From: http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2000-06-22/stewart.html } Where's the Smoking Gun? Bill Lann Lee hasn't established "pattern and practice." By Jill Stewart The secret of successful bluffing is that the poker player not only be a good faker and liar, but that the bluffer give off enough circumstantial cues that observers will be tricked. It is with this truism in mind that I turn to the Rampart Division scandal rocking the Los Angeles Police Department. The big story these days is not really Rampart per se, but the far more politically and institutionally devastating claim by the Department of Justice that Rampart is merely one example of corruption and criminal behavior by cops that the feds say proves a "pattern and practice" of such wrongdoing throughout the LAPD. This contention by Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee and his team of prosecutors is the result of a four-year investigation by the feds into scores of troubling incidents involving police, reams of documents that create the paper trail on those incidents, and a detailed probe into the way the LAPD brass do and do not react to corruption and undue force once they discover it. Or so Lee would like everyone to believe -- particularly the dweebs on the Los Angeles City Council who are itching to invite the feds to run the LAPD via a federal consent decree. Don't get me wrong. I am not about to claim that the LAPD is clean outside of Rampart. It could indeed have rotten cops and violent uncontrolled cops in every division of the city, all operating freely because of the code of silence. The department might even have top brass who know about the rot and look the other way, allowing all this outrageous activity to continue unabated. The only problem is, the evidence strongly suggests that Bill Lann Lee hasn't found this widespread secret society of shame. And if the feds haven't smoked out the supposed platoons of bad officers and their acquiescing bosses after four years, it's anybody's guess as to whether they are out there. The evidence against Lee's claim of a "pattern and practice" within the LAPD is reflected in the federal investigation itself. The federal probe was launched by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in 1996 when Ray Fisher was the president of the L.A. Police Commission and Willie Williams was the chief. I have a very fat set of documents on my desk that show how the work was conducted by Steven H. Rosenbaum, the special litigation counsel in charge of the Los Angeles probe, who delved years backward to 1991 in his search for problems. One of the oddest things about the federal investigation is the broad scope of the requests made by the Civil Rights Division. I have read through the pile sitting on my desk, and it is plain to see that, over the years, Rosenbaum's requests for potentially damning information did not begin to get dramatically more detailed. They did not begin to clearly zero in on certain divisions, nor did the requests hammer away at a certain group of officers or top brass. One source of mine who was intimately involved in helping city officials respond to the probe Rosenbaum conducted says the feds did not, in fact, find a "pattern and practice" of corruption, criminal behavior, or top brass looking the other way. "It was a fishing expedition for four years," says my source, "and, toward their end, the documents show the DOJ is pulling back and making the sort of requests which you might conceive of if you were in the mop-up stage, because you hadn't found your smoking gun." Nobody involved in the ongoing top-secret meetings between Lee, Mayor Richard Riordan, City Attorney James Hahn, and City Council representatives is leaking information from the discussions, so it is hard to know what stage the talks have entered. What is known publicly is that Lee is pressing the city to agree to a federal consent decree, and various cop-hating groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and much of the City Council are drooling to see the city sign such a decree. The decree would last for a decade or more and could conceivably give the federal government the power to oversee the LAPD's Internal Affairs Division and the power to tell Chief Bernard Parks how to mete out discipline among the troops -- although Lee has implied he doesn't want nearly that much power over the LAPD. Despite the lack of serious leaks from the talks between Lee's bunch and City Hall's bunch, certain bits of information have surfaced. Key among them is the apparent fact that Lee has not produced any evidence of a series of heretofore secret scandals, or a layer of bosses gone bad that can be called a "pattern and practice" inside the LAPD. One of the people involved in the top-secret discussions tells me, "We have agreed, and we all believe that there can be no leaks and no discussion in the media as to how things are going and what the negotiations consist of." That is truly admirable. But I was able to squeeze one tiny admission out of this careful source. Which is: "Nobody who has heard Lee's arguments has heard of any multiple cases or multiple examples against the LAPD unknown to the public at large that work to argue his case for a pattern and practice." In other words, without Rampart, Lee doesn't have very much at all. One lawyer who has firsthand knowledge of the federal probe says that there is no actual case law defining what "pattern and practice" means. However, the attorney says, "The standard interpretation is that a pattern and practice is not something the rank and file are doing. It has to be the management doing it too -- knowingly helping or knowingly looking the other way. To make it stick in federal court, you can't just show a pattern among the little guys." What is Lee basing his claims upon, if he has generated little hard evidence of his own? It appears that he is riding on the coattails of the LAPD, which issued its own refreshingly withering self-assessment this spring by a board of inquiry made up of the top detectives and top honchos of the department. The board found poor training, poor management skills, a failure to implement several major recommendations by the Christopher Commission report spawned by the 1992 riots, and a host of other systemwide problems -- but it did not find the smoking gun some police critics were waiting for. "As each day passes," says the attorney with firsthand knowledge of the federal probe, "the suspicion grows within the LAPD that Lee issued his consent decree demand almost entirely on the strength of Bernard Parks' own self-assessment." It would hardly be the first time that the feds muffed an investigation or came up largely empty-handed, and then tried to manipulate fearful and cowed locals. The DoJ badly embarrassed itself recently after suing the city of Torrance for discrimination within its police department. Not only did the feds lose, they were shown at trial to have engaged in a host of dubious practices to force the feisty leaders of Torrance to capitulate to their unfair charges. In Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is another example. For several years, the feds claimed to have seven investigations under way into allegations of corruption involving the outrageously costly subway project. Most of us suspect there must have been plenty of corruption. The L.A. Times, which tends to be a bit breathless when touting a "federal investigation" involving Los Angeles, repeated the feds' claims of multiple investigations. It wasn't until Susan Goldsmith of New Times dug into a tragic death during the building of the subway that the media got wise to the bluffing by the feds. Goldsmith showed that not a single MTA investigation was being actively pursued, and, despite the passage of years, no reports had been issued. Yet the MTA power hierarchy believed itself to be under a microscope. Lee's investigation into the LAPD seems closer to the Torrance example: Prosecutors who oversell what they know in their zeal to get the supposed bad guys. In a normal world, the City Council would never sign a settlement with the Department of Justice without proof of its accusations. But the council's hands are not clean on Rampart. For years, most council members didn't care that LAPD reforms were lagging, as evidenced by the council's childish refusal to pay for a tracking system of problem officers because the council didn't like the proposed contractor the LAPD chose to build the computer system. The truth is, most council members behave only when the public is watching. And one sure way to get the public to stop watching them is to let the Justice Department take over the difficult job of reforming and weeding out at the LAPD. http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2000-06-22/stewart.html ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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