Cooley: ‘Look at the Pattern’ to Detect Corruption

STEVE COOLEY, 52, is one of three candidates for Los Angeles County district attorney. During his 26 years as a deputy district attorney, Cooley ran the office’s Antelope Valley and San Fernando branches, founded the major narcotics unit and now heads the welfare fraud division. He was interviewed by Times staff writers Molly Selvin, Peter Y. Hong and Tim Rutten.

Question: Crime is down. Rampart scandal aside, why do we need a new district attorney?

Answer: Corruption is definitely up and faith in the justice system is definitely down.

Q: Why do you think corruption is up, aside from the Rampart scandal?

A: I think corruption’s up because the only institutions or entities that apparently have played any serious role in exposing corruption are the free press in this area, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News, the L.A. Weekly and some of the other publications. The district attorney’s office has done very little in terms of prosecutorial oversight over official public corruption. There was corruption in Belmont; [Dist. Atty. Gil] Garcetti apparently has done nothing. There is clearly corruption relative to misconduct in the Rampart Division, and I think that Mr. Garcetti’s approach there has failed.

Q: Why? What would you do?

A: In The Times recently, it was suggested in a front-page story that as many as 3,000 cases may be affected by officers under suspicion in connection with the Rampart scandal. What Mr. Garcetti has not done is come up with any kind of a comprehensive plan where those cases can be looked at in a very accurate, immediate way. The district attorneys who handle those cases should take each case file and open it up to the defense attorney who was involved in that case. The defense attorney could then evaluate the file, what their client told them, what other information they developed and they could resolve in their mind whether a writ of habeas corpus should be taken by them on behalf of their client. Mr. Garcetti has it all upside-down. The only writs that were initiated, and there’s only a handful, have been initiated by his prosecutors. And that’s fine and dandy to pose as the savior, but that’s not his job.

Q: Why do you think he does it?

A: I think he wants to control it, micro-manage it. I firmly suggest that he will try and position himself as the savior of Rampart, and, quite frankly, the opposite is true. I think he is part of the reason we have the Rampart situation.

Q: The office twice in recent years has found itself complicit in organized perjury conspiracies, first in the case of the jailhouse informants and now in Rampart. What is it about the culture of Garcetti’s office that appears to make it susceptible to this? And why so few prosecutions coming out of that?

A: The chief prosecutor, the D.A., has to set the tone of independence from law enforcement. His or her deputies have to have this sense of independence. There is no mechanism in place that I am aware of, a clear mechanism for deputy D.A.’s, when they detect apparent police perjury, to handle that. Evidence of that was the [Ubaldo] Gutierrez case from about 27 months ago. A deputy D.A. apparently got documentation establishing that [disgraced former LAPD Officer] Rafael Perez had lied during the course of testimony in trial and memorialized [this information] in a memo [to his superiors in the district attorney’s office] but it never went anyplace.

Now the jailhouse informant scandal: Jailhouse informants are effective at manipulating deputy D.A.’s and justice personnel. I think the prosecutors and police wanted this evidence of someone’s guilt and therefore didn’t scrutinize it the way they should. Then clever people like Leslie White [a jailhouse informant who sparked a scandal by proving that he could concoct a believable murder confession from someone he had never met] were able to manipulate them.

Q: So what procedures would you put in place?

A: Well obviously “roll-out” [a program that Garcetti recently reinstated after discontinuing it in 1996, in which deputy D.A.’s automatically investigate police shootings] is now coming back on-line, that the Board of Supervisors demanded to come back on-line. I’m not so sure that the program as they are currently implementing it is the best it can be. Mr. Garcetti canceled it after 10 or 11 years, right before an election. I don’t know a reason given other than for budgetary reasons, which is a false reason. There should have been analysis in terms of: What were its good points? What were its bad points? What can be done to improve it? I am not so sure having a lawyer out there enhances that program. My sense is it’s better to have the investigators out there performing different tasks.

Officer-involved shootings by and large are justified. The lawyer [who] ultimately decides what should happen, in terms of evaluating those cases and rendering an opinion, should do so in an independent way, after reading reports from an appropriate investigative staff.

I do know that the final evaluation decision by the prosecutor regarding a particular officer-involved shooting in some major cases is not made for 15 or 16 months after the incident. Now, the problem of waiting is: One, the public doesn’t get their assurance in a timely manner that the shooting was valid. Two, the officer, his partner, his spouse, his family, are all on tenterhooks, awaiting the D.A.’s decision. This decision should be made in 90 days, absent some extraordinary circumstance. And that decision should be double-checked by at least one other person who can see the big picture. That person might be able to detect patterns, and patterns become corruption. You always look at the pattern. It can happen once, well maybe an anomaly. It happens twice, three times or seeing this with the same language, the same sort of situation, the same complaints from a defense attorney or perhaps the defendant, then you see a pattern and you can zero in on it.

Q: Is the office rigorous enough about holding the police and other law enforcement agencies to a standard of truthfulness in these criminal cases?

