Those of you who were wondering what became of retired Claremont Police Chief Roy Brown will be glad to hear that he's doing just fine, having traded one college town for another on the opposite coast.
The Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II reports in today's paper that Brown has been hired as an assistant police chief for New Haven, Connecticut. Brown, the article says, wasn't picked out of the blue. Former Pomona Police Chief James Lewis (not the Jim Lewis who used to be Claremont's Assistant to the City Manager), hired Brown.
The article also says that Lewis is trying to recruit Pomona Police Captain Ken Gillespie and gave some background on the eastern migration:
Lewis said he thought of Brown and Gillespie when he learned the open chief position needed a team to deal with community and policy issues, auditing and internal affairs.
The Inland Valley police migration to the East Coast comes after an August 2007 Police Executive Research Forum report described how to improve the New Haven Police Department.
A federal indictment in March 2007 of two New Haven narcotics police officers suspected of taking bribes from local bail bondsmen and stealing money at crime scenes led to that report.
The report reviewed organizational structure, narcotics enforcement and internal affairs investigations.
Pomona has about 172,000 people while New Haven has about 132,000, Lewis said. But Pomona has about 190 cops and New Haven roughly 500.
Pomona has more foot patrols while New Haven has officers assigned to a post.
Brown wasn't necessarily popular within the Claremont Police Department during his years here. You might recall that Brown came to Claremont from Eugene, Oregon, in the aftermath of the Irvin Landrum shooting in January, 1999.
In the midst of the subsequent blow-up caused by the former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard's handling of the situation, then-Claremont Police Chief Robert Moody retired (and later took a job with the law firm that defended the city in the civil suit brought by the Landrum family).
Brown wasn't Southard's first choice for the police chief position. We tend to forget that Southard first hired Thomas Scheidecker, a former LAPD officer, who at the time was working for the police in the city of Ripon, CA.
Southard quickly dumped Scheidecker after news of an LAPD scandal involving Schiedecker became public. A 2/6/00 LA Times article summed up the matter:
A key figure in the Los Angeles Police Department spying scandal of the 1980s has been named chief of the Claremont Police Department–a force that is beleaguered over a controversial shooting of a black motorist last year.
Thomas Scheidecker, 55, who was temporarily suspended for lying about and mishandling confidential intelligence documents while he worked for the LAPD, is scheduled to take the reins of the Claremont department on Valentine’s Day, after Chief Robert Moody’s retirement for personal reasons. For the last eight years, Scheidecker has been police chief of the small San Joaquin Valley town of Ripon, near Modesto.
As an LAPD lieutenant almost two decades ago, he served as custodian of records for the agency’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division, which was disbanded in 1983 after revelations that it was spying on law-abiding citizens, including civic leaders, judges, police commissioners, clergy and actors.
A police probe concluded that Scheidecker had kept classified information at his Westminster home and had made false and misleading statements to investigators as to what that data included.
Because some of the information in Scheidecker’s home came from military sources, he was also investigated by federal and state agencies. He was never charged with a crime but was suspended for 15 days.
Scheidecker is on vacation out of state and could not be reached for comment. Claremont officials said they were aware that he was somehow involved in the LAPD unit but had not known about his suspension or his specific role in the controversy.
“The focus of the interviews were his performance as police chief,” said city spokesman Mike Maxfield. “That’s what he’s being hired for. That’s not to say we skimmed over the rest of his career. We were aware of his work in the [LAPD] unit.”
Needless to say, Claremont and Southard dropped Scheidecker, who had given notice in Ripon, like a hot potato, leading to another lawsuit, this time by Scheidecker, against the City of Claremont. Brown was then picked as Claremont's police chief.
At the time all this was occurring, the City Council and Southard took on the look of the Richard Nixon White House circa 1973. You could almost see the stone walls rising around City Hall, complete with arrow-slitted guard towers. It was the peak of the Claremont 400, which had complete control of the City Council.
And at the same time it was the council's lowest point, with them daily defending positions that were so obviously undefendable. The city council meetings were packed with citizens and students protesting the council's handling of the Landrum shooting, and a good segment of the population calling for Southard to be fired.
The fact that the council ignored those calls and allowed Southard to stay on five more years, seemed proof to a good portion of the public that the council and their supporters were terribly out of touch with the rest of the public. Two councilmembers who were most supportive of Southard, Karen Rosenthal and Al Leiga, lost their re-election bids in 2003, and were replaced by Peter Yao and Jackie McHenry, both of whom ran as reformers.
It's always been our contention that the problems of Claremont and its city government were embodied by Glenn Southard but that the real heart of the dysfunction lay with those Claremonsters who still control influential groups like the board of Pilgrim Place, the Claremont Community Foundation, Claremont Heritage, and the League of Women Voters of the Claremont Area.
It's odd that all of those groups do good works, and we have no problems with the things they do as charities; however, it's their actions as the props to a form of municipal government that is close-minded, wasteful, and prone to crisis after crisis that we take exception with. It really has been a case-study in the corrupting power of small-town politics.
From those groups, the Claremonsters' new council and commission candidates will emerge - more Ellen Taylors, more Al Leigas, more Karen Rosenthals - and they will continue to try to take Claremont back to the days of 2000 when they controlled all five city council seats and when all hell was breaking loose.
The conscious effort by folks like Claremont Heritage president and former Claremont Mayor Judy Wright to erase the past and replace it with a sanitized, Disneyesque version of history ensures that we will be inevitably back again to deal with some other miscue, scandal, or crisis.
While it's job security for Insiders everywhere, it's also sad to see the same foolishness played out again and again.
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