Santa Paula settles lawsuit over altercation between police, good Samaritan firefighter
The city of Santa Paula has reached an out-of-court settlement with a retired firefighter who claimed he was roughed up and detained by police after he came to the aid of a shooting victim in 2020.
The settlement ends a federal lawsuit against the city by Joseph Garces, a Santa Paula resident and retired Oxnard firefighter. No details of the agreement have been released, and both sides signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of the settlement, Santa Paula City Manager Dan Singer said.
Lawyers for Garces and the city agreed on the settlement in June, according to court filings, and the Santa Paula City Council was briefed on the matter in a closed session on Aug. 2. No council vote was necessary to approve the settlement, Singer said, because the city doesn’t have to allocate any money for it — the payment will be made by the city's insurance cooperative.
The lawsuit stems from an altercation in October 2020 between Garces and Chris Rivera, who was then a senior officer with the Santa Paula Police Department. Garces claimed Rivera assaulted and unlawfully detained him at the scene of the shooting, injuring his shoulder and triggering his post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rivera left the Santa Paula Police Department and the city “in good standing” on June 23, for a job with the Baldwin Park Police Department, Singer said.
The city did not disclose whether it disciplined Rivera for the incident. But an investigation conducted for the city by an outside firm found that Rivera did use “unreasonable and unwarranted force” toward Garces despite having no evidence he had broken any laws or interfered with the investigation of the shooting. The report also said Rivera’s supervisors on the scene should have intervened and tried to de-escalate the situation.
Singer would not comment on the report by Barrister Professional Services, a private investigator firm. It was provided to The Star by an unknown source and was labeled “Privileged attorney work product,” though the investigators named as the report's authors are not attorneys. The city manager did say he believed the document is authentic.
Crime scene confrontation
On Oct. 9, 2020, Garces was driving down A Street in Santa Paula when he was waved down by a woman on the sidewalk. She had found a man lying in a parking lot, in a pool of blood. Garces administered CPR to the man, who survived, despite having been shot in the face.
Santa Paula police officers began arriving on the scene a few minutes after Garces. When Rivera arrived, he ordered Garces to “get the f--- out of my crime scene,” according to police body camera footage from the incident. Rivera and Garces then got into an expletive-filled shouting match that ended with Rivera pinning Garces to a tree, handcuffing him and detaining him in the back of a police car.
Their altercation was the basis for the lawsuit Garces filed in August 2021 against Rivera and the city of Santa Paula, alleging civil rights violations, unreasonable use of force, battery and negligence. Garces said he suffered shoulder injuries that required surgery, as well as emotional distress, as the incident triggered a post-traumatic stress response that first arose in his career as a firefighter.
The city sought to have the case dismissed, and in March, U.S. District Judge Fernando Anelle-Rocha ruled it could continue. The judge did rule in the city's and Rivera's favor on one motion: Rivera had “qualified immunity,” which means he couldn’t be held personally liable.
Some of the other pre-trial motions, which Anelle-Rocha hadn’t ruled on yet, focused on whether certain evidence would be admissible in court, should the case ever go before a jury. In a motion filed in February, the city of Santa Paula asked the judge to exclude from trial "any evidence of an internal affairs investigation, administrative investigation or other post-incident inquiry into Officer Rivera's conduct, and/or any reports of such investigation."
In that motion, the city said "an anonymous source has illegally 'leaked' a copy of the administrative investigation ... prepared by an independent investigator" to Garces' lawyers. The city's lawyers had disclosed the existence of the report to Garces' lawyers, and the city provided recorded interviews that were conducted as part of the investigation, but the report itself had been withheld from discovery, the city's motion stated.
The city's motion cites court precedent stating that factual information gathered in an internal affairs investigation — such as the recorded interviews conducted by Barrister's investigators — must be turned over to the other side's lawyers, but the conclusions and recommendations of the investigation can be withheld. The city asked the judge to prevent jurors from hearing any mention of whether there was an internal affairs investigation.
In response to a public records request from the Star, the city of Santa Paula declined to provide any records related to investigations of possible misconduct by Rivera, stating there are no such records that are publicly available under California law.
Police personnel and disciplinary records are generally confidential, but a series of state laws passed between 2018 and 2021 established a requirement to disclose them to the public in certain cases.
Those include any sustained finding of unreasonable or excessive force; any incident involving an officer firing a weapon; any incident involving the use of force by an officer that results in death or “great bodily injury”; any sustained finding of sexual assault; and any sustained finding of unlawful arrests, unlawful searches, dishonesty, or conduct displaying prejudice on the basis of race, gender or other protected attributes.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Santa Paula settles suit by good Samaritan firefighter
