Riverside Police Chief’s Retirement Divides City

The abrupt retirement of 50-year-old Riverside Police Chief Jerry Carroll has prompted bitterly divided reactions in a city still split by the 1998 police shooting of an African American woman found passed out in her locked car.

Those in support of the four police officers and their sergeant, whom Carroll fired after the shooting of Tyisha Miller, say the chief played to race politics.

Others believe the chief kept a bad situation from getting worse and did the right thing.

Carroll, who stepped down Friday, had called for healing in the city in the months after Miller, 19, was shot 12 times by four white officers called to give her aid. The officers said they fired when Miller reached for a gun on her lap.

Carroll had said the officers carried out an “unreasonably dangerous plan” when they opened fire. The Riverside County district attorney determined that the officers may have used faulty tactics, but were not criminally liable.

In a little over a year since the shooting, the city has been torn by demonstrations--by those demanding prosecution of the officers as well as police officers angered when the four officers involved in the shooting and their sergeant were fired.

Carroll’s departure has underscored the clashing views of some police officers and residents.

The chief had “lost the hearts and minds of the officers,” according to the past president of the officers union.

But others say Carroll was a healing force. “He kept a lid on things in a very volatile period,” said Riverside Councilman Ameal Moore.

Carroll, who had served on the Riverside force for nearly 30 years and was named chief in 1997, could not be reached for comment.

Moore, the only African American member of the seven-member Riverside City Council, called Carroll’s decision last year to fire the officers “the right thing to do, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing.” Moore said Carroll’s tough stance “certainly defused tension in the minority community.”

The Miller shooting had put Riverside at the center of a national civil rights controversy. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King III, activist Dick Gregory and the Rev. Al Sharpton joined protests in the city.

Miller’s family alleges that police did not respond with the caution they would have exercised for a white woman in distress. They have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city.

The U.S. attorney’s office is also investigating possible civil rights violations in the incident.

When Carroll fired the four officers and sergeant, many Riverside officers either got crew cuts or shaved their heads in protest.

Other officers walked door to door through Riverside neighborhoods, leaving fliers asking for residents’ support, and bought newspaper ads claiming to “put out the facts” of the shooting.

Bill Hadden, a lawyer representing two of the officers involved in the Miller shooting, said Carroll “pandered to the most scurrilous elements of the community” by firing the officers.

Det. Jeffrey Joseph, who headed the city’s police union when the officers were fired, also believes Carroll succumbed to outside pressure, and said he wants the city to pick a successor who is “somebody the officers can trust, who is not swayed by politics.”

Jack B. Clarke Jr., a lawyer who served on a city committee on police use of force formed after the Miller shooting, called charges that the chief did not support his officers “absolutely preposterous.”

“I heard him publicly defend the professionalism and training of his officers,” Clarke said. “I don’t believe for one second that he’s the kind of person who bows to political pressure.”

Clarke said he did not know Carroll before he was appointed to the use-of-force committee. An African American who has lived in the city for 30 years, Clarke was impressed by the chief’s willingness to consider and eventually agree to the group’s recommendations, which included increasing the pool of minority officer applicants and using more nonlethal weapons.

“I am very saddened by the chief’s decision,” said Clarke.