San Quentin News

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Investigation of LAPD falsifying documents leads to larger scandal

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Lady Justice

The elite Metro Division of the Los Angeles Police Department is under investigation for falsifying documents that identify people as gang members, newspaper stories report.

The probe was prompted by a mother who said police improperly identified her son as a gang member. The resulting preliminary investigation uncovered discrepancies between video recording of police stops and written reports.

“An officer’s integrity must be absolute,” Police Chief Michael Moore explained to civic leaders from South Los Angeles who demanded changes. “There is no place in the department for any individual who would purposely falsify information on a department report.”

Metro officers assigned to patrol South Los Angeles are suspected of falsifying data, after interviews with people stopped in the field, and inputting incorrect information about those questioned to bolster statistics, a Jan. 6 Los Angeles Times article reported.

The investigation began after a San Fernando Valley mother received a written notice in 2019 that her son had been identified as a gang member and added to the CalGang criminal intelligence system, the LASentinel.net reported Jan. 23.

Believing her son misidentified she reported the mistake to someone in a supervisory capacity at the Van Nuys Police station.

According to the LAPD, that supervisor reviewed the circumstances, including the footage from the body camera along with other information, and found that the officer’s report did not match up with the facts, the story said.

The mother who first brought this to the attention of the department was notified that her son was misidentified as a gang member and any documentation to that effect would be deleted.

These events led to an internal investigation focused on three officers, but has since grown in the coming months to include as many as 20, LASentinel.net reported.

The office of the LAPD Inspector General uncovered additional false documentation by the same officers, as well as others, the story said.

All the officers involved were assigned to the Metropolitan Division, “Given the serious nature of the alleged misconduct, all involved officers have been assigned to inactive duty or removed from the field,” the story reported.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times published last year revealed Metro officers stopped African American drivers at a rate five time their share of the city’s population.

LAPD has historically targeted and criminalized men of color; this has to stop, a group of community leaders said during a meeting with Chief Moore, the LASentinel noted.

Those assembled did not mince words when they outlined their concerns, blaming the LAPD and racist cops as the problem, asking that all the officers involved be fired and that the gang data base CalGang be eradicated.

Moore said he was not in agreement with eliminating the gang data base, which was created and is maintained by the States Attorney General’s Office.

He does however want changes to the CalGang protocols, such as changing the way officers document individuals as gang associates and eliminating officers and informants as reliable sources, the LASentinel article reported.

In 2015 the size of the Metro unit was doubled to about 200 officers, to combat a surge in violent crime throughout the city.

Moore said Metro’s vehicle stops had not proved effective, netting about one arrest for every 100 cars stopped, with innocent drivers complaining they were being racially profiled, the Times reported.

The union which represents officers released a statement saying that it was “aware of reports of discrepancies contained on a limited number of field interview cards that the department is looking into.” The statement also said that the union expects Moore “will oversee a thorough and fair process to determine the facts and to also ensure that any impacted officer is accorded his or her due process rights,” the Times article reported.

As a result of the statistics, LAPD announced last fall that it will reduce the number of random vehicle stops, Metro officers will instead track down suspects wanted in violent offenses and use strategies other than vehicle stops to address flareups in crimes such as burglaries and shootings, the story notes.

Attending the meeting were Michael Lawson, president of L.A. Urban League Yvonne Wheeler, labor leader; Khalid Shah, executive director of Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace; Horace E. Frank, assistant police chief, director LAPD Special Operations; Charisse Bremond-Weaver, Brotherhood Crusade president; Abdul Malik Sayyid Muhammad, representative for the Nation of Islam Western Region; Danny Bakewell, publisher of the L.A. Sentinel and L.A. Watts Times.

Police continue to shoot about 1,000 people a year

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Child holding a gun and ammo

987 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2017

Police across the country shot and killed approximately the same number of people in 2017 as they did in each of the previous two years.

Because there is no official nationwide tally of fatal police shootings, The Washington Post took charge and has compiled the most accurate accounting of these incidents – 2,945 shooting deaths in all since 2015, with roughly 1,000 each year. According to the Post’s report, 987 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2017.

“The numbers indicate that this is not a trend, but a robust measure of these shootings,” said University of South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert, who specializes in the study of police use of force. “We now have information on almost 3,000 shootings, and we can start looking to provide the public with a better understanding of fatal officer-involved shootings.”

Intimate partner violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime. One in three women and one in four men in the United States has experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. Husbands are five times more likely to kill wives than vice versa. A third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate male partner or ex-partner, according to FBI reports. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf

Deadly police shootings came to the forefront of national attention in 2014 when an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, was killed by a White police officer in a suburban community outside St. Louis, Mo.

The controversy surrounding his death sparked a huge public outcry that contributed to the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Post reported.

The number of unarmed persons killed by police has shown signs of decreasing, according to the Post’s data. After 94 unarmed persons were fatally shot in 2015, that amount dropped to 51 people killed in 2016 and inched back up to 68 in 2017.

“African American families comprise 42 percent of welfare recipients…but are 59 percent of poor people shown on television are African American.” “Sustaining Stereotypes” by Lanien Frush Holt in QUILL Summer 2018 www.spj.org/quill

“The national spotlight on this issue has made officers more cautious in unarmed situations,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. His group developed training for dozens of departments aimed at de-escalating potentially violent encounters.

“We are giving officers more options like slowing the situation down and using time and distance to gain a tactical advantage,” Wexler said.

