Who disciplines LAPD officers? Records show same lawyers picked repeatedly for process
The pool of civilians who help determine the discipline for Los Angeles police officers accused of serious misconduct includes pastors, former public defenders and a travel consultant — but they are not the ones called most often to do the job.
Instead, records reviewed by The Times show, the task usually falls to the same handful of lawyers and arbitration professionals.
Their work — a process that involves what’s known as a board of rights — has faced heavy criticism in recent years from city and Police Department leaders for repeatedly allowing cops to remain on the force despite having lied, used excessive force or shown racial bias. This week, the Los Angeles Police Commission said it would reassess the qualifications for participating.
But a Times analysis raises the possibility that the problem may be less the diversity of the board pool and more a matter of who is being chosen to sit on the three-member panels. Data from more than 200 board of rights hearings show the same people were routinely picked to serve over and over.
A breakdown of the “hearing examiners” who served on board hearings, which spanned from 2019 to this February, was obtained through a public records request.
There are about 65 people in the examiner pool, but among them 10 have been called far more often than others, appearing on at least 30 panels. One of them was on two-thirds of the panels across the entire data set.
Others were selected only a handful of times, and some haven’t been picked at all, which has prompted claims they have been excluded because they were not seen as being pro-police.
As city leaders mull LAPD’s discipline system, focus turns to the civilian arbitrators who decide if an officer accused of misconduct should be fired.
The examiner who appeared most often, records show, was David Shapiro, a partner at law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, who served on 55 boards. Other frequent participants were Michael Diliberto, a veteran arbitrator who sat on 39 boards, and Sonia Amin, an immigration attorney based in Encino, who was part of 43.
Emails to the three weren’t immediately returned on Wednesday.
Under the city’s charter, police disciplinary hearings play out like mini-trials. Instead of jury selection, department representatives and defense attorneys for the accused officers agree on three examiners from a group of nine picked at random.
Records show that more than half of the examiners are men. Most live outside of L.A., and about a third are former law enforcement officers or people who previously worked in positions that put them in contact with the LAPD.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the board of rights process, it is currently impossible for the public to know how the examiners vote and how they compare to one another in terms of disciplinary outcomes, but the department’s top brass has long complained that the all-civilian panels are too lenient. In some cases, officers recommended for firing by the chief have been allowed to keep their jobs even though they were found to have violated department policy by lying about physical altercations, including one in which an officer knocked a woman out cold.
LAPD interim Chief Dominic Choi said the City Council has asked the department to “take a look at the entire disciplinary process, from beginning to end, not just the adjudication part.” He said that he “looked forward to being part” of the review, but also defended the department’s system for investigating and disciplining officers as “one of the most thorough” in the country.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League has filed a lawsuit accusing LAPD Cmdr. Lillian Carranza of improperly accessing the officers’ union’s records.
“We’ll get working groups together to discuss what’s good and what’s bad about the process,” Choi told reporters after Tuesday’s meeting of the commission. The interim chief said he continues to fight the perception that “command officers get treated differently than our line officers.”
“As a department, as a city, we need to address that,” he said.
The Police Commission, the five-member civilian body that sets LAPD policy and standards, has proposed changing the requirements for prospective hearing examiners in hopes of attracting a more diverse pool of candidates.
The current commission rules give preference to city residents and limit the job to civilians with no criminal history who are not serving as active police officers and have a record of “responsible community service.”
Applicants must also have at least two years of experience with “arbitration, mediation, administrative hearings or comparable work,” although that requirement may go away under the changes now being considered.
Any changes will need approval from the City Council’s public safety committee and labor leaders, which could take several months.
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Former law enforcement officers who have been retired for at least five years can be considered, something that would remain unchanged in proposals made thus far by the commission.
The changes could also limit examiners to a five-year term and require enhanced training on use of force standards, “best practices for community-based policing,” and the “impact of retaining officers who have been found guilty by a Board of Rights of allegations involving dishonesty, biased policing, or other conduct that has the potential to compromise their ability to continue to serve.”
Last month, Mayor Karen Bass vetoed a proposed ballot measure to rework the disciplinary process — resulting in its removal from the Nov. 5 ballot and delaying the possibility of any meaningful reforms for at least two years. The proposal would have stripped officers of the option to opt for an all-civilian board, while giving the chief of police the power to fire an officer outright for certain serious offenses.
In her veto letter to the City Council, Bass said the proposal risked creating ‘bureaucratic confusion’ within the LAPD’s disciplinary system.
LAPD leaders warned the proposal risked creating a two-tier disciplinary system, with some offenses resulting in termination by the chief and others still requiring a board of rights hearing. They also opposed the proposal’s creation of a binding arbitration process to resolve cases under appeal.
The mayor’s veto came amid a philosophical split between the measure’s original architects, Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Tim McOsker.
In his regular newsletter to his Council District 15 constituents, McOsker wrote that he was “disappointed” by his colleagues’ decision not to block the mayor’s veto but said he was committed to making “meaningful change” to the board of rights process. He has since introduced a motion that called for a “top-to-bottom review” of police discipline.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the powerful union that represents LAPD rank-and-file officers, has also argued for changes, saying the current system is skewed in favor of command staff and those officers who are well-connected. The union has argued that civilians tend to be more impartial arbiters because they are less likely than sworn officers to fear running afoul of top brass when they don’t follow a recommendation to fire an officer or mete out other major punishment.
Greg Yacoubian, a lawyer who often represents LAPD officers in workplace matters, said that any disparity in discipline has less to do with who is serving on boards of rights than it does with the department’s overzealousness in bringing cases against certain officers.
“The real problem [is] that the civilian boards have been finding that, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t have the evidence, it doesn’t support the finding of guilt,’” he said. “You should have an unbiased, uninfluenced panel of hearing officers and let the chips fall where they fall.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
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