A Tough Enforcer--but Willing to Talk

As a longtime lawyer for civil rights groups in Los Angeles, Bill Lann Lee built a reputation as a skilled litigator whose goal was to solve problems rather than collect scalps.

Now, as the nation’s acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Lee has returned home with all the might of the federal government at his disposal as he spearheads its efforts to reform the Los Angeles Police Department.

Lee, 51, who served for 15 years as a staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Center for Law in the Public Interest here, is seeking to persuade Los Angeles officials to agree to a consent decree mandating major changes in the way the LAPD trains and supervises its officers and deals with civilians’ complaints.

Allies and lawyers who were his adversaries agree that Lee is singularly qualified for the task.

He has intimate knowledge of the LAPD’s organizational structure and leadership because he played a key role in several discrimination cases lodged against the department and other local agencies, they say.

In handling such suits, Lee earned the respect of several major players in the current dispute--Mayor Richard Riordan, City Atty. James K. Hahn and Police Commissioner T. Warren Jackson--all of whom wrote letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1997, recommending him for the position as the nation’s chief civil rights enforcer.

“It is somewhat ironic that Bill spent most of his career in the civil rights community here, and now is in a position nationally where he has come back to Los Angeles to rectify one of its worst civil rights problems in recent memory,” said Paul Hoffman, a Venice civil liberties lawyer.

During a federal investigation after the Rodney G. King beating in 1991, Hoffman and others urged Congress to enact a statute giving the Justice Department the authority to take action against a local police department based on a pattern or practice of violations. Such a law passed in 1994 and Lee is now making use of it.

Lee, who lives in Virginia but still owns a house in Silver Lake, faces the weighty task of getting Los Angeles government officials to agree to dramatically change the policies and tenor of their highest-profile institution. Lee has said he would prefer reaching agreement without a court battle. But if all else fails, he has made clear that the Justice Department will sue the city to compel reforms.

Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, who fiercely opposes any outside interference with his department, is reportedly furious about the Justice Department’s action. Although he has no formal role, Parks clearly will not hesitate to weigh in with his strongly held views as the negotiations begin this week between the Justice Department and the city’s representatives: Hahn, Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton, Police Commission President Gerald L. Chaleff and the mayor’s chief of staff, Kelly Martin.

In an uncharacteristically blunt letter delivered to city officials Monday, Lee made it clear that the Justice Department considers major change imperative because of what it calls the LAPD’s failure to properly respond to citizens’ complaints about officer misconduct, to train and supervise officers adequately, and to track the performance of problem officers. The Justice Department has also concluded that some LAPD officers regularly use excessive force, make false arrests and conduct improper searches and seizures, wrote Lee, who is also reviewing allegations that the LAPD discriminates on the basis of race or national origin in its law enforcement activities.

The threat of a lawsuit in Los Angeles--an action undertaken with the approval of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno--is “little more than legalized blackmail,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union. He charges that the Justice Department is using its vast resources to bully police agencies into imposing broad reforms affecting street cops without doing much to change problems with upper management.

On the other hand, a key Justice Department official said federal investigations into allegations of police abuse in Los Angeles and New York will serve as important tests of Washington’s ability to transform problem police departments.

“The attorney general realizes that the repercussions are great,” said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

Decree Would Be Key Use of 1994 Law

If a court-supervised consent decree is imposed on the LAPD, it would be the most significant use thus far of the 1994 federal law that gives the Justice Department authority to assume significant control over a local police department found to have engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct.

Under Lee, the department is investigating such allegations in a dozen communities across the nation, and he has significantly expanded the number of attorneys devoted to such cases. With no subpoena power for those investigations, federal officials are often at the mercy of the police agencies they are investigating. That has proved particularly frustrating in recent months in the LAPD investigation, with federal authorities complaining that the agency has been slow to turn over requested documents.

Lee has declined to be interviewed since issuing Monday’s letter.

But if his history is any guide, he will seek as much common ground as possible early on and then navigate through the more difficult issues. As is his wont, Lee has made it clear to city officials, including Riordan last week, that he would prefer to reach a consent decree rather than go through years of bitter, costly litigation.

Veteran civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, who worked with Lee for years at the NAACP legal fund, said he would strive vigorously to reach an agreement short of a court battle.

“That is Bill’s genius; he makes his opponents feel like his partners,” said Rice, noting that she often played the “bad cop” to Lee’s “good cop” in negotiations.

Lee already has met with Ted Hunt, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the officers union. Lee said in his letter to city officials that despite the pervasiveness of the problems, federal officials believe “the majority of officers are ethical, hard-working and responsible.”

Hunt said he firmly believes that the league’s input will be considered, but that it is too early to say if the Justice Department approach will be acceptable.

Rice and others stressed that no one should confuse Lee’s low-key style with a lack of resolve.

“He is a very tenacious guy,” said one Los Angeles city official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He doesn’t start high and negotiate low. He starts high and expects you to meet him.”

Assisting Lee on the LAPD case are Justice Department attorneys Steven Rosenbaum and Donna Murphy. Rosenbaum is also no stranger to Los Angeles, having served as the department’s lead lawyer in a successful 1990 voter rights suit against Los Angeles County that led to redistricting and the election of a Latino supervisor.

