New police chief gaining Inglewood's trust

Few in Inglewood had heard of Jacqueline Seabrooks or knew anything about the new police chief. After the City Council interviewed three finalists and then announced the appointment, Inglewood police officers and residents wondered how the new boss would adjust.

After all, Seabrooks, 45, is a 26-year police veteran of Santa Monica, a city that had two homicides in 2006; Inglewood had 36.

"Everything was a concern, because she was an outsider, she was new to the department and nobody knew anything about her," said Det. Loyd Waters, vice president of the Inglewood Police Assn.

Now, four months into Seabrooks' tenure at the Inglewood Police Department, concerns have been replaced with excitement about the energetic chief.

During her first weeks, Seabrooks responded to a silent alarm and took down information from a robbery report. She popped in to the station on weekends to speak to officers she hadn't met and went along with a SWAT team to hunt for a homicide suspect.

"I tend to be more hands-on and focused on how the person at the end of my decision perceives things," she said.

Seabrooks took over Sept. 28 at a department hoping to put behind it a series of scandals, including a nationally publicized 2002 videotaped beating of a handcuffed teenager and recent allegations of on-duty officers committing rape. Federal investigators have also been scrutinizing the department over evidence that appears to show officers receiving sexual favors at massage parlors.

For a new leader to oversee Inglewood's 200-strong police force, the South Bay city of more than 100,000 chose Seabrooks, the first black woman in California to hold a city police chief's position and only the second female to hold the top office among Los Angeles County's 48 police departments.

"We had a department that needed a dynamic new leadership," Inglewood Councilman Daniel Tabor said. "What we get from Jacqueline is a person on their way up, trying to make their mark as a chief."

Waters agreed: "She seems like a person that can change things . . . like a doer and not a talker."

In a way, Seabrooks says she is right at home in Inglewood. She was born and raised in neighboring South Los Angeles, which shares much of the same cultural mix and problems. The makeup of Inglewood's population mirrors Seabrooks' group of friends growing up, a mix of black and Latino. She picked up Spanish from her friends and later studied it in school.

As a girl in South Los Angeles, Seabrooks never imagined she would become a police officer.

Seabrooks remembers that when she was 17, she and her friends were pulled over because police said their car resembled a vehicle used in a robbery. The officers ordered the teenagers out of the car and, saying "vile things," told them to face the ground. Seabrooks could clearly hear a voice through the police radio informing the officers they had pulled over the wrong car.

"They didn't explain to us why they stopped us, they didn't say sorry, nothing. Just, 'Get into your car and get the hell out of here,' " she said.

Then there was the time she was working as an assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant when the alarm went off. An officer who responded upon arrival ordered her out of the store, holding a shotgun to her forehead.

Almost 30 years later, Seabrooks still remembers the officer's trembling hand, thinking: 'If I sneeze, I'm dead.'

Again, she recalled, there was no apology, no explanation.

"I have no doubt the officers were doing their job," Seabrooks said. "The question is, did they have to do it like that?"

But police presence was a necessity in Seabrooks' neighborhood, where gangs were beginning to take hold in the early 1970s. A number of her friends ended up in jail, fell victim to gang violence or died from drug overdose.

"I saw how things would spiral out of control . . . how people got sucked up into something that was bigger than them," she said.