They say the city is well on its way to bankruptcy, 4,000 city workers are going to be laid off (maybe including police and firefighters), Wall Street is downgrading the city’s credit rating, and on and on. The police vehicle fleet is not getting any new vehicles and officers are being transferred out of specialized units into patrol to increase the police presence on the street because thousands of criminals are being released by the prisons. Department management is continually being challenged to do more with less. And less is going to be getting even more less next year.
We are getting to the point where even sacred cows should be examined to see if they are still worth feeding. A recent Los Angeles Times article pointed out that LAPD has over 270 Internal Affairs investigators for 9,900 officers while the LA Sheriff’s office has 30 for 10,000 deputies. Why? Are LAPD officers really so bad that they require nine times more monitoring than the average deputy sheriff? I don’t think so.
We are forced to take personnel complaints that the Sheriffs would laugh at, the stolen ovaries complaint being the legendary example. Since the Consent Decree requires us to take all outside complaints, the way that LAPD over-investigates everything probably keeps our 270 IA investigators much busier than the Sheriff’s 30.
One obvious problem is the bifurcation of IA into two groups: the criminal section and the administrative section. Theoretically, the criminal IA investigators do not expose themselves to the compelled statements of the accused officers thereby keeping themselves “clean” to prosecute the officers in criminal court. After they do their investigation, the criminal team turns its investigation over to the administrative section to interview the accused officers. The administrative section then has to review the criminal team’s investigation to familiarize themselves with the facts to conduct the compelled interview of the officer. In other words, two sets of investigators are required to investigate one set of accusations.
The duplication continues because the criminal section and the administrative section each require their own facilities, their own respective set of supervisors all the way up to separate captains, their own respective vehicles, their own respective administrative staff, and the increased overtime that has to result in the separate investigations of the same facts.
This wasteful setup was the result of police commission criticism that not enough officers were being criminally prosecuted, stemming from recommendations in the report of the Rampart Independent Review Panel. Not enough cops going to jail, it said, fix it. The fix was to bifurcate all investigations that had criminal elements in the allegations, which would be most of them, ranging from excessive force to violation of constitutional rights. The theory was that by separating the IA teams with a paper wall and making rules that required more investigations to be submitted to the District Attorney for filings, more cops would go to jail because the investigations would not be “tainted” by compelling an accused officer to submit to an interview.
It is a shaky theory. This paper wall is really thin and at least translucent. After all, both sections are presided over by a common commander, deputy chief, assistant chief and police chief. So much for the separation theory, since the information all eventually comes together in the same investigating agency.
On top of the shaky legal theory is the fact that of the over 6,000 personnel complaints taken every year, only a tiny fraction would ever be seriously considered to have the potential for a criminal filing. In typical LAPD fashion, a wrecking ball is being used to kill an ant. Wrecking balls are expensive and unnecessary because there is an ethics team constantly testing officers by setting up opportunities to commit criminal acts. Also, serious criminal accusations can be investigated by RHD or other detectives, as they have been for decades.
The shaky legal theory also drives the investigation of categorical uses of force. Fifty-five investigators staff a division that handles 60 rollouts per year. A single incident results in the response of two three-person teams and a lieutenant (not to mention also, on some occasions, an IA rollout team). One criminal team and one administrative team will typically respond to the same investigation.
It gets more insane. There also has to be the duplication of requiring a criminal photographer and an administrative photographer from SID. Walk-throughs are split between the two teams, causing additional delays as they juggle the involved officers with the witness officers. This works to the disadvantage of the officers being investigated, resulting in mountains of overtime and, all too often, interviews of exhausted officers who have been awake for an excessive number of hours.
Again, the paper wall is see-through. The criminal and administrative information all comes together at the captain level and proceeds up the chain from there in the same agency. The duplication is unnecessary. The feds accomplish their prosecution goals all the time by simply building a clean team and a dirty team when a decision is made to prosecute. It works just fine. Our county District Attorney can do the same thing. Cops will go to jail when they deserve to go to jail.
Several years ago, over-investigation reached the height of ridiculousness when a team from Force Investigation Division was launched on a Sunday on overtime to investigate the shooting of a rattlesnake by an off-duty officer with his .22 rifle. A neighbor had found the snake in his backyard and requested the officer’s help. The police commission realized this investigation was crazy and new rules were laid down stopping the practice.
Memories appear short. In the last few months, although an entire team wasn’t launched, an FID investigator and a divisional sergeant responded to an officer’s home to conduct an official investigation into the officer’s shooting of a coyote with his own rifle. The officer lives out in the back country and the coyote was on the officer’s property threatening his animals. A few weeks later, another team was sent out to the same officer’s home to investigate the officer’s shooting of a bobcat that had come on to the officer’s property with similar intentions. One hopes for the sake of the city treasury that this officer never goes on safari to Africa and shoots another predator. The investigative response could be expensive.
Not to pick on FID, since the individual detectives have nothing to do with implementing the protocol, but they are now back in the dog shooting and accidental discharge investigation business. These investigations had formerly been assigned to divisional supervisors during a moment of police commission clarity following the snake-shooting investigation.
A recent investigation of an accidental shotgun discharge during the safety check at start of watch resulted in an entire unit being put out of action for a day. Ten officers heard the gun go off, so they were separated under the watchful eyes of a supervisor while the shooter was separated with his own sergeant babysitter. The parking structure was taped off. Other members of the unit who hadn’t heard the shot were tasked with guarding the “crime scene.” The cars couldn’t be moved, so officers couldn’t go out in the field. The officers who had heard the gun go off were individually required to on a walkthrough to mark their positions at the time of the shot. Then they were each photographed to show how they were dressed at the time of the incident. Then each one had to write statements of their observations at the time they heard the shot. Twenty police officers were rendered useless for a day and the investigation took so long that many went on overtime.
Another recent accidental discharge into the ground in the field resulted in the command-post trailer being set up with a full-blown investigative response because the discharge was tactical. When the responding employee representative saw the number of people at the scene, he was astonished to find that there was no body, just a bullet hole in the ground. How many hours of overtime and resources that could have been used for police work are being expended on this type of investigation?
Then there are the times that two and three Internal Affairs investigators are sent out to interview an officer who works mid-p.m. or morning watch. Rather than give a P-2 a little overtime, the system required by the Consent Decree has the investigators on overtime to accommodate the P-2’s regular work schedule. In one case, two Sergeant IIs and a Detective II from IA conducted interviews, which also required a response from a Sergeant II officer representative.All of them normally worked days so each went into several hours of overtime.
Not very logical from a financial perspective and that may be the problem. There is no financial perspective on sacred-cow investigations. Officers have lost cash overtime and the City’s financial liability for unpaid time banks is building rapidly. Yet the focus is on the crime fighting functions of the Department to pull back on the overtime. Maybe the pullback should be on some of the luxury investigations that we could afford a couple of years ago but that are just too expensive today.
The financial situation is ringing the warning bells, not me. It is time to prioritize. Is a homicide investigation more important than a dog shooting investigation, or isn’t it? In these times, we probably cannot have both.
Be legally careful out there.
