PERSPECTIVE ON THE POLICE : Is the LAPD Committed to Reform?

We have now had an opportunity to review the response of the LAPD leadership to the commission’s report. This LAPD memorandum was submitted to the Police Commission and this committee in mid-September.

I would like to address the LAPD memorandum in the same spirit as the commission’s report: that is, to be “blunt” and “plain-spoken” while acknowledging the difficulty and complexity of the issues facing the Los Angeles Police Department today.

In its September memorandum the department indicates support for most of the independent commission’s recommendations. This support is welcome. But unfortunately the LAPD memorandum is unresponsive to the principal thrust of the commission’s report. Rather than accepting the challenge and the opportunity for fundamental reform, the leadership of the LAPD has treated the central recommendations of the report as “simply restatements of existing policy.” The department’s memorandum of more than 100 pages is filled with references and quotations from the LAPD Manual and other written policies. It largely ignores the basic conclusion of the commission’s report: However laudatory these written policies and guidelines may be, the reality on the street conflicts with the rhetoric of the manual. The commission found that to bridge this gap requires basic reforms and a fundamental change in the attitude of the leadership of the LAPD.

Had the commission wished simply to reassure itself and the public that the written policies of the department were appropriate, it would not have required a staff of more than 50 lawyers and 60 accountants working more than 25,000 hours to interview hundreds of police officers, conduct public hearings throughout the city, hear testimony from dozens of experts and review more than a million pages of LAPD and other records. The goal of all this effort was, as stated in the commission’s report, “to determine whether and how the LAPD’s use of force policy and guidelines are followed in practice” and to recommend changes to address any deficiencies in that practice.

The problems identified by the commission were not in the stated policies of the LAPD regarding use of force, but in the enforcement and implementation of those policies. The commission also found that these systematic departures from formal policies were apparent from the LAPD’s own records. Thus, to respond to the commission’s report by saying--as the LAPD has done here--that “it’s already in the manual” is to miss the central thrust of the commission’s report.

Let me mention several specific examples to illustrate my concern that the leadership of the LAPD is appearing to resist meaningful reform. The commission found that a group of “problem officers” was easily identifiable in the LAPD’s own computer records. While the commission’s report discussed a specific sample of 44 officers, the report made clear that the “problem group” was by no means limited to this number. Indeed, during the commission’s investigation, the department indicated that as part of Chief (Daryl G.) Gates’ “10-Point Plan,” the department was conducting a study of a much larger number of officers with multiple excessive-force complaints.

In response to the commission’s report, however, the LAPD has stated that it is conducting an in-depth analysis of the sample of 44 officers discussed in the report. The department has not indicated what results, if any, have been obtained from the larger study of officers with multiple excessive-force complaints, or whether that effort has now been abandoned. If such a broader study is not being done, it should be.

Another body of evidence analyzed by the commission was the Mobile Digital Terminal (MDT) communications. The commission found “graphic confirmation of improper attitudes and practices” in the “brazen and extensive references to beatings and other excessive uses of force.” The commission also found a disturbingly large number of racially and sexually offensive messages.

The following month, a department representative was quoted as saying that the content of the MDT messages was “not as serious a problem as it first appeared” and that many comments identified by the commission were “not worthy of concern”. . . .

Statements that many of the shockingly offensive MDT messages were simply self-deprecating humor exchanged between minority officers or were otherwise deemed “not worthy of concern” are precisely the type of “mixed signals” that the commission warned against.

Police offer the manual as evidence of appropriate policies. But we’re seeing different realities on the street.