OUTRAGE AT COPS BOILS OVER

Civil rights panel gets an earful as Sonoma residents list gripes of police
abuse, neglect

SANTA ROSA - U.S civil rights commissioners tapped into a well of
antagonism between the people of Sonoma County and their cops - and hit a
gusher.

Tension crackled all day Friday through the Justice Joseph A. Rattigan
State Building, where the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined
brutality and neglect charges against the county's 11 law enforcement
agencies, grilled police on their procedures and looked for answers.

Hundreds of people on both sides showed up, swamping the 80-seat hearing
room and forcing those waiting to speak and to hear to spend most of the
day in the lobby, split into camps that had nothing to say to one another.

The outraged citizens were a diverse bunch of men and women, most wearing
black and white ribbons in solidarity with those they see as victims of
police abuse.

Police officers, sheriff's deputies and their supporters wore yellow
ribbons or buttons saying, "I support our law enforcement community."

"I have been to a lot of hearings around the country - in Miami, New York,
many in Washington, D.C., - on the issue of police-community relations, and
in none of them have I seen the intensity of interest that I have seen
here," said Cruz Reynoso, former California Supreme Court justice and now
U.S. Civil Rights Commission co-chair.

"Nor have I seen this "us' and "them' perspective," he said. "What do you
think is happening in Sonoma County? What's gone awry? It's a matter of
some concern."

What led to Friday's hearing was anger over a spate of police-related
deaths, and complaints that at least some officers in the Sheriff's
Department and the county's 10 police departments still refuse to treat
domestic violence as criminal.

Two killings in particular - and law enforcement's solid defense of them -
fueled sentiment that police are out of step with the changing community.

The fatal shooting of Kuan-chung Kao by a Rohnert Park police officer last
April, because he was drunk and loud and waved around a broomstick,
galvanized Asian Americans outraged by the stereotype implicit in the
officer's defense - that he thought Kao, a Chinese American, was
brandishing the stick in a "martial arts fashion."

Seven other Sonoma County residents have been killed by police, most of
them Santa Rosa officers, since April 1995, and three others died in or
just out of jail, according to the October 22nd Coalition, which grew out
of opposition to the killings.

The other rallying cry has been the 1996 murder of Teresa Macias by her
husband, who also shot her mother in the legs and then killed himself.

Though Macias had repeatedly reported his abuse, threats and violations of
a court stay-way order to sheriff's deputies, neither they nor the district
attorney's office ever arrested the husband or took any other action to
keep him away from her.

Tanya Brennan, a member of the Purple Berets, a domestic violence victims'
advocacy group, said Macias' story was all too common.

"I'm now working with a 15-year-old woman whose partner violated (a court
order) 15 times," she told the hearing panel. "The district attorney is
indignant that she wants him jailed. He thinks (the man) is just young and
immature. And this is after Macias."

Macias' death has become a symbol of what Judith Volkart of the Sonoma
County American Civil Liberties Union Friday called a "general pattern of
discrimination" by the law enforcement agencies.

A key part of the problem is what Volkart called the "absence of (police)
accountability to the community and the resistance of law enforcement to be
accountable to any organization it cannot control."

Complaints against law enforcement are handled by the agencies themselves
and the district attorney's office, with oversight by the county grand
jury.

District Attorney J. Michael Mullins told the panel that in his three years
in the job, his office had not once sustained a charge of wrongdoing
against an officer.

And the grand jury's recommendations for improvements have generally been
ignored, several victims' advocates contended.

"All our efforts to reach out to law enforcement and local officials have
met with closed doors," said Elizabeth Anderson, executive director of the
Sonoma County Center for Peace and Justice.

In their own defense, the chiefs of the three biggest law enforcement
agencies in the county took the hot seat to explain and defend their hiring
and recruitment practices, training, policies and procedures, and handling
of complaints.

"I feel overall (people) are comfortable with what we are doing," said
Sonoma County Sheriff Jim Piccinini. He said that the panel was being
misled by "certain interest groups."

He said he'd taken steps to recruit and retain more women and minorities,
and formed a new domestic violence unit.

Michael A. Dunbaugh, police chief in Santa Rosa, said a 1995 survey of city
residents showed that 82 percent rated his department as good or excellent.

Reeling off a list of community groups like the Boy Scouts that his
officers take part in, he said, "We are very involved in our community. We
treasure it."

Santa Rosa police Sgt. James Carlson, who was involved in one of the
killings, told the panel, "It's obvious everyone missed the point about who
is in the wrong in these incidents. . . . If there have been eight dead
officers because of these incidents, there would be no hearing today."

Larry Shinegawa, an associate professor at Sonoma State, said part of the
problem might stem from changing times and demographics in the rural county
- - the same changes sweeping the state and country.

The county's population has doubled in 20 years, to 424,495 in 1996, with
huge increases in the Asian and Hispanic communities pushing the minority
total to 18 percent, Shinegawa said. At the same time, police agencies are
only 8.7 percent minority, and only 6.9 percent female.

"Diversity in Sonoma County is at a cusp," he said.

One recommendation likely to come out of Friday's hearing - and urged by
most police critics - was creation of an independent civilian review system
to decide charges against police. Also explored were ways to improve
training, recruitment and hiring, and to reach out to the community.

The California committee will make its report to the full commission,
probably within 6 months. If the commission adopts it, its recommendations
won't have the force of law but will build pressure for change.

"Demographics and population changes always create problems for a system
that isn't prepared for them," said Philip Montez, the commission's Western
regional director.

"It's important that law enforcement and all other governmental systems be
prepared to meet the change - because it's coming, faster than anyone can
say."

)1998 San Francisco Examiner Page A 1