LAPD REFORM PLAN AIRED CHIEF WANTS LIE DETECTORS FOR RECRUITS, MORE INTERNAL INVESTIGATORS.

Byline: Beth Barrett Staff Writer

Saying the Los Angeles Police Department should fight internal corruption with lie detector tests for recruits and random sting operations, Police Chief Bernard Parks and top brass asked the Police Commission on Tuesday for $9.2 million to hire 200 officers and civilians to root out crooked cops.

The president of the Police Commission, Gerald L. Chaleff, said the reforms are long overdue, while civil liberties attorneys criticized the plan as short on the kind of civilian oversight they say is necessary to deal with a widening corruption probe in the Rampart Division.

``These are things that should have been done that weren't done,'' Chaleff said after the meeting in which the chief's proposal was tabled until a departmentwide board of inquiry reports its findings later this month.

``Supervision was lax in some areas,'' Chaleff added. ``The controls that were in place either were not used or were not sufficient. Obviously we have to do a better job.''

The chief's written proposal calls for mandatory polygraph exams for all recruits, increased command supervision, more than doubling the size of the Internal Affairs Division - from 150 to about 350 sworn officers and civilian personnel - over the next five years and reinstating investigative teams for officer-involved shootings.

With Parks in Hawaii attending a professional conference, police spokesman David Kalish said department officials believe oversight systems either weren't being followed closely enough or weren't adequately monitored when individual Rampart officers exploited that vulnerability.

``Because there historically has been an absence of corruption, based in large part on the culture of the LAPD as being totally honest, there may not have been the attention to these types of issues,'' Kalish said.

Former Officer Rafael Perez disclosed the worst LAPD corruption in half a century when he provided information on officers who allegedly beat and shot suspects, planted drugs and guns, and gave perjured testimony to convict people wrongfully. Two officers have been fired and about 17 relieved of duty pending further review of their cases.

Elizabeth Schroeder, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said members of the ACLU and some other organizations have believed for years that there was significant corruption in the LAPD.

She said police didn't follow up on the signs until Perez, an officer in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums program, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from the department.

``For years we've had too many allegations of harassment by police of gang peacemakers and others,'' Schroeder said. ``The complaints against CRASH and Rampart were not adequately investigated. They weren't taken seriously.''

In an interview, Internal Affairs Cmdr. Jim McMurray said the plan to decentralize and vastly increase the staff will help the department ferret out corruption, much as New York City has done for years.

In addition to sifting through more than 5,000 citizen complaints a year for serious violations, internal investigators will begin random stings of to see how officers respond to temptation, even if they are not suspected of corruption.

``We've always done stings if there was a reason to believe the officer was involved in criminal activity, but now we'll use more of the New York City approach of random integrity checks - for example, leaving a $100 bill on the seat of the car,'' McMurray said. ``We didn't have to do that before.''

McMurray and other officials attributed recent corruption more to a decay in officers' ethics than a lack of oversight systems, a trend police hope the mandatory lie detector tests will help stem.

LAPD officials said civil service rules have prevented the wholesale administration of polygraphs in the past, and changes in the city's charter could be required.

McMurray said LAPD officials long believed the citizen complaint system, beefed up in the wake of the 1991 Rodney King beating, would detect corrupt officers. He said officials now realize that intimidated suspects may not lodge complaints.

``We had a level of comfort that the people we're obliged to protect would speak out. We did not think that (suspects) would go to jail, would plead guilty if they weren't,'' he said.

``What we've learned is that people with . . . a criminal record, when faced with the big machine that is the criminal justice system, sometimes will do this, will plead (guilty),'' he said, in hope of getting a lighter sentence than if found guilty after a trial.

Police Protective League spokesman Geoffrey Garfield said the board has not taken an official position on the chief's proposal, but union president Ted Hunt issued a statement calling it a plan ``to spend $9 million on spying on officers'' and ``a short-term fix for a long-term problem.''

Under the proposal, many of the new Internal Affairs positions would be filled by officers now on patrol.