‘Code of Silence’ Often Shrouds Police Misconduct

From the front passenger seat of a parked Dodge Colt, John Jenkins watched as the nightsticks of uniformed Los Angeles police officers came crashing down on the windshield, fracturing it into huge spider webs. The officers smashed the other windows, then pulled the terrified Jenkins out.

They were among more than 30 officers who had been summoned to the Olympic Auditorium to control bottle-throwing youths after a 1985 punk rock concert. But in a parking lot near the facility, they were the ones out of control.

Witnesses said several officers clubbed Jenkins for no apparent reason, then watched as he crawled, bleeding, back to the car. Later, when Jenkins complained to the LAPD, Internal Affairs investigators said they couldn’t figure out who the officers were.

Their efforts were stymied, said Jenkins’ attorney, Hugh Manes, by a classic case of the police officers’ “code of silence.”

Manes was referring to the custom of many police officers of placing loyalty to one another above loyalty to the public by keeping silent about one another’s misdeeds.

Officially, the Police Department downplays the existence of any such code. “I read a lot about this code of silence,” said the department’s chief spokesman, Cmdr. Robert S. Gil. “I can’t say that I’ve seen the code of silence.”

Others said they have.

“Basically, being raised by a Los Angeles police officer myself . . . it is basically a non-written rule that you do not roll over, tell on your partner, your companion,” Officer Scott Kennedy, whose father is an LAPD detective, testified recently.

Kennedy was explaining why he had not come forward immediately to report his partner of one night, Officer Lance Braun, who was charged criminally with an unprovoked assault on two civilians.

Kennedy had at first denied to superiors that he had seen any part of the assault, heeding what he said was Braun’s injunction to deny they were present. But a week after the civilians identified Braun in a lineup, Kennedy had a change of heart. He testified that he felt he “had to tell the truth” because he had been “unable to sleep or live a normal life.”

That sort of gut-level decision-making commonly governs whether people come forward, veteran officers said.

“I tell them that when your gut wrenches, very pragmatically, you’ve got to do something,” said Sgt. Jim Starr, who teaches an ethics class for recruits at the Police Academy.

Starr said he also teaches “career survival”--reminding recruits that officers caught covering up for colleagues will be disciplined by Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Despite this training, it is clear from a Times study of hundreds of police, prosecutor and court records that misconduct often goes unreported, particularly if it can be rationalized as minor.

“Certain things you will be applauded for for coming forward,” said a 20-year veteran who asked not to be named. “Other things you will be excommunicated for.”

Misconduct such as child molestation, drug abuse or bribery may be reported without stigma, he said. But ostracism would result from reporting offenses such as “getting in an extra” punch on a handcuffed suspect who resisted arrest.

And there is a vast middle ground. In the Rodney G. King beating, for example, none of the 21 LAPD officers on the scene apparently thought it was worth reporting to anyone beyond their sergeant, who had watched the incident himself without stopping it and therefore, implicitly, seemed to have said it was OK.

A videotape of the incident made by a nearby resident inspired outrage among the public and has resulted in four of the officers being charged criminally.

A few years ago, an LAPD detective came forward to report that he had witnessed more than a year’s worth of misconduct by colleagues assigned to juvenile narcotics, including the striking of a handcuffed prisoner. But he paid for his honesty.

In a confidential report to the Police Commission, Internal Affairs investigators said co-workers responded by harassing and refusing to work with him. The detective’s name was blacked out on the copy of the report made available to The Times.

A reluctance to turn in colleagues is observable in any social group, said James Fyfe, a former New York City police officer who teaches about police brutality at American University in Washington. To make that point, Fyfe said, he asks each new class, “How many of you have ever seen someone cheat? Everybody raises his hand. How many have told the professor about it? No one raises his hand. That just goes to show that if you’re working or living in a group of people it’s very difficult to be the rat.”

But the social price that students, lawyers, doctors or academics may have to pay for turning in an errant colleague may be substantially less than that faced by officers.

Police are “essentially social isolates anyway because of the nature of the job and also because of the working hours,” said Fyfe. “You’re working 4 to 12, you’re off Wednesday and Thursday. Your social life revolves around other cops. If they feel you can’t be trusted you have no one.”

“Premature cynicism is the hallmark of a cop,” said novelist Joseph Wambaugh, a former member of the LAPD. “They start mistrusting everyone, thinking that nobody’s any good, except members of the group. They start palling around with police exclusively because they’re the only ones who understand.”

Wambaugh believes that the cynicism is unconscious and that, if you ask most officers, they’ll tell you that they have retained their youthful idealism. “This is what I write about,” Wambaugh said, “the clash between idealism and cynicism.”

