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.”

The present CHP commissioner is Joseph A. Farrow, who has been with the CHP since 1979 and was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008 to succeed his boss, Mike Brown, after a series of scandals. In 2007, then-Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, accused Brown of tolerating a sordid atmosphere at CHP’s Inland division, including looking the other way when a senior CHP leader seduced a subordinate whose husband was deployed overseas. Garcia said Brown acted to oust two CHP leaders in her district for their gross unprofessionalism only after he was told that she and then-state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, were going to Schwarzenegger to complain.

Whom did Brown appoint to shape up the troubled Inland division? Tim Clark, a CHP senior officer who had already been implicated in a scandal of his own related to close ties between senior CHP officials and vendors. This is from a Sacramento Bee story in December 2006:

All told, the state spent nearly $50 million on the new equipment, effectively excluding competition from other brands. As a result, California’s sky and highways today are branded: Eurocopters monitor its cities and landmarks from above, while BMW motorcycles patrol below.

 

As the CHP assembled those fleets, its bosses accepted hospitality from the companies, including visits to the companies’ European headquarters, dinner at an upscale Sacramento restaurant and a party at the home of a company lobbyist that featured a flyover by a CHP helicopter, the investigation found.

 

Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick, the CHP’s top boss at the time, even got a jacket from BMW the same month the department awarded a contract to a BMW dealership.

Mass pension-spiking tolerated at highest level

Helmick, who was CHP commissioner from 1995 to 2004, is central to the criticism of the CHP over its internal culture. He and his proteges were the key figures in the biggest CHP scandal of this century. The Bee broke the story in 2004. Here’s the AP summary:

SACRAMENTO – Fifty-five of the 65 high-ranking officers who retired from the California Highway Patrol since 2000 filed workers’ compensation claims within two years, entitling them to lucrative disability settlements and medical pensions with tax-free income.

 

The practice is so widespread among the roughly 150 CHP chiefs and captains that rank-and-file officers have dubbed it “chief’s disease,” boosting costs in a department that pays the highest rate in state government for injuries and medical pensions.

The payments are in addition to routine pension benefits that let CHP officers retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their pay.

Nearly 70 percent of CHP officers retire on disability, and the department pays among the highest percentage of workplace injury claims, The Sacramento Bee found. The combination cost taxpayers $75 million two years ago.

“It turns out we need to be policing the police,” said state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Daly City, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Government Oversight.

CHP Commissioner D.O. Helmick, who is being nudged into retirement next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has asked the Public Employees’ Retirement System to determine if he, too, should be granted a disability pension because of injuries from vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, said spokesman Tom Marshall.

CHP officials ‘unable or unwilling’ to cooperate in 2007 probe

Acevedo, the well-regarded Austin police chief since 2007, won a $995,000 judgment from the CHP and the state after establishing that he had been subject to egregious retaliation by top CHP officials for objecting to the pension spiking. The California State Personnel Board concluded that he had made a persuasive case of mass perjury among top CHP officials.

But a criminal investigation by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully was stymied. In 2007, her office said top CHP officials were “unable or unwilling” to testify about details related to the mass pension spiking.

I interviewed Acevedo on a number of occasions. He said Helmick and his predecessor, Maurice Hannigan, encouraged a macho, secretive culture in which leaders and rank-and-file officers alike believed it was OK to look the other way when wrongdoing occurred.

Hannigan was notorious for punishing CHP officers who arrested or cited his daughters for driving offenses, including suspicion of DUI.

Introduced last year, Senate Bill 11, the first, has begun to gather steam as lawmakers have fleshed out the legislation with more specific provisions. The bill would mandate a basic training course on how to recognize and de-escalate conflict involving “persons with mental illness or intellectual disability who are in crisis,” upping substantially the hours of education required for cops.

“The bill would require that this evidence-based behavioral health classroom training course be 20 hours long and be in addition to the basic training course’s current hour requirement,” according to the language of SB11, which would also require ongoing updates to the course as part of so-called “perishable skills training.”

SB11 has taken on a new relevance as the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health held a special hearing in L.A.’s Exposition park. As the Sacramento Bee reported, lawmakers called on “current and former law enforcement officers from the CHP, the San Diego Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as representatives of Disability Rights California and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.” State Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, took the opportunity to voice her support for SB11, along with SB29, a similar bill initially introduced, like SB11, by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose.

