Gang and assault charges rock Pasadena police – Pasadena Star News

Attorney Brad Gage discusses filing claims and stands with two of his clients, retired Pasadena police Lt. Carolyn Gordon, who speaks, and retired police officer Omar Elhosseiny, right, outside Pasadena Police Department headquarters in Pasadena, Calif., Thursday, June 6, 2024. (Photo by Dean Musgrove, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG

I think that our attitudes as civilians towards the police and police work are shaped in our youth.

So, good experiences in dealing with each other, good attitude. Bad – bad.

Growing up in Altadena in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we were monitored by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department field office. When we got to the point where older friends could drive and take us down the hill to house parties and the like in Pasadena, we, as long-haired white kids, always breathed a sigh of relief when we crossed Woodbury and entered the jurisdiction of the Pasadena Police Department.

The deputies back then were always a bit cowboy and arrogant when they stopped us and scared us out of principle, while the PPD officers seemed cooler and calmer. The department even tried to use all-white patrol cars instead of the traditional black and white colors, because it was believed that an ordinary-looking sedan would be less provocative than the standard police car paint job.

I know that black kids, Latino kids, often had different experiences and different attitudes toward the PPD. The late advocate for better policing, Michael Zinzun, paid for that with the loss of an eye.

It’s all relative. I’m thinking of John Ball’s novel In the Heat of the Night, in which the African-American Northern detective Virgil Tibbs, unlike the later film adaptation of the book, visits the South from his home police station in Pasadena, not from Philadelphia.

To create his character, who is investigating a South Carolina murder for which he himself was originally arrested, Ball shadowed then-Pasadena police officer Jim Robenson for several days to understand what it was like to be a black police officer.

Jim later became chief of the PPD.

Tibbs, the character he is based on, tells a white Carolina policeman, “It may be hard for you to believe, but there are places in this country where a colored man, to use your words, is just a human being like any other. Not everybody thinks that way, but enough do that I can go weeks at home without somebody reminding me I’m a Negro. Here I can’t go fifteen minutes.”

“Home” was the police in Pasadena.

So it saddens me to see, half a century later, that a number of current and former Pasadena police officers – all of them men of color – have filed lawsuits against the police, claiming they were victims of attacks and intimidation by cliques within the police force. These cliques include one called the “Good Ole Boys Club” and another called the “Veteranos,” who are alleged to be police officers involved in shootings.

“How can anyone feel safe in our community, especially if they are a person of color, in a city where police officers themselves are the target of violence?” her attorney said, reports our contributor David Wilson.

“Officer Jarvis Shelby said he was put in a headlock by a commander in August. Lt. Sam De Sylva said he was kicked in the leg by another lieutenant so hard that he had to undergo surgery. And retired Lt. Carolyn Gordon said she was shot in the groin with a paintball gun during training, an injury that caused internal bleeding,” reports Richard Winton in the Times.

In December, Police Chief Eugene Harris said a thorough investigation found there was no attack on Shelby.

And although the organization represents all parties involved, the department’s union said in a statement, “The inflammatory rhetoric of an opportunistic consultant will not prevail.” Hey, we thought the only place that had internal gangs was the Sheriff’s Department and its Bandidos.

I hope it’s not true that there is a gang within the PPD. The department still has a good reputation in the community – that is, among the middle class people who are my neighbors and friends.

On Saturday, I worked in the garden and garage with J., a Honduran immigrant I met seven years ago at the city’s day laborer job center. He’s really happy with his new apartment near Orange Grove and Los Robles. I asked him if he felt safe in the neighborhood. “Absolutely,” he said. And the police, do they harass you? “Never a problem,” he said. Do many of them speak Spanish? “Many,” he said.

We can’t yet know how the court cases will turn out. But if there are police gangs, they must be broken up. And the PPD must honor the spirit of Jim Robenson and other trailblazing officers by ensuring its culture lives up to the department’s reputation for cool and calm.

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