Step to Confidence in Cops

As Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley prepares to close the book on the Rampart police corruption prosecutions, he has promised more aggressive pursuit of cases against law enforcement officers in the future. Such prosecutions have been a traditional weakness of district attorneys, who must depend on police and sheriff’s deputies to make their cases.

Cooley will send his own investigative teams to the sites of officer-involved shootings. He also expects law enforcement agencies to refer more allegations of criminal misconduct to his office and says any prosecutor’s suspicions about a cop will be pursued.

That is exactly what didn’t happen when some deputy district attorneys expressed concerns about Rafael Perez, at one time the Rampart Division anti-gang unit’s star cop. Perez disgraced the Los Angeles Police Department when he framed, shot and beat suspects and lied under oath; he was caught only when he stole cocaine from LAPD evidence facilities. Perez agreed to talk in exchange for a shortened prison term, less than three years. He claimed that 70 officers broke the law. However, fewer than a dozen have been prosecuted and only slightly more have resigned or been fired.

Bad cops like Perez are hard to catch because few police officers will testify against another. The district attorney’s promise of immunity will not prevent the Police Department from punishing a testifying officer for departmental infractions. And with Cooley declaring his agency to be out of the Rampart business, there will be little impetus for any officer to risk coming forward concerning that scandal.

The district attorney’s office believes that Perez could have come under scrutiny earlier if the LAPD had referred numerous complaints of misconduct against him to prosecutors, who could have seen a pattern of criminal misconduct. But that is not the way it works even under the rules, the first of their kind, issued last week by Cooley’s office. Allegations are to be referred only when they rise to the level of probable cause. Police departments, however, have a stake in how they look if officers are criminally charged, and chiefs may hesitate to make referrals. The channels of communication should be opened wider by also giving direct referral authority to internal investigators and to the Police Commission’s civilian inspector general.

Cooley does spell out what he expects in new protocols that apply to almost all law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County. He wants referrals to be appropriate and made quickly--no delay in forwarding, say, a domestic abuse allegation against a cop until the statute of limitations has nearly run out, leaving the district attorney’s office no time to put a case together.

Of course, it will remain possible for a department to hold back information. But the new rules inject the district attorney into the process of investigating law enforcement crime in a more dramatic and involved manner. This can only bolster the confidence of citizens in the police who protect them.