Leading by example
Pasadena Police Chief Melekian leaves a legacy of ability, fairness and compassion
By Kevin Uhrich 11/05/2009
To be sure, Police Chief Bernard Melekian and the paper have had some differences over the nearly 14 years that Melekian’s been in charge.
Like the time a few years back when we published photos of bruises suffered by three foster teens during a confrontation with police that landed the boys in jail and facing some very serious charges; the so-called El Sereno 3, as we came to call them.
When we reported that story in fall 2003 — all of it ending more than two years later with felony assault charges dropped against two of the teens and the third boy eventually pleading out to a lesser charge that resulted in no jail time — Melekian was incensed at the coverage.
In a letter to the editor, Melekian was firm but fair in prefacing his remarks with his hope that I wouldn’t take them personally, which I didn’t. But I’m glad he did that anyway, primarily because he ripped me and us up one side and down the other, not because of the photos, but for publishing what he called misleading headlines and shoddy reporting.
More important than that to the chief, though, was what was left out of the coverage, and that was the number of young lives that Melekian said his officers actually saved. This was a major bone of contention, because Melekian had declared “no more dead children” soon after coming in as chief a few years after the 1993 Halloween murders of three young boys who were shot in a case of mistaken identity by three gangbangers who are now on Death Row. At that time, Melekian vowed to drive down incidents of violence against children, and he’s been successful in that, as well asin bringing down the city’s overall murder rate over the past few years.
But it wasn’t long after the El Sereno 3 story that Melekian and some of his officers found themselves in the hot seat again, this time for the officer-involved shooting death of an armed man, and a month after that, another officer-involved fatality — both men African Americans and both killed under murky circumstances in Northwest Pasadena.
As he was with the case of the three teens, Melekian was up front and proactive about dealing with the press regarding these incidents, urging transparency in police operations and inviting in outside agencies, such as the FBI, to look for wrongdoing in the two lethal situations, then determine how the department could improve.
Along with encouraging scrutiny, Melekian went the extra mile, applying a personal touch by speaking with family members of the two men and reaching out to the community at a series of public forums at which he sometimes absorbed some pretty nasty criticisms.
Melekian shouldered those barbs without complaint, probably because he’s a big advocate of The Pasadena Way, the set of rules (guidelines, really) that the department operates by, which are engraved in metal and laid in cement on the very steps of the department. One of those tenets is, “How we get the job done is as important as getting the job done,” and Melekian has proven the power of that axiom through example time after time while at the helm.
Those leadership skills were never more apparent than when Melekian stepped up to take over the reins of the city as interim city manager following the retirement of former City Manager Cynthia Kurtz in 2007. He had already served as interim fire chief for a brief time, so there was little doubt that he could handle the ministerial duties of the job. No one in anyone’s memory had ever served as chief of the fire department and the police department, nor was there a police chief who ever became city manager. Truly, he was a one-of-a-kind person who lived to serve. But along with those responsibilities, Melekian also serves as a member of the Coast Guard Reserve and he was called to duty shortly after America went to war in Iraq.
This week, Melekian leaves Pasadena for Washington DC to take over as director of the Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) division of the federal Justice Department.
As fate would have it, he leaves town as the final investigations into yet another officer-involved shooting death are being made public, and in this incident, Melekian invited not only the FBI and the District Attorney’s Office, but also the county Office of Independent Review to look over the department’s shoulder, and the latter two have done so — both concluding that the officers involved acted within the law. However, the latest and most exhaustive of these, the OIR report, raised serious questions about the officers’ tactical judgments, possible overreactions and about the adequacy and objectivity of internal procedures when police investigate each other in officer-involved shootings.
There may well be room for improvements based on those critiques, but at least the investigation is over for the most part and Melekian can move on with a clear conscience, knowing that he did all that he could to ensure the department did everything in its power to follow the direction he set for it by not just mouthing the words of The Pasadena Way, but actually living them.
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Kevin,
You have no idea. . . . things are just now coming to light about this guy.