San Diego swore in a new police
chief last week, and it took about two days for a scandal with 20-year-old
roots to explode in the department.
In late 2011, former cop
Anthony Arevalos was convicted of sexual battery against 13 women over a period
of months. He was sentenced to eight years in jail. The first complaint against
him surfaced publicly in March 2011, but testimony in a civil lawsuit against
the city this year suggests that police officials knew about Arevalos' assaults
dating back 20 years and hid it from prosecutors and the public.
The first allegation against
Arevalos came in February 2010 from a woman who said the officer sexually
assaulted her. The district attorney declined to file charges in that case, but
prosecutors said another woman complained eight months later that Arevalos
groped her during a traffic stop. In between the two incidents, the officer
continued his behavior.
Arevalos' career ended in March
2011 when he was accused of another assault at a traffic stop. The department
fired him and criminal prosecution began. Questions were raised then why
Arevalos hadn't been confronted earlier about the string of complaints, but it
wasn't until last week that information surfaced that knowledge of the officer's
criminal behavior went much further back.
In closed-door testimony in
2012 concerning a civil suit by the 13th victim, former officer Francisco
Torres described an alleged 1997 assault in which his partner, Arevalos, forced
a woman to have sex with herself using his baton. “He has his Polaroid out and
when I got there the female was in the backseat again naked with her handcuffs
in front of her and she had the baton.”
“This all could have been
stopped years ago,” Torres testified under oath. The ex-officer said he told
his superiors about the incident but court records indicated the allegations
were not reported to internal affairs, according to the ABC news affiliate in
San Diego.
DA investigator Susan Rodriguez
told a Voice of San Diego reporter last month that top officials within the
police department refused to cooperate with her office after Arevalos was
finally arrested. She said they wouldn't conduct a search of Arevalos' home and
by the time the DA got access a month later, they feared evidence had been
removed.
“This was the first time in my
now 28 years in law enforcement that I’d ever seen anything like that,”
Rodriguez said in a sworn 2013 deposition. Rodriguez said she suspected that
Arevalos' direct superior, Rudy Tai, blocked the search but had no evidence.
Tai, who heads the department’s criminal intelligence unit and reports directly
to the chief, testified that Arevalos admitted to flirting with women he
stopped and was told to cut it out.
Lawyers for the 13th victim
want a court-ordered independent monitor appointed to oversee the department.
Former Chief William Lansdowne was not receptive to the request, and so far
neither is his successor, Shelley Zimmerman. Both favor an outside audit
restricted to department handling of misconduct cases.