The Intercept this week released a documentary by filmmaker Stuart Harmon cataloging incidents from the experience of four Fontana police officers detailing a level of long-existent distinguishing racism and brutality within the police department which is alleged to continue to plague that agency.
The Intercept, which can be accessed at theintercept.com, is an unabashedly left-wing nonprofit news organization that publishes online articles and podcasts involving what it characterizes as rigorous, adversarial journalism in the public interest.
Harmon’s documentary, titled Fontana PD: Hate Within The Ranks, dwells in the main on recurrent allegations that the department in much of its 72-year history has been plagued with racism. In the main, the documentary focuses on the experiences of three of the department’s so-called “protected minority” officers who were employed with the department between the years of 1996 and 2017, David Moore, Andy Anderson and David Ibarra.
Their narratives were supported in part by a white member of the department, Raymond Schneiders, whose father had previously worked as an officer with the Fontana Police Department in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Schneiders, who had begun his law enforcement career in 1982 with the San Gabriel Police Department, hired on in Fontana, in his father’s footsteps, in 1990. He promoted to a detective in the robbery/homicide division, and remained with the department for 18 years, until his 2008 retirement.
Harmon depicts the difficulty that each of the three said they encountered in finding a meaningful or lasting niche within the department and the glass ceiling that prevented their advancement beyond their relatively lower ranks they were confined to while employed in Fontana. A factor limiting their advancement, Moore, Anderson and Ibarra stated, was their ethnicity. Moore is African American, while Anderson and Ibarra are Hispanic.
Premises laid out with opening of the documentary are that it is true that there is a “code of silence,” that those within the law enforcement professtion who speak out against one police officer or one member of a particular department are considered by their peers to be speaking against all police or all members of that specific department. The documentary takes as truism that to become a member of the law enforcement brotherhood you face the perspective of retaliation if you do not toe the line.
Ibarra, who was with the department from 1996 to 2006, said he came to Fontana to “buy the American Dream” and that he had envisioned “one day, when I retired from the police department, that I would go onto the city council and possibly make a run for the mayor.”
Moore, who had previously worked with the Los Angeles Police Department and came to Fontana in 2000, remaining there until 2017, stated that “as soon as I signed up with the Fontana Police Department I noticed… it was a predominantly Caucasian organization” and that the minorities employed there were “stressed.”
Anderson, who was employed as a police officer in Fontana from 2002 until 2017, noted that after being hired by the Fontana Police Department, he experienced a degree of “culture hock. For a community that’s 70 percent Hispanic, the numbers of the department were really disproportionate,” Anderson said.
A visual displayed following Anderson’s statement quoted the website governing.com’s analysis of Bureau of Justice statistics and census data for the year 2013, which stated, “Fontana had the worst minority representation among cities of more than 100,000 population.”
Ibarra said he early on observed about the department that, “the upper management was all white.” With regard to racism within the Fontana Police Department, Ibarra said, “You can’t see it, but you can certainly feel it, and I felt it.”
On more than one score, the documentary seeks to draw both an analogy with and connection between the police department and the Ku Klux Klan, doing so in a way that is both elliptical and faintly disingenuous through a suspect associative process. The subject of the KKK’s past presence is established with archival photos of rallies, circa the 1970s and 1980s, led by the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, George Pepper, who indeed lived in a somewhat grand home in the City of Fontana that was extant at the time Moore was an officer and which he is caught on video driving past. Moore mentions that his uncle at the time of his hiring in Fontana referenced the community of Fontana’s connection to the Ku Klux Klan. Moore states that he responded to his uncle by telling him that was something in the city’s past. Moore then intimates that after working in the Fontana Department, he had concluded that the KKK’s proliferation in Fontana wasn’t that far in the past.
Moore states in the documentary that “There was a culture of white supremacy in Fontana,” such that “some of that old negativity still permeates the halls of the Fontana Police Department.”
This sentiment is backed by Ibarra, who said that through his experience relatively early on in his time with the department, “You could tell that they didn’t want nothing to do with the Mexican community.”
In attempting to make his case that the department had moved into full Ku Klux Klan or National Socialist mode, Moore charged that the department purposefully overlooked minorities, in particular himself, in favor of white officers with regard to advancing rank-wise in the department.
