Women Mistreated in LAPD, Official Testifies

After nine months of representing two female officers in a harassment case, Sgt. Joseph Peyton spoke grimly Tuesday night of the Los Angeles Police Department’s treatment of women.

In testimony before a City Council committee, Peyton described command officers who hold archaic views of women, biased Internal Affairs investigations and female officers ostracized for complaining.

“By any measure, the working conditions which presently exist for women on the Los Angeles Police Department are unacceptable and the behavior of some of our officers is disgraceful,” said Peyton, a 16-year veteran of the department currently assigned as a career counselor. “The city and department are on a collision course with notions of fairness, due process and respect for our fellow employees.”

Attitudes toward women have improved at upper management levels, Peyton said, but “the abuse continues and is at the very core of certain people’s beliefs in the organization.

“There are command staff members that must also be held accountable for their lack of leadership and tremendous resolve to ignore and tolerate the injustice against women” said Peyton, who testified that he was prompted to come forward because of his recent experiences representing the two female officers.

“This particular case alone will reveal some of the most extraordinary abuse of power ever documented in the history of the LAPD,” Peyton said. “There was an attempt to cover up the truth and destroy the reputations of my officers and a clerk typist who recently returned after nine months of stress leave.”

Peyton made his comments at the second of two hearings called by the City Council Personnel Committee to examine issues of sexual harassment within the LAPD.

Also testifying were two female officers, one of whom complained bitterly of the unwillingness of a department official to help when she sought aid in dealing with a biased supervisor. The other woman told the committee that she had been raped by another officer and then subjected to humiliating treatment when she reported the incident.

“From the minute I reported the crime, I faced unfathomable treatment by the department and its investigators,” said the woman, whose alleged assailant was found not guilty by a department Board of Rights and remains on duty.

Fighting back tears, the female officer said department investigators probed her private life and sexual history in a way that never would have been permitted in a criminally prosecuted rape case.

“I felt completely discarded by the department,” said the woman, who has filed a lawsuit against the LAPD. “I feel my career has ended at the age of 27.”

“Please listen,” she told council members. “I hope that you don’t sell your women short.”

(The Times is not identifying the woman because of the newspaper’s policy of not naming the alleged victims of sexual assault.)

Officer Susan Willis said that after she refused to falsify a document for a supervisor, he constantly found fault with her work and favored the men in her office. When she went to the department women’s coordinator--whose job it is to assist female employees--the coordinator did nothing, Willis testified.