Lawsuits Seek Ban on Firearms for Off-Duty Police Officers : Law enforcement: Civil rights attorney contends that carrying the weapons poses danger to public. Union lawyer calls the action ‘grandstanding.’

A Los Angeles civil rights attorney filed lawsuits Thursday challenging the carrying of weapons by off-duty police officers and sheriff’s deputies as a menace to innocent people and asking state courts to order Sheriff Sherman Block to forbid that practice in his department.

The package of lawsuits filed by Carol A. Watson, a longtime litigant seeking reform of police practices, indicates that an acceptable alternative would be a ruling prohibiting off-duty officers from carrying or using the weapons while intoxicated or under the influence of any intoxicating substance.

Watson and James Fyfe, a legal expert on off-duty police shootings to whom she referred reporters, conceded that the more sweeping ruling is unlikely.

“I would prefer that off-duty officers not carry weapons because it is dangerous to them and it’s dangerous to members of the public to have people out of uniform wielding firearms,” Watson said. “But if we are unable to get regulations forbidding it, we at least want them not to have weapons when they’re drunk.”

Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia who wrote his doctoral dissertation on police shootings in New York, said he would not go as far as Watson in wanting a complete ban. He expressed concern that off-duty officers need weapons to protect themselves against possible revenge attacks by criminals.

Fyfe said that his research 20 years ago indicated that about 20% of all police shootings in New York City were by off-duty officers. He said a survey taken in Detroit in the late 1970s showed that 15% of all fatal shootings during that period “involved police who killed their spouses in off-duty arguments.”

Both the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department encourage--but do not require--their officers to carry their weapons while off duty.

Watson said the lawsuits are directed at the Sheriff’s Department and the Montebello Police Department because there were plaintiffs with a cause of legal action against those agencies and not the LAPD. But she said she hoped that the LAPD would go along with any court ruling directed toward the other agencies.

An LAPD spokeswoman declined comment on the lawsuits. Assistant Sheriff Mike Graham said the Sheriff’s Department already bans, with termination as a frequent penalty, any of its deputies from “being intoxicated in a public place with or without a gun.”

“The state law allows peace officers to carry weapons off duty,” Graham said.

Two of the lawsuits filed Thursday cite cases in which allegedly inebriated officers used weapons to kill someone or threaten a group of people.

In the lawsuit directed against the Sheriff’s Department, it is alleged that Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas R. Kirsh on Aug. 14, 1994, “while off duty and in a drunken condition, used his departmentally approved firearm which he was permitted, encouraged or required to carry at all times, even when he was off duty and regardless of whether he was under the influence of alcohol,” to kill John Huffman.

The slain man’s parents, Gerald A. Huffman and Gunilla Lukse, are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

In the second lawsuit, directed at the Montebello Police Department, four plaintiffs allege that on Dec. 14, 1994, they were threatened with a gun by a policeman identified only as Satterfield who, outside a restaurant and in an intoxicated state, “drew his .38 caliber firearm and assaulted” them by “intentionally and recklessly drawing, pointing and brandishing his gun.”

The third lawsuit is by Eva Thayer, who alleges that Block is spending tax revenues to enforce firearms policies for off-duty officers that threaten citizens such as her with bodily harm.

Richard Shinee, general counsel to the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs and a lawyer for several other police unions, called the lawsuits “grandstanding and absolutely ludicrous.”

“A police officer has a duty to take action 24 hours a day,” Shinee said. “It expands protection to the public, and it is not uncommon for a police officer to come into contact with someone he’s arrested in the past who make seek to take revenge.”

But Watson said that she believes the courts can act and that the same standard used in a drunk-driving arrest, 0.08% blood-alcohol content, might be used as a standard for judging inebriation by off-duty officers.