U.S. Low Profile in Big-City Police Probes Is Under Fire

The struggling steel town of Steubenville, Ohio, has 49 officers on its police force--barely enough to fill the typical roll-call room at a Los Angeles police station.

So City Manager Gary Dufour can only laugh in amazement when he sees how aggressively the U.S. Justice Department has moved to root out police misconduct in his town--imposing new training, among other measures--while corruption in faraway places seems to go unchecked.

“We’re an awfully small community. You see all these problems that have come up at the police departments in Los Angeles and New York and New Orleans,” he said, “and you’ve got to wonder, why us?”

Indeed, while federal officials in the last few days have stepped up their four-year inquiry into broad patterns of misconduct at the Los Angeles Police Department, critics are left to wonder how the Justice Department missed warning signals leading up to the worst corruption scandal in LAPD history. And they question whether federal authorities have the resources--or the will--to move aggressively now in cleaning up the embattled force.

Political and legal pressure on the Justice Department is mounting. Federal attorneys in Ohio this week had to answer charges that their efforts to “control the everyday affairs” of local police departments is an affront to federalism. And a House committee approved an amendment last week to an appropriations bill criticizing the Justice Department for moving too slowly in its civil investigation of the LAPD.

“With new revelations unfolding daily about LAPD misconduct, the citizens of Los Angeles cannot wait any longer for this four-year investigation to conclude,” said Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles), a co-sponsor of the amendment.

The Justice Department, employing a 1994 law that grew out of the Rodney G. King beating, has used court orders and the threat of lawsuits to uncover patterns of police abuses in such smaller communities as Steubenville and Columbus, Ohio, and in Pittsburgh.

But it has taken a more cautious approach in monitoring police departments in such places as Los Angeles and New York City, a stance that critics say reflects the political clout of those cities.

The Justice Department’s civil review in Los Angeles, a low-profile inquiry that started in 1996, “has been either nonexistent or so fatally flawed as to be meaningless,” said Stephen Yagman, a prominent Southland civil attorney.

In general, said Michael Selmi, a George Washington University law professor here who has studied civil rights enforcement, “it doesn’t seem like [Justice Department officials] have a very strategic approach--they simply react to cases that are brought to them and they react very cautiously.” At larger police departments, in particular, involving cases that can be time-consuming, “the incentive may not be there to push these cases.”

The civil reviews offer the Justice Department a relatively new weapon in trying to ferret out the use of excessive force, racial profiling and other broad patterns of misconduct at local police departments.

Individual cases of misconduct by police who may have crossed the line, such as in the Rampart scandal in Los Angeles or the shooting death of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo in New York City, are still investigated as criminal matters by FBI agents and federal prosecutors, who determine if federal charges are warranted. The new head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, James V. DeSarno Jr., also investigated police misconduct issues in New Orleans.

But operating on a separate track, civil rights attorneys can now investigate entire departments for evidence of a “pattern or practice” of misconduct in which lapses in training, supervision or other areas may lead to a culture of constitutional abuses.

“We look for systemic problems,” said Steven Rosenbaum, who oversees “pattern or practice” investigations at the Justice Department’s civil rights division and met with officials in Los Angeles this week to step up the federal inquiry there. “We try to differentiate between what looks like an isolated incident and something that may be indicative of a broader problem.”

Justice Department officials have no power to subpoena documents as part of their civil police reviews, often making them dependent on the departments they are investigating for cooperation. Sources said that has stymied federal authorities in the LAPD inquiry because department officials, particularly during Chief Bernard C. Parks’ tenure, have been slow to turn over requested records.

Vic Walczak, head of the American Civil Liberties Union in Pittsburgh and a key participant in litigation that led to a Justice Department settlement with the police department there, said that he thinks the large number of cases in big-city police departments may have prevented federal officials from moving more aggressively.

“As I read accounts of what’s happening with police in L.A. or New York, it seems to me that the pathology is the same as we had in Pittsburgh, and that’s defective management--cops not being monitored,” he said.

“The magnitude of the problem is just much greater in Los Angeles, and I don’t think [civil rights officials at the Justice Department] have the resources to get their hands around the problem,” Walczak said.

But the unit that investigates such cases is now significantly expanding its staffing and budget, and Rosenbaum said that the size of a case has never been a deterrent. “We’ve taken investigations where they need to be taken. . . . Bigger departments require more work, but we’ve got [the investigations] open.”

The Justice Department’s hammer in Los Angeles and elsewhere is the threat of civil action: bringing suit in federal court to impose reforms on a police department and, in extreme cases, to stop federal funding. Such measures can force institutional reforms in a way that prosecuting individual officers may not, federal officials said.

But litigation has been rare.

Rosenbaum said that his unit has investigated about 20 police departments around the country because of alleged patterns of misconduct by officers. Pending cases include police departments in Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans and Washington, D.C., along with the Riverside Police Department in the wake of a 1998 shooting death of a black teenager in her car.

But the department has initiated legal action in only four cases. It reached settlements imposing reforms on police in Steubenville, Pittsburgh and the state of New Jersey, where highway troopers were accused of singling out minorities in traffic stops. In the fourth case, the Justice Department reached a settlement with the city of Columbus, but the local police union objected to the terms, throwing the matter into litigation.

The Columbus case could pose thorny legal issues for the Justice Department, with the city and the police union charging last month that the federal government has overstepped its authority.

The federal government’s complaint against Columbus last October charges the city with tolerating misconduct on the force and failing to train its officers properly, but it offers no specific instances of abuse.

“Yes, we’ve got some isolated cases [of police misconduct], but nothing where we’ve got officers sitting in jail for lying or anything. There were no Rodney Kings here,” said Bill Capretta, head of the local police union.

“They’ve basically come in here and tried to intimidate us” by threatening to pull federal funds, Capretta said.

About 120 miles away in Steubenville, Dufour remembers a similar feeling of helplessness when federal attorneys began combing police records several years ago over allegations of wrongful searches and other police excesses.

He’s not sure there was any pattern of wrongdoing, but the city agreed to the government’s settlement offer anyway, including the appointment of an outside auditor. In a small community still ravaged economically by the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs, “even if we thought we could prevail, it wouldn’t be worth the struggle,” he said.

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Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this story.