D.A.’s Office Gets High Marks, Plus Advice for Improvement

The county district attorney’s office is “doing a good job” of performing its basic functions of evaluating and prosecuting criminal cases, but there is much room for improvement, according to the first independent audit of the nation’s largest prosecutor’s office released Friday.

In some respects, the audit by Price Waterhouse gave Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s criminal prosecution operation high marks.

Garcetti has improved his staff’s jury trial felony conviction rate by 6% over the past three years to 89%, which is 11% higher than the national average, according to the study.

And his office has a “dynamic management staff which is continually considering alternative strategies and approaches” to the always-tough effort to prosecute criminals, auditors concluded in the 155-page report.

But the report included a raft of criticisms, which were couched in the bureaucratic language of management analysts as “opportunities to improve performance.”

Garcetti should hire more senior prosecutors to oversee juvenile cases and more paralegals to assist all prosecution teams, the audit recommended.

Garcetti also needs to come up with both a short-term and long-term strategic plan, it said. And he needs to improve his office’s oversight of its huge staff--including 980 prosecutors--to find out where the criminal prosecution effort is working well and where it needs to be improved and supplemented by additional staff.

“With the development of responsibility-linked performance measures, [the district attorney’s office] could more easily determine whether cases are being settled appropriately, where and why cases are being dismissed, and variances in policy application,” said the auditing firm, which was hired by the Board of Supervisors last year after its audit committee called for a review of Garcetti’s operation.

Without such data, the district attorney’s office “cannot easily diagnose the true cause of below average performance,” including why such branch offices as San Fernando, Van Nuys and Compton file fewer cases than other branches, the audit said.

Garcetti also needs to improve relationships with many law enforcement agencies, auditors said, to cut down on instances in which cases are rejected by judges or end in hung juries or acquittals.

And he should seriously consider splitting up the giant team of prosecutors based out of his headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and spreading them out around the county. Such “regionalization,” auditors said, “could bring the criminal justice system closer to particular communities, thus enhancing neighborhood accountability.”

Garcetti said he agreed with all of those recommendations. And he said the audit--despite its series of critiques and recommendations--confirmed that he is running a tight ship.

“We are effective despite facing the toughest caseload in the state [and] despite being woefully underfunded,” Garcetti said.

He said his budget is almost 60% less than the average California district attorney’s budget, and that taxpayers pay only $365 per filing, compared with the statewide average of $581.

He added that he was pleased that the audit recognized not only his office’s “strong and lean management team,” but its emphasis on improvement as well.

Garcetti said the audit confirms that he has responded to criticisms lodged recently by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. and the county grand jury, which said he needed to train his staff better and to hire additional victim-witness coordinators, case investigators and prosecutors in specialized units.

Garcetti said that every felony case already is reviewed by the head deputy in charge of each branch office or special unit.

But, he added, he agrees with the auditors’ recommendation that he construct a database so he and his top aides can review all of the cases to identify trends, patterns and problems.

Garcetti cautioned that such reforms will cost more than $4 million, which he doesn’t have in this year’s $280-million budget.