LAPD Complaint Procedure Still Lagging, ACLU Says

Despite a directive from Police Chief Willie L. Williams to improve civilian access to police complaint and commendation forms, many of the city’s police stations still lack those materials, according to a new study done by the American Civil Liberties Union just days after public attention was called to the issue.

“The department doesn’t do very well,” ACLU spokesman Allan Parachini said. “There has been some progress, but not very much and not nearly as much as we had hoped.”

Faced with the latest critical assessment on this issue, Williams ordered a survey of police stations Monday morning, a department spokesman said. That survey turned up markedly different numbers than last week’s ACLU analysis.

The ACLU announced its findings last Tuesday, and simultaneously unveiled a pilot project to make complaint and commendation forms available throughout the city, not just in police stations. Starting this week, the ACLU is placing copies of complaint and commendation forms at community centers and other locations within two ethnically and culturally diverse areas policed by officers from the Wilshire and Rampart divisions.

The forms will be displayed on boards explaining citizens’ right to complain against police officers and supplying a toll-free number that reaches the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Parachini said that six boards have been put up already and that ACLU officials hope to extend the displays into Hollenbeck Division later this week.

The ACLU findings released Monday were a follow-up to a report that it completed just over a week ago. In that report, the organization concluded that complaint forms were difficult to obtain in some police stations and that citizens who sought advice on how to place complaints often were given incorrect information.

Responding to those findings, Williams directed his subordinates to investigate and report back to him within eight days that all the city’s stations were complying with department regulations governing the complaint intake process. Monday’s ACLU report, however, suggests that the department did not respond as aggressively to that directive as Williams had ordered.

Stations in the city’s South Bureau, for instance, lacked complaint forms in certain languages--the department prints them in English, Spanish, Cantonese and Korean--as well as mailing envelopes. Some stations lacked commendation forms, posters advertising the process and other materials.

Ng’ethe Maina, a representative of a community organization known as AGENDA, said the dearth of complaint materials in the city’s police stations, particularly after the chief had ordered changes, was discouraging.

But Cmdr. Tim McBride, an LAPD spokesman, said department officials had checked on stations Monday morning and found that complaint forms were available everywhere except two stations in which Cantonese forms were missing. Some posters also were missing in some stations, McBride acknowledged, but he said that was because new posters had to be ordered and were not yet on hand.

The issue of citizen access to the complaint process came up in the 1991 report of the Christopher Commission, which cited access problems as a key obstacle to holding police officers accountable for their actions. Since then, the department says citizen complaints have dropped--1,354 were filed in 1991, compared to 602 last year. But reformers question the reliability of those statistics.

“The department traditionally has reported what appear to be very, very low numbers of complaints,” Parachini said. “One of the reasons it has very, very few complaints is that the LAPD makes it as hard as possible to make one.”

Again, McBride disagreed. “We think that the big reduction in complaints is a result of accessibility, not inaccessibility,” he said.

That view is echoed in many city police stations, where officers say they are deluged by meaningless and sometimes false complaints--all of which take department time and resources to investigate. Nevertheless, the ACLU and other police reform backers believe that changes in the complaint filing process would draw out more people who feel aggrieved by the department.

The public campaign launched Monday is intended to reach out to those people. But even as they launched it, ACLU leaders said they hoped that the LAPD would cooperate with them and eventually take over the program.

McBride responded that while department officials already believe that enough avenues are available for citizens to make complaints, the LAPD would not rule out working with the ACLU--a longtime nemesis.

“What we have ought to be sufficient,” he said. “However, we’re certainly willing to sit and discuss any option because we’re committed to the very best level of service that we can provide.”