A Porous Net for Career Criminals : D.A.’s unit formed to pursue repeat offenders has been drained of staff and funding. Now, says its leader, ‘we’re missing the guys who are preying on this community.’

The Career Criminal Division of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office boasted of 20 senior prosecutors, two staff investigators and its own secretaries when the unit began operations in 1979.

With funding stretched thin, the investigators have long since departed. So have the secretaries. Where there were once 20 lawyers, today there are 10--most fresh out of law school.

“Our impact,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter S. Berman, who runs the unit, “is minuscule.”

The Career Criminal Division was formed with nearly $1 million in mostly state grants after a RAND Corp. study found that 10% of California’s criminal population committed 60% of all violent crimes. An elite corps of prosecutors with small caseloads, it was theorized, could ride herd on chronic offenders, guaranteeing that they would receive the longest possible prison sentences.

But through the 1980s, as prosecutorial attention turned increasingly to gangs and drugs, funding to fight career criminals remained fixed at 1979 levels. And so, as salaries rose along with the cost of living, administrators in the district attorney’s office began paring positions.

Once, Berman’s unit went after murderers, professional robbers and slick cat burglars.

“Now, basically, we take only the biggest armed robbers and a handful of burglars,” he said. “The reality is, we’re missing the guys who are preying on this community.”

Last year, according to district attorney records, the unit prosecuted 189 suspects, 162 of them accused robbers.

To determine if career criminals were escaping scrutiny by his unit, Berman last year posted a sign in the waiting room of the district attorney’s offices where detectives go to have charges filed against suspects they arrest. The sign said: “All 459 (penal code for burglary) and 211 (robbery) suspects must first be screened by the Career Criminal Division prior to complaint processing.”

Of about 90 burglary and robbery cases filed downtown each week, Berman discovered that more than half involved repeat offenders who could be considered career criminals--far more than his attorneys could ever hope to prosecute.

Dejected, he took down the sign a few months later.

“It’s not worth the officers putting forth the effort to log these cases in with us,” Berman said, “when we can’t get to them.”