Blame Extends Past LAPD

How did Los Angeles arrive at a point where its Police Department is embroiled in scandal? What path led to the false conviction and imprisonment of a man for three years, the suspension or dismissal of more than a dozen LAPD officers, serious doubt about other convictions, and a threat to L.A.’s primary antigang program?

The answers are multifold: First, the force’s internal checks and balances clearly failed. In addition to internal management failures, however, there were external management failures, and these are a result of years of timid oversight by past and present mayors, city attorneys and district attorneys, city councils and Police Commission members.

Yes, some of this mess predates Mayor Richard Riordan and other current elected officials, but they too bear some responsibility. All, to one extent or another, have been seduced by the political need to be seen as supportive of the police, which too often meant backing away from their duties of civilian oversight.

Not that there haven’t been attempts to maintain aggressive civilian oversight. Past police commissions intermittently tried, and largely failed, against past police chiefs over whom they had little legal and even less political control. In the 1970s, then-Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp created “roll-out” teams of prosecutors and investigators who would go to the scenes of officer-involved shootings to make their own inquiries. It was the kind of thing that might have thwarted the cover-up of a “bad” shooting.

But by the late 1980s, the roll-out teams had become a public relations tool. A deputy D.A. at the time said the teams primarily “bolster public confidence. It gives the police the position of being able to say, ‘It is under investigation by the district attorney’s office.’ ”

The present D.A., Gil Garcetti, scuttled the roll-out teams in 1996, claiming budget restraints. But members of the county Board of Supervisors have accused Garcetti of political motivations in getting rid of a program generally hated by police. The supervisors claim that Garcetti has always had the money to operate the roll-out teams.

The teams should be restored, but they must be given teeth. If the district attorney restores roll-out teams, the Police Commission should require police to call the teams to all officer-involved shootings.

Another impediment to strong civilian oversight is that California has a tighter rein than most states on any information about an officer that might give the press or others what they need to establish a pattern of inappropriate behavior. These laws were passed at the urging of law enforcement lobbies but also come from court decisions, charter changes and collective bargaining agreements with police unions.

The California Penal Code, the state Public Records Act, the state’s 23-year-old Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights and other laws, court rulings and union rules can prevent the dissemination of important information. For example, they can too broadly define information about an officer’s misconduct as confidential and thus inaccessible. Rather than protect good officers, these restrictions sometimes provide too much cover to the bad eggs.

LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks has promised the largest internal inquiry ever into every aspect of LAPD operations. That of course is crucial. But it’s important to remember that the Police Department didn’t dig this hole by itself. It had plenty of help from complacent folks in City Hall, the district attorney’s office and Sacramento who, as one politician admitted, “have for many years now been constantly competing to see who can be more ‘anticrime,’ more ‘pro-police’--at the expense of just about everything else.” At the expense, it seems in some of the cases now under investigation, of the U.S. Constitution.