Good Cops: Whistle blowing around the globe

Columnist Dan Bernstein of the Press Enterprise revisits one of the biggest stories from Election 2007, which was the city's "purchase" of the Kawa Market from the Guan family in order to clear the area for what it called, "affordable housing". Just call it the million dollar house that doesn't come with sunken marble tubs, lots of rooms with different names and golden faucets.

Before the house, there was possibly a "similar use" plan and before that, there was the market. Maybe you could just call it the market which might have helped define a city council election.

At any rate, Bernstein does lay out a chronology of sorts to relate what's happened since the bulldozers knocked down a long-time neighborhood fixture and a family's dream.



(excerpt)




"We are investing in the neighborhood," says the head of Riverside's Development Department. "The city was getting calls about the commercial business that was there. We look at it as neighborhood preservation. There's a cost associated with that." (Is there ever!)

Months ago, the city bought and leveled Kawa Market, a decades-old Mag Center mom 'n' popper owned by Lin Lin Guan and Hua Yu for about 15 years.

True enough, the city got complaints about the litter and parking habits of store clientele. The market also had passionately loyal customers who were dismayed by its demise, which appeared to have been expedited by threats of eminent domain. (The city eventually argued that the sales contract's eminent-domain clause gave the owners tax benefits.)

The city bought the market and a house next to it for $653,500, then kicked in $61,500 for fees and demolition. In July, the city approved a plan to move a century old Craftsman bungalow to the site and fix it up at a cost of $260K.

The city plans to sell the bungalow -- it hasn't been moved yet -- under its affordable-housing program. When the house beckons a first-time buyer, the city will have spent close to $1 million to put one affordable home on the market,






Leaving the La Sierra area is Sleepytime furniture store which is being sold to the Redevelopment Agency, which will then have the property developed into multiple businesses including stores, restaurants and offices by a Newport Beach-located development firm.

The council members representing the area apparently disliked the store which had attracted loyal customers during the past 20 years.


(excerpt, Press Enterprise)



For several years, he expressed a desire to stay put. But when the Redevelopment Agency early last year bought and tore down a small commercial building across La Sierra Avenue, at the southwest corner with Pierce Street, he knew it was time to begin negotiations.

"You can't sit it out forever," Deery said.

He went in expecting the agency to give him a lowball appraisal, but his own appraisal and the agency's appraisal were within 10 percent of each other, Deery said.

"I was surprised," he said.

Deery said he has no fixed plans but he'd like to re-open in Riverside, where he can count on the goodwill he has generated from his years in business.

As customer Anabell Sandoval bought a pair of twin mattresses for her daughters Friday, she offered proof of that goodwill, saying she has always felt Deery was trustworthy.

Plus, she said, "I like his prices."




At least he was able to avoid what would have likely been the threat of eminent domain if he had not been amiable to selling the land his business rested on. At least, he got what he felt was a good offer for that land. But most businesses that are relocated have trouble staying well, in business. Here's hoping that this is one business owner who sold his property to the city's middle-man agency in property transactions whose dream wasn't taken with it.





Hawthorne Elementary School's new campus opened in what some say a safer place according to the Press Enterprise. The old school has donated several of its classrooms to be used to hear civil trials in order to alleviate some of the backlog in the Riverside County Superior Court.







Whistle blowers here and there


Earlier entries in this series on law enforcement officers who have blown the whistle on corruption and other misconduct inside their agencies are listed below.



Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four






To many people, it might seem backward that law enforcement agencies which are trusted to enforce and uphold the law are actually retaliating against officers who report other officers who are committing crimes while on the job or committing other misconduct. But unfortunately it seems to be an almost universal problem, whether it's the officer's peers, supervisors or even the management that is harassing them through overt actions, ostracism, threats or retaliation for breaking the Code of Silence and blowing the whistle.

In many cases, officers who blow the whistle on inhouse misconduct leave the agencies that employed them, often with psychological stress retirements, but many others are fired or forced to resign. Many report illnesses and other symptoms associated with the stress of having gone against the Code of Silence, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Many of these cases occurred in the United States and examples of these cases have already been discussed here.

Here's several more examples of whistle blowing and its aftermath in this country.




In 1993, Det. Jeff Baird testified in front of the Mollen Commission which was convened to investigate corruption in the New York City Police Department much as the Knapp Commission had done so about a decade or so earlier. He did so because he thought he was doing the right thing as a police officer who is supposed to fight crime, not look the other way or cover up for officers in his ranks that were committing crimes. That's what departments say that they want their officers to do but do they really mean it? Do their reactions to this type of reporting bear that out?

