King City PD hopes to clean up its act with new chief.

A year and a half ago, the King City Police Department closed for a day after sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys investigators gutted their force, arresting a third of the active police officers.

Since then, six of the seven arrested have pleaded no contest in court to charges related to ongoing corruption, minor and major. As part of his plea deal, former Acting Chief Bruce Miller agreed to never work in policing again.

Now there’s new leadership at King City PD, where Chief Ron Forgue was sworn in June 22. Since then he’s hired three new officers, and he continues searching to fill four remaining vacancies.

“We did the bulldozing,” Forgue says. “Now we’re starting to do the rebuilding.”

Part of that is getting King City up to snuff on policing basics. Corruption scandal aside, Forgue inherited 24 unsolved murders that claimed 28 victims since 1999. (Over the same time period, KCPD solved fewer than five homicides.)

Forgue mapped the homicides and created a histogram, the kind of diagram you might see on a crime show, looking for connections. His predecessor, Interim Chief Tony Sollecito, brought on a retired district attorney’s investigator to help.

“WE DID THE BULLDOZING. NOW WE’RE REBUILDING.”

King City has seen three murders since Investigator Allen Rowe started in April. The first two are under investigation by the sheriff’s office. The third, the July 1 shooting of 29-year-old Michael Benavides, led to the Aug. 17 arrest of a 15-year-old boy.

Rowe has assembled case files, organizing relevant videos, audio recordings and photos into binders and boxes.

“Back in the ’90s, this was just a sleepy little town,” Rowe says. “Then gangs came in, and look what’s happened.”

His next step: reading through each of those 24 case files, looking for leads that could rejuvenate the investigations. The key to unlocking each case: finding witnesses willing to talk.

“There’s someone in this community who knows exactly what happened with each of these homicides,” Rowe says.

As the murder investigations press forward, they’ll face the usual challenges cold cases do. Some witnesses have moved or passed away, and much of the evidence is long gone. (For more details on the cases, visit www.mcweekly.com.)

But these cases face an added challenge: public distrust of the King City PD in the wake of the corruption scandal.

“There are some homicides where police credibility is absolutely critical,” Chief Assistant District Attorney Berkley Brannon says. “It makes it more difficult [to persuade a jury], but not insurmountable.”