LAPD Should Rein In Discipline Hearings, Not Officers

Angelenos interested in putting more cops on our streets might consider the case of Police Officer Musa T. Camara.

Camara is a defense representative, a cop who defends other officers in disciplinary hearings conducted by the Board of Rights. He told me that he has defended more than 2,000 officers in these and other disciplinary proceedings, with most of the cases ending successfully.

Now the defense rep is forced to defend himself, facing department punishment on charges of failing to appear at a disciplinary hearing for an officer he was representing. On April 14, he was relieved of duty, without pay, until his Board of Rights hearing May 14.

What attracted my attention was not the issue of innocence or guilt, which will be decided by the board. I was interested in the extraordinary amount of time and money this shorthanded department has put into nailing someone for not showing up at work.

I also wondered why Camara was relieved of duty without pay--put on the sidelines--when the Los Angeles Police Department needs every available man and woman out on the streets.

Camara brought me his files last Wednesday. We met at a restaurant in Covina, where he lives. He’s a trim, athletic-looking black man with a slight accent that reflects his Asian-Indian heritage.

He has been a police officer since 1981. In those years, he has been disciplined seven times for such offenses as missing a shooting test. Because he was relentless in his own defense, other officers began asking him to represent them in their disciplinary hearings.

Camara also became a public critic of the LAPD discipline system. His outspokenness is contrary to the tradition of a department that dislikes critics from within its ranks. In August, 1991, Camara wrote an article for The Times’ Op-Ed page charging that “the disciplinary system has become the primary instrument for political and economic repression within the department. . . . Instead of being used as a means to promote efficiency, discipline was increasingly used to punish, intimidate and terrorize officers.”

His latest, and most serious, run-in with the department occurred last August when he was representing a cop accused of cocaine use. Camara requested a delay in the hearing, saying he needed more time to prepare. He was turned down. He told the board that he would not appear at the Aug. 17 hearing. When he failed to show up, the department brass launched an investigation and filed charges against him.

His excuse was that he had to take his 4-year-old daughter, Fatimah, to the doctor for the final treatment of a severe burn suffered earlier in the month when she stepped on a piece of charcoal in the park. Because he shares custody of his children with his estranged wife, he has sole responsibility for them several days a week.

While at the doctor’s office, he was treated for a chronic throat ailment that manifests itself in a hoarse voice. Meanwhile, the officer he was representing phoned in sick, so he too missed the hearing. Department investigators rejected Camara’s explanation, insisting that he was just trying to delay the case and using his child’s burn to cover up his tactics.

Camara handed me the file from his case, more than 100 pages of reports, transcripts, interviews and photographs.

Four LAPD investigators had worked on it. They had interviewed every police officer involved in the Board of Rights hearing. They had gathered 44 pieces of evidence, including the records of each of Fatimah’s nine visits to the West Covina Medical Clinic. There were three color pictures of Fatimah, including two close-ups of her injured foot.

Meanwhile, as L.A. was gearing up for the verdicts in the Rodney G. King federal civil rights trial, Camara was taken off duty and placed on disciplinary leave. He was home in Covina, he explained, miles from the feared violence and the department’s full mobilization, miles from where they needed more cops.

This isn’t the first time the department’s preoccupation with enforcing internal rules has attracted attention. The Christopher Commission criticized this when it investigated the LAPD after the beating of King.

Many patrol officers and representatives of the police union told the commission that “officers receive more severe punishment for breaking what they described as ‘administrative’ rules than for breaking rules regarding excessive force. Many . . . believe punishment is arbitrarily imposed and depends on the subject officer’s place in the department’s formal and informal hierarchy.”

That was written in July, 1991. Today, we’re in the middle of a mayoral campaign where Richard Riordan and Michael Woo are promising to boost the size of the LAPD to 10,000.

We need more cops. But as politicians search for them, they ought to look inside the LAPD and study cases like that of Musa T. Camara and the money and police officers’ time expended to put him on the sidelines.