Baird's career had begun promisingly enough, but it ended not too many years later due to him being ostracized by other officers and even having his life threatened, according to the Gotham Gazette. Baird's experience with his own agency is one answer to the questions asked above.



(excerpt)



“I was only interested in positive change,” said Baird, 49. “I didn’t think the retaliation would come.”



Little did he know as he found out later, facing retaliation so bad that he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and tried to apply for a psychological disability retirement. The city denied his claim, but in 2004 a judge scolded the city for doing so and reinstated his claim for further consideration.


(excerpt)


"In short, NYPD subjected [Baird] to an insidious 'death of a thousand cuts' in retaliation for his work on the Mollen Commission, with the Medical Board's refusal to even address the cause of his condition being the last gash. This the court will not condone.,” Judge Louis York reportedly said in his ruling in favor of Baird. The city is appealing.



The city actually has a whistle blower protection law and even a board to investigate corruption which arose from the Mollen Commission report but for a while, the board didn't even have members on it. What can a memberless board actually do? Was it the city's way of not really backing up its claim that it welcomed whistle blowing again corruption with its action?


This city was hardly alone in the gap between what it claimed it wanted officers to do and how it treated them after the fact.





In Oakland last year, the city paid out $625,000 to one of its officers, Keith Batt who blew the whistle on the "Rider" scandal, according to the Oakland Tribune.


(excerpt)


Kemper[Insurance] evaluated the risks going forward and made the decision that it made economic sense to settle the claim now," said Gregory Fox, an attorney with San Francisco-based Bertrand, Fox and Elliot, who was hired to represent the city. "It was an opportunity for us to resolve the rest of these cases and allow the department to move forward."

Batt's allegations were made against four officers who patrolled the streets of West Oakland during overnight shifts. Batt said the officers made false police reports, beat suspects and planted evidence on residents to trump up arrests.

Four police officers were eventually arrested and charged for a host of crimes related to Batt's complaints, but none were ever convicted of the crimes despite two separate trials.



After speaking out against the officers implicated in the scandal, Batt received death threats from at least one of them and was run out of the department. He now works as a police officer in another city. Not an uncommon outcome for whistle blowers from different law enforcement agencies. Some of them may actually remain law enforcement officers but nearly all of them leave or are run out of their agencies because they broke the Code of Silence on serious and even criminal misconduct.


Like the one above, some of them even sue the cities and counties that oversee the agencies where they work and the payouts can be very large.


In October 2007, Darla Abbatiello who was employed by Kauai Police Department received a $980,000 settlement after she filed a complaint that she was retaliated against after reporting that a sergeant was selling protection to drug dealers.



Not surprisingly the involved sergeant threatened her and she was stressed to the point of being ill. She ultimately transferred to another section of the department but saw her paycheck take a big cut. She said that the actions taken against her were in violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act.


But the agency didn't seem to care about that. Perhaps it existed on paper only, backed up with nothing substantial except that it would be the officer who would pay the price if they actually utilized a process set up for them or so they might have believed.



The above examples all happened in this country but what was really striking is that this kind of situation is universal in that it happens in other countries around the globe and the stories that are told by whistle blowing police officers in those countries match stories told in this country in many details. For one thing, it appears that the Code of Silence is a world-wide phenomenon and so is the punishment given to officers who break it.



Accounts of police officers getting harassed, ostracized and threatened by others inside their departments are given by those who work in law enforcement agencies outside the United States. Here are several examples from Canada and Australia, two nations thousands of miles apart.





In 2006, Toronto Police Department Sgt. Jim Cassells discovered that any examination of corruption within his police department would have to wait. Cassell was a whistle blower who had brought misdeeds by other officers working in a drug squad inside his department to light.

Leo Kinahan, the attorney who represents Cassells had some strong words.



(excerpt, Canadian Broadcasting Company)





"That's just passing the buck," he said. "That's turning around saying that in X number of years this will hopefully become a dead issue."

He says the board hopes people will forget about the scandal and it will all "just fade away quietly."

In May, Cassells said police brass had for years been covering up, refusing to investigate or burying cases of alleged police brutality, public complaints and internal corruption.



Cassells and another officer, Neal Ward who blew the whistle said that doing so cause serious problems with their health. Both were assigned to investigate allegations of inhouse corruption, but doing so led to feelings of intense isolation from other officers along with a sense of not being supported by their management.



