Bratton OKs Task Force for Reforms

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton agreed Tuesday to create a task force to enact reforms recommended by a citizens panel that looked at the Rampart Division police scandal. But he warned that some of the changes, including a 3,000-officer expansion of the police force, require elected officials’ approval and may take years to achieve.

Bratton told the Police Commission that he embraces many of the reforms proposed by the Blue Ribbon Rampart Review Panel, including a move toward a more community-friendly, problem-solving policing style.

In one measure of the challenge he faces, Bratton’s comments came on the same day the Police Commission’s inspector general issued a separate report warning that the department has underreported racial bias and misconduct among its ranks. Such reporting is a requirement of a federal consent decree that grew out of the Rampart scandal.

The Rampart panel of legal experts, headed by civil rights attorney Connie Rice, issued a report last week that found the police force needs to be significantly expanded and the department must move away from a suppression “warrior policing” style to “high road” policing as part of a major reform effort.

“We are very comfortable with that idea” Bratton said. “The terminology might be different, but the concept” is the same.

Without that change, the LAPD faces more potential incidents like the Rampart scandal, in which members of an anti-gang unit beat and framed people, the panel warned.

That panel also recommended the creation of an “Expedited Joint Action Task Force” of police officers, command staff, union leaders and outsiders to oversee reforms. Bratton on Tuesday told the Police Commission that he is appointing Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger to head the task force, which will also include deputy chiefs and other command officers, and will be in place in about six weeks.

“The transformation must be accomplished by the LAPD,” Bratton said. “That’s why I’m recommending that we carry the ball. We need to own it rather than it being seen as being imposed from the outside.”

Some of the Rampart panel’s recommendations are outside Bratton’s control, including the proposal to expand the 9,300-officer police force by at least 3,000, the chief said.

Just before Bratton announced his plans, the inspector general released a report showing that the Los Angeles Police Department’s problems with racial bias remain a challenge.

Inspector General Andre Birotte Jr. said the department has been wrongly classifying many complaints of ethnic comments as “improper remarks” or discourtesy, which, he said, downplays the scope of the problem of racial bias in the department and subjects the incidents to lower-priority investigations with potentially lesser penalties.

The report looked at 21 investigations of improper remarks and found that six of them were wrongly classified because they involved racial- or gender-bias allegations. In one, a supervisor told African American subordinate officers that he was “down with the brothers,” which the officers found demeaning.

In another, a civilian supervisor asked a Korean American employee if his wife was a “mail-order bride,” which Birotte said should have been handled as an ethnic remark.

Commission President John Mack agreed that the report was troubling and that the department needs to properly classify such remarks in the future.

“It’s very important that we don’t institutionalize procedures in which people are finding another way of defining ethnic or racial slurs to give the department a clean bill of health,” Mack said.