Some Murder Investigations Are Flawed, Police Agree

High-ranking Los Angeles police officials Tuesday acknowledged that the department’s homicide investigations are not always adequate.

“Homicide detectives were not as diligent as they should have been” in some instances, Cmdr. James McMurray, supervisor of the LAPD’s detective operations, told the Police Commission.

He was referring to an LAPD review of 30 cases examined by The Times. These included nine instances in which a murder suspect was charged even though he was provably innocent because he had been in jail when the murder occurred.

The police officials said that homicide detectives--along with other detectives--are overwhelmed by too much work. Many nonhomicide detectives spend much of their time just keeping up with paper flow rather than investigating cases, said Deputy Chief John White.

“What they’ve virtually turned into is paper pushers,” White said. Citing the city’s 67,000 annual auto thefts, he said detectives assigned to investigate them simply cannot.

White echoed Chief Willie L. Williams, who told the commission in a letter that the department desperately needs more detectives. The chief, whose department investigates half of the nearly 2,000 homicides each year countywide, was responding to a Times study of five years of homicides in Los Angeles County.

Among the study’s conclusions were that detectives and prosecutors are overwhelmed by too many murders and are operating ineffectively. The study found that only one in three killings in the county leads to a homicide conviction.

“We absolutely agree with the bulk of the findings in The Times articles,” McMurray said. “It is not appropriate that less than half of the homicides result in conviction.”

Commission President Raymond C. Fisher expressed frustration that he was learning of a crisis in detective staffing only because of the newspaper articles.

“When did these facts become known to the department so that we could mount a proactive effort instead of having the L.A. Times point out in public that we have this crisis?” Fisher said.

“The consequences in homicide . . . are enormous,” he said. “Nothing can turn the city around more quickly . . . than a sense that we can’t handle homicides.”

Police officials, however, were unable to tell the commission how many more detectives they need. They said that for four years they have been stymied in an attempt to find $300,000 in grant money to fund an analysis of detective workload that could result in a substantial redeployment to meet the department’s investigative needs.

McMurray said in an interview that it is clear that hundreds more are needed.

In recent times, the mayor and council have emphasized expanding the department’s patrol force at the expense of detectives. Officials said more than 200 detective positions have been effectively transferred to patrol in recent times.

Police officials said they will appear before the City Council today in an effort to save 46 of the 107 new detective positions requested in next year’s budget.

“The fact of the matter is we do not have enough detectives to provide the kinds of follow-up and quality case management that we need,” said White.

As a result, he said, the district attorney’s office is sometimes not satisfied with investigations, and, as a result, some cases are not filed or are filed and fall apart in court.

White said that part of the problem in court is traceable to hasty preparations caused by understaffing of the district attorney’s office, including “trial attorneys that really don’t have time to do basic reviews and interview witnesses until the day that case goes to trial and they meet in the hallway outside the courtroom.”

District attorney’s officials did not return a call seeking comment.

Prior to publication of the series, The Times gave White a list of 30 LAPD cases where a judge, a prosecutor, an investigator or the facts indicated that the person the LAPD had arrested for murder and whom the district attorney had charged with that murder was factually innocent.

Those cases became the subject of an audit by detectives in the department’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division. McMurray declined to answer the commission’s questions about specific cases in public session because of concerns about civil liability.

In every case, he said, auditors determined that there had been probable cause to make an arrest.

In nine of the cases, The Times found the suspect was in jail at the time of the murder he was accused of committing.

Some of these errors were traceable to a Department of Justice backlog in updating computerized rap sheets with recent arrests, White said. The detectives relied on computer checks rather than local jail records.

In a number of other cases, eyewitnesses who had identified photographs of the accused later changed their minds--a phenomenon that McMurray attributed in some cases to fear of gang retaliation.

He said that in a “fair proportion” of the 30 cases, investigators still believed the person they arrested was the killer.