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Police
Chief Mark Kroeker's salary is $130,000 a year. In June,
he bought a $366,000 house in Portland.
In 1991, then-Chief Tom Potter appeared on the cover of
Just Out, Portland's gay-oriented newspaper, with
his daughter, Katie, the bureau's first openly lesbian officer.
Stephen
Yagman was a special prosecutor in the Ruby Ridge trial
in Idaho.
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Ten months ago, when Mayor Vera Katz hired him, Mark Kroeker
appeared to be the very model of a modern city police chief.
Smart and sophisticated, the former deputy police chief of
the Los Angeles Police Department emerged from that notoriously
corrupt agency without a smear on his record.
Now his tenure is under a cloud, thanks to some anti-gay
comments published in this month's Portland Alliance.
Kroeker's comments, made 11 years ago, are captured on
several tapes, available through the Fellowship of Christian
Peace Officers. On one of the tapes obtained by the Alliance,
Kroeker calls homosexuality a "perversion" and says AIDS
will claim millions of victims because society decided that
"certain kinds of morality was not the affair of the state."
The comments brought criticism earlier this week. There
may be more to come.
WW recently obtained additional tapes from the Fellowship
that contain comments raising questions about Kroeker's
views on women and parenting. On a tape titled "Family Discipline,"
Kroeker says parents need to set examples for their kids.
"If you haven't figured out how to be a submissive wife...then
[kids are] going to be confused in the way they approach
their lives," he says. As for the husband, he says, "you've
got the authority as the man in the house."
In that same tape, he also advocates corporal punishment,
recounting, in a bemused tone, how he physically disciplined
children with a 3-foot paddle at Hume Lake Christian Camp,
where he and his wife volunteered for 10 years.
Kroeker's views seem at odds with City Hall's progressive
image but were not unique in the LAPD. Kroeker has acknowledged
that his mentor in Los Angeles was the controversial former
Assistant Chief Robert Vernon, who retired in 1992 after
his extreme anti-homosexual views became public. Both Kroeker
and Vernon, who belonged to the 10,000 member Grace Community
Church in the San Fernando Valley, were members of what
former LAPD Assistant Chief David Dotson calls the department's
"Born-Again Mafia."
In an interview with WW on Monday, Kroeker declined
to discuss whether he still holds the views he espoused
on the tapes, saying his personal religious beliefs don't
spill into the workplace.
Two of his former colleagues, however, say otherwise.
"He doesn't hide the fact that he's a Christian," says
retired LAPD Lieutenant David Smith. "He talks to the guys
and talks about how he thinks people ought to live. But
I've got to tell you, there's nothing wrong with that."
A more worrisome anecdote comes from Virginia Acevedo,
a lesbian who worked for Kroeker in LA in the late '80s.
During his interview with WW, Kroeker described her
as a friend.
Acevedo, however, tells a different story. She says that
after her sexual orientation became apparent, she was subject
to a trumped-up internal affairs investigation. Instead
of coming to her defense, she says, Kroeker "dropped me
like a hot pan."
She sued the LAPD for sexual harassment in 1993; her case
was eventually settled for $750,000. "What he did to me
was all about abandonment," Acevedo says of Kroeker. "Not
once during my six-year ordeal did he contact me, even as
my health was failing."
Kroeker denied cutting off ties with Acevedo. And, he says,
it's "unfair" that his personal views are being aired in
public, although he acknowledges that "people have the right
to wonder."
Among those wondering are members of the City Council.
"How far can you go in divorcing personal views from job
performance?" says City Commissioner Dan Saltzman.
"Bigotry under any umbrella is still bigotry," says City
Commissioner Erik Sten. "The chief and the mayor need to
have some real conversations about 'Is this the right fit?'"
Mayoral aide Elise Marshall says an in-depth background
check performed by Shannon Associates, a Sacramento recruiting
firm hired for the chief search, did not turn up any anti-gay
statements. WW, however, was able to locate the tapes
during a simple Internet search.
Moreover, Katz was warned about Kroeker's views before
she hired him.
Former Portland police chief Penny Harrington, who's lived
in the Los Angeles area since 1988, says she spoke for a
half-hour with a mayoral aide last December, before Kroeker
was hired. In particular, Harrington says she noted the
LAPD's strained relationship with the gay and lesbian community.
Harrington says she never received a return call.
Stephen Yagman, a Los Angeles lawyer who has been critical
of the LAPD, says he, too, called Katz a week before she
picked Kroeker and left a voicemail message raising concerns.
"Had Ms. Katz called me back, I would have shared with her
that in my view he was intolerant of gays and lesbians,"
he told WW.
Strangely silent in all of this is Katz herself. She hasn't
spoken with Kroeker or the press. In a written statement
released Tuesday, she said she wanted to "reassure the community
that I share their concerns."
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