In D.A.’s Office, Cochran Had Chance to Fight Abuses

For the three-year period that Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. served as the third-ranking official in the district attorney’s office, the veteran defense attorney had a rare opportunity to help combat police misconduct from the inside.

But a look at Cochran’s 1978-1980 tenure as assistant district attorney, when he had direct oversight for police abuse issues while supervising the Special Investigations unit headed by now-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, shows the office had decidedly mixed results.

On one hand, Cochran--who is using the specter of police misconduct as a central tenet of his efforts to win freedom for his client O.J. Simpson--helped oversee the formation of the district attorney’s then-novel Rollout program, in which prosecutors were sent to the scene of each shooting by a police officer.

On the other hand, the program, which Garcetti disbanded this summer to cope with budget constraints, resulted in only one, unsuccessful, prosecution during the Cochran era.

Few non-shooting brutality cases were filed either.

A 1978 Boyle Heights incident is a case in point. In a now-notorious audiotape, key Simpson trial witness Mark Fuhrman has described brutalizing a suspect in a situation with striking similarities to the Boyle Heights case. After the incident, civil rights lawyer Antonio H. Rodriguez demanded an investigation in a letter sent to the district attorney’s office.

Documents obtained by The Times show that Garcetti read the letter and sent it to Cochran. But little investigation of Rodriguez’s brutality allegations was apparently done by the district attorney’s office.

“We were looking at it from the point of view of the shooting incident,” Cochran said in an interview this week. “We should have done more” to look into allegations of police misconduct.

Longtime prosecutors who had firsthand experience with Cochran during his three-year reign say he made a generally favorable impression, and at times took a hands-on approach to investigating police misconduct. But several added that Cochran, who had oversight responsibilities in several areas, spent much of his time on other functions for which he was hired, including recruiting young minority lawyers to the district attorney’s office.

“I’d say [Cochran] was more a politician than a hard-nosed prosecutor,” said retired longtime prosecutor Curt Livesay, who briefly served as Cochran’s supervisor and later as assistant district attorney. “Johnnie was very adept at dealing with people and was really more of a contact with the community for the district attorney than he was an administrator.”

Then-Los Angeles Police Commission President Stephen Reinhardt said he cannot recall ever meeting with Cochran on police misconduct cases during Cochran’s stint as the No. 3 executive.

“I remember Gil Garcetti as a very aggressive person who was very interested in doing what he could about police abuse and I remember having a couple of meetings with Gil trying to see what could be done,” said Reinhardt, who is now a federal appellate judge. “I don’t remember having any contact at all with Johnnie Cochran during that period.”

Cochran, in an interview, said that he demonstrated his deep-seated commitment to fighting police misconduct by having taken the prosecutor’s job in the first place. “That’s why I went there primarily,” he said. “I was committed, man. I took a fivefold pay cut to do it. That shows you’re really committed.”

Cochran said he lobbied for additional prosecutions but was overruled by the man who hired him, then-Dist. Atty. John K. Van de Kamp.

“I’m not knocking John, because he was the best district attorney in the county for the last 50 years,” Cochran said. “But I don’t think enough cases were filed.

“Sometimes I recommended filing cases that should have been filed,” Cochran added. “But I didn’t win many arguments.”

One reason that few misconduct cases were prosecuted, Cochran said, was because of the office’s recognition that Los Angeles County juries at the time were very reluctant to believe that police occasionally broke the law.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t have videotapes like in Rodney King and that’s what juries wanted,” Cochran said. “Juries said the police could do nothing wrong.”

Cochran said he left the district attorney’s office to earn more money again and because of his growing sense that “I could do more on the outside than I could on the inside. I’m not fettered [as a private attorney] by bureaucratic stuff and I can do what’s right.”

Van de Kamp agrees that Cochran did not always concur with his final decisions on misconduct prosecutions.

“Occasionally, he would come in and make a pitch to me about something,” said Van de Kamp, who later served as state attorney general. “We’d agree most of the time and sometimes disagree, but always in a way he could come back the next day.”

Ironically, when Cochran was the subject of what he considered an unwarranted traffic stop, he declined to even tell his boss for a month.

“He didn’t come in and make a great play about it,” said Van de Kamp. “He had learned to sort of live with that stuff.”

The incident took place after a Van de Kamp fund-raiser near the Sunset Strip, Cochran said, when officers pulled over his Rolls-Royce and forced him to spread-eagle on the hood.

“I wasn’t surprised and I didn’t want to make a big thing about it . . . because it involved me,” Cochran said. “I wasn’t going to sue for myself. It wasn’t about money. But it was an affirmation about how far we had to go.”

Cochran earned his reputation as a civil rights attorney in a highly publicized 1966 case in which he represented the family of Leonard Deadwyler, an unarmed black man who was shot to death by a Los Angeles police officer as he was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital.