A pattern of shootings

After a brutal CHP beating of a mentally ill 51-year-old woman this July, advocates have been up in arms against what they identify as a pattern of police abuse. Those tensions spilled over as, over the past two months, L.A. saw cops shoot dead two homeless men. Both Charly Keunang of Skid Row and Brendon Glenn of Venice were “combative, but not armed,” NBC Los Angeles reported. “Keunang had been diagnosed with mental illness while in prison. Glenn suffered from alcohol abuse, according to those who knew him. Both cases remain under investigation.”

A contentious town hall meeting in L.A.’s Venice neighborhood that focused on Glenn’s death drew a powerful wave of criticism as Police Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Eric Garcetti both opted not to attend. “Several people who attended Thursday night’s meeting faulted Beck and Mayor Garcetti for not being there,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Beck rebuffed the criticism of the mayor, saying it was ‘unfair’ because previous mayors hadn’t attended similar events in the past.”

Although California police face thousands upon thousands of situations involving the mentally ill, only a relative handful have recently culminated in police shootings. Nevertheless, the pattern of outcomes that has emerged this year put the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department on the defensive.

“Every year, the Los Angeles Police Department responds to some 14,000 calls for service involving mentally disturbed individuals,” LAPD Lieutenant Brian Bixler, officer in charge of the Crisis Response Support Section, told NBC Los Angeles. The share of ensuing events involving police violence and mental health problems has been massive, the network reported.

“Encounters with the mentally ill, or those affected by substance abuse, account for a disproportionate number of the uses of force by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department” — around 40 percent, as Sheriff Jim McDonnell told the Select Committee.

A statewide challenge

Observers have warned that law enforcement troubles with mentally ill individuals have arisen in part because of California’s failure to adequately house them. According to the Marin Independent Journal, in 1960, “California had a population of 15 million and 37,000 mental hospital beds; by 2010, the state’s population had grown to 37 million and there were only 4,000 mental hospital beds.”

By STEVEN GREENHUT

Last year, one of my reporters and her adult son were walking in downtown Sacramento when a couple of young toughs tried grabbing her purse. She pulled back her purse, and the robbers lunged at the two of them, leaving the son’s face covered in blood. Despite a frantic call to 911, the Sacramento police never showed up, nor did they respond to her repeated attempts to file a police report. Mom and son were OK, but a violent attack midday in downtown Sacramento apparently is not a serious-enough crime to warrant any police response.

Apparently, this incident is not unusual. “Armstrong & Getty,” a talk-radio show in Northern California, recently featured a morning drive-time discussion during which listeners shared similar stories of police indifference.

Police officials are blaming budget cuts for their cutbacks in service, but it’s hard to accept this explanation. The other day I saw an officer giving tickets to three teen-agers who were caught riding their bicycles without helmets. One downtown Sacramento officer rides around on a horse and gallops after people who jaywalk. There’s clearly the manpower to hand out tickets (but not to clean up the piles of manure the horses leave behind). It’s a question of priorities.

A recent Modesto Bee report points to this trend: “The California Highway Patrol is handing out more traffic citations than it did a few years ago, and that has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for state and local governments.” Another relevant statistic:

The average CHP officer who has retired in the past couple of years is bringing home a guaranteed pension of $98,000 a year (after 25 years of work), with automatic cost-of-living increases.

More Tickets

Police departments aren’t available to provide the services that the public depends upon, but they do have the manpower to increase their revenue-generating ticket operations. They are spending incredible amounts on salaries and benefits. And public safety budgets are consuming the lion’s share of city budgets.

In crime-plagued Stockton, where, because of budget cuts, police will respond only to violent crimes or crimes in progress, 80 percent of the city’s entire budget goes to “public safety,” according to the city manager. If cities spend more on police and fire services, that will leave less than a pittance for everything else.

Police officials acknowledge they are cutting back on services. For instance, in 2010, in the face of budget cuts in the notoriously crime-ridden city of Oakland, the police chief “listed exactly 44 situations that his officers will no longer respond to, and they include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism,” according to an NBC report. According to a USA Today report last year, “Budget cuts are forcing police around the country to stop responding to fraud, burglary and theft calls.” As budgets have tightened up, the problem is only getting worse.

