OAKLAND'S POLICE 'RIDERS' ON TRIAL

Officers Lauded for Drug Busts Are Accused of Brutality by Ex-Colleague

OAKLAND, Calif. - At the high point of their careers, the so-called
"Riders" were considered the best and the brightest, veterans whom
rookie police officers tried to emulate. Their specialty: bringing in
reputed drug dealers in record numbers from the crime-plagued streets
of West Oakland.

Now, three of the four rogue officers are on trial here for using
dishonest and sometimes brutal tactics in making those arrests.

Clarence "Chuck" Mabanag, 37; Jude Siapno, 34; and Matthew Hornung,
31, are charged with a total of 26 criminal counts, including
kidnapping, the beating of falsely arrested suspects, and submitting
falsified police reports. A fourth officer, Francisco "Choker"
Vazquez, considered the Riders' ringleader, fled before prosecutors
were able to charge him. Vazquez, 45, is believed to have left the
country and is being sought by the FBI.

The alleged abuses came to light after a rookie officer, just 10 days
on the job and fresh out of the police academy, resigned and reported
his former co-workers' activities to the police department's internal
affairs division. Since that time, the rookie officer, Keith Batt, has
also filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Oakland, and claimed
that police department supervisors should have been aware of and able
to stop the alleged renegade practices of the officers who worked the
graveyard shift in West Oakland, a neighborhood notorious for drug
deals. Batt is now a police officer in Pleasanton, an Oakland suburb.

The trial has been underway since September and is expected to last
through next month. It has riveted this city and is the largest case
of police misconduct here in decades.

Assistant District Attorney David Hollister has portrayed the Riders
as a clique whose members thought they were above the law and who fed
off the attention they received from other officers and their
supervisors for their string of drug arrests. "These are crimes of
either laziness or concealment," said Hollister, who likened the
arrests to the seemingly profitable energy-trading giant Enron before
its fall. "The numbers look great. But if you look behind the numbers,
what you see isn't what you thought was there," he said.

The defense has sought to paint Batt, the prosecution's star witness,
as a naive rookie with little understanding of the ways of an urban
police department fighting a deadly drug war. "You don't send
choirboys out to West Oakland to get rid of drug dealers," said
defense lawyer Michael Rains, who is representing former officer
Mabanag, Batt's training officer at the time of the complaints.

In addition to Batt and numerous other officers, eight alleged victims
also testified regarding the abuses they said they suffered in police
custody. None is the ideal witness; almost all have previous arrests
and convictions, the majority for minor drug offenses.

"These men are the most vulnerable. They have prior convictions; they
have served time in prison; they are on parole. They are not generally
believed to be victims in a case like this," said Oakland civil rights
attorney John Burris, who is representing a number of the alleged
victims in a separate civil lawsuit against the officers, the police
department and the city.

As part of the evidence, Hollister presented enlarged photographs of
some of the alleged victims, all of whom are African American, showing
their injuries. Two of the witnesses testified to being handcuffed and
subsequently beaten and having had rock cocaine planted on them by
officers Vazquez and Siapno.