November 4, 2004

Office of Independent Police Auditor investigates use of
stun guns and officer-involved shootings

Editor’s Note: The following is the 14th article in an ongoing series about the city’s departments and appointed officials. Next: San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis

By Sheila Sanchez
Staff Writer

Reviews of all officer-involved shootings, less use of lethal weapons and more training of police officers to better deal with the public are some of the major accomplishments of San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor’s Office (IPA).

Guerrero-Daley is being credited with creating an office respected worldwide as an effective form of civilian police oversight.

Under the leadership of police auditor Teresa Guerrero-Daley, the office has worked hard to educate San Jose residents about their right to file a complaint against a San Jose police officer who may have acted inappropriately. Complaints can be filed with the auditor and are then forwarded to the San Jose Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit for investigation.

Guerrero-Daley monitors the investigations’ progress and participates in officer and witness interviews. The closed investigations are forwarded to the auditor for final review, where they’re examined for thoroughness, objectivity and assurance that the evidence supports the findings.

“We’re here to listen. Sometimes complainants just want to be heard. They just want somebody to know that this happened to them,” she said.

These days, Guerrero-Daley is found cleaning out her desk to leave the office she’s headed for more than a decade to serve a six-year term as a Santa Clara County superior court judge in January.

The petite 5-foot-tall Latino woman won the primary election in March against Mountain View attorney William Monahan by a large margin. She will join the county’s 79-member bench and earn about $140,000 per year, exactly the same amount she makes as auditor.

Since 1993, the 52-year-old Guerrero-Daley has bore the brunt of the SJPD’s ire after former San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer appointed her to make sure cops were behaving properly.

Beginnings
In 1992, after the Rodney King verdict and rioting in Los Angeles, human rights groups demanded the creation of a civilian review board to oversee the SJPD, several storming City Hall after former San Jose Police Chief Louis Cobarrubias had threatened to resign if the board was created.

The police auditor model functions differently than the better known civilian review boards and therefore, three years after it was created, a commission evaluating its effectiveness gave it high marks for providing independent police oversight, but also indicated the office lacked staff, resources, and funding. In 1996, San Jose voters overwhelmingly passed a charter amendment making the IPA a city office.

Today Guerrero-Daley is being credited with creating an office respected worldwide as an effective form of civilian police oversight. Police authorities have praised her work saying the mere existence of the IPA contributes to the deterrence of police misconduct, improvement in police services and greater accountability.

Her desire to work in the field began in the summer of 1982, six months after she left her work as a DEA agent for the U.S. Department of Justice. She was alarmed by the arrogance and lack of courtesy of an undercover police detective who verbally abused her after she asked him to move his car, which was parked in front of a fire hydrant in a red zone blocking her car.

The IPA
The IPA’s mission is to provide an independent review of investigations alleging officer misconduct and to promote public awareness of the citizen complaint process.

It receives citizen complaints, monitors and audits complaint investigations, makes policy recommendations and conducts community outreach to enhance public confidence and credibility in the outcome of the investigation.

Since its creation the IPA has made more than 100 recommendations related to SJPD policies and procedures, 85 of which have been adopted.

“Our work is important so that there’s a fair process. I know some don’t agree with us or feel that we don’t do enough. I let people know that I’m not an extension of anyone’s activism. I need to maintain credibility with the officers,” she said.

When she first started with the office, some investigations alleging misconduct took three years to complete with complainants sometimes never hearing about their case.

Guerrero-Daley began establishing procedures to ensure complainants were contacted at certain intervals during the investigation and before the audit is initiated. They also receive a closing letter. Serious use of force complaints that require emergency medical care for a serious bodily injury are now required to be finished in 180 days or six months.

Through negotiations with the police department’s internal affairs unit, the IPA has set up its complaint intake process to mirror the internal affair’s process. Now regardless of where the complaint is filed, it gets handled the same. Internal affairs also increased the number of sergeant investigators from six to eight.

Use of force complaints and officer-involved shootings
The IPA reviews all unnecessary or excessive use of force complaints against police officers, including deadly force, which has always been the public’s primary concern when considering cases of police misconduct.

Guerrero-Daley is pleased to leave the office citing that the total number of unnecessary force complaints in the past 10 years has dropped from a high of 114 complaints in 1999 to a low of 49 complaints in 2003. She said the number is impressive because there are almost 500,000 contacts a year between the public and police officers.

The number of unnecessary force allegations (there can be multiple allegations per complaint) has also dropped from a high of 199 in 1994 to a low of 83 in 2003, with a significant majority of complainants alleging they had only received minor injuries such as bruises and abrasions during altercations with the police.

Three years ago, the IPA didn’t respond to the scene of an officer-involved shooting. If there was no complaint, it didn’t review the case. It now reviews the administrative investigation of all officer-involved shootings, regardless of whether there’s a complaint filed.

The SJPD also created the Officer-Involved Shooting Review Panel, another one of the IPA’s recommendations, which includes the police chief, the deputy chief for the Bureau of Field Operations, the police auditor, the training unit commander, a representative from the City Attorney’s Office and other police command staff. The panel reviews all officer-involved shootings resulting in injury or death. The panel does not review the case until after the criminal and administrative investigations have been completed.

Guerrero-Daley has worked with three police chiefs and one interim police chief. Under her leadership, the IPA has developed a good working relationship with the department’s internal affairs unit, currently under the direction of San Jose Police Lt. David Cavallaro. Disciplinary actions against the officers are strictly within the police chief’s purview. In her 10 years as auditor, she’s worked with 10 internal affairs commanders, which has made her job even more complicated by having to retrain and reestablish ties with police officials.

