One Day Suspension Overturned in Vallejo

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 in 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.