Critics Say Kolts Report Is Flawed by Bias, Errors : Sheriff: Attacks come from district attorney’s office, deputies’ union and civil liberties advocates.

One week after retired Judge James G. Kolts issued his blistering report on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, critics at both ends of the political spectrum are launching a counterattack, charging that the report is biased and flawed by errors of fact.

High-level officials in the district attorney’s office brand the study “woefully inadequate.” The president of the union that represents 6,500 sheriff’s deputies takes issue with one of the report’s most basic elements: statistics, drawn from a department computer, on the number of officers fired each year. Civil liberties advocates, meanwhile, complain that Kolts’ recommendations for reform are weak.

The man who holds the key to reform, Sheriff Sherman Block, has offered no public criticism of the report--perhaps because it did not make him a target, perhaps because to do so would seem impolitic during a year when police reform is in vogue. But Block and his top aides have spent the past week analyzing the document, and the sheriff is scheduled to give his first detailed response to the report at a news conference Wednesday.

While Block prepares his reply, others are building a case against the study, searching for--and in some cases finding--holes in its methodology and cracks in its logic. The views of these critics, combined with Block’s response, may shape the battle over implementation of the reforms.

The Kolts study offers a troubling portrayal of a department that, it said, has tolerated a “deeply disturbing” pattern of excessive force and has failed to discipline rogue officers. But those conclusions are being undercut on several fronts:

* Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner has attacked the report as inaccurate, saying it omitted a significant piece of evidence in its discussion of a controversial shooting, leaving out the fact that the victim was pointing a gun at the officer who shot him. And while the Kolts report says that the district attorney sent a “soothing” letter explaining why it would not prosecute the officer, the letter in fact notes that the case “raises troubling questions” about the deputy’s behavior.

* Officials of the deputies’ union say they, too, have uncovered factual inaccuracies. They say that in the report’s account of last year’s controversial officer-involved shooting at the Ramona Gardens housing project, two crucial bits of information were left out: that the deputy’s partner had been knocked unconscious, and that the victim was about to strike the fallen deputy with the officer’s flashlight.

* Civil rights advocates complain that Block was not held responsible for the failings of his department. “The big letdown is that their recommendations don’t match the weight of their evidence,” said Gloria Romero, co-chair of the Coalition for Sheriff’s Accountability. “It’s like saying that the department has committed murder and we’re going to give you probation.”

* The report identifies 62 “problem deputies,” based on how many times each has been investigated for using excessive force. But some say a far better indicator would have been to compare the number of investigations to the number of arrests made by each deputy. A deputy who works in a high-crime area, they note, comes into contact with the public more often and is therefore more likely to be the subject of complaints than one who does not.

* Kolts’ staff has drawn criticism for failing to interview any of the “problem deputies” whose work histories were outlined in the report. “Kolts got information from lawsuits, which were money-driven events, and took the allegations as truth,” said Dick Shinee, attorney for the union that represents the deputies. “He had no independent verification of what took place as to the point of view of the deputy sheriff.”

The Kolts study, which patterned itself after the Christopher Commission report on the Los Angeles Police Department, has also drawn much praise for its thorough, exhaustive nature. And as the critics pick their way through its 359 pages of text and charts, Kolts and his staff are standing steadfastly by their work.

“I’m very comfortable with the report-- very comfortable with it--and I have been pleased in general at the way that it has been received,” said attorney Merrick J. Bobb, who served as chief counsel to Kolts. “I think we’re off to a great start.”

Bobb vehemently rejected suggestions from Reiner’s office and the union that important facts were omitted. In the Ramona Gardens incident and the officer-involved shooting reviewed by the district attorney, he said, there were different versions of what happened. He does acknowledge, however, that none of the so-called “problem deputies” were interviewed; he said legal constraints and the union contract prevented his staff from doing so.

Bobb says he is not surprised that there is criticism, particularly from the deputies’ association: “The rank-and-file officer is the defendant in the civil litigation, is the subject of the citizens’ complaint, is out there on the street,” he said. “And the union which represents the rank-and-file officers clearly sees that one of the effects of these recommendations is to make discipline swifter and perhaps more severe. . . . To the extent that they do not believe that is in their interests, they will be vigorous in trying to resist change.”

