U.S. atty. in L.A. set quotas, staff says

Increased productivity is important because it can influence funding levels for the office, which are dictated by the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Because the numbers in Los Angeles have been on the rise, so has the size of the staff. O'Brien estimates that he has hired 60 new prosecutors over the last year and that the office is approaching its full strength of 267 lawyers for the first time in recent memory.

The Times spoke with 11 prosecutors from various enforcement sections of the office, which employs about 180 attorneys in its criminal division. The lawyers spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals from their superiors. Three former prosecutors who recently left the office also asked to remain anonymous because they were not comfortable speaking publicly about internal matters they were privy to while employed there.

The disgruntled prosecutors in Los Angeles say they are now spending an exorbitant amount of time working on less significant cases -- mail theft, smaller drug offenses and illegal immigration -- to reach quotas. They cited the recent disbanding of the office's public integrity and environmental crimes section, a unit with a history of working on complex police corruption and political corruption cases, as evidence of a shift toward high-volume, low-quality prosecutions.

"It's all about the numbers," one prosecutor said.

One former supervisor put it this way: "I can't remember how they sugarcoated it, but the feeling around the office was, if you got your quota, then you could work on your real cases without being hassled."

The decision to set numeric goals appears to be unprecedented in the recent history of the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. U.S. attorneys going back to the early 1990s said they had no such goals.

The move was part of a broader office restructuring to address a severe staffing shortage and steadily declining productivity, which had fallen 30% or 40% from 2001, O'Brien said. He said he wanted to improve service for crime victims and law enforcement agencies, which had grown accustomed to having their cases rejected because of a lack of resources.

"We were literally not even taking cases in the door anymore," O'Brien said. "We were almost becoming irrelevant."

Historically, routine criminal cases referred by federal agents were handled by lawyers who were relatively new to the office. In fact, the general crimes section is known as Rookie Row.