Officer Burky Worel is a 25-year veteran of the
Vallejo Police Department. For 10 years he served as president of the
Vallejo Police Officers Association and has been a member of the PORAC
Board of Directors for four years. In his role as a union official, he
frequently clashed with the department’s administration. Two years
ago, Worel was not re-elected to his union office and since that time he
has come under fire from the department for a variety of alleged
disciplinary infractions.
On February 17, 1999, the Vallejo Police Department
disciplined Worel for failure to meet the department’s
"performance standards" relative to arrest and citation
statistics. Worel was suspended from his position as a police officer
for one 10-hour day. LDF panel attorney, Charles H. Briggs, III, of
Mastagni, Holstedt & Chiurazzi, represented Worel in his appeal to
the Vallejo City Civil Service Commission. Worel vigorously disputed the
allegation that his performance was substandard and also asserted that
the Police Department’s policy of establishing arrest and traffic
citation quotas was unlawful.
At the hearing, the city presented seven witnesses,
and introduced more than 100 pages of documentary evidence, including
color coded graphs and a computerized color slide show, in support of
its case against Worel. The barrage of evidence and witnesses tended to
obscure the issues in this case: whether or not the city could
discipline Worel for failing to meet the department’s arrest, citation
and field interview quotas for the period beginning August 1, 1998 and
ending September 8, 1998, and whether or not the one-day suspension was
the culmination of years of retaliation against Worel for his union
activism.
The evidence and testimony proved that Worel was
placed on a personal improvement program in 1997. He successfully
completed that program. Next he was assigned an FTO to ride along with
him for several weeks. The FTO wrote daily evaluations of Worel, but did
not allow him to review them. The FTO testified that he ordinarily
allows his trainees to read their evaluations daily. Instead, the
evaluations were delivered to Worel’s sergeant, and were not disclosed
to Worel until after the FTO wrote the final evaluation. Rather than
being a productive training experience, the FTO evaluation evolved into
a negatively charged, antagonistic situation. Both the FTO and Worel
felt uncomfortable. Ironically Worel himself has been an FTO for 20
years, and had trained the officer assigned to observe him.
Worel’s sergeant testified at length about his
efforts to counsel and remediate Worel. He also testified that the
performance standards were targets, and not quotas. However, on cross
examination, the sergeant testified that "at some point, the
department’s statistical targets stopped being goals" relative to
Worel, and that the standards became "number that Worel was
required to meet or exceed". He further testified that in Worel’s
case, there was no leeway relative to meeting or exceeding the quotas.
As a result, when the department checked Worel’s statistics in
September 1998, and found that Worel’s numbers were slightly below the
department’s quotas, Worel’s sergeant recommended Worel be
disciplined for failing to meet the department’s quotas.
Admittedly, from time-to-time, Worel has made fewer
arrests and issued fewer citations than required by the department’s
quotas. However, Worel has repeatedly and correctly asserted that it is
illegal for the Vallejo Police Department to establish such quotas and
to discipline officers for failing to meet them. The prohibition against
arrest quotas is found in Chapter 7 of the Vehicle Code starting at
section 41600. Vehicle Code section 41600 states:
"The purposes of this chapter, "arrest
quota" means any requirement regarding the number of arrests made
or the number of citations issued by a peace officer whenever an
arrest is made, or the number of citations issued, by a peace officer,
or the proportion of such arrests made and citations issued by a peace
officer relative to the arrests made and citations issued by another
peace officer or group of officers."
Vehicle Code section 41601 defines the term citation:
"For purposes of this chapter,
"citation" means a notice to appear, notice of violation, or
notice of parking violation."
Vehicle Code section 41602 and section 41063
prohibits arrest quotas. Section 41602 states:
"No state or local agency employing peace
officers engage in the enforcement of this code or any local ordinance
adopted pursuant to this code, may establish any policy requiring any
peace officer to meet an arrest quota."
After 14 hours of testimony, the commission
deliberated and voted to rescind the one-day suspension. In doing so,
the commission sent a clear message to the department that although the
department has discretion in evaluating and disciplining its officers,
its discretion in this case has been limited by the California
legislature, when it enacted the provisions of the Vehicle Code and
outlawed quotas.
