Panel Will Hear Complaints About Sheriff’s Deputies

A five-member Law Enforcement Review Board will convene in Lynwood next month to hear residents’ complaints about Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies who patrol the city.

The Lynwood City Council voted 4-1 Tuesday in favor of the new panel, with Councilman Armando Rea casting the dissenting vote.

The creation of a review board was discussed by the Lynwood City Council more than a year ago, but Councilman Paul H. Richards II called for an emergency ordinance Tuesday night to put the panel together, declaring that it is sorely needed in the wake of recent riots in Los Angeles.

Richards said that in the last year “there have been a number of harassment calls and other complaints” against the Sheriff’s Department and that Lynwood residents have no place to vent their concerns and anger. He also said residents have no guarantee that complaints filed with the department will be resolved.

“The people are concerned that these complaints just go into a black box, never to be heard of again,” Richards said before the meeting. “We need to be able to follow through.”

Rea, a sheriff’s deputy on leave of absence from the Lakewood Sheriff’s station, strongly opposed forming the panel. Instead, he proposed a Public Safety Commission to oversee not just law enforcement, but the Fire Department, Health Department and animal control in Lynwood.

“(Richards) just has one agenda,” Rea said before the meeting. “And that is to attack the Sheriff’s Department.”

Richards called Rea’s opposition to the board a conflict of interest, and accused him of creating divisiveness in the community.

The review board of five Lynwood residents will meet once a month to hear commendations to and complaints about the department, Richards said. The panel will then prepare summaries and pass them along to the City Council and the city manager so the city can keep track of the number of complaints filed.

Richards said the Sheriff’s Department has not cooperated with him when he has inquired into specific complaints and said he hopes that the panel can help the city keep tabs on department misconduct. But police officials say they are not legally able to provide detailed information to the council on investigations because they are part of an officer’s personnel file.

But Richards said he wants to see more communication between the council and the Sheriff’s Department.

“We never know what is going on over there, and we have no say. They are not beholden to us, and they let us know that often,” he said.

Officers at the sheriff’s station say they are unsure why the council would think a Law Enforcement Review Board is needed, since a mechanism for lodging complaints--either written or by telephone--is already in place.

Once a complaint is made, the Sheriff’s Department Internal Affairs Division is responsible for an investigation, if one is needed, Lynwood Sheriff’s Lt. Chuck Jackson said.

In 1991, the Lynwood station received 250 to 300 complaints, Jackson said, and Internal Affairs conducted 12 investigations. He said “one or two” of those investigations dealt with excessive force, and said the remainder were “officer demeanor complaints, such as rudeness or disrespect for a citizen.”

Jackson said the complaints not investigated generally involve slow response time to a call or a dispute about a traffic ticket.

“You have to look at the nature of complaints we get,” said Jackson. “Most of them can be resolved by a watch commander at the time they are made. An explanation can go a long way in resolving problems between residents and the deputies.”

He said that after an investigation is conducted, the complainant receives a notice in the mail that the matter has been resolved. However, Jackson said it is against department policy to disclose the findings of the investigation or to release what discipline, if any, was meted out to the offending officer.

Jackson sees some danger in a review panel where the police are not able to respond to criticisms hurled at them in an open meeting.

“When you have a public forum like this, anyone can get up and say whatever they want,” he said. “There can be some image damage to the Police Department, because we will not get involved with a public debate, so we can’t defend ourselves.”

In 1991, a federal judge presiding over civil rights lawsuits filed by more than 70 Lynwood residents concluded that many sheriff’s deputies at the Lynwood station routinely violated civil rights, are motivated by “racial hostility” and use “terrorist-type tactics” with the knowledge of their superiors.

The judge described the group, known as the Vikings, as a “neo-Nazi, white-supremacist gang” of deputies. The department denied the allegation, calling the Vikings a social group.

Last year, the Vikings became embroiled in another controversy when the Pasadena City Council requested that no members of the Lynwood station help to patrol the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day.

Several residents spoke in favor of the review panel at Tuesday night’s meeting. The Rev. Charles Floyd of Lynwood’s Second Mount Moriah Baptist Church said that the community is not anti-law enforcement but that the residents want an agency they can respect and trust.

“The record is clear about the character of this Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “They think that all blacks are out to rob and steal and kill, and that we need to be lorded over. It’s just not true.”

Jackson bristled at the notion that the Lynwood Sheriff’s Department is racist.

“To say that is just reverse discrimination, and I find it very demeaning to the entire department,” he said.