Penny's posse

Former Portland police cheif organizes a watchdog group to clean up local law enforcement

BY MATT MCBRIDE

PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER GARDNER

Former Portland police chief Penny Harrington’s seen it all.
From good cop, to bad cop.

The Morro Bay resident has seen enough, and she wants to stop cops from misusing their authority.

Harrington was a cop for the city of Portland for 22 years. While working her way up the ranks to eventually become Portland’s chief of police, she saw her share of corruption and cover-ups. Those events left an indelible mark on the trail-blazing law woman, and it set her on a new course in law enforcement.

She has since become an expert in policing the police.

She’s served on The Webster Commission, which looked into the Los Angeles Police Department’s handling of the L.A. riots and Rodney King beating. She was the director of the National Center for Women & Policing, an organization that tries to increase the number of women in law enforcement, believing it lowers the incidence of officer-committed violence. She has also led a group of women in San Jose in creating a citizen’s oversight committee there to help the community handle questionable police matters such as excessive use of force.

JUSTICE CRUSADER Former Portland police chief Penny Harrington has seen enough corruption in law enforcement to know that the current system isn’t working.

Lately, she’s set her sights on cleaning up the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s and police departments.

For the last 18 months she has been chairwoman of the San Luis Obispo Citizens for Justice Oversight, meeting weekly with a core group of people in SLO to educate them on what’s needed to create such a committee and how to run it once it’s started.

Members of the group include retired U.S. diplomatic foreign serviceman Harlan Hobgood; Los Osos businessman Ed VanFleet, whose son was exposed to sheriff’s office police brutality in a mistaken identity case years ago; Nipomo resident and nurse Mary Brooks; Adel Mazen, India-born retired secretary of the ACLU; Al Kellogg, retired ex-guard at the California Men’s Colony; and Morro Bay resident Ray Rennick, the group’s “conspiracy theorist,” according to Harrington.

In recent weeks, the group has felt the growing support of a public outraged over the use of excessive force by local law enforcement. Many questions, for example, have been raised over the sheriff’s department’s involvement in two recent cases: the permanent brain damage suffered by Gerald Bernales during a scuffle, and the death of postal worker Jay Vestal while in the custody of sheriff’s deputies.

‘This county is just a cauldron of hate and distrust of the police, and they have no place to go to vent it.’ Penny Harrington

Harrington said a justice oversight committee is needed to appease an angered public and to reestablish the community’s trust in its police departments.

“This county is just a cauldron of hate and distrust of the police, and they have no place to go to vent it,” she said. “Smart police agencies understand that if they don’t have the community’s support, they’re dead in the water. Nobody’s going to tell them who’s committing the crimes. The police don’t solve the crimes on their own—usually it’s someone coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, I know
something.’”

Harrington said there are four different types of community oversight groups that vary in size and power.

The one with the least amount of power involves one person that is named by the court as a monitor. That person does quarterly or annual audits and reports to the board of supervisors.

The second type is an audit committee, which consists of a group of people citizens can go to if they have a complaint. But this group can’t investigate problems. The only thing they can do is look at what the law enforcement agency does, and then turn over concerns to another law enforcement agency.

A more powerful committee is a review board that has an appeal process. If the public doesn’t like what an agency did, they can appeal to this committee and the committee can either choose to investigate or order the police to reinvestigate. Sometimes this group has subpoena power.

LET’S VOTE ON IT 4th District Supervisor Katcho Achadjian wants to verify whether or not the community agrees on the need for a law-enforcement oversight committee.

The fourth and most powerful group is the one Harrington would like to get started here. This group of people would become the internal affairs unit of the law enforcement agency. All the citizen’s complaints would go to them and they would conduct the investigation. This type of committee has subpoena power to force the officers into court. They could also get any documents they needed under that subpoena power. They would not, however, be able to hand down punishments. But because they would get all the complaints, they can keep records of individual officers. If they started seeing a name coming up over and over, they could bring that to the attention to the board.

There are several ways to make this committee a reality. If the county board of supervisors thinks it’s a good idea, they could simply create an ordinance, and the group would be formed. More likely, however, a petition-gathering drive would need to get enough signatures of people who support the plan and it would be put on the ballot. If the public voted in favor of it, it would be formed.

Last Wednesday, Oct. 12, the Citizens for Justice Oversight Committee met with 4th District Supervisor Katcho Achadjian and 2nd District Supervisor Shirley Bianchi to tell them what it thinks the public wants. The group is meeting with 3rd District Supervisor Peg Pinard in the near future and is waiting to hear back from 5th District Supervisor Mike Ryan and 1st District Supervisor Harry Ovitt.

Harrington said she thought the meetings went well.

