Politics Trumps Justice

“With every book, when you read it, you close it,” said Steve Cooley after he announced earlier this month that his office will shut down its Rampart investigation by the end of the year. The L.A. County district attorney then added that he expected no new indictments in the interim.

It was a stunning pronouncement. During his hard-fought campaign to unseat Gil Garcetti, Cooley had presented himself as a reformer appalled by a district attorney’s office that seemed always to look the other way when confronted with police lying, brutality and other abuses. He had promised to change the widely held perception among the public that LAPD officers could pretty much do what they wished without fear of punishment or indictment. In April, Cooley repeated his pledge, vowing to take the Rampart probe “as high, wide and deep as the facts indicate.”

So, why has he stopped looking for “the facts” so soon? Despite the furor over the Rampart police corruption scandal, there still has been no official investigation of the Police Department’s 17 other divisions, although scores of credible cases of police abuse were documented as far back as 1991 in the Christopher Commission report, and complaints against cops continue to be made. As for what happened at Rampart, we have only the LAPD’s own self-serving inquiry, limited to the division’s anti-gang unit, and one by the Police Commission that was more concerned with making recommendations than investigating misconduct.

The anterooms of civil rights attorneys, meanwhile, remain filled with victims of Rampart-style police abuse. And the implications of the cases already in the pipeline are extremely serious. They suggest that the abuses carried out by Rampart’s anti-gang unit were known about high up in the LAPD chain of command and that such misconduct was widespread in the entire Rampart division. But we will never know the truth of these and other allegations because Cooley, in announcing the end of his investigation, has removed any incentive for potential or current suspect officers to disclose misconduct going on at Rampart or any other division in the department.

The reasons that Cooley has retreated from aggressively pursuing abusive cops seem to have more to do with local politics than with justice.

Since Sept. 11, public esteem for the police has shot way up, while the desire to put their conduct under a microscope has all but disappeared. Cops, after all, have become our front line against terrorists. Accordingly, there is little political advantage for Cooley to continue the Rampart investigation, especially since L.A. Mayor James K. Hahn, Chief of Police Bernard C. Parks and the Police Protective League all want Rampart assigned to the dustbin of history.

Hahn signaled his attitude toward police reform--and, indirectly, toward the Rampart investigation--with his appointments to the Police Commission of four members who have no reputation for and little interest in the kinds of reforms that would curb police abuse. (The panel’s fifth member, Bert Boeckmann, whom Hahn reappointed, has displayed scant interest in the issue as well.) Hahn also owes a political debt to the city’s African American community, which heavily supported his candidacy. His reappointment of Parks, who remains popular among L.A.’s blacks, as chief next year would help with that task. Finally, a continuing and expanded probe of police abuse could prove embarrassing to Hahn. As city attorney, he never pressed the hard questions about why police-abuse lawsuits seemed to have a distinctive pattern or why the LAPD never changed the policies, training and culture that many outsiders, including the Christopher Commission, believed were at the root of the department’s misconduct problems. Instead, Hahn dutifully paid out some $100 million to settle police-abuse lawsuits against the city during his watch.

From the day the Rampart scandal broke, Parks has successfully limited any “outside” investigation of his department. Throughout, he decided which information would reach the D.A.’s office, and thus largely shaped the outcome of the probe. For the police chief, who’s up for reappointment next June, Cooley’s announcement could not have been more welcome news. Six or seven months is a long time in politics--certainly plenty of time for voters and the media to have forgotten Rampart.

Cooley, too, benefits from dropping the Rampart probe. He will be able to solidify his relationship with a still powerful and very shrewd chief of police. As important, he enhances his strong relationship with the Police Protective League. The last thing Cooley wants is to rile the league, which, with great energy and effectiveness, supported him in the last election.

In theory, Cooley could have done whatever he wished when it came to rooting out and punishing police misconduct. For example, he could have set up an independent task force, staffed solely with his deputies and their investigators, with the goal of restoring public confidence and trust in L.A.’s criminal-justice system. That would have put the LAPD on notice. In practice, however, his options were limited. Had he decided to form a task force and take the Rampart probe as “high, wide and deep as the facts indicate,” he would have had to take on the Protective League and deal with the wrath and formidable stonewalling talents of Parks. In short, had Cooley decided to pursue an aggressive, open-ended investigation, he would have risked alienating a huge portion of the city’s political establishment, with no real payoff. Kudos from various civil rights organizations are nice, but they don’t win elections.

Moreover, any such investigation would surely have led back to Cooley’s office, that is, to many of his deputies and top lieutenants. The Rampart scandal has always been about more than the LAPD. For decades, the Police Department sent under-investigated and poorly crafted cases against abusive officers to the district attorney’s office, and the D.A. didn’t send them back to be improved. No D.A., certainly not one new to the job, wants to publicly question the judgment and integrity of the top people working for him.

Cooley faces another problem that dogged Garcetti--getting convictions. With the exception of LAPD Officer Rafael Perez, whose disclosures set off the Rampart scandal, the code of silence worked remarkably well during the investigation. Cooley doesn’t want to bring highly publicized cases that he’ll lose--and make enemies of a lot cops, too.

As district attorney, Cooley will continue to send his deputies to the site of officer-involved shootings, a procedure known as rollout. But what will Cooley do if the LAPD tries to prevent his investigators--”outsiders”--from doing the nitty-gritty work that can make or break a case? And rollout, of course, only deals with shootings, not with beatings and evidence planting.

The consent decree negotiated by the city and the U.S. Justice Department will provide a higher level of oversight, but its focus will be future conduct, not what has happened in the past. More important, the monitor of the agreement will rely on the LAPD for the information that will be the basis of its judgment. Therein lies the problem: Decisions about police misconduct are, in effect, being made by the source of the problem.