THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : The Reality Behind Assault on Fung

Now that criminalist Dennis Fung’s televised torture has ended, it’s a good moment to take a look at the institution that produced him, the Los Angeles Police Department’s crime lab.

After taking a fearsome beating from the defense and us journalists, Fung managed to pick himself up off the floor and finish his time on the witness stand with some semblance of dignity.

Looking tired but under control, he expressed himself more clearly as he sought to clarify answers he gave during a ferocious cross examination last week by O.J. Simpson defense attorney Barry Scheck. In the language of boxing, Scheck on Tuesday looked like a fighter who had punched himself into exhaustion without putting his opponent away.

The assault on Fung has fascinated the media. But the real story involves the crime lab’s long struggle against mistakes and money shortages that have troubled the entire LAPD. I’m talking about broken down patrol cars, an unbelievable computer shortage and record-keeping methods straight out of the 1950s.

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When court recessed late Monday afternoon, I discussed the lab with Deputy Police Chief Frank Piersol, in charge of LAPD administrative services, and Bill Russell, who heads the LAPD’s Support Services Bureau.

Russell was brought over from the city Personnel Department two years ago by Chief Willie L. Williams, Piersol and other top brass. They wanted Russell to put his civilian administrative ability to work in an area that needed help. One of the sections most in need was the Scientific Investigative Division, which includes the crime lab.

In 1989, a faulty ballistics test by the department’s top firearms expert resulted in the mistaken arrest of a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy, Rickey Ross, on a murder charge. It was the third such big-case mistake for the department in five years. “The reputation of the LAPD lab has always suffered” because of such incidents, forensic science expert Robert Jolling told Times reporters Bob Baker and Paul Lieberman at the time.

Despite the department’s efforts, troubles persist, as was seen during Fung’s testimony last week. He told about a failing refrigerator in the crime van where he stored blood from the murder scene. “It stops working after several hours,” Fung said. “It doesn’t keep working . . . the battery just doesn’t work after a long period of time.”

Russell wasn’t surprised. Like the rest of the LAPD, he said, the lab has been deprived of funds for new equipment by a city government faced with increasingly severe revenue losses since the passage of the Proposition 13 tax limit in 1978.

For example, the Scientific Investigative Division perennially puts in for a $4 million to $5 million appropriation to put all the lab’s records on computer. Even today, much of the record keeping is still done by hand. Every year, the request for computers is denied somewhere along the line.

Piersol said the lab’s problems are symptomatic of what has been happening to the entire Police Department.

From 1990 to 1994, the city purchased no new patrol cars, he said. While big corporations and tiny insurance offices moved into the computer world, the LAPD remained firmly anchored in paper. Police stations are old and crowded.

Admittedly some progress has been made but it is slow, and it came only after the situation became intolerable.

In 1992, voters approved a bond measure to fix the city’s 911 system so somebody would answer the phone. Only after breakdowns became commonplace did the city begin buying new police cars. A third of the 1,000-car patrol fleet is new, and 400 more cars are arriving this year, Piersol said.

The highly publicized mistakes prompted a reorganization of the forensic section, with the troubled ballistics operation split off from the bomb squad and given five outside experts to help with analysis and training.

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These changes reflect how public concern over crime has slowly forced a shift in City Hall priorities from social services to law enforcement.

The change in thinking helped elect Mayor Richard Riordan in 1993 and in making a majority on the City Council receptive to shifting more city funds to the LAPD, including putting more cops on the street.

With the city budget short, Riordan formed the Mayor’s Alliance to raise $15 million in cash, services and equipment from business and other private sources for new computers for the LAPD’s stations, the traffic bureaus and Parker Center headquarters. The Alliance’s Kimberly King, corporate counsel at Kaufman & Broad, said $12 million has been donated and arrangements are being made with the USC engineering school to teach the cops how to use the new system.

This is fine. But it happened only after city government and the taxpayers permitted the LAPD to sink into technological disrepair.

As the trial continues, we’ll learn more about the LAPD’s forensic skill. Department science, as well as Simpson, is on trial in the Criminal Courts Building. The verdict on the LAPD could hurt the department. Or it could help by showing the public how far the LAPD must travel before it can compete in the computer age.