Report Echoes Christopher Panel’s Findings
There is a familiar ring to the laundry list of internal problems that the Los Angeles Police Department Board of Inquiry says allowed corruption in the Rampart Division to fester.
That’s because such deficiencies as inadequate screening of new officers and the inability of the LAPD to track use of force and monitor problem officers were identified by the blue-ribbon Christopher Commission after the beating of Rodney G. King nine years ago.
The LAPD’s failure to adopt the most significant reforms the commission recommended to resolve those problems has caused some reformers to question whether the department can police itself--especially since less than two years ago the LAPD said it had dealt with many of those issues.
In August of 1998, Chief Bernard C. Parks was joined by his civilian bosses on the Police Commission in declaring that it was time to “move beyond” the Christopher Commission report, saying that 80% of its recommendations had been “completed” or “closed.”
“We honestly thought a lot of these things were fixed,” LAPD Cmdr. Dan Koenig said in an interview last week. “Now we find out that some of these things aren’t fixed.”
“What do you do?” Koenig asked. “You honestly report to the people of this city what you’ve found and then you go fix it, knowing full good and well you’ve got an inspector general, a Police Commission and a City Council looking over your shoulder to make sure that you’ve got it fixed this time.”
In an interview, Parks stood by his prior statements that most of the commission’s recommendations had been implemented--even though reformers have long cautioned against treating the commission’s work as a procedural checklist.
“The fact that somebody fails to comply doesn’t mean they [reforms] are not in place,” Parks said. “The expectation that once we put it into place that there’s going to be automatic 100% compliance is not realistic.”
‘We’re Light-Years Beyond Christopher’
Parks said that many of the issues cited by the Christopher Commission are subjects that police managers continually reexamine, and that the ways the department will now tackle them go beyond the original recommendations. One example he provided: the Christopher Commission urged analyzing patterns in complaints against individual officers, whereas the Board of Inquiry recommends doing the same for units of officers.
“We’re light-years beyond Christopher,” Parks said.
Former Police Commissioner Edith Perez, who was the panel’s president at the time of the 1998 news conference, did not return calls seeking comment. The commission’s current president, Gerald Chaleff, said last week he would return a reporter’s phone call but never did.
The statement that most of the recommendations had been implemented was made even though the department and others in the city rejected what Christopher Commission members said were several key recommendations: to give officers in the field regular psychological tests and to beef up the staff of the civilian Police Commission with auditors and investigators in addition to an inspector general, whose post was created in 1995.
The Christopher Commission and the department’s self-evaluation nine years later were triggered by two very different events--the former by the videotape of four officers beating King in Lake View Terrace, the latter by disgraced former Officer Rafael Perez’s confessions of how he and other members of his anti-gang unit allegedly shot, beat and framed civilians in the Pico-Union district.
As such, there are significant differences between the 228-page Christopher Commission report and the 362-page report of the Board of Inquiry into the Rampart scandal. The Christopher Commission report--named after the chairman of the Independent Citizens Commission, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher--dealt with issues of excessive force and racism, and concluded that “by all accounts, the LAPD is . . . free of corruption.”
The Board of Inquiry report, written by LAPD officials, is laden with detailed examinations of the department’s procedures and paperwork and recommends steps to prevent future corruption.
But the two reports have common themes. And analysts say the two scandals appear to have their roots in similar failings.
“What’s the same is that we were talking about the failure of supervision,” said former U.S. Atty. and Christopher Commission member Andrea Ordin, who had yet to read the Board of Inquiry report. “We were talking about how captains and commanders were not doing their job looking at these officers [who use] excessive force.”
A central theme of the Christopher Commission report was the department’s inability to discern patterns in officers’ use of force. The LAPD lacked any central database of officers’ internal records, and the commission cited numerous instances in which officers were evaluated or promoted without reference to their disciplinary history.
At the 1998 news conference, the department distributed a report saying those problems were completed or “closed” by the implementation of a centralized computer database that would help curb excessive force, strengthen officers’ human relations training and be central in personnel decisions.
But 18 months later, the Board of Inquiry found the data in the computer system so error-ridden that it said a complete review is needed.
Parks downplayed problems with the system, saying no database is perfect. “There are errors in small percentages across the board,” Parks said.
