Understaffing Hampers LAPD Investigators, Memo Says

A top prosecutor says Los Angeles Police Department investigators working the high-crime Downtown divisions are too understaffed to do much real detective work.

“If someone comes to my house and breaks in, and the neighbor gets the license number of the car they drove away in, the detective doesn’t even have time to follow that up,” said Donald N. Eastman, head deputy of the district attorney’s complaint division and author of a candid memo now circulating through the LAPD.

Eastman, whose unit handles felony cases for nine LAPD divisions, laid out his view of the troubled state of felony investigations in the memo, which he wrote in July at the request of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

Eastman’s memo, which relies more on anecdotal than statistical evidence, also decries the low morale that has plagued officers for the last few years and says it affects the type of felony cases that are brought to his attorneys.

Eastman wrote: “LAPD patrol officers are not going into the ‘line of fire.’ We have been told so in person by police officers we chat with and we can see the phenomenon in the felonies that are submitted to us.”

Officers’ morale has been low in the wake of the 1991 Rodney G. King beating case, but Eastman said Saturday that the detectives’ problems are due more to inadequate staffing.

“This is not to knock their morale, their energy or anything,” Eastman said in an interview Saturday. “They don’t have time to do the fundamental things we need them to do to do the job right.”