Officer Shooting Probes Held Flawed, Inviting Cover-Ups : Investigations: The panel says there is no legitimate reason for the department to continue to engage in the practices.

The LAPD for years has used seriously flawed investigative techniques that have invited cover-ups of improper shootings of civilians by police, according to the Christopher Commission.

“The commission perceives no legitimate reason why the LAPD continues to engage in these practices,” the report said.

The commission found in a report released this week that:

* LAPD “officers at the scene (of a shooting) are frequently gathered together and interviewed as a group, which many have appropriately criticized as an opportunity for witnesses to ‘get their stories straight.’ ”

* “Officer statements are often not recorded until the completion of a ‘pre-interview,’ ” from which district attorney investigators and prosecutors dispatched to shooting scenes are excluded.

* After the “pre-interview,” the officers are usually “compelled” to make tape-recorded statements which can be used against them only in administrative disciplinary proceedings.

* These compelled statements effectively foreclose prospects for a criminal prosecution if wrongdoing is found.

As was the case with Oliver North’s compelled testimony before Congress in the Iran-Contra case, courts have deemed that evidence growing out of such statements, even indirectly, is tainted and, therefore, unusable.

The commission noted that other, unspecified law enforcement agencies have “successfully conducted shooting and other investigations without resorting to these techniques.” Commission staff members declined to identify these agencies.

The Los Angeles Police Department declined to comment on criticisms by the Christopher Commission.

“I really think it would be inappropriate for us to comment on this report piecemeal,” said Lt. Fred Nixon, a department spokesman. Lt. William Hall, who heads the LAPD’s officer-involved shooting investigations, did not return phone calls to his office. Nor did former Lt. Charles Higbie, who headed the shooting investigations for 13 years until his retirement in 1987.

Los Angeles police officers shoot more civilians than officers in other major police departments, the commission also reported. It cited a 1986 study, which found that an LAPD officer was more likely to shoot a civilian than officers in the nation’s five other largest cities.

According to Police Department statistics, Los Angeles police officers shot 571 people during the 10-year period ending in 1987--197 of them fatally. The district attorney’s office said it has investigated 678 shootings by LAPD officers since 1980 and prosecuted officers in none of them.

The last time the district attorney prosecuted any law enforcement officer for a shooting was 1982, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office said. That was the year a bored Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy faked a complaint about drug dealing at a house in Duarte so he would be dispatched to answer it. He wound up shooting a pregnant woman and killing her fetus, and ultimately served a year in jail for manslaughter.

The district attorney spokeswoman, Sandi Gibbons, said her office would not comment on any aspect of the Christopher Commission report because of a desire not to contribute to pretrial publicity for four officers accused in the beating of Rodney G. King. The officers are seeking to have their upcoming trial moved from Los Angeles because of publicity surrounding the King beating, which spawned the Christopher Commission report.

The report noted that “district attorney representatives are not permitted to interview the police officer (involved in a shooting) or witnesses until after the LAPD has completed its investigation.”

Gary A. Feess, a former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles who helped prepare that section of the report, said in an interview Wednesday that “based upon the evidence I saw, these are not universal practices. They don’t happen in every case. But there was evidence that they happened certainly with some degree of frequency. . . .

“I think it would be unfair to say that it’s a fix,” he added. “But . . . the principal complaint against it is that it’s an opportunity to eliminate inconsistencies in a manner that’s not designed to get to the truth, but rather to get to a set story.” Feess, a 10-year federal prosecutor who served as interim U.S. attorney in 1989, said plaintiffs’ attorneys who have sued officers or the city on behalf of shooting victims have complained about these investigative practices for years, but the situation may be improving. “We heard a lot of criticism of procedures during the (Lt. Charles) Higbie era,” which ended in 1987, he said. “Criticisms of the officer-involved shooting team are not as harsh now.”

He said that the LAPD justified the techniques because supervisors “want to know--absolutely as quickly as possible--what really happened.” They say “the quickest way to do that is to get the whole group together--that is, those officers who were at the scene”--and re-enact the shooting. But he said this justification failed to account for instances in which group interviews were conducted after everyone had left the scene.

“When you’re away from a site, I think the rationale totally disappears,” said Feess, who is now head of the litigation department of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Los Angeles and served as a volunteer deputy general counsel to the commission.

The report also criticized a police practice of failing to identify or question people who may have been witnesses to instances of police brutality alleged by civilians.

In a number of files containing the results of investigations of citizen complaints, “there was no indication that the investigators even attempted to identify or locate independent witnesses,” the report said.

In the absence of credible, independent witnesses, the Police Department routinely took the word of a police officer accused of misconduct over that of a citizen complainant. The practice is known informally within the Police Department as the “tie goes to” the police officer, the commission said.