Troubled LAPD Unit to Be Revamped

The Los Angeles Police Department’s officer-involved shooting team--beset by turmoil during the past year--was assigned a new leader Monday, the first in a series of changes that the unit will be undergoing during the next few weeks, police said.

Lt. Ken Lady is replacing the current leader, Lt. Bill Hall. The team, part of the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division, investigates all shootings by Los Angeles police officers.

Hall, like Lady a veteran of Robbery-Homicide, will be assigned to one of the division’s homicide teams, said LAPD Cmdr. Tim McBride.

Chief Willie L. Williams is expected to announce within the next few weeks a reorganization of the controversial team, Police Department sources say. The team will be expanded and another lieutenant and nine additional detectives will be added.

Currently, many of the 36 Robbery-Homicide detectives are handling officer-involved shootings in addition to other high-profile cases. But Williams is expected to announce that the officer-involved shooting team will expand and become more autonomous, with a number of detectives assigned solely to work on officer-involved shootings.

This will free the rest of the Robbery-Homicide detectives, among the department’s most experienced and highly paid, to concentrate on their other cases. The new team will continue to work under the auspices of Robbery-Homicide.

Last year, a realignment within Robbery-Homicide overburdened its detectives with officer-involved shooting investigations, many of which deal with incidents in which no one was hit.

As a result, the division’s senior officers signed and sent a letter to Williams complaining that detectives were so busy that the entire unit could only field a small number of murder cases. Morale had plummeted, the officers wrote, and there was a growing backlog of cases.

“To be blunt,” they wrote, “we are wasting our expertise.”

Last year’s realignment was undertaken by Williams after Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti had repeatedly expressed concerns about the officer-involved shooting team and its leader, Hall.

Garcetti complained that Hall and the team were protecting police officers rather than vigorously investigating them, which police officials have disputed.

Williams eventually authorized folding the officer-involved shooting team into the Robbery-Homicide Division. The goal was to speed up police shooting investigations and ensure that the most difficult cases were investigated by the city’s most skilled detectives. But, Robbery-Homicide detectives said, their current cases were being pushed back because they were so frequently interrupted to chase officer-involved shootings.

Williams recognized that this was not the most efficient use of the unit, a source said. He will be announcing the proposed changes to the Police Commission within the next few weeks and then will put the changes into effect.