LAPD Begins Crackdown on Computer Messages

The Los Angeles Police Department, stung by disclosures that some officers sent racially and sexually offensive messages to colleagues, has begun a massive crackdown on abuses of its patrol car computer system.

It is aimed partly at finding and punishing those officers who sent the hundreds of “outrageous” personal messages cited by the Christopher Commission as evidence that the department tolerates racism, sexism and brutality.

It is also aimed at stopping officers from sending even innocuous personal messages on the 1,100 mobile digital terminals in patrol cars.

These terminals, part of the department’s dispatching system, carry about 20,000 messages from cars a day. In practice, they have functioned much like the networks of computer terminals in many large offices that transmit jokes and chitchat, as well as work-related communications.

As part of the crackdown, three officers at police headquarters in Parker Center have been assigned full time, and 15 part time, to conduct spot checks of printouts of the preceding day’s messages citywide, sources said. Messages determined not to involve official business are forwarded to the LAPD division from which they originated, where efforts are made to find out who sent the offending communications and why.

The monitors at Parker Center also are forwarding printouts of past messages the Christopher Commission found offensive. There are plans to conduct spot checks for improper messages the commission may have missed, going back one year.

The crackdown already has proved a management success in one respect. Snooping by headquarters has led to a 25% decline in message traffic, which is supposed to consist mainly of dispatches to non-emergency calls and queries about cars and suspects.

Department sources predicted that management will fail in its time-consuming effort to conclusively identify most officers who sent racist or sexist messages.

Although MDT messages are retrievable from computer discs back to 1983, when the system was installed, they carry only a coded reference to the car and shift from which they originated, not to the officer who typed them.

Because patrol officers are usually assigned to two-person cars, there is no way to prove in most cases who sent the offensive message, unless a patrol officer admits responsibility, or a partner turns the officer in, sources said.

The chief exception is for sergeants, who typically ride alone. As field supervisors, they have primary responsibility to see that department policies are observed and can, in a limited way, monitor the MDT transmissions of a patrol car they are supervising.

Ironically, the Christopher Commission found that “many of the offensive MDT comments were made from sergeants’ field supervisory units.”

So far, no officers have been accused of misconduct for making any of the 700 remarks cited in the Christopher Commission report, said Lt. Dan Koenig, the officer in charge of the review.

The ongoing inquiry has produced a few instances in which messages of the kind that were singled out by the commission turned out not to be as harsh as they first seemed, when a context was supplied.

For example, one department source cited a message that said: “Typical Negroes. Nobody knows nothing.”

The source said LAPD’s research showed that two black officers in a car had sent this message to a car containing two black officers. The two officers in the sending car were married to the two officers in the receiving car, and they had been talking back and forth via the computer expressing confusion about what time a party was to start.

The source also cited an apparently sexist message that said: “That’s what you get for being a woman.”

It turned out that a female officer had been assigned near the end of her shift to interview a rape victim. She asked to get out of the assignment to avoid having to work late, but was told she was stuck because no women officers were on the next shift, and the department has a policy of offering rape victims the opportunity to be interviewed by women officers.

“There have been a few instances like that,” said this source. “There haven’t been a lot. Nor do I mean to imply that those instances were appropriate. They’re just not what they appear to be on the surface without the context.”

These may have been the types of messages Chief Daryl F. Gates was referring to on the day the Christopher Commission released its report, when he said that “some of the most racist comments are being made by black officers in (a) kind of dark police humor. Hispanic officers, women officers--you’re going to find that that’s going to be the case, self-deprecating (comments) in many cases.”

Asked last week what evidence the chief was citing, a department spokesman, Lt. Fred Nixon, said he could not say. “I don’t think we’re going to share that information even if we find it,” Nixon said, “because it would be part of an ongoing personnel investigation. . . . If we start saying this officer is a black officer and this officer was sending this apparently anti-black message to this black officer, then we’d be saying something that would tend to identify the officer. We just can’t do that.”

