Cracks in Government: a City Attorney Issue : King fallout shows a structural problem in key L.A. office

The police beating of Rodney King has revealed all sorts of cracks in the structure of Los Angeles city government. The dramatic City Hall battle over the case has laid bare just how weak the city’s “weak mayor” system is, how powerless the mayor’s commissions really are and how the city attorney’s office sometimes must represent diametrically opposed interests. That conflict, particularly in high-profile, highly charged cases, is unacceptable not only from an ethical point of view but from a financial one, because the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill for any mishandling of city legal cases. Most important, the public must have total trust in how its elected attorneys handle cases that are closely watched and deeply cared about.

THE CONFLICT: In the King case, the city attorney’s office has been adviser to two bodies at complete odds--the Police Commission and the City Council. The city attorney told the commission it had the legal authority to place Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on leave and then, within days, advised the council on a legal maneuver to reverse the action. Legal experts agree that a lawyer can’t represent opposing interests in a single matter. A spokesman for City Atty. James K. Hahn contends that the office has only one client, the City of Los Angeles, and that there is no conflict of interest because both the commission and the council are part of the city. Now, if only we all lived in the fantasy world in which the city were one big family, without the infighting, there would be no problem. But in the real world of City Hall, there has been a history of conflict-of-interest problems, as the King case vividly reminds us.

HISTORY: The city attorney recognized the conflict-of-interest problem in 1985 when a councilman was under investigation for violating the city’s campaign contribution law. Because the city attorney’s office had provided advice to the councilman, the investigation was passed to the district attorney’s office “to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest,” a Hahn spokesman said.

Another conflict occurred in the case of a former planning director investigated in 1984 by the city attorney’s office. Later a judge ruled that evidence obtained by then-City Atty. Ira Reiner could not be used. The attorney-client relationship had been breached, the judge said, because the planning director, after going to the city attorney for advice, found himself the target of a probe by that office. (The planning director was later cleared.)

And, in a police case in 1983, Reiner, as city attorney, publicly criticized a Los Angeles Police Department unit that was accused of spying on law-abiding citizens. The city attorney’s office was handling the defense of the Police Department. The city later hired private counsel at a cost of about $2 million.

Some council members have suggested that the city attorney’s office be split, as it is in the county, into an elected city prosecutor’s office and an appointed legal adviser’s office. Hahn has said that the number of conflicts within his office are “minuscule” and a split in the office would “create two separate bureaucracies, which would create new costs for taxpayers.”

POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Hahn is right about the potential costs. Also, most city legal conflicts would crop up not between criminal and civil cases but between two potential civil cases. James Ham, an attorney who has served on the ethics committees of the state and county bar associations, has a promising idea. How about a panel of private lawyers, working pro bono, that independently would review, upon request, whether the city attorney has a conflict of interest? The city attorney could reject a finding of conflict of interest from the independent panel--but he would have to explain it to the public.

The conflict-of-interest question--another issue of accountability--goes to the heart of trust in government.