Culver City Police Face Federal Suit : Civil rights: The lawsuit alleges that a department policy unconstitutionally limits a citizen’s ability to register complaints about police misconduct.

A federal judge this week cleared the way for a constitutional challenge to a Culver City Police Department policy that limits the ability of citizens to register complaints of police brutality or misconduct.

U.S. District Court Judge David Kenyon ruled Monday that he would hear a lawsuit alleging that the Police Department has an unconstitutional policy of refusing to take charges of misconduct if the incident has been described in police reports. The defendants, including the department, the police chief, and the city, had urged that the suit be dismissed.

The suit, claiming violation of a West Los Angeles man’s civil rights, also names four police officers as defendants. It stems from the arrest of William Schaub, 22, in early 1989. Schaub, a plumber, led police on a car chase that ended in the officers’ hitting and arresting him. Schaub contends that he was arrested on robbery charges without probable cause and that the department has a policy of using and encouraging excessive force.

The Culver City Police Department manual states that whenever officers engage in a physical struggle in the course of an arrest, police reports must “contain the specifics of the force used by the officer and the arrestee.” But complaints against personnel “will generally not be taken on an altercation which is adequately described in an arrest report.”

The manual adds: “If in the judgment of the supervisor or commanding officer there is insufficient evidence or basis to substantiate any misconduct, no personnel complaint shall be accepted.”

Robert Mann, Schaub’s lawyer, says that means “any time an officer writes, ‘I had to beat the guy up because he tried to run away,’ it makes no difference if the citizen says, ‘No, that’s not what happened.’ . . . Their policy is that they will not investigate that complaint.

“Essentially that translates into, from the line officer’s perspective, carte blanche for use of force in instances like this,” Mann said. If complaints are ignored, that could breed misconduct and falsified reports, he said. He said that the policy leads to the ironic result that, if there’s no mention of a fight or force in a report, a brutality claim will be taken and investigated.

The department, Mann wrote in a court filing, is guilty of “suppression of evidence indicating officer misconduct.”

F. James Feffer, the defendants’ attorney, declined to comment. But in court documents, Feffer stated that there is no evidence that the city has any “persistent and widespread” practice or “an express policy of using excessive force, making illegal arrests, or condoning officer misconduct.”

Under state law, the department “need only establish a procedure to investigate citizen complaints,” and there is no proof that Culver City’s is inappropriate, Feffer argued.

Lt. Ed Baughan, in charge of public relations for the Police Department, said the department and Police Chief Ted Cooke would not comment because of the pending litigation. Baughan would not give statistics for police brutality claims filed or investigated, saying only, “Culver City gets very few complaints” of officer misconduct and “the (complaint) policy speaks for itself.”

Mann, the attorney for plaintiff Schaub, did not have information on the number of misconduct claims. But two lawyers who handled other brutality complaints against the Culver City department filed declarations in Schaub’s case. In one, the attorney wrote to Chief Cooke three times to complain about the shooting of his client in an incident with police officers, one of whom, Michael Poulin, was involved in Schaub’s arrest. But the chief never responded. In the other case, criminal charges against the suspect were dismissed because of evidence that the department did not accept and keep certain citizen complaints.

The Culver City policy does not conform with the guidelines of the California Peace Officers Assn., which state that “every person has an absolute right to file a complaint,” and “all alleged or suspected violations of law . . . department rules . . . or orders . . . must be investigated.”

Don Jackson, a former Hawthorne police officer who attracted nationwide attention last year with a sting operation that exposed misconduct by the Long Beach police, agreed. In a declaration filed with the court, he wrote, “I have never seen an internal disciplinary system as obviously designed to protect officers against misconduct claims as that of Culver City.”

“Simply requiring an officer to document the manner in which force was allegedly used . . . does not provide any adequate safeguard against misconduct,” said Jackson, who now works for a firm specializing in investigations of police misconduct.

Other law enforcement agencies try to restrict complaints, with rules such as taking only written complaints and delaying investigations of claims until criminal charges stemming from the incident have been resolved, Jackson said.

Schaub’s case started out being fairly routine, Mann said, an instance of a “guy who made the mistake of running when Culver City police tried to pull him over.” On Feb. 20, 1989, Police Officers Steven Schultz and Pamela Graves tried to stop Schaub for an expired car registration. Schaub instead sped down the street, fearing that he would be thrown in jail for driving on a suspended license and having no insurance.

According to Schultz’s report, after a five-minute chase, which Officers Poulin and Donald Zimmer joined, Schaub crashed into a stop sign.

Schaub says he surrendered, arms up and face forward, and that the officers approached him from behind, knocked him to the ground with batons, and kicked him in the head. The police report says that Schaub was resisting and grabbed Schultz’s belt near his gun, so the officers hit Schaub with their batons and “forced him onto the ground” to subdue him.

The police searched the car, and allegedly found three wallets, an air pistol and other items, and arrested and booked Schaub for robbery. Robbery charges were never filed, however, and Schaub pleaded guilty to evading arrest.

Schaub’s suit is scheduled for trial Feb. 26. Judge Kenyon agreed to the defendants’ request to split the trial, with the brutality charges against the four officers to be heard first, followed by the policy issue against the city, the department and Chief Cooke.