Affirmative Action Stance Draws Fire

For all his clout, Lee has not been confirmed as chief of the civil rights division because of Republican opposition in the Senate to his support of affirmative action. Opponents say he supports use of quotas. During his Senate confirmation hearings, he said he considers quotas illegal and drew a distinction between quotas, which he opposes, and affirmative action, which he supports as a system of flexible goals. As the acting head of the division, Lee can serve at least until the end of the Clinton administration. Although Clinton resubmitted Lee’s name for confirmation last year, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) “has no intention of considering [the nomination] again,” a spokeswoman said this week.

Still, even though Lee has carried the lesser title of acting assistant attorney general, he has clearly left his mark as an aggressive enforcer of civil rights.

During his more than two years on the job, Lee has pushed antidiscrimination suits, hate crime prosecutions and greater utilization of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

In one case, the civil rights division reached an agreement with two large New Jersey apartment complexes resolving allegations that the defendants had discriminated against potential renters on the basis of family status and race. The division also reached an accord with private hospitals in Connecticut to ensure that deaf patients had access to sign-language interpreters. On the hate crime front, the division secured guilty pleas from six Idaho men who had engaged in a series of racially motivated attacks on Mexican American men, women and children.

Lee, who attended Yale College and Columbia Law School on scholarships, is the son of a Chinese laundryman who came to this country as a penniless immigrant during the Depression. Lee talks passionately about how his career ambitions have been shaped by a desire to stamp out the kinds of prejudices suffered by his father--who was derided as a “dumb Chinaman” and was initially unable to find a place to live when he returned to the U.S. after serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

Lee’s actions at the Justice Department appear to have reinforced the views of both his supporters, who say he has pursued a mainstream civil rights agenda, and his opponents, who say he is overly zealous.

Lee “is somebody who has never met a quota he didn’t like,” said Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank.

Clegg said he was particularly troubled by Lee’s efforts to force prisons to expand services for people with disability claims. Although the Justice Department sees such efforts as part of its enforcement duties under the Americans With Disabilities Act, Clegg maintained that the department “has been too willing to force prisons to accommodate dubious claims of dubious disabilities from prisoners, and it’s needlessly complicating the lives of state officials trying to run the prisons.”

On the other hand, Lee’s approach clearly impressed one of the first adversaries he encountered after taking the job in Washington: Zell Miller, who stepped down as Georgia’s governor last year. In 1998, Miller, a Democrat, was initially furious with Lee because of a blistering report the civil rights division issued on juvenile prisons in his state.

Miller said he was “fearful that Georgia would be unable to get a fair forum in which to present our position and that we would once again be compelled to engage in protracted and expensive litigation.”

But those fears proved unfounded, Miller said.

“Under the direction of Bill Lann Lee, what began as a potentially divisive and litigious process was transformed into an atmosphere where the state was able to have its case heard fairly, resulting in a reasonable agreement benefiting all parties,” Miller said in a letter to senators last year.

‘His Backbone Is Strong’

But there have also been times when Lee has used the club of litigation. The civil rights division sued on behalf of a group of black tourists in Florida who alleged that the Adams Mark hotel chain had discriminated against them, putting them in undesirable rooms, charging higher rates and discouraging them from returning.

John P. Relman, a private attorney in Washington, D.C., who worked with Lee on the case, said Lee’s resolve helped forge an $8-million settlement in March--a record for a hotel discrimination accord.

“He likes to settle, and he likes to reach a consensus wherever possible,” Relman said. “But there are certain principles he thinks are important, and if you are not going to accept what he sees as the basic ground rules to make something work, he doesn’t hesitate for a second to file suit. His backbone is strong.”

When Lee worked in Los Angeles, he specialized in Title VII employment discrimination suits, rather than police misconduct of the type brought to light in the current Rampart scandal. But he spent four years on a case that led to a strong affirmative action promotions program for the LAPD.

Minority and female officers claimed they were denied pay raises and were underrepresented in prestige assignments. Lee started with one black client, Det. John W. Hunter Jr., and forged a coalition with other civil rights groups to expand the suit’s scope.

The decree set a goal of dramatically increasing the percentage of minorities in mid-level positions such as detective, sergeant and lieutenant within 15 years. It also mandated changes in testing procedures for those jobs.

Hunter was awarded $50,000, and $1 million was set aside to be paid to minority officers who could show that they were unfairly denied pay grade increases. The city was also required to spend $500,000 on a new training program for all officers interested in being promoted.

Theresa Bustillos, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who worked with Lee on the case, praised him as a master strategist whose strength was “reading the other side, getting into their heads,” figuring out what arguments opponents would make and how to deal with them.

Lee’s experience in that case, which was settled in 1992, and in other LAPD matters, will serve him well in his latest initiative, she said. “Bill knows that department. . . . Every position, every function, the corporate culture. Bill comes to this with an incredible base of knowledge.”

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Weinstein reported from Los Angeles and Lichtblau reported from Washington.