S. Pasadena Names New Police Chief

Michael Berkow has taken on some of the toughest rescue calls a police officer can get.

He led efforts to rebuild the police force in war-torn Somalia, then helped create a Haitian force for that country’s return to civilian rule. As police chief of Coachella in Riverside County, Berkow is credited with cleaning up a department whose reputation was so tarnished that other police agencies refused to share sensitive information with it.

Now he takes on South Pasadena.

Berkow, 42, was hired Monday to head South Pasadena’s Police Department, taking the helm of a force that over the last year has been rocked by serious troubles in a city usually known for its tree-lined quiet. The previous chief was allowed to retire in January after the department’s brush with an embarrassing sex scandal and charges that officers covered up a car crash involving one of their colleagues.

City Manager Sean Joyce said Berkow’s record for turning around Coachella’s department made him an ideal choice to take the reins of the South Pasadena force.

“He has helped reestablish the credibility of a police department in a community, and that is appealing to us,” Joyce said. “He is innovative, creative and enthusiastic. . . . He has breadth of knowledge and world experience that is unsurpassed for a guy who is 42 years old.”

The new chief will take over the $91,000-a-year post in late July.

Berkow, who earned a law degree 16 years ago while still a street officer in Rochester, N.Y., said he plans no big changes in South Pasadena until he has had time to gauge community sentiment about the department and the city’s needs.

“I need to spend the first several months there listening,” Berkow said in an interview Monday. “I’m not an expert on South Pasadena. I will be.”

But Berkow said he will deliver an unequivocal message to his troops: “All your behavior counts and it counts all the time. You have to be above reproach all the time.”

Berkow, who said he hopes someday to run a larger department, said he is drawn to the challenge of turning around troubled police forces. “I really believe the way a police department is led and run fundamentally affects people’s lives in that community,” he said.

Despite his world travels and police experience in the Northeast, he said he wants to live in California and run a police department, even if it is a small one at first.

Berkow said the problems of South Pasadena’s department appear to be far less severe than those he has encountered in his previous rehabilitation efforts.

“I have the sense they have a good, functioning Police Department. They have fairly low crime. They’ve had some lapses in ethical behavior” on the part of certain officers, he said.

Law enforcement colleagues describe Berkow as a decisive and demanding leader who was unafraid to remove substandard officers when he assumed command of the department in Coachella, a poor and mostly farming community.

When Berkow took over in 1995, the 24-member Coachella force was bedeviled by troubles: low morale, poor community relations and a sense among other police that the force was too unreliable to be given confidential information about drug suspects.

“There was a lack of training, there were no procedures, evidence wasn’t logged and drugs went missing. It was in complete disarray,” said Edward J. Synicky, special agent in charge of drug enforcement in Riverside County for the state attorney general’s office.

“There was no chain of command. Any problem you can imagine, they had down there. Morale was nonexistent,” Synicky said. “Mike single-handedly turned it around.”

It was not Berkow’s first effort at creating a trustworthy and effective police force. As a police commander in Rochester, Berkow helped lead a joint anti-corruption effort with the FBI in 1990 that he said resulted in the convictions of public officials and police officers.

He later worked for the U.S Department of Justice, rebuilding a police force devastated by the civil war in Somalia, and later heading the formation of the first civilian force in Haiti. Even as a small-town police chief, Berkow has maintained his interest in far-flung spots. He recently took vacation time to travel to Romania as part of a State Department-sponsored study.

But Berkow also is reluctant to label himself a rescue specialist.

“I’m not convinced South Pasadena needs rescuing,” he said.