Panel Urges Firing of Officer Over Slaying

An LAPD Board of Rights panel Wednesday recommended that Officer Douglas J. Iversen be fired for violating department policy in the controversial 1992 shooting death of an unarmed tow truck driver.

The three-member panel unanimously agreed that the veteran motorcycle officer’s “bad judgment call” was the latest in a series of “poor decision-making and bad judgment calls,” said Capt. Valentino P. Paniccia, who headed the panel of three police captains.

“The termination was the result of an accumulated pattern of past conduct,” Paniccia said. “The board believed his continued employment would expose the city and the Police Department to an unacceptable level of civil liability.”

Chief Willie L. Williams will have five days after receiving the recommendation to decide whether to terminate Iversen from the police force. Following the shooting, which took place shortly after the chief was installed in mid-1992, Williams strongly questioned Iversen’s decision to draw his gun and fire at John L. Daniels.

Williams has the option of accepting the board’s recommendation or imposing less severe punishment on Iversen, 45, who shot the tow truck driver after he refused to obey a request for information and began driving off from a Southwest Los Angeles gas station.

The case drew intense community interest because of the nature of the shooting and because of the racial overtones of a black tow truck driver being killed by a white officer in the wake of the 1992 riots.

Iversen--the first officer in Los Angeles County in a decade to be charged with committing a murder while on duty--was tried twice on criminal charges. Both times, mistrials were declared after jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked.

The Board of Rights hearing, which began before the district attorney’s office filed its charges against Iversen in 1993, reconvened last week after a Superior Court judge rejected a request from prosecutors to try the officer a third time.

Iversen, suspended without pay after the shooting, was similarly disciplined three times previously in his LAPD career, authorities said.

In one incident, he was found to possess a hand-held department walkie-talkie that he had reported missing six months earlier. Iversen was suspended for accessing the police crime computer for personal reasons while serving the theft suspension and for not properly registering property given to him.

The board’s decision was praised by civil rights leader Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.

“I’m hopeful he will no longer be on the force . . . and won’t be stalking Los Angeles streets with a gun and a badge anymore,” Hicks said.

However, Hicks said he was upset at the lack of a criminal court verdict.

“If you and I shoot someone, we don’t just lose our job,” he said. “I remain troubled by the court’s inability to apparently reach some conclusions this Board of Rights was able to reach fairly reasonably.”