Order 40 works

Anyone who proposes modifying the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40 is fishing in dangerous, potentially divisive civic waters.

In 1979, the LAPD voluntarily decided it no longer would investigate people solely to establish their immigration status and would not arrest anyone simply for being in the country illegally. It was a practical rather than a political or altruistic decision by then-Chief Daryl F. Gates. If the department was going to police the burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods, particularly those where Latinos predominated, it needed the newcomers’ cooperation as tipsters and witnesses -- help that wouldn’t be forthcoming if the LAPD continued to be regarded as an arm of la migra.

In the years since, Special Order 40 has become a Janus-faced icon: To those who believe that legal and illegal immigration have transformed Los Angeles in uncontrolled and undesirable ways, it’s a symbol of City Hall’s politically correct kowtowing to ethnic interest groups and soft-headed civil libertarians. In Los Angeles’ many immigrant communities -- particularly sprawling Latino neighborhoods -- the order represents the wider city’s guarantee that the law’s protection extends to all who accept and support it, and those who enforce it.

So where does City Councilman Dennis Zine’s proposal fit into this contentious picture?

Friday, he asked his colleagues to request that LAPD Chief Bill Bratton and the Police Commission amend Special Order 40 so that, “when in the course of gang suppression investigations, LAPD officers are able to verify that a suspect is a known gang member, those officers be instructed to obtain information on the suspect’s immigration status and transmit” it to federal authorities. Why now?

In a conversation Friday, Zine said the “tragic killing” of L.A. High School football star Jamiel Shaw II and his grieving parents’ wrenching appearance before the council this week, along with the lawmakers’ recent decision to centralize anti-gang activities in the mayor’s office, had created “an opportunity” to strike a blow at gang criminality. Shaw’s alleged killer is a gang member and an illegal immigrant who was released from jail a day before the shooting.

Zine acknowledged that modifying the order wouldn’t have prevented Shaw’s murder because the suspect was arrested by Culver City police and released by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. “I think Special Order 40 serves a valid purpose,” Zine said. “We’re talking about bringing some good out of all this with a modification that deals with the way things have changed over the years and with these known gang members, who usually prey on their own community.”

The problem, according to LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz, is that Zine’s proposal won’t work because the only way the department has to verify someone’s membership in a gang is to search a computerized data base called Cal/Gang, which is maintained by the state and locally managed by the Sheriff’s Department.

For security reasons, only specially trained gang officers and detectives have access to the system, and only a few of them can enter a gang member’s name. Patrol officers have no access from the computers in their cars. Equally important, neither gang nor patrol officers have any way to verify a person’s immigration status, Diaz said, unless the suspect previously had been arrested and deported. Even knowing that might not tell an officer what he needs to know about a person’s current immigration status.

Immigration law is hideously complex, Diaz pointed out. “I would resist any attempt to try to make 10,000 LAPD officers into immigration experts,” he said. “We have enough to do educating them all about probable cause and the 4th Amendment.”

Zine’s motion is a sincere attempt to be proactive concerning a problem that has afflicted the city’s conscience and heart. Where he sees opportunity, however, others are bound to see peril.

In recent weeks, for example, some African American leaders have accused Bratton of underestimating the significance of incidents in which Latino gang members appear to have targeted blacks. The fact that Jamiel Shaw II was black and his alleged killer a Latino could fuel a disastrous “racialization” of the debate over Special Order 40.

Finally, with a mayoral election in 2009, there are those who would like nothing better than to turn the order into a political football that could be carried against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

That would be a tragedy because for 30 years LAPD chiefs have agreed on one thing: Special Order 40 makes the city safer for everyone. That’s because an L.A. in which illegal immigrants run from the police and refuse to talk to them about crimes is about as close to anarchy as anything anyone can imagine.

--

timothy.rutten@latimes.com