LAPD Records System Needs Major Reform, Report Says

Los Angeles police officials did not deliberately cover up a controversial set of complaint files, but LAPD record keeping is so confused that officials overlooked scores of the files, and the department’s handling of the accusations they contain is so inadequate that major reforms are in order, a new report concludes.

The report, written by the Police Commission’s special counsel, will be forwarded to the board this week. It recommends that the department discontinue a long-used practice that allows senior officers, including the chief of police, to keep some complaints out of an officer’s record--in a department where even unsubstantiated complaints usually go into an officer’s file.

The commission, a civilian body that oversees LAPD policy, takes up the report at a delicate and important juncture. Commissioners this week will elect a new president and will review their staff’s analysis of an embarrassing question for the LAPD: why arrests have plummeted in recent years in spite of LAPD expansion.

Like the arrest issue, the handling of the complaint files has raised questions about the LAPD’s ability to monitor officers and their performance. The report recommends abolishing a controversial practice that resolves some complaints, and at least one commissioner agreed Sunday that changes seem necessary.

“I think there clearly has to be reform,” said Raymond C. Fisher. “Obviously, I’d want to hear from the chief and the command staff before doing anything final, but my inclination is to say that some changes need to be made.”

That sentiment echoes the recommendations of Merrick J. Bobb, the panel’s special counsel, who argues in his report that the board should abolish “miscellaneous memos.” The rarely used miscellaneous memos are a way to resolve some internal investigations without using formal personnel complaints.

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When investigations are ended by miscellaneous memos, the charges do not go into officers’ personnel packages. By contrast, most personnel complaints are logged in officers’ records, even those that are found to be without merit.

Bobb has proposed abolishing miscellaneous memos because, according to him, it makes monitoring officers more difficult and because the memos occasionally have been abused.

In place of the memos, Bobb’s report recommends three new categories to resolve complaints. One would close cases in which citizens complained but the investigation revealed that the accused person was not a Los Angeles police officer but an officer from another agency; another would end inquiries when the conduct, even if true, would not violate LAPD policies; the third would close investigations in which the department’s efforts to get to the bottom of a complaint proved genuinely futile.

Any time any of those avenues is used to dispose of a complaint, Bobb’s report recommends that the commander of the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division be required to concur in writing.

Those new categories would offer authorities ways to dispose of many of the cases now handled by miscellaneous memo. But Bobb goes further when it comes to those complaints that the police chief can decide to eliminate by using the memos. He recommends abolishing that practice altogether.

“I seriously doubt that the City Charter or the LAPD manual grants the chief of police the discretion to change a classification from a personnel complaint to a miscellaneous memo,” Bobb states in his report.

Bobb’s recommendations represent his latest foray into the issue of miscellaneous memos, a topic that he first raised in a landmark review of the progress of reform within the department. His report, released in May, concluded that the LAPD had made strides toward reform in the five years since the Christopher Commission drafted its reform blueprint for the agency, but it also found that the department had fallen short in many respects.

As part of that report, Bobb reviewed 50 miscellaneous memo files, which he believed to be “substantially all” of the complaints resolved by the memos in 1994 and 1995.

A follow-up article in The Times, however, revealed that department officials believed that there actually were 148 cases in those two years. That revelation angered Bobb and commissioners, many of whom wondered why the complete set of files had not been disclosed in response to Bobb’s request.

Officials demanded explanations. LAPD leaders counted again and concluded that there were 131 memos resolving accusations against 178 officers. Still another review suggested that the real number of cases from those years was 152. After painstaking inquiry, Bobb now concludes in his report that the number 152 is correct, but adds that the department has been unable to find one file.

Despite the continuing confusion, Bobb’s report absolves LAPD officials of deliberately concealing information, a possibility that had deeply troubled some commissioners and others when the contradictory numbers came to light.

The problem was not a cover-up, Bobb concludes, but rather another in a growing list of examples of a department that has severe difficulties compiling and managing information. That same issue underlies the continuing controversy over the LAPD’s attempts to clearly state how far arrests have declined in recent years and to explain the reasons for the drop.

“I conclude that there was no calculated effort by the LAPD to keep the existence of [miscellaneous memos] from special counsel or this commission or its staff,” Bobb says in his report. “Rather, the misunderstandings arose because of the generally confusing state of LAPD record keeping and because the LAPD and the Police Commission use different computer databases and written records for differing purposes.

“I reiterate and underscore the recommendation . . . that the LAPD create a departmentwide comprehensive computer database to analyze and manage information about officer conduct and performance.”