UNCHECKED DEPUTIES SETTLING UNPROBED CASES COST MILLIONS.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department failed to investigate 800 civil claims of deputy misconduct from 1993 to 2001, missing the chance to solve problems and cut costs, a civilian oversight panel has found.

The report, to be officially released Thursday by the year-old Office of Independent Review, comes at a time when the Sheriff's Department is under pressure to reduce its soaring litigation costs.

It found that department officials routinely failed to investigate allegations of misconduct outlined in civil claims, which are filed with the county as a precursor to filing a lawsuit and are generally rejected.

``I think it's very troubling to see a very large number of claims where there hasn't been the necessary investigation,'' said University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a civil-rights expert. ``These are exactly the kind of things that need to be found by an independent review board.''

In the report, Michael Gennaco, the panel's chief attorney, wrote that civil claims filed with the county provided crucial information about allegations of officer misconduct.

``Unfortunately, in the past, the Sheriff's Department has largely viewed civil litigation as a realm exclusively for its defense lawyers and has not thoroughly exploited this valuable information source,'' he wrote.

``OIR has therefore focused on finding a better way for the Sheriff's Department to take advantage of the information regarding alleged misconduct found in civil claims and complaints, so that those allegations of misconduct are subjected to fair, thorough and effective internal review.''

Sheriff Lee Baca said the report reinforces his concerns about the reasons for his department's rising litigation costs, which have soared from $11.9 million in 1999-2000 to $26.7 million in 2001-02.

``I think the claims and lawsuits filed against the department need to have thorough investigations at the very beginning,'' Baca said. ``I think the OIR is doing very well and the report indicates a lot of improvements have been made in managing internal-affairs investigations.''

At Baca's request, the Board of Supervisors created the OIR in October 2001 with an annual budget of $1.2 million.

Gennaco, a former civil-rights prosecutor, was hired for $200,000 a year, and his two deputies, Benjamin Jones Jr. and Robert Miller, are earning $175,000 each. Criminal-investigations attorney Ray Jurado, investigations team attorney Ilana B. Rosenzweig and rollout team attorney Stephen J. Connolly are each receiving $150,000 a year.

The office, which civil-rights experts say is the most far-reaching of all civilian oversight panels in the country, was formed to ensure the integrity of the sheriff's internal affairs investigations.

The OIR's attorneys help ensure that Sheriff's Department internal investigators don't cover up cases of misconduct, but rather get a comprehensive assessment of the facts and recommend policy and training issues to correct the problems.

In the report, Gennaco said misconduct complaints filed at sheriff's stations or with the department's internal-affairs hotline are more likely to be investigated than civil claims filed with the county.

According to Gennaco, about 1,100 claims are filed against the department every year.

But because the department gave virtually no direction to the personnel responsible for responding to the claims, the inquiry into those claims was not thorough. Only rarely did investigators try to contact the claimant or interview witnesses.

``The Sheriff's Department's responses to claims were often inadequate,'' said Gennaco, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Stanford Law School who went on to become chief of the civil-rights section at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles.

At Gennaco's recommendation, the department has implemented a more thorough and timely inquiry into allegations made in claims.

Although Baca follows the vast majority of Gennaco's recommendations, the office has run into a roadblock with County Counsel Lloyd Pellman's office.

Pellman has refused to provide Gennaco with documents related to misconduct lawsuits filed against the department. The restriction impedes Gennaco's efforts to ensure that the Sheriff's Department uses the information learned during lawsuits to address misconduct and to examine policies, procedures and training.

Gennaco said he has repeatedly seen cases presented to the Board of Supervisors in which the counsel's office recommends a settlement, predicting that it couldn't successfully defend the employee's misconduct. Often, the supervisors ask Baca to explain why the misconduct was never addressed.

Usually, the answer is that information that should have prompted an internal review was never given to Sheriff's Department executives. By the time the litigation reaches the supervisors, it's often too late to discipline those involved.

Senior Assistant County Counsel Donovan Main said there are serious attorney-client confidentiality issues involved in releasing records to Gennaco that could get the county sued for malpractice and referred to the state bar. Main said the office has sought outside advice on how to resolve the issue.

After the OIR was created in October 2001, Gennaco and his attorneys spent six months researching the department, going on patrol with deputies and reviewing the Internal Affairs Bureau.

Since then, they have overseen numerous misconduct investigations, including a case in 2000 in which a jury awarded a $2 million verdict to Patricia and Lupita Gutierrez. They had alleged improper sexual contact by deputies stemming from a 1994 incident. The jury found in their favor on allegations of unlawful arrest and failure to investigate their citizen complaint.

The allegations against the deputies were never investigated internally, so no discipline or policy changes occurred to fix the problems that led to the lawsuit.

``Attempts were made to explain away the jury's award as the product of a hostile jury and some incorrect rulings by a judge,'' Gennaco said.

As a result, Gennaco recommended that an administrative investigation be conducted and Baca agreed.

Gennaco also discovered that computer records from the department's Mobile Digital Communications System, which allows Sheriff's Department personnel to communicate with each other through patrol car terminals and at fixed locations, were discreetly cataloged and not given freely to defense attorneys to help them defend their clients.

``You had to know the magic words to get the information,'' Gennaco said.

As a result, Gennaco recommended and Baca agreed to change the policy for a wider interpretation of record requests without having to use precise Sheriff's Department nomenclature.

``No longer will an attorney have to know about and then correctly recite the words that will unlock the sheriff's vault of information,'' Gennaco said.

After spending 18 years as a civil-rights prosecutor, Gennaco said it was the right time to join the OIR to help reform the Sheriff's Department.

``The fact is, the stars are lined up for other law enforcement organizations to think about what meaningful police oversight is,'' he said.

HIGHLIGHT CASE

Here are highlights of some of the investigations conducted by the year-old Office of Independent Review monitoring the internal-affairs cases involving the Sheriff's Department:

--A deputy who pushed and slapped a motorist after a traffic stop. The incident was videotaped by a bystander and is still under investigation.

--A deputy alleged to have lost or stolen a computer after impounding a vehicle and its contents after a traffic stop. Prosecutors declined to file a theft charge, but the OIR asked investigators to focus on whether the deputy lied when he denied recollection of the computer. The investigation is ongoing.

--A deputy shot a man behaving erratically in public and brandishing a knife. Prosecutors determined that the shooting was justified, but the OIR questioned whether less-lethal alternatives could have been used. A further inquiry was ordered.

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HIGHLIGHT CASE (see text)