Sheriff’s Probe Transformed Kolts’ Views

There is little about James Greely Kolts to suggest that he is the raging liberal reformer some people would make him out to be.

The 67-year-old grandfather and retired judge plays golf and is a registered Republican. He wears corduroy jackets, button-down shirts and is a fervent supporter of the death penalty. In 1969, Ronald Reagan appointed him to his first judgeship.

Yet Kolts last week handed down a scathing report on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a 359-page indictment of brutality and misconduct among deputies. Its proposed reforms, if adopted, would substantially change the way the agency operates.

For those who know Kolts, the contrast between the man and his report could not have been more dramatic.

“He’s a conservative Republican, a real law-and-order guy, the type who believes a man in uniform would never lie and beat you up,” said Harland Braun, a former prosecutor who brought cases before Kolts in the criminal courts. “For him to come up with this, it must have been very persuasive evidence.”

The Board of Supervisors appointed Kolts to review the department in December, after a series of controversial shootings by deputies and reports that payouts in excessive-force lawsuits had cost the county more than $32 million since 1988.

Following the example of the Christopher Commission report on the Los Angeles Police Department, Kolts and his staff--four of them paid, about 30 volunteers--examined nearly every aspect of the department--from academy training to the meting out of discipline.

Clearly, something happened to Kolts as he waded through endless stacks of court files and investigative reports, detailing hundreds of cases of alleged misconduct by sheriff’s deputies. Kolts described his reaction as one of horror as he delved into the cases of people who said they had been abused by deputies.

“I was appalled at these things,” he said during an interview just a few days after releasing the report. “And we weren’t hearing these things from people out on the street. We were seeing this in the county counsel’s files (of paid settlements in brutality lawsuits). It was shocking.”

Kolts discovered cases where deputies wielded flashlights and batons to beat and nearly kill inmates. In another incident, a deputy smashed a suspect’s skull after shooting him to death. And Kolts found that innocent bystanders injured by deputies included a 73-year-old woman who was dying of brain cancer.

Kolts did not hesitate to include the gruesome details in his report. He concluded with a sharp criticism of the lack of public oversight of the 8,000-member department and called for greater civilian participation in disciplining deputies and other matters.

“My staff and I found deeply disturbing evidence of excessive force and lax discipline,” Kolts wrote. “The LASD has not been able to solve its own problems . . . and has not reformed itself with adequate thoroughness and speed.”

Kolts also tried to be diplomatic, praising Sheriff Sherman Block for his “openness” and for some recent moves toward reform. Still, the report was not well received by Sheriff’s Department supporters and others in the criminal justice system.

The retired judge was almost immediately lambasted by conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich, rank-and-file deputies and Dist. Atty Ira Reiner, who was criticized in the report. They attacked Kolts’ findings as inaccurate and an unjust assault on law enforcement.

Antonovich called the report “a back-door attempt by liberals to undermine law enforcement. . . . Liberals for years have been attempting to handcuff law enforcement, expanding the rights of criminals to the detriment of victims.”

Longtime friends of Kolts find such comments amusing. The retired judge, they say, is anything but a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“As far as his ideology, he is a lifetime Republican,” said retired state Supreme Court Justice John A. Arguelles, who has known Kolts for about 30 years. “He was appointed (to the Superior Court bench) by one of the most conservative governors we ever had--Ronald Reagan. You can hardly append to him the tag of liberal or civil libertarian.”

Jack Goertzen, who was also appointed to the Superior Court bench by Reagan in 1969, remembered that Kolts was not the sort of judge to go easy on criminals.

“He was probably a little bit on the tougher side of sentencing,” Goertzen said. “If he had a guy who had committed a crime and a jury found him guilty . . . you could rest assured he’d go to prison. He wasn’t going to get probation.”

Arguelles, a conservative who served on the Christopher Commission, believes that Kolts’ experiences while conducting the Sheriff’s Department investigation were similar to his own. Like Kolts, Arguelles signed his name to a report that was unflinching in its criticism of a major law enforcement agency.

Eventually, even the most deeply held beliefs can change when confronted with overwhelming evidence, Arguelles said.

“I know that fundamentally I’m a very conservative person and very supportive of law enforcement,” Arguelles said. “I feel that Jim is that way too. You start out (in the investigation) with the premise that you’re going to look very carefully at every claim with the thought that, generally speaking, the officers conducted themselves properly.

