Attorney for Police a Kindred Spirit

Before he became Ventura County’s most active law enforcement lawyer, Alan Wisotsky was a young Los Angeles police officer.

He loved the job. The uniform. Being out on the streets. The feeling that he was doing something for his community.

“But my [former] wife and parents just felt that nice Jewish boys aren’t cops,” he said. “They’re doctors and lawyers.”

Today, after 22 years of representing the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department--and with police in Oxnard, Ventura and Port Hueneme as clients--Wisotsky, 53, stands apart as the attorney who local police turn to most often when they’re in trouble.

Perhaps three-fourths of all lawsuits against local police and sheriff’s deputies go through his five-attorney office at Oxnard Financial Plaza.

“There was something about being on the right side of the law that just appealed to me,” said Wisotsky, a stocky man with a cop’s square-jawed profile. “And it still does.”

Most recently, Wisotsky has defended the embattled Oxnard Police Department against charges that its officers, who have killed five criminal suspects this year, use lethal force too often and that they racially profile black and Latino motorists.

Wisotsky has also assumed the role of city spokesman in answering claims that officers in August unnecessarily killed an emotionally disturbed Oxnard man, Robert Lee Jones, as the crouching 23-year-old artist rose toward them from his bedroom closet.

He unflinchingly pleads the case of officers--insisting that they will be criticized whatever they do, but that they almost always do the right thing.

Beyond such responses, however, Wisotsky has gained a reputation as an informed and forthright voice for his clients.

“I’m not going to give the press the legal mumbo jumbo you read about so often in the newspapers,” Wisotsky said. “To the extent I’m able, I’m going to provide truthful and accurate responses to relevant questions.”

In fact, he often advises police officials to do the same thing.

He counseled Art Lopez before the Oxnard police chief acknowledged shortly after the Jones shooting that Oxnard officers need more training in how to deal with mentally disturbed people.

“[Lopez] told me what he wanted to communicate to the public, and I said just be careful with your choice of words,” Wisotsky said. “But I’ve made it clear to all the administrators that they’re not going to have me hanging on their coat sleeves, whispering in their ears. They just need to say what needs to be said, and say it straight away. These agencies don’t have anything to run scared of.”

Wisotsky has emerged from a blue-collar background--his father was a Lockheed machinist, his mother a homemaker--to represent the thin blue line in Ventura County. Educated at Cal State Los Angeles in police science, he earned a law degree at Southwestern University in L.A. in 1975.

Happy to Be in Pro-Police County

After moving to Ventura County in 1979, he parlayed his law enforcement background into a specialty that has landed him hundreds of cases. And Wisotsky considers himself lucky to practice in a county whose juries support police officers and which produced acquittals of L.A. officers who beat motorist Rodney King a decade ago.

“Every time a police officer is afforded an opportunity to have his case tried in this county is a grateful day to me,” Wisotsky said. “Ventura County residents are generally pro police.”

That means attorneys often file their cases against local police departments as civil rights claims in federal court in L.A.

Regardless, opposing attorneys say they respect Wisotsky, who a decade ago was one of 15 U.S. lawyers sent to Moscow to help the Russian government reform its civil law system.

“He doesn’t have a hidden agenda,” Ventura lawyer Victor Salas said. “He’s a good advocate of the police party line. It’s, ‘This is what the book says. I believe our guys 100%.’ ”

But Wisotsky is also a realist, Salas said. “If he sees there’s a chance the city could get dinged, he’s going to make the settlement.”

Oxnard settled one of Salas’ cases for $500,000 after a police sharpshooter in 1997 killed a truck driver whose 8-year-old son had called police as his parents argued. The marksman mistakenly thought the man, Larry Pankey, had reached for a gun.

Salas said the city’s hand was forced when a district attorney’s inquiry found that a “tragic misinterpretation of events” by police was partly responsible for the Pankey shooting.

“We recognize that when mistakes are made,” Wisotsky said, “we need to stand up and take responsibility.”

To L.A. lawyer Samuel Paz, who has won several lawsuits against Ventura County police agencies, Wisotsky is an able opponent.

“He’s a tough-nosed guy who does a good job,” Paz said. “He takes well-thought-out positions and expresses himself clearly. He tends to do the best he can with what he has. Of course, on the plaintiff’s side, we get to select our cases. He doesn’t have that option.”

The county settled a Paz claim for $1 million after a federal judge ruled in 1999 that deputies had misused a special chair to subdue belligerent inmates being booked into the County Jail.

In the largest payout by police in local history, Oxnard settled for $3.5 million a lawsuit by the widow of Oxnard Officer James Jensen, a special-weapons team member shot by a colleague in a disastrous drug raid in 1996.

But most often, Wisotsky wins. Dozens of cases are dropped. Others go away after early skirmishes. Some are settled for small amounts.

He has won all 17 of the cases he has taken to trial, except for a split verdict in an excessive-force case against a Thousand Oaks deputy a decade ago.

One of those victories was the most difficult Wisotsky said he has ever argued: a claim by a Ventura couple after their son was killed when a 1997 party in Meiners Oaks turned violent.

Nicholas Dowey, 21, a student at Cal State Northridge, died from extensive head injuries. Testimony indicated he was struck with a bat before deputies arrived. But more than a dozen witnesses also testified they saw deputies wrestling with Dowey before putting him in a headlock, trying to douse him with pepper spray and hitting him as many as three times with a flashlight.

Wisotsky argued that only one deputy, Donald Rodarte, hit the disoriented and thrashing young man, and just once with a 1-ounce pepper spray can.

Wisotsky said the case took its toll emotionally.

“Nicholas Dowey was very close in age to my boys, and he just happened to find himself at the wrong place at the wrong time,” the lawyer said. “My duty is to represent this department and officers, so I do my best to put my own feelings aside. But I was in part addressing his parents when I spoke to the jury and extended my grief for the family and for Nicholas.”

Dowey Case Was a Heavy Burden

The Dowey case was difficult too because the Sheriff’s Department had fired Rodarte for allegedly filing a false incident report, denying ever striking Dowey. The county Civil Service Commission eventually found the deputy had not lied and ordered him rehired.

“So I was saddled with a heavy [emotional] burden and facing a tremendous uphill battle with so many evidentiary problems, because witnesses expressed their belief” that Dowey was struck by deputies, Wisotsky said.

The Dowey family’s appeal of that loss is still before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A Westlake Village resident, Wisotsky is married to family therapist Beverly Cross and has four children ages 17 to 27. An avid fly fisherman and private pilot, he covers the western U.S. in search of a stream where the water is clear and the fish are biting.

Recently, Wisotsky fished in Alaska. “It’s what I do whenever I have a chance,” he said.