62 ‘Problem Officers’ Found in Department

He became a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy after being rejected by two other police agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department.

Over the last six years, he was the subject of 27 departmental investigations for allegedly harassing people or using excessive force against them.

He was suspended after a fistfight with another deputy and reprimanded for a verbal altercation with a state police officer and for allegedly threatening to unleash his police dog on a civilian employee of the Sheriff’s Department.

At one point, the county counsel recommended that the deputy undergo a psychological examination “to determine if he may be safely retained in an active law enforcement capacity.”

That warning, however, never appeared in the deputy’s personnel file. Instead, his formal evaluation described the deputy as “very good” at getting along with people, and he remained on the job.

The saga of the unnamed deputy was outlined by the Kolts investigation Monday in a report that concluded that 62 “problem officers” have managed to survive, or even prosper, in the Sheriff’s Department.

The deputies--all men and most over 30--have been the subjects of more allegations of excessive force and harassment over the last six years than any other members of the 8,000-officer department.

In all, the officers were the targets of nearly 500 separate internal affairs investigations from January, 1986, to April, 1992, the Kolts report said. But the outcome of those investigations was not detailed in the report.

Seventeen of the “problem deputies” were defendants in 22 lawsuits that cost the county nearly $3.2 million in jury awards or settlements.

Attorney Richard Shinee of the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs questioned the Kolts panel’s methodology of relying on excessive-force investigations to determine “problem officers.”

“What the Kolts report does is take allegations and then say that the mere allegation is equivalent to being deemed guilty of the use of force,” Shinee said.

The commission concluded that the department “has failed to deal with officers who have readily identifiable patterns of excessive force.”

“Despite a history of questionable misconduct, nearly all of these (62) officers continue to patrol the streets of Los Angeles County,” the panel said. “Worse, many act as field training officers imparting their ‘street wisdom’ to patrol deputies.”

Some deputies also were given coveted assignments such as a spot on the Gang Enforcement Team, where there is little or no supervision of deputies, said the panel.

Staff representatives who rode along with Gang Enforcement Team members said they observed deputies “rousting . . . asserted gang members with thin cause” and engaging in questionable pat-downs and searches of their vehicles, as well as “petty and not so petty harassment.”

The term “problem officers” is the same one used by the Christopher Commission in singling out 44 officers in its critical report on the Los Angeles Police Department last year. But the Kolts panel cautioned that no inference should be drawn that the Sheriff’s Department has “a greater problem with excessive force or more ‘bad guys’ than does the LAPD.”

The panel said that, although the Sheriff’s Department had fired four officers for questionable shootings within the last year, the discipline of deputies involved in excessive force remains inadequate.

In addition to the deputy involved in 27 investigations, another “problem officer” was the subject of 25 investigations over the last six years, the panel said. A third officer, described as Deputy B, was the subject of 17 investigations, including three involving shootings.

The allegations against Deputy B were twice referred to the district attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecutions. He was fired for writing a false report, but reinstated, the report said.

Deputy B was accused of beating a motorcyclist with a flashlight after a pursuit--a charge corroborated by independent witnesses, the panel said, but the department concluded that the allegation was unsubstantiated.

The same deputy was accused of using his flashlight to hit a suspect in his patrol car. The department referred the matter to the district attorney. “Prosecution . . . was initiated, but was later dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct,” the Kolts report said.

Shinee, of the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, said he was familiar with the allegations against the deputy, whom he would not name.

“What the report fails to mention is that the deputy cited in this case had the highest felony misdemeanor arrest record at his station,” Shinee said. “It’s clear that he came into contact with more people and made more arrests than anyone else.”

Others who have read the Kolts report said the reference to 62 “problem officers” is a conservative figure.

“I think we are talking about the tip of the iceberg,” said Kevin Reed, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“What we found in investigating our lawsuits is that the same names keep coming up again and again.”

In describing the background of another “problem officer,” the Kolts panel said the deputy has been the subject of seven excessive-force and harassment investigations, including two shootings in 1990.

According to the report, the first investigation centered on the unnamed officer’s role in the beating and fatal shooting of a robbery and kidnaping suspect. The suspect allegedly had driven his car directly at the officer, who opened fire. A high-speed chase followed, and when the suspect stopped his car, he reportedly became combative.

The deputy said he pulled the suspect out of the car and struck him several times on the head with a flashlight. A coroner’s report, however, revealed that the suspect’s skull had been smashed after he was fatally shot, the commission said.

That same year, the same deputy shot and wounded an unarmed suspect following another car chase. Although the officer claimed the driver was armed, no gun was found.

The deputy was relieved of duty last January, the commission said, “apparently not because of any of the . . . force incidents, but because of becoming argumentative when he was pulled over by LASD deputies for suspected drunk driving while off duty.”