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The System is Stacked Against Our Best Police Officersby Tim Sands, President Los Angeles Police Protective League,Reprinted with permission from LAPPL  In May, Fox 11 News ran a two-part "expose" on Watts gang members and their rather incredible political power in the city of Los Angeles. Two Los Angeles Police Department officers, Chuck Garcia and Ryan Moreno, told a story that has a familiar ring to many of their colleagues.Officers Garcia and Moreno were assigned to one of the toughest gang neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the Jordan Downs housing project. They were aggressive, tough and, by all accounts, successful. In fact, they were responsible for more than 300 arrests, detentions and/or stops of alleged gang members. This did not please the gang members or their families. The gangbangers and their families took action. They filed complaint after complaint against Moreno and Garcia, and apparently talked to some friends in City Hall. Moreno and Garcia were reassigned, separately, to new duties. Normally, the story would end here. However, Moreno and Garcia are the kind of cops who care, passionately, about making a difference. They were not about to be intimidated. With the Police Protective League's support, they filed suit against the city for violation of the Peace Officers Bill of Rights and their rights to free speech. How could it be that these murderers, drug dealers and gang leaders could actually convince public officials that the city was better off removing the most successful cops from their neighborhoods? As part of the federal consent decree resulting from the Rafael Perez case, a new database-driven program called Teams II collects complaint data on officers. Every complaint filed, no matter who files it or how obviously false it is, gets logged against an officer and investigated. An accumulation of complaints, even if they are all proved false, will get an officer pulled off a street. Many smart cops-who don't want their careers to end prematurely-have requested assignments that take them off of patrol and out of gang-infested neighborhoods. They know that the system is rigged against them; any cop who takes aggressive and consistent action against gang members will be the subject of complaints. And their record will be forever marked by these complaints, even if every one of them is falsely generated as payback for a fair arrest. It is apparent the city leadership fails to understand the dangers of the new complaint system. Police Commissioner John Mack recently went on record that he finds it "baffling" that almost 80 percent of all racial-profiling cases last year were dismissed outright as "unfounded." His stubborn and misguided defense of unsubstantiated complaints only serves to promote the complaint system as a useful gang tool to neutralize effective neighborhood policing. Gang members' attorneys support the complaint system, because they can use it to get their clients off. Here's how it works: The gang-member arrestee files a complaint about the officer after an arrest. When the case comes to trial and the attorney asks the cop, "Isn't it true that you are under investigation by the police department for your actions in this case?" the cop is forced to concur, and the judge and jury now believe that they are seeing evidence of a dirty cop-regardless of a complete lack of substantiation of the claim. Checks and balances that keep bad cops off the streets are important. Nobody wants a bad cop as a partner. However, city leaders ought to know who the good guys are and understand that officers risk their lives to prevent the gang members from taking control of our neighborhoods. City leadership should support officers who arrest gang members, and not vice versa.  Print This PageBack to Volume 25, Issue 5 Back to PEACEKeeper Main Page |
