Police-Community Relations Panel Gets Earful

The citizen advisory group charged with assessing the state of police-community relations in San Diego got an earful Thursday night when Southeast San Diego residents turned out 200 strong and pronounced the condition of relations nil.

“I don’t think in this neighborhood there are any relations between citizens and the police,” Janet Aburto informed the Citizens Advisory Board on Police-Community Relations. Her opinion was repeated over and over at the public forum in Encanto.

“How can we have relations when there’s no one there?” she continued. “ . . . I haven’t seen a police car in our neighborhood for two years, unless it came through at night.” Aburto asked how there could be good relations “when you’re told (by the police) that the treatment you received is because you live in Southeast: ‘We know how to treat people who live in Southeast.’ ”

“People are arming themselves,” warned Cleo Malone, director of a Southeast San Diego drug treatment program. “If they want to and the time is right, those same weapons will be used in a variety of ways. So please, please, please do something. Quickly.”

The forum, held in the auditorium of O’Farrell High School, was the third in a series of eight that the board is holding in an effort to improve police relations and ease tensions, especially in communities such as Southeast.

The heavy turnout was in sharp contrast to the half-dozen city residents who showed up at the first forum in Rancho Bernardo, last month. Also in contrast to the approval voiced in Rancho Bernardo was the anguish evident in almost every comment made Thursday night.

“The state of police-community relations . . . at the very best it is strained, strained to the breaking point,” Gregory Knoll, director of the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, said in an impassioned plea that brought long applause.

” . . . I keep being told (by officials) ‘We’re not getting any complaints,’ ” Knoll continued. “To us, that is part and parcel of the problem. There are reasons that people don’t report complaints. Those reasons are as tragic as the reasons for the complaints. Please do not simply sit by and assume there is no problem. This is just another indication of how deep and tragic this situation is.”

Many testified they never saw police officers in their neighborhoods, and that when they did, the police treated them more as suspects than as victims. They said dispatchers asked their skin color and ignored their complaints, and they charged that police exhibited blatant bias.

Blacks and whites alike echoed the same complaints, urging the advisory board to look closely at police officers’ training. Almost universally, they said officers did not know how to deal with minority communities, and some traced that tendency to the top.

“Complaining to the Police Department about official misconduct is about as effective as complaining to a fox about stolen chickens,” said Fred Mitchell, a county mental health worker who lived in Southeast for a decade before moving to Golden Hill.

He pronounced police-community relations “about on a par with Johannesburg.”

“We are at war,” said Rashad Shareef of Logan Heights. “Police come into Southeast with a John Wayne-type mentality.”

Of the panel, he said, “I look at this as an appeasement. It satisfies certain political whims but after this is over there will be nothing. This relationship cannot be continued; there will be more tragedies.”

There were calls for the resignation of Police Chief Bill Kolender and for statistical analyses of the numbers of citizens killed by police during his tenure. Others urged an independent review of residents’ complaints against police and new systems for weeding out officers with records of psychiatric trouble and violence.

Among those calling for quick removal of officers with psychiatric disabilities was Doug Seymour, a former reserve intelligence officer who now tracks civil-rights abuses in the department and elsewhere. Seymour argued that the department leadership’s unwillingness to grant disability pension has resulted in disturbed and unqualified officers remaining on the force.

Seymour called for a system that would provide for removal of officers who submit notice of job-related stress injuries. He urged paid leave rather than “demeaning” light duty; treatment toward rehabilitation rather than “elimination,” and an outside mediator to enforce these policies.

Knoll urged a revised complaint policy, under which all complainants would immediately receive a copy of his or her complaint as proof of filing and all complaints would be answered within 30 days. He called for police officers to take the initiative in attending community functions, and regular “walk-alongs--with regular officers, not community relations officers.”

Attending the forum were Mayor Maureen O’Connor and council members William Jones, who represents Southeast, and Ed Struiksma. O’Connor and Jones had come straight from an earlier community meeting in another Southeast neighborhood where the subject was drugs.

At that meeting, too, the turnout was heavy--more than 100 people jammed into a steamy meeting room in a YMCA. Some of the audience had come on breaks from work; others brought children and grandparents.

Police Chief Kolender called on the community to assist the police in reporting the drug crimes that have skyrocketed in the community. But the residents called back that they needed more help, that they were scared and the situation was out of hand.

“It is obvious that this has gotten totally out of control,” said Howard McIntyre, a 35-year-old construction worker. “It’s up to us. . . . It’s up to us to band together and kill this monster called drugs.”

The advisory board that held the later forum was born last year out of the fatal run-in between the police and Sagon Penn in Southeast San Diego in March, 1985, and the shooting of an emotionally disturbed college student in San Carlos one week later. It has been controversial since it was conceived.

Critics of the police, particularly blacks in Southeast San Diego, had asked for a citizens’ review board. They wanted an independent group empowered to investigate reports of police misconduct and influence police policies, much like a county grand jury.

But Kolender insisted that the panel be barred from setting policy or ruling on the appropriateness of specific police actions. He dismissed the idea of a review board as a potential “kangaroo court” and argued that the panel should not be permanent.

What emerged in July, 1985, was a compromise--a strictly advisory body with a two-year life span. Its 13 members, appointed by the San Diego City Council, include bankers, a lawyer, academics, social service workers and the president of the San Diego Police Officers Assn.

Assistant Police Chief Robert Burgreen represents the Police Department on the committee as a non-voting member.

The group’s charge is to determine whether police policies are “sensitive, effective and responsive to the needs of the city.” They may also offer general policy recommendations, which the department is under no obligation to accept.

Already, the panel and its subcommittees have begun making recommendations based on testi mony at a series of early subcommittee meetings. One, approved by City Manager Sylvester Murray, would require that Kolender make semiannual reports to the City Council on citizen complaints about police behavior.

Kolender, who has said he has “no problem” with the proposal and that he is already “doing that kind of thing,” has expressed pleasure with the panel’s performance so far. Board members have said they have tried to keep the meetings from becoming an opportunity for bitter, public attacks on the police.

Asked at Thursday’s hearing whether he had confidence that the advisory board might act on the pleadings made Thursday night, Gregory Knoll said, “I’ve been around a long time and it’s very difficult for me at any point in time to be cynical. If I was cynical, I would have left the Legal Aid Society before my 13 years are up. I’m forever optimistic.”

But Thomas Penn, the father of Sagon Penn, recently acquitted of charges of killing a police officer in a scuffle, said he was not planning to speak: “I have a lot I could say, but nobody’s listening.”

Standing outside the school before the hearing, eating a box of fried chicken he referred to as “that old gospel bird,” Thomas Penn said, “It’s worthwhile, but whether anything will come of it, I don’t know. . . . I don’t think the police can police police. If it’s going to be in the hands of the board, then let the board handle it.”

Times staff writer Crocker Coulson contributed to this story.