'It's not a painful decision:' Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera retires Monday, tells personal story of past 49 years with the department

LORAIN — Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera retires Monday, just days before his 70th birthday and the day his third great-grandchild is due. He has worked for the department for 49 years, 25 of those as chief. Announcing his retirement in May, Rivera has been packing up his office recently, including the awards he's received over the years. A plaque from the city's SWAT team, noting his role in founding it, is one he said may find its way into an office space at home, along with some other gifts from his officers. Others, he said, won't feel right beside pictures of his family as he transitions away from Chief of Police. "I wasn't thinking about retirement, I mean I understood at 49 years it was just a matter of a short period of time," he said. "But I hadn't pinpointed exactly when I was going to do it until Elba (Elba Armstrong, Rivera's wife) was in the hospital and she was there for about six-and-a-half weeks ... I was there from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day and given a lot of time to sit there and think. And I thought, I'm going to be 70-years-old and you just can't be a 70-year-old cop. It made me just kind of think about what the priorities are and what's really important." 'The last straw' Before Rivera joined the department, he grew up in South Lorain, eventually bounced from a Catholic orphanage to foster care — separated from his seven siblings after his mother's death and father's inability to care for them all. "From the beginning I was kind of rebellious," he said. "I would leave early in the morning, come back late at night everyday. I was out on the streets a lot. A lot of times I would run away, sometimes I used to sleep in the park where the Historical Society is." When he remembers why he dropped out of Lorain High School, he said the reason seems small. In 10th grade he went out for the football team, walking to the stadium from his 12th Street and Lexington Avenue foster home, or where ever else he'd spent the night, to practice. But when he was told he had to drop off the team to work in the fields, he said that was "the last straw." He waited until he was 16 and then dropped out of school altogether. After working odd jobs, including at the Mister S Drive-in on Broadway where he met eventual veteran Sam Felton Jr., he tried to enlist in the Marines at 17-years-old. When a sergeant refused to take him until he got his high school diploma because of how high he scored on the entrance exam, he joined the Army. At 17, he was stationed in Germany and worked to get his GED. But to get his diploma from Lorain High, he was told he had to be a combat veteran. So, he pushed his captain to transfer him to Vietnam. "He was trying to talk me out of it, telling me I'm crazy," Rivera said, adding the captain used stronger language than just "crazy." "... He goes, 'Well why in God's earth would you want to go there?' I didn't tell him about the high school diploma thing because I thought he would really scream at me. I just told him I feel like that's where I want to serve." 'Special squad' After serving his three years in the Army, Rivera said he wasn't sure he wanted to come back to Lorain. He'd used the military as a ticket out of the city — picking up a bus on the corner where he'd later spend more than half his life working for the LPD. But after being separated in different foster homes, he and his siblings had fought to maintain close relationships. He said one of his sisters wrote him letters every day when he was in the Army, and growing up he'd ride his bike to where his siblings lived to check up on them and bring them candy. To stay close to his family, he came home and worked at the Ford and U.S. Steel plants while going to school at Lorain County Community College. Having done a ride-along with Oberlin police while on leave from the military before he was transferred to Vietnam, he joined the Lorain Police Department at 21-years-old. Those first years with the department, Rivera remembers protecting a very different town, under a very different set of rules. There was the Shotgun Squad in 1975 — a group of officers who patrolled in their own cars after a string of nightly robberies. Named by local papers that covered the controversial group, the plainclothes officers went from volunteering to do the work to becoming a full-time unit that eventually became the narcotics division. Rivera said dealerships in the city allowed the group to use cars off their lots — even after one was totaled. He remembers driving a new mint green Lincoln Continental courtesy of Buckeye Ford. He laughed and said the dealership that always supplied them cars was Davidson Volkswagen, but often suspects didn't believe they were being pulled over by police in the foreign cars. From there, Rivera moved into the narcotics unit. In December 1977 police raided Tito Rodriguez's Gary Avenue home, seizing roughly $1.5 million worth of heroin, some found in false heels of his wife's shoes. Leading up to that arrest, the duplex where Rodriguez and his common-law wife Jeannette Marrero had been living was under surveillance for months in a home-made surveillance van, Rivera said. He and other members of the unit chipped in to buy an old, army-green van and renovate it to suit their needs, and often had to use their own money as buy-money for drug busts. Head of narcotics at the time, he said his first wife was afraid -- the group was always in the paper. There was no body armor or battering ram when officers raided