City Seeks Answers to LAPD Delay
City leaders want Los Angeles Police Department officials to explain today why they are having so much trouble perfecting a computer system to track officer conduct when that has been successfully done by agencies around the nation -- including just miles away at the county Sheriff's Department.
The City Council's Public Safety Committee has called a special joint meeting with the Police Commission to figure out what has gone wrong and how quickly it can be remedied. Leaders are so concerned about delays that have plagued the TEAMS II computer system that a shake-up of staffing is said to be in the works.
With the department's history of abuse and corruption as a backdrop, a federal judge cited the computer system trouble last week in deciding to keep the LAPD under federal oversight for three more years as part of a consent decree struck in the wake of the Rampart Division scandal in 1999.
When the decree was signed in 2001, U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess and his appointed monitor, Michael Cherkasky, insisted that the LAPD create such a system to quickly identify officers who have been frequently targeted by misconduct allegations.
"It is the keystone of the consent decree," said Merrick Bobb, a nationally recognized policing expert based in Los Angeles.
For more than a decade, such a system has been in place at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, headquartered in Monterey Park.
During a recent review, sheriff's officials determined -- with the push of a button -- that 162 deputies had accumulated a troubling number of shootings, citizen complaints, traffic accidents, lawsuits or other problems. The deputies identified by the sheriff's Personnel Performance Index system will now get a special look from supervisors to determine whether they need more mentoring, remediation or training.
"It's a critical system," said Michael Gennaco, chief of Sheriff Lee Baca's Office of Independent Review, which monitors department disciplinary actions. "It's an indispensable piece of equipment for what we do here on a daily basis."
Similar computer systems are in place in Phoenix; Tampa, Fla.; and Pittsburgh; but despite five years of effort, the LAPD has failed to complete such a system of its own.
