LAPD Method of Handling Complaints Is Under Fire : Police: Reforms are urged in the system. Department officials respond that it is fair and effective.

By Rick Lomas’ account, the Los Angeles police officer who stopped him in 1987 for a possible traffic violation yanked him out of his car, threw him to the ground, pulled him up by his shirt collar and pushed him into the patrol car. Lomas later went to the LAPD’s Rampart Division to complain--but said he never got past the officer at the desk.

“I remember him saying: ‘Is this against one of our officers?’ ” said the 35-year-old singer and drummer from Hollywood. “I said, ‘Yes it is.’ He said, ‘You’re going to have to take that downtown or try to find an attorney.’ It got to a point where I didn’t feel comfortable with filing the doggone thing.”

Three weeks ago, at the Van Nuys station, Hardy Rogers said he had a similar experience. The 48-year-old General Motors assembly line worker was angry with two officers who, he alleged, fabricated a report saying they had found drugs in his car. He asked for a complaint form, unaware that the department has no such forms. Rather than tell him so, a sergeant pressed the complainant to talk.

“He asked, ‘What happened?’ ” Rogers recalled. “I said, ‘That’s for me to put down on a complaint form. . . . I’ll write out the complaint and then you deal with it.’ But he would not give it to me. I walked out.”

These two incidents--four years apart, one long before the infamous police beating of Rodney G. King and the other shortly after--illustrate what some view as the shortcomings of the Los Angeles Police Department’s procedure for handling citizen complaints.

Critics complain that the system is shut off from the public, an internal process in which cops investigate other cops with little, if any, outside scrutiny. All too often, they say, citizens are discouraged from filing complaints. In the majority of cases, officers are exonerated--without the complainant learning the result. In part, this is because of a state law that requires police agencies to keep most misconduct investigations confidential.

In the wake of the King beating, the department’s citizen complaint process is under more scrutiny than at any time since the Watts riots. The Christopher Commission--the independent panel investigating the Police Department--is examining the system, and is reportedly considering sweeping changes. So is the Los Angeles Police Commission, which is looking at citizen complaint procedures in five other cities as part of its probe.

“We are attempting to examine other jurisdictions . . . and how they handle complaints of police misconduct,” acting Police Commission President Melanie Lomax said, “because clearly, our system is not fail-safe.”

Others are far more pointed in their criticism. “The object of this entire process is to squelch complaints,” charges Tom Beck, a lawyer who represents victims of police abuse. “I’ve been doing this since 1978 and I’ve run into this time and time again. We’ve got cops committing crimes that the department doesn’t even bother to look into.”

In the King case, a sergeant refused to initiate an investigation after King’s brother, Paul, contacted the Foothill Division station and complained about the beating. Paul King told the sergeant that a videotape of the beating had been made, but no complaint was lodged until after the video was shown on television.

Civil rights advocates are calling for an independent review panel that would either investigate police misconduct or review the department’s findings. About 50 U.S. cities--including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C.--have civilian review boards, although their authority varies and none has power to impose discipline.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has expressed his opposition to such a board. His department maintains that its current system--in which complaints are investigated internally and the police chief metes out discipline--is fair and effective.

“We hire very talented, very intelligent people who conduct very thorough and insightful investigations,” said department spokesman Lt. Fred Nixon, “and you’re not going to get a better investigative effort than the one that is put forth now.”

According to Nixon, the department makes it “extremely easy” for people to file complaints; it can be done over the telephone, in writing or in person, at any station or with the mayor’s office or the Police Commission, the five-member citizens panel that oversees the department.

The vast majority of complaints--more than 90%--are investigated by the officers’ superiors at the division where they work, a method that was criticized 26 years ago by the commission that investigated the Watts riots. Most are investigated within 30 days. The remainder are investigated by the departments’ Internal Affairs Division, before forwarding them to the chief for action.

Nixon stressed that the department takes great pains to “really drum it into our officers” that discouraging a complaint or stonewalling an investigation is “a very, very serious act of misconduct.”

But those who come in contact with the complaint process--citizens, lawyers and community activists--say Nixon and the department paint far too rosy a picture.

Karol Heppe is one of the most vocal critics. She is executive director of the Police Misconduct Lawyers Referral Service, a 10-year-old agency that works out of cramped, cluttered quarters just west of downtown Los Angeles, in a building that belongs to the American Civil Liberties Union.

With five full-time employees, the service counsels more than 2,600 callers a year. They recently hired an additional counselor and put in two new phone lines because of a surge in calls after the March 3 King beating. The complaints they receive involve law enforcement agencies across the county, and allege everything from racial remarks to dog bites. The most common is assault.

Heppe and others say that because the Los Angeles force is the largest police department in the county, it sets the tone for a host of smaller departments. Its complaint system, Heppe said, is anything but inviting--especially when a citizen tries to file a complaint at the station where the offending officer works.

