Silence Code Doesn’t Exist

In response to “Police Hide Behind Code of Silence, Lawyer Says” (Times Valley Edition, Dec. 11), there is a perception by some critics that all police officers participate in a kind of shared secrecy.

In reality, the “code of silence” is more a convenient creation inspired and exploited by segments of the legal and media professions, seemingly for profit and headlines. The covert theory of surreptitious conduct is further fueled by coverage of the Rodney King incident and subsequent trials, the Kolts and Christopher reports and the dramatic increase in police civil litigation cases.

The accusation is that police officers lie to protect their illegal activities as well as those of their fellow officers. Unfortunately, this is an easy premise for the public to accept about a closed organization whose members talk in codes, use numbers and symbols to communicate with one another and vigorously shelter crime-related information.

This has always been intriguing, if not threatening, to a public that does not readily understand the law enforcement culture.

In actuality, the use of abbreviated language and the protection of initial crime scene facts is often necessary to expedite communication and preserve the integrity of our investigations. Traditionally, these methods paid off for us in high arrest statistics and successful prosecutions. Currently, however, we in law enforcement are faced with a backlash from the very crime-fighting tactics that served us so well in the past.

I can state emphatically that there is no purposeful, conspiratorial, unofficial or otherwise sanctioned, code of silence either taught or tolerated in today’s progressive police organizations.

There are, however, peace officers who lie and act improperly under the color of authority. For them, justice should be swift and harsh.

But to paint all officers with that same brush of illegality is to buy into a scenario created and promoted by some who seek profit at the expense of the dedicated majority of law enforcement men and women.

We recruit our personnel from the human race, and they come with all the human frailties. As such, our profession, like most others, has those who capitulate to temptation and corruption and who violate their oath of office. Unfortunately, there will never be a guarantee that all who enter this profession will meet the high standards the public should expect.

In these times of urban strife and sparse resources, the exploitative actions by a few, on both sides of the fence, should not serve as the standard for the majority, nor should they serve to obstruct the all-important process of bonding between community and government. Hopefully, with more attention on the good actions of devoted and highly skilled public servants, citizens will more readily be able to distinguish between the myths that are so often used to define us and the reality of our integrity, as evidenced by the sacrifices that we, your police officers, make every day on the streets of Los Angeles.

CLARENCE ROBERT CHAPMAN

Woodland Hills

Chapman is a captain in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department .