Lawyer’s Group Urges Sheriff’s Department Shake-Up : Law enforcement: Panel investigating complaints of excessive force is told of need for civilian review.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department needs sweeping structural changes, including the establishment of civilian review boards, a police watchdog agency on Thursday told a panel investigating complaints of excessive force by deputies.

Nothing less than massive reforms will solve widespread abuse problems plaguing the department, Karol Heppe, executive director of Police Watch, an association of lawyers who handle police misconduct cases, told the group at an evening meeting in Cerritos.

The Board of Supervisors hired retired Superior Court Judge James Kolts as a special counsel to head the panel looking into alleged abuse by deputies. County officials appointed the panel to reduce the rising number of excessive force complaints.

The settlement of excessive-force lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Department has cost taxpayers more than $32 million over the last four years.

Public attention was focused on the department’s use of force in August after four questionable fatal shootings. After an investigation, the county grand jury did not indict the deputies involved.

Discipline within the department is negligible, Heppe said at the first of three scheduled public hearings Thursday. “The most powerful sanction against deputies accused of excessive force is criminal prosecution. But in Los Angeles County, this rarely happens.”

For example, Heppe said, between 1986 and 1990, the Sheriff’s Department referred 26 excessive force cases to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s office for review, but only five were prosecuted.

Heppe said complaints coming before the civilian review boards across the county should be examined by independent prosecutors “whose sole purpose is to press charges against abusive sheriff’s deputies.”

Kolts was hired after a panel appointed by Sheriff Sherman Block was criticized for lacking independence. Supervisors had been denied an opportunity to make appointments to Block’s panel. Last year, Kolts helped investigate allegations of brutality in the Los Angeles Police Department.

At Thursday’s hearing, leaders of several women’s groups testified that women are radically underrepresented in the Sheriff’s Department.

Jenifer McKenna, managing director of the California Women’s Law Center, said that the “underrepresentation of women of all races” has led to excessive use of force and pervasive sex discrimination in the department.

Though the eligible work force in the city of Los Angeles is 50% women, fewer than 13% of sheriff’s deputies are women, she said.

“It is our fervent belief that there is a direct, causal relationship between this underrepresentation of women in the department and both the documented excessive use of force by members of the department and its history of grossly inadequate response to crimes of violence against women in the community,” McKenna said.

She cited studies in New York City showing that on male-female patrol teams, men fired more than 75% of all the shots.

About 75 people attended the hearing in an auditorium in a Cerritos park. Speakers included officials from the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, the Feminist Majority and several neighborhood groups.

Roger Coggan, director of legal services for the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, suggested that the panel institute several changes, including the recruitment, hiring and promotion of openly gay men and lesbians.

The next hearing is scheduled for 7 p.m. March 5 at Jesse Owens Park in southwest Los Angeles.