After noting that he had been chosen to receive the department’s officer of the year award, which provoked, he said, expressions of incredulity from some white officers he said he was close to that they couldn’t believe that the honorific had been bestowed upon “a nigger,” Moore said, “You look at my arrest record. You look at the things that I accomplished. It far surpassed most of my white colleagues. Yet every time a promotion came around, I was skipped over.”
Harmon, using visual means focusing on iconography used by the department together with Moore’s statements, sought to draw a tangent between the symbology used in some of the department’s insignia with Nordic Runes, which, it was implied or directly stated through Moore’s analysis, were tangentially “related to white supremacy.”
Moore, without further elaboration or explanation is heard in the documentary asserting that “this agency is sympathetic and believes in the same ideologies as your street white supremacist gang member.”
The documentary goes on to meld the accusations of overt racism, attitudes of white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan affiliation of some of Fontana’s citizenry, such as Pepper, with the recent misadventure of the department’s former assistant chief, Alan Hostetter. Hostetter departed from the Fontana Department in 2009 to become the police chief of Yorba Linda in Orange County. After his retirement shortly thereafter and becoming abstracted into the beach community lifestyle in San Clemente for nearly a decade, Hostetter with the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 became a passionate crusader against California Governor Gavin Newsom’s precautionary mandates aimed at arresting the spread of the disease. Hostetter insisted that the coronavirus was being used as a pretext to initiate a set of government-imposed restrictions on the American population which he characterized as a plot involving the Chinese government and American communists to eradicate Americans’ Consitutionally-granted freedoms. As the 2020 election approached, Hostetter’s mission against Newsom’s programs morphed into his advocacy for the reelection of Donald Trump, whom he celebrated as “the greatest president this country ever had.” When Trump was defeated that November, Hostetter became a primary West Coast instigator of the “Stop the Steal Campaign,” traveling twice to Washington, D.C., as part of the contingent intent on preventing Joseph Biden’s succession, once for the “Million Man March” on November 14, 2020 and then again in late December 2020/early 2021 in conjunction with five of his associates from Orange County as part of the effort to convince Congress to not ratify the outcome of the presidential election. On January 5, 2021, appearing with Trump advisor Roger Stone, Hostetter gave an incendiary speech during the Virginia Women for Trump rally that was held near the Supreme Court Building. The next day, he was on the Capitol grounds during the riot that resulting in a breach of the Capitol Building itself. While one of his five associates did enter the Capitol building, Hostetter did not, but he milled about on the Promenade, at first approaching the police line on the west plaza area of the Lower West Terrace, then ascended the stairs immediately adjacent to the construction support for the Inaugural Stage and subsequently walked up to the Upper West Terrace, near where the where rioters were entering the building by means of the Upper West Terrace door. He did not go into the building but remained on or near the Upper West Terrace for at least two hours. Throughout that time, according to federal prosecutors, Hostetter was carrying a hatchet in his backpack. He was indicted and arrested for participating in the January 6 riot in June 2021 and, after more than a two-year delay, went to trial in July 2023, representing himself. Hostetter agreed to forego a jury trial and instead be tried in a bench trial before Federal Judge Royce Lamberth.
Judge Lamberth, serving as both judge and jury, found Hostetter guilty on all four felony counts lodged against him – conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of an official proceeding, including aiding and abetting others engaged in that obstruction and interference; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building and grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon. Judge Lamberth sentenced him to 11 years and three months in prison.
Moore attributed what had befallen Hostetter as a byproduct of his experience in the crucible of far-right ideology that he implied permeates the Fontana Police Department.
“He’s a person that spiraled out into these extremist views because of the environment he was raised in there,” Moore said in a reference to the Fontana Police Department.
The documentary did not, however, establish any explicit connection between Hostetter and any racist or bigoted policies that proliferated in the department during his leadership.
One of the areas in which Harmon seemed to misread the historical and social context in Fontana consisted of where his documentary seized upon Fontana’s status as the birthplace of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and what Moore saw as a similarity between elements of the motorcycle gang’s logos and symbols on its paraphernalia to emblems used by the department, with references to commonalities with regard to both Nazi or Neo-Nazi symbols, to further the suggestion that the department has strayed into the province of racial intolerance. In making this point, Moore characterized the Hells Angels as white supremacist in nature. This glossed over the historical reality that during the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s run in Fontana during the 1970s and 1980s, while Pepper was yet a high official in the KKK, the Hells Angels had, in fact, purposefully and actively physically placed themselves during public events in the middle ground between on one side Fontana’s African-American citizens and on the other side members of the Ku Klux Klan and their Neo-Nazi allies in an effort to avert violence.
