Is Training of Deputies for Deadly Clashes Adequate? : Sheriff’s Dept.: Despite extensive instruction on when to shoot, critics say officers are too quick on the trigger.

To prepare its deputies for life-and-death encounters, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sends them to “Laser Village.”

At the high-tech training facility, officers strap on laser beam pistols and light-sensor vests, then engage in mock drug busts, robbery calls and hostage situations. The idea is to teach split-second judgments without fatal consequences: a red light and alarm on the vests signal whenever anyone is shot.

“It’s the closest thing to reality,” said Sgt. Mike Janovich, who runs the program at the department’s Biscailuz Center in City Terrace.

Even such state-of-the-art simulations rarely approximate the vicissitudes of the streets, where training and policy are challenged by uncertainty and fear.

A spate of real-life shootings by deputies over the last month--in Willowbrook, Artesia, Ladera Heights and East Los Angeles--has raised questions about the adequacy of the department’s lethal force guidelines and whether they are followed by deputies in the field.

Although deputies in all four fatal shootings said they feared for their lives, other witnesses contended that none of the officers were in danger from the suspects. The Federal Bureau of Investigation last week announced that it was probing three of the incidents for possible civil rights violations. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing prompted by the fourth.

Those shootings have brought to 20 the number of people killed by deputies this year, more than in any other year during the last decade, according to department officials. Even Sheriff Sherman Block has acknowledged that there is growing public perception--though he believes it is a mistaken one--that his officers are too quick in pulling the trigger.

Angry crowds of several hundred people gathered after the East Los Angeles and Willowbrook Park shootings, taunting officers, throwing bottles and hurling dirt at one deputy’s face--evidence of increasing hostilities between the department and the county’s minority residents.

More than 10 years after the Los Angeles Police Department first came under fire for its officer-involved shootings, the Sheriff’s Department finds itself on the hot seat, facing for the first time a rigorous review of its policies and practices.

From the sheriff’s point of view, the problem is simply Los Angeles--an increasingly violent place, where the crooks often have bigger guns than the cops.

“There is 24-hour-a-day combat going on in this community,” Block said at his monthly news conference in August, which drew about five times the usual number of reporters. “If they feel their life is in jeopardy . . . they are going to take aggressive action.”

Civil rights activists and police-misconduct lawyers contend that deputies have been nothing short of cavalier in their willingness to shoot, knowing that the chance of prosecution is slim. Since 1979, there have been 477 deputy-involved shootings, 174 of them fatal. Only one officer has been criminally charged.

“They’ll just haul out a gun and shoot it and worry about it later,” said attorney Hugh R. Manes, who helped win a $1-million settlement last year for the family of a Cerritos man killed in a barrage of 17 shots after he refused to stop for a traffic arrest. “That’s the way it goes down, I don’t care what the department says.”

Under Sheriff’s Department policy, firearms are regarded as “defensive weapons” to be used only when deputies believe their lives, or the lives of others, are in danger.

The key factor, according to the Manual of Policy and Procedures, is that lethal force be “absolutely necessary” and “fully justified.” It is the responsibility of each deputy to make that determination based on the circumstances.

At the Sheriff’s Department’s academy near Whittier, where recruits go through an 18-week training course, about three to four hours of classroom time is dedicated to explaining that policy, officials say. Another 70 hours is spent doing hands-on firearms training.

That includes a trip to “Laser Village,” a cluster of makeshift wooden buildings that all 8,000 deputies are required to visit every two years. On a recent day, Deputies Derek Sill and Curtis Jensen were called to “Sammy’s Saloon,” where the bartender explained that a man believed to be selling drugs was in the bathroom.

Each officer was equipped with a standard-issue 9-millimeter Beretta, the only difference being a laser beam device inserted in the barrel. With country-Western music adding to the ambience, they used tactical maneuvers to corner the armed suspect and extract him without firing a shot.