suspected drug houses. He admits the city was violent, seeing 16 homicides in one year, many related to drug trafficking. "One time they put a grenade on my porch — no pin in it or nothing, but just to send a message," he said. At the time, Rivera said there was no training program and he thought the tactics police where using, like the lack of an entry team and everyone rushing to surround suspects with their guns drawn, was unsafe. He made captain in 1983, and stayed head of patrol for seven years. He founded the SWAT team — after writing several letters to then-chief John Malinovsky for years asking for support. While working in different units and moving up in rank, Rivera also served as the head of the department's Fraternal Order of Police Lodge. Not always seeing eye-to-eye with city administration, he was part of a couple of "Blue Flues," where officers would call in sick to protest for better wages and training before negotiated contracts and arbitration existed. Value of relationships Working just about every department and shift beforehand, Rivera became chief of police in 1994 — but even that wasn't a straight shot. Rivera initially took the civil service test to become police chief while serving as acting chief. He remembers he wasn't thinking about taking the test, but came in one day to find his fellow officers had packed his bags and were sending him away to study at a cottage owned by a Lorain County sheriff's deputy. After cramming for five days straight, Rivera said he went to the testing center with a pounding headache and took the test. He missed getting the position by less than two points. He filed a lawsuit, alleging the questions on it were outdated and irrelevant, but quickly dropped it, citing concerns for the rift it would create in the department and community and the money it would cost the city. The ordeal was not the last time he would think about retiring, but that thought was put on hold when he was offered the position after Craig Casteel stepped down for health reasons just months later. While Malinovsky was a tough chief for a thriving but gritty steel town, Rivera said he wanted to focus on rebuilding community relationships that some of those earlier policing styles may have frayed. That focus started when Rivera was a lieutenant. In 1983, LPD had a brutal reputation, with residents and other police departments. Then-Mayor Bill Parker created a "Blue Ribbon Committee," or a police review board with subpoena power, requiring officers involved in use-of-force claims to appear before the civilian board. While that idea was voted down by City Council, Rivera realized then how bad the relations were and started monthly meetings. "During that time I just saw the value of having a respectful relationship with the community you serve and I always kind of believed in that anyways," he said. "The rest of the time as a captain and certainly when I became chief, I made the focus building trusting relationships with our community." Over his 25 year as chief, he's weathered storms that have threatened that community trust, including a Department of Justice investigation through the mid-2000s. Investigating allegations of excessive force and sexual abuse by members of the department, the investigation concluded while those issues existed in the past there was no longer a pattern of misconduct by the city's cops when it was released in 2012. He's proud of several of the programs implemented under his administration, especially becoming the first department in the state to issue naloxone to its officers. He remembers the night the bill sponsored by then-state Sen. Gayle Manning, R-North Ridgeville, allowing them to carry the life-saving drug went into effect: officers were handing the nasal spray out at midnight in an effort to curb overdose deaths in the city. He wrote the police levy that has kept the department afloat since 1992 and co-chaired the committee that passed it, as well as grants that allowed for more training and equipment for officers. "I realized that I allowed myself to become consumed by the job," he said. "And it seemed like what was going on here was so important in terms of the community, in terms of officers' safety that I just think I became obsessed with trying to get the resources. So I would spend weekends here and nights here writing grants and things like that, and so I realized that everything that was a hobby or for fun I let go years ago." Stepping down Rivera's replacement, Capt. Jim McCann, will be sworn in Monday, marking the end of an era for the city and its police department. But for Rivera, the ceremony Monday is the start of his next journey. After a vacation with his wife, Elba Armstrong, Rivera plans to start a nonprofit, Courage and Dignity, to focus on the social issues that have marked his years on the force. Those include educational, African American and Latino issues, along with immigration, something he became tied to when enacting a policy that his officers would not ask for someone's citizenship status in regard to nonviolent offenses like traffic stops. Hoping to only devote 20 hours a week to the cause — rather than the 60 to 70 his police work took up — he said he's going to spend the rest of his time with his six grandchildren, soon-to-be-three great grandchildren, three daughters and wife. Joking he feels like he's been "on the front pages" his whole life, his retirement is coming about 20 years later than he ever thought. "It was not a hard decision and it's not a painful decision," he said of finally stepping down. "I'm looking forward to it." Contact Carissa Woytach at 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.