Good cop or bad cop?

Three Grover Beach police officers say they were fired for getting too many drunks off the road–including relatives of the SLO Police Department

BY DANIEL BLACKBURN

In principle, it all seemed simple to Todd Miller.

He was a traffic cop in Grover Beach and he was gaining a reputation as a no-nonsense guy who didn’t countenance drunken drivers.

In practice, things didn’t work out quite like Miller expected.

He arrested people–lots of people–for driving under the influence of alcohol. Miller wasn’t a solitary vigilante, either. During 1998, arrests for DUI by Grover Beach police officers increased 40 percent–from 38 the prior year to 98. Most of those arrests were made by Miller and two fellow officers, Scott Pipan and Sgt. Mike South.

Since then, all three have been fired by the Grover Beach Police Department.

In interviews with New Times, Pipan and South both said they backed Miller’s version of events, yet expressed reluctance to jeopardize their future law enforcement careers by talking extensively about details.

South’s new boss, Atascadero Police Chief Dennis Hegwood, said that "South is moving on, closing the door on all that. That was the past."

His career-ending action, Miller said, was arresting several relatives, in separate incidences, of San Luis Obispo police officials.

In a recent letter to the San Luis Obispo County Grand Jury, Miller wrote that "my own department’s chief, commanders, and sergeants were very upset about this, as well as my high number of DUI arrests. To use their terms, I had blackened the eye of the department."

Police Chief John Bradbury said the department was prevented from making any comment on the case.

"The termination of officer Todd Miller and any related issues are a personnel matter," he said, "which has been appealed to the administrative process by Officer Miller. The administrative process has not been concluded, and the city believes it would be improper to make any comments at this time."

Miller, a former auto mechanic who joined the Grover Beach department five years ago and was earning about $46,000 annually, said the department has spent about $300,000 during the past two years "to keep me unemployed."

"It has been very expensive," agreed Bradbury.

Miller, 38, now describes himself as "a stay-at-home father." Pipan and South both have moved on to different law enforcement agencies.

According to Miller’s comments to the grand jury and at a Grover Beach City Council meeting in August, John Bradbury, now the department’s chief, was "shocked by my high numbers of arrests, and accused me of sitting on the local bars to wait for patrons to drive away."

Miller said he and his fellow graveyard-shift officers "were told by command staff that the department was worried bar owners would sue the city if they felt they were losing business because of this."

No such thing was occurring, said Miller.

During his brief career in law enforcement, Miller made about 130 DUI arrests and said he "never lost a case." He received four awards for his work during that period, from Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) and the state Office of Traffic Safety (OTS).

Miller also represented the department at county-sponsored DUI Task Force meetings. He was trained to maintain and calibrate the department’s PAS (preliminary alcohol screening) devices, used in the field for sobriety checks. As the department’s only traffic officer, he said he was responsible for the training of his fellow officers in testing for implied consent, report writing, and courtroom preparation and testimony. He developed a Spanish-language "DUI probable cause" questionnaire.

During his tenure, Miller said DUI arrests soared to 70 percent, making Grover Beach arguably the most risky community on the Central Coast in which to drive after imbibing.

But according to the former officer, his department supervisors were not happy with his performance.

Over the four-day Thanksgiving holiday in 1999, Miller and Pipan made 14 DUI arrests. Vehicles driven by those arrested were impounded, which was the usual procedure in the Grover Beach department at the time.

"The department was extremely upset at all the paperwork this generated," said Miller. "People were particularly bothered by all the cars that we had towed."

The result, he said, was a reprimand from two sergeants and an order to cease the practice of towing vehicles of drunken driving suspects.

"Chief Bradbury actually told us that we were ‘sticking a knife in the ribs’ of the poor DUI drivers who suffered enough through the court system," he said.

The no-tow policy stayed in effect just long enough for local towing companies to notice the sharp drop in their revenues and complain to city management.

At the beginning of 2000, Miller and Pipan were chosen by the department to attend a prestigious DUI school for law enforcement personnel in Southern California.

In early 2000, Miller said he made the first of several drunken driving arrests which would cause him considerable grief.

One was of a young man whose father works for the police department in San Luis Obispo. The entire incident was observed by a sergeant, said Miller.

Miller said that several days later he was "verbally reprimanded for making the arrest." A superior officer accused him of keeping the arrestee’s "status" from the sergeant who witnessed the arrest, and asked Miller if he "really thought it was a good idea to be arresting the son of another agency’s police officer.

Around the same time, according to Miller, he arrested the boyfriend of one of Grover Beach’s fire department captains, only to be told that "the department didn’t think it was right to arrest the spouse of a city firefighter," and that Miller should have simply "driven him home."

