Rampart’s Rising Costs

The taxpayer costs and adverse effects of the worst corruption scandal in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department now extend well beyond the city’s residents. They provide further proof of the need for close cooperation on a negotiated settlement with the Justice Department regarding a variety of police reforms and on an extended period of outside scrutiny of the department. The costs also provide more staggering evidence (as if area residents needed that) of why such widespread misconduct can’t be countenanced in the future.

Estimated costs for the county’s district attorney, public defender and alternate public defender offices for finding and working on cases tainted by LAPD officers now stand at $11.4 million and counting. That amounts to 25% of every new dollar of revenue that Los Angeles County expects in the coming year; as a result, commensurately less can be spent on other vital county services.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has already proposed, and the City Council has considered, budgeting $41 million for liability costs and investigation and police reforms in the coming fiscal year, not to mention redirecting the city’s $300-million tobacco settlement windfall.

As officials in the state attorney general’s civil rights enforcement office point out, related costs “for the remedies and reforms” could well soar. One state official said, “The consent decrees we have looked at involving Justice Department demands are extensive and detailed, incredibly time-consuming in terms of resources.”

In fending off a Justice Department lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for its handling of mentally ill inmates, for example, the county agreed to nearly $13.2 million in remedies and fixes in fiscal 1997-98.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority promised to increase spending on new buses to more than $800 million to reduce overcrowding, up from its original plan to spend just $450 million, and the MTA may be forced by federal courts to spend an additional $97 million to $115 million.

In several cases involving the Justice Department, there’s also a complicated compliance formula, and the target government is normally expected to be 95% in compliance for about two years before the federal presence is ended. The amount of paperwork evidence and work hours needed to support such an arrangement is usually huge.

The New Jersey state government, for instance, will have to pay for two outside monitors and related staff and resources to police its agreement with the Justice Department to end so-called racial profiling by state police. Just this week, New Jersey state officials created a new position, inspector general, to monitor the agreement and other government practices.

These are just some of the costs of a major police scandal, not to mention the intangibles, such as a community’s loss of faith in a local police department or in the criminal justice system as a whole. Let the whole painful and expensive process be a lesson that Los Angeles never forgets.