Fewer lethal weapons and training
For several years, Guerrero-Daley has been asking police authorities to use of fewer lethal weapons when confronted with violent subjects. In 1994, 12 stun bag shotguns became available. Today there are 45 available and all San Jose police officers know how to use them.

The department has also purchased 40-millimeter multi-launchers, 14 purchased in 1999, 22 of them are available. There are also 126 single-shot launchers available with more than 100 officers trained in their use.

In 2003, many officers had been trained to use stun guns or electronic restraint devices also called “taser” guns.

Currently every officer on patrol is equipped with a taser gun.

The IPA has begun a study on their use. San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis is supporting the investigation and both agencies are working together to release the findings to the public to better understand their usage and limitations.

“We want to know how often they’re being used before a person is shot. I want to look at the times, not just when the officers shot and killed somebody, but at all the times when they used the tasers successfully,” she said. “We want to find out what the difference was when the tasers were successful and when the officers had to use deadly force.”

She gives high marks to the SJPD and notes that cases in which the officer had criminal intent are rare. “It’s hard to explain it to the family, because they’re suffering their loss, but I have not seen a case where I think that the officer said, ‘I want to kill somebody.’ ”

Since 1998, the IPA has encouraged the SJPD to expand specialized training of its officers to better handle dangerous situations in which they may have to use lethal force. It has also recommended that more officers become trained in crisis intervention because of the high percentage of officer-involved shooting cases that have involved persons with mental disabilities or people who are emotionally troubled. The training teaches officers how to best diffuse a situation when faced with these kinds of individuals.

The training is said to have helped contribute to a steady decline of officer-involved shootings from eight in 1999 to none in 2002. However, in 2003, there were four cases of officer-involved shootings, two fatal. This year so far, there’s been six, with the department nearing a record high.

Guerrero-Daley said many complaints stem from the initial interaction with the police. The officer is alleged to react in an authoritarian way and rude manner escalating the confrontation with the citizen. Had the officer had better people skills at the onset, the confrontation could have been avoided. She explained 97 percent of a police officer’s time is spent providing service to the community and only three percent making an arrest.

However, the majority of the officer’s training involves addressing the three percent of work they must do to protect themselves from violent suspects. “They’re not receiving as much communication and interpersonal skills training as they should,” she said.

San Jose wasn’t the only city ignoring this important police-citizen contact training. None of the other big cities in the state were training their officers in these areas. When Guerrero-Daley reviewed the Police Standards and Training requirements mandated by the state the SJPD didn’t have that as a course. The city is now looked as the expert in the field. It’s now mandatory for all police departments in the state to have their officers take the class every two years.

When she attends the police academy, she reminds officers continually to look at their paychecks and remember that San Jose residents are the ones who signed them. “The public pays us for the work we do. The public is the boss,” she said. “If they don’t understand that then they are going to have problems. Even the citizen that’s difficult to deal with is the boss.”

Small things like a citizen asking a police officer his or her name and badge number have led to a complaint, she noted. “There’s resistance from a few officers. They feel like they don’t owe the public any explanation.”

Difficult cases
Asked to name some of the hardest cases she’s had to investigate, she names the officer-involved deadly shooting of 25-year-old Bich Cau Thi Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant killed July 13, 2003 by a police officer responding to a neighbor’s call about an unsupervised child in the street. Police knocked on Tran’s duplex door, entered, and within a minute, Tran was dead from a single gunshot. Police say she had something in her hand that looked like a cleaver and the officer felt threatened. Tran was holding a vegetable peeler with a 6-inch blade.

The shooting sparked outrage in the Asian community, prompting a march on City Hall days after Tran’s death.

“It was troubling to me because she was a woman and a mother of two children,” she said. “It was a tragic incident, but after reviewing the evidence and the investigation, especially the forensics, I agreed that the officer acted within procedure.”

Guerrero-Daley explained the officer was following police regulations. “To discipline an officer he has to be operating outside the rules and regulations.

“It’s important that there be an external agency to review cases, especially those that have such deep consequences,” she said. “The citizens of San Jose have given police officers the authority to, in a split second, take someone’s life. That’s a lot of authority and power and because it’s such an enormous responsibility there should be safeguards to make sure it’s not abused.”

Teresa Guerrero-Daley
Born in Brownsville, Texas, to a Mexican immigrant couple, Guerrero-Daley moved to California when she was 12. She grew up in Visalia picking tomato crops in the summer months with her one brother and five sisters.

She graduated from a continuation school because she married when she was 15 years old, eloping with her boyfriend much to the disappointment of her family.

But with her tenacious spirit and hard work ethic, Guerrero-Daley obtained her high school diploma when she was 23. She then divorced and moved to San Jose with her three children.

She returned to school and during the next 15 years attended San Jose State University earning in 1978 a bachelor of science degree in administration of criminal justice. She then worked for the Morgan Hill Police Department as a crime prevention specialist.

From 1978 to1982 she worked as a special DEA agent in San Jose, the first female in the city to work for the agency, back when few women entered a career in law enforcement.

She then became a criminal defense investigator for the San Mateo Private Defender’s Program working in that capacity from 1982 to 1990.

In 1990, she graduated from Lincoln Law School.

From 1991 to 1997 she was in private practice as a trial attorney and was working as a part-time independent police auditor for San Jose.

In 1997, her duties as a police auditor became full time being praised as a fair, honest, and impartial leader and earning international recognition for developing policing guidelines that improve effectiveness and safety in law enforcement.

In 2000 the National Center for Women & Policing gave her the prestigious “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” award.
She is married to a retired police officer and has four sons.

To file a complaint against a police officer please mail, telephone, e-mail or visit in person the IPA office, 2 North Second St., Ste. 93, San Jose, Calif., 95113, call (408) 794-6226 or log onto www.ci.sj.ca.us/ipa.