Police personnel investigations, with rare exceptions, are kept secret by state law.

The Christopher Commission criticized the department for being lax in the discipline of officers who make improper remarks. It noted only two sustained personnel complaints in seven years for improper MDT transmissions.

In one case, an officer was reprimanded. In the other, a white male officer sent a “vulgar sexual and racial remark” to a black female officer, who responded with “angry profanities.” Their commanding officer recommended that he be suspended for four days and she for two. Gates reduced both penalties to one-day suspensions, despite a strong statement of official policy, made in 1987, that “deliberate or casual use of racially or ethnically derogatory language . . . is misconduct and will not be tolerated under any circumstances.”

The Christopher Commission also found that “officers from all geographic areas of the city talked (in their computer messages) about beating suspects and other members of the public.”

Dennis Perluss, a deputy general counsel for the commission who was involved in its message review, said he was struck that “you didn’t find casual, jocular references to smoking dope or taking bribes. . . . Neither of those forms of improper conduct are tolerated, and the level of intolerance is so great that you don’t even joke about it.”

Interest in the MDTs was triggered by the disclosure of messages sent by officers just before and after the March 3 police beating of Rodney G. King.

The messages beforehand included one from a car containing two officers who have been charged with felonies as a result of the beating. That message described a domestic disturbance call they had just handled involving a black couple as “right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist.’ ” Later, messages from the same car joked about beating King, who is also black. “Oops,” they began.

The King beating, which was videotaped and led to a national outcry against police brutality, also led to an LAPD audit of computer messages.

Police officials selected a 30-day period in late 1989, knowing they would not have to discipline officers for any improper comments they discovered because the one-year statute of limitations for offenses had expired.

The department said it found 260 objectionable messages in its study.

Gates then issued a restatement of department policy, banning use of MDTs for personal messages and promising daily audits of the preceding day’s messages and discipline for those who abused the system.

Since then, said Koenig, the officer in charge of the audits, “We’re finding some banter, but nothing of a racial or sexual nature.”

The Christopher Commission reviewed 182 days of transmissions citywide over the 16-month period before King was beaten. Deputy general counsel Barbara Kelley, who headed the review, said the commission found 1,450 messages involving racial, ethnic and sexual slurs or a desire to pursue and beat up suspects or others. Of these, she said, the commission published a representative sample of 700.

Koenig said that about half of the published messages fall within the department’s statute of limitations and will be investigated to see if discipline can and should be imposed.

Meanwhile, one division in the San Fernando Valley has 18 personnel investigations under way as a result of the computer crackdown, a department source said.

At the 77th Street Division in South-Central Los Angeles, there are five, stemming from a Parker Center audit of hundreds of June messages.

Sgt. Rick Angelos, who has been asked to investigate the 77th Street messages, called the effort “a logistical nightmare” and “an unfolding monster.”

Typical of what he is finding, he said, are “XOXOXO”--or “hugs and kisses”--messages that patrol officers, most of whom are men, sometimes send to radio operators, most of whom are women, to thank them for doing a good job.

Officers who send “XO” messages could be charged with improper use of department equipment, Angelos said. Such cases would probably be punishable by a “notice to correct” behavior, placed in the officer’s personnel file, and removed after six months if the officer has no more infractions, he said.

Penalties for other kinds of improper messages could range from informal counseling to suspensions, other officers said.

Creating a context for the messages is mechanically difficult because the LAPD has an inflexible computer program. It can command printouts of messages only chronologically.

That means the messages of two cars in the Devonshire Division between midnight and 12:30 a.m. will be scattered on a printout among those of all cars citywide who were exchanging messages during the same period.

Koenig said the department is trying to get computer experts to write programs that will allow them to print out all messages from a specific unit.

That might help identify an officer as the sender of offensive messages if he or she sent them on multiple shifts from the same car with different partners.