City Settles With Officer Claiming Retaliation

The Los Angeles City Council has decided to pay $225,000 to settle a lawsuit by a veteran LAPD officer who alleged he was retaliated against for raising concerns about other officers’ conduct in connection with a federal consent decree.

The settlement ends a 2-year-old lawsuit by Officer Reggie Dickenson, who alleged that department supervisors refused to listen when he questioned whether some officers were falsifying the racial data that the consent decree requires for traffic-stop reports.

The reports, part of the decree mandating reform of the Los Angeles Police Department, are designed to look for evidence of racial profiling.

Dickenson alleged in the lawsuit that instead of acting on his concerns, his supervisors pursued unfounded complaints against him, raided his home and took a pair of his guns, gave him “freeway therapy” by assigning him far from his home and refused to give him back his previous assignment when he returned from hip surgery.

“I definitely think the data was doctored,” Dickenson said. “This settlement is vindication.”

Dickenson, 56, who has been with the LAPD for 19 years, received the department’s second-highest medal for heroism and has worked assignments including undercover for the anti-terrorism division.

The settlement, approved Tuesday by the council, provides $125,000 in cash and $100,000 in benefit enhancements to allow Dickenson to retire a year early.

As part of the settlement, the city does not admit any wrongdoing, and it previously had filed court papers generally denying that Dickenson was treated improperly.

Council members said they acted on the recommendation of the city attorney in unanimously approving the settlement.

“The city attorney made clear this was a very complicated case and that was what the recommendation was based on,” said Councilman Jack Weiss, chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee.

Weiss declined to say whether a closed-door discussion of the settlement included talk about the allegations that racial data might have been falsified.

“If there is a factual basis to that complaint, it should be looked at,” Weiss said. “I would be very concerned about that.”

LAPD Lt. Paul Vernon said that several administrative complaint investigations had been opened as a result of Dickenson’s complaints.

The consent decree was approved by a federal judge in 2001 to mandate reforms after the Rampart corruption scandal in which anti-gang officers were accused of framing, beating and improperly shooting people.

The decree requires the LAPD to record the ethnicity of every motorist and pedestrian stopped by its police officers.

Dickenson was the coordinator for field data reports for the Northeast Division, which covers communities that are predominantly Latino.

He said some officers told him they were warned by supervisors that if they continued to write field reports mostly on Latinos, it might look like racial profiling.

Dickenson said he then saw a 290% increase in the number of field data reports on white pedestrian stops. The stops could not be verified because the reports did not include names, addresses or phone numbers of those allegedly stopped.

“Dickenson, from maintaining the data for several months, believed that he saw inexplicable significant statistical and demographic deviations in the raw data that were resulting in higher and higher compliance numbers but which could not be explained, verified or validated,” the lawsuit alleged. “The anomaly is in the number of whites shown stopped, which suggests the books were being cooked.”

In October 2003, before he went on leave for hip surgery, Dickenson tried to raise “concerns about possible criminal activity within the Northeast Division with respect to the consent decree program,” according to his lawsuit.

He provided a package of papers documenting his concerns to one of his captains, but she said later in a deposition that she had accepted the package but did not remember what was in it.

The lawsuit alleges that Dickenson “tried on several occasions” to report his concerns.

He alleged that his commanding officers ignored his efforts and made it clear they were pleased with the results of the data collection.

In addition, Dickenson said he was transferred to a temporary assignment in Westchester, farther from his San Gabriel Valley home.