D.A. Asks Help Investigating Deaths Linked to Industries

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner has asked 47 Los Angeles County police chiefs and the sheriff to help investigate industrial deaths with an eye to prosecuting negligent employers for involuntary manslaughter “and in some cases, second-degree murder.”

When he was elected last November, Reiner said that one of his priorities was to use the state manslaughter statute to prosecute employers whose carelessness results in worker deaths. He announced then that he was setting up an occupational safety and health section under Special Assistant Dist. Atty. Jan E. Chatten-Brown.

In a letter sent Thursday to Sheriff Sherman Block, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and chiefs of other police departments, Reiner declared that many of the more than 100 industrial deaths that take place in the county every year “are caused by unsafe working conditions.”

He said his new safety section has found that state Division of Occupational Safety and Health engineers “are not trained in criminal investigation techniques, nor are they always promptly called to the scene of a death.”

The state agency has only five field criminal investigators state-wide, Reiner added.

“For an effective prosecution program,” the district attorney told the law enforcement officials, “we must obtain physical evidence before it is destroyed and witness statements before they decide not to be candid because of fear of losing their jobs.”

The county prosecutor said his staff plans to conduct a training program for police and Sheriff’s Department homicide investigators, stressing “the types of issues (involving industrial deaths) we anticipate, and the applicable laws.”

There was no immediate reaction from the law enforcement heads to whom Reiner wrote.

Cmdr. William Booth, spokesman for Gates, said the Police Department has yet to receive the letter.