Compromises Sought on Kolts Report : Reforms: Sheriff voices opposition to ongoing oversight of department by a civilian commission. Most supervisors back an individual monitor.

A majority of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors signaled Tuesday that it will support civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Department by an individual monitor--not the standing commission proposed by special counsel James G. Kolts and his investigators.

Board Chairman Ed Edelman said he will introduce a motion calling for a monitor to audit the Sheriff Department’s compliance with scores of reform recommendations made in Kolts’ report. Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Gloria Molina indicated they would support the measure.

Sheriff Sherman Block, however, opposes the idea of any ongoing monitoring program. At a hearing Tuesday, Block sparred politely with Kolts and Merrick Bobb, who acted as general counsel to the Kolts investigation. After listening to their views, Edelman suggested that the two sides meet again and put their areas of agreement and disagreement in writing, reporting back to the board before its Jan. 5 meeting.

Edelman said he plans to make his motion at that meeting. The other two board members, Deane Dana and Mike Antonovich, indicated Tuesday they do not support a monitor. But if an overseer must be appointed, Antonovich said he hopes the monitor will not be a lawyer but someone “whose business is not suing everybody.”

Although he resisted the idea of an ongoing monitor, the sheriff Tuesday said he would accept periodic monitoring. As an elected official, Block is answerable only to the voters, although the supervisors control his budget appropriations.

Seeking to show his amenability to reform, Block also told the supervisors that he is willing to see an ombudsman appointed to serve as a buffer or liaison between citizens and the department, if the supervisors appropriate $100,000 for this purpose.

He also proposed that the supervisors give him a $400,000 special appropriation to train all sheriff’s personnel in correct use-of-force policies.

The Kolts report found a “deeply disturbing” pattern of excessive use of force by sheriff’s deputies and said that department efforts to curb it were lax.

On Oct. 28, Block and his senior colleagues said they accepted the spirit of the report and many of its recommendations, but took exception to a number of others, including one for a civilian panel, perhaps of retired judges, to “monitor and audit” the department on a continuing basis.

As Block said that he would accept periodic monitoring, Kolts stated that he is willing to accept a single permanent monitor, rather than the commission proposed in his report.

Even while the matter appeared headed for the compromise suggested by Edelman, an outside group, the Coalition for Sheriff’s Accountability, issued its own report. The group, which is made up of minority groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded that an 11-member Community Complaint Commission be established by the supervisors.

Modeled after a San Diego commission, the new body would take over investigations of complaints of excessive force from the sheriff’s Internal Affairs Bureau and make recommendations to Block on imposition of discipline.

Gloria J. Romero, a Cal State Los Angeles professor speaking for the coalition, told the supervisors that it seems useless to name retired judges, “who are typically old, white and conservative,” to monitor a department whose main disputes over use of force are primarily with members of minority groups.

Even the Kolts report does not have enough teeth in it when it comes to reforming the Sheriff’s Department, Romero said. What is needed is a civilian review board broadly representative of the community, she contended.

Rebecca McMillan, speaking for the ACLU, said the proposed Edelman compromise “cannot be appropriately called civilian review.”

But Molina interjected that even under the coalition’s proposal, the review panel would be named by the supervisors, and she questioned whether the final results would be everything the coalition hoped.

In their remarks before the supervisors, Block and Kolts outlined other areas of disagreement.

Block said it would be too expensive to go along with a Kolts proposal to have the Internal Affairs Bureau take over all serious investigations of the use of force by deputies. Station captains now handle many such cases.

The sheriff said he is willing to have Internal Affairs look into cases involving hospitalization, which he said number about 300 a year. But he said he cannot afford an Internal Affairs unit large enough to investigate all use-of-force cases that require admission to emergency rooms, as suggested by Kolts. These number 1,200 a year, he said.

Internal Affairs investigates all officer-involved shootings.