Guarding the Henhouse

Today the Los Angeles Police Commission’s Inspector General, Andre Birotte, will present a 34-page audit that suggests that the LAPD needs a bit of improvement when it comes to policing itself. Joel Rubin of the LA Times reports:

The audit, which is expected to be presented to the civilian Police Commission today, examined how 60 complaints filed against officers in recent years were handled by the officers’ supervisors and investigators in the department’s internal affairs group. In 29 of the cases — nearly half of the time — it found some sort of flaw, including investigators who inaccurately recorded statements and failed to interview witnesses or identify accused officers. In some cases, investigators failed to address allegations of misconduct at all. “We are always concerned about the quality of our investigations,” said Deputy Chief Mark Perez, head of internal affairs. “We take these findings very seriously.”

[SNIP]

In several of the cases reviewed, Birotte and his staff indicated that the investigators’ conclusion that the accusations against officers were “unfounded” would have been different if the investigations had been handled better.
[SNIP]

In another case, two men said they were injured — one suffered a broken or badly sprained elbow — by a group of officers using excessive force while trying to break up a party. The report faulted investigators for failing to interview two witnesses or retrieve any of the documents on file about the incident. Investigators failed to identify any of the officers involved in the altercation and did not include any photographs of the injuries the accusers sustained — a basic component of an excessive-force complaint.

Birotte noted in his report that he had found deficiencies in the complaint investigations in previous audits and criticized the department for not implementing reforms.

I can’t speak about internal affairs under Mark Perez, whom I hear is a good guy, but I did have a couple of go rounds with IA under his predecessor, Michael Berkow. This occurred when a story on which I was reporting triggered two internal affairs investigations, and so I was contacted by investigators in both instances.

I was as helpful as was possible within the bounds of journalistic ethics. But what struck me in each case was the effort on the part of the investigating officers—sometimes subtle, sometimes no so subtle—to convince me that the IA cases had no merit. (I’d have thought—silly me—that it would have been wiser to do the legwork necessary to get to the truth of the matter before they began to draw conclusions.)

In one of the cases, where I’d alleged in print that an officer had falsified witness statements on an arrest report, getting to the bottom of things would have at least meant following in my reporter’s footsteps, interviewing whom I interviewed. It wouldn’t have been easy. Some of the people involved were homeless and difficult to find. But I found them with nowhere near the resources of an IA investigation. Yet, as nearly as I am able to tell, the IA people never quite managed it.

The other case, which had to do with the alleged disappearance of some citizen complaints against a police officer, concluded with what appeared to be a similar lack of rigor or curiosity on the part of the investigator, who seemed nice enough, but less than eager to do the work that would have shown the allegations to be false or true. Not surprisingly, the case was ultimately deemed ”without merit.”

I suppose all of this proves nothing conclusive. Maybe in both of the instances there is a whole other side to the story.

And look: I know a couple of the people who work at IA now—and another couple who have worked there in the past—and they are exactly the officers you’d want: smart, doggedly determined, utterly honorable.

But I believe I’ve met the other kind too, the ones who seem to us civilians to be bound and determined to find the complaint baseless and the accused officer virtuous—facts be damned.

******************************************************************
PS: And no, just because we criticize the department, this doesn’t mean that those financial disclosure demands are a good idea. They still aren’t.