I previously wrote about Alameda city firefighters who refused to save a suicidal man drowning in San Francisco Bay, then blamed the inaction on budget cuts that deprived firefighters of training for cold-water conditions. This sparked widespread outrage in Northern California, especially after the fire chief told a TV news show that he would not even save a drowning child because of the budget-caused restrictions.

Also, don’t expect better service if you have a civil lawsuit pending before any of the state’s court systems. “San Francisco Superior Court Judge Katherine Feinstein announced drastic cuts … to the city’s civil court system in response to funding slashes in the current state budget,” according to the Pleasanton Weekly. “‘We will prioritize criminal, juvenile and other matters that must, by law, be adjudicated within time limits.

“‘Beyond that, justice will be neither swift nor accessible,’ said Feinstein.”

This is a hissy fit. First, officials look everywhere they can to drum up new revenue. Notice all the new “fees” added to traffic tickets.

Sacramento charged drivers or their insurance companies fees of $495 to $2,275 when drivers were involved in a collision that requires a firefighter response, then repealed it in the face of public outrage.

Shutting Down

When officials can’t find enough pennies under the sofa cushions, they engage in what is known as “Washington Monument Syndrome.” When the multitrillion-dollar federal government “closes,” the first thing the officials do is close down the low-cost attractions in the hopes that tourists run home, clamoring for higher taxes. When we see tough times in local budgets, angry officials try to inflict as much pain as possible on the public by denying us services. At every step, they try to scare us into giving them more money. But they also work to assure that we cannot take care of ourselves.

We’re supposed to wait patiently for a police response that might never come. A 1982 state Supreme Court decision (Davidson v. City of Westminster) reminds us the police do not have to help us.

But don’t take matters into your own hands! California’s Draconian gun laws, for instance, put severe limits on our ability to protect ourselves. The public-sector unions also have assured that cities cannot contract out police and fire services to private bidders, where competitive pressures might improve customer service and efficiency.

Governments could improve the bang for the taxpayer’s buck if they reformed pensions, cut back on work rules, brought salaries in line with the marketplace and reduced the special protections that make it nearly impossible to discipline or remove ill-performing employees. Don’t hold your breath.

In the private sector, companies would minimize the pain on customers, who can take their business elsewhere. In the public sector, agencies spend money like crazy, and when they run out, they withhold services.

This is why government is supposed to be limited to the few tasks that cannot be provided in the marketplace.

We need to reject the scare tactics and insist on real, competitive reform. Otherwise, we might be the ones left waiting for the squad car that never comes.

However, this isn’t being done without a cost – over the past two years, the CHP has been implementing overlapping 12-hour shifts, reported the Bee. I’d like to see the overtime hours for the CHP compared with the increased number of traffic citations – I am betting that both overtime pay and traffic tickets are on the rise. And I’d like to see just how many of those tickets are issued on time-and-a-half or double-time, and who is authorizing that overtime.

“The California Highway Patrol is handing out more traffic citations than it did a few years ago, and that has generated tens of millions of dollars in new revenue for state and local government,” the Bee reported, using data from the CHP.

Once again, the working class and lower-income folks are paying the bill. And advocates for drivers say traffic enforcement all over the state is on the rise.

If this is true, then according to the police departments and CHP which claim they have had to cut staff with the budget crisis, they are achieving this revenue windfall with fewer employees, and probably could have done this all along.

In Oakland, the police department has learned to do more with less. “Overall,the department’s officer ranks shrank from 837 in November 2008 to 660 now due to layoffs and attrition,” the story said. And, as cities rely more on red-light cameras to do the work for them, violations have increased.

But, a lack of enforcement of laws is one of the biggest gripes voters have – not that we want more traffic citations, but thousands of laws are passed and never enforced — that is, unless revenue is attached, and even then it happens erratically, vindictively and resentfully.

Police departments around the state have been quite dramatic about budget cuts, as if public safety shouldn’t have to tighten up budgets the way everyone else is forced to do. There’s just as much waste in public safety as in other government agencies.

The CHP and other police officials claim that their sole concern is safety.  And they report that they are currently putting more officers on the street, despite cutting staff.

Why haven’t police done this all along if safety is really the primary concern? While the number of expired registrations and unpaid tickets may have gone up during the economic crisis, bad drivers didn’t just increase when the budget crisis hit California.

Revenue is a powerful motive – the state wants more, police departments want more, and employees want overtime. It’s a win-win… for everyone but drivers.

APR. 1, 2011