D.A.’s Office Disputes Criticism of Arrest

For the second time, The Times has editorially rapped the knuckles of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for doing its job (“Chill Wind Over Witnesses,” editorial, July 16, and “Made-for-Media Arrests,” editorial, July 28). Unfortunately, the facts do not back up claims made in either editorial as they relate to this office.

You have erroneously taken me and my office to task for arresting Mitchell Crooks, the cameraman who took the video in the Inglewood police abuse case. If that was not enough, on July 28 you implied--again erroneously--that the district attorney’s office chose to “make a spectacle” of the Crooks arrest. You called the decision “tawdry.”

Crooks never offered to turn over his tape to the D.A.’s office so there could be a speedy and thorough investigation of the Inglewood case. He said he would be “totally uncooperative,” although he later said he would cooperate if his “record is completely wiped out.” To determine what that record was, we checked and discovered just hours before locating Crooks in Hollywood on July 11 and serving him with a grand jury subpoena that he was a fugitive from Placer County and that a warrant had been issued for his arrest.

Section 142 of the California Penal Code clearly states that if a law enforcement officer knows an arrest warrant exists, he must make the arrest or he would be committing a felony. Surely The Times believes that anyone with evidence of a crime--especially the alleged beating of a 16-year-old boy by a police officer--should come forward. Without the original videotape and Crooks’ authentication of it, there very well might not have been a speedy criminal indictment.

Steve Cooley

District Attorney

Los Angeles County

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Your July 28 editorial hit the nail on the head. Indeed, why arrest just the Rigas family when we have so many fat cats in the Enron fiasco? Could it be that the Rigas family is not in the oil business and is not friends with the Bush family? Where is the justice and fairness?

Gabriella Kolias

Placentia