Yet, in words echoing the Christopher Commission, the Board of Inquiry warned: “In too many cases, people are making personnel and promotional decisions unaware of matters that certainly would affect their decisions.” And it cited “the failure of management to recognize those clear patterns and correct the behavior of the officers involved” in the Rampart scandal.
The LAPD’s continuing inability to create an effective system to monitor personnel is in sharp contrast to the county Sheriff’s Department, which created a nationally recognized tracking system relatively soon after it was urged to do so by a separate commission.
“If you want to do it, you can do it,” said Merrick Bobb, a former counsel to the Christopher Commission who monitors the Sheriff’s Department for the county Board of Supervisors.
‘Evaluations Have Little or No Credibility’
Another similarity between the Board of Inquiry and Christopher Commission reports is their concern with the department’s performance evaluations. The panel criticized the omission of use of force findings in some officers’ evaluations, warning that they may not adequately portray officers’ performance.
LAPD officials said they have found other weaknesses in the system. The Board of Inquiry states: “We must restore integrity to our performance evaluation system so it can be relied upon as a true measure of performance. . . . Our personnel evaluations have little or no credibility at any level in the organization.”
In yet another echo of one of the Christopher Commission’s central themes, the Board of Inquiry report criticizes the way the department responds to civilian complaints. Those who filed complaints against Rampart officers “all seemed to be viewed as recalcitrant and their allegations were not taken seriously by some of the supervisors assigned to conduct the investigation.”
That comes nine years after the Christopher Commission bluntly concluded: “The complaint system is skewed against complainants.”
Parks said that most of the complaints covered in the Board of Inquiry report were lodged before he introduced a new, less restrictive policy on taking civilian complaints in 1998.
Another recurring problem cited by the Board of Inquiry is the failure of the LAPD to adequately conduct background checks on its recruits--a concern raised by the Christopher Commission nearly a decade ago. Parks said that the background process has improved and that the current problems differ from the procedures singled out by the Christopher Commission.
Still, the Board of Inquiry noted the similarity. “As painful as it may be,” the report said, “we must recognize that this problem has not been solved.”
Because pre-employment screening cannot detect emotional or psychological problems, which may develop during an officer’s career on the force, the Christopher Commission recommended that officers be retested regularly.
The department has long rejected that key recommendation, to the dismay of many reformers. But members of the LAPD brass were alarmed when they discovered during the Rampart investigation that a departmental policy designed to deal with some of those concerns--counseling officers who use force--was not always followed.
Parks noted that the review found that counseling was omitted in 10% of the cases sampled. “It’s not earth-shattering nor does it make the department collapse,” he said.
But the Board of Inquiry report said: “Anything less than 100% compliance in this area is completely unacceptable.”
Adherence to Diversity Training Questioned
The Board of Inquiry probe revealed so many problems within the department that LAPD command staff is taking a second look at even those Christopher Commission recommendations that it believes to be in place.
As one way to address concerns about racial bias, the Christopher Commission recommended that police officers receive diversity and cultural awareness training and continuing education.
In 1998, the department said it had implemented the suggestion to ensure that timely and consistent training occurs during roll calls.
The Board of Inquiry found that a review of watch commander logs indicates a “high level of compliance” with requirements for the training programs. But the department investigators were so shaken by the lack of compliance in other areas that they were skeptical of the result on roll calls.
“It is possible that the standardized roll call training curriculum is being fully and faithfully provided, but it is also possible that people are simply making the expected notation on their log whether or not the training actually occurred,” they wrote.
Of possibly greatest concern to some reformers is the seeming persistence of one of the gravest problems identified by the Christopher Commission--the code of silence among officers that discourages them from reporting wrongdoing.
The department in 1998 said Christopher Commission recommendations regarding the issue were “closed,” saying, “The expectation that our employees be candid and truthful has been the subject of numerous written reports, training sessions and, unfortunately, discipline.”
Reformers say their concerns have only been heightened.
“I think we’ve seen from the Board of Inquiry report that the code of silence is alive and well,” said Mark Epstein, a former counsel to the Christopher Commission. “You can’t address that problem by regulation. You can only address it by management.”
Still another key theme of the Christopher Commission was the need to hold commanding officers responsible for their officers’ use of force. The LAPD in 1998 said that was being done because command officers now review every report after an incident in which an officer uses force.
