City Seeks Answers to LAPD Delay

City leaders want Los Angeles Police Department officials to explain today why they are having so much trouble perfecting a computer system to track officer conduct when that has been successfully done by agencies around the nation -- including just miles away at the county Sheriff’s Department.

The City Council’s Public Safety Committee has called a special joint meeting with the Police Commission to figure out what has gone wrong and how quickly it can be remedied. Leaders are so concerned about delays that have plagued the TEAMS II computer system that a shake-up of staffing is said to be in the works.

With the department’s history of abuse and corruption as a backdrop, a federal judge cited the computer system trouble last week in deciding to keep the LAPD under federal oversight for three more years as part of a consent decree struck in the wake of the Rampart Division scandal in 1999.

When the decree was signed in 2001, U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess and his appointed monitor, Michael Cherkasky, insisted that the LAPD create such a system to quickly identify officers who have been frequently targeted by misconduct allegations.

“It is the keystone of the consent decree,” said Merrick Bobb, a nationally recognized policing expert based in Los Angeles.

For more than a decade, such a system has been in place at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, headquartered in Monterey Park.

During a recent review, sheriff’s officials determined -- with the push of a button -- that 162 deputies had accumulated a troubling number of shootings, citizen complaints, traffic accidents, lawsuits or other problems. The deputies identified by the sheriff’s Personnel Performance Index system will now get a special look from supervisors to determine whether they need more mentoring, remediation or training.

“It’s a critical system,” said Michael Gennaco, chief of Sheriff Lee Baca’s Office of Independent Review, which monitors department disciplinary actions. “It’s an indispensable piece of equipment for what we do here on a daily basis.”

Similar computer systems are in place in Phoenix; Tampa, Fla.; and Pittsburgh; but despite five years of effort, the LAPD has failed to complete such a system of its own.

What currently exists as TEAMS II is intended to be an improvement on the LAPD’s old Training Evaluation and Management System. When operational, the $40-million system will provide instant access to each officer’s record of shootings, civilian complaints, vehicle pursuits, training, commendations, use of force, assignments, arrests, claims and citations. It will also provide a breakdown of the ethnicity of every pedestrian and motorist an officer stops.

However, TEAMS II is not expected to be in operation until September at the earliest, according to Deputy Police Chief David Doan, who heads the 40-employee TEAMS II Development Bureau.

“These computer systems are some of the most complex computer systems ever designed for a public entity,” said Police Chief William J. Bratton. “We’ve had great problems and frustration.”

Conceived years before the consent decree, TEAMS II first suffered from a lack of political will to take on such a massive effort -- converting file cabinets of information from paper to digitized data. It was later delayed by budget problems, red tape, the LAPD’s past neglect of technology and missteps by contractors.

After a false start pursuing a more ambitious but ultimately unworkable system, the effort to combine data from 14 previously incompatible sources was marred by glitches and design changes, according to city records and interviews.

The U.S. Department of Justice took a year to sign off on the design, and the system’s use was subject to a lengthy meet-and-confer process with unions representing LAPD employees, Doan said.

Union officials have had concerns about the large amount of data officers are now required to collect and enter. And they don’t believe raw statistics always provide a fair basis for singling out officers.

A hiring freeze limited project staffing, and protocols, user manuals and training had to be developed while the contractors installed the hardware and software.

A city report last year noted that a new project manager was appointed by contractor BearingPoint. The firm, the report said, “has now to replace all of the key people that were originally assigned to the project. The turnover has had an impact on their ability to meet their deadline.”

Doan said the LAPD system will eventually be more sophisticated and provide more data than any other system being used by a police agency.

The Sheriff Department’s system, operating since 1993, prints out a report every month that identifies deputies who have reached problematic thresholds in more than a dozen categories.

In a 2002 report, Bobb, who monitors the department for the Board of Supervisors, said red flags generally go up when a deputy has had at least two shootings, six personnel complaints, six significant uses of force or 10 less-significant uses of force in the previous three years.

Gennaco said the periodic computer reports he receives and the ability to instantly pull a wide range of data on an individual deputy are vital tools in allowing him to determine whether deputies need help and how they should be disciplined when they get into trouble.

For example, when a particular deputy was accused of mistreating people and making false statements, the data showed Gennaco’s office that the deputy had a suspicious past: He had been the target of 12 internal affairs investigations since 1999, including eight in which misconduct resulted in a total of 66 days of suspension.

In some cases, rapid access to a deputy’s entire personnel history allows supervisors to spot patterns and head off problems by recommending counseling or training, Gennaco said.

“Deputies’ careers have been saved as a result of the tracking system,” he said.

Indeed, Bobb’s 2002 evaluation of the sheriff’s system found that deputies identified and placed in the performance review program saw a “significant” reduction in allegations of misconduct.

The computer system for police in Pittsburgh -- as in Los Angeles -- came about because of a federal consent decree against the department.

In fact, it was the first consent decree negotiated by the U.S. Department of Justice. It ran from 1997 to 2002. The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police managed to create its computerized early warning system within a year of agreeing to do so.

Pittsburgh had the advantage of being able to start largely from scratch because many of its records were kept on paper and some kinds of data were not kept at all.

A study last year by the Vera Institute of Justice, based in New York, found that Pittsburgh’s computer-driven early warning system “helped create broad accountability within the bureau” and “remains a strong presence.”

Pittsburgh’s Performance Assessment Review System collects data on 18 issues, including traffic accidents, arrests, workers’ compensation claims, lawsuits, awards, disciplinary actions, uses of force, missed court appearances, sick time, criminal investigations, traffic stops and warrantless searches.

Among those who believe the computer system has significantly improved policing is Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania’s Greater Pittsburgh chapter.

“The early warning system is the heart and soul of these police reform movements,” Walczak said. “It’s been tremendous.”