A Case Study in Law Without Enforcement
Officer 341’s Highly Documented Record

During a UC Regents meeting on the UCLA campus, Officer 341 personally wrote a parking ticket to a vehicle driven by a UC Regent. Two command officers ordered him to cancel the ticket. He documented the directive as a ticket-fixing case “directed by the Chancellor, the Regent, and UCLA police administrators.”

He was not a secondhand reporter. He was the officer who wrote the ticket and was directly ordered by his chain of command to void it. Ordering a police officer to cancel a lawfully issued citation is illegal. Both command officers who issued the order became central figures in the retaliatory campaign that followed.

During this period, a lieutenant told Officer 341 and numerous other officers that he was the Chief’s and Assistant Chief’s “AX MAN” and “HATCHET MAN — the one responsible for getting rid of troublemakers, writing paper on people and initiating investigations.”

This is a direct admission of an assigned role in a retaliatory scheme — he identified himself as the designated enforcement tool of the two officers above him in the chain of command. The statement was made to multiple officers, establishing potential corroborating witnesses.

Officer 341 personally initiated and conducted a criminal investigation into systematic criminal activity inside the UCLA Center for Health Sciences. Through eight tape-recorded conversations with a confidential informant, he documented:

•  Systematic theft of $10,000 to $15,000 in hospital supplies and equipment by a housekeeping supervisor and associates, loaded into University vehicles and diverted to the supervisor’s off-duty cleaning business — verified through Los Angeles County Fictitious Business Name records.
•  An extortion and job-selling scheme — jobs at the new UCLA Medical Plaza sold for $600 to $2,000 per hire.
•  Prostitution on-duty inside the hospital, including in the boiler room near the emergency area.
•  Drugs brought into the facility.

He placed the eight tape-recorded conversations into evidence under Property Report #0190000204.

Officer 341 and his supervisor met with the Chief of Police and two Assistant Chiefs. He had requested transfer away from the lieutenant who had identified himself as the department’s “Ax Man.” The three command officers agreed to the transfer — on the condition that he drop his workers’ compensation claim and grievances.

This later turned out to be a fatal mistake. The Chief used the opportunity to try to claim the department had never received a workers’ compensation filing from 341 at all — an assertion contradicted by the claims administrator’s own file, by Applied Risk Management’s interview notes, and by Officer 341’s retained correspondence.

He complied. He was transferred. From June 1991 to January 1992, his documented stomach and heart problems improved and he was asymptomatic.

On January 6, 1992 — seven months later — against his numerous documented protests, he was transferred back to the same lieutenant’s supervision. His medical and personnel problems immediately resumed. As documented below, this same supervisor was subsequently demoted for sexual, racial, and general harassment.

Three command officers had conditioned relief from documented harassment on the surrender of statutory rights, with a supervisor as witness. When the officer complied, the University broke its own agreement. The fact that his medical conditions resolved during the transfer period and resumed upon return establishes that the University knew the source of the harm.

Applied Risk Management claims administrator John Hodson interviewed Officer 341 about job stressors. At the end of the interview, Hodson stated that Officer 341’s filing of a workers’ compensation claim “would not help the grievances” he had filed — a statement by the University’s own claims administrator tying the WC claim to the grievance record.

Hodson’s interview notes later disappeared. When Officer 341 asked for them, Michael Lehman told him the notes “don’t exist.” Officer 341 subsequently saw a letter from Hodson at his treating physician’s office referencing the same conversation — confirming the notes had existed and had been removed from the claims file.

Grievance AR 91-01-14 — Filed January 14, 1991.
Grievance AR 91-02-21 — Filed February 21, 1991.
Grievance AR 92-10 — Illegal removal from motorcycle assignment. Won. Retaliatory memo removed from personnel file.
Grievance AR 92-11 — Improperly issued counseling memo. Won. Memo removed from personnel file.
Grievance AR 92-12 — Physical threat by a lieutenant for filing grievances. Won. Lieutenant demoted.
Grievance AR 92-14 — Improperly issued performance evaluation. Won. Evaluation removed from personnel file.
Grievance AR 92-16 — Sexual, racial, and general harassment by 341’s immediate supervisor, a Lieutenant. This is among the most extensively documented grievances in the record. The specific documented conduct included: racial jokes targeting African-American, Jewish-American, and Mexican-American individuals; sexual jokes and pornographic material depicting transsexuals displayed in the substation; pointing his service weapon at an African-American suspect and stating he would buy him “fried chicken and watermelon” if he came down from a tree — witnessed by two officers; referring to female officers as lesbians; calling the department’s Director of Administration, a female employee, a “cunt” and an “amazon”; a pre-existing reputation among officers as a prolific liar and poor supervisor — so disliked that a fellow officer cut the brake lines on his personal vehicle and a police report was filed. Won. Lieutenant demoted.
Grievance AR 92-18 — Improperly issued written warning. Won. Memo removed from personnel file.

