Bad Use of a Bad Law

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a more inappropriate use of a bad law than a federal judge’s recent decision to allow a class-action suit against the Los Angeles Police Department under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act. This is a mistake that the Los Angeles city attorney’s office is right to challenge even at this early, pretrial stage.

This is not the first time that RICO, an overly broad and poorly worded Nixon-era crime bill, has been used in a suit against a Southern California law enforcement agency. But the RICO argument ultimately failed in the two earlier cases while other, straightforward lawsuits alleging police brutality and other abuses not only succeeded in winning huge settlements but also laid the groundwork for real police reforms.

RICO was born in 1970 out of the government’s frustration with inability to prosecute and contain organized crime. It handed prosecutors sweeping powers to link otherwise singular events or actions to criminal conspiracies and to label them part of a continuing criminal enterprise. But that’s not all RICO did. Its loose wording allowed for prosecutions far beyond the law’s original intent--against health insurers, HMOs, antiabortion protesters, slumlords, tobacco companies and, yes, police departments. Sometimes the goals were admirable, but RICO was still a bad law, easily abused. Moreover, RICO uses have been labeled affronts to due process that result in unfair and unduly harsh penalties. As pointed out in a recent Times commentary by Theodore B. Olson, a former Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, RICO has been assailed by pillars of the right and the left, from conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to the late liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall. The Times editorial page through the years has repeatedly called for the repeal of RICO. To paint an entire police department with such a law, even in the Rampart scandal, is absurd.

In one previous local case, a federal judge allowed a lawyer to sue the Huntington Beach Police Department under RICO in 1990, charging extortion in the operation of a speed trap, but the case failed. A year later, RICO was used by 18 plaintiffs to sue the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over alleged abusive treatment of African Americans. That argument too failed, whereas many other lawsuits against abusive treatment by sheriff’s deputies succeeded and ultimately forced the department to accept the Kolts Commission reforms and an independent monitor.

RICO is a blunderbuss. The proper course for reforming the LAPD is for the city to accept a federal consent decree laying out specific reforms and an outside monitor to determine whether those goals are being met. RICO, in contrast, would treble the city’s taxpayer liability in Rampart lawsuits and probably bring the criminal justice system to a halt. RICO could result in literally every arrest involving an allegation of misconduct going to a federal court review.

It would put authority over the LAPD in the hands of a federal judge, probably without the clearly thought-out and mutually agreed-on goals for police reform that a consent decree would provide. There are many good ways to force the LAPD to accept reforms. RICO is not one of them.