Riordan, Others Decry Handling of Homicides

With only one in three killings leading to a conviction, the way homicides are investigated and prosecuted in Los Angeles County is “obviously not tolerable,” Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan said last week.

In the city of Los Angeles, where half the killings occur, the mayor attributed much of the problem to a “poorly managed” LAPD. Riordan said police can do a better job with existing resources.

Other politicians, community leaders, law enforcement officials and public health experts agreed that the criminal justice system is not functioning acceptably. But some said the situation will not improve without more resources.

Acknowledging deep-seated problems in solving the county’s homicides, they proposed a variety of solutions, ranging from changes in police and prosecution tactics and deployment to gun and drug control and family intervention programs aimed at reducing levels of violence.

“The political vision by our leaders is worse than anemic” because it does not focus on social change, said Connie Rice, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “It’s a . . . jail-them-all, hopeless vision.

“You can lock up all the kids you want. But the next generation is going to be sucked up into the same . . . nihilistic, ‘Clockwork Orange’ machismo, and it’s deadly.”

These assessments came in response to a weeklong Times series that traced five years of homicides in the county and found that only half resulted in charges being filed and only a third resulted in convictions for murder or manslaughter.

The articles documented a criminal justice system so overwhelmed that many homicide cases are not fully investigated. The 20-month study also indicated there was a higher likelihood that a case would be successfully prosecuted if the victim was white, had a high school education or the death received newspaper coverage.

The series was “fear-provoking and for me, anger-provoking,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick, head of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “From time immemorial, it has always been the accepted philosophy that punishment for wrongdoing is not only the definition of justice, it is also the way to provide an effective deterrent.”

Peter Berman, a district attorney’s office supervisor, added: “When you can’t bring justice in the important cases, you can’t get the message out that crime will not be tolerated.”

Some experts pointed as models to fledgling, federally funded pilot projects, such as one in the East Bay community of Richmond, Calif., where police have embraced community policing and working in schools as a critical part of their efforts to reduce the murder rate and the number of unsolved killings.

Others suggested that law enforcement’s response to the most serious crimes cannot become more vigorous without a vast infusion of tax dollars.

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, whose district includes some areas with many unsolved homicides, said such an infusion would not happen without a public outcry. Ridley-Thomas said he was not prepared to say that more resources are necessary: “I think there needs to be a serious assessment of the existing resources.”

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LAPD officials say they still have far too few patrol officers, even with recent additions, and the number of detectives has lagged behind. The department is seeking a federal grant to reexamine its deployment of detectives.

Chick said there has been too much emphasis on getting more patrol officers on the streets, while expansion of the number of detectives and support personnel necessary to investigate crimes has not kept pace. She said that, in part because of Proposition 13 and resulting financial constraints, “politicians and others have not been truth tellers to the public” on how bad the problem of unsolved homicides has become.

In interviews last week, some law enforcement officials acknowledged the depth of the problem publicly for the first time.

The supervisor of the LAPD’s detective operations, Cmdr. James McMurray, said his investigators are understaffed and “overwhelmed.”

“The fact that they continue to come to work day after day is amazing, because they are never going to win,” he said. “They can expect that the next day will put them deeper in the hole than they were the day before.”

Police Chief Willie L. Williams declined to be interviewed last week. The department spokesman, Cmdr. Tim McBride, said the homicide series had brought “a correct focus on a very serious issue.”

Sheriff Sherman Block, whose department handles a quarter of the county’s homicides, declined interview requests last week, as did county Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, whose office is responsible for homicide prosecutions countywide.

Zev Yaroslavsky, current chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, which funds the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office, also declined to be interviewed. Supervisors Gloria Molina and Mike Antonovich did not respond to interview requests.

Robert Tannenbaum, a Beverly Hills city councilman and former Manhattan homicide prosecutor, said the district attorney’s office needs to reexamine its system of assigning homicide cases to different attorneys at different stages until trial.

Tannenbaum, who ran unsuccessfully for district attorney in 1992, said the district attorney should adopt the New York model of assigning one of several veteran prosecutors to each homicide--when detectives are first seeking to charge a suspect. The prosecutor then can assist in decision-making in the investigation.

“That would say that homicides are the top priority,” said Tannenbaum, and would help prevent weak cases from being filed in the first place.