One night, while working graveyard shift at the UCLA Center for Health Sciences Hospital, the Lieutenant ordered 341 to meet him in his office. 341 followed the order. When he arrived, the Lieutenant had 341 sit down next to his desk, opened the bottom drawer, pulled out a pornographic magazine depicting transsexuals, showed the pictures to Officer 341 and said, “Isn’t this weird?” 341 replied, “No — but what is weird is you calling me into your office on graveyard and showing it to me. That is really fucking weird.” 341 left the office and resumed his patrol duties.

Officer 341 sent a written protest through the chain of command to the Assistant Chief. The protest objected to the Assistant Chief having declared the Center for Health Sciences criminal investigation “closed” while simultaneously assigning an unqualified officer to conduct further investigation into the same matter.

He warned the Assistant Chief directly in writing: “I feel you are mismanaging this investigation and allowing CHS management personnel to break the law and further damage the University.” He concluded: “If you do not care to investigate these allegations, I will find someone outside our department who will.”

The investigation was never prosecuted.

This occurred just prior to the UCLA Medical Center coming under the new requirements of AB 508 (Chapter 936, Statutes of 1993) — the California law that added Health & Safety Code §§ 1257.7 and 1257.8, requiring California hospitals to conduct annual security and safety assessments, implement a written security plan, and report injuries sustained by on-duty hospital personnel to local law enforcement. Officer 341 later verified that his investigation of criminal activity at the UCLA Center for Health Sciences was never submitted to the reporting stream the new law required.

Act 1: A lieutenant circulated a completely fabricated rumor that Officer 341 “had tried to obtain an appointment with the Chancellor, was refused, became upset and had to be physically restrained and removed from his office” and “had been sent to a psychologist for evaluation.” None of this occurred. The rumor was circulated before the officer had written to the Chancellor — establishing preemptive retaliation against protected petition activity that had not yet occurred.

Act 2: On the same day, the officer discovered a memo in the computer printer from the Assistant Chief to the Chief stating: “I believe 341 will again come down with stomach problems and seek a medical retirement. This may be his actual intent. Enough is enough!”

Two command staff officers engaged in simultaneous documented adverse actions on the same day — coordinated institutional action.

The complaint was subsequently stymied because the DA investigator assigned to the matter was personally acquainted with the Chief of Police.

Complaint filed with the FBI. Re-filed with new information in December 1995 and April 1996.

Complaint filed with the California DOJ. Re-filed with new information in December 1995.

The lieutenant attended a mutual aid training session in Orange County and told officers in the class — including a friend of Officer 341 — that Officer 341 was “a paranoid schizophrenic, cocaine user,” that he filed workers’ compensation claims for stress, and that the department “was definitely going to force him out — he won’t get his job back.”

The friend telephoned 341 from the training course. 341 immediately called Karl Ross, who recalled the lieutenant to the station and placed him on administrative leave. A captain was assigned to investigate and concluded 341 was lying.

341’s friend then came in for his interview with the captain and produced a tape recording of the entire training session that inadvertently captured the lieutenant’s statements verbatim — conclusively proving 341 was truthful and the investigation conclusion was factually wrong.

Campus Human Resources fact-finder Tina Simmons completed her investigation and found that the lieutenant had violated University policy. The fact-finding report is a University-generated document confirming Officer 341’s complaints were substantiated by the University’s own investigator.

Contained within the fact-finding was a statement from the Assistant Chief in which he stated Officer 341 was “riding the worker’s comp gravy train” and that his goal was to “milk the department and sue.” He added that the claims were “not as large as I reported them to be and were manipulated, orchestrated, and blown out of proportion.”

This statement was made eight months after the Assistant Chief’s own “Enough is enough!” memo — documenting an eight-month progression of institutional animus by the same command officer against the same whistleblower.

The Chief of Police stated in writing that the lieutenant had violated department and University policy on sexual harassment and violated a direct order by discussing Officer 341’s case. The lieutenant was demoted two ranks from lieutenant to police officer. After an administrative hearing, he retained the rank of sergeant due to a POBR technicality — the failure to provide Lybarger/Miranda warnings before the compelled investigation, as required by Government Code § 3300 et seq.

Officer 341 discovered a manila envelope in his station mailbox bearing no return address, postmarked April 29, 1993, P.M. Oxnard, California, labeled “Two Day Priority Mail.” The envelope contained copies of his grievances, a copy of Tina Simmons’ fact-finding report, a copy of the disciplinary letter from the Chief to the lieutenant, and a copy of his lawsuit.

