U.S. Begins Rampart Civil Rights Inquiry

Concerned about civil rights violations arising from the Police Department’s Rampart Division corruption scandal, high-ranking U.S. Justice Department officials flew to Los Angeles Sunday to meet today with LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks and other top city leaders.

Bill Lann Lee--the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington, D.C.--wants to find out why the LAPD has not implemented some long-anticipated changes and to learn how the department plans to move forward on other key reforms, according to a government official familiar with the federal probe of alleged civil rights abuses by Los Angeles police officers.

Over the next two days, Lee and a top aide, Steven Rosenbaum, who oversees the Justice Department’s inquiry into LAPD’s conduct, will meet with Parks, civilian police commissioners and City Atty. James K. Hahn.

“We’re going out there to talk to them and find out where they are in all of this,” said the government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The high-level meetings are intended to be substantive and symbolic, signaling the Justice Department’s desire to take its investigation of the LAPD to a new level. Lee and Rosenbaum have been following developments in the ongoing corruption investigation, but waited until after the LAPD released its 362-page analysis of the scandal before flying out to meet with the chief and other city leaders.

Since 1996, Justice Department officials have been monitoring the LAPD to determine whether incidents involving excessive force fall into any recognizable pattern. The purpose of such “pattern and practice” reviews, authorized by federal law in 1994, is to ensure proper management and oversight at police departments and, if needed, to bring federal lawsuits to pressure local authorities into cleaning up their operations.

In Pittsburg, the Justice Department and the city agreed on a set of reforms intended to curtail corruption and abuse by police officers. Among the reforms that city adopted was the creation of an officer tracking system, similar to a long-stalled project in Los Angeles.

At the LAPD, the recent allegations that Rampart Division officers were involved in beatings, unjustified shootings, false arrests, evidence plantings and perjury go well beyond the issues the federal government previously was examining.

The Rampart scandal “is being taken seriously and we’re interested in seeing that this investigation stays on the right track,” said one U.S. government official, who declined to be identified.

In addition to the probe by Justice Department’s civil rights division, federal authorities have stepped up their involvement in a criminal investigation of alleged police crimes and abuses. While the criminal investigation is looking at crimes allegedly committed by individual officers, the civil probe takes a broader approach, examining cultural and systemic issues at the department that may allow civil rights violations to occur.

One topic Lee is expected to discuss with city officials is why $162,492 of federal money set aside two years ago to help the LAPD track the performance of its police officers, still sits in a bank account, unspent by the city. Los Angeles’ failure to spend the money was reported Sunday in The Times.

City and police officials have cited a litany of bureaucratic failures that has left the money untouched and the key reform unfulfilled.

Federal officials also are interested in what plans the LAPD has to implement the more than 100 recommendation that Parks has called for in his department’s Board of Inquiry report on the Rampart scandal. Specifically, the Justice Department is focused on reforms that seek to enhance the supervision of police officers, one source said.

A focus on supervision and management is typical of such “pattern and practices” reviews by the federal authorities.

Another area of inquiry is expected to be the status of police reforms which were proposed by the Christopher Commission after the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King. Although police officials more than 1 1/2 years ago declared that most of those reforms had been completed, the Rampart corruption scandal appears to call that assertion into question.

City officials said they are taking the meetings with the Justice Department authorities seriously.

“It’s their meeting, they’re calling it, and we’ll be there,” said Cmdr. David J. Kalish, the LAPD’s spokesman.

“This visit reinforces the Police Commission’s belief that it must move ahead with as wide-ranging an inquiry [into Rampart] as possible,” said Commission President Gerald L. Chaleff.

He noted that the commission embarked on a massive analysis of the corruption and the status of police reforms last week. As part of that examination, the commission is holding a series of public hearings starting Tuesday.

“Ultimately, what is at stake here, is future of civilian oversight and local control” of LAPD, Chaleff said.

Though it has been done only in rare cases, the Justice Department has the power to go to court and force a local police agencies to accept an outside monitor, implement reforms or turn over police records.

When the Justice Department first started its civil rights probe in 1996, former Chief Willie L. Williams was in office and the police commission was headed by lawyer Raymond Fisher, a well-regarded police reformer, who later went on to work for the Justice Department. In that period, federal investigators promptly received documents relating to excessive force complaints and other matters. Additional requests in 1998, since Parks has been chief and Edith Perez was the acting commission president, were not responded to in such timely manner, officials said.

“We got a quicker response to our first request,” said one government official familiar with the federal civil rights investigation. “Whether that was because of the people who were in charge, I can’t say.”

Many police reformers consider Parks to be resistant to strong civilian oversight. In fact, some of the reforms Parks has recommended in response to the corruption scandal have been to increase the authority of his office. The chief and the commission also have sought to fend off the creation of an independent panel, similar to the Christopher Commission, to investigate the Rampart scandal.

Times staff writer Jim Newton contributed to this story.