Rules Laid Down for LAPD’s Organized Crime Squad

The Los Angeles Police Commission adopted Tuesday the first formal set of guidelines designed to regulate the operations of the Police Department’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID).

Scheduled to go into effect immediately, the new standards restrict the division’s operations solely to organized crime operations, limit intelligence-gathering on public figures and require investigators to record the dissemination of intelligence materials to outside law enforcement agencies.

In addition, the guidelines call for an annual inspection of the division’s files, and theywill allow the Police Commission for the first time to participate in the yearly audits of the division’s activities.

The guidelines were mandated by the settlement last year of the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charging that the Police Department’s since-disbanded Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) had illegally spied upon law-abiding citizens.

A former Organized Crime Intelligence Division detective testified in a deposition given to the ACLU that members of the organized crime unit had engaged in political spying. The ACLU was p1919252069rime Intelligence Division and provide such standards as it deems necessary to regulate and monitor (the division’s) activities.”

Police Commission President Stephen D. Yslas, noting that organized crime activity “is very low in the city, due in no small matter to OCID,” said that the guidelines essentially “codify” the procedures under which the division had already been operating.

“We just want to ensure that OCID’s intent is to focus on traditional organized crime enterprises,” Yslas said. “We don’t want them to cast their net too broad. We don’t want to dilute OCID’s abilities to monitor what they should be monitoring--organized crime problems.”

Yslas specifically mentioned that the Organized Crime Intelligence Division could conceivably focus on the activities of Los Angeles’ street gangs rather than traditional organized crime figures if the guidelines were not adopted.

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Capt. Stuart Finck, commanding officer of the division, voiced only minor objections to the guidelines. Their main complaint was that the new standards will place “an unnecessary administrative burden” on investigators by requiring them to record a “dissemination log” every time they share division materials with outside agencies.

Adopt Amendments

Three minor amendments offered by Gates and Finck were adopted by the commission, pending a public hearing on the guidelines, which Yslas said would be scheduled within six weeks.

ACLU attorney Joan Howarth said after the meeting that she was “real disappointed” with the new standards. She said they “assure that the public will never be able to know anything about the OCID’s surveillance, undercover and informant operations.”

She said she had “no knowledge” of any constitutional infractions on the part of investigators along the lines of past abuses by the PDID.

“But the real spirit of these guidelines is exactly the opposite the spirit of the PDID settlement,” she said. “The spirit here is ‘anything goes.”’

Reaffirm Policies

The guidelines reaffirm department policies that prevent the “illegal or unauthorized methods of collecting, maintaining, or disseminating information.” They specifically prohibit the division from gathering information about an individual’s sexual, political or religious activities, “unless such information is material to an organized crime investigation.”

The procedures approved by the commissioners direct division investigators to immediately contact the division’s commanding officer in instances where organized crime figures attempt to “establish an alliance with or influence” public officials, and also to contact the captain when they learn of potential criminal conduct on the part of such officials.

Division investigators will be prevented from hiring individuals to incite illegal activities on the part of organized crime groups or to “engage in the collection, maintenance or dissemination of intelligence data or information through illegal means.”

Information compiled by the division “shall not be maintained unless it is material to an investigation.”

Investigators, however, will be allowed to record the information if it cannot be immediately determined whether the information might be pertinent to a future investigation. Those materials must be destroyed within two years if they do not become part of a pending investigation, the guidelines state.