Police Taping Again Subject of Investigation : Privacy: Supervisors in Laguna Beach say recording of personal conversations was inadvertent, but seven employees continue to press claims and grand jury seeks second inquest.

The Orange County district attorney’s office, which has already conducted one investigation into allegations that the personal conversations of Laguna Beach Police Department employees had been improperly tape-recorded, has been asked to re-investigate the issue, the police chief said Friday.

The investigation was requested by the Orange County Grand Jury on behalf of seven Police Department employees, who say their privacy and civil rights were violated when their personal conversations at work were taped without their knowledge.

The employees--three police officers, two dispatchers and two records clerks--have also filed a $10,000 claim against Laguna Beach, which the City Council is expected to reject Tuesday night.

The taping issue first surfaced in January, when workers learned that their idle conversations--including comments about their superiors--had been recorded and some began to fear that their words would be used against them.

Police officials have blamed the tapings on faulty telephone equipment, which has since been replaced. They say none of the employees whose conversations were taped were disciplined.

Police supervisors say the faulty equipment was in place for about seven months before being discovered and replaced. Calls to the Police Department are routinely recorded, but the equipment continued to record the conversations of the employees after the telephone calls had been terminated, police explained.

But Don Barney, president of the Laguna Beach Police Employees Assn., said Friday that their attorney has evidence “there has been an ongoing eavesdropping of private conversations of employees for years.” Barney, a retired Laguna Beach police sergeant, declined to elaborate.

Chief Neil J. Purcell Jr. said the employees’ determination to press the case has created tensions between the seven claimants and the three supervisors whose actions are being investigated--himself, Sgt. Danell Adams and Lt. Paul Workman.

“In a place this small, you can’t be having employees asking for a criminal investigation and a grand jury investigation and now a claim--which is a prelude to a lawsuit down the line--without creating unwanted and unwarranted tension and disruption within the department,” Purcell said.

“In my mind it appears the motivation behind it is to try to harass the supervisors and command staff involved,” the chief added.

Police officials maintain the problem began late last June when four new telephones were installed in the department, three near the front counter in the records office and one nearby in the dispatch center.

Because of what Purcell describes as “a glitch” in the system, when employees pressed the release button to end a conversation, a microphone in the handset continued recording office sounds.

Some department telephones--including the four in question--are wired to record telephone conversations to ensure that employees respond appropriately to the public, and to document conversations that could be used in court, Purcell said.

Lt. Workman said that two days before the firestorm that swept through this city in October, Sgt. Adams asked him to look into what appeared to be a problem with the telephones. But Workman said he was sidetracked by the fire.

In early January, Workman said he sent a memo to workers telling them to “please consider yourself recorded at all times.” Five days later, after the faulty telephones were identified, Workman said he wrote another memo saying, “as it turns out, you were being bugged.”

Both Workman and Purcell acknowledged in January that the situation should have handled differently, and Purcell said Workman was disciplined as a result of the incident.

Purcell, who said he has repeatedly apologized to the affected employees, said he felt the matter should have been put to rest.

But a letter dated April 25 to the city from James E. Trott, the claimants’ attorney, says “the acts giving rise to this claim have been ongoing for many years” and that Purcell, Adams and Workman knew about it, did nothing to stop it and “allowed or participated in its continuance.”

The letter says that, because their private conversations were listened to, the employees suffered “emotional and physical distress.” It also says the department has “undertaken a course of retaliation and began to discipline those who initially filed the complaint.”

Purcell called the charge that the department had been taping conversations for years “baloney.” He also said it was “absolutely ludicrous” to say supervisors would “eavesdrop” on the private conversations of department workers.

This will be the second time that the district attorney’s office has been asked to look into the taping. In February, six of the seven claimants filed a complaint asking that an outside agency investigate possible criminal or civil violations on the part of Purcell, Workman and Adams, Purcell said, adding that he forwarded the complaint to the district attorney’s office a few days later.

A letter from the district attorney’s office dated April 11 says that office found insufficient evidence of criminal conduct on the part of department personnel to file charges. It also says that “further investigation by this office is not warranted.”

Purcell and Barney said this second investigation was prompted by a request from the claimants’ attorney.

Barney said the police association did not believe the first investigation was sufficiently thorough, because the taped employees were not interviewed. “So if they didn’t interview the victims, where did they get the information from, the suspects?” he said.

Neither Trott nor officials from the district attorney’s office or the grand jury could be reached for comment Friday.

Mayor Ann Christoph, however, came to the department’s defense.

“It’s frustrating, because it was an unintentional, mechanical problem,” she said. “As far as I understand, the supervisors did everything they could to rectify the situation. I think it’s unfortunate that people continue to imply that this was an intentional thing, which it wasn’t.”