A year after joining the district attorney’s office in 1978, Cochran took a low profile on the police abuse cause celebre of the time, the fatal shooting of Eulia Mae Love by two LAPD officers in Watts.

Cochran said this week that he was forced to limit his role in the Love case because of a possible conflict of interest because his former law firm was representing Love’s family in seeking civil penalties. It was Van de Kamp and Garcetti who announced the decision not to file charges against the officers, saying they appeared to fire in self-defense as Love, a black woman, was starting to throw a knife at them. The officers had gone to the house in a dispute over an unpaid gas bill.

In subsequent months, the office instituted its Rollout program, designed to provide prosecutors with independent evidence of the conduct of police.

“The Love case highlighted the need for it,” Van de Kamp said. “I was getting tired of waiting on police for six months or longer to get reports [to us]. . . . Johnnie was very much part and parcel in setting up the Rollout program.”

Cochran and Garcetti, who declined to be interviewed for this article, met together daily during that era, discussing cases of alleged misconduct by police and other public officials. The pair, now involved in a titanic struggle over Simpson’s fate, also caught flak from LAPD officials who said they were unfairly maligning the reputation of hard-working officers.

In mid-1980, Cochran, speaking before a national group of black law enforcement officials, proclaimed that the Rollout program was having a “deterrent effect” on police use of deadly force, citing statistics that shootings dropped nearly 50% in early 1980 compared to the same period the previous year.

Soon after, however, the program also began catching flak from community activists, who pointed out that although prosecutors investigated more than 350 shootings involving law enforcement officers countywide in its first three years, charges were filed in only one case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jay Lipman tried that case, in which three officers were accused of felonious assault for shooting gas station attendant Cornelius Tatum, who they assumed was a robber because he was carrying a shotgun on the job.

Lipman recalls Cochran taking the unusual step for an executive of becoming personally involved in the prosecution.

“There was a witness who was reluctant to testify against police officers, and we met the witness at a coffee shop in Inglewood and Johnnie convinced the witness to testify,” Lipman said. “Not that we got a good result. It was two not guilties and a hung jury.

“But Johnnie was quite helpful. He wanted to speak personally to the witness and he did.”

A handful of non-shooting brutality prosecutions were also filed during that period, according to Lipman and other deputies from the Special Investigations Division. But they were also difficult to win.

In one case, Lipman said, an officer was charged with clubbing a motorist who had struck his patrol car and did not surrender until after a long chase through the San Fernando Valley involving several police agencies. “The officer arrived after the chase was long over, walked up and hit the man with his baton,” Lipman said. “On paper that should be a guilty verdict, but the jury came back not guilty.”

In most cases where attorneys or alleged victims made allegations of LAPD brutality to the Special Investigations unit, the information was forwarded to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs unit, old-time Special Investigations lawyers say.

“Van de Kamp had a policy where before he’d do an investigation, unless it was extremely unusual circumstances, he’d allow Internal Affairs to do it first so he wasn’t stepping on their toes and getting involved in their investigation,” said John Stillman, now a private attorney in Orange County.

Cochran now says the policy was misguided. “I had very little confidence in Internal Affairs. The things I heard on the Fuhrman tapes . . . reconfirm what I felt.”

Some leading police misconduct attorneys contend that the district attorney’s track record during Cochran’s tenure reflects less on Cochran than it does on a traditionally cozy relationship between prosecutors and police.

“A guy like Johnnie Cochran goes into the D.A.’s office and does what anyone else in the D.A.’s office has done in the last 20 years--absolutely nothing about the rampant police abuse problem in Los Angeles County,” said Pasadena attorney John Burton.

“But it shows you can’t change things by plugging in individual people,” added Burton, who calls Cochran a “pioneer” civil rights lawyer. “The institutional pressures are such that just putting in a different person won’t change things.”

Community activist Michael Zinzun, longtime chairman of the Coalition Against Police Abuse, agreed that “Cochran did very little but it was because he wasn’t in control.”

“Johnnie took that job as an opportunity to give his perspective,” Zinzun said. “But I don’t give a damn who’s in there. Johnnie, you, me or Clinton. The way it’s structured, there are two sets of rules, one for the police and one for us.”

Not all civil rights lawyers agree about Cochran’s tenure.

Attorney Stephen Yagman, who once filed a lawsuit accusing Garcetti and Van de Kamp of illegally disclosing grand jury testimony to then-private attorney Cochran, calls Cochran a well-connected hypocrite who placed self-interest above principles.

“When Mr. Cochran had the opportunity to do something to correct police misconduct, he did absolutely nothing,” Yagman said. “In my opinion, the reason he did nothing is because he was basically a big-mouth who was so connected politically that there was no reason for him to do anything.

“Johnnie Cochran has never been one to upset his own apple cart. . . . Since his main interest is not fighting corruption but making money, there was no way in the world he would have done that.”

Times staff writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.