(excerpt, CBC)


"Everybody that was on that task force suffered some physical ailment in one way or other. And I mean everybody," he told CBC News.


Ward ended up in hospital because of a stress-related illness and he claimed many others suffered from stress during their time on the task force.

"It was worry," said Ward. "I ended up in hospital. I wasn't sleeping."

"[The work] alienates one from his peers," he said. "It's a hard, hard job looking at officers and looking at their work under a microscope."



Many more links on the problems in Toronto's police department are here.







In New South Wales, Australia, former officer, Trevor Haken still lives in fear one decade after testifying in front of a commission, according to Australian's Story



(excerpt)



"I would have been far better off not going on side with the Royal Commission and holding the line with other members of the New South Wales police force," he told ABC TV's Australian Story.

"I still feel, and I think I always will feel, that my life is in danger because of the number of people that I implicated at the royal commission.

"I'm basically not a creature of habit anymore. I live life as though I'm being followed all the time. I drive looking out of the rear-view mirror all the time. I don't shop in the same shopping centre twice."



Haken began doing work for those investigating a huge scandal involving narcotics detectives in his department only after he was given a choice between doing that and facing criminal prosecution. At that point, Haken said there was nothing illegal that he hadn't been doing, including lying, writing false reports and stealing.

He began doing relatively minor misconduct but that didn't last for long.



(excerpt)



"When you start off into corrupt practice it doesn't take very much to go up the ladder. And the further you go up the ladder, the more acceptable things become until you reach a point where there's nothing that isn't acceptable," he said.




After word got out what he was doing, his life and those of his family members were threatened to the extent that they all to enter into the witness protection program, only his family went to a separate location in another country. In retrospect, he wishes he had gone to prison several years rather than be in hiding for the rest of his life because he decided to tell the truth even after being pushed into a corner.







Larry Gaines, a Criminal Justice professor at the California State University, San Bernardino wrote a well-known text book on criminal justice and law enforcement titled, Policing in America along with Victor E. Kappeler and Joseph B. Vaughn.

It's pretty comprehensive in the police-related issues that it addresses and includes sections on police culture, ethics, the history of policing in this country and training issues. If Gaines' name sounds familiar, it may be because the Riverside Police Department hired him as a consultant for several years to analyze the raw statistical data collected by police officers who conducted traffic stops of motor vehicles on an annual basis.

Gaines even appeared at a public forum sponsored by the Human Relations Commission in 2005 to discuss one of his reports to commissioners and community members.

Here are some statistics provided from his book on the dollars and cents cost of police misconduct in several large-sized law enforcement agencies. The links refer back to reports conducted by the Human Rights Watch under its Shielded from Justice series in the 1990s.



Cost of Police Misconduct in Several Cities in the United States


(source: Policing in America, Larry K. Gaines, Victor E. Kappeler and Joseph B. Vaughn)



Chicago 1991-94 $29 million excessive force, false arrest

Detroit 1986-97 $100 million all law suits

Los Angeles 1991-95 $179.2 million excludes traffic

Minneapolis 1994 $1.4 million excessive force, false arrest

New York City 1994-95 $44 million excludes traffic

Philadelphia 1994-95 $20 million unknown

San Francisco 1993-95 $1.9 million settlements

Washington, D.C. 1993-95 $4.1 million false arrest only






High-Risk Ares of Law Enforcement Liability



(source: Policing in America)



Liabilities of Officers



Negligent operation of police vehicles

Negligent failure to arrest drunk drivers

Negligent failure to protect crime victims

Failure to respond to calls for assistance

Failure to restrain criminal offenders

Failure to investigate

Negligent service at accident scenes




Liabilities of Supervisors



Negligent hiring

Negligent supervision

Failure to direct officer

Negligent assignment

Negligent entrustment

Negligent retention of officers

Failure to discipline





Whether or not the New York City Police Department officers who shot and killed Sean Bell in 2006 are tried in Queens may depend on how the prosecutor perceives advertisements taken out by the department's labor union according to the New York Daily News.



(excerpt)



Now the ads could be used to fight claims by the lawyers of the indicted detectives that negative media coverage has made it impossible to find a fair jury pool in Queens, sources said. The lawyers announced late last month they would ask the state Supreme Court's Appellate Division in Brooklyn to move the trial elsewhere. The motion has not yet been filed. The district attorney's office declined to comment.