Mayor Backs 2 Police Reform Measures

Mayor Richard Riordan announced his support Thursday for ballot measures that would make it easier to discipline police officers and provide officers with a better pension plan.

The proposed charter reforms, which will appear on the April 10 ballot, are part of a continuing effort to fulfill the mayor’s promise to reform the Los Angeles Police Department and increase the number of officers, which has dropped to about 9,100, on the streets.

“Angelenos want a safe community, but we also demand reform in the LAPD,” Riordan said. “We want them to stay on the force but also protect them from falling victim to the criminal actions of a very few.”

The first proposal includes extending the time period in which the Police Department can discipline an officer who is the subject of a complaint. Now there is a one-year statute of limitation after the filing of a disciplinary complaint. That constraint created difficulties for the prosecutors who investigated officers involved in the Rampart corruption scandal.

The second measure would allow officers and firefighters to accrue pension benefits beyond current limits. Riordan aides said that many public safety officers retire and work elsewhere because they have earned the maximum pension available. The idea is to reduce the number of early retirements as the department actively works on recruitment.

Critics of the first measure, however, said that hidden in it are provisions that would give the police chief too much control over the department. The most disturbing, said Erwin Chemerinsky, chairman of the Charter Reform Commission, would allow the chief to decide when a complaint against an officer becomes public record.

Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin, who helped draft the initiatives, disagreed. She said the measure simply clarifies existing practice and does not provide Chief Bernard C. Parks with “more or less authority than he has today.”

Chemerinsky, a USC law school professor, shot back: “Talk about facilitating the ability of a cover-up or the release of information for the sake of reprisal! I think the chief didn’t get what he wanted in the charter reform and is trying to get it through this way.”

Two years ago, the Charter Reform Committee considered and rejected some of the provisions proposed in the amendment, such as making officers pay for their own transcripts as well as their own counsel, he said. It was, they thought, unfair to cut city funding for officers.

“It has nothing to do with reform,” Chemerinsky said. “It’s an attempt by the city to take things from the officers and not give anything back.”

The issue resurfaced last summer during discussions about the proposed amendment that included these provisions. Several police officers told the City Council that they opposed the measure because it cut into funding for officers’ legal representatives.

To placate the officers, during police contract negotiations the city had a provision written stating that if the Police Protective League supported the ballot measure, it would get $6.5 million to hire defense lawyers for officers facing disciplinary proceedings.