Public defender launches integrity unit and victims still look for their cars.

The man approaches me after the second hour of a neverending press conference March 6 outside City Hall in King City, an event sponsored by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). The man’s English is about as good as my Spanish – which is to say, pretty bad – but I make out that he’s asking about the television cameras.

“No no, lo siento, soy una periodista de la prensa, no television,” I tell him. That makes him happy. Turns out he doesn’t want to be on camera and doesn’t want his face identified or his name used. But he does want to tell his story.

His hands are labor tough and his arms scratched up. He was missing more than a few teeth. I grab someone to translate and he tells me his simple story.

“The police took my car,” he says.

That’s really about it. The police took his car. He says that about seven months ago he had a diabetic episode while he was driving in King City. His vision got blurry, he got dizzy and his car scraped the rear of another vehicle. The police came, declared the man was drunk, took his car and left him there.

“I hired someone to try to help me,” he says, “but so far he’s done nothing.”

“Did you give him money to try to help you?” I ask.

“Yes, yes,” he answers.

And that in a nutshell is the unholy miracle of King City. The prey is on the bottom and the predators are on top, or at least many of them were, until the District Attorney’s office started arresting them. Quick recap: four police officers, the former chief, the former acting chief and the former acting chief’s brother were charged in late February with a handful of felonies. Some of those charges relate to a scheme in which often undocumented Latino immigrants were pulled over, their cars impounded and towed off, never to be seen again. One officer swung the lion’s share of the tow business to the acting chief’s brother, owner of a tow company; along the profit chain, the officer allegedly received a free car for every 15 he ordered towed.

Now that the initial round of charges has been identified, prosecutors are faced with the onerous task of finding victims. Some don’t want to talk, out of fear of deportation, and some don’t want to talk out of general habit: In Mexico, you don’t go up against the police. But more predators are coming forward, the kind who say they’ll help, take your money and do nothing.

It’s why someone recently compared King City to Tijuana – because of the pervasive silence when it comes to police abuse. When you have people who are easily victimized, you have people looking to capitalize.

As the press conference wore on (there were some great speakers – a particularly fiery Assemblyman Luis Alejo called for state Attorney General Kamala Harris and the Department of Justice to investigate), I thought more about the perpetrators. Not only were the alleged crimes police-on-resident, they were, in many cases, Latino-on-Latino.

That’s not perplexing, though, it’s heart breaking, says Dwayne Goff, a Vietnam War veteran and state commander of the American G.I. Forum, a group that formed in the 1940s to advocate for Latino soldiers returning home from war.

“The true test of a man is what he does when he’s given power,” Goff says. “These police have the power to call in immigration, and the next thing you know, the people are in a for-profit prison, without any charges, without any trial and if they’re female, they’re probably getting raped.”

The latest in the King City debacle is that on March 10, the Public Defenders Office announced the formation of a “public integrity unit,” to examine cases that involved the King City officers under arrest. KSBW, in its usual hysteria-inducing way, said it could be thousands of cases – thousands! – that might have to be dismissed.

It’s not thousands of cases. In the past 10 years, the whole of the King City P.D. probably hasn’t even investigated thousands of cases. But it is dozens, maybe scores. And for each individual, it will mean something difficult to quantify, but something of fundamental importance to a healthy community. Trust.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or twitter.com/maryrduan