Outrage (48 page)

It’s estimated that during the past half century, on-duty police officers in L.A. County shot and killed well in excess of one thousand people. [This sounds bad, of course, but 99 percent of the killings were justified. The problem is that some were not.] According to the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Criminal Statistics, between 1988 and 1991 alone, there were 223 homicides by police officers in L.A. County. Yet, the indictment in 1992 of a Compton police officer for voluntary manslaughter in the killings of two Samoan brothers is believed to be the first homicide prosecution of any law-enforcement officer in the county for the on-duty killing of a private citizen since the
LAPD
prosecution almost two decades earlier in 1973. (An
LASD
deputy sheriff was prosecuted and convicted of second-degree murder in the 1982 shooting death of a pregnant woman’s fetus.) The only homicide prosecution anyone can remember before 1973 was of a Los Angeles deputy sheriff in 1969.

Perhaps the most alarming statistic of all is that in the ten years between 1982 and the Compton police officer prosecution, Special Investigations rolled out to the scene of more than a thousand officer-involved shooting cases.
Yet not once
did they find criminality on the part of any officer in the entire county, not even criminal negligence.

It couldn’t be clearer, then, that the Los Angeles DA’s Office looks the other way at police brutality. Johnnie Cochran, a former L.A. assistant district attorney and now a plaintiff’s lawyer in many successful civil suits against L.A. County police agencies, says, “There have been a number of police brutality cases throughout the years where the DA should definitely have filed charges, but he didn’t.” A current L.A. County Superior Court judge said a few years ago, “I have a distinct feeling that the district attorney, either intentionally or unintentionally, has a double standard when it comes to filing criminal complaints against the police.”

Would prosecuting the police ultimately hurt society by forcing officers to act tentatively in situations that call for aggressive conduct? I doubt it. Although prosecutions would heighten awareness among all officers in the proper use of force, 95 percent of the police wouldn’t feel handcuffed on the job because they simply don’t harbor the impulse to mistreat or brutalize those whom they detain or arrest. Knowing that officers on the street are compelled to act spontaneously in highly dangerous, life-threatening situations, the DA should continue to give officers considerable latitude and discretion in their use of force, with the benefit of the doubt always going to the officer. But carte blanche authority—essentially the current situation—must cease. When the officer’s conduct clearly trespasses beyond permissible margins into blatant, egregious, and unnecessary use of force, the officer has to be criminally accountable for his conduct. To hold otherwise is to hold that in the process of enforcing the law, an officer is legally entitled to violate the law himself.

During the Rodney King beating there were several civilian witnesses. Ask yourself this question: If the officers who beat King knew that there was a district attorney downtown who would prosecute them for police brutality, would they have been as likely to rain fifty-six blows with their batons to the head, torso, and legs of a defenseless person in front of independent civilian witnesses? What I’m saying is that if the district attorney and his predecessors had done their job throughout the years there is a reasonable probability that the Rodney King beating would not have taken place.

Likewise, if the district attorney had been prosecuting police brutality cases through the years, with a fair share of convictions, the likelihood of a riot following the Simi Valley verdict would have been substantially diminished. The black community would most likely have viewed the stunning verdict—as most nonblacks have—as being mostly attributable to the conservative venue in which the case was tried: nearly all-white Ventura County. Instead, they viewed it as confirmation of their indictment of the criminal justice system in America.

I spoke earlier in the book about the staggering incompetence in our society. Warren Christopher, by all accounts an honorable and conscientious public servant, headed up the 1991–92 Commission named after him to investigate excessive force and police brutality in the
LAPD
and come up with proposals to end it. Of the 129 recommendations made by the commission to stop excessive force, unbelievably,
not one
is a recommendation for increased prosecution by the district attorney of police brutality, the
only
recommendation which, if carried out, would substantially reduce it. In fact, there isn’t
one word
in the entire 228-page report of the Christopher Commission that refers to the lack of DA prosecutions of police brutality. Nor is there one word about how the DA, whose job it is to prosecute police brutality cases, can play a part in reducing police brutality.

Instead, after months of highly publicized inquiry and investigation, the celebrated Christopher Commission concluded that the key to reducing excessive force was to implement a “major overhaul of the disciplinary system” within the
LAPD
. The same, identical recommendation—even to the extent of using an independent inspector general to monitor the discipline—had been urged twenty-seven years earlier by the McCone Commission, which followed the Watts Riot and on which Christopher served as vice-chairman. Not only hadn’t Warren Christopher learned anything at all about the problem in twenty-seven years, but even with a staff of 130, 101 of whom were lawyers, helping him, he exhibited not the smallest grain of common sense. In Christopher’s view, internal discipline by the
LAPD
was the best way to deal with police brutality. In other words, the police (as opposed to everyone else in our society) should be relied on to continue to police themselves.
And Warren Christopher is our present secretary of state.

It’s not as if Christopher and his commission were unaware of the law. The commission report points out that
LAPD
policy
and the penal code
, which the DA prosecutes under, require that force be
reasonable
. It’s just that the Christopher Commission apparently believed that the DA’s job is to prosecute all members of the community except the police.

If one had confronted members of the commission with their colossal incompetence and lack of insight, they would have been forced to invoke the anemic argument that they were commissioned only to investigate the
LAPD
, not the DA’s office. However, the commission itself stated that it “ought to examine
all
aspects of the law-enforcement structure in Los Angeles that might cause or contribute to the problem of excessive force.” The DA’s office, of course, is an integral part of the law enforcement structure of Los Angeles, being the agency responsible for prosecuting all felonies in the county. Moreover, the Christopher Commission did make recommendations concerning an entity
outside
the LAPD: “Community councils are to be created composed of local residents and community and business leaders to work with the police…in matters that affect their neighborhoods,” the commission said.

