LAPD to Keep Rules on Dealing With Immigrants

The Los Angeles Police Commission and top LAPD officials decided Tuesday not to revise a 17-year-old city policy restricting police officers from quizzing certain suspects about their residency status.

The civilian panel and agency brass agreed with several minority and activist groups that a change in the policy would severely hamper the department’s community policing efforts and make some members of minority groups fearful of working with police to report and prevent crime.

“It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40,” said interim Police Chief Bayan Lewis, referring to the policy enacted in late 1979.

The City Council’s Public Safety Committee asked the department to determine whether changes in the policy would help the Los Angeles Police Department combat street gang crime. The committee’s action came in response to a Times series on the 18th Street gang--the region’s largest and most widely dispersed. According to law enforcement authorities, many of the gang’s members are undocumented immigrants.

After a six-month review of the matter, department officials concluded that any policy change would be unwise.

“Any broadening of the [policy] gets us into the immigration business. It’s a federal law enforcement issue, not a local law enforcement issue,” Deputy Chief John D. White told the commissioners.

Under the city’s policy, LAPD officers are prevented from initiating police action with the objective of discovering a person’s immigration status. They also are restricted from checking with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and barred from turning in suspects accused of minor violations to INS officials.

Officers can notify the INS when they have booked an undocumented immigrant on suspicion of felonies, multiple misdemeanors or a “high-grade” misdemeanor.

The policy was established at a time when the LAPD was under fire for its handling of illegal immigrants.

On Tuesday, two speakers at a public hearing called for changes that would allow police to aggressively pursue and arrest illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. Several community groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Hispanic Advisory Council for the LAPD, urged the Police Commission not to revise the policy.

“If officers were required to question victims and witnesses about their immigration status, vital cooperation with police investigations would disappear,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, in a letter to the commission. “Immigrants, already disproportionately the target of crime, would become easy prey for criminals who knew the victims would not report offenses to the police for fear of being deported.”

Lewis agreed, saying any changes would undermine the department’s progress in community policing.