“However, you begin to realize after a study of many, many reports (of abuse) that this kind of utopia does not exist,” Arguelles said. “That’s not always the way it works out there in the real world on the streets.”

Kolts experienced a similar feeling of transformation during the course of his investigation. “As a judge, I was used to dealing with police agencies, police officers and police reports,” he said. “It wasn’t until we got into the case files to see what was going on that my attitudes broadened.”

He added: “I would have to say that perhaps I’m a little less accepting of some of the things I’ve seen in police reports.”

That Kolts was able to set aside his deeply held beliefs and give his name to the highly critical report says much about his sense of fairness and honesty, friends say.

And besides, Kolts said, “you can be a Republican and still be objective.” He added, jokingly: “It may seem unlikely, but it’s possible.”

Above all, Kolts applies a sense of humor to work. When a visitor pointed out that he lives in Altadena, which also was home to Rodney G. King at the time of the infamous beating, Kolts quipped: “We’re both victims of law enforcement!”

His easygoing demeanor befits a man who, before last week, had not been in the limelight much. Foreshadowing his involvement in the sheriff’s investigation, one of the few high-profile cases he presided over during his 20 years on the bench was the trial of a sheriff’s deputy charged with murder in the shooting of a suspect. A jury found the deputy guilty after it was determined that he planted a gun at the crime scene.

Kolts moved to civil court, from which he retired in 1989. He took some work as a “rent-a-judge” but devoted most of his time to golf, gardening and his two grandchildren, he said. When an aide to Supervisor Ed Edelman called his home last December to offer him a job investigating the Sheriff’s Department, he thought it was a joke.

Kolts said he took the job because it afforded him the chance to use his judicial skills to leave a mark on history. He also saw himself as uniquely qualified for such a tough, politically sensitive assignment.

“My personal career as far as wanting to go someplace or accomplish something was over,” Kolts said. “This was so liberating to me, the idea that I could draw any conclusions I wanted to or make any recommendations I wanted to without any fear of reprisal.”

He added: “I could direct this toward having a real effect in the community, an impact for maybe 10 or 20 years or longer. The opportunity was there.”

The first thing he did was to pick up a copy of the Christopher Commission report and read it while flying to visit his grandchildren in Niceville, Fla. When he returned to Los Angeles, he called around and looked for the best attorneys he could find for his staff.

After that, he delegated responsibility to his staff, which grew to 54 people. As the weeks passed, his Spartan offices in the downtown Hall of Administration began to fill with dozens of boxes of court files and internal sheriff’s investigations, the records of about 400 cases of alleged brutality.

Kolts said he was surprised by much of what his staff discovered. The sheer volume of cases was unexpected, as was the systemic neglect by authorities at all levels of the county justice system. Sheriff’s officials and the district attorney’s office often let cases go by unexamined, despite strong evidence of misconduct, Kolts’ investigators found.

Kolts remembered the day he came upon a large settlement awarded in federal court to a truck driver who claimed to have been victimized by deputies. He asked his staff to check out the case.

“I asked our people: ‘How about this case? What happened?’ ” Kolts said. “They found nothing. There was no record. It never went to Internal Affairs, it was never even referred. We checked with the D.A. Nothing there either.

“These were the kind of surprises we had,” he said.

By his own admission, Kolts also was something of a moderating influence in the investigation. And as his staff completed its work, Kolts used his authority as the sole author of the report to delete passages.

“I read over everything they wrote and if I didn’t like it, it came out,” he said. “We went through numerous drafts, revising some of the recommendations I didn’t agree with.”

Kolts would not say what he ordered deleted. But he did say he was concerned that the report appear fair and balanced. “It gives us credibility,” he said. “You can’t identify the report as coming from either direction.”

Now that the report is complete, Kolts says he will not become a crusader for law enforcement reform. Unlike Warren Christopher, head of the commission that investigated the Los Angeles Police Department after the King beating, Kolts says he will not campaign to ensure that his proposed reforms are adopted.

“I was retained to assemble a staff, conduct a study and make those recommendations,” he said. “We did it. We did a good job. What’s done with it after that doesn’t detract from our work at all.”