It may not be entirely accurate, but the perception is that the Police Commission has been hell-bent for leather to change the “culture” of LAPD, which refers to the street cop’s treatment of the public. Eight years of Consent Decree enforcement have been directly aimed at this goal. TEAMS II has been created as a warning system to focus attention on any officer who exhibits the slightest symptoms of treating the public unfairly.
A Constitutional Policing Unit has been formed to examine in detail every allegation of biased policing, no matter how irresponsibly made. LAPD has 10 times more Internal Affairs investigators than the County Sheriff’s to make sure no stone goes unturned when an officer is accused of misconduct.
It is no defense for an officer to say that he or she treated a suspect more harshly because they were guilty of some heinous crime. The same standard of treatment applies to all suspects. There is no sliding scale based on degree of culpability. The suspect’s guilt is not even part of the administrative investigation into an allegation that a suspect was mistreated.
There is no mystery as to who is watching the officers as they do their jobs on the street. It is the Professional Standards Bureau (PSB), the home of Internal Affairs, the Special Operations Division and Force Investigation Division. However, there is a question as to who is watching the watchers. Where do officers go when there is unfair treatment by the PSB?
It would seem that the Police Commission should be as concerned about the fair treatment of its employees — including employees suspected of, or even guilty of, misconduct — as it is about the fair treatment of the citizens of Los Angeles who are suspected of, or have, in fact, committed crimes. The Commission’s treatment standard doesn’t change based on guilt.
Since the Police Commission seems to be in this business, there is another “culture” that needs to be changed in the LAPD besides the one of how the street cop treats the public. That culture is the one in the Professional Standards Bureau that seems to see officers who have allegedly committed acts of misconduct as not needing to be treated with the same respect for rights demanded by the Police Commission for criminal suspects. It seems that a conviction of guilt in the minds of LAPD management justifies extraordinary measures in the treatment of accused officers.
What Can Happen to One Can Happen to Anyone
A case in point is the treatment of an officer who will be referred to as “Officer A.” It is possible to discuss this case because the officer has been forced to file a lawsuit, making many of the facts public record, and the officer, through his attorneys, has given permission. As will be seen, he has nothing to lose. He has been marked for termination. (A side benefit for League members is a lesson in how alcohol and firearms can be a poor mixture.)
Officer A, his girlfriend and her female friend went to a birthday party at a nightclub and imbibed alcohol. They left together at 1:30 a.m. and walked to the parking lot where Officer A’s vehicle was parked. Another vehicle drove by them and the occupants yelled derogatory comments at the young ladies. Officer A verbally responded and he and the two women entered his vehicle and began to leave the parking lot.
The other vehicle did a U-turn and one of the occupants exited and came up alongside Officer A and sucker-punched him several times in the face. Officer A saw lights and, feeling like he was about to go unconscious, drew his off-duty weapon and fired two to three times out the window at the suspect. The suspect disappeared (no hits and never identified) and Officer A accelerated away from the suspects.
Officer A drove to his residence, sent his girlfriend and her friend home and removed the license plates from his car in case the suspects had followed and were looking for him. After a little more than an hour, he phoned one of his partners and arranged to meet his supervisor and relayed to him what had happened.
FID and IA rolled out for the investigation. It was later determined by the Department that Officer A would have blown a .13 when he left the nightclub.
Those are the basic facts. Whether Officer A deserves termination or not is not the point of this article. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, including the Department. The point of this article is how an employee was treated by the Department.
Officer A was taken to an LAPD station and ordered to remain there under the guard of a supervisor. There he remained for more than 12 hours while waiting for the investigators to interview him. He requested medical treatment for the injury to his face, but it was several hours before it was granted. Finally, after being awake for 33 hours, he was ordered to participate in an interview, over his attorney’s objections. Due to his condition, the interview was so unproductive that it was terminated. (He would be re-interviewed two additional times in the coming days.)
After this interview, he was ordered to another LAPD station and again monitored so that a search warrant could be written to search his person for a shell casing (his residence was also searched pursuant to a search warrant). During this period, a rescue ambulance had to be called to examine him a second time. By the time he was released, he had been kept continuously awake for nearly 40 hours.
What is supposed to happen, and what has happened during the last 15 years of my involvement in this process, is that the FID completes its investigation, a Use-of-Force Board is convened and recommendations are made to the Chief of Police as to whether the officer-involved shooting is in policy or not. The Chief then makes recommendations to the Police Commission and the Commission makes the final decision.
If it is Administrative Disapproval, the Chief imposes a penalty if warranted. The officer is then ordered to a Board of Rights if the Chief thinks that termination is the appropriate remedy. The officer is given the FID report and other discovery and a Board is held.
This did not happen in Officer A’s case. Before the FID report was even complete, Officer A was ordered to a Board of Rights. He was charged with 11 counts ranging from failing to report an OIS in a timely manner to compromising an investigation. Everything except an out-of-policy shooting was charged because that had not been officially decided yet by the Use-of-Force Board. That could be charged in a second Board of Rights (BOR) in the unlikely event that Officer A has not been terminated at that point.
The advantage to the Department was that the FID report did not have to be shared, Officer A would go off payroll and there was another charge potentially hanging if needed later.
The League attempted to intercede, but was told by the PSB that the 11 counts were not related to the OIS. What???
Officer A’s attorney brought this up to the BOR when it convened. The BOR agreed that the officer was entitled to the FID report and ordered the hearing to continue until the FID report was completed and provided to Officer A, even though it was said that this would be several months.
The League appealed to Chief Beck, and to his credit, the Chief reinstated Officer A, pending the BOR, because of the need for the long continuance.
Apparently not happy with this development, the PSB reconvened the BOR and argued for it to reconsider its previous ruling. Internal Affairs was able to change the Board’s mind. The decision to provide Officer A with the FID report was reversed and the BOR was scheduled to be heard without it. There was no choice left but to file a lawsuit.
So What Is to Be Done?
To keep things in perspective, thousands of investigations go on every day by PSB investigators in which the employee is treated very fairly. More officers are cleared by Internal Affairs investigators than are convicted — a fact not widely recognized. Most FID investigations prove that the officers acted appropriately.
The most egregious problems connected with employee treatment seem to be connected with roll-out situations where the investigations tend to be criminal as well as administrative. But can you imagine what would happen to a P2 if he or she treated a murder arrestee the way that Officer A was treated?
The League met with the inspector general (IG) this month and attempted to relay its concerns about the lack of fair treatment by the Department that is often reported by our members. The IG was sympathetic, but needed specifics and asked us to keep her informed.
That indeed is the problem: providing specifics. How often do these problems happen? Are trends developing? Is it the same commands over and over again?
The Department keeps endless statistics — maybe the League should do the same. So, maybe the League should implement a centralized reporting system on incidents reported by our representatives when Department management treats our members unfairly. We could forward these incidents to the IG and keep an index, sort of a TEAMS II, on Department management, to identify problems so that corrective action can be taken. Or, if ignored, better lawsuits could be filed. I would hope for the former.
Be legally careful out there.