Again, the Board of Inquiry found problems in the procedure. Of 349 use of force reports examined by the department, 103 had illegible signatures, making it impossible to determine who had reviewed them. Another 75 were reviewed by sergeants and lieutenants, who are rarely acting as commanding officers and should not be making final reviews. Thirteen reports did not address tactical issues.
In response, the department has launched an audit of all use of force reports in its archives.
The Board of Inquiry also recommended changing the format of the use of force report sheet to ensure commanding officers are actually reviewing them.
In another effort to rein in the LAPD’s use of force, the Christopher Commission urged that complaints about excessive force be investigated by the department’s Internal Affairs Group rather than by the division where the alleged misconduct occurred.
The LAPD in 1998 said that recommendation was “closed,” stating that “every effort is made” to have Internal Affairs investigate those complaints. But the Board of Inquiry found too many serious complaints were still being investigated by local divisions rather than Internal Affairs--a particular problem at the Rampart Division. The new report recommends beefing up the Internal Affairs unit to do more probes.
The LAPD’s Koenig said that the department knew in 1998 that it did not have enough Internal Affairs investigators to examine enough serious personnel complaints, but that its requests for more funding to increase the staff had been repeatedly rebuffed by the City Council--a concern not raised in its 1998 report.
Koenig defended the assertion in 1998 that the issue had been dealt with.
“We ask for stuff and we get told yes or no,” he said. “This is a matter of [the] budget.”
Koenig said that the only way to spot the deviations from Christopher Commission recommendations was through the extraordinary review undertaken by the Board of Inquiry. There was, he said, no way to discover the problems in August 1998, when the department, with the assistance of a public relations firm, held its news conference to issue its report declaring the Christopher recommendations mostly implemented.
“The report was written as we believed the situation to be at the time,” Koenig said. “Who the hell knew Perez was going to get up and say what he said?”
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Problems in the LAPD Then and Now
Nine years ago, the Christopher Commission issues its landmark report on excessive force, racial bias and problem officers in the Los Angeles Police Department. Now, in the wake of the Rampart scandal, an LAPD Board of Inquiry has issued it examination of the corruption case. Some of the issues are strikingly familiar to those issues in the Christopher Commission Report.
CHRISTOPHER COMMISSION
CODE OF SILENCE
“Perhaps the greatest single barrier to the effective investigation and adjudication of complaints is the officers’ unwritten code of silence: An officer does not provide adverse information against a fellow officer.”
RECOGNIZING PROBLEM OFFICERS
“The failure to control these [problem] officers is a management issue that is at the heart of the problem. The documents and data that we have analyzed have all been available to the department; indeed, most of this information came from that source. The LAPD’s failure to analyze and act upon these revealing data evidences a significant breakdown in the management and leadership of the department.”
HIRING ISSUES
The LAPD “pays too little attention to a candidate’s history of violence. Experts agree that the best predictor of future behavior is previous behavior. Thus, the background investigation offers the best hope of screening out violence-prone applicants.”
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
“Personnel evaluation reports ... often paint unduly favorable pictures of officers who appear to have significant problems in their use of excessive force.”
BOARD OF INQUIRY
CODE OF SILENCE
“None of the employees interviewed recognized any particular trend toward a code of silence, which is certainly ironic, to say the least, given what we now know regarding events at Rampart.”
RECOGNIZING PROBLEM OFFICERS
“Time and again, the board found clear patterns of misconduct that went undetected. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the investigation of personnel complaints by the Rampart community. Regardless of the source, complaints all seemed to be viewed as recalcitrant and their allegations were not taken seriously by some of the supervisors assigned to conduct the investigations. Equally significant was the failure of management to recognize those clear patterns and correct the behavior of the officers involved.”
HIRING ISSUES
“Pre-employment information on four of the profiled [Rampart] officers raises serious issues regarding their initial employment with the department. Criminal records, inability to manage personal finances, histories of violent behavior and narcotics involvement are all factors that should have been precluded their employment as police officers... So, as painful as it may be, we must recognize that this problem has not been solved,”
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
“The fact is that our personnel evaluations have little or no credibility at any level in the organization, and that must be corrected.”
* Source: Christopher Commission, Board of Inquiry reports
