Long Beach must rehire police officer it fought for years to keep off the force, appeals court rules

A state appeals court ruled Monday that Long Beach must rehire an officer it fired four years ago after he was accused of lying in official reports.

The unanimous decision from the three-judge panel upholds a previous ruling from a city employment panel and a lower court. It also brings an end to a roughly five-year legal saga during which the city filed two appeals in an attempt to keep former Long Beach police Officer Dedier Reyes off the force, even at a time when the department has struggled to fill vacancies.

Long Beach City Attorney Dawn McIntosh said she was “disappointed” by Monday’s decision by the appeals court, but said her office does not plan to file any further appeals.

Monday’s ruling means Long Beach owes Reyes more than four years of pay he has missed since his dismissal, and the city must offer him a job with the police department that is on par with his previous position as a patrol officer. Records from Transparent California show Reyes’ base salary was $121,948 in his last full year at the LBPD.

The city fired Reyes in 2022, shortly after he was charged with one count of filing a false police report and one count of perjury for allegedly lying about his observations during a 2018 gun arrest. A jury ultimately acquitted Reyes and his less-experienced partner, Officer David Salcedo.

But the charges, the city’s firing of the two officers and the criminal trial that followed, cast doubt on their credibility. As a result, prosecutors dropped dozens of cases where the two made arrests or would’ve needed to testify to make the case.

Reyes, who was training Salcedo, was accused of lying and perjuring himself when he wrote in a February 2018 police report that he recognized two gang members standing outside a Long Beach taqueria and then saw one go inside and leave a bag containing a gun.

Surveillance video from the taqueria made internal affairs investigators question how Reyes could have seen what was happening inside the restaurant and also showed he arrested the wrong gang member for allegedly carrying the bag with the gun.

Reyes later told internal affairs investigators that he “made a mistake in this police report,” according to an interview transcript from a separate civil lawsuit.

Reyes and Salcedo continued working and weren’t criminally accused for nearly four years after the incident. Then-District Attorney Jackie Lacey reviewed the case and decided it didn’t merit charges, but when George Gascón became the new District Attorney in 2021 — after making police reform central to his campaign — he brought charges against the officers.

After their acquittal on the criminal charges, a city employment panel ruled they must be rehired, but Long Beach sued to try to block that decision.

After reviewing all of the evidence, the three-judge appeals panel sided with Reyes on Monday. They found it plausible that he mistakenly recalled the events leading up to the 2018 arrest and noted that the city “identified no apparent motive” for him to falsify the police report, according to their ruling.

When the city fired Reyes, it noted that he had racked up 14 use-of-force reviews and 11 citizen complaints since 2010, according to court documents. But the department determined that all of those uses of force were within policy and none of the citizen complaints were determined to have merit, the court noted in its ruling.

Long Beach has, however, been sued twice over Reyes’ alleged misconduct, resulting in payouts of $550,000 and $499,800.

After Monday’s ruling, Reyes will have the option of rejoining LBPD.

Salcedo has already been rehired and assigned to work patrol, LBPD Executive Communications Officer Allison Gallagher wrote in an email last October.