Tough-Guy D.A. Shooting Blanks

As political ads go, it was a beaut. The front of the placard was a grainy, unflattering photo of the former Los Angeles County D.A., and the text was deliciously accusatory.

L.A. Confidential 2

Gil Garcetti Under Fire. . .

The Road to Rampart

On the back, then-candidate Steve Cooley said of Garcetti:

“We don’t need another L.A. Confidential. We need confidence in our district attorney. We need Steve Cooley.”

It was nearly a year ago that Cooley rode into office high in the saddle, promising a new day in Dodge City. So you have to be more than a little disappointed to discover that on the Rampart police scandal, the very issue that got him elected, the man has come up shooting blanks.

I actually began to have my doubts about how tough a tough-guy Cooley was when his knees buckled in the heat of August. He took a pass on going after an LAPD officer who gunned down a 55-year-old, mentally ill homeless woman armed with a screwdriver.

(And thanks in advance, but I don’t need 500 cops calling to regurgitate something you learned in training, or to tell me a screwdriver is a lethal weapon. Yeah, I know it’s hell out there, and I respect what you do. But if the only way you can handle a feeble and pathetic woman armed with a screwdriver is to shoot her dead, you shouldn’t be in uniform.)

Then, less than two weeks ago, Cooley took a flop on Rampart, of all things, despite having taken Garcetti apart for lacking the will or the smarts to “deal with the problem aggressively,” to use Cooley’s own words.

Well how aggressive is it to stand up and say that although 50 Rampart-related cases are still open, you’re ready to wash your hands and move on?

“Is it closing the book? Yeah,” Cooley said. “With every book, when it’s read, you close it.”

Well excuse me, but as I understand it, the book’s still being written.

In fact, Bill Hodgman, Cooley’s head deputy in the Rampart prosecution unit and a widely respected prosecutor, says his boss might have spoken prematurely.

Hodgman says that Cooley’s remarks were “largely accurate,” but that the D.A. “hadn’t had benefit of the latest information.”

Well then why is he going off half-cocked? This isn’t some nickel-and-dime case of a cop gone bad. It’s one of the biggest police corruption scandals in history, with 70 cops implicated and more than 100 convictions thrown out because of cops planting drugs and weapons on suspects, beating them, threatening them, and lying through their teeth to cover their crimes.

If it’s over, let’s hear the whys and wherefores. If the plan is to turn the strongest cases over to the Feds, who have greater leeway and a longer statute of limitations, then fine. But the public deserves to know, and merely telling us the “book is closed” does not suffice.

Hodgman admitted the Rampart unit is winding down, and he said many of the remaining cases lack sufficient evidence or are about to blow the statute of limitations on prosecution.

“But there are still matters under investigation,” he said, and “nothing has been preordained.”

If you have any idea what’s going on here, you’re in better shape than I am.

“What they’ve essentially admitted is that they have no intention of prosecuting anybody,” says Gary Wigodsky of the alternate public defender’s office.

“I think Rampart was seen by [Cooley] as the old administration’s problem, and they weren’t going to be bogged down by it.”

One former Rampart prosecutor told me that when Cooley took over, prosecutors who’d spent months on the grunt work of preparing cases were scarcely consulted.

“Initially, everyone was in shock. There was foot dragging and they didn’t want to do what had to be done,” says the attorney. “Prosecutors were sitting around putting together jigsaw puzzles and playing board games and such because they had nothing to do.”

Others in the unit dispute this, and Hodgman says there have been no tiddlywinks on his watch. The staff spends all day every day going through what’s left of the cases, he says.

Well if that’s so, then how does Cooley already know there’s nothing left to prosecute? Does anyone believe all the bad cops have either quit or been driven out? And does anyone really think that under Police Chief Bernard Parks, the code of silence doesn’t still prevail?

When I got hold of Cooley, he contended the press has distorted the truth. What’s salvageable in Rampart will be handled appropriately, he vowed, either by other units of the D.A.’s office or by other agencies. He was particularly ticked off that his comments about Rampart became the story, even though he’d called a news conference to announce new protocols for going after bad cops.

Well guess what. He can tell us what questions to ask at a news conference just as soon as we can start prosecuting cases in court.

When I moved back to Los Angeles six months ago, one of the first people I met with was a former ethics commissioner. You’ve got to go after public officials around here, he implored me, because they seldom hold each other accountable.

We got into the Rampart mess because of a history of looking the other way. And Mayor Jim Hahn didn’t help by sitting on his hands as city attorney when the first signs of a growing Rampart scandal came across his desk in the form of lawsuits.

Cooley, without question, inherited a mess. But if this is his idea of cleaning it up, he’s got a ways to go before fulfilling his campaign promise of restoring public confidence in the D.A.’s office.

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Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.