City Reaches Deal With U.S. on Police Reform Package

The City of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Justice agreed Tuesday on the most comprehensive set of police reforms ever imposed on the LAPD, ending months of tense negotiation over a settlement that will chart the future of the city’s long-embattled police department.

Under the terms of the deal, an outside monitor with broad powers to probe the LAPD’s inner workings will be appointed no later than March 1, 2001. That person will serve for five years and will be able to spend as much as $10 million on staff and other expenses--even more, if special circumstances arise.

Never before in its history has the LAPD been subjected to outside monitoring of that type.

Among other provisions of the 114-page agreement:

* The city will be required to build a sophisticated computerized system for tracking police officers. That system must be in place within two years.

* For the first time, the LAPD will collect data on the ethnicity and gender of people subjected to traffic and pedestrian stops. That data will be used to assess whether local police are biased in deciding whom to detain.

* The LAPD will keep in place various reforms adopted after the revelations in the Rampart police scandal, including new rules on how police work with confidential informants.

* The city’s civilian Police Commission will review all serious uses of force by police officers and a host of new audits required under the deal.

* The city’s police chief, Bernard C. Parks, will be evaluated in part on how well he implements the provisions of the agreement, which he bitterly opposed but lately has begrudgingly agreed to put in place.

Officials from both the city and federal governments welcomed the deal. City Atty. James K. Hahn, who led the city’s negotiating team, said the agreement would provide needed police reform and restore public confidence in the LAPD, a sentiment echoed by his federal counterparts.

“We are pleased to reach agreement with the city’s negotiating team,” said Assistant Atty. Gen. Bill Lann Lee, who oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and who is from Los Angeles. “The proposed consent decree provides meaningful and necessary police reform in a fair and reasonable way.”

Before it can be submitted to a federal judge, the deal requires City Council approval. Passage there appears likely, as the package agreed to Tuesday addresses each of the issues that council members had asked to have included and which they approved in concept more than a month ago. Though some members continue to have reservations about the agreement--Councilman Joel Wachs said Tuesday that he is bothered that it does not go far enough toward reforming the police culture--most are expected to vote in favor of the package, which they will consider at a special meeting Thursday.

Mayor Richard Riordan could veto the final package. However, 11 council members have indicated their tentative support, one more than the number needed to override a veto. Moreover, Riordan has said he would not veto the deal if certain conditions were met in the final document, and the agreement appears to meet those conditions.

“This deal satisfies all of the things that were required under that letter” spelling out the mayor’s conditions, said Kelly Martin, Riordan’s chief of staff and his representative on the negotiating team.

As a result, negotiators for both sides expressed optimism that their reform blueprint soon will govern the LAPD.

“This is real reform here,” Hahn said.

Police Commission President Gerald L. Chaleff, another member of the city’s negotiating team, agreed:

“I think this is a good document,” he said. “This was the result of a lot of hard work, and I’m glad we finally got there. We’ve accomplished a lot of things here that we can be proud of. We should begin implementation of this as quickly as possible.”

Hahn predicted that the decree will strengthen civilian oversight of the LAPD, improve the department’s image among residents of Los Angeles and protect vital police services.

He dismissed LAPD management projections that it could take more than 300 police officers to supervise implementation and oversight of the agreement, but acknowledged that there will be some cost in seeing that reform is carried out. Among other things, the agreement requires the city to beef up the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Group, and it creates a new team that will investigate serious uses of police force.

Both of those will require money and officers, though they may also relieve some field supervisors of responsibilities for investigating complaints.

“There is going to be a cost,” Hahn said. “No doubt about that.”

Another key provision of the decree is the requirement that the city build a computer system for tracking police officers. Although the LAPD has a rudimentary system in place, the agreement will force Los Angeles to invest millions of dollars to upgrade it. It is intended to give police supervisors the ability to more closely monitor officers and identify patterns of potential misconduct.

The LAPD pledged to build that system several years ago and even accepted a federal grant to get started. But the plans bogged down in Los Angeles’ byzantine politics, infuriating federal officials, who backed off their civil rights investigation of the LAPD at the time, in part because of assurances that progress was being made.

Only two other police agencies in the country have comparable systems. One is the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The other is the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, which is under a federal decree similar to the one Los Angeles now seems poised to enter.

Although the key political figures in Los Angeles and Washington already have signaled their likely support for the agreement struck Tuesday, there remain many potential roadblocks ahead--both in implementing the decree and in grappling with the expected opposition of the city’s powerful police union.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which initially welcomed the Justice Department, partly because the union saw it as an ally in its continuing battles with Parks, lately has taken a dimmer view of the proposed reforms. League lawyers are scheduled to appear in state court this week to ask a judge to block the decree.

On Tuesday, Hahn said he and his staff of lawyers were confident that the decree will withstand that challenge. And even though some provisions of the deal will require the city to meet and confer with union leaders, Hahn said the rest of the agreement can proceed without delay.

But Hank Hernandez, general counsel for the Protective League, said the union intends to press ahead with its court challenge.

“It is not that we don’t want a consent decree,” Hernandez said. “We don’t want this particular one because of the way in which they went about doing it. It’s a total abrogation of the city’s responsibility by not even consulting the Protective League.”

Hernandez also said that he has serious concerns about some of the provisions in the decree.

“Many of the provisions of the consent decree are counterproductive to ensuring public safety,” Hernandez said. “It has a negative impact on the officers’ ability to do their job. Every time they make a pedestrian stop, they have to fill out a form? It impacts the amount of time officers spend in the field.”

Despite those mounting concerns from the union, Chaleff said he hopes the league will drop its opposition and join city officials in implementing the reforms.

“The league should be embracing this document, rather than attempting to inhibit its implementation,” Chaleff said. “This document is designed to improve the department, not target the average hard-working police officer.”