TOO CLOSE FOR JUSTICE

When it comes to the LAPD, the district attorney's office, historically, has
never aggressively pursued allegations of misconduct. Can that change?

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti's reaction to the Los Angeles Police Department's
scandal-plagued Rampart Division has been as curious to watch as it is, at
first glance, hard to understand. The mounting allegations of criminal
wrongdoing--murder, evidence planting, beatings, perjury--are unquestionably
worse than any offenses committed in the 1991 police beating of Rodney G.
King. Indeed, Chief Bernard C. Parks has, so far, asked for the dismissal of
99 cases and has estimated the potential damages from civil suits at $125
million. More than 70 officers are under investigation, more than 30 of them
for conspiring to incarcerate innocent people and to cover up unjustified
beatings and shootings.

In the face of all this, the D.A.'s office has been playing, at best, a
reluctant second banana to the LAPD. Garcetti, to be sure, has been saying
all the right things.

Last November, for example, he declared: "We are aggressively pursuing every
lead," and noted that the Rampart investigation was "absolutely critical . .
. to every police agency and the criminal-justice system as a whole."

The problem with Garcetti's pronouncements is that they come after the
Rampart revelations. Would we, for example, ever have known about the abuses
of the anti-gang Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, unit
at Rampart if one dirty cop had not been caught stealing cocaine from a
police-evidence locker and started to sing to get a lighter sentence?
Probably not.

That possibility spotlights a critical choice that every district attorney
has to make: whether to be a watchdog or a lap dog of the police department.
In dealing with the LAPD over the past 50 years, L.A. County district
attorneys have usually chosen the latter, for understandable if ignoble
reasons.

The modern subservience of the D.A.'s office to the LAPD goes back to the
transforming presence of the tough, tenure-protected, politically astute
Chief William H. Parker, who, from 1950 to his death in office in 1966,
reigned almost unchallenged in Los Angeles. He knew where all the bodies
were buried and used his power to keep "outsiders," including the district
attorney, out of LAPD affairs.

The idea that the department, and only the department, should monitor itself
became a nonnegotiable principle passed on to Parker's successors. Chiefs
Edward M. Davis and Daryl F. Gates kept the office of chief of police the
most potent and most feared political post in the city.

They were not alone in keeping it that way. The LAPD's rank-and-file union,
the Police Protective League, and the Command Officers Assn. both used their
influence and financial clout to punish or reward local politicians during
election campaigns.

They wanted high pay and benefits, but they also didn't want D.A.
investigations and officer indictments. And the last thing a D.A. wanted in
the months leading up to reelection was for the chief, the league or the
officers association to point at him and say that he's anti-cop.

The best example of the power relationship between the D.A. and the LAPD is
that of officer-involved shootings.

From the mid-1950s until 1977, the LAPD, by design, had no shooting policy.

Such a policy would limit officer actions and expose the city to civil
lawsuits.

Whenever an officer shot someone, the LAPD investigated the incident and
came to its own, nearly always self-serving conclusions. It then reported
the results to the D.A. End of story.

That changed in 1979, when a series of LAPD shootings of unarmed civilians
culminated in the slaying of Eulia Mae Love over an unpaid gas bill. Love's
death created an uproar.

Except for an indictment filed the same year in an unrelated case, the
district attorney's office had not filed any charges against any officer
involved in a shooting during the previous eight years. In response, Dist.
Atty. John K. Van de Kamp established a special D.A. unit called Operation
Rollout to investigate police shootings.

A furious Gates reacted with a vengeance.

Almost immediately, Rollout members complained that the LAPD Officer
Involved Shooting team (OIS) and its leader, Lt. Charles A. Higbie, were
deliberately interfering with their investigations. Deputy D.A.'s charged
that OIS members were directing civilian witnesses out the back doors of
police stations, making it impossible for them to be interviewed. Some said
they were denied access to shooting scenes.

Garcetti, who then headed the Special Investigations Division of the D.A.'s
office, accused Higbie of withholding "information for hours, days or weeks
[and] impeding our investigations." To which Higbie replied: "I do not
welcome these people with open arms. Our dealings with them are purely
professional. I don't serve tea or cookies at these unfortunate
occurrences."