Moore painted a picture of a sadistic institution in describing the department he had worked for.
“I started hearing complaints about use of force and police brutality,” Moore said. “I personally witnessed when officers were involved in questionable shootings or violent acts. Instead of them being disciplined, they actually were promoted. Very few have garnered discipline from the administration.”
The documentary made much of a distasteful joke relying upon a hackneyed racial association which resulted in a lapse of professionalism that compromised the integrity of the investigation of a murder that took place two decades ago to further establish the premise that the Fontana Police Department is a racist organization. That incident pertained to the circumstances around the autopsy carried out in the aftermath of the July 1994 stabbing death of Jimmy Burelson, a black man who died in an alleyway behind a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. A technician with the department had affixed an eaten chicken leg from his own lunch into the hand of the corpse as a form of crude practical joke.
According to Schneiders, there were officers in the department who resented the manner in which the evidence technician had altered the body and the way it had been found, potentially interfering with evidence relating to the murder. He said the higher-ups in the department had not investigated the technician’s action or disciplined him and that Burelson’s murder case had gone unsolved.
A photograph of Burelson on the autopsy table with his hand apparently clutching the drumstick was widely circulated throughout the department. In the documentary, Moore is heard saying that Burleson’s corpse had been degraded by “the stereotype of Black men eating chicken.”
According to Moore, he at a certain point came to realize “rogue cops, racist cops” were attempting to “push me away from the job that I love.”
Moore claimed that he and Anderson, relatively late during their tenures with the department which ended in 2017, began to make reports of the incidents of police misconduct and racism within the department. This led to trouble.
According to Schneiders, “When you approach your police administration as an officer or any police employee and you expose corruption or this happening, racism, sexism, any of those things, they immediately resent and kill the messenger. They just don’t like whistleblowers, period.”
Ibarra stated “You start going out there and start questioning, soon you’re going to be labeled as a rat. That’s a death wish and if they want to make it rough on you, they will.”
In 2006, Ibarra left Fontana PD, and moved on to take a job with another department.
Moore and Anderson remained in Fontana. Anderson was given a promotion in 2007 to corporal, a position between that of a patrolman and detective. He remained at that level for another ten years.
After nearly a decade-and-a-half with the department, Moore, in tandem with Anderson, grew a bit more aggressive in seeking to prompt reform in the organization with which they were deployed. There efforts were not appreciated and they were not effective, according to the documentary. Moore found himself being investigated, including his department locker being searched and his movements being monitored. Anderson was removed from his narcotics division assignment on a pretext.
Both were accused of misconduct by the department.
At that point, Anderson recognized that he would never realize his intention of being promoted. “I always had hope and ambition that I was going to get up higher in the organization,” Anderson said. “My dreams of making lieutenant, of making captain, and making positive change were gone. They were dead.”
In 2016, Anderson and Moore filed a discrimination lawsuit against the department. In the suit they cited discrimination, being retaliated against and having been skipped over for promotion. After the filing of the suit, according to Moore, the department sought to make an example of the two of them. Citing sleep deprivation and anxiety issues that Anderson was experiencing, he was walked off the job and declared unfit for police work. “I never went back to work another day,” Anderson said.
“They falsely accused me of violating a department policy by leaving my wife on my insurance until I was completely divorced.” Moore said.
The suit they had filed dragged on in the courts for some six years. At the end stage of that litigation, Moore told Harmon, who was working on the documentary, “We are hoping that we’ll encourage other people to speak up, but we’re also hoping to shed light on the process in which it takes to speak up. I still believe in our country, in our law enforcement, and I believe in our criminal justice system.” Nevertheless, Moore acknowledged, he was in a fight with the system.
In April 2024, the case Moore and Anderson brought against the department was settled. No details of the settlement were revealed, and neither Moore nor Anderson, who apparently signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of the settlement, are at this stage willing to speak about what the terms of the settlement are.