Jury Dismisses Allegations of Racial Profiling

A federal jury found Monday that Los Angeles police officers acted properly when they ordered three black motorists, including a Virginia judge, out of their car and forced them to lie face down in the street following a traffic stop in Venice.

After seven hours of deliberations, the 12-member jury dismissed allegations that the LAPD officers engaged in racial profiling, applied excessive force and conducted an illegal search. The vote was unanimous.

The plaintiffs were Alotha C. Willis, a juvenile and domestic relations court judge from Portsmouth, Va.; her husband, Wayne Person, a civilian contract manager for the Navy; and Sheryl Crayton, assistant principal at a Carson middle school. They sued 10 police officers involved in the July 3, 1999, incident, along with top department officials.

All three declined to comment as they left the courtroom.

“The jury did the right thing,” said Assistant City Atty. Don Vincent. “They vindicated our officers, all of whom acted properly.”

The “high-risk felony prone” takedown, the focus of the lawsuit, grew out a run-of-the-mill traffic violation in the middle of the afternoon at a busy intersection.

Officers Luis Navarette and Manuel Ibarra, working together for the first time, testified that they saw Crayton’s red Volvo sedan make an illegal right turn.

Navarette said that when he ran a computer check on the car’s license plate, he was advised that it belonged to another vehicle. He said he and his partner thought the Volvo might have been stolen or been fitted with stolen plates by someone planning to commit a crime.

The officers radioed for backup, including a police helicopter, and pulled Crayton’s car over several blocks away.

One by one, each occupant was ordered at gunpoint to get out of the car and lie face down on the asphalt, where they were handcuffed.

After five to 10 minutes on the ground, they were helped to their feet, ushered over to a sidewalk and frisked. Several minutes elapsed before a sergeant approached and ordered their handcuffs removed. The Department of Motor Vehicles made a mistake, he told them. The agency had sent Crayton a set of plates intended for another motorist.

In his closing arguments to the jury, civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman argued that Navarette and Ibarra decided to stop the car before they had even run the Volvo’s plates. All they knew at the time, he said, was that the occupants were black.

But two jurors interviewed after the verdict rejected that claim. Jurors Mark Acosta and Dennis Breckenridge said they listened to police radio tapes that showed the officers called for backup a full minute after being advised that the plates did not belong to the Volvo.

“The crux of the plaintiffs’ case was that the two officers entered into a conspiracy to stop them because they were black,” Acosta said. “There was just no evidence of that, plain and simple.”

During the 13-day trial, Yagman subpoenaed former police chiefs Daryl F. Gates and Bernard C. Parks, Interim Chief Martin Pomeroy, 12 current and former members of the civilian police commission, and two inspectors general in an attempt to support the claim that the department has tolerated racial profiling for decades.

Acosta and Breckenridge said the jury did not deliberate on that issue. They did not have to once they found the officers were not liable.

Several of the officers named in the suit were in attendance when U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder read the verdict.

Sgt. Tom Burris, the highest ranking officer among the defendants, said he was proud of their conduct and gratified by the jury’s verdict. “Believe me,” he said. “It was no fun sitting in court and hearing someone call you a bunch of Nazi storm troopers.”