A group of civil rights lawyers Monday asked a federal judge to place restrictions on Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies in Lynwood in order to halt "a pattern of violence, terrorism and destruction of property."
The deputies have conducted a campaign of "unrelenting terrorism against the black and Latino residents of this community," alleged one of the lawyers, Kevin Reed of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The attorneys' charges were outlined in a lengthy legal memorandum and 202 pages of declarations submitted in Los Angeles to U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr.
The declarations detailed alleged physical abuses, death threats, unwarranted shootings and arrests, ransacking of homes, uninhibited expressions of racial animosity and a host of other allegedly illegal activities by the deputies.
Hatter was asked to impose an immediate injunction on the Sheriff's Department to end what the attorneys described as the "wanton abuse of police power" by deputies in Lynwood.
Attorney George V. Denny III, of the Police Misconduct Lawyers Referral Service, described the Lynwood situation as only "a microcosm" of widespread problems of excessive use of force by the Sheriff's Department.
Denny called for creation of a special commission--similar to the Christopher Commission, which examined the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of the beating of Altadena motorist Rodney G. King--to be formed to investigate the Sheriff's Department.
"If you could get a commission to go into it (the Sheriff's Department) with the depth and breadth that the Christopher Commission did," Denny said, "they would find practices that make the Los Angeles police look like choirboys and the discipline imposed by their superiors look Draconian."
The papers filed Monday were the latest chapter in a class-action suit filed in September. The original suit accused Lynwood deputies of engaging in a wave of wanton shootings, beating and excessive force from February to May in 1990. The lawyers asked Hatter to take over control of the Lynwood sheriff's station as the most effective means of stopping "an institutionally condoned reign of terror in Lynwood."
The Los Angeles County counsel's office filed a motion for dismissal of that complaint, but no hearing has been held.
On Monday, the plaintiff's lawyers said immediate action is needed because the beatings and other illegal activity continue. They asserted in court papers that "Lynwood deputies appear to consider the lawsuit a call to arms."
