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NOLA.com
21 March 2010

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New Orleans Police Department,

Danziger Bridge case suggests

When an investigator needed an identity for a fabricated witness in the Danziger Bridge police shooting, prosecutors say, he looked to his fellow officers for help.

"Hey, somebody give me a name!" the veteran NOPD supervisor allegedly called out to a group of officers. Another cop, former New Orleans police detective Jeffrey Lehrmann, said he chimed in, offering up "Lakeisha," a fictitious female who could back up the police version of events.

Later, when officers needed evidence to back up their claims, the same investigator allegedly drove Lehrmann and two sergeants to his home, where he plucked a clean, untraceable gun from a storage container in his garage. With a flair for comedy, the investigator allegedly called the weapon he later placed into evidence a "ham sandwich."

The allegations of a coordinated coverup and conspiracy don't end there. Prosecutors say officers also held a secret meeting in a gutted-out police station to talk about their plans, and that supervisors colluded with other ranking officers to make sure their concocted stories rang true.

Even in a town where residents have long cast a suspicious eye on the police force, the allegations in the Danziger case seem almost too cinematic to be real. But two officers, Lehrmann and Lt. Michael Lohman, both of whom now likely face prison time, have already attested that they're true.

Their guilty pleas raise a key question: Do the misdeeds signify a few rotten apples at NOPD or reveal an entire culture of corruption?

The extent of the alleged coverup, the sheer number of cops involved or implicated, and the nonchalance with which officers carried out these crimes could point to systemic problems in the police force, both experts and local criminal justice observers say. Court documents so far implicate at least eight officers, and more allegations are sure to come.

As portrayed by prosecutors, the collusion between all these officers was casual, familiar -- almost a matter of routine. When the investigator said he had a gun that could be planted and used in the case, the two former officers admit their reply was not shock but a pointed question: Is the weapon clean?

Moreover, the fact that one officer was not afraid to ask such a self-incriminating question of his superior suggests he knew his boss would be comfortable with a planted gun -- or at least that his boss would not report him.

"It's chilling, it's disheartening," said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission, adding that he and others are bracing for more cringe-worthy revelations. "We are only at the beginning of what are going to be darker and more disturbing disclosures regarding police conduct. If this is a marathon, we have not even lost sight of the starting line yet."

Peter Scharf, a Tulane University criminologist, said the Danziger revelations leave open the question of how deep the department's corruption runs.

"You really need a qualitative study. You really need to assess that issue in a serious way," Scharf said. The details about the ham sandwich that turned out to be a gun suggest that there are "remnants of the culture where you fix things rather than investigate" within the NOPD, he said.

Scharf noted that some of the involved officers, such as Lohman and others implicated in his guilty plea, are products of the NOPD's admittedly troubled past in the 1980s and early 1990s. "That's a lot of history to undo," he said.

Barbara Attard, a police practices consultant who previously worked in civilian oversight of police misconduct cases, agreed that the confessions in the court document were "shocking" and suggested the need for an independent investigation of the NOPD. The kind of probe that is needed is a "policy and practice study" conducted by an outside organization, preferably the Justice Department's civil division, she said. More charges are expected in the Danziger case, which is just one of at least seven open federal probes into the NOPD. The scope of the effort has forced the local FBI field office to expand and assign more agents to its civil-rights squad; Washington-based prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice have also encamped here.

Still, Capt. Michael Glasser, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, says it would be a mistake to conclude the department suffers from a culture of corruption.

"There's no doubt that some things were done that were improper, but to the level and extent that they were done, it had nothing to do with any culture that could exist," Glasser said.

Glasser pointed out that the officers under federal scrutiny represent fewer than 1 percent of the 1,600-plus commissioned officers on the force.

"When you look at how many people are involved in the organization, it is not as pervasive as it appears," Glasser said.

Lawyer Stephen London, who represents Sgt. Arthur Kaufman -- the investigator in the Danziger case and the recipient of a target letter from the feds -- likewise believes that the probes overstate the extent of corruption. "You can't paint a broad brush over the police department because of the actions of a few officers during these circumstances," he said.

Glasser, a veteran cop and longtime police representative, acknowledged that some of the acts officers admitted are likely rooted in fact. But he warned that what the guilty officers have said about others should be taken with a grain of salt.

"When people cooperate in exchange for things, very often they embellish things in order to enhance their own bargaining position," Glasser said.

London added that Lohman "is the guy that wrote the report. He is the guy that ordered the investigator to turn the report in. We just all of a sudden assumed that because he got his hand caught in the cookie jar, that everybody else had their hand in there."

Former FBI agent Edward Tully argues in an article published by the National Executive Institute Associates -- a group that trains top police leaders -- that corruption will exist in any organization that does not have a specific code of conduct, tolerates lax supervision, and condones actions that suggest officers are above the law.

The Danziger pleas have highlighted some of those problems in NOPD's command structure. Superintendent Warren Riley said publicly after the pleas that he never read the department's own internal investigation of the incident, in which police shot six civilians, two fatally. Well before Danziger, Riley had come under fire by some rank-and-file officers for what they considered inconsistent disciplinary practices. In one recent case, for instance, Riley reduced the suspension of an officer who admitted systematic payroll fraud from 80 days to 30 days. Soon thereafter, the officer was promoted.

While the attitudes of police brass are important, Tully maintains the most important position within a police force in terms of departmental culture is the sergeant. The sergeant is the front-line supervisor who implements policy, monitors conduct of officers, and directs the department's strategies.

Several NOPD sergeants are implicated in the recent Danziger court filings. Their actions, according to federal prosecutors, range from fabricating witnesses and planting evidence to coaching false statements and making sure other officers went along with the cover-up.

The scandal is easily the worst the department has had to endure since the mid-90s. During a time when the city was enduring more than 400 murders a year, the world watched in shock as the FBI hauled in Len Davis, a murderous cop and drug ring leader, and Antoinette Frank, a young officer who killed another cop and two others in a restaurant robbery.

For people in some New Orleans neighborhoods, the admitted bad behavior by Lohman and Lehrmann is not what elicited shock, it was the fact that any New Orleans police officer "told on" fellow cops, said community activist Norris Henderson.

Many New Orleanians believe the actions described in the Danziger guilty pleas are more widespread than the court documents themselves suggest, Henderson said. He noted that after Frank's arrest, police reconsidered an armed robbery arrest she made, deciding she was the actual perpetrator. That man later testified against her in court.

"This long history of this makes it hard to think this is an isolated incident," he said.

Citizen outrage prompted reform in the department, including the addition of FBI agents working within the NOPD's internal affairs unit.

But Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska criminal justice professor who has written two books about police accountability, said corruption remains "deeply ingrained" within the NOPD. Walker studied the department and its internal affairs unit in 1998.

"I got the sense that the reforms never really took root," he said last week.

Rooting out corruption, Walker said, goes beyond prosecuting officers for crimes. He observed that prosecuting individual officers doesn't have a great impact on the whole.

"If the barrel is rotten, what good does it do to replace a few rotten apples? You have to replace the barrel," he said.

One component of reform, Walker noted, is for civic and political leaders to demand accountability.

"In that regard, New Orleans stands out," he said. "The city has tolerated corruption in ways that are far different from other cities."

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NOLA.com21 March 2010

Danziger Bridge case suggests

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NOLA.com
21 March 2010