He documented the leak in writing to Sandra Rich, Employee and Labor Relations Manager for UCLA Campus Human Resources, stating the leak “amounts to a serious breach of Mr. [the lieutenant’s] and my protectable interest to have our investigation remain confidential” and that “someone in the UCLA administration who has access to such restricted and confidential records is leaking them to members of the department.”

Filed in Santa Monica Superior Court. Named defendants included the Regents, Acting Chief Karl T. Ross, and other UCLA PD officials. Claims included discrimination, whistleblowing, and acts against public policy arising from his employment and his role as founding president of FUPOA.

The case received contemporaneous coverage in the Los Angeles Times on February 25, 1993 and April 24, 1994. The Santa Monica College Corsair published a two-part investigative series on the case. Officer 341’s October 1993 escalation correspondence was transmitted to the Daily Bruin, the Los Angeles Times, and 60 Minutes — the highest-profile media escalation available to him at that time. UCLA’s own Luskin Center for History and Policy subsequently cited Officer 341’s case by name in its March 2022 institutional publication, “The History of Racism and the Quest for Racial Justice at UCLA.”

Officer 341 wrote directly to the Chancellor, stating he had been on paid leave “for no apparent reason or justification, getting paid full salary and benefits of over $42,000.00 a year, to sit at home and do nothing,” and reminded the Chancellor: “I am not the person who was investigated for misconduct. I was the victim of the misconduct.”

The day after the letter to the Chancellor, Acting Chief Karl T. Ross changed Officer 341’s leave status from Administrative Leave to Investigatory Leave and ordered him to surrender his gun, badge, and identification card — items he had already surrendered eleven months earlier.

He was not informed what he was being investigated for until almost a year later. When he asked the Internal Affairs investigating officer why he was being investigated, the officer stated he “did not know and he was just following orders.”

Under Lawson v. PPG Architectural Finishes, Inc. (2022) 12 Cal.5th 703, the one-day temporal proximity is sufficient to establish that the petition was a “contributing factor” in the adverse action.

While on involuntary leave ordered by the University, Officer 341 paid $2,060 out of his own pocket for a stress treadmill evaluation at the Pacific Heart Institute. Dr. Merz recommended evaluation for cardiomyopathy. The test was performed outside the University’s claims-administrator network because the documented claims-management conduct had compromised his ability to rely on it.

The medical workup establishes a contemporaneous, independently financed record of the cardiac symptoms the University’s own Assistant Chief had dismissed as a “worker’s comp gravy train.”

Officer 341 sent identical formal complaints simultaneously to the Chancellor and the UC President, invoking the Reporting of Improper Governmental Activities Act and formally evoking his right to pursue civil action and collect punitive damages and attorney’s fees. Both letters were signed under penalty of perjury. Copies were transmitted to the Bureau of State Audits and the Los Angeles Times.

The complaint named seven individual UC employees as having engaged in acts of fraud in connection with the fabricated Internal Affairs investigation, including altering official documents, omitting witnesses, concealing evidence, and lying about facts that would prove Officer 341’s innocence.

Under Government Code § 8547.10, the University was required to reach a decision regarding the complaint “within the time limits established by the Regents.” Read that again. The statute delegated the decision back to the Regents themselves — on their own timeline. The fox investigates the henhouse on the fox’s schedule. The documented record does not reflect that the University ever reached the required decision or notified him of any investigation. The 33-year-old officer used every tool available to him. The 65-year-old now understands why none of them worked.

One week after Officer 341 prevailed at the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board on November 15, 1995, the lieutenant who had previously been demoted for harassment issued a retaliatory sick leave memo against him.

The memo landed during the same window in which Officer 341 was simultaneously leading the statewide FUPOA union drive and preparing the federal FLSA lawsuit — establishing a clean temporal chain from the favorable WCAB ruling, to the retaliatory memo, to the union organizing activity, to the federal filing that followed eight weeks later.

Officer 341 simultaneously re-filed complaints with new information to the following agencies:
•  Los Angeles County District Attorney — Special Investigation Division
•  Federal Bureau of Investigation
•  California Department of Justice
•  California Attorney General
•  California Personnel Board
•  ABC News

Separately, five DFEH complaints were filed between July 1992 and June 1995. The DFEH investigated and issued a right-to-sue letter, confirming sufficient evidence existed to proceed to civil litigation. A Cal/OSHA complaint was filed March 22, 1994.

University Police Officers v. Regents of the University of California — Case No. 2:96-cv-00396-WDK-AJW — United States District Court, Central District of California. Officer 341 was the individually named plaintiff and founding president of FUPOA, filing as representative of all sworn UC police officers systemwide.