In a 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department began to emphasize that their officers strive to preserve life in all encounters. In 2017, the LAPD started to award Preservation of Life medals to officers that demonstrate exemplary action in avoiding a fatal shooting. Local police unions were derisive, but top managers in the LAPD think de-escalation training has made a difference.

“Our officers are in 1.5 million volatile encounters a year, so shooting someone is an incredibly rare event,” LAPD First Assistant Chief Michel Moore told the Post. “Yet we pull each instance apart to see what factors might have played a role and train our officers to make that rare event even more rare.”

“Police departments in 13 of the 25 largest U.S. cities did not post their (operating and use-of-force) procedures online.” “The Opaque Blue Line” by C.J. Ciaramella in Reason magazine May 2017

About one out of four fatal shootings in 2017 involved persons experiencing some form of mental health crisis.

“We call 911 for other medical emergencies, and they bring specially trained medical technicians, but when it’s a mental health crisis, we send the police,” said Ron Honberg of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

For each of the last three years, the Post documented more than twice the number of fatal police shootings than were recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is limited by its reliance on voluntary data submissions from police agencies.  The Post did its own research by sifting through local news coverage, public records, and social media reports.

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Right to Police Transparency

San Francisco DA Gascόn stands apart from law enforcement to endorse bill

LAPD Settlement's Soar

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Los Angeles County Twin Towers Correctional Facility

[Los Angles Police Department (LAPD) Los Angeles Times Cmdr. Michael Hyams Kash Delano Register Bruce Lisker LAPD Foothill Division]

The Los Angles Police Department (LAPD) doled out almost $81 million in the last fiscal year to settle lawsuits, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Two of the settlements amounted to approximately $24 million for men who were wrongly convicted of murder and spent more than 25 years behind bars.

“It is a few cases that create the most liability” Cmdr. Michael Hyams said. “It is not hundreds of cases.”

With 343 homicides in 2017, Baltimore “had the highest murder rate in its history, and by far the highest among the nation’s 30 largest cities,” according to The New York Times 1-17-18

Kash Delano Register received the largest payout of $16.7 million dollars, after spending more than 34 years in prison, alleging wrongful conviction of armed robbery and murder in 1979.

Bruce Lisker was paid $7.6 million to settle his claim after being released. A federal judge ruled that key evidence, provided by LAPD detectives and used by prosecutors, was false.

Lisker’s mother was killed in 1983, and a bloody shoe print was left at the scene. Lisker was convicted and spent more than 26 years in prison. In a hearing challenging Lisker’s conviction, an FBI expert testified that the print left by the shoe was not his.

“The LAPD was the defendant in Lisker’s lawsuit because the law gives immunity to prosecutors from civil law suits over how they handle cases,” the Times said.

Since taking the cases to trial could prove more costly, the LA city lawyers recommended the council approve both deals, the article noted.

In addition, $24 million dollars went to a boy left paralyzed after being shot by officers, and $5.7 million was awarded in a trial to a man who was shot when officers mistook his cell phone for a gun.

Nearly $10 million in payouts involved employment cases. LAPD Foothill Division detectives alleged they were passed over for positions and overtime because of racial discrimination. They received a $2.5 million settlement. A former motorcycle cop was awarded nearly $1 million after he alleged retaliation from the LAPD because he refused to participate in an illegal ticket quota system.

The City of Los Angles has borrowed $70 million dollars this year to avoid having to tap into the city’s emergency reserve funds.

Hyams said the city is trying to resolve cases more quickly, hoping to reduce the size of settlements.

Over the past five years the department has spent more than $215 million in litigation costs, including judgments and settlements.

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Officers Being Rewarded For Showing Restraint

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More local police departments reward officers for showing restraint in the line of duty, reports Errin Haines Whack for The Associated Press.

Following the Justice Department’s recommendation to institute de-escalation tactics after a 2013 increase in police shootings, Philadelphia has honored more than 40 police officers since December 2015 for defusing conflicts without using maximum force.

“This is an effort to slow down situations for the sake of everybody concerned,” said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross.

Such awards are key to changing the mentality inside law enforcement, said Phillip Goff, director of the Center for Policing Equity, a think tank.

This change is resisted by many police departments. The Los Angeles police union called such awards “a terrible idea.” 

In a blog post, the Board of the Los Angeles Police Protective League stated, “This award will prioritize the lives of suspected criminals over the lives of LAPD officers and goes against the core foundation of an officer’s training.”

As police officers receive significantly less training in de-escalation than in firearms or self-defense, numerous agencies are discussing and adopting de-escalation tactics to slow down and defuse confrontations, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank.

Philadelphia officer Eric Tyler was recognized for using a stun gun instead of his firearm on a suspect who threatened to shoot Tyler’s colleague in February. 

Tyler had never shot anyone in his 12-year career; however, he was prepared to, and then “I thought better of it, and our training took over” he said. 

Advocates say that by rewarding officers for showing restraint and putting the tactic on par with bravery, police departments can counter the rise in accusations of excessive force following recent deadly shooting of Blacks in Ferguson, Cleveland, Chicago, North Charleston, etc.

The suspect who Tyler used a nonlethal Taser on turned out to be unarmed.

https://sanquentinnews.com/suicides-disturbingly-common-among-correctional-officers/

Right to Police Transparency

San Francisco DA Gascόn stands apart from law enforcement to endorse bill

LAPD Settlement’s Soar


 
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