There are few tyrants like blind custom, and I believe that the Christopher Commission never recommended more aggressive DA action against police brutality cases simply because the absence of such prosecutions has been institutionalized in Los Angeles and around the country. And their abject incompetence prevented them from lifting their vision beyond the custom.

At present, the only thing a rogue cop really has to fear is internal discipline by his own department. But only a small percentage of police brutality allegations result in internal discipline. For instance, the Christopher Commission found that of 2,152 citizen allegations of excessive force from 1986 through 1990, only forty-two (2 percent) were sustained by LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Former assistant chief Jesse Brewer, now deceased, estimated at the time that for every complaint, there were three or four incidents that citizens did not report. And even when Internal Affairs did sustain the complaint, the typical punishment was suspension without pay for a week or, in unusual cases, dismissal from the force. As a deterrent, none of this begins to compare with a criminal prosecution and possible incarceration in the state prison.

Was the
LAPD
incompetent?

The defense in the Simpson case, by its two-pronged attack—the
LAPD
framed Simpson, and were also butterfingered incompetents in their collection and preservation of evidence—put the
LAPD
on trial during the Simpson case, and the defense succeeded in convincing the jury of both of these charges. But because the jury bought the defense allegations doesn’t, perforce, make them true.

Obviously, the
LAPD
did not frame Simpson, and as far as I can determine, they were no more incompetent or competent in this case than in the other major cases they investigate. It would be impossible to find any murder case having the amount of physical, scientific evidence that existed in this case in which there weren’t some slip-ups and unexplained discrepancies here and there in the investigation of the case and the collection and preservation of the evidence. It’s normal and to be expected, particularly when so many people are involved.

For instance, in the Manson case, the
LAPD
criminalists neglected to take blood samples from several pools of blood at the murder scene. Horn-rimmed glasses (whose owner was never identified) were seen by the first officer arriving at the murder scene near two trunks in the living room. Though the crime scene was supposed to be preserved for the criminalists, the glasses somehow ended up on top of a desk. Two pieces of a gun grip, first seen near the entryway, ended up under a chair in the living room. As stated in an
LAPD
report, “They were apparently kicked under the chair by one of the original officers on the scene. However, no one is copping out.” An officer accidentally wiped off a bloody fingerprint on the gate of the Tate residence when he departed. The police sent out flyers all over the country and Canada looking for a gun they already had in their own Van Nuys division. A detective and his partner crossing a busy street near the courthouse dropped a vial of dog hairs I was going to introduce, losing all but one. (I did not introduce the hair, since it wasn’t absolutely key evidence and presenting one hair would have looked too desperate and speculative.) And so it went.

Discrepancies in times and everything else are extremely common. Again, in the Manson case, the
LAPD
report on the Tate-LaBianca murders says: “At 0914 hours, West Los Angeles Units 8L5 and 8L62 were given a radio call, ‘Code 2, possible homicide, 10051 Cielo Drive.’” There were one-man patrol cars in those days, and the first officer to arrive at the scene of the five Tate murders was Jerry Joe De Rosa, who wrote in his report that he arrived at 9:05 a.m., which was nine minutes
before
he received the Code 2. The second officer who arrived, William Whisenhunt, set the time of his arrival at between 9:15 and 9:25, while officer Robert Burbridge, who arrived
after
DeRosa and Whisenhunt, said he arrived at 8:40 a.m.

But you see, all of these things, when viewed in the context of the entire case, don’t add up to a hill of beans.

Make no mistake about it. The DA lost this case, not the
LAPD
. In no way, as so many talking heads have said, did the
LAPD
lose the case for the DA. The DA’s office lost this case all by itself.

In summary form, in my opinion the
LAPD
did an adequate job in this case, though it definitely could have been more competent, but the Los Angeles DA’s Office could hardly have been more incompetent. And yet, because they do not know whereof they speak, many in the media have decided that the
LAPD
lost the case. “By acclamation:
LAPD
blew an open and shut case” read the caption of an October 5, 1995,
Los Angeles Daily News
article.

Even in the areas where
LAPD
officers or employees did not perform well, their poor performance was usually on the witness stand, not in the work they did on the case. Examples are Dennis Fung, Mark Fuhrman, and Phil Vannatter. If the prosecutors had adequately prepared Fung for cross-examination, which they failed to do, Barry Scheck wouldn’t have had anything like the success he had with Fung. And the prosecutors should have known how to deal,
beforehand
, with police officer witnesses who didn’t want to admit something on the witness stand: Fuhrman did not want to admit he had used the word “nigger” in the past ten years; Vannatter did not want to admit that he had said to two witnesses and within earshot of an
FBI
agent, that Simpson was “a” suspect in the case at the time he and three fellow detectives went to Simpson’s Rockingham estate in the early-morning hours of June 13, 1994. With proper preparation by the prosecution, neither Fuhrman nor Vannatter would have had his credibility undermined with the jury.

Even Phil Vannatter’s bringing the vial of Simpson’s blood over to Rockingham to deliver it personally to the criminalist, Fung, though clearly ill-advised, was not what I would call “incompetent,” and if Vannatter had been adequately prepared by Chris Darden, and a much fuller explanation had been given as to why Vannatter didn’t immediately book the vial (see later discussion under blood evidence), it probably would have only been a blip on the radar screen, particularly if there hadn’t been so many other errors by the DA in the presentation of their case.

Let me put it this way. There have been countless examples through the years where murder cases have been successfully prosecuted, yet the investigations of the cases by law enforcement were substantially more incompetent than the LAPD’s performance in the Simpson case.

Unreasonable doubts