In another building a few steps away, Deputy Chris Branuelas was forced into a confrontation. Using an interactive video program known as “Shoot--Don’t Shoot,” he faced a distraught woman on a movie screen pointing a gun at her abusive husband.

As Branuelas ordered her to drop the weapon, she began to turn toward him with the gun still raised. Without hesitating, the deputy fired two laser beam shots that struck her in the upper body.

“Goddamnit, you son of a bitch!” her on-screen husband shouted at the officer as he embraced his fallen wife.

“That’s a tough one,” Branuelas admitted. “I can only give her a very small amount of time to cooperate and drop the gun.”

The department has no policy of shooting to kill, officials say, nor is there any provision for shooting only to wound. The objective is to stop the aggression of the suspect, although they acknowledge they can best achieve this by aiming for the upper body--the “kill zone.”

They also say there is no regulation governing the number of shots fired from their semiautomatic pistols, which can hold 15 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. Deputies are trained to shoot in bursts of two or three rounds, momentarily re-evaluate the situation, then continue firing if necessary. In fact, officers sometimes empty their weapons, contributing to allegations that they are prone to violence.

Unlike the movies, where shooting victims are blown backward by the force of bullets, real-life victims often appear to be only stunned, officials said. The victim of a lethal shot may even have enough blood to continue functioning for another 15 to 20 seconds, which is why deputies say they sometimes are compelled to fire all their bullets.

“Police work is not an exact science,” said Cmdr. Bill Stonich, who oversees training for the department. “The fact of the matter is there’s a great deal of gray area out there.”

Although critics say the department’s high-tech training is valuable, they believe more emphasis should be placed on avoiding situations that require lethal force, rather than practicing when and how to use it. Too often, they contend, the decision to shoot is a result of panic, adrenaline or what they call the “John Wayne Syndrome”--forcing a confrontation for fear of appearing weak.

“It’s the old adage: Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread,” said Robert Feliciano, a former sheriff’s sergeant who now works as a management consultant to law enforcement agencies. “Personally, I think we have to teach them to back off, take cover and try to wait it out.”

Many critics believe that that approach would have prevented the four recent shootings, which have sparked calls for an independent investigation of the Sheriff’s Department, similar to the Christopher Commission’s probe of racism and brutality in the Los Angeles Police Department.

The latest incident occurred Labor Day at Willowbrook Park, where deputies fatally shot Steve Clemons, 27, after he allegedly pointed a gun at an officer, then “in a simultaneous motion” tossed it in a lake. Although a gun was recovered by divers, witnesses among the angry crowd that gathered said Clemons was unarmed and fleeing with a beer bottle in his hand when he was slain.

Five days earlier, David Angel Ortiz, 15, was shot to death in Artesia at the end of a chase with deputies pursuing the allegedly stolen car he was driving. Deputies said they opened fire after the boy tried to run away, then reached for his waistband. A lawyer for Ortiz’s family said the youth was unarmed and, according to an autopsy, was shot several times in the back.

On Aug. 13, deputies shot and killed former mental patient Keith Hamilton, 33, in Ladera Heights, after his mother asked for help when he failed to take his medication. The deputies said Hamilton was reaching for a knife in his waistband, but a neighbor who witnessed the incident contended that deputies planted a metallic object by the body.

All three incidents occurred against the volatile backdrop of the Aug. 3 slaying of Arturo Jimenez, 19, after he allegedly assaulted a deputy with his own flashlight at the Ramona Gardens housing project in East Los Angeles. Witnesses who were attending a birthday party with Jimenez insisted he was unarmed and had only accused an officer of mistreating his friend.

“The shooting of Arturo Jimenez is a classic example of a police officer who violated all the basic rules,” said attorney R. Samuel Paz, who filed a wrongful death claim against the county on behalf of Jimenez’s family. “They simply moved to the ultimate sanction . . . rather than considering that as a last alternative.”

