The Torrance Police Department will call on the district attorney's office to investigate officer-involved shootings and deaths of prisoners in custody, a department official said this week.
Police Chief Donald Nash is expected to order this month that Torrance investigators call the district attorney's "roll-out" teams in those situations, Capt. Jim Weyant said.
The decision to ask for independent investigations follows a difficult year for the Torrance Police Department. Last February, two officers were charged with lying about the shooting of an unarmed man, and in September a jury ruled that the department has routinely condoned misconduct by officers.
About half of the county's 47 police departments call the district attorney's office to investigate jail deaths and police shootings that result in injuries or deaths, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Herb Lapin.
Torrance police officials have vehemently denied charges that they have not thoroughly investigated fellow officers. However, Weyant noted, participation in the district attorney's roll-out program will help eliminate even the appearance of impropriety.
"Some changes can be made so that the perception is that we do things right," Weyant said. "It adds to the overall thoroughness. Anything we do, there is another entity doing it too."
In the district attorney's program, a prosecutor and an investigator "roll out" to the scene of police shootings and jail deaths, Lapin said. They interview witnesses, review evidence and reach conclusions independently of police investigations.
The district attorney's investigations seldom find improprieties in the police department reviews, but they bolster public confidence, Lapin said. "It gives the police the position of being able to say, 'It is under investigation by the district attorney's office,' " Lapin said.
Participation in the roll-out program is the most recent in a series of procedural changes in the Torrance Police Department after last year's problems. The department has already imposed a rule that ranking officers must investigate misconduct allegations. It has also begun to reorganize and simplify internal affairs files. And it will adopt a computer program that will allow administrators to track the most common kinds of police misbehavior and to standardize discipline.
In the past, the Torrance department conducted its own investigations when officers shot suspects, as it did in the May, 1988, shooting of Patrick J. Coyle.
