The California Highway Patrol’s overtime scandal – in which more than 100 officers from its East Los Angeles branch may have inflated their overtime while helping Caltrans workers stay safe while doing freeway maintenance work – could explode into a statewide scandal. That’s contrary to claims made when the scandal first emerged in February, when CHP officials said a survey of other commands turned up no similar false claims.

Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley and a team of attorneys are representing more than 30 of the accused CHP officers. According to a Los Angeles Times report, 14 accused officers are facing termination while 90 more are still being investigated. Cooley says about 40 in total are at risk of being fired.

The main allegation facing officers: That they would seek eight hours of overtime pay after only being needed by Caltrans to work half that many hours or less on protection details.

Overtime spiking called common across state

But in court documents and in comments to the Times, Cooley says he can establish several points countering the CHP’s claims about the case. The most serious: The practice of padding such overtime is common in many of the 103 CHP commands around the state, according to former CHP officers. This would mean that Caltrans was overcharged by far more than the $360,000 that CHP has already documented.

Cooley also alleged that several middle- and upper-level CHP officials, including one who helped launch the East L.A. probe, engaged in the same questionable overtime billing practice when they were lower-ranking officers from 2007 to 2009.

The CHP is so far resisting releasing related documents requested by Cooley’s team and the media, saying the information is related to the ongoing investigation of the scandal.

But the involvement of another state agency with its own reputation to protect makes it seem unlikely that CHP can keep the lid on the scandal, as it tried to do on other internal problems earlier this century.

In February, Caltrans Director Laurie Berman announced that the agency’s inspector general would do a thorough audit of the CHP-Caltrans relationship.

“Caltrans takes violations of the law very seriously and illegal activity of any kind is not tolerated within the department,” Berman said in a statement to the Times. “If it is determined there was Caltrans employee misconduct, disciplinary action will be taken.”

Caltrans has not disclosed a timetable for when the inspector general’s audit will be released.

Scandal echoes those seen in Schwarzenegger years

The scandal marks the end to a decade of relative quiet for California’s largest law-enforcement agency. Among the allegations against the CHP during the Schwarzenegger administration:

• In 2009, the Ventura County Star reported that there was strong evidence that CHP officials impeded a hate-crimes investigation of a local CHP officer involved in a racially charged incident after officers held a party at an Oxnard hotel.

• In 2006, the Sacramento Bee reported that the CHP spent nearly $50 million on helicopters and motorcycles that were not open to competitive bidding. The companies given the contracts – Eurocopters and BMW, respectively – had courted top CHP officials with gifts and meals.

• In 2004, the Bee reported on the “Chiefs’ Disease” phenomenon in which 80 percent of top CHP officials filed for medical disabilities in late career, enabling them to get much more generous pensions. Because police discipline records were then confidential, Bee reporters confirmed the scandal through worker’s compensation claims filed by the CHP executives.

A CHP attorney threatened the Bee with a lawsuit if the records were used in the Bee’s reporting, saying the records were confidential. The Bee went ahead with the story, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to eventually force out then-CHP Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick.

For the second year in a row, a sweeping police reform measure that law-enforcement organizations said was motivated by antipathy toward peace officers has been embraced by the state Legislature.

Last year lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1421 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. It required police agencies to release information on officer discipline records – treating these records the same as many others that are routinely released to the public under government openness laws. California’s police disclosure rules previously had been among the strictest in the nation.

This year, Assembly Bill 392, by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, appears headed for passage after being approved 67-0 by the Assembly on Wednesday. It says officers may only use lethal force if it is “necessary” for public safety. Existing law says officers can use such force if they believe it is “reasonable” to ensure public safety. While provisions in Assembly Bill 392 were dropped to persuade law enforcement organizations to end their opposition and take a neutral stand – as they did last week – the ACLU says the bill will create among the strictest use-of-force standards of any state.

These organizations were lobbied by Gov. Gavin Newsom to accept Assembly Bill 392. After their decision to go neutral was announced, Newsom, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins issued a joint statement endorsing Weber’s bill, seemingly guaranteeing its eventual approval.

The passage of the two reform measures would have been impossible to imagine earlier this century. Law enforcement unions had tight relationships with most elected Democrats, the same as with unions for teachers, nurses, service workers and government bureaucrats, providing them with heavy campaign contributions.

Gov. Gray Davis’ 2001 decision to give prison guards a five-year, 37 percent raise after its union helped him get elected in 1998 drew sharp blow-back from good-government advocates and newspaper editorial boards, especially after the 2003 revelation that Davis had badly underestimated the long-term cost of the labor deal. It was among the issues that helped lead to his unprecedented recall later that year.