Sheriff’s officials say they will not pass judgment on the deputies until the four have been investigated. They do acknowledge that restraint, even in tense situations, is essential but that deputies who want to survive must be prepared to pull the trigger.

Four of this year’s 20 fatal shootings were by off-duty deputies defending themselves against would-be robbers while withdrawing money from automated bank machines, according to the Sheriff’s Department. There’s even an ATM at “Laser Village” for training purposes, courtesy of Bank of America.

Another four people were killed this year by the department’s Special Weapons Team, which had not been involved in a fatal shooting the previous three years. In all four of those slayings, the suspects were armed, officials said. In one case, the assailant had the gun pressed up against the head of a hostage.

“We had been deployed well over 300 times (prior to this year) and hadn’t had a fatal shooting because it wasn’t necessary,” said Capt. Dan Burt, head of the team. “But each one of these incidents was an extremely intense situation where any reasonable person would have come to the same conclusion my men did.”

This year’s fatal shootings already exceed the 18 recorded last year, as well as the previous decade high of 19 in 1987. The Los Angeles Police Department, which has essentially the same policy regarding lethal force, has been involved in 15 fatal shootings this year; last year its officers took 37 lives.

What happens after a deputy uses deadly force can sometimes be as hotly debated as the shooting itself. While sheriff’s homicide detectives say they conduct impartial investigations of deputy-involved shootings, critics say the process exists solely to find justification for the use of deadly force.

The critics contend that no effort is made to scrutinize reasons often given by deputies for the shootings: The suspect reached for his waistband, moved his hands quickly or was holding an object that looked like a gun.

“They’re the standard lies--like boilerplate language taken out of a word processor,” said John C. Burton, one of several attorneys in a class-action suit against the department over a litany of alleged wrongdoing by Lynwood deputies. “But they all have the character of being very difficult to disprove.”

Prosecutors say they have to assess whether it was reasonable for deputies to believe they were in danger, regardless of whether the danger was real or apparent.

The only deputy during the past 20 years to be prosecuted by the district attorney’s office was Robert Armstrong, who served eight months in jail after falsely reporting a disturbance at a Duarte home in 1982 to justify a raid there. After kicking the door down, he shot Delois Young, 22, who was pregnant and holding an unloaded rifle. Young survived, but her 8-month-old fetus was killed.

“We’re not saying there aren’t some questions about some of these cases,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. John Spillane, a prosecutor assigned to review police-misconduct allegations. “But our gut feelings and hunches can’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the law we face.”

The Sheriff’s Department declined to reveal the results of its administrative investigations, which are conducted simultaneously with the criminal probes. Critics contend that the internal reviews are meaningless, but the attorney who represents the deputies’ union said the scrutiny is intense.

“The deputy gets it both from the public and internally,” said Richard A. Shinee, attorney for the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs.

Regardless of the outcome, every deputy who wounds or kills a suspect is required to visit the offices of Dr. Audrey Honig, the department’s director of psychological services.

She said they come to her teary-eyed, depressed and trembling, sometimes full of guilt, sometimes angry that the suspect compelled them to use deadly force.

“It’s not unusual, after they look at things from the emotional side rather than the factual side, to come to new types of awarenesses and realizations about the incident,” Honig said. “Sometimes, the officers don’t even want to go back in the field . . . back in a situation where they might have to take someone’s life.”

The 9-mm. Beretta

In 1988, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department began phasing in the 9-millimeter Beretta, Model 92-F, as its standard side arm, replacing the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 15, a revolver.

The Italian-made Beretta is a semiautomatic and can hold 16 rounds (15 in the magazine and one in the chamber).

The Beretta is also the standard-issue pistol for the U.S. military and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Weight (unloaded): 2.1 pounds

Length: 8.54 inches

Barrel: 5 inches

Round: 147-grain hollow point

Retail price: $636

SOURCE: L.A. County Sheriff’s Department

Compiled by Times researcher Michael Meyers