Nearly 200 Join Lawsuit Claiming LAPD Retaliation

Nearly 200 current and former officers are now plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department, alleging that they were retaliated against when they tried to report misconduct, an attorney said Thursday.

“Once you become an LAPD pickle, you can never become a cucumber again,” said Bradley Gage, who represents former and current officers suing the department. “All of these officers have been pickled.”

The number of plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which also names selected LAPD supervisors as defendants, has tripled in the last three months. Originally filed in August in Los Angeles County Superior Court, it has been refiled in U.S. District Court downtown because it involves federal civil rights claims.

At a news conference in his Woodland Hills office, Gage was joined by two plaintiffs, twin sisters Theresa and Lisa Golt, who said they had been jailed on false charges. In November, each was charged in Los Angeles County with issuing bail without a license and illegally accessing confidential information on law enforcement computers. They were arrested again in December in Orange County on suspicion of running a bail bond business without a license.

Lisa Golt, a former LAPD officer, held up a driver’s license-sized card Thursday that she said was her valid state bail agent license. But at the time she was arrested, she alleged, someone had tampered with her license status in the state’s database.

Golt, who was fired by the LAPD for using pepper spray while off duty, said she believed that she was retaliated against because the company she worked for provided bail for former Rampart officers charged with corruption, and for being an outspoken critic of LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks. In 1999, she led a campaign to encourage other officers to sign written instructions to bar Parks from attending their funerals if they were killed in the line of duty.

She also said she had refused to lie during what she called an unfair internal investigation of a sergeant and raised the ire of the LAPD’s top management as a result.

Theresa Golt, a current officer, is on administrative leave while charges against her are pending.

Officer Jason Lee, an LAPD spokesman, declined to respond, saying department policy bars comment on pending lawsuits. Defense lawyers from the city attorney’s office could not be reached Thursday.