In March 2000, Miller said he was accused by department officials of "being a one-dimensional officer" for concentrating on DUI arrests. He also was told that he was "corrupting younger officers" into an enthusiasm for DUI arrests, and was taken off the graveyard shift.

Two months later, Miller received his fourth MADD award.

About that same time, the Grover Beach Police Department set its sights on a traffic safety grant from OTS, which would allow acquisition of a motorcycle for traffic enforcement.

Suddenly, Miller said, he was moved back onto the night shift and told he had a "green light" to make all the DUI arrests he could.

"They needed the statistics [to justify] the traffic grant," he said. "OTS wanted to see increased stats or they would not fund the grant."

Miller said that this marked "the beginning of the end" for himself and officers Pipan and South.

In October of that year, Miller arrested a temporary firefighter with the California Department of Forestry after spotting him weaving and speeding. The man’s blood alcohol measured .08, the legal limit for intoxication in California, said Miller.

The man went to department headquarters a day or so later, in full uniform, said Miller, and complained that he had not been under the influence.

Police officials responded by returning the man’s driver’s license, which had been confiscated at the time of his arrest. They then reprimanded Miller, and Bradbury reportedly told him that the department had no plans "to ruin the young man’s life by giving him his first DUI."

Miller said he was then told that he "needed to make a choice–to continue feeding his family and making house payments, or continue on with the DUI arrests."

"I guess I was just naive," said Miller recently. "I always thought that if I did my job right, I would be all right."

Then, in quick order, Miller made the apparent mistake of stopping two more SLO police officers’ sons. The first was under 21 and given an "administrative" DUI, which did not require his arrest.

The second was the son of a SLO police captain.

"I watched this guy blow a stop sign and then drive in the bike lane. When I stopped him, he got out of his vehicle and shouted, ‘Don’t you know who the fuck my father is?’ I arrested him, and he was shouting all the time with threats of his father’s retribution."

His own department’s response to this incident, said Miller, was to plan a sting operation to catch Miller making unjustified traffic stops.

But before such an operation could be launched, a man Miller calls "a local transient drug dealer" appeared at Grover Beach police headquarters with a complaint against Miller.

Miller had responded to a dispatch call on a burglary in progress at an apartment building. He arrived quickly, he said, within 30 seconds after getting reports of a 911 call from a witness.

It appeared that two men were trying to break into a commercial washing machine, and as Miller drove up, one of the men got into a vehicle and started to leave. Miller detained him and the man subsequently was found to have a blood alcohol content of .17, more than twice the legal limit.

Miller arrested him and another man who lived at the apartment complex, whom the officer found in bed fully clothed and expressing knowledge about the attempted theft from the washing machine. Fingerprints were lifted from the machine, linking the man who had tried to depart in his vehicle, said Miller. A watch commander observed as Miller made the arrests, and the same commander approved the arrest report three days later.

The suspects continually denied the burglary allegations, said Miller, and on that basis and the fact that no witnesses could place them in the laundry room at the time of the attempted theft, they were not prosecuted.

From this case, said Miller, came the allegations against him that would lead to his eventual firing.

As a result of the incident, the department accused Miller of 13 serious transgressions, including false arrest, violations of civil rights under color of authority, falsifying police reports, destruction of evidence, and conduct unbecoming to an officer.

"This was done in order to have charges serious enough to start the process of firing me," said Miller. "They wanted to use this case against me, rather than the DUI arrests of the police officers’ relatives, which could have been embarrassing for them."

Miller said that the city’s legal counsel, Richard Chrysler of the Los Angeles law firm of Liebert, Cassidy & Frierson, eventually told police officials that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him.

Chrysler said such an allegation "should be taken with a grain of salt. I don’t remember the conversation specifically, but I don’t think I would have rendered such a decision over the telephone.

Following his termination, said Miller, "my department turned its attention to the two remaining members of the traffic division: Pipan and South."

Pipan was placed under house arrest by the department, and remained on that status for six months before he resigned. South ended his year-long house arrest this week and plans to work for another county law enforcement agency.

"They’ve taken my job, my career, and my excellent reputation," said Miller. "What I have left is my self-respect, my dignity, the knowledge that I’m right, and the support of my family and friends. If my termination is upheld, I’m no worse off than I am right now. The difference is that the city of Grover Beach will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take me there."

But Miller is uncertain about his professional future.

"It will be difficult for me to continue my life in law enforcement with what they are accusing me of," said Miller.

He’s appealing the allegations. Labor law hearings on his firing are pending.

"This is bigger than just my story," he said, "because this is happening in other agencies."

Drunken driving cases originating in Grover Beach have declined steadily since the three men were removed from traffic duty. Throughout 2001, the department made 68 DUI arrests. This year, to date, there have been 32. Æ

‘New Times’ news editor Daniel Blackburn can be reached at [email protected].