King City cops allegedly preyed upon marginalized people who were distrustful to begin with. Rebuilding won’t be easy.

Tuesday, Feb. 26 was a rough day for Michael Powers, the city manager of King City. Before sunup, six police officers and the acting chief’s brother had been arrested. A flurry of reporters would rotate on and off the City Hall lawn all week long. Making matters worse, Powers stepped on something – a pine cone, or an acorn – and twisted his ankle.

Two days later, he was still limping. Now it’s time to start limping toward recovery, even as FBI and District Attorney investigations into the King City Police Department continue.

That recovery got off to a rocky start. There was a Tuesday afternoon press conference, hours after all seven suspects bailed out, with about two dozen angry residents demanding answers.

There was no interpreter on hand, despite the fact that victims of the alleged scheme – in which police seized upwards of 200 cars, delivered them mostly to the chief’s brother’s tow pound, then gifted some to cops when the vehicle owners were unable to pay the fees – being mostly Latino and, in many cases, non-English speakers.

Juan Zaragoza, a 36-year-old ag irrigator, told a Univision TV reporter in Spanish that his car got impounded when he was pulled over for driving too fast, though he had a driver’s license from Mexico. When he returned to Miller’s Towing, his car was already gone, and so were his personal belongings, he said.

The day after the arrests, Powers appointed Dennis Hegwood as acting chief, based on his experience leading team-building workshops for the King City P.D. in the past. Besides a controversial history (visit www.mcweekly.com/kingcitycorruption for more on that), he doesn’t speak Spanish.

“That’s an opportunity that was lost today,” Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, says. “The next chief should be someone who’s going to help build trust, especially with the Latino community. It should be someone who’s bilingual and able to communicate with the victims of this corruption scandal.”

Getting undocumented immigrants who are victims of crimes to cooperate with law enforcement at all is a challenge – they fear deportation, and many don’t speak English. Testifying as a witness to a crime is anathema to living a life under the radar. That makes King City, where undocumented immigrants and poor farm workers make up a large portion of the population, a perfect place to engineer a car-impounding scheme targeting immigrants.

Complaints about impoundments are nothing new in Latino communities.

When he was mayor of Watsonville, Alejo led the charge on a new tow and impoundment policy. Impoundments dropped by 80 percent, he says, after the new policy – which gives owners a 24-hour notice to pick up their cars, or send a licensed driver – was enacted.

King City Councilman Carlos Victoria, elected in 2010, says he campaigned largely on a platform of reforming the city’s impounding policy.

“That was one of my number-one priorities,” he says. “I understand [some people] don’t have a license, but they have to drive to work, take their kids to school, and go to the grocery store.”

Victoria says he helped engineer an agreement with the P.D. that the practice of 30-day holds would end; anyone who could show a driver’s license and registration could get their car back right away.

But it’s not just an apparent failure to implement that policy which led to deteriorating trust in the police. Victoria says it’s been a string of unsolved murders.

Consider, for example, the night of Jan. 10, 2013. At 7:46pm, police officers found an 18-year-old man lying in a field on the outskirts of King City, where a residential neighborhood meets ag land.

Ortiz bled out and died en route to Mee Memorial Hospital. Ortiz’s friend, 32-year-old Jose Manuel Calderon Alvarado, was luckier. He barely dodged bullets that passed through both sleeves of his coat. Those bullets were allegedly fired by Hispanic men in a white Volkswagen Jetta with tinted windows and chrome rims, but no arrest was ever made and no suspect has been identified.

“It’s crimes that have been happening and haven’t been solved,” Victoria says. “Those crimes had nothing to do with being documented or undocumented. People don’t trust the police.”

That lack of trust might run even deeper than the police department’s shortcomings.

“I look at my immigrant population, and if I came from Mexico or some other Latin American country, I wouldn’t trust the cops,” Powers says. “I get that. We have illegal immigrants and they’re afraid to interact. As a country, I don’t know that we do a good job – we don’t really do the melting pot thing anymore.”

Resources to help are too few and far between, Powers says. He met with U.S. immigration officials, who told him to encourage King City immigrants to visit the office in Salinas: “For my folks who work in the fields from 6 in the morning to 6 at night, that might as well be on the moon,” he says.

None of this comes as a surprise to Michael Harpold, a retired border patrol agent who spent 35 years working for Immigration and Naturalization Services, mostly in Bakersfield. He recently wrote a book called Jumping the Line, a fictionalized account of illegal border crossings.

Harpold recalls something a friend used to say: “Show me people in need, and I’ll show you people making money.”

Poor, undocumented non-English-speakers qualify. But many are also breaking the law.

Mary Hamilton grew up in King City, and moved away for 25 years before returning in 2012 to run her dad’s property company. An unlicensed driver crashed into a building they own – leaving Hamilton’s insurance on the hook for repairs. “If you can’t afford the insurance on your car, you really shouldn’t be in a position to drive,” she says.

Similar tensions came to a head in nearby Greenfield, where retired Police Chief Joe Grebmeier – who’s lived in King City since 1977 – got caught up in a politically charged battle over whether police should educate or enforce among an influx of new immigrants from Mexico.

Grebmeier used to hold community meetings aimed at helping the Oaxacan community get looped in on local laws. That effort deteriorated as opponents wanted more of a crackdown on building code violations, like cars parked on lawns and multiple families living in too-small apartments. Leonard Dart, who narrowly lost a 2012 challenge to Mayor John Huerta, said, “I’m running because our town is looking like a third world city.”

Powers says King City might try to imitate what Greenfield did with educating immigrants, but Grebmeier says these arrests are likely to undermine those efforts: “One step forward, two steps back. It takes years to earn trust and minutes to lose it.”