D.A. Cuts Staff for Environment, Workplace Cases

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office will accept no new cases involving environmental and worker safety violations or major fraud so that the agency can concentrate more of its dwindling staff on violent crimes, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Monday.

The move is the latest in a series of steps Garcetti has taken toward dismantling special units that were created to aggressively attack mostly white collar crime. Already he has transferred personnel out of his workers’ compensation and auto insurance divisions.

The new policy becomes effective today, Garcetti said.

“I want desperately to continue to prosecute these cases, but unless we have the ability to prosecute violent crime, we can’t,” he said.

A strict hiring freeze has created staff shortages that have depleted the number of prosecutors who devote their time to street crime, Garcetti said. His only alternative is to pull personnel from the special units, he said.

Representatives of several advocacy groups held a news conference Monday to warn that the public’s health and safety will suffer if the violators of environmental and worker safety laws are not aggressively prosecuted.

They credited the special units with deterring serious workplace safety violations and the illegal disposal of toxic substances, and predicted that violations will skyrocket. In Los Angeles County, they said, those violations disproportionately affect ethnic communities--especially poorer Latinos.

The environmental crimes and occupational safety and health unit has handled more than 400 cases since 1987, and produced more than $13 million in fines, penalties and restitution, according to Garcetti’s office.

The major fraud unit prosecutes white collar crimes that involve amounts over $100,000. The unit has 214 active cases involving 11,000 victims and fraud believed to total $675 million.

In addition, Garcetti said two other special units will stop taking new cases.

One litigates motions related to appeals by defense lawyers and the other prosecutes building permit violations for municipalities that do not have city attorneys.

Rick Rice, a spokesman for Cal/OSHA, the state job safety agency, said his department would be “very concerned” if Garcetti stopped taking cases from its investigators.

He and others interviewed Monday said there are a couple of alternatives to pursuing cases through the district attorney’s office. The state attorney general might be one avenue, but Rice wondered if the agency has the resources and expertise to prosecute complex criminal cases of that type. Another route would be to pursue misdemeanor charges through the offices of city attorneys.

The district attorney’s special units prosecute the cases as felonies.

The County Board of Supervisors last year imposed the strict hiring freeze on the district attorney in an attempt to force him to stay within his annual budget.

Garcetti acknowledges that he overspent his budget by about $3 million last year, and will probably overspend by as much or more this year if his $119.6-million budget is not significantly increased.

The district attorney said it is ironic that the units he is disbanding generate significant income for the county through fines, and some cost the county little or nothing because they are financed by state and federal grants and private money.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said he favors lifting the freeze and giving Garcetti the money that he seeks, but at least one member of the board said that will not happen.

“We can’t give Gil Garcetti the money he wants because the money doesn’t exist,” said Supervisor Deane Dana. “It’s his decision to how he makes his cuts. There is no magic pile of money we can go to.”

The other supervisors could not be reached for comment. Supervisor Gloria Molina in the past has accused Garcetti of using threats to get his way and has warned him such tactics will not work.

Earlier this month, the district attorney cut personnel in his workers’ compensation fraud unit by 25% and moved four of 18 prosecutors out of his auto insurance fraud unit as part the gradual dismantling of those teams.

In addition, he would not accept a $500,000 gift from a real estate group that wanted it used to fight real estate fraud, because, he said, he did not have the personnel to staff such a unit.

Garcetti said all of the special units he is trimming will be disbanded by July 1 if he does not get budget relief.

Other units that he has not yet targeted for cuts could also be disbanded by that date, he said. Those include the consumer protection division, a crime prevention program for young people and the special investigations division which involves prosecutors early in cases of shootings by police officers.