The lawsuit resulted in all sworn UC police officers systemwide receiving overtime pay. A Stipulated Judgment and Order was entered April 29, 1997.

On Thursday, February 15, 1996, Officer 341 encountered the UCLA Chief of Police in the UCLA PD parking lot on his day off. Officer 341 told the Chief he was considering leaving police work. The Chief’s response, as recorded contemporaneously by Officer 341 in a February 17, 1996 letter to his attorneys Jennifer Eason and Edgar Saenz, was: “That’s a slam dunk.” When Officer 341 asked what he meant, the Chief stated the case qualified as a medical retirement under the heart-presumption framework: “If you had any little mark on your heart, you were out of there.”

The Chief’s knowledge of Officer 341 predated UCLA. As a former Los Angeles County deputy, the Chief had personal knowledge of Officer 341 from a Culver City traffic stop years earlier, during which he had observed Officer 341’s mixed-race family.

This admission — made one day before the line-of-duty injury that ended his patrol career — is a contemporaneously documented statement by the UCLA Chief of Police himself that the case warranted full medical retirement. The subsequent thirty-year reclassification chain (“resigned,” “retired,” “service retiree,” “disability retiree”) is documented in Act II.

Officer 341 sustained a line-of-duty injury that ended his patrol career. The subsequent workers’ compensation proceedings, the Octagon Risk Services permanent disability determination of August 8, 2001, and the thirty-year chain of institutional obfuscation regarding his employment classification — “medically separated,” “resigned,” “retired,” “service retiree,” “disability retiree” — are the subject of the current POST complaints and are documented in full in Act II: Schrödinger’s UC Retiree.

On August 8, 2001, Octagon Risk Services — UC’s own claims administrator — issued the permanent-and-stationary disability determination on Officer 341’s line-of-duty injury. For the next decade, UC honored every term of that determination: tax-free disability income, paid health coverage, and continuing CCW (Carry Concealed Weapon) authorization.

The CCW record confirms it. UCLA PD issued Officer 341 his first CCW on September 6, 2002 — after the Octagon determination — and renewed it on August 29, 2013. A peace officer deemed unfit for duty does not receive CCW authorization. The University’s own actions for more than a decade establish what it understood his status to be.

The pattern documented in this chapter is not isolated to UCLA PD. The University of California managed Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under contract with the United States Department of Energy from 1943 until 2006 — a sixty-three-year span. During the late 1990s, LANL was rocked by multiple national security scandals, including missing classified hard drives and failed security tests in which mock intruders successfully penetrated the facility.

In 2002, UC hired two former federal investigators, Glenn Walp and Steven Doran, to investigate theft and security breaches at LANL. Walp and Doran uncovered documented misconduct. UC’s response was to fire them. They lost their livelihoods. Their disclosures were later vindicated in congressional hearings. UC’s contract to manage LANL was not renewed after 2006.

Different property. Different era. Same institutional response to whistleblowing: terminate the reporter, protect the institution. The structural wall that produced the outcomes documented in this chapter produced identical outcomes at a national security laboratory six hundred miles away.

In 2016, Officer 341 met Steven Doran through a mutual security-industry contact. The two became good friends, and years later — telling war stories — they realized they had walked the same road inside the University of California. As part of his 2003 settlement with UC, Doran was reinstated and placed at the UC President’s Office in Oakland as Director of Public Safety and Systems Security — a role whose portfolio, according to Department of Defense reporting at the time, included security oversight at the three UC-managed national laboratories and at all ten University of California campuses (Military.com — “Fired Whistleblower Now Labs’ Security Chief,” Feb. 26, 2003; Los Angeles Times — “Fired Whistleblower at Los Alamos Wins $930,000 Settlement From UC,” Aug. 21, 2003). In cop shorthand: they made him the chief over all the UC chiefs. The institution fired him for doing his job, then — to buy silence — gave him the job of watching everyone else’s.

What happened to that consolidated “chief over all UC chiefs” authority in the years that followed — and why no single executive holds it today — is examined in Chapter 4: Ten Chiefs, No Boss, No Voter.

In August 2023, twenty-one years after Officer 341’s first UCLA PD-issued CCW and ten years after his renewal, the UCLA Chief of Police denied his CCW renewal. The denial reversed more than two decades of continuous authorization issued by UCLA PD itself under the Octagon permanent-and-stationary determination.

No change had occurred in Officer 341’s status as a retired peace officer. No disqualifying event appears in the record. What had changed was the institutional appetite to continue honoring the 2001 determination — the same reclassification impulse that would later surface in the 2026 Via Benefits transfer attempt documented in Act II.