2004 CHP scandal downplayed by state leaders

But the clout of law enforcement was again on display a year later. In 2004, the Sacramento Bee broke the story of a pervasive workers’ compensation scam in the upper reaches of the California Highway Patrol. The Bee found that 55 of the 65 senior CHP officers who had retired since 2000 had filed workers’ comp claims – with some citing injuries never reported while they were on the job. Their disability claims were routinely approved, sharply increasing their retirement benefits.

CHP Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick agreed to retire after the “Chiefs Disease” scandal broke, then added to it by also claiming he was disabled because of vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s. But neither the Legislature or Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – who courted and won law enforcement support – agreed with calls to bring in an outside reformer to run the agency. Instead, Schwarzenegger chose Mike Brown, one of Helmick’s top aides.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer declined to prosecute the case, citing conflicts of interest because of his office’s close ties to the CHP. The case was assigned to Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully. But in 2007, she closed the investigation without bringing any charges. Scully said CHP officials and former officials were “unable or unwilling” to testify about the pension-spiking scheme. The story faded from the headlines.

But ties between lawmakers and police unions have weakened since then as the national outcry has grown over alleged police mistreatment of minorities, especially a series of fatal shootings of young African-American men in questionable circumstances. The California Democratic Party has also had an influx of newly elected progressive lawmakers who dislike the aggressive, confrontational policing style adopted by many departments after it was credited with reducing crime in New York City in the 1990s under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Recent analyses of how Assembly Bill 392 overcame the obstacles that doomed a similar bill last year have focused on the March 2018 fatal shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black father of two, in Sacramento.

The announcement two months ago that no officer would face charges for Clark’s death triggered an outcry so intense it became a national and international story that appeared to give Weber’s bill new momentum.

Former California Highway Patrol Commissioner Mike Brown — a person of interest in several CHP scandals and mysteries — was installed Jan. 16 as

Brown, 61, resigned the CHP’s top post in February 2008, then worked for a year in the Schwarzenegger administration before taking a transit safety post with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington. He is married to an Alexandria sheriff’s deputy.

Brown quit after the CHP was sharply criticized in state audits for wasteful spending in using executive aircraft and in buying weapons, motorcycles and technology for patrol cars. 

But Brown’s 2008 resignation also came a month after the state personnel board found that former CHP Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick Jr. and four of his top aides had subjected CHP official Hubert “Art” Acevedo to illegal retaliation after — among other issues — Acevedo complained in 2003 and 2004 about the CHP encouraging pension spiking by improperly allowing officers to work past their 60th birthdays. Acevedo eventually received a $995,000 settlement.

While Helmick was a friend and mentor of Brown’s, Brown was not named in the retaliation complaint. He was tapped by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to succeed Helmick in 2004 when Helmick was forced out after the Sacramento Bee broke a bombshell story about “Chief’s Disease” — a pattern of top CHP officials reporting newly discovered work-related injuries just before retiring, sharply spiking their pensions.

Houston police chief: Brown tolerated corruption

In interviews a decade ago, Acevedo — recently installed as the police chief of Houston after nine years as chief in Austin, Texas — called Brown an enabler of a CHP culture in which corruption and corner-cutting was tolerated.

Eye-opening things happened under Brown when he was CHP commissioner.

The criminal investigation of “Chief’s Disease” was impeded by several CHP witnesses whom Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully described as “unable or unwilling” to cooperate in January 2007. Scully dropped her inquiry without filing charges.

In the 2006 gubernatorial race, the campaign staff of Democratic candidate Phil Angelides, the state treasurer, alleged the CHP committed a political dirty trick to keep a cloud over the Angelides campaign and help Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger win re-election.

The flap began in September 2006 after Angelides aides surreptitiously provided audiotapes to the Los Angeles Times that they had found on the governor’s official website in which Schwarzenegger made risque comments about “very hot” Assemblywoman Bonnie Garica, R-Cathedral City. Both the CHP and the Attorney General’s Office began investigating the incident as a possible cybercrime.

The attorney general’s investigators quickly concluded no crime was committed. But CHP didn’t close its investigation until four months after Schwarzenegger won re-election. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the agency faced questions at the time about whether this decision was politically motivated.

In May 2011, it was revealed soon after Schwarzenegger left office that he had fathered a child with a former housekeeper at his Brentwood estate. The Associated Press wrote a story raising the prospect that the CHP detail serving Schwarzenegger had aided him in his hiding his illicit relationship and second family. If the CHP facilitated Schwarzenegger’s extramarital escapades, it’s difficult to come up with a scenario in which Brown was not involved.

This complex, checkered history got little to no coverage from the Washington, D.C., media. The Washington Post’s story about Brown’s hiring concluded with a laudatory quote from Alexandria City Manager Mark B. Jinks: “Chief Brown’s remarkable career has put him at the forefront of neighborhood protection, community policing, traffic safety, strategic planning, and other areas of concern here and around the country.”