A Brea school board member alleging officials defamed her by publishing a scathing dossier on the city’s website as part of an elaborate political vendetta to inaccurately depict her as anti-law enforcement.
Keri Kropke, a Black Lives Matter activist whose two-year term on the Brea Olinda Unified Board of Education ends Thursday, Dec. 10, filed a claim against the city in November as a possible precursor to a formal lawsuit. She is seeking a formal apology from city officials and possible monetary damages.
Kropke, a teacher and speech language pathologist in Los Angeles County, alleges Mayor Marty Simonoff worked with acting Police Chief Adam Hawley to write a false and defamatory memo that contributed to her unsuccessful bid last month to win a seat on the North Orange County Community College District board.
Kropke, who hasn’t been charged with a crime, also contends the city engaged in an unprecedented data dump in August linking its website to internal memos, videos and recordings detailing her alleged interactions with Brea police during a June 30 Black Lives Matter march and two other unrelated incidents.
“Basically, the city council is using its power against a sitting school board member to conduct a politically motivated and personal hit job,” said Kropke, a white single mother to an 8-year-old Black son. “Why haven’t they done data dumps on other people? This has never happened in the history of Brea.”
City defends release of file
Brea City Manager Bill Gallardo defended the decision to post the dossier, but did not comment on whether the city has built such a file on a public official or private citizen who hasn’t been charged with a crime.
“There is no merit to the allegations made in Ms. Kropke’s claim,” he said in an email. “The police chief’s memo to the city council is 100 percent factually accurate. The city has been extraordinarily transparent in this matter, partly because of a request from Ms. Kropke’s attorney to make all available material public, and by making exempt material available for public review.”
Brea police declined to discuss the dossier. Simonoff said the release of the dossier was proper.
“The City of Brea has not targeted Ms. Kropke or treated her unfairly in any way,” he said in an email. “Our officers have performed their duties with professionalism, including on two occasions when Ms. Kropke interrupted ongoing investigations. The City has been fully transparent on this matter as requested by Ms. Kropke and as is appropriate given the community’s interest in the activities of a public official.”
Problems first surface in 2018
Kropke maintains she first drew the city’s ire in 2018 after supporting efforts to change the name of William E. Fanning Elementary School because of the namesake’s alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan. She was the only Brea Olinda school board member to vote in June against renaming the school the Fanning Academy of Science and Technology.
However, a month later Fanning family members requested that their name be dropped from the school to end the controversy. The school board ultimately renamed the school the Falcon Academy of Science & Technology.
Fallout from the name change was swift.
“Immediately, stakeholders contacted me stating they would run me out because the Fanning heirs were their friends and one of Brea’s finest families,” Kropke said.
Police encounters
Kropke was put under the microscope again on June 1 when two Brea police officers responded to East Birch Street and South Brea Boulevard following a report that a man with a black backpack had applied red spray paint to an electrical box. Officers quickly detained a man matching the description of the tagger and, about two minutes later, encountered Kropke, who happened upon the incident..
According to an audio recording made by one of the officers at the scene and included in the dossier, Kropke can he heard asking the officer, “Is everything OK?”
Kropke then identifies herself as a school board member and tells the officer she doesn’t know the man detained by police. When one of the officers explains they are there to investigate a graffiti incident, Kropke asked, “Well do we know that to be a fact or are we just making assumptions?” according to the recording.
Kropke also tells the officer they need a search warrant to look inside the man’s backpack. “Do you guys have a warrant to go through his backpack?” she can be heard asking in the recording.
Then Kropke turns her attention to the suspect sitting on the ground in handcuffs. “Did you give consent to them?” she asks. “You don’t have to give consent for him to go through your backpack.”
The suspect can then be heard telling Kropke, “I appreciate that, I do know my rights, I did give them consent.”
Kropke denied interfering with police, adding she thought the suspect in handcuffs may have been one her students. “I was not there to interrupt but to make sure a student is OK,” she said.
Next encounter
Brea police reported their next encounter with Kropke was on the evening of June 30 at the Black Lives Matter protest
Hawley wrote in a July 14 memo to Simonoff and the City Council that about 40 demonstrators gathered at City Hall Park. Officers made contact with the group to identify the event organizer, discuss Brea’s assembly guidelines and learn of the protesters plans for the march.
“Before anyone identified themselves as the event organizer, a woman, known to officers as Brea Olinda Unified School District board member Ms. Keri Kropke, told officers that no one was in charge of the event and refused to share information,” the memo says.
During the march, protesters briefly occupied several intersections before making their way back to City Hall Park, according to police. At the park, Kropke and others began yelling at officers, using derogatory and profane language, Hawley wrote in the memo. No one was arrested.
Kropke denied hurling obscenities at police, blocking traffic or being disorderly. “It is categorically untrue,” she said. “In fact, I complimented a female officer who was coming to the aid of a young man.”
Still another encounter
Two Brea police officers also reported they were confronted by Kropke on the morning of July 2 after they detained a homeless Black man suspected of shoplifting a package of cookies from a bakery near 2445 E. Imperial Highway. Kropke had been washing her car when a man she recognized ran up to her crying. Police then put him in handcuffs and walked him away from her vehicle, she said.
“When you see a man crying profusely you can’t can turn a blind eye and walk away,” she told the Southern California News Group. “It is more incumbent on me to show care and concern for others. When you are a human being you are expected to represent everyone.”
According to a police recording of the incident included in the dossier, Kropke approached an officer and asked, “What are you doing?” The officer explained why the man was being detained and then instructed Kropke not to stand behind him.
The suspect eventually was released after the bakery owner decided not to press charges.
Police also said the recording reveals Kropke engaged in a racially charged discussion with a second officer who responded to the shoplifting call and is Black.
Kropke told the officer she had seen the suspect previously in a nearby Subway restaurant, saying those inside used the “N” word to describe the man. “I’ve seen from multiple store owners here, how this guy is treated,” Kropke says in the recording.
The officer informed Kropke he would prefer if she didn’t use the “N” word, adding he believed her son “would not appreciate her using that word either.”
Harassment on social media
After the dossier was posted to Brea’s website, Kropke says she began receiving threatening and harassing messages on social media. “You are on a school board and you are involved with Black Lives Matter crap?” one person asked in a Facebook post. “We are all kind to our neighbors and help each other. That crap don’t belong here.”
“For someone that cares so much about children she picks and chooses what children,” another person posted on Facebook. “Then to bring violence to a peaceful city … she needs to go!”
Kropke said she owes it to her son and other people of color to maintain her unwavering support for justice, equality and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I can’t unlearn or unsee what I have experienced,” she said. “I must do right by every person of color.. It’s incumbent on to me to listen and learn from their life experiences and life truths. I don’t accept the vilification of our young people in the street crying for justice.”
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