City Near Critical Choice as 4th Officer Faces Charges

Faced with decisions that could permanently change the way the Police Department is run, top Los Angeles officials are fast approaching an important crossroads: Whether to fight the U.S. Department of Justice in court over the management of the LAPD or to cut a deal that would require the city to implement a long list of reforms.

City and federal authorities have been meeting privately for weeks, and sources say the federal government has completed presenting its reform plan. That 103-page document covers major aspects of the LAPD’s management, oversight and discipline, according to participants in the talks, who are scheduled to meet again this week.

The talks this week represent a watershed moment in the negotiations. Up to this point, Justice Department lawyers have been laying out their case while city officials asked questions or tried to understand various provisions. Now, it’s up to the local team--made up of City Atty. James Hahn; Mayor Richard Riordan’s chief of staff, Kelly Martin; Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton; and Police Commission President Gerald Chaleff--to decide how to respond.

In its proposed decree, the federal government lays out the reforms that it wants the city to adopt or else face a lawsuit charging that the LAPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct. Although some observers have urged fighting that suit, most people involved in the talks--and many knowledgeable legal experts removed from them--believe the city would lose in court.

Among the highlights of that document, according to several people who have seen it:

* The Police Department would need to build and maintain a computerized officer-tracking system far beyond what it currently operates. The new system would track, not just officer discipline, but also such things as shootings, arrests, assignments, promotions and training recommendations.

* The Police Commission’s inspector general would receive broad orders and authority to conduct audits of the LAPD’s operations, discipline and other areas--duties that would probably require the city to beef up the inspector general’s staff. Under the proposal, the inspector general or his staff would also be expected to respond to the scene of police shootings.

* The Police Department’s Internal Affairs Group would be required to handle many of the more serious complaints currently investigated at the department’s local police stations. As with the inspector general, that obligation would almost certainly force the city to spend more money.

* The LAPD would be directed to gather information about the ethnicity of the people it stops for traffic violations and other offenses, material that later could be used to determine whether police disproportionately focus their efforts on minorities--a practice known as “racial profiling.”

* The city would have to agree to the appointment of an outside monitor who would report to a federal judge to ensure that the city government and the LAPD live up to the reforms demanded in the decree. This notion, in some ways, is the most controversial because it would shift the final say on some LAPD matters from the city government to a federal judge.

Although many specifics of such an agreement are still being discussed, in the end the choice for the local negotiating team is either to accept some version of the federal demands or to fight the matter in court.

Some have suggested just that. Top LAPD officials have argued that the city should not give in, and others, including some who have never seen the proposed reforms, have derided the federal proposal as a recipe for “takeover” of the LAPD.

That argument has gained some political traction as well, with businessman Steve Soboroff, an advisor to Riordan and candidate for mayor, using it to try to distinguish himself from the rest of the mayoral field.

“Anyone who has seen the federal government in action knows that a federal takeover of the Los Angeles Police Department would result in more bureaucracy, massive litigation costs and fewer officers on the street fighting crime,” Soboroff said last month in a publicly released letter to City Atty. Hahn, who is the city’s lead negotiator and also a candidate for mayor.

In response, Hahn called Soboroff’s letter disappointing and irresponsible, and accused his rival of trying to make personal gain out of the police crisis.

“Politics,” Hahn wrote, “has no place in an issue as important as resolving the Rampart crisis in LAPD.”

Some observers familiar with the Justice Department’s proposed order--and with the evidence the federal government has accumulated--argue that litigation would be costly, embarrassing and ultimately pointless. According to them and other experts, to prevail in court, the federal government would need to present only a handful of examples of officer misconduct. The Rampart case alone could supply dozens of such cases, and many other instances, from the clique of officers once known as Men Against Women to the year-after-year litany of police brutality allegations, provide fodder for more.

Once the government proved that rights were violated, it then would need only to demonstrate that deficiencies in LAPD management either allowed or fostered that misconduct--not that management collaborated or deliberately covered up abusive behavior.

Strengthening Internal Affairs

Many experts believe that would be an easy task for the Justice Department. In fact, the LAPD already has admitted as much in its Board of Inquiry report on the Rampart scandal and in the chief’s recent request for $9 million to beef up internal affairs.

“Had the department and the Rampart management team exercised more vigorous and coordinated oversight of area operations, and its CRASH [anti-gang] unit in particular, the crimes and misconduct that occurred may have been prevented, discouraged or discovered much earlier,” the department’s Board of Inquiry said, one of many such statements throughout that document.

Moreover, there are 61 pending federal lawsuits against the LAPD, and the plaintiffs in all of those argue that their civil rights were violated by LAPD officers. Although opinion is divided about whether a judge would agree, some legal experts believe that every one of those allegations could be joined with the federal case, creating a nightmarishly long and expensive lawsuit that many observers believe Los Angeles would lose.

Even if that did not occur, any lawsuit in which a plaintiff sued the LAPD in federal court and won would contain facts that might be admissible against the city in the current case.

All told, that leaves most observers convinced that, for the city, fighting the federal government in court would be a losing proposition.

“There’s no way the city is going to be able to deny pattern or practice,” USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky said. The city’s only hopes, if it were to fight in court, Chemerinsky added, would be either that the judge in the case impose a less stringent order than the Justice Department is seeking or that the lawsuit drag on into next year and that the next president would withdraw it.

Without exception, legal experts interviewed for this article dismissed the contention--advanced by Police Department brass and others--that a recent court victory by the city of Torrance over the Justice Department gives hope that Los Angeles might win, too. The Torrance case was an employment discrimination lawsuit with virtually no similarity to the allegations or legal challenges that Los Angeles would face.

That leaves Los Angeles officials faced with the question of haggling over what should be in an agreement here--and over what form that agreement should take.

Some of the federal government’s proposed provisions are sure to invite opposition from at least some members of the city’s negotiating team. Recommendations that the Police Commission assume a greater role--possibly in an advisory way--over LAPD discipline will undoubtedly draw the ire of Martin and Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy, who also participates in the sessions. Martin and Pomeroy work for the mayor and chief, respectively, and both those officials have strenuously argued that the chief needs to remain the final, unfettered authority over police discipline--a view also advanced by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who headed the 1991 commission that recommended many of the police reforms still being debated in Los Angeles.

Police Chief Bernard C. Parks in the past has also resisted calls for the LAPD to gather more information about the ethnicity of people stopped or arrested by police. Although participants in the talks say that issue has been put to the side for the moment, they expect the Justice Department to insist on some measures, setting up another point of potential conflict with the city negotiating team.

At the same time, both sides have given some indications of flexibility. One example cited by participants, for instance, involves the Justice Department’s initial insistence that the computerized officer-tracking system, known by the acronym TEAMS, include with each officer a list of every partner with whom that officer ever worked.

According to negotiators and others, the Justice Department’s intention was clear: to compile a record of relationships that might be telling if an officer someday landed in trouble. The problem with that is that the LAPD does not typically put two officers together as partners for months or years at a time. Often, officers are paired up at roll call, meaning that a single officer can work with scores, even hundreds, of other officers over the course of a career, some of them for just a shift or two.

As a result, the Justice Department’s suggestion would have been unwieldy and would not have produced the information it was seeking, city officials said. After conversations about those issues, the Justice Department team appears to have backed off that proposal, negotiators said.