When Robert H. Philibosian became D.A. in 1983, funds for Rollout were
drastically cut. The LAPD itself continued to investigate officer-involved
shootings, but the district attorney stood passively by. From 1977-87, LAPD
officers were involved in 571 shootings; many victims were unarmed
civilians. But only officer was indicted.

Prosecuting police officers isn't easy, to be sure. Cops are trained in how
to testify, have lots of witness-stand experience and make great impressions
with juries.

Furthermore, because prosecutors want convictions, they are reluctant to
antagonize officers whom they may need in the future to help make their
cases.

Consequently, it's rare that police officers are challenged.

As if to underscore that reality, Garcetti dismantled the Rollout unit in
1996. He blamed county supervisors for not giving him the money to run the
unit, even though his overall budget was growing by tens of millions of
dollars. Only if the police department requested that his office voluntarily
review a shooting, would his office do it, said Garcetti.

The D.A.'s see-nothing attitude toward LAPD shootings continued until last
September, when, in the wake of the Rampart revelations, Garcetti asked and
received funds from a skeptical Board of Supervisors to revive the unit.
"What's the point if you're blocked by law enforcement?" asked Supervisor
Zev Yaroslavsky. "It's your [the D.A.'s] obligation to go out to the chief
of police and raise hell with him. Now's the time to do it."

But given the LAPD's power, a politically conscious D.A. in Los Angeles is
not going to launch an independent investigation of police wrongdoing
unilaterally. He would quickly earn the enmity of the Police Protective
League and lock horns with Parks. The LAPD credo that the department is its
own best monitor has been passionately embraced by the chief.

He has steadfastly fought against strengthening the Police Commission and
strongly resisted an empowered inspector general.

He has enervated a community-policing strategy that would have involved
community leaders and cops making decisions about law enforcement in their
neighborhoods. Moreover, the D.A.'s office knows that convicting the cops
recommended for prosecution by the LAPD may be difficult if they all decide
to take the 5th Amendment, leaving the D.A. with only the word of one dirty
officer to be corroborated by victims, many of whom are gang members.

Garcetti hardly needs to lose another big case after O.J. Simpson's
acquittal.

The district attorney has thus followed tradition and ceded control of the
Rampart investigation to the LAPD. Even granting Parks the best of motives,
he can simply limit the information the public can receive.

He can blame it all on dirty cops, demand their quick indictments and get
the scandal out of the headlines.

But since 1994, Parks has been either in charge of the department's Internal
Affairs or chief of police.

Who will look into how he or his top command staff may have contributed to
the situation?

Since Parks has become chief, for example, he has changed the LAPD manual so
that he and a high-ranking command officer must pass on any recommendation
that an LAPD officer be indicted before it goes to the D.A. Before the
change, internal affairs did that job.

A D.A. has an obligation to enforce all laws. But he can choose what to
focus on and what to downplay.

He can shape policy at the investigatory, charging, case-settlement and
sentencing stages.

If, over the last 50 years, there had been an attitude emanating from the
top of the D.A.'s office that it was an independent agency, and that if
police officers did something wrong, they would be investigated and let the
chips fall where they may, perhaps the alleged crimes so routinely carried
out at Rampart might not have happened.

It's not enough to just blame the CRASH unit or the LAPD. There are others
culpable, too.

Regrettably, nothing will change until the institutional power of the LAPD
is curbed.

To do that, the Police Commission must begin to vigorously carry out its
statutory oversight duties and support a powerful, independent inspector
general's office.

Better, an office of civilian complaints independent of the LAPD, with its
own investigators and subpoena powers, should be established. Short of that,
the district attorney's office must start to investigate all civilian
complaints in which an officer's actions are potentially criminal, as is
done in many municipalities. Finally, the city attorney's office, which
regularly pays out tens of millions of dollars in police-abuse settlements
without any public complaint, should not escape attention. The city attorney
cannot simultaneously defend the LAPD against civil suits and play an
influential role in reducing the shootings and brutality cases that Los
Angeles has witnessed.

City politicians, for the most part, have been eerily silent in response to
the unfolding Rampart scandal.

Other than expressing sticker shock over the potential civil damages
stemming from the alleged police abuses, the City Council has mostly been
mute. Mayor Richard Riordan steadfastly backs his chief of police, believing
the LAPD remains its own best disciplinarian. In Los Angeles today, it is
not only the D.A. who's decided to be a lap dog.