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| NEWS > 21 March 2009 |
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LA police chief criticized for
Five City Council members accused Chief William Bratton of acting unprofessionally when he said two of them didn't know what they were talking about when they criticized his department's policy of sometimes hiring people who once used drugs.
"While we may not all agree on the policy change and how it was implemented, we do agree that Chief Bratton's comments were unprofessional and unnecessary," the five council members said in a letter sent this week to the Los Angeles Police Commission.
The council members also accused Bratton of routinely making "public com... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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San Francisco Chronicle - CA,
21 March 2009
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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San Franciso Police Department
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Long delays plague S.F. police
Almost six years after San Francisco voters gave civilians unparalleled power over police officers, the city's discipline system is beset by delays of months and sometimes years, officials in charge of it say.
The backlog means unfit officers stay on the city payroll when they should be fired and good officers languish on desk duty when they could be on the streets.
Recent examples of the faulty system include a police officer who committed suicide in 2005 after he was charged with rape. His discipline case was not formally closed until more than three years after his death.
And it has been six years since a street brawl between two men and three off-duty officers over a bag of fajitas led to brief indictments of top police brass and spurred the push for greater civilian oversight. The captain who oversaw the fight investigation still faces a discipline case for allegedly compromising the internal probe.
The backlog is likely to worsen under cuts Mayor Gavin Newsom has ordered to bridge the city's record budget deficit. At risk is a burgeoning mediation program praised for helping reduce the backlog by resolving conflicts between citizens and officers.
"The system is broken," Police Commission President Theresa Sparks said. "It just doesn't work very well the way it's designed."
'Notoriously unique'
The system has two separate channels for investigating misconduct, which can range from officer rudeness to the death of people in custody.
The Office of Citizen Complaints usually handles complaints about excessive force and other on-duty violations of police conduct rules. The Police Department's management control division, often known elsewhere as internal affairs, typically handles off-duty misconduct and situations like officer-involved shootings.
The police chief can impose suspensions of only up to 10 days. The Police Commission, a panel of seven civilian volunteers appointed by the mayor and Board of Supervisors, handles discipline for any serious misconduct, a power unmatched in 50 jurisdictions across the state, including the eight largest cities, according to the city's legislative analyst.
Former Deputy City Attorney Bob Aaronson, a police management consultant, told the legislative analyst that San Francisco's disciplinary system is "notoriously unique."
The process affords officers "a tremendous amount of due process rights," but they're also "very frustrated" at its slow pace, said Police Officers Association representative Steve Johnson.
Delays abound. Beyond the initial investigations, individual police commissioners, who typically have day jobs, hold hearings that can last days, even weeks. Discipline waits for the outcome of any court proceeding if an officer is charged with a crime. Officers before the commission have the right to file motions for dismissal or file challenges in state court, and regularly do. They even appeal minor discipline leveled by the chief.
"The officers many times are dragging these processes on way beyond where they should have been," Sparks said earlier this month at a commission meeting. "We have current cases right now that could have been settled a year ago."
Other commissioners have voiced frustrations at the pace.
"There is a problem," Commissioner David Onek said. "And so the question is what we should do about it."
Politically charged
The proposed solutions are politically contentious, including the ceding of some disciplinary power to the police chief or paying for more commission staffers in the face of a $565 million city deficit.
"I believe it's fixable," said Assistant Chief James Lynch, who supports boosting the chief's discipline authority. "To fix it may require a charter change or some other legislative action."
However, budget tightening could make the problem even worse as staff cuts at the Office of Citizen Complaints threaten a successful mediation program.
The program, in which mediators sit in as citizens and officers air their grievances face-to-face, cleared cases more than twice as fast as investigations last year, a recent report from the complaint office shows.
Only select, nonviolent cases go to mediation, such as a complaint against an officer who shouted when a driver got out of his car after being pulled over for running a stop sign.
However the mediation goes, the case is closed. Participants gave the program a 96 percent satisfaction rating last year, the report said.
The program is a bright spot for an office rebounding from a withering 2007 city controller's audit that found "officers who arguably should have been disciplined, counseled, or retrained were not" because 53 percent of the time the office failed to complete investigations by the nine-month deadline.
Last year, 59 percent of the office's cases were completed in six months, and "investigators accomplished the mammoth task of eliminating the backlog" of cases from 2005 to 2007, said Joyce Hicks, the executive director who took over after the audit.
Cutting the budget by the amount Newsom has requested would mean eliminating an investigator and the attorney who oversees the mediation program, Hicks said. That would leave the department with 16 investigators, the bare minimum allowed by city law, and one attorney to do the job of two.
"To have to go backward in terms of staffing is going to be very difficult," Hicks said.
Commissioner Petra DeJesus, meanwhile, is critical of the proposal to give the chief greater disciplinary power, including authority over offenses like drunken driving.
"Incidents could be swept under the rug and be covered by the department," DeJesus said. "The commission (could) be completely excluded."
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