Sheriff Baca’s Bold Move to Keep His Deputies Accountable

If a time capsule could contain only three items symbolizing the Los Angeles Police Department over the past five years, the choices would be easy: the 3,242 pages of Officer Rafael Perez’s transcribed interviews with investigators, which sparked the worst police scandal in the modern-day history of Los Angeles; the unspent $162,492 that the Justice Department earmarked in 1998 for the LAPD to establish a computerized tracking system to monitor officer misconduct; and Chief Bernard C. Parks’ inquiry into the Rampart scandal, which died stillborn because it did not focus on the fundamental problems plaguing the entire department. All represent the LAPD’s utter unwillingness to reform itself, or to yield to meaningful civilian oversight.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, by contrast, has been inching forward, often haltingly, on the road to reform. Last week, it reached a milestone when Sheriff Lee Baca announced his plan for civilian oversight of the department’s investigations of police abuse and officer misconduct. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky rightly called the proposal an “unprecedented [leap] in the history of law enforcement.” Yaroslavsky’s enthusiasm has a historical context.

Because the Sheriff’s Department has never billed itself as God’s gift to policing, and has seldom been publicly combative, it has never generated the kind of criticism that the LAPD has. Yet, over the past 20 years, it has been guilty of the same sins as the LAPD.

From the mid-1980s to the early ‘90s, to cite a few examples, 18 narcotics deputies were indicted for stealing drug money and dealing in drugs seized in raids. Meanwhile, about 60 deputy sheriffs in the department’s former Lynwood station were allegedly involved in a neo-Nazi group known as the Vikings. At about the same time, a class-action lawsuit was filed against scores of Lynwood deputies, alleging that they had systematically engaged in a campaign of “shooting, killing, brutality, terrorism, house-trashing and other acts of vandalism.” This prompted federal Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. to order, in 1991, that all future complaints of excessive force against the department be submitted for his review. (The order was struck down in 1992 by a federal appeals court.) Meanwhile, county jails were frequently plagued by race riots, and abuse of inmates by guards and other inmates was endemic.

By late 1991, it was undeniable that something was radically wrong with the Sheriff’s Department. To discover why, the Board of Supervisors appointed an investigative panel headed by retired Superior Court Judge James G. Kolts. The result was a withering report chronicling the department’s failure of leadership, breakdown of discipline and brutal style of policing, particularly in African American and Latino communities. Soon after, attorney and police-reform specialist Merrick J. Bobb was hired to monitor the department and produce semiannual reports on its performance. Since then, Bobb has issued a dozen highly detailed, often critical reports of department misconduct.

Neither the Kolts commission’s recommendations nor Bobb’s reports produced any miracles. By 1999, the results were mixed, at best. Jails remained poorly maintained, and unarmed people were still being shot and abused. But the amount of money paid out to settle police-abuse lawsuits had declined, a computerized tracking system monitoring officer misconduct and abuse was in place, and the number of civilian complaints had dropped.

Results are what count most, of course. But the precedents of unconditional civilian-investigative access to the department and the public airing of often highly critical conclusions that have been embedded in Bobb’s reports also seem to have shaped the proposal the sheriff unveiled last week. Baca has accepted the principle of public scrutiny developed by Bobb and taken it to a far higher level. In finalizing his plan, the sheriff, in a gesture extraordinary in and of itself for L.A. law enforcement, consulted with representatives of about 10 civil rights organizations, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and gay and lesbian groups.

At the heart of Baca’s plan is an Office of Independent Review (OIR), to be headed by a civil rights attorney who would be in charge of both the department’s Internal Criminal and Internal Affairs offices. The attorney would have complete control of the investigative process, from bottom to top, through five assistant attorneys, two of whom would supervise the captains who would run the two offices on a daily basis. The other three attorneys would roll out with Sheriff’s Department investigators to officer-involved shootings and other scenes where excessive force may have been used. The investigator reports would then be examined by the attorney heading OIR.

“The difference between our new system and traditional investigations of peace officers,” says Baca, “is that the eyes of these investigations are not just law-enforcement eyes, they are also the eyes of attorneys who are familiar with the law and the need for us to ensure that the law is respected, and who believe that when [deputies] violate the law, we should do the appropriate thing. So the Office of Independent Review will see everything and manage everything--that’s a key word. Then it will make recommendations back to my office [concerning which officers should be disciplined or prosecuted.]

“If the [county] supervisors are unhappy with any of our investigations, they can refer them to a panel of retired judges, who will reexamine the investigation from their point of view. So we’ll have two sets of legally trained minds who are not culturally bounded by law-enforcement thinking, looking at facts and only facts. We in law enforcement have an obligation to tell the truth as it is. But the public doesn’t trust us, because policing has been such a secret world.”

Baca’s plan for operational civilian oversight goes beyond San Francisco’s system, one of the most progressive in the country. There, the Police Commission’s Office of Citizen Complaints, which is completely independent of the San Francisco Police Department, uses its own trained civilian investigators to examine complaints against officers. Under Baca’s proposal, civilians would be supervising the ground-level initial investigations and signing off on them, a truly radical departure.

There are potential pitfalls: a sheriff who defends his troops right or wrong; attorneys who, despite their civil rights backgrounds, might get co-opted by the cops they work with. But at this point, these are only what ifs.

All who have been critical of law enforcement in Los Angeles should applaud Baca for his courage, vision and willingness to lift the veil of secrecy that shrouds much of policing. Then they should closely scrutinize how his plan is carried out. Chief Parks, take note. *