City Attorney’s Office Takes Heat on Costly Settlements

Amid dissatisfaction with the city attorney’s negotiations of costly settlements in lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department and alarm at the office’s procedural mishandling of one well-publicized case, city officials--including the mayor, the police chief and City Council members--are seeking dramatic changes in the way City Hall’s legal business is conducted.

While careful to avoid publicly criticizing City Atty. James K. Hahn or his staff, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks is working to win approval of a plan that would post a deputy city attorney or new sort of in-house counsel full time at Parker Center, the LAPD’s headquarters, to work exclusively on police matters. Police officials say Parks hopes the net effect would be legal counsel on which he and future chiefs could rely completely, particularly on issues of liability, discipline and personnel.

The chief’s proposal reflects, in part, a view widespread in Parker Center and, increasingly, at City Hall that the rising number of lawsuits against the police reflects the view of many civil lawyers that the city attorney’s office is a soft touch.

“The perception is that if you sue the LAPD, your chances of getting a settlement are better than winning the lottery,” said one top aide to a council member. “In the long run, that encourages frivolous and questionable lawsuits.”

Last week, Mayor Richard Riordan went even further than Parks, suggesting that a reformed City Charter should split the city attorney’s office in half, creating an elected prosecutor to handle misdemeanors, while giving the mayor’s office control over civil matters. The current charter, which was adopted in 1925, assigns the elected city attorney responsibility for both criminal and civil cases.

Meanwhile, some City Council members are calling for a new system of charging legal fees to the budgets of individual city departments in an effort to improve accountability. These members, frustrated by the increasing number of suits against the police, are particularly concerned about the high costs of settling cases in which internal investigations by the LAPD or Police Commission found the officers to have done nothing wrong.

The city attorney’s office, which employs 390 lawyers, is America’s largest municipal legal operation. If it were a private firm, it would rank among the nation’s top six. Despite their numbers, most of the lawyers carry huge caseloads, because the office handles about 250,000 misdemeanors each year and defends the city and its employees against about 2,000 civil suits.

Under the current charter, the council approves all settlements of more than $100,000. The chairman of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee signs off on settlements between $50,000 and $100,000, and those less than $50,000 are approved internally by the city attorney’s office.

The council’s responsibility for approving or rejecting the largest settlements has only heightened its unease with a series of cases recently presented to it by the city attorney. Among the most troubling to concerned lawmakers:

* The council in February agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a pair of lawsuits after learning that police did little to reprimand an officer who assaulted his estranged wife months before he killed her and her boyfriend. Council members said they felt compelled to settle the cases after being told that additional evidence at the upcoming trial would show that the LAPD had a practice of handling domestic violence cases involving officers within the department instead of referring the cases for criminal prosecution.

* The council in July agreed to pay $3.2 million and eliminate a controversial procedure of restraining violent suspects, settling two unrelated wrongful-death lawsuits. In one case, the council approved a $750,000 settlement with the family of a 25-year-old man who died after officers shackled his hands and feet together behind his back. In the other case, a $2.5-million settlement was agreed upon in the killing of a 27-year-old knife-wielding mother who was shot nine times--seven in the back--while her child watched.

* Last month, the city attorney missed a court deadline in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the family of a bank robber whom police fatally shot in February’s widely covered North Hollywood siege. That potentially costly mistake placed the city in jeopardy of default on the civil rights suit, but a federal judge Monday allowed it to proceed while admonishing the city attorney for missing the deadline.

“There are definitely times when I feel the city attorney’s office is working at a different vantage point than we are. They just want these things to go away,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who heads the council’s Public Safety Committee. “I think we have a generic dissatisfaction and frustration that the advice and guidance we get just seems to be ‘Settle and get out of it.’ ”

The city attorney’s office vigorously defends its legal work, pointing to a recent drop in the monetary total of settlements despite rising numbers of claims and lawsuits. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the city spent $9.85 million to settle suits against the Police Department. That amount is down from $26.4 million in the 1993-94 fiscal year.

The number of lawsuits and claims settled for less than $100,000 is climbing. In the 1994-95 fiscal year, for example, 488 suits and claims were settled for less than that sum. In 1996-97, the number has climbed to 523, of which 511 were settled by the city attorney for less than $50,000.

The numbers of claims and lawsuits filed against the LAPD are also rising. Last year, 795 claims and suits were filed, compared with 663 in 1994.

“The police litigation unit is a premier unit in our office,” said Tim McOsker, chief deputy city attorney. (Hahn declined to comment for this story, and his office referred calls to McOsker.) “We have excellent . . . attorneys who ethically and professionally want to do the best possible job to protect the city,” he said.