One by one, she rattles off the obstacles: “The officer at the desk can tell them, ‘We don’t take complaints.’ The officer may say, ‘You’re going to have to sit and wait.’ The officer may say, ‘Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to destroy this man’s career?’ If the person appears to be foreign, then the officer might say: ‘If you file this complaint and you are undocumented we are going to turn this over to (immigration authorities)’ . . . Or they may check their computer and if there are outstanding warrants they may arrest you on the spot.”

While nearly a dozen lawyers and civil rights advocates interviewed for this story maintained that such tactics are commonplace, there are no statistics to quantify their claims. Heppe said that in the aftermath of the King beating, the Police Misconduct Lawyers Referral Service is beginning to compile such data.

However, statistics do show that a relatively small percentage of citizen complaints are sustained by the department. A recent Times computer analysis of 4,400 misconduct complaints filed from 1987 through mid-1990 showed that only 7% of those filed by citizens were upheld. Unless there was physical evidence or an independent witness to the alleged police abuse, the department took the word of accused officers over the word of civilian complainants.

That is not unusual, according to Jerome Skolnick, a sociologist and law professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in police issues.

“Most complaints against police are one on one,” Skolnick said. “So what you have is a swearing contest, a contest of oaths, in which each person takes an oath to tell the truth. When you have a case like Rodney King, where somebody is badly beaten, it is one thing. But when you have a case where there is no evidence afterward, it is very difficult to sustain a complaint.”

Consider the case of Lonnie Sykes of Lake View Terrace.

In January, 1989, Sykes filed a complaint against Officer John Edwards, then a patrolman in the department’s West Los Angeles Division. Sykes alleged that Edwards struck him repeatedly on the head with a flashlight, causing a cut that required four stitches.

But in a statement obtained by Sykes’ lawyer, Gary Casselman, Edwards told police investigators that Sykes injured his head during a struggle in which the officer was trying to pull Sykes over a fence. The department later informed the lawyer that the complaint against Edwards was “not sustained”--that it could neither be proved nor disproved.

Sykes and his attorney said that because there were no independent witnesses, the department rejected the complaint. They further said that the officer’s partner was a witness, and that she apologized for the incident, but apparently backed Edwards’ version during an Internal Affairs probe.

Casselman, who is now suing the Police Department on Sykes’ behalf, said the case is evidence that the complaint process needs reform and that a “code of silence” exists among officers.

“The system isn’t working,” he said. “A man gets clunked on top of his head enough to have four stitches and they accept a lame explanation? The cops all know that their partners will back them up. The officers know, like spoiled children, that they won’t be punished.”

The city attorney’s office has not received notice of Sykes’ suit and the Police Department is prevented by state law from commenting on the case.

The department denies that a “code of silence” exists within its ranks, but The Times found instances in which the department was unable to identify officers involved in beatings. In one case, an officer repeatedly rammed his patrol car into a suspect’s vehicle while other officers beat the suspect. The department concluded that the officers were guilty of excessive force, but told the Police Commission they could not be identified.

California law requires that the results of police misconduct investigations be kept confidential unless the files are released by a judge or the officer goes before a departmental disciplinary tribunal, known in the LAPD as a Board of Rights. That generally happens in cases that warrant severe punishment--a suspension of more than 22 days.

Police spokesman Nixon estimates that about 5% of all complaints go before a Board of Rights. The rest of the time, the person who complained never learns the outcome, unless a judge orders it. At best, Nixon said, the department sends the complainant a letter, saying his allegation “has been investigated and appropriate action has been taken.”

This is both frustrating and emotionally unsatisfying for the complainant, according to Heppe, of the Police Misconduct Lawyers Referral Service.

“I think these people should be notified of the results of the investigation into their complaint,” she said. “That encourages people, it empowers people to feel like they have some power in the community, like they have some say.”

Without new laws, that is unlikely to happen. But even LAPD officials acknowledge that they expect some recommendations for change to emerge from the Christopher Commission, whose report is due next month, and also from the Police Commission.

If history is any guide, those expectations are well-founded. In its report on the Watts riots 26 years ago, the McCone Commission called for the creation of an “Inspector General”--a unit of sworn officers and civilians, outside the chain of command and reporting directly to the police chief--to investigate all civilian complaints.

Such a unit was never established. It would have eliminated the current method of having division commanders investigate their subordinate officers. While the McCone Commission criticized that practice, it also praised the department for setting “high standards of conduct” that are “conscientiously enforced.”

The McCone Commission rejected calls for a citizens review panel, saying it would “endanger the effectiveness of law enforcement.”

Skolnick, the Berkeley professor, said civilian review boards help to ensure that a department’s citizen complaint system is fair. Perhaps even more important, he said, they help create the perception of fairness in the public mind.

“Unless you have a very extraordinary Police Department, you have to have some way that non-police can penetrate this insular society,” Skolnick said. “Obviously, police are not going to encourage people to complain about police.”