Tanaka
February 21 - March 6, 2014
Serving the Seven Cities of the Harbor Area
from p. 7
10
worked with me will ever tell you it was ok to work in a gray area as it’s generally thought of in a nebulous area on the outside of the line of the gray. “This is what I used to tell deputies, and I gave this speech hundreds of times, ‘This is the line, it’s the line of the law, it’s the line of policy, it’s the line of whatever you see on this side of the hand... this is the line you learn when you were just 5-years-old. Don’t cross the line. You can work anywhere within this area because the law says you can and society says it’s ok so lets call it...and I made a mistake and I even told them that. I used the wrong color. This is black, this is white, because that’s our job There is no in between. Then there’s this working area as long as.... In some places I called it the ‘green area.’” The commission seemed to frown upon the fact that Tanaka only tried to clarify his remarks just before his commission testimony. For his part, Tanaka noted that this issue was not brought up until five years after he gave the speech, though it was a speech he says he has given hundreds of times. The other issue that should be highlighted is that of deputy cliques and Tanaka’s lax attitude towards them. That may be due to his own life experiences as a member of the Lynwood Station Vikings in the late 1980s. He described the Vikings as being little more than a station moniker that is used as a form of friendly station identity and bonding; a moniker used for when they have their departmental softball tournaments and charity events. This is what he said to Random Lengths: First of all, there’s no clique, OK. It was our station moniker. If you find an old picture of the sheriff’s in the archives, there’s a picture of Sheriff Block and all of us there in either our baseball or running uniform with a banner on the wall that said Lynwood Vikings. Firestone had Pirates, Norwalk had Wolverines. We had an intramural teams that played softball, it was mostly involved with the Baker[sfield] to Vegas relay. At some point in the ‘90s or ‘80s there was a case involving Darren Thomas, who sued the department, and in front of an African American judge, Terry Patter, had all of these defendants and someone brought up a white supremacist group. One judge made that statement and the rest is history. Do you know who the lead defendant was in that case? A female African American deputy sheriff. She is not a white supremacist and I was not a party to that case. I worked at that station and I also worked at other stations that had other affiliations. Don’t you think that if the Vikings symbol was so bad, do you think we would have Vikings charities or the Minnesota Vikings? To put Tanaka’s comments into context, the Lynwood Sheriffs station gained notoriety after having a class action civil lawsuit filed against it in 1991. Seventy-five Lynwood residents joined the suit testifying to the existence of a white supremacist cell operating with official knowledge out of the Lynwood sheriff’s station, as well as patterns of deputy shootings, torture, beatings and harassment. The lawsuit produced numerous accounts of bullying-to-hazing-type pranks. In one account, deputies shot a dog and tied it under their commanders’ car; in another account deputies smeared feces on a supervisor’s engine. There
Sheriff Lee Baca’s retirement in January created space for newcomers to change the culture at the department. File photo.
was the map of Lynwood in the shape of Africa, the racist cartoons of black men, the mock “ticket to Africa” on the wall. U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter, who presided over the case, concluded that many deputies were engaged in racially motivated hostility against blacks and Latinos. In 1996, the department was ordered to pay $7.5 million to 75 alleged victims of excessive force in the area the Lynwood station policed and spend $1.5 million for mandatory training.
The Kolts Report
The Kolts report, a commission headed by Superior Court Judge James G. Kolts, charged with investigating the sheriff’s department in 1991, never found conclusive evidence that the Vikings were a white supremacist cell within the Lynwood sheriffs station. However, it found that there was a core of deputies that closely identified with the Vikings station moniker, and that these deputies engaged in the behaviors reported in the Thomas v. County of Los Angeles Sheriffs Department class-action lawsuit. Tanaka became a tattooed member of the Vikings after he was promoted to sergeant and assigned to the Lynwood station in 1987—a year before he was named in a wrongful-death suit stemming from the shooting of a young Korean man. The department eventually settled for close to $1 million. In a 1999 Los Angeles Times exposé on sheriff department cliques, “The Secret Society Among Lawmen,” a sheriff’s department spokesman was quoted as saying Tanaka had the tattoo removed. “Paul doesn’t have anything to say about [the tattoo],” Sheriff’s Department spokesman Capt. Doyle Campbell said. “It is perceived by some in a way that was never intended. He’s having it removed. He wants it behind him.” When Random Lengths asked about the tattoo, Tanaka admitted that he still had it. “There’s differing philosophies, and I thought about it...you know when I got it…you know it is not a symbol that stands for something bad and certainly when I got it. It was no secret. It was just our station moniker. And over time if you remove it, what do people say, ‘ah...it was because it was bad.’” With all of his baggage, whether from his past or these current investigations—the latest being the cloud over his head regarding his role in the FBI informant Anthony Brown controversy— people aren’t asking if he’s the answer to the sheriff’s department’s problems. Observers are asking why is he running for the seat at all?