LAPD’s Bad Buddy System

A drop of almost 25% in homicides this year is a welcome sign that Police Chief William J. Bratton’s overhaul of the Los Angeles Police Department is showing results on the street. At the same time, a recently announced city settlement is a reminder of the chief’s other challenge: steering the department clear of its reputation for brutality and corruption.

The L.A. City Council has agreed to pay $6 million to settle nine lawsuits brought by LAPD officers who said they were fired or suffered other retaliation for blowing the whistle on fellow officers. The cases were not directly linked to the 1999 Rampart scandal, which has cost the city $42 million in settlements to defendants allegedly victimized by rogue cops. But the whistle-blowers’ experiences help explain why even the vast majority of cops who aren’t corrupt might look the other way rather than risk the consequences of breaking the code of silence.

In one case, a 15-year LAPD veteran claimed he was fired after reporting two incidents of misconduct, including one in which another officer clubbed a pregnant woman in the stomach. In another, an officer said he was shunned for testifying that officers who stopped Margaret Mitchell in May 1999 need not have fatally shot the 102-pound homeless woman for brandishing a screwdriver.

The incidents occurred before Bratton was hired in October 2002. But the behavior was dismayingly consistent with a recent sting operation that found LAPD officers routinely dismissed or stonewalled attempts by civilians to report police misconduct. It’s promising that Bratton ordered the sting after noticing a dip in citizen complaints.

Abolishing a code of silence that is as old as the LAPD itself will take time and persistence. It also may take amending the City Charter to allow the chief or the civilian Police Commission to overrule the LAPD’s boards of rights -- internal panels that mete out discipline. In the case involving the pregnant woman, a board punished the only officer to file a written report, saying he had failed to properly document the incident. The officer who hit the woman was not disciplined. (In a notorious decision this year -- not one of the nine cases -- another board ignored the Police Commission ruling that the Mitchell shooting was out of policy and let the officers go without punishment.) Neither Bratton nor the commission has the power to override board decisions.

Other changes may well be suggested by a new panel charged with reviewing the LAPD’s Rampart response -- assuming it ever gets to start its work. At Bratton’s urging, the Police Commission formed the panel of prominent lawyers and law professors in July and named civil rights attorney Constance L. Rice to head it. But the panel’s private fundraising, staff and paperwork remain hung up in the bureaucracy. By looking at what happened to officers who dared speak up about the false reports and planted evidence, the panel can suggest what needs to happen to create a police culture that puts protecting and serving the public, not each other, first. That is what it will take to truly put to rest the Rampart scandal.