But senior attorneys in the district attorney’s office said they doubted that the New York model could be adapted to widespread use in Los Angeles.

“It’s a good idea; the question is resources,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling Norris, who successfully prosecuted “Freeway Killer” William Bonin and headed the special trials section of the district attorney’s office. Norris said the district attorney’s office uses the technique in high-profile cases.

Tannenbaum said the New York model also gives prosecutors additional expertise that eliminates the need for homicide detectives to sit with them throughout trials--freeing the detectives to spend more time in the field.

Norris and other veteran Los Angeles prosecutors said the detailed knowledge homicide investigators bring to a case is invaluable to prosecutors and that investigators should be present during trials.

The problem of unsolved homicides is not unique to Los Angeles. Last year, the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police held a summit to discuss how communities nationwide could respond to the problem.

The summit was held as the number of homicides nationwide rose from 9,850 in 1965 to more than 24,000 in 1993. In Los Angeles County alone, there were almost 2,000 annually from 1990 through 1994.

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To stem the tide of homicides, the summit participants concluded that concerted efforts and innovations will be required. These include community policing and youth programs; drug, alcohol and gun control programs; improved witness protection; better evidence collection by police, and better education by schools.

Such solutions are being studied in communities large and small. In Richmond, Chief William M. Lansdowne said there “is light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is getting away from the same old patterns, the same old ways of trying to do things.”

The Richmond department has received federal funding for a pilot project to attack the homicide problem. “The real answer to the issue of unsolved homicides is in prevention,” Lansdowne said. “You have to solve unemployment, poverty, broken homes and high dropout rates, the proliferation of firearms.”

In 1993, Lansdowne took the chief’s job at a time when few people would have wanted it. The department had been hit with a multimillion-dollar judgment for engaging in a pattern of brutality. And the previous chief was removed after the police union notified the city that it had lost confidence in him.

Lansdowne, formerly assistant chief in San Jose, has put his efforts into regaining the trust of a skeptical community. Officers serve as mentors for students in each school. Community groups are invited to discuss ways to address problems. And Lansdowne has disbanned specialized units to make more patrol officers available, so communities feel police presence more routinely.

With the grant, Lansdowne has bought computers for each homicide officer and required them to routinely share information with patrol officers. He has put a lot of focus on crime analysis technology, to anticipate retaliatory shootings and try to prevent them. He has upgraded the department’s evidence collection.

Homicides in Richmond, with 90,000 residents, have dropped by a third since 1993, when the bayside community had 52. But less than half of the slayings get solved--about the same as Los Angeles County.

The chief estimates that it takes five years for such programs to be fully effective. And whether the results will translate to a county like Los Angeles--as justice officials hope--remains to be seen.

Many of the steps taken by Richmond are consistent with the recommendations of experts who have studied homicide prevention.

They have observed, for example, that there is a tremendous concentration of homicides in poor areas of cities. “It is clear that something about economic inequality or just strong concentration of poverty plays a strong role” in homicides, said Jim Mercy, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The experts have also observed that young children who are exposed to violence are more likely to become killers.

“One of the areas where there is some promising evidence of impact is in early intervention--trying to reach families and children . . . to prevent child abuse, neglect and witnessing violence in the home,” Mercy said.

Although Riordan said better management could enhance police performance, he said social ills need to be addressed by providing, for example, quality public education and after-school programs for youngsters. These, he said, could encourage youths to avoid gangs, which account for more than 40% of the county’s homicides.

Riordan said he believes money for such programs could be obtained through private and government sources.

“You get me the leadership, I’ll get you the money,” he said. “You get a police department that the public feels is doing its job, deploying correctly . . . and the public will vote for a bond issue.”

A spokeswoman said the mayor was neither endorsing a tax hike nor proposing a specific bond measure.

Because two-thirds of all Los Angeles County killings involve handguns, some researchers suggested that additional gun controls might reduce killings.

Garen Wintemute, director of the violence prevention research program at UC Davis, said there is already a consensus that “bad guys should not be allowed to buy guns.”

Wintemute suggested that laws which currently prevent felons from buying guns could be expanded to include everyone with a misdemeanor conviction. In an overloaded system, he said, felonies are frequently plea-bargained down to misdemeanors.

“We know [through research] that even having a minimal criminal history is associated with a higher risk of doing crime later,” he said.