Police Abuses Laid Bare, but Solutions Fall Short : The ‘revised’ complaint system leaves the fox running the chicken coop. And who will prosecute perjury on police reports?

The Christopher Commission report exposes the kinds of police misconduct involved in the Rodney King incident as commonplace and reveals the gross lack of leadership and accountability that make it so.

Although there is a great deal of room for disagreement with the commission’s conclusions and recommendations, the scope of the investigation and the analysis of the system deserve credit. Many questions remain, however, and other areas deserve closer scrutiny.

The report shows a pattern of tolerance for and tacit approval of racism and unnecessary aggression in the Los Angeles Police Department. The commission documents repeated use of excessive force by a significant number of officers (who are usually investigated by officers they work with on a daily basis), officers who are infrequently and inadequately disciplined and officers who are promoted or assigned without regard to their propensity for violence.

Systemic racism, expressed within the department as well as toward members of the public, is the inevitable legacy of an executive whose own racist attitudes have been revealed in well-publicized statements. The commission reported on some of the evidence of racism and the department’s lack of concern over it. The violent, racist and sexist messages transmitted between officers on their mobile computers with obvious unconcern for any possibility of adverse consequences are particularly disgusting illustrations.

The report also shows that the process for handling complaints against officers fails at every stage. The commission correctly points out that a major overhaul is necessary, that tinkering will not solve the problems. Their recommendations fall somewhere in between.

The proposal to receive complaints at places other than police stations is good, as is the recommendation for civilian monitoring of complaints and discipline. But while recognizing the inherent flaw in permitting complaints against officers to be investigated by co-workers, the commission recommended that such investigations continue to be done by the department’s Internal Affairs Division. The commission fails to recognize that there is little likelihood that internal affairs officers, who serve in that assignment for only a few years, will be appreciably more vigorous than before in rooting out evidence against officers accused of violence or racism.

To leave the investigation of complaints and the decisions about discipline in the hands of the department is to continue a demonstrably unworkable system of the police policing themselves.

The proposal that the police chief’s term in office be limited to five years is one already being actively pursued by community activists. The commission gingerly suggested to Gates that he should go, making a thinly veiled effort to avoid offending him.

Gates has made it clear that he has no intention of taking this face-saving offer to retire or do what is best for the residents of this city. Instead he minimizes the evidence of his misfeasance by claiming that the report shows misconduct by only a few officers and ignores what can only be construed as an environment where brutality and racism receive widespread acceptance.

Only two days ago, Gates was still contending that the beating of Rodney King was an aberration.

The commission mentions that officers have sometimes been disciplined for dishonesty but makes no distinction between dishonesty in reporting overtime, for example, and dishonesty that results in wrongful convictions. Sufficient attention is not paid to perjury and false reporting, and although it is recommended that there be better monitoring of civil lawsuits filed over alleged brutality, the results of dishonesty and perjury in the criminal-justice system should also be examined. LAPD officers are credited with making more arrests for violent crimes than their counterparts in other large metropolitan departments, but whether those arrests result in the filing of prosecutable cases or convictions or are based upon false reports is not addressed.

The commission recommends a more community-based approach to policing to eliminate the siege mentality (us versus them) that characterizes the relations between the LAPD and the community. To place more emphasis on community needs is laudable, but because it was beyond the scope of its mandate, the commission made only passing reference to the root causes of crime.

In the absence of full employment at a living wage, the level of crime will continue and the corruption of the police will be inevitable. The clear connection between poverty and crime must finally be addressed.

The community must acknowledge the rampant abuses that have long been known to its minority members, civil-rights lawyers and activists, and translate that knowledge into action. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is no less culpable than the LAPD, and it, too, must be reformed by civilian controls.

Above all, a special prosecutor’s office must be established to prosecute police crime, because the district attorney has failed and refuses to do so.