A Special Unit Could Prosecute Police : D.A.: Civil-rights attorneys, free of law-enforcement ties, are needed to prosecute abuse cases.

The report on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department by retired Judge James G. Kolts concluded that the district attorney’s office has been deficient in prosecuting abuses of authority by police officers. Unfortunately, the recent responses of Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and his election opponent, Assistant Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, fail even to adequately acknowledge the problem.

Instead of denying that the problem is serious, we should be seeking a solution, and one is readily available--establish a Civil Rights Unit in the office of the district attorney, staffed by attorneys experienced in civil-rights litigation against police officers. Such units exist in the federal and state Departments of Justice, as well as in cities like Philadelphia.

The U. S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has obtained convictions in 75% of its last 140 cases. And federal authorities file only after there has been a failure by state authorities to bring charges or gain a conviction.

The need for a civil-rights division is no reflection on the abilities of the deputy district attorneys who perform all of the other responsibilities of the office. Rather, it arises from the problems inherent to the prosecution of police officers for abuses of authority and to the special relationship that normally exists between prosecutors and police.

The record is clear. In Los Angeles County, there are few prosecutions of police, and pitifully few convictions even when there are prosecutions, despite an explosion of civil judgments in lawsuits against officers. The repeated failures of prosecutors to obtain convictions results in further reluctance to file in all but the strongest and most egregious cases--hence the deficiencies cited by the Kolts report.

Prosecutors cannot simply blame the racial composition of the jury panels for their failures. Nor is it accurate to simply blame the public, as suggested by Reiner, to explain the difficulties in obtaining convictions.

Civil judgments against police were also once viewed as almost impossible to obtain, but are now commonplace. Criminal convictions against police can also be obtained, but the key is having prosecutors with experience and training in the unique legal, factual, tactical and emotional issues presented in a prosecution of police officers. They must be free of the conflicting interests and loyalties that burden their colleagues when they try to prosecute the very officers with whom they work on a daily basis.

Once we have prosecutors with such experience, training and independent judgment and the litigation successes that would follow, we will also then have prosecutors who are better able to gauge what types of cases deserve filing and have reasonable prospects of success. These specialists have already built expertise in dealing with the attorneys who represent the officers. These defense attorneys know how to manipulate juror bias and fear by skillful exploitation of the “thin blue line” and other sympathy-producing police mythology. Attorneys who are experienced in such trial dynamics can neutralize such emotional pleas and are effective in cross-examining police officers and police experts, who by profession are highly experienced witnesses.

Without these specialized skills, the district attorney’s office will continue to lose prosecutions even when the evidence of guilt is overwhelming. The most striking recent examples include:

-- The Rodney King beating trial, in which prosecutors had not only the famous videotape but also half a dozen police eyewitnesses who testified for the prosecution;

-- The Dalton Street case, with its overwhelming physical and photographic evidence of random and outrageous violence against innocent people;

-- The Samoan brothers’ case, with its undisputed medical evidence that the officer fired 19 bullets into the bodies of two unarmed brothers--13 into their backs and six into their sides, many of them while they lay on the ground.

The next district attorney in Los Angeles County, regardless of who is elected, should establish a special civil-rights unit with newly hired, experienced civil-rights attorneys who will specialize in prosecution of police officers charged with unnecessary use of force.

Nothing less will succeed in remedying the deficiencies cited by both the Christopher Commission and the Kolts report.