Evidence Contradicts LAPD Arrest Report

In a case that raises serious questions about the quality of the Los Angeles Police Department’s internal investigations, two elite Metro Division officers accused of lying about a drug arrest were cleared by the department despite compelling evidence of their misconduct, a Times investigation has found.

The officers were exonerated even after separate investigations by the county public defender and the district attorney produced at least four eyewitnesses who flatly contradicted the officers’ account of the July 1998 arrest of a homeless drug addict named Larry Betts, according to documents and interviews.

In fact, the Metro Division sergeant assigned to investigate his colleagues’ alleged misconduct recommended that the pair be cleared without interviewing several key witnesses identified by the district attorney and public defender.

Al Cohen, the public defender’s investigator on the case, said in an interview that he offered to personally escort the sergeant who was conducting the LAPD’s investigation to the witnesses.

But Cohen said the sergeant declined, saying that “he would conduct his own investigation.”

The disclosure of the LAPD’s handling of the case comes at a time when the department is accused of being unable or unwilling to police its own. Critics have long argued that the LAPD routinely dismisses complaints against officers, particularly when they are lodged by minorities or people with criminal records. Betts is both.

“I think they felt they had a guy from skid row, and they figured they could do anything they wanted with me,” speculated Betts, who said he has been off drugs for more than a year. “They made up a big story.”

The police version of Betts’ arrest and the account he and the four eyewitness give are miles apart--9.2 to be exact.

In the police report on the arrest--and later during sworn testimony at a preliminary hearing--Officer Patrick McCarty said he and his partner, Officer Chris Soldo, stopped Betts when they saw him jaywalking in the 1700 block of South La Cienega Boulevard about 9:40 p.m. on July 13, 1998.

McCarty wrote in his report that when he asked Betts for his identification, Betts volunteered that he was on parole and that there might be an outstanding warrant for his arrest. McCarty confirmed that there was a warrant and took Betts into custody, the report states.

During a pre-booking search, Soldo found a crack pipe laced with rock cocaine residue in Betts’ sock and three rocks of crack in his pocket, according to the report.

Betts was taken to jail and booked on suspicion of drug possession and parole violation.

When Deputy Public Defender Ellie Schneir interviewed Betts two weeks later, she said, the first question he asked was, “Where’d they say they arrested me?”

When she told him La Cienega, Betts snapped, “They’re lying!”

She said Betts insisted that he was arrested downtown, off skid row, where he had lived on the street much of the past decade. There were several witnesses, Betts told the public defender. He pleaded with her to check his story out.

The next day, July 29, Schneir filled out a request for her investigator, Cohen, to do just that. Schneir admitted in a recent interview that she was skeptical about what Cohen would find.

On Aug. 11, Cohen said, he drove to the seedy neighborhood south of downtown where Betts said he was arrested and began searching for witnesses.

He was so shocked at what he found that he called Schneir at home to give her an update: David Jones, a security guard who works at a store around the corner from where Betts said he was arrested, told Cohen that he clearly remembered the incident.

His girlfriend had just dropped him off at the Boyd Hotel, where he lives, Jones said, when he saw a police car approaching. Jones said the officers got out and called a woman he knew as Cynthia over to the vehicle. Jones said he watched as the officers searched her, then told her to go away.

Next, he said, they called Betts to the car and, after a few minutes, handcuffed him, put him in the back seat and drove away.

Jones told Cohen that he recognized Betts as a drug addict who hung out across the street from the Boyd Hotel in the 200 block of Boyd Street. Jones said he “really didn’t know why they arrested the defendant and really didn’t care.”

Over the next two months, Cohen and Jim Martinez, a district attorney’s investigator, located and interviewed at least four witnesses, including Jones, who independently confirmed that Betts was arrested on Boyd Street the night of July 13, according to documents obtained by The Times. They also talked to a merchant from the area, who recalled Betts’ helping him close his shop shortly before the arrest.

As a consequence, prosecutors dismissed the case against Betts on Nov. 2, 1998. Deputy Dist. Atty. John Gilligan, who oversaw the district attorney’s handling of the case, said he did not file a complaint with the LAPD against the officers because he knew Schneir was preparing one.

In fact, the next day she sent her boss a memo asking that the public defender’s office file a formal complaint against Soldo and McCarty.

On Jan. 13, 1999, Assistant Public Defender Adolfo Lara wrote a letter to the LAPD, requesting that the department investigate Betts’ claim. Enclosed was Betts’ arrest report, the felony complaint against him, the transcript of the preliminary hearing at which McCarty testified, and investigative reports by the public defender and district attorney.

Eight months later, Lara received a letter from Capt. Rodger K. Coombs, Metro commanding officer.

“The matter of your complaint against officers under my command has been investigated and the matter is now considered closed,” the four-paragraph letter began. “The complaint has been classified as unfounded.”

How did LAPD investigators arrive at a conclusion so at odds with that of their counterparts at the public defender’s and district attorney’s offices?

For one, the LAPD failed to interview several key witnesses who backed Betts’ version of events. A department source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said investigators were apparently unable to find some of the witnesses referred to in the public defender’s and district attorney’s reports, and were skeptical of another.

Moreover, the Metro investigator uncovered information and found witnesses of his own:

* A motel owner placed McCarty and Soldo in the vicinity of South La Cienega a few hours before the partners claim they arrested Betts about 9:40 p.m.

* Another motel manager, the LAPD source said, told investigators in a taped statement that he recalled the officers’ arresting an African American man outside the window of his motel in the 1700 block of South La Cienega. But he did not know when. The LAPD declined to make the tape available to The Times or to provide a transcript of its contents.

