For New District Attorney, Reality Check Begins Today

When Steve Cooley is sworn in today as Los Angeles County’s 36th district attorney, he will be in congenial surroundings: on a stage at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Fine Arts Complex, where he once was honored as alumnus of the year and where his daughter once danced in “The Nutcracker.”

After that, he will enter a world both familiar and foreign.

His new 18th-floor office in the downtown Criminal Courts Building is the seat of one of the most demanding and difficult public service jobs in America, one that ultimately conquered his immediate predecessors, Gil Garcetti and Ira Reiner.

Cooley, a 27-year veteran of the district attorney’s office who ousted Garcetti in the November election, has high hopes of changing the place in significant ways.

He has promised to issue a new policy on enforcing the three-strikes law in what he calls a more “proportional, evenhanded” way. He has said he will go after organized crime and political corruption, keep a closer eye on police misconduct, and be a fair and honest boss for his 3,700 employees, who include more than 1,000 lawyers--a restive, ambitious, prickly work force that can bedevil the most well-meaning of leaders.

It won’t be easy. Already, Cooley has been reminded that he is moving from the small stage of the Welfare Fraud Unit, where he has been head deputy for the last four years, to the big screen of the top job, where every move he makes--and many he doesn’t--will be scrutinized, dissected and commented upon.

“If I had a dollar for every rumor I’ve heard,” Cooley said last week in his transition office, “I could retire my campaign debt--which is substantial.”

Most of the rumors have swirled around the appointments Cooley will make to the executive staff of the office--17 positions that are exempt from Civil Service protection.

“He’s had to deal with rumors that he doesn’t like women lawyers or that he’s not friendly with lawyers of a certain racial or ethnic background,” said Larry Trapp, a former deputy district attorney who is coordinating the Garcetti-to-Cooley transition. “How these rumors start is a mystery to me, but I guess in an office as big and spread out as this one, it’s inevitable.”

Framework of Changes Cited

The usually affable Cooley has been tight-lipped about whom he plans to appoint to the top jobs--with one exception. Clearly intending to send a message to those who fear that he will usher in a traditional, white male administration, he has let slip that he will appoint Jacqueline Lacey, a well-regarded African American prosecutor, as director of the Bureau of Central Operations, one of the most important positions in the office.

She will be charged with revamping the Central Trials Division, perhaps best known as the unit that unsuccessfully prosecuted O.J. Simpson.

Cooley has said the division is structured in a way that makes it aloof from the communities it serves, and has called for it to be reconfigured along geographic lines so prosecutors become more familiar with the neighborhoods--and law enforcement agencies--from which cases arise.

The rest of the appointments will be announced Tuesday. Cooley has promised that they will reflect the diversity of Los Angeles County and will include only “a couple” of holdovers from Garcetti’s administration.

In a memo last week to his future staff, Cooley acknowledged the anxiety many are feeling and laid out some of the framework of changes he intends to make.

He said, as he has before, that he will split the Special Investigations Division, which prosecutes corruption, into two divisions, one to keep an eye on police misconduct, another to put a new emphasis on public corruption. He also said he will establish a new organized crime division.

Cooley issued a separate, earlier memo to prosecutors and defense lawyers outlining the first significant change he intends to make--one that has landed him in the first political battle of his tenure.

The memo, written on official stationery with Gil Garcetti’s name emblazoned across the top, described Cooley’s much-anticipated new policy on the three-strikes law.

Cooley has said that the law, which calls for prison terms of 25 years to life for three-time felons, needs “a dose of proportionality” and should not generally be used against defendants whose third crime is relatively minor and nonviolent.

With his memo, he circulated a draft proposal of his new policy, noting that California law allows the district attorney to “strike a strike”--in effect, ignore one of a defendant’s prior crimes--”in the interests of justice.”

