Brush v. City of Los Angeles

[122]

Opinion

JEFFERSON, J.

Petitioner Jack R. Brush sought a writ of administrative mandate (Code Civ. Proc., § 1094.5) to compel respondents, the City of Los Angeles, Edward M. Davis, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Los Angeles Police Department, to reinstate him as a sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department and to pay to him accumulated back salary. The trial court denied the writ and entered judgment for the respondents.

Since the judgment must be reversed for the reason hereinafter stated, we refer only briefly to the factual basis of petitioner’s termination from employment.

Petitioner was first employed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1963. The department, acting upon a tip from an unnamed informant, commenced an investigation in 1971 of events involving petitioner which had occurred in 1968. During the course of the investigation, petitioner was questioned by investigators for the department, and in 1971 and 1972 he denied the truth of certain charges which had been made against him by Lawrence E. Marken, namely that petitioner had, in 1968, planted narcotics in a suitcase in the possession of Marken and Doris Damone (later Doris Marken); had arrested them for possession of narcotics; and had subsequently testified falsely at a preliminaiy hearing on the narcotics charge with the objective of having the charges dismissed. It was charged that the motivation for the harassment of Marken and Damone by petitioner stemmed from his involvement with an informer and user of narcotics, Shirley Fleming, who had, just prior to the 1968 events, been in an altercation with Marken and Damone.

In 1972 petitioner was charged

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with three counts of lying to departmental investigators and, after a board of rights hearing, was discharged from his employment. He then sought review of the administrative action in the trial court. At that time the trial court applied the standard of review approved by current decisional law, determining whether the administrative decision to terminate petitioner’s employment was supported by substantial evidence contained in the administrative record.