A: Well, it’s a whole area of conduct. But testifying honestly, writing honest and accurate reports is part of that. What I intend to do as the D.A. is to have a separate police conduct review division charged with overseeing police conduct and investigating allegations of police misconduct.

Q: You’ve talked about changing the policy on three strikes, toward focusing for third strikes on serious and violent felonies. Why do you think that change is needed in Los Angeles County?

A: The whole determinate sentence law was a structure to bring about an appropriate punishment, based on certain factors related to the defendant or the crime. You get additional time for prior criminal history. If there are other factors or enhancements, those can be added on to bring about additional imposition of time. It’s sort of a mathematical scheme, but the whole goal is to take relative factors and have them end up in a sentence and hopefully everyone is treated in an even-handed manner. The three-strikes law is an area that needs a heavy dose of proportionality. If a new crime is a serious or violent one, and it’s been committed by a person who has two or more serious or violent felonies in his or her background, we’re looking at 25-to-life in most cases. [But] if the new offense is not a serious or violent felony, as a general rule, the presumption should be they should be treated as not a 25-to-life candidate, but as something less.

Having someone go off to prison for a small petty theft, for a small possession of drugs or narcotics, 25-to-life is, in virtually all cases, wholly disproportionate and I think would breed a certain amount of cynicism among certain groups. And they become even more cynical when they see relatives of major campaign contributors committing really serious offenses who have two or more prior strikes, getting minimal sentences. I’m talking very specifically about the Brian John McMorrow case [in which the grandson of a Garcetti contributor received a 16-month prison term in a case that could have cost him life in prison]. Mr. Garcetti should be absolutely ashamed of his conduct; it defies his position that he’s tough on crime. He’s tough on crime as long as it doesn’t have an adverse effect on one of his campaign contributors’ relatives.

Q: What do you think some of top management issues are within the department? There seemed to be some morale problems.

A: I think the morale problems all stem from an embarrassment over Mr. Garcetti because of his shenanigans in terms of doing favors for campaign contributors. I’m talking about Lockheed Martin, nearly $20,000 in donations two weeks before he’s supposed to recommend a contract enhancement. I mean give me a break, that was essentially a political shakedown. The [Brian Patrick] Ballou case [a reputed gang member with a politically connected father who received back-to-back lenient plea bargains on gun and drug charges], the McMorrow case, the [Robert] Rosenkrantz case [in which the district attorney’s office did not oppose parole for a convicted murderer who used an assault weapon and whose father is a prominent Calabasas attorney]. We have a D.A. who really has put the office up for sale in many different ways--Guess jeans, given them some sort of special advantage on their trademark cases after they’d given $220,000 in campaign donations.

Q: Were there anecdotal reports of increasing problems with juries, particularly downtown juries?

A: The downtown jury trial conviction rate has never been exceptionally high compared to the branches. I think that the downtown organization is very poor in terms of the deputies presenting the best case they can. They’re getting way too many cases on the last day, and they’re not well-prepared, and this reflects on how they appear before the juries. You throw in general doubt about law enforcement officers because of things like the Rampart scandal, you’re going to be up against it.

My plan is very simple and straightforward. And I think it’ll bring accountability back to this huge bureaucracy. There are three trial teams down there that service general trial courts on three floors. I would take those trial teams and structure them like a branch, make them accountable to a certain part of this central city and say, these are the people you’re going to serve. You’re going to take care of the people in Rampart, Wilshire and Northeast. So let’s say there’s a particular problem in that area, a drug problem, a drug sales problem, then you can focus your attention and work with law enforcement. Decentralization and regionalization have a real benefit by building more accountability rather than this faceless, nameless, bureaucracy like in the Ballou case, which your paper did a story on. Fourteen deputy D.A.’s touched the case; it should have been resolved with one deputy D.A. making a decision before it got to the final stage. It was craziness. The other benefit, if there is a problem like certain police officers engaging in a pattern of, say, suspect conduct, it might be detected by deputy D.A.’s who are exposed to it over time.

Q: Can you talk a little about Belmont Learning Center? Why has there been no action by the D.A.’s office on that situation, and what do you think should happen?

A: What should have happened a long time ago is when there was enough documentation of the possibility of collusion or corruption at the initial contracting and purchase stage and other indications of environmental violations, Mr. Garcetti should have put together a task force of at least two deputy D.A.’s--one familiar with the unique environmental laws and one who has the ability to deal with corruption-type issues. By having a team assigned to it, you might start getting informants or witnesses to come forward. I think Mr. Garcetti has delayed this so long that the statute of limitations is going to run on virtually all of the criminal conduct if any, and probably nothing can be done. I think we’ve got to find out, was this just incredible bureaucratic incompetence, gross negligence of the first order or was there criminal activity, self-dealing and conflicts of interest and collusion so that certain people can make a lot of money at the expense of the children of LAUSD.

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Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti faces two challengers--Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley and attorney Barry Groveman--in the March 7 primary election. Reporters and editors for The Times interviewed the candidates in recent weeks. This is the first of the three question-and-answer sessions.

Thursday: Groveman.

Friday: Garcetti.