Ramos opens up on police

DOWNTOWN — City officials failed to communicate internal police discrimination issues to the City Council and avoided attempts to address the problem, according to transcripts of depositions taken by attorneys representing five officers suing the department for civil rights violations.

Former Mayor Marsha Ramos testified that she was instructed by the city attorney not to speak to anyone about the allegations months before they became public. She was told by then-City Manager Mary Alvord that the allegations would be handled within the confines of a police audit, according to interviews and a transcript of the deposition last month that was released last week.

“The amount of information that we, as a council, were given about any Police Department issues was very, very limited,” Ramos said in an interview Tuesday. “I believe that the city attorney and the city manager have a responsibility to ensure that City Council members are informed, and I seriously question whether that has been done in the last 18 months.”

Nayiri Nahabedian, a Glendale school board member who is running for state Assembly in the 43rd District, testified in her deposition that when she was brought on in December 2008 to provide cultural diversity training, she faced a department that was hostile toward the lesson.

After giving then-Police Chief Tim Stehr a negative assessment of department dynamics, she was not asked to return, she said in her deposition.

In the time since then, the Police Department has been jolted by a federal probe into allegations of excessive force and five civil rights lawsuits filed by eight current and former officers. One of those lawsuits, filed by a lieutenant and four police officers, alleges rampant racial and sexual discrimination, and that complaints to the command staff were greeted with retaliation and lost promotions.

Lt. Omar Rodriguez and Officers Steve Karagiosian, Elfego Rodriguez, Jamal Childs and Cindy Guillen-Gomez charged that discriminatory practices within the department included pervasive use of racial epithets and other inflammatory language.

Certain officers targeted Armenians and Latinos through improper race-based profiling, and would later joke about their conquests, according to testimony from other officers.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Solomon Gresen, pointed to the depositions given by Ramos and Nahabedian to bolster his claims.