“I think [Achadjian’s] main concern is not wanting to add another county agency if there’s another way to do it. I think he wants to do it; he’s just not sure what it will look like. Bianchi was very noncommittal, but attentive.”

Supervisor Achadjian said he is always willing to listen to any member of the public who has concerns and an idea on how to address those concerns. He wants to see if there is a need for such a committee.

“It’s a very, very sensitive issue, and both sides need to be heard very carefully. How best can we serve the community? That’s the bottom line,” Achadjian said.

“But when I say community, I’m often challenged,” he continued. “Is the community those who talked to me, or the entire population of the community? The reason I say that is because even with what’s going on in the sheriffs or police departments, there are people out there that are very supportive of law enforcement. The public at large has to be at large.

“Voting on the issue is probably the best option,” he said.

Sheriff Patrick Hedges said he is familiar with the group’s plans and has attended one of their meetings. He doesn’t think an oversight committee is needed because there are already ways in which the police and sheriff’s departments are kept in check.

For one, his job is an elected position.

‘UNNECESSARY BUREAUCRACY’ SLO County Sheriff Patrick Hedges claims there already exists a system to keep law enforcement in check—electing a sheriff they trust.

“If the citizens are not satisfied with the direction the department is going and the actions taken by the sheriff, they have the ability to elect somebody else who could be more to their liking,” Hedges said.

“The other thing is that if there’s a feeling that the department is not exercising appropriate oversight and appropriate control,” he continued, “then there’s the county grand jury that can step in and conduct an investigation. On top of that, within the California Constitution, the sheriff and district attorney can be looked at … at any time by the California attorney general. So the public already has oversight ability.”

He also said he hasn’t heard what could be constituted as a “public outcry” for an oversight committee. He’s heard some isolated negative comments, but he also thinks there are plenty of citizens who are happy with how the police are handling such matters.

“I’ve probably heard much more from the other direction—that it’s an unnecessary extra bureaucracy which is not going to provide anything that’s any different than we have now,” Hedges said. “The problem is they are going from a premise that all of these things are not being looked into.”

In the case of Jay Vestal, Hedges said he had an internal investigation started the next morning before the story even hit the papers. He initiated two investigations—an internal investigation and a criminal investigation. He also requested that the FBI come in and initiate its own investigation.

Harrington said Hedges did all he could have done in the Vestal case. But her background in law enforcement tells her that deputies on the scene in the Bernales and Vestal cases were in the wrong. While she admits that she formed her opinion based on the stories she read in local newspapers, she feels those officers did not handle the situations correctly.

“Just looking at it from a police point of view, there’s something really wrong with their procedures,” she said. “With Bernales and Vestal, their procedures are horrible. Their training is bad and something’s wrong. Somebody needs to look at this organization.

“I think it’s probably because they’ve never been held accountable. It’s that old saying—every time I hear it it makes me crazy—‘I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by six.’”

She questions the procedures officers used in the arrests of Bernales and Vestal. On Bernales:

“You have to be suspicious, especially with the extent of the damages to that young man. That’s more than a simple fall. I’m highly suspicious, and I feel the chances are pretty good that he was smacked in the head.

“First of all, you never hit them in the head. That is absolutely in every police-training program because it’s too easy to kill them, even if you’re not intending to.

“Secondly, this kid committed a traffic violation. When you’re looking at your use of force, you look first at what’s the force being used against me, but also what’s the underlying law that’s being broken here. When you’ve got a minor traffic violation, that doesn’t rise to the level of being able to use deadly force, and I call that deadly force. That child could’ve died.”

And, according to Harrington, the sheriff’s department didn’t do much better with the handling of Vestal:

“[The use of force] was absolutely not justified. He wasn’t doing anything. You have no right to use force against him at that point. They didn’t have a warrant, they had a fail to appear, and a warrant hadn’t been issued yet.

“They had no reason to arrest him, because even if they did get a call on a disturbance, they didn’t witness it, so they can’t arrest him for a crime that wasn’t committed in their presence.

“And what’s this bit about sitting on him? This is a police tactic that I have never heard of. You take him down, put your knees on him to get him cuffed, but then you set them up. But they keep sitting on this guy? They’re trying to put a face on this that’s not going to work.”

Jim Eicholdt was a friend of Vestal’s. He has strongly supported the idea of a justice oversight committee and has gathered over 500 signatures in support of it. Even if it’s too late for his friend, Eicholdt said it could help this community.

“Jay’s death was not for nothing. His death has just brought the public’s awareness out, and the people are starting to realize we don’t live for the police, the police work for us, and it’s about damn time we spoke up because this could happen to you, me, or anybody at any time.” ³

Staff Writer Matt McBride can be reached at mmcbride@ newtimesslo.com.