A centerpiece of the report is its examination of 124 civil lawsuits in which the county paid more than $18 million in awards and settlements. Within the Sheriff’s Department, critics say Kolts and his staff relied too heavily on the allegations in these lawsuits, without taking into account the aggressive posture of lawyers for the plaintiffs and the litigious nature of society in general.

“These attorneys are in the taxpayers’ shorts but good,” said one high-ranking sheriff’s official. “It is costing the taxpayers millions of dollars and we get smeared in the process.”

Moreover, officials at the district attorney’s office--which received harsh criticism in the Kolts report for prosecuting only one officer-involved shooting case during the past decade--say Kolts’ staff failed to recognize that it is far more difficult to gain a criminal conviction in an excessive force case than it is to win a civil jury award.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Dan Murphy, who reviews all decisions involving police officer prosecutions, also complained that Kolts’ staff never interviewed him, or anyone else in the district attorney’s office. Bobb, however, says six former and current deputy district attorneys were interviewed.

Still, Murphy complains bitterly: “If they had come to me and asked: ‘Why, with all these millions the county is paying out, (have) you folks only filed one case in the last 10 years,’ I could have explained it to them. . . . The only reason I can come up with (as to why) they didn’t want to come back is that they had their own point of view, they made up their mind and I don’t think they wanted to hear any explanation. . . . That worries me about the report as a whole.”

Union officials, meanwhile, point to a discrepancy in the report’s statistics on the number of deputies fired between 1989 and 1991. The Kolts study says 151 deputies were discharged in 1989; 160 in 1990 and 99 in 1991. But a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department says the figures are much lower: 25, 22 and 49 deputies discharged in 1989, 1990 and 1991, respectively.

Bobb could not explain the conflicting figures, although he said the study drew its numbers from the sheriff’s computer system. But Shawn Mathers, president of the Assn. for Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriffs, hammered away at the gap.

“You look at those sorts of numbers, and you see that type of discrepancy,” he said, “and I think it calls into question the entire report.”

What remains to be seen is how--or whether--the union and other potential opponents of reform will use such criticisms to attempt to block implementation of Kolts’ proposals.

It will be largely up to Block to decide whether to put the reforms in place. The sheriff, an elected official, has broad control over the management of his department, and does not report to any civilian overseers.

Should all of Kolts’ proposed reforms be implemented, they would drastically alter the way the Sheriff’s Department does business. Kolts and his staff called for unprecedented civilian participation in some key department functions, including the adjudication of citizen complaints.

In addition, the report proposed community-based policing programs at each sheriff’s station, and called for implementation of a computerized “early warning and tracking” system that would monitor deputies who use unnecessary force.

The debate over implementation may begin as early as Wednesday, when the sheriff issues his response to the report. So far, Block has not ruled out any of Kolts’ recommendations. But speculation in some quarters is that he will offer to implement only those reforms that are not costly, along with those that are under way in the wake of his examination of excessive force within the department.

That examination was begun two years ago after a series of articles published in The Times. Some say the Kolts report is “far behind the curve” and does not give the department enough credit for its efforts to change.

As one veteran captain, who declined to be named, said: “It’s tough to be painted as a bunch of buffoons when we really are working desperately to turn things around. . . . A lot of these recommendations are good, common-sense responsible kinds of things, and a lot of those are things we are already doing.”

Kolts recommends that the department develop an “early warning and tracking system” that will help predict which deputies are likely to use excessive force.

But the department is already traveling down that path; it purchased several million dollars worth of computers last year and is developing software that will track the use of excessive force. Still, the report noted that it will be at least another 1 1/2 years before the system is running.

Other recommendations are likely to provoke greater controversy, if only because they would cost money at a time when the county faces a budget crisis.

The report questions the wisdom of assigning probationary deputies to staff the county’s jail system; Kolts and his staff found that the so-called “custody assignment” often turns young deputies into hardened cynics who are “ready to harass, intimidate, bully and physically punish any person who does not immediately follow orders and conform.”

Kolts and his staff recommended that the initial custody assignment be limited to no more than two years, that officers be transferred frequently between jail facilities and that they spend at least 24 hours every six months doing paid community service work.

The study did not attach a price tag to that recommendation--or any others.

According to Mathers, just one of those reforms--requiring deputies to work outside the department in social service agencies--could cost the county as much as $10 million a year.

“These are champagne and caviar recommendations,” he said, “but we are only provided with a beer-and-peanuts budget. Where will the money come from to put that into place?”