* Two of Soldo’s and McCarty’s colleagues from the Metro Division, after reviewing their logs from the night of July 13, said they recalled seeing the pair detain an African American suspect on South La Cienega about the time Betts allegedly was arrested.

* Betts’ mother, whom Betts occasionally stayed with, lives about a mile and half from where police said they arrested him.

But none of the witnesses could put Soldo, McCarty and Betts in the same place at the same time, as the witnesses on Boyd Street did.

There were other problems too.

The first motel owner, although placing Soldo and McCarty near South La Cienega, said the officers were at his Relax Inn roughly between 4:30 and 6 p.m. The officers’ log for that night shows that they arrived at the motel at 6:15 p.m. and left two hours later. Regardless of which time frame is correct, the officers would have had more than enough time to get downtown and arrest Betts.

The other motel owner, Pratapbhai G. Patel, in an interview with The Times, denied the police investigator’s claim that Patel could identify Soldo and McCarty. Patel said he told the investigator that he had witnessed some police activity outside his window sometime in summer 1998 but that he could not identity the officers involved or the suspect. In fact, his description of the suspect did not match Betts’ appearance. And when police showed him a photo of Betts, he did not recognize Betts as the suspect.

Also, if the arrest occurred right outside Patel’s window, as he insists, it does not match the address where Soldo and McCarty say Betts was taken into custody. McCarty’s report states that Betts was arrested at 1777 S. La Cienega. Patel’s motel is at 1755 S. La Cienega.

McCarty’s report contains at least one error that the officers acknowledged about six months after Betts’ arrest. The report says they were driving a marked black-and-white police cruiser on the night in question. In fact, they were in an unmarked brown undercover vehicle--the same type of car described by several witnesses who say they watched Betts’ arrest on Boyd Street.

McCarty, an eight-year veteran of the LAPD with a spotless disciplinary record, did not return several phone calls seeking comment. Soldo, who has been with the department for 11 years and who department sources say has at least two other complaints against him, initially said he had “no problem” discussing the case, but wanted to get a supervisor’s approval.

When contacted a second time, Soldo said his supervisor had advised him against giving an interview. Asked for the supervisor’s name, Soldo corrected himself. He had not actually spoken with a supervisor, he said, but had read the department’s manual, which he said prohibited him from discussing personnel complaints.

He added, “All I can tell you is, you’re barking up the wrong tree on this,” suggesting that Betts was wrong.

What motive the officers would have to lie about the circumstances of the arrest is unknown. Schneir, Betts’ attorney, speculates that the officers were not in their assigned area at the time of the arrest--a disciplinary infraction--and had to change the location to cover their tracks.

Betts, who now works in the human resources department of the Midnight Mission on South Los Angeles Street, said his memory of the arrest is clear.

In an interview with The Times, he spoke candidly about that night.

“I had just smoked up all my money and laid out my bed and I was looking at a dirty magazine,” Betts recalled, when a friend, Cynthia Williams, walked up. Williams had a six-pack of beer, a bottle of wine and about a quarter-ounce of rock cocaine, he said.

“She gave me a pipe and said, ‘Hit this,’ and I did,” Betts said, adding that he then handed the pipe back to Williams.

That’s when the police rolled up, he said. They called Williams over to the car, talked to her for a few minutes, and then let her go, he recalled.

Betts said the officers then walked over to where he was lying on the sidewalk, leaning up against the metal security gate in front of 219 Boyd St.

He said one of the officers rummaged around in a nearby box and pulled out a crack pipe. At that point, Betts said, the officer told others who were with Betts to leave. He then cuffed Betts and put him in the unmarked police car.

At first, Betts said, he was protesting his arrest, telling the officers that they had no probable cause. But as the car headed west on 3rd Street, and onto the Harbor Freeway, Betts became concerned.

He said he wondered why the officers were going away from Parker Center and the Central Division police stations, both of which were just blocks away. He also noticed that the officers had not called in his arrest on the radio, he said.

“I was kind of nervous. I’m thinking, ‘Where are you guys taking me?’ ” recalled Betts, who as a former LAPD Explorer Scout and an occasional arrestee is no stranger to police procedure.

Betts said he was then taken on a meandering drive across the city that ended with his being booked into a jail somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. Police documents confirm that he was booked in the Valley.

The Times located and interviewed two witnesses who previously told the public defender’s and district attorney’s investigators that they saw Betts arrested on Boyd Street on July 13. Those witnesses confirmed their earlier statements to investigators.

The paper also interviewed two additional eyewitnesses who have not been interviewed by authorities, including Williams, the woman who Betts said had the drugs.

A transient drug user, she confirmed Betts’ account. “They had me scared,” she said of the police officers who questioned her before turning their attention to Betts. “I had the drugs. I got away, though.”

The Times also interviewed David Nikpajou, who owns the store in front of which Betts says he was arrested. Nikpajou told The Times--and authorities--that he saw Betts on the sidewalk in front of his business about 6:30 p.m. that night.

Although the LAPD has closed the case on Betts’ complaint, the department’s civilian watchdog has not. “We had some concerns, based on our review,” said Inspector General Jeffrey C. Eglash. “We have requested additional information and are continuing our review.”

LAPD Cmdr. David J. Kalish said the conflicting accounts in the Betts case made it “extremely difficult” to resolve. “If additional witnesses have pertinent information, the department will continue its investigation. We are committed to getting to the truth of this matter.”

Betts said the effort of his public defender motivated him to turn his life around. “I love Ellie. I really do,” he said. “Ellie believed in me.”