Defense lawyers have complained that, under Garcetti, defendants were being sent to prison for 25 years to life for relatively minor crimes such as drug possession and shoplifting. Since Cooley’s victory, many defense attorneys have sought delays in potential three-strikes cases so their clients would be tried under Cooley’s rules, not Garcetti’s.

One public defender, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she couldn’t countenance her client’s going to trial until Cooley takes over. “I mean, how fair is that?” she asked Friday. “Today he’s looking at a maximum of 25 years to life. Monday, he’s looking at eight years.”

But Cooley’s memo prompted a surprise attack from California Secretary of State Bill Jones, who charged Wednesday that the prosecutor “has just placed a welcome mat for career criminals at Los Angeles County’s doorstep.”

The attack was especially odd, considering that Jones, like Cooley, is a Republican.

An angry Cooley shot back that Jones “need not worry that three-strike felons will be ‘let off the hook,’ ” and questioned why Jones hadn’t spoken up during the campaign, when the three-strikes policy was a major issue.

At least one veteran official in the prosecutor’s office wondered how big a difference Cooley would make in three-strikes enforcement. To begin with, she said, the differences between Garcetti and Cooley on three strikes were exaggerated during the campaign--”If Cooley said white, Garcetti said black; if Garcetti said white, Cooley said black.”

Garcetti’s three-strikes policy gave deputy district attorneys discretion to wipe away third strikes, but without the sort of guidelines Cooley proposes. That led to charges that the law was being interpreted unevenly from one courthouse to another. But that may be inevitable, the official said.

Assembling the Executive Staff

“I don’t think anything’s going to change, unless he has more control over the head deputies than any other D.A. I’ve ever seen,” she said, insisting that her name not be used.

Since the election, Cooley has spent most of his time assembling his executive staff, writing a speech for his swearing-in and getting briefed on matters of pressing importance, most significantly the status of cases against police officers in the Rampart anti-gang CRASH unit.

Three Rampart officers were convicted last month of framing gang members in the first case against allegedly corrupt cops in the unit. During the campaign, Cooley was highly critical of Garcetti’s handling of the scandal, although he pointedly avoided criticizing the prosecution of the three officers.

“I think one of the most important things he’s going to have to deal with is the fallout from the Rampart situation and the relationship between his office and the Los Angeles Police Department,” said George Cardona, a former prosecutor who teaches criminal procedure at UCLA Law School.

Cooley, he said, will have to walk a tightrope between healing the office’s strained relations with the LAPD and demonstrating to the public that he won’t tolerate police misconduct. If Cooley handles it well, Cardona said, police should welcome a tough but cooperative attitude from the district attorney.

“I think it will be very important for the D.A.’s office to quickly convey the message that, ‘Look, we work with you, but at the same time, when and if officers step over the line, we are not going to coddle them.’ . . . I think as long as everybody knows that, that will be a major step forward,” Cardona said.

Since the election, Cooley and Garcetti have spoken just twice--once when Garcetti conceded defeat, the second time when they passed each other in a hallway. But although the two have kept at arm’s length, Cooley and his top aides praised Garcetti for cooperating in the transition.

“He has clearly directed his senior staff to effectuate a smooth transition, and that’s exactly what’s happening,” Cooley said.

Cooley was the leader of an angry, insurgent group of prosecutors who had been harshly critical of Garcetti for years. At the same time, Garcetti had a core of strong support in the office, reflected in the hundreds of people who turned out for an emotional farewell reception Thursday.

“I’ll tell you something,” said one Garcetti loyalist, Deputy Dist. Atty. Danette Meyers, “there were deputy D.A.s in tears. . . . He was our boss for eight years, and he did so much for all of us.”

Meyers, who is in charge of the Bellflower office, said she is keeping an open mind about Cooley and will be watching carefully to see if he carries out his promises about diversity in hiring and promotion, something Garcetti has been widely praised for doing.

Ultimately, she said, she intends to do what most people in the office say they’ll do: Go to work, do her job and hope for the best.