Regarding the missed deadline in the North Hollywood bank robbery case, the office conceded the mistake, calling it a technical error.

McOsker and others said settlements are typically reached when attorneys are close to going to trial. And although each case is evaluated individually, lawyers in the city attorney’s office say the potential mind-set of jurors typically is a large consideration.

For example, during the months after the Rodney King beating, juries were considered hostile to the LAPD. But after the North Hollywood bank robbery in which officers were held at bay for nearly an hour by two gunmen firing assault weapons, juries appeared more sympathetic to police.

“Even in those cases when we think the police did absolutely the right thing, we have to take the same facts and try to determine how a jury would react,” said Dan Woodard, the senior assistant city attorney in charge of the civil liability division. “It does appear to us that a jury’s state of mind . . . reflects the public’s feeling about police at any given time.”

But some city officials feel the city attorney simply has no incentive to take cases to court. They say the office’s attorneys aren’t responsible for the incident causing the claim or suit, so do not feel accountable for the costs of settlement.

“What lawyer wants to break his back, work 19 hours a day to go to trial--especially when he’s up against someone like Johnnie Cochran?” asked one City Hall insider who has worked closely with the city attorney’s office. “What incentive is there to go to trial? Absolutely none.”

But some lawyers who have successfully sued the city say settlements are neither easy to achieve nor inappropriate.

“Settlement in general is a good thing, not a bad thing,” said Los Angeles attorney Larry Feldman, who frequently represents plaintiffs in civil cases. “If you have two good lawyers who can evaluate the facts and understand what juries do, you should be able to both be in the same ballpark and resolve the cases. That’s true of divorce, personal injury and police cases.”

But top police officials as well as some council members argue that settling too many cases is not only encouraging a growing number of frivolous lawsuits against the LAPD, but also sending a chilling message to officers that following department rules may not protect them from censure.

“It’s demoralizing for a lot of officers,” said one high-ranking LAPD official who declined to be identified. “There’s a feeling that cases are being settled because city attorneys are lazy and/or incompetent.”

However, the increase in lawsuits comes as the LAPD is experiencing an upswing this year in the number of citizen complaints of police misconduct. Statistics through August show that the department has received about 530 complaints this year--nearly as many as it had for the entire previous year.

The surge comes as the LAPD moves toward a new policing style, aimed at reducing crime by using comprehensive statistics to pinpoint problem areas and better deploy resources. A similar style of policing has resulted in increased complaints in New York City.

Still, some top LAPD officials also have privately expressed concern about the general quality of legal representation the city attorney’s office provides.

During recent negotiations on the merger of the department and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s police, then-LAPD Chief Bayan Lewis openly criticized the assistant city attorney handling the matter when last-minute issues nearly derailed the proposal.

Lewis said he could “not rely” on the opinions he received from the assistant and asked Hahn to remove the attorney from all police matters.

Some top LAPD officials were even more critical, saying legal opinions from the city attorney’s office have been known to change seemingly overnight without explanation. “They’re notorious for flip-flopping,” said one high-ranking official. “There’s a feeling that if you get an opinion you don’t like one day, that you can just wait for a while, because it’s bound to change.”

To hear the mayor tell it, the problem with the city attorney’s office is structural. The City Charter requires that the top lawyer be elected, rather than appointed as the county counsel is. Moreover, by giving the City Council control over the higher settlements, the city departments being sued are completely out of the decision-making process. For example, the police typically are not consulted when attorneys decide whether to try or settle a suit against the LAPD.

In addition, by paying settlements out of the general city budget rather than the particular department’s, the agency heads have minimal accountability, mayoral aides say.

“The city attorney should not be considered in control of litigation,” said one member of Riordan’s staff. “You need a client in control--the Police Department, the Public Works Department.”

“Several people have suggested that one of the reasons the Police Department has so many lawsuits is because it doesn’t cost them anything,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “We have to do something, because right now it’s very difficult to point to a lawsuit that we’ve lost or settled and say, ‘I’m sure we’ve learned our lesson; we’re never going to do that again.’ There’s an absence of accountability.”

Not all council members agree, however. Councilman Mike Feuer, a lawyer, said that process could hurt departments if they were weighing staffing or other decisions against potentially costly litigation.

“What services are not going to be provided because of that accountability?” he said. “There are unintended consequences to charging back [legal fees] to these departments.” But, he said, “there is great danger for the city to appear to be a deep pocket.”