SIS Officers Accused in $10-Million Civil Suit : Police: 6 retired and current members of controversial squad are accused of violating rights of 2 bank robbers by wounding one and killing the other, who was unarmed.

This morning, as they did each morning last week, a cadre of middle-aged men dressed in business suits will arrive at the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

They will ride the escalator to the second floor, enter the imposing courtroom of Judge Stephen V. Wilson and take their places as defendants in a trial that is the first of its kind.

The defendants are police officers, but they are hardly ordinary cops. They are members and former members of an elite and secretive unit of the Los Angeles Police Department, a surveillance squad that watches dangerous criminals commit crimes and then attempts to arrest them, often engaging in fatal shootings in the process.

The Police Department calls it the Special Investigations Section, or SIS. The lawyer for the plaintiff calls it “a death squad.”

At issue in the $10-million civil case is whether the SIS violated the civil rights of convicted bank robber Jane Berry when its detectives wounded her and killed her companion, John Crumpton, after watching the pair rob a Security Pacific Bank in Burbank on Sept. 15, 1982.

Berry’s lawyer, Stephen Yagman, contends the police--who shadowed the couple for 17 days before the robbery--had ample opportunity to arrest Berry and Crumpton, both of whom were wanted on outstanding warrants on lesser charges. Pointing to physical evidence that showed Berry and Crumpton each sustained numerous shotgun wounds--all to the back--Yagman also claims the officers used excessive force during the shooting.

Although the officers said they fired in self-defense, Crumpton was unarmed and Berry--who, unknowingly, was three months pregnant with Crumpton’s child--never drew her gun.

The trial, which is expected to conclude this week, has offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the SIS, a squad so clandestine that few people knew of its existence until a 1988 Times investigation brought it to light. Since its inception in 1967, members of the unit have killed more than 25 suspects and wounded at least 24 others.

Berry’s case, which names as defendants six current and former SIS officers, marks the first time members of the squad have been brought to trial as a group. The lawsuit could clear the way for similar litigation; Yagman has already filed a case on behalf of the families of three men who were shot to death by SIS officers after a robbery at a McDonalds restaurant in Sunland last February.

Moreover, if Berry is victorious, she will be permitted under federal law to continue her case with a second, wider-ranging phase that names Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, Mayor Tom Bradley and other city officials, alleging that the very policy that permits the SIS to exist is a violation of civil rights.

“The object of this exercise,” Yagman said, “is to put on trial the system which, regrettably, tolerates the existence of a totalitarian-like unit within the Police Department. There’s no question it’s a death squad.”

City officials, meanwhile, maintain that the officers acted properly. They say the SIS had no reason to arrest Berry and Crumpton before the bank robbery and that bystanders could have been injured if they had tried to thwart the robbery. They bristle at the mention of the term “death squad,” a phrase Judge Wilson has refused to allow Yagman to use in court.

“These officers and their unit are being unnecessarily defamed and mischaracterized,” said Assistant City Atty. Victoria Chaney, who represents the detectives. “They are the elite, the cream of the crop. They are being characterized as executioners and criminals in their own right, which we vehemently deny.”

The detectives--Dale Ostrom and Roger Marine, both retired, and Henry Cadena, Rodger Niles, Jerry Brooks and Michael Sirk--would not be interviewed. But Chaney said a verdict against them “would have a chilling effect on the officers’ ability and desire to deal with career criminals, which is what this unit is set up to deal with.”

The top brass at the Police Department, meanwhile, is watching the Berry case closely. The department’s chief spokesman, Cmdr. William Booth, said he does not expect civil suits such as Berry’s to prevent the continued operation of the SIS. But he said he is concerned about the possibility of a large monetary award for Berry.

“It’s a very important case to us,” Booth said. “Everything about this case is worrisome and bothersome.”

According to testimony thus far, the SIS began its surveillance of Crumpton and Berry in July, 1982. Robbery-homicide detectives told the SIS officers they suspected the couple of robbing a bank, but could not prove it because the robbers wore Halloween masks, gloves and, in Berry’s case, a wig.

At the time the surveillance began on July 26, Berry and Crumpton were on parole from federal prison and a warrant had been issued for Berry for violating her parole, according to testimony from her former parole officer. In August, a similar warrant was issued for Crumpton’s arrest. But Ostrom and Marine, the retired SIS officers who supervised the surveillance, testified they never checked whether Berry and Crumpton were wanted.

On the day of the shooting, testimony showed, Berry and Crumpton injected themselves with a mixture of cocaine and heroin. SIS detectives watched them as they left a motel in the Silver Lake area and followed them while they repeatedly cased the bank in separate cars--a white Volkswagen Beetle and a brown Chevrolet Corvair, which they had stolen from the Sherman Oaks Galleria. They saw Berry put on her wig and also watched as the pair left the Volkswagen in the carport of a nearby apartment complex and drove off in the Corvair to rob the bank.

Several of the detective testified that they did not know until just “8 seconds” before the robbery--when Crumpton and Berry put on their Halloween masks--that it was going to occur, and decided it would be safer to arrest the couple when they returned to the carport to ditch the stolen Corvair.

Said Marine, who acted as field supervisor that day: “I felt there was less chance for civilians to be involved in the situation should a shooting occur, and I felt that was a possibility.”

The four officers who did the shooting--Cadena, Niles, Brooks and Sirk--each testified that Berry and Crumpton refused to stop when they were ordered to, and that they either saw Berry reach for her gun, or believed she had. “My opinion,” Niles said, “was when she attempted to draw the weapon, she was attempting to open fire.”

But James Fyfe, a criminal justice professor at American University in Washington who testified as an expert for Berry, told the jury that he believed the officers had repeatedly violated accepted standards of police practice and had, in effect, created a set of circumstances in which there was bound to be a shooting.

“If police had just taken the step of checking out their records,” Fyfe testified, “the case would have ended then and there.”

Throughout the trial last week, Berry, now 43, sat attentively at the plaintiff’s table, often clutching a tissue to wipe away tears. With long, blonde hair and glasses, dressed on some days in a hot pink dress, and on others in a blue dress and flowered jacket, she hardly fit the picture of a hardened bank robber who is serving 15 years at the California Institution for Women at Frontera.

In an interview outside the courtroom, Berry said she accepts full responsibility for her crimes. Asked why she is bringing the suit, her answer reflected a greater regard for Crumpton than for herself.

“I believe that someone should take responsibility for killing him,” she said simply. “It has nothing to do with me at all.”

Also seeking to avenge Crumpton’s death are his three sisters--Diane Ollis, Patricia Lee and Gloria Polk--who have attended the trial each day. They are raising Berry and Crumpton’s child, who just turned 7. The boy, represented by Yagman, also is suing the SIS, although that case was dismissed by Wilson and is now on appeal.