Report Clears Officers in Northridge Shootout

The Los Angeles Police Commission and Chief Bernard C. Parks on Tuesday concluded that officers from an elite undercover squad acted “in policy” during a shootout with four robbery suspects following the holdup of a Northridge bar.

In a report to the civilian commission, Parks disclosed that prior to the shooting that night, officers attempted to get the district attorney to file robbery charges against a couple of the suspects for a previous holdup, but a prosecutor declined.

Parks said the prosecutor rejected the case because of a belief that the victim’s identification of the suspects would not withstand cross-examination. The victim, police records show, was able to positively identify the suspects, despite the fact that the suspects were wearing stocking masks during the crime.

No spokesperson for the district attorney could be reached late Tuesday.

In the February 1997 incident, officers from the department’s Special Investigations Section shot and killed three of the four robbery suspects they chased into a Northridge neighborhood after the armed holdup of about 20 patrons and employees at The ClassRoom bar.

Following the shootout, a resident of the neighborhood was mistaken for a fleeing robber, and wounded in the leg by police. Officers said the man was trying to hide behind a bush in the neighborhood, and when officers approached, he ran, ignored orders to stop and reached into his waistband as if for a gun.

The man, who was not armed, has since sued the LAPD and the special investigations unit. The case is pending in federal court.

The 16-page report traced the investigation, beginning with an outbreak of takeover robberies of bars and fast food restaurants in January 1997. By mid-January, the detectives were regularly following a suspect who had been arrested earlier in connection with a robbery in Gardena, the report said. At times, detectives tracked the man and his associates for up to eight hours a night.

On the day of the holdup, the group of robbery suspects repeatedly stopped at businesses, approached the front door, then returned to their cars and drove away, leaving the shadowing detectives to scramble to resume the surveillance.

They did the same thing at The ClassRoom, the report said. “Consequently, the SIS investigation units, believing the suspects were going to leave, began to redeploy in anticipation of the surveillance going mobile,” the report said.

Instead, the robbers suddenly turned back into the bar and held up the patrons, the report said, ran out the rear door and sped off as one detective ran into the bar to confirm that it had indeed been robbed.

The detectives, trailing the getaway vehicle in several cars, opted to move in when the suspects turned into a cul-de-sac, the report said, and opened fire when one of the robbers leaned out a rear window of the getaway car and pointed a pistol at them. A .45-caliber revolver was later retrieved from the man, with one cartridge fired, the report said.

The report concluded that the detectives had followed department policies in regard to tactics, drawing their weapons and opening fire.

“Although department policy generally prohibits shooting from or at a moving vehicle,” Chief Parks commented in the report, “I find this instance an exception. I have determined that the detectives acted appropriately in the immediate defense of life.”

One officer was ordered to take additional training because one of the shotgun shells he fired contained birdshot--used in training but insufficiently lethal for use in gunfights. The shell had apparently been “inadvertently mixed in” with the more destructive buckshot rounds he was supposed to use, the report said.