Williams Disputes Report on LAPD

In a rare public confrontation between two of Los Angeles’ most important law enforcement officials, Inspector General Katherine Mader chided the LAPD on Tuesday for failing to track citizen complaints, then weathered a sharp response from Police Chief Willie L. Williams, who said her report was inaccurate and personally offensive.

Mader’s emergence as an important figure in Los Angeles police affairs has won her strong support from members of the city’s civilian Police Commission and other community leaders. But it also has triggered some backlash from top department officials, and Tuesday’s meeting illustrated the growing tension over her influence.

The subject was a report she completed last week in which Mader detailed her first six months in office and pointedly criticized some LAPD systems, including what she described as a flawed way of tallying citizen complaints against police. Although Mader took pains in her report to praise the department for its efforts to make complaint forms more readily available to the public, she accused the Police Department of producing misleading statistics on complaints.

The LAPD annually reports on the number of personnel complaints against police officers, but Mader discovered that the department only includes in that statistic the number of complaints that are formally investigated, not the total number of complaints received. The department’s official numbers show citizen-initiated personnel complaints dropping from 717 in 1991 to 496 in 1995; in fact, hundreds or even thousands of other complaints are made against police officers but are never formally converted into what the department calls “1.81s,” the LAPD code for a personnel complaint.

As a result, those complaints are not included in the numbers that the LAPD reports.

“It is reasonable as a member of the public to think that a complaint means that somebody walks into a police station, calls a police station, calls the 800 number and complains that a police officer did something that they thought was wrong,” Mader said Tuesday. “Well, the total number of times that that happens in a given year is not counted.”

That issue is sensitive both for the department generally--high-level officials frequently boast of the department’s progress in reducing complaints--and for Williams personally, since he has based his candidacy for a second five-year term partly on his success in driving down complaints.

Because of that, the topic has significant management and political overtones. And Tuesday, Williams responded to Mader’s presentation with a rare flash of anger.

“There were portions of the report that were inaccurate or led one to the inappropriate conclusion,” he said, promising a more detailed response in the near future.

Although Williams did not mention it, members of his top staff already are working on a close analysis of the Mader report and are particularly taking aim at its look at the complaint process.

Tuesday, Williams declined to say specifically what about the report was inaccurate, but alluded to a section in which Mader analyzed patterns of complaints involving rank-and-file officers and compared those to complaints against supervisors. She found that higher percentages of senior officers had their complaints cleared by a controversial process known as “miscellaneous memo” and that complaints against ranking officers are less likely to be sustained than those against officers with the rank of lieutenant or lower.

Those are long-standing sources of internal LAPD unhappiness, and Williams accused the inspector general of having “perpetuated some of the myths that we’re trying to get out from under.”

Williams did not say that Mader’s findings were incorrect, but complained that the report overemphasized some topics and created misleading impressions.

The chief added that he was personally offended by a section of the report that criticized the department for failing to take aggressive action to root out officers who lie or cover for colleagues under a “code of silence.” During an appearance before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last year, Williams said the LAPD was moving aggressively to break the code of silence.

In her report, however, Mader noted that there were fewer code-of-silence investigations in 1996 than in previous years. Mader’s office audited four years of code-of-silence cases. That audit found that 14 officers were disciplined for code-of-silence violations in 1993, 12 in 1994, 10 in 1995 and none in 1996.

“These numbers do not reflect an increasing concerted effort to discipline officers for following the code of silence,” Mader said in her report.

Williams bristled at that statement, saying it ignored other LAPD progress in tackling the issue and implying that he considered it inappropriate for the inspector general to hold him accountable for his comments to the civil rights commission.

“I do take some personal offense that simply because the chief of police makes a statement at a public meeting, that now the inspector general is going to run out and see if we are in fact doing anything about addressing the code of silence,” Williams said.

After the meeting, Mader declined to respond in detail but made it clear that she was not shrinking from a confrontation with the chief.

“I stand behind every word in that report,” she said.

Commission President Raymond C. Fisher, who presides over the five-member board that supervises both Williams and Mader, accepted the competing presentations without extensive comment. But he stressed the importance of having an inspector general to monitor the LAPD and to reassure the public that the police can be trusted to police themselves.

As Fisher noted Tuesday, the creation of the inspector general position was a key plank in the reform package written by the Christopher Commission in 1991. Fisher served as deputy general counsel to that commission, and has emerged as a major champion of reform on the Police Commission as well.

“It has been a difficult assignment and it has been difficult for the department to accept, understandably, because it’s not been used to having this type of function in place,” said Fisher, commending the LAPD for its willingness to work with Mader. “It hasn’t always been smooth. It won’t always be smooth. Quite honestly, it wasn’t intended to always be smooth.”