Accord on Anti-Terror Rules Reached

The president of the Los Angeles Police Commission and leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union have reached agreement on a controversial proposal to revamp the guidelines governing anti-terrorist operations of the LAPD.

The proposal to ease restrictions on the department’s Anti-Terrorist Division touched off an emotional debate when details surfaced this fall. Since then, talks have been underway on some points of the deal that troubled civil libertarians.

In particular, the ACLU balked at a measure that would relax the standard for sending an officer undercover to infiltrate a group from needing to show “probable cause” of illegal activity to only needing to show a “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing.

Under a new compromise, which the commission is expected to consider next week, the standard for sending police officers undercover would remain probable cause. That recommendation has the backing of commission President Raymond C. Fisher and Capt. Joseph Curreri of the Anti-Terrorist Division. The ACLU, though not entirely satisfied with the new rules, said it would accept the proposal.

“Basically, the thrust of this is that we’ll reinstate the probable cause standard,” Fisher said. “I really felt that we and the department could live with the higher standard.”

Curreri agreed, saying he felt that the Anti-Terrorist Division could work with the modified guidelines.

ACLU spokesman Allan Parachini said that while the organization continues to believe that no changes were needed in the original limits, the compromise is acceptable to the organization.

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“Are we totally pleased with this? No,” he said. “Are we satisfied that given all the political pressures and other interests that this is an acceptable solution? The answer to that would have to be yes.”

The agreement appears likely to end--at least for now--a debate with deep roots.

In 1985, after years of mounting controversy over police spying, the city agreed to court-supervised restrictions on the LAPD’s intelligence-gathering operations, which had targeted prominent Los Angeles leaders, including council members and Mayor Tom Bradley. From the start, some Police Department leaders chafed at the restrictions, which they said constrained their ability to conduct effective anti-terrorist investigations.

With domestic terrorism an increasingly sensitive problem and the court order now expired, LAPD officials argued that they needed greater flexibility and encouraged the commission to consider changes in the rules. Fisher, a prominent civil rights advocate, agreed that some modifications were needed, and helped draft a new set of guidelines, which were approved this fall.

Then, after some opponents raised concerns about those guidelines, Fisher agreed to reconsider a few changes. The latest change means that police officers seeking to go undercover will have to show slightly more evidence in order to get an authorization than they would have under the original changes.

In the new guidelines, the probable cause needed to launch an undercover investigation is defined as a “good faith reasonable belief that the use of an undercover officer will, when taken with the facts gathered in the investigation . . . lead to the probable cause to arrest the targets of said investigation for acts involving a significant disruption of public order or to prevent a significant disruption of the public order from occurring.”

Reasonable suspicion is defined as “an honest belief based on known articulable circumstances which would cause a reasonable person to believe that some activity relating to significant disruption of the public order is occurring or is likely to occur.”

Although those represent different legal thresholds, Curreri and Police Commission analyst Clifford Weiss said the difference may not be significant in day-to-day operations of the Anti-Terrorist Division.

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According to Weiss, undercover officers generally are not sent to infiltrate groups until significant investigative work has been done. As a result, the probable cause standard almost always has been surpassed by the time division leaders seek to use an undercover officer, he said.

“That takes a huge investment in resources,” Weiss said. “They’re not going to waste the resources on a hunch.”

Added Curreri: “That’s absolutely right. I wouldn’t want to put an undercover officer into a group where he would not be productive.”

Parachini agreed that the Anti-Terrorist Division today appears to be abiding by the probable cause standard, but he added that the importance of the guidelines is that they will govern the department’s actions in years to come--after the current chief, commission president and other department leaders are long gone. Strict guidelines will help reassure the public that the department is not slipping back to the days in which its intelligence operations, according to Parachini, “were running amok.”

“It is absolutely reassuring and critical and essential for that standard to be in place,” he said.