law enforcement agencies who more or less have their act together, because the hiring agencies are often restricted in their access to information on the prospective hires including their disciplinary records. Also, the agency that employs the officers may be less than honest about problems it has had with these officers, because it is eager to get rid of them if they are officers who have caused serious problems within the agency or have put the city or county at risk of civil liability. Representatives from the agency employing these officers might tell their counterparts at the hiring agency that these officers don't have problems and have good records even if that's not true. So often the hiring agencies don't know exactly who or what they are getting.

Some police officers have gone from one agency to the next over a relatively short period of time for undisclosed reasons, including a Riverside Police Department officer who last week testified in a trial that he had been to two other law enforcement agencies during a six year period before coming to Riverside.

In the hiring guidelines for the Riverside Police Department, are provisions to look carefully at officers who have worked at two or more law enforcement agencies during a short period of time.

Former Riverside Police Department officer, David Hackman's career went something like this. He started out working for the Los Angeles Police Department, before moving to Riverside. In 1999, Hackman was suspended for 30 days for racist remarks he made in connection with the shooting of Tyisha Miller. He resigned from the Riverside Police Department in May 2000 and went to work for Hollister Police Department before leaving that job to work at San Benito County Sheriff's Department where he soon was given a medical disability retirement from the county after a controversial incident that resulted in the county paying damages on a lawsuit filed in relation to it and other legal troubles further south.

In 2005, Hackman got into trouble when he was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon after an incident at Anaheim baseball stadium which left a man with a fractured skull.

However, in 2005, Riverside also reduced its hiring and screening period from six months to six weeks as part of a package that also included hiring incentives. People worried that if the hiring period was shortened, that it would be the background checks and psychological evaluations which would see their corners cut. Other law enforcement agencies who did this to quickly fill their ranks with officers in cities like Washington, D.C. and counties such as Dade County in Florida wound up having to go out and arrest many of their own officers for criminal conduct within two years after changing their rules. Several years spent walking on eggshells is a long time.

Hiring good, qualified officers doesn't allow for taking shortcuts nor should it. The same goes to creating an accountable department that is held to that by the department's leadership, the city's and the community. The lessons that come out of the situation involving Maywood Police Department are ignored at everyone's peril.




In Santa Rosa, California, community members are pressing for the creation of a civilian review board seven years after the Santa Rosa City Council failed to act on a recommendation to create one, according to an article in the Press Democrat.


Supporters say civilian review is long overdue


The latest push is being catalyzed by the recent shooting of a 16 year old boy who was mentally ill.

(excerpt)


"The time is right, but it's long overdue," said Santa Rosa Junior College trustee Marsha Vas Dupre, a former Santa Rosa city councilwoman who favors civilian review. "I just don't want to see any more harm come to people who really need mental health intervention, let alone putting our law enforcement in harm's way."


Not that it will be easy because the city leadership is just as adamant against it as it was years ago. But the community still pushes as others have done before it despite the obstacles in its path.