LAPD Pushing to Relax Limits on Undercover Probes

The Los Angeles Police Department, which 12 years ago reluctantly agreed to restrictions on intelligence gathering amid an explosive scandal over police spying, is now preparing to relax those limits and significantly increase its authority to conduct undercover probes--a move civil libertarians are greeting with fear and skepticism.

According to a proposal that the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners will consider next week, the new guidelines would eliminate bans on the use of electronic surveillance and other undercover techniques during the preliminary stages of investigations. They also would lower the legal threshold for opening certain investigations from cases in which an officer can show “probable cause” of illegal activity to ones where authorities can articulate a “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing.

Capt. Joseph Curreri, the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorist Division, said the changes are necessary in order to allow police to counter the growing threat of terrorism.

“The current standards are severely hampering us,” he said, adding that field detectives cannot take such routine steps as following someone who meets with a known terrorist. Such surveillance only can be undertaken with approval from Curreri, and seeking that permission often is impractical, he said.

Police Commission President Raymond C. Fisher has helped oversee the drafting of the revised guidelines, which are being forwarded to the commission for approval by the Police Department and Chief Willie L. Williams.

If adopted, the proposed modifications, which have been under discussion since long before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing ratcheted up fears of domestic terrorist attacks, would represent a sea change in the LAPD’s approach to anti-terrorist investigations. They also strikingly illuminate the growing national concern about terrorism and the determination to strike back against it.

When the limits were imposed by a court-supervised consent decree in 1984, they were enacted in response to outcry over LAPD spying on citizens. Today, much of the public is focused more on the threats posed by foreign and domestic terrorism than on restricting police activities.

City officials maintain that the consent decree only bound the LAPD for 10 years, so the changes being contemplated do not require the approval of the organizations that brought suit against the city during the spying scandal. Although some of the parties in those talks disagree, they have attempted to work with the city to craft new guidelines that would satisfy both sides.

The Police Department has long balked at the consent decree restrictions--then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates denounced them as “foolishness, foolishness.” But civil libertarians who fought hard for the limits worry about giving the LAPD freer rein to follow, investigate and infiltrate.

“We have a fear of how this will affect the community,” said Michael Zinzun, chairperson of the Coalition Against Police Abuse. “This will impact activists and outspoken critics of the Police Department and the city government.”

Similarly, the ACLU said that although it has been consulted about the proposed changes, it still has reservations about them.

“We believe the consent decree provided the right balance,” said Allan Parachini, a spokesman for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. “It allowed the police to do their job and it provided appropriate safeguards.”

The ACLU, Parachini added, is “not persuaded that any changes were necessary.”

The Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division was established in 1970, at the height of the anti-war movement, and was charged with keeping the peace in Los Angeles. But it first became embroiled in scandal in 1977 when Officer Connie Milazzo, a woman with well-established leftist credentials, was revealed to be an LAPD spy. She became the first of 12 officers exposed in the controversy.

Once a lawsuit was filed, the LAPD was forced to turn over thousands of pages of internal documents to the plaintiffs, including the ACLU. Those documents revealed that the Police Department had monitored many of the city’s political leaders, including Mayor Tom Bradley. Officers also monitored private meetings of United Farm Workers supporters, spied on anti-nuclear and campus groups and reported on appearances by City Council members at meetings of groups who criticized the LAPD.

In addition, undercover officers infiltrated marches, rallies and left-wing groups. One LAPD officer found work as a bodyguard for Jane Fonda and her husband, Tom Hayden.

After bubbling for years, the controversy took another strange turn in 1983, when LAPD Det. Jay Paul revealed that he had stored 180 boxes of intelligence material inside a mobile home and garage. Some of that material allegedly was leaked by Paul to a right-wing group that was compiling information on political leftists.

Struggling to resolve the scandal, the City Council unanimously voted to dismantle the PDID and replaced it with the Anti-Terrorist Division, the unit that today investigates allegations of illegal subversive activity. That unit operates under different rules than those that governed PDID, however, and it is those rules that the commission now is considering changing.

Under the current rules, the department’s Anti-Terrorist Division may not open a preliminary investigation unless it has a “reasonable and articulated suspicion” that a person or group is planning or threatening illegal acts that will disrupt the public order. During the preliminary investigation stage of an inquiry, detectives may consult public and police records in order to check their suspicions. They also may interview people connected with the suspect, but they cannot direct those people to do anything for the department.

As a result, Curreri said, detectives could ask an informant about a suspect’s activities, but could not direct that same informant to get the suspect’s license plate for them.

“Those rules severely limit our ability to conduct a preliminary investigation,” he said.

The new rules, however, eliminate the preliminary investigation process altogether.

Instead, the ATD would be able to move immediately to a full investigation, barred only from engaging in illegal acts as part of that inquiry. Plainclothes surveillance would be automatically approved, and undercover surveillance could be used with the permission of the police chief.

That leap troubles some activists, who saw the restrictive preliminary investigation process as an important check against unbridled police conduct. Curreri, however, said the new guidelines would preserve strong civilian oversight over the division, subjecting it to regular audits and forcing it to report to the Police Commission on its activities.

“We are not at all interested in violating the civil rights of anybody,” he said. “There are, in my estimation, adequate safeguards to ensure that.”