Wambaugh said the clash allows police to shade the truth. “To a cop, and to most people, there is something between truth and a lie,” he said. For example, “nobody would stand for cops planting evidence on somebody who was innocent. But if it’s just a matter of saying evidence was here, rather than there . . . that sort of stuff is where the truth gets pretty fuzzy,” Wambaugh said.

As for brutality, he said, that--like pornography--can be defined only by the beholder.

A Superior Court jury recognized it in the Jenkins case, ordering the city to pay Jenkins more than $200,000.

Jurors apparently discounted denials of wrongdoing by the officers and credited testimony from a police gadfly, former Hawthorne Police Sgt. Don Jackson, that officers in his own department and the LAPD routinely lied to protect colleagues and themselves.

Jenkins, a construction worker who was leaving the Olympic Auditorium after hearing a band called The Exploited, had ended the night of his 18th birthday at a hospital near his Upland home, where doctors said he suffered a concussion, a partial hearing loss, and numerous cuts and bruises.

In an effort to determine who beat him and some other civilians who said they were attacked, Internal Affairs investigators had interviewed each of the more than 30 officers present. All denied complicity. And all but one denied even seeing any misconduct in the parking lot where Jenkins was attacked.

The one officer who came forward partly confirmed accounts of civilian witnesses that he “observed several punkers on the parking lot underneath the freeway being randomly pursued and beaten with batons by uniformed police officers.” But even he said he was too far away to have seen their faces.

As a result, said Assistant City Atty. Ward G. McConnell, “it is literally impossible” to say which officers were involved.

The failure of the Police Department to identify officers involved in a beating was not limited to the Jenkins case.

In 1988, LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division was asked to investigate complaints that Rampart Division officers brutalized suspects after a car chase. “Apparently, officers . . . beat the suspects,” investigators concluded in another confidential report to the Police Commission. But “no penalties were assessed due to the department’s inability to identify the concerned officers.”

And in 1987, a civilian complained that Foothill Division officers beat him after another car chase. Internal Affairs investigators said they were able to verify the chase but were unable to identify the officers “due to the confusion at the scene and the conflicting statements of those present.”

In the recently concluded “39th and Dalton” police vandalism trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Darden told jurors that many of the 18 LAPD officers he called to the stand perjured themselves because they owed fidelity to a “code of silence.”

After jurors acquitted three officers--saying there was insufficient evidence that they were the ones who had committed the vandalism--Darden told reporters: “Had we had a little more support from the LAPD in terms of ensuring that these officers testified truthfully, I think that might have helped.”

Sometimes when LAPD officials discover cover-ups within the ranks, the punishment they mete out is light. For example, in separate cases in 1988 and 1990, two sergeants tried to cover up incidents of misconduct, but were each suspended for only five days.

Some critics within the department have suggested that cover-ups could be discouraged by increasing penalties, thus heightening the risks. But there are times when administrative penalties have been harsh.

When Officer Rodney Kelley fatally shot Miguel Herrera in 1984, he told investigators that he fired three times in self-defense as Herrera attacked or prepared to attack him, according to district attorney files. His partner, Daniel Perez, backed him up. Their stories were later contradicted by physical evidence that showed Herrera had been shot in the back. Perez was suspended for six months for making false statements to investigators. Kelley was fired.

A deputy district attorney assigned to decide whether such shootings should be prosecuted--this one, like most, was not--said a code of silence often had to be overcome. “You know that even if an officer sees something that perhaps is not totally cricket, he is not going to reveal it to any prosecutor,” said the prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

On the other hand, he added, he “would not expect a code of silence in a case involving an execution” or other conduct “where the individual, for whatever reason, is so offended by the conduct, he feels obligated to come forward.”

This prosecutor said he believes police officers come forward only rarely, but LAPD spokesman Gil said he believes it is not that rare.

“I can give you examples where there was no code of silence among officers who step forward and said, ‘Doggone it, that guy did it,’ ” Gil said.

One example cited by other officers was that of Officer Orlando Nieves, who three years ago as a probationer turned in his training officer for planting cocaine on a suspect arrested for drag racing.

The training officer told Nieves to pretend that the cocaine had been found in the car, but Nieves wouldn’t go along. Instead, he reported the training officer to a superior.

Initially, Nieves was ostracized when the training officer spread the word he was just a probationer trying to make trouble, said Sgt. Starr, the Police Academy ethics instructor.

But, when it became apparent that Nieves was telling the truth, the training officer was prosecuted and convicted of false imprisonment and he resigned from the department in disgrace.

Nieves was heralded as a hero.