Declaring that the Los Angeles Police Department has reformed itself significantly after decades of corruption and brutality complaints, a U.S. judge on Friday ended a long-running period of federal oversight.
U.S. District Court Judge Gary A. Feess terminated the consent decree federal officials had imposed on the LAPD in 2001, after the Rampart corruption scandal. The decree required the department to undertake dozens of wide-ranging reforms meant to tighten internal checks on officers' conduct and subjected the department to rigorous audits by a monitor who reported to Feess.
In freeing the LAPD, Feess and his monitor, Michael Cherkasky, acknowledged improvements.
"When the decree was entered, LAPD was a troubled department whose reputation had been severely damaged by a series of crises," Feess wrote in his ruling released early Friday evening. "In 2008, as noted by the monitor, 'LAPD has become the national and international policing standard for activities that range from audits to handling of the mentally ill to many aspects of training to risk assessment of police officers and more.' "
Since his arrival shortly after the decree went into place, LAPD Chief William J. Bratton embraced it as a blueprint for how to pull the department from a troubled past and into a modern era of policing. In recent months, however, Bratton voiced increasing discontent. He said continued oversight had become a stigma that hurt morale, even when the department had proved its ability to police itself.
Bratton struck an anticlimactic note Friday, saying that while the decision showed "the department has regained its reputation," the LAPD itself had come to view the decree as outdated and irrelevant. "In the mind of the department, it has been over for a long time," he said.
Feess' action does not free the LAPD from making mandated improvements .
The judge approved a transitional plan that attorneys for the LAPD and the U.S. Department of Justice proposed to him last month. Under that agreement, the Los Angeles Police Commission, which oversees the LAPD, will assume responsibility from Cherkasky for keeping tabs on the department's efforts to fully implement a handful of still-incomplete or recently finished reforms. If DOJ lawyers are unsatisfied with the commission's oversight, the agreement allows them to object and bring the department back before Feess.
