Bills Seek to Alter Way Police Are Monitored

A pair of bills working their way through the state Senate and Assembly are quietly pitting police reform advocates against police union representatives in a battle that could have major implications for monitoring officers, particularly at the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

One bill, backed by the Los Angeles Police Protective League and other police officer organizations, would prevent law enforcement agencies from taking any action against most officers if investigations into misconduct take longer than one year. That bill and another also would delete from personnel records all complaints against officers that ultimately are ruled unfounded.

Opponents--who range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department--have voiced their concerns and tried to amend or block the bills. Those critics argue that denying police supervisors access to personnel information is bad management and dangerous public policy precedent.

By contrast, supporters of the bills say that deleting unfounded complaints from police officer personnel records would prevent good cops from having their careers clouded by false accusations. Too often, suspects and others make complaints against police merely to create problems for officers and to blemish their records, officers and their defenders say. And to make matters worse, they add, police departments keep the files and continually reexamine them in order to suggest that officers are developing bad habits.

“This department likes to use every complaint that’s generated to show a pattern of conduct,” said Bill Harkness, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League. “That’s B.S. Of course I oppose that.”

As a result, the league is supporting legislation by Assemblyman George House (R-Hughson) that would remove unfounded complaints from police officer personnel files. The term “unfounded” is not defined in the legislation, part of the reason the Sheriff’s Department and others oppose it, but House said it referred to cases in which the allegations against an officer were found to have no merit.

“This is in the interest of the officer who doesn’t deserve to be hounded,” said House, a former officer for the Modesto Police Department and California Highway Patrol. “Why can’t we do this for them?”

House’s bill, a more narrowly drafted counterpart to one introduced by state Sen. Nicholas Petris (D-Oakland), passed the Assembly’s Criminal Procedure Committee by unanimous vote this week. It heads next to the Senate, where backers also predict relatively smooth sailing.

“I think it will get support,” House said. “It’s a fair bill.”

Petris’ bill, meanwhile, calls for not only deleting certain complaints from personnel records, but for limiting administrative action against officers when investigations run longer than a year. That proposal is having more difficulty winning supporters. But it, too, is moving through the state Legislature.

Even critics agree that police officers should not be punished for complaints that turn out to be untrue, but they argue that deleting that information from police files would have other consequences.

According to those critics, purging the files of that material would deny police managers tools that many see as important: the ability to look for patterns in complaints to determine whether some officers are developing troubling habits and also the ability to assess whether internal investigators are doing enough to ride herd on fellow officers.

“Police officers have legitimate fears concerning misuse of unfounded complaints, but this proposed legislation is not the answer,” said Merrick Bobb, a Los Angeles lawyer who monitors the progress of reform at both the Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD. “I strongly oppose any legislative proposal that fails to make explicit that supervisors are entitled to track all complaints, sustained or otherwise.”

In fact, it was that approach that allowed the Christopher Commission in 1991 to discover that 44 Los Angeles police officers--one of whom was Harkness--had racked up more than six allegations each of excessive force or improper tactics in a four-year period. Some of those complaints were sustained after internal investigations; others were not.

The commission found that little had been done to address the propensity of the 44 officers to generate so many complaints. Some had received glowing evaluations even as they were generating more and more complaints. One officer, for instance, was found to have hit a handcuffed arrestee with a shotgun, but in his evaluation was praised for his “stable personality and mature perspective toward police work.”

Concluding that the LAPD had failed to monitor those and other officers, the Christopher Commission recommended that the department step up its oversight and carefully track all complaints, not just sustained ones.

Alan Parachini, a spokesman for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said that had the proposed legislation been law in 1991, it would have been all but impossible for the Christopher Commission to have performed its landmark study. Moreover, he said, the bills extend protection to the wrong people.

“Police officers do not need additional protection,” said Parachini. “It’s the public that needs protection.”

Parachini and other observers warned that the bills could effectively gut computer tracking systems installed by the Sheriff’s Department and being developed by the LAPD in order to track potentially problem officers.

In theory, the systems are intended to help supervisors spot potentially troubling trends before they graduate to major disciplinary problems. An officer, for instance, might have gone years without generating any complaints and then suddenly produce a rash of them.

Even if those complaints were not sustained by an internal investigation, a supervisor who spotted the flurry of complaints might be able to talk to the officer and determine whether something was wrong. Counseling or training might head off a problem before it got worse.

Similarly, a citizen’s complaint against a police officer might be ruled unfounded if investigators could not tell whether the citizen or the officer was telling the truth about an alleged incident. But if various citizens made similar complaints over the years, the pattern might cause investigators to believe the citizen over the officer.

Under the current system, police managers can access personnel files to look for that information. If the bills pass, much of that material might disappear, officials warned.

“If you have a pattern of allegations that turn out to be unfounded, the pattern might tell you something,” said Gordon Trask, a deputy county counsel who advises the Sheriff’s Department. Department officials consider that an important tool, he added.

It is unclear to sheriff’s officials whether, if the legislation passed, they would be required to go into their computer database and purge all references to unfounded complaints. House’s bill does not prevent departments from keeping records somewhere of unfounded allegations, but it does bar them from including that material in anything classified as a personnel record.

Since Sheriff’s Department supervisors use the computer database in considering transfers, promotions and discipline, House said he believes that system would be considered part of any officer’s personnel record. If so, that would severely undermine the current computer database and would force retooling of a system that some observers already believe is too modest.

“That,” said the ACLU’s Parachini, “is several steps backward.”