A Huge Settlement for His Troubles
Last March, Brad Gage, who has been called “the smartest 46-year-old lawyer in California,” won a $4.8 million settlement for his client, Mark Van Holt, the fired Deputy Police Chief of the South Gate department. At a news conference last Friday, the 6-foot-5 Mr. Van Holt, his career shrunk to the role of a school cop in Orange County, talked freely about his few months as a frustrated reformer in South Gate. He said that he and his chief were frozen out the first hour of the first day on the job, and the environment never improved. After 20 years as a police officer, the crewcut Mr. Van Holt, still boyishly handsome as a college football hero, could easily be a poster boy for officer recruitment. Except he can’t get hired, he says. Anywhere. Much as he would like to excise the black memories of South Gate from his consciousness, he can’t because his career has been derailed, possibly permanently. Four years ago this spring, when Mr. Van Holt’s career as a police officer was cruising along in Maywood, in the southeast corner of the County, his former chief, Rick Lopez, recruited him for a new and mountainous mission. Not long after Mr. Lopez moved from chief of Maywood to South Gate, with a mandate to clean up the department, he invited Mr. Van Holt to join him. As the new Nos. 1 and 2 officers, they would try to bring order to a department widely said to be led and dominated by rogue cops. In the midst of recalling numerous city leaders, South Gate was known as a dissension-riddled blue-collar community.
He Had One Career Desire
This is Mr. Van Holt’s story: “I grew up in Seal Beach, a small town in Orange County, where my father was a policeman. He did 33 years there. I always wanted to be a police officer. When I was 14 years old, I became a Police Explorer. I became a police officer myself when I was young. I have a younger brother who is a police officer as well. You could say the family is in the business. I moved to the Maywood Police Dept. in East L.A. in 1997. I spent five years there. Rick Lopez was my chief at Maywood, and together we formed two-thirds of the Command Staff. (After Mr. Lopez transferred to nearby South Gate) he told me ‘I have the opportunity to bring you to South Gate as my Deputy Chief because I like your work ethic.’” (Reports of police abuse in South Gate had appeared in a newspaper, Mr. Van Holt said, but he was only distantly aware of the accusations of abuse.)
Moving to South Gate
“I was excited about going over to South Gate (in June of ’02) and making positive changes, making a difference. I was not fearful in any way. I thought the problems I had heard about had been exaggerated. Because I had grown up in the profession, I did not believe they were as bad as I had heard. I really didn’t. I figured it was typical internal law enforcement issues. My first morning on the job (Mr. Van Holt and Mr. Lopez) went in to meet the Command Staff. Let’s say they were less than personable. Professional, but less than friendly. Afterward, we didn’t have a lot of visitors. Within the first 30 to 60 days, it occurred to me this was going to be impossible. We had such an uphill battle that, without outside help, it wasn’t going to happen. I am an optimistic person. I have always tried to keep my work (shielded) from my wife and my kids. I always have. On occasion, I would talk to my father about South Gate because he was in the business. He could not believe the stories I was telling him. After 33 years in the business, he could not believe cops would do the things I was telling him. Anyway, we had the support of the majority of the South Gate City Council until they were (targeted for recall) the following December or January. The Police Officers Assn. had started the recall movement. As for my own safety, I didn’t begin looking over my shoulder until a few months along, my last several weeks. As the recall came closer, things really became volatile.
Comparing Treatment
“What some members of the department did to Rick Lopez was far worse than anything they did to me. What they did to him and his family in their own family home… Rick was taking his boys out of the car one day when four South Gate officers surrounded his car and served him with paperwork. They scared the hell out of him and his family. This is what happened. A testing process had been done, and Rick had come out No. 1. The Police Officers Assn. had found out they were going to offer him the (chief’s)job. They didn’t like that. They filed legal paperwork to get an injunction on the test. They had to serve him. So they illegally got his home address. By law, police officers’ home addresses are confidential. It scared him so much that he withdrew from the process.”
The End Is Near
In February of ’03, eight months after he was hired, Mr. Van Holt, Mr. Lopez and another officer “mysteriously” were placed on paid administrative leave. Mr. Van Holt said he was not given a reason. “I was just told not to come to work. The next I heard, one day in May, I pick up the L.A. Times, and it says South Gate has fired its Police Chief. I said, ‘I guess I have been fired.’ The first thing I did was to make some phone calls to my attorney. That same day, about 4:45, I received a certified letter at my house that I had been fired. My phone was ringing off the hook. Friends and relatives were asking, ‘Did you get fired?’ I said, ‘That’s what the L.A. Times is claiming.’” An answer to the question of how the South Gate experience has affected Mr. Van Holt’s career and private life was not immediately clear. “Like I said, I am a very positive, a very optimistic man. I believe with my whole heart in the integrity of the law enforcement profession. I always have. Ninety-nine percent of the cops out here are doing a great job. Ninety-nine percent of them are underpaid, too. It’s a horrible job, in a sense, what we have to do. Unfortunately, we run into a case like this where we have a department that is being controlled by the minority. A minority of bad cops are running the department in this case. (Mr. Van Holt said that “possibly half” of the South Gate department is comprised of “bad cops.”) This experience hasn’t changed me, though. I have moved on. I am a motor officer in my present job (with an Orange County school system). It was not the job I sought. It was the only one I could get because of what South Gate had put in my file. South Gate actually put trumped-up charges in my file, all sorts of allegations saying I did all sorts of wrong things. It was difficult for me to find a job. I inquired at a dozen other agencies in Southern California.”
From a Legal Perspective
“It’s a terrible thing,” interjected Mr. Gage, the attorney for Mr. Van Holt. “Once you get pickled, you never return to being a cucumber.”
At the end, Mr. Van Holt admitted that “a piece of my heart is gone. After what I went through and after what I witnessed of what cops can do, sure, it took a chunk of my heart, my soul, about law enforcement. But it hasn’t changed me. I am still a professional.”
Postscript
“Hopefully,” said Mr. Gage, “this (jury award) will get him back to the position he would have been in had he not been wrongfully fired and not had all the different emotional stress issues from it, and his lost reputation. The award is fair. We had an intelligent jury that paid attention to the evidence.”
Next: The conclusion.
