City Attorney’s Office Hit Over Police Records

In recent months, federal judges and magistrates have imposed monetary sanctions and criticized the city attorney’s office several times for failing to turn over information about Los Angeles police officers accused of brutality or other misconduct in civil suits.

Twice in the last two weeks, a city attorney has been forced to take the witness stand in federal court to answer accusations that his office had withheld information that could alter the outcome of pending brutality cases against the Los Angeles Police Department.

Lawyers who specialize in police misconduct cases assert that these recent skirmishes are part of a disturbing pattern of conduct by the city attorney’s office designed to make it difficult for civilians to win lawsuits against police.

U.S. District Judge William J. Rea said Wednesday that the city attorney’s office had been “negligent, perhaps grossly negligent,” in responding to requests for information from the lawyer for a homeless woman who alleged that officers allowed a police dog to attack her in 1988. Rea also said that the city attorney’s method of keeping track of complaints against police officers was “very sloppy.”

However, the judge denied the woman’s request for a new trial, saying that there was no evidence that the city had fraudulently withheld information or misrepresented facts.

Last week, in another brutality case, U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon told Deputy City Atty. John A. Wright that the attorney had exaggerated the difficulty of finding and producing police records on use of force. Kenyon made his statement after taking the highly unusual step of paying a personal visit to a Police Department file room.

Wright had told Kenyon that it would take “thousands and thousands of man-hours” to retrieve records requested by an attorney suing the Police Department because the files were disorganized. But the judge said that even if Wright’s assertions were true, there was “something wrong” about allowing government officials to “get the benefit of screwing up.”

Kenyon ordered the Police Department to produce by July 24 records related to the conduct of three officers from 1983 to 1987.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers say it is critical for them to obtain department records and court documents describing the prior conduct of officers named in lawsuits, because they can show a pattern of misconduct that is relevant to the allegations of excessive force.

“The city attorney’s office routinely and systematically refuses to turn over material” that is critical to the outcome of police brutality cases, said Venice civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman.

“As a general rule, the city attorney’s office makes you go into court for everything you want,” said Westwood attorney Edward Fox. He alleged that the city attorney’s office attempts to withhold information--even public records--under the guise that they are part of police personnel files provided special protection under the state evidence code.

“It is their standard operating procedure to disobey court orders to turn over material or to skirt court orders that they find too difficult,” said Los Angeles attorney Thomas E. Beck.

These allegations were denied by Thomas C. Hokinson, the assistant city attorney in charge of liability cases. “I don’t know what they are talking about,” he said. “Our lawyers file appropriate objections. After the court rules, we provide information.”

However, federal judges and magistrates have penalized the city attorney’s office for failing to cooperate with information requested about police officers. The sanctions have been imposed both before and after the March 3 police beating of Rodney G. King, which city attorneys say has made it more difficult to defend other brutality suits against Los Angeles police officers.

For example, federal Magistrate Venetta S. Tassopulos imposed a $1,500 sanction in January against the city attorney’s office for failing to cooperate with valid information requests in a case where Joseph and Sandra Stone claim they were beaten and falsely arrested after their car was stopped near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1988. As in most federal lawsuits, the magistrate had been assigned to handle discovery matters in the case’s pretrial phases.

The Stone case was the one in which Kenyon chided attorney Wright last week.

In two other cases, federal Magistrate Joseph Reichman imposed a $1,500 sanction against the city attorney in March and Magistrate Charles F. Eick ordered a $1,000 sanction a month later. Both magistrate’s ruled that city attorneys had failed to comply with orders to turn over police records to plaintiffs’ attorneys.

In June, U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi ordered the city attorney’s office to pay Yagman and his partner, Marian Yagman, $30,485.75 because of the failure of Assistant City Atty. David Hotchkiss and Police Chief Daryl F. Gates to release two confidential LAPD reports on the controversial 1988 Dalton Avenue raid that resulted in damage to several apartments in South-Central Los Angeles.

The penalties imposed by Takasugi were to cover the attorneys’ costs to re-interview witnesses in view of new information obtained in the reports.

In some instances, federal judges have gone beyond issuing monetary sanctions. In April, U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. issued a default judgment against the city in a case where the city had been accused of brutality in its use of police dogs. Hatter ruled that for the purposes of this case, “The city of Los Angeles has a custom, policy and practice of permitting and encouraging its employees to brutalize suspects by letting Police Department dogs maul them.”

Earlier in the case, Magistrate Volney V. Brown Jr. imposed $3,195 in sanctions, saying city attorneys had “dishonored” promises to turn over material.

Assistant City Atty. Hokinson and several attorneys working under him said they work closely with the Police Department in an attempt to comply with discovery requests.

Last week, in Judge Rea’s courtroom, Lt. Hugh Halford, the officer in charge of LAPD’s litigation processing section, testified about the department’s response to requests for release of documents about police officers.

“What I say (to the city attorney) as a representative of the Police Department is: Use every legal method you can to resist turning over every document because my job is to protect the documents within the Police Department. But I . . . do not make that decision; the city attorney makes that decision,” Halford said.

Later he added: “I don’t hide documents. If someone has a right to something and a court orders it and the city attorney says they have a right to it, I follow the instructions of the city attorney involved.”

Halford said the department had turned over thousands of documents to attorney Donald W. Cook and his partner, Robert F. Mann, who are suing the LAPD on behalf of several people who have been bitten by police dogs.

Hokinson asserted that another problem encountered by his office in complying with discovery orders is “the amount of work entailed in getting records is longer than the time limit provided.”

In late April, Hokinson submitted a declaration that said his unit “has had staffing difficulties for at least the past 12 months and has been working under extremely difficult conditions for some time.” He said the civil liability unit was currently defending about 3,300 personal injury and property damage cases, including more than 100 federal civil rights lawsuits.

In the hearing before Judge Rea this week, Deputy City Atty. Donald Vincent said that the office simply had inadequate automation and insufficient personnel to handle all the discovery orders. “We work for a very cheap outfit and then you have these onerous requests . . . and that makes the job worth very little,” Vincent said.

He stated emphatically that the office was not “corrupt” in its response to information requests.

But attorney Cook said it was unfair to plaintiffs to excuse the city’s failures simply because of inadequate staffing.

Veteran civil rights lawyer Hugh Manes added that “there is a lot of indifference in the city attorney’s office” about sanctions “because the money doesn’t come out of their personal pockets. The people of the city of Los Angeles are the ones who have to pay for it every time there is a sanction. That’s too bad.”