Extend the LAPD consent decree

On June 8, a District Court judge will once again consider the future of the federal consent decree under which the Los Angeles Police Department has operated for the last eight years. The court will decide whether the decree -- which was designed to address a series of long-standing problems by imposing a detailed and ambitious program of reform -- should continue or whether it should be allowed to lapse.

Many Angelenos remember those problems well: the tolerance of excessive force within the LAPD; the aggressive, even lawless, attitude that resulted in the Rampart scandal; and the racial bias that erupted repeatedly from the Watts riots to the Rodney King beating. In the years since the agreement was reached in 2000, there's no question that the LAPD has made substantial strides in changing the culture of the department, for which Chief William J. Bratton, the Police Commission and the entire department deserve great credit.

But progress does not mean that all necessary reforms have been accomplished or have taken permanent root. That's why we don't believe the time has come to lift the decree.

Most notably, the department still shows disturbing and unjustifiable racial patterns in the way it does its policing. A report prepared last fall for the ACLU of Southern California by Yale economist Ian Ayres examined detailed data on more than 800,000 cases in which the LAPD stopped pedestrians or drivers between July 2003 and June 2004. It found racial disparities that could not be justified by any legitimate rationales evident in the data, such as differences in crime rates in the neighborhoods where the stops occurred, the time of day or the age and gender of the people stopped. Ayres also found that while African Americans and Latinos are frisked and asked to submit to consent searches much more often than whites, those searches were less likely to turn up drugs, weapons or other evidence of crime.

What's more, the latest raw numbers available on the LAPD's website reveal, disturbingly, that racial disparities in how people are treated when stopped have increased, rather than declined, over the last five years. Consider these figures: When stopped, African Americans drivers were asked to exit their vehicles 2.41 times more often than whites between July and December 2003. That figure grew to 3.49 times more often for the same period in 2008. For Latinos, the numbers grew from 2.37 in 2003 to 3.68 in 2008. Similar increases are evident in the disparities in which African Americans and Latinos are stopped, frisked and searched.