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	April 11, 2005 Former Pleasanton Police Officer Sues City for Wrongful Termination A former Pleasanton police officer filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court against the City of Pleasanton today, claiming he was terminated for trumped-up reasons after he refused to falsify a police report. The officer, Clay Smith, was involved in responding to a strong-arm robbery call in the early morning of February 27, 2004. The complaint alleges that Smith was pressured for days to change his report of how the arrest was handled so that it would cover-up the fact that the police had violated the constitutional rights of a suspect taken into custody. He refused to make the change. Five months later, on August 17, 2004, Smith was terminated by Police Chief Tim Neal following what the complaint describes as "a campaign of retaliation" by various command-level officers including ostracization, humiliation, intense pressure and unwarranted scrutiny. Over the course of the months leading up to his termination, Smith says his complaints to superiors about the retaliation were never addressed. Instead, he started being written up and harangued for failing to meet the Police Department’s ticket and arrest quotas, a standard Smith says was not applied similarly to others. In late July, the Department put him on a "Performance Improvement Plan" that was supposed to give him three months to increase his statistics. Some of his superiors in the Department acted repeatedly to undermine and distort Officer Smith’s performance record. They refused to credit him for police activities, tailed him as he performed his work in the field, and ridiculed him in front of fellow officers. All of this took a heavy toll on Officer Smith’s sense of personal safety and ability to cope with the demands of policing. Smith was fired just two weeks after he began the three-month "Performance Improvement Plan." "There are a lot of good officers in the Pleasanton Police Department," said Smith. "Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that the culture and powers-that-be in the Department make it easier to be a bad cop than a good one." With a termination on his record, the former officer has not found a law enforcement agency willing to hire him and has had to return to his prior profession as an automobile mechanic. According to Smith’s attorney, Jean Hyams of Oakland’s Boxer & Gerson, "Because of what has happened, Clay hasn’t just lost his job, he’s lost his whole career." Hyams explained that her firm filed a claim with the City of Pleasanton in February of this year to try to resolve the case without having to bring suit. Hyams commented, "It is shocking that the City of Pleasanton never even bothered to contact us about these serious allegations of wrong-doing by ranking officers in the Police Department. If it’s a lawsuit they wanted, it’s a lawsuit they’ve got." In what may or may not be a coincidence, Police Chief Neal announced his planned retirement at a Department meeting within three weeks of the February claim filed by Smith. Contacts Jean Hyams 510.835.8870 Lynx-Eyed Marketing Andrea Snedeker 510.919.2324 << BACK