Racism and retaliation

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The L.A. Watts Times wrote an article earlier this month on claims made by a former Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputy that his department was engaging in racist practices.

Garrett Shah who worked for what used to be the Compton Police Department before that city signed a contract with the Sheriff's Department filed a law suit in federal court. In that law suit, Shah said that a sergeant complained to him because he took too few African-Americans to jail and also told him to stop acting Black because he could never be Black.

Shah, who is White was raised by a Black family and grew up in a predominantly Black community in Inglewood. He said he first noticed the racism in the ranks when he was hired by the Sheriff's Department after Compton disbanded its own department several years ago.


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Wearing a bulletproof vest and routinely scanning his surroundings at a West Los Angeles eatery, Shah mentioned several times during an exclusive interview with the L.A. Watts Times, "I'm a dead man."

"I wear a vest everywhere I go because I know they are going to kill me," he said.

The suit, which was originally filed in February 2006 and has since been amended twice, describes a department in which deputies not only target African Americans for felony arrests, but also participated in "planting illegal items on African Americans, using neighboring law enforcement agencies to make unwarranted arrests of African Americans and lying in Court proceedings concerning such wrongful conduct."

"I know (there are) hundreds of blacks right now sitting in prison for crimes they did not commit simply because they are black and they are doing 10, 30 years," Shah asserted."It looks good when you have stats, what we call pat stats when you make so many felony arrests, when you make so many misdemeanor arrests. It looks good. It even looks better to the racist supervisors who are in there that you are taking more black people to jail. Blacks are not liked period in law enforcement…, " said Shah.



In his interview with the L.A. Watts Times, Shah explained how the sheriff deputies policed African-Americans in their neighborhoods.


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"Let's say there are a certain group of gang bangers or blacks that you don't like in a certain area that's really bad. What you do is you drive around and you see who is hanging outside and…you take your little duty weapon and you put your gun out the car and you shoot in the air. Then you get on the radio and say shots fired in the area. Now you call in the helicopter, you call in the K-9 and you lock down the whole area and anybody in that area automatically gets detained. So those guys you wanted who were hanging out on the corner, you've got probable cause to detain them," Shah explained.

Sheriff Lee Baca didn't have much to say about the allegations raised in the law suit but through a spokesman, he did say he couldn't wait until the full story could be heard, which seems to indicate that he's denying the allegations without really denying them.

Michael Gennaco, who with a group of lawyers oversees the department's internal investigations had this to say about the law suit.


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"The allegations are significant but right now they are just a complaint. In a complaint you can put anything you want," said Gennaco, adding that he would be personally looking into the allegations.



Gennaco once worked for the U.S. Attorney's office which was assigned the task to look into pattern and practice problems in law enforcement agencies including the Riverside Police Department in 1999. Gennaco lost his job when President George W. Bush came in and was hired by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors to work as a means of oversight over the Sheriff's Department. Hopefully his experience will help him here.


Ironically or not, Gennaco' agency first came to Riverside after a former officer here raised allegations of racism within the police department. Former officer Rene Rodriguez said that training officers taught him and other new officers how to engage in the racial profiling of Black and Latino motorists. According to him, officers had made racist remarks after the shooting of Tyisha Miller in 1998 and in the roll call room while sessions were being held. On one occasion, he said an officer had driven by him, stuck his fist out the window and yelled, "White power".

Like Shah, Rodriguez also said that he felt his life was in danger when he came forward. He said that he slept on a couch in the living room by the front door at night and received numerous hangup and harassment phone calls. Rodriguez detailed his experiences on 60 Minutes in 1999.

Another officer, Roger Sutton, also filed a racial discrimination, harassment and retaliation law suit that went to trial in 2005. After six weeks of trial testimony, the jury awarded him $1.64 million which the city paid out last year. Like the others, Sutton also alleged that he was retaliated against by other officers including those in management after bringing his allegations forward. In one incident, he said his truck had been keyed while it was parked inside a garage accessible only to city employees. He also faced ostracization by other officers, according to his law suit and was subjected to retaliatory behavior by the Internal Affairs Division, as was Rodriguez according to his complaint.

And it's not only those who file law suits alleging racism who said they faced this type of behavior in the department.

A White female officer who filed a law suit against the police department alleging sexual discrimination and harassment in 1996 stated in her complaint that she had also experienced retaliation in response. Then Sgt. Christine Keers said she received harassing phone calls, was called a "bitch" on the bathroom wall and in the elevator and was prosecuted for a crime alleged by the same officers she had listed in her complaint. Keers took her case to trial and was acquitted by a jury within an hour of deliberations. The city paid an undisclosed large sum of money to her when it settled her law suit and reinstated her back on the force with a retirement in 2000.





Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton is coming up for a term renewal by the city's police commission, according to this article in the Los Angeles Times. And as is typical in cases like this, he's being graded. In response, Bratton said that he believed there was still much left for him to do.

Bratton said there's more work left to do


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"A major reason why I came to Los Angeles was to deal with this issue of the divisiveness in the city in a sense that it never seemed to be able to heal itself," the chief said in an interview last week.

"I really felt that I could be that catalyst to use the police for racial healing rather than racial divisiveness," Bratton said. "So if I were to get reappointed I would hope it would be around that idea, that the healing process is further along than it was five years ago."



According to a survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times, Bratton still has his work cut out for him. Although White Angelenos heavily supported him, his support by African-Americans, Latinos and Korean-Americans was below the 50% level.


Here's a summary of what he's being graded on in a performance review. It includes issues such as implementation of the federal consent decree reforms, department morale and growth of the police force. Bratton's done fairly well in the latter two, with the Police Protective League being supportive of him though the union hasn't officially endorsed him. Also, the police department is growing slowly after having gone through a lot of attrition in relation to the Rampart Scandal in 1999 which led to the consent decree being imposed in 2001.

But he did have some problems in the implementation of the consent decree.


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Police misconduct lawsuits and the amount paid in settlements have dropped significantly. But the number of citizen complaints against officers is up. Bratton says that's because the department does a better job of taking complaints and investigating accusations.

The department is still recovering from a corruption scandal that erupted eight years ago — predating Bratton — when officers working an anti-gang unit in the Rampart Division admitted to framing, beating and shooting people without justification. The city subsequently agreed to implement reforms laid out in a federal consent decree.

Under Bratton, the department has achieved a majority of the mandates but missed a deadline last year to complete them all within five years. The delayed projects include the development of a computer system to track officer conduct, which recently became fully operational. Last year a judge extended the decree's term three more years, a costly development because the LAPD must spend up to $10 million a year to monitor reform efforts.

Fatal shootings by officers went from seven in 2001 to 15 the next year, spiked at 16 in 2004 and dropped to 12 last year. Critics say officers still too often use excessive force. To improve relations in troubled neighborhoods, Bratton has moved toward more community-based policing, including having senior lead officers help residents solve problems before crimes occur.




The city of Atlanta, Georgia is still reeling from an announcement by federal authorities that its police department is rife with corruption.


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On Thursday, Police Chief Richard Pennington and other department leaders stood stone-faced as federal officials talked at a news conference about misconduct on their watch.

"This has been a very painful five months in the police department," Pennington said. "The mayor and I, we wanted one thing to occur, to get to the bottom of this and let justice be meted [out]."

One United States Attorney said that he fully expected to find other similar cases where officers planted evidence and lied about it during his agency's investigation into the department that was initiated in the wake of Johnston's death.

Here, details of the events that led to the fatal shooting of Kathryn Johnston, 92, were provided through documents released by these federal agencies.

It began with three narcotic officers from the Atlanta Police Department who were strolling through the neighborhood and discovered a large quantity of marijuana in plastic bags. They didn't know where it came from so they put them in the trunk and carried them around for several hours.

They ran into a well-known drug dealer, planted a couple of the bags so a canine officer could sniff them out and then told him he could help them out or face arrest. So he did.

The dealer said that he had seen a kilogram of cocaine at Johnston's house and a sale take place. After attempts to bring in one of their informants to purchase drugs at the house failed, the three officers decided to do a "no knock" raid anyway. They showed up at Johnston's house, with signed warrant in hand, breaking into her house after prying the security bars off of her windows. Perhaps the judge who approved the warrant didn't know it at the time but he had just signed an elderly woman's death warrant.

Johnston fired once at the door with a gun given to her by family members for self-protection. It was the last action she would ever take and it will never be clear how frightened she had been when she heard her door breaking down.

Her bullet missed. The officers' did not, with at least five bullets hitting her body. Other bullets that were fired struck the officers in what's called "friendly fire".

It's not clear whether Johnston was already dead as she lay handcuffed on the floor of her own home while police officers frantically searched for what they wouldn't find. Drugs or weapons.

It didn't matter, because what they couldn't find, they could plant.

Afterwards, the chain of lies began, but the house of cards soon came crashing down after it was an informant who came forward and said it was all lies. Soon after, the first officer confessed to his role in a horrible crime. A crime committed by those who were hired to protect and serve Johnston but instead took her life.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "no lie can live forever". Mercifully, in this case he was right. Not that it brings back the mother, the grandmother and the cherished relative that Johnston was to her family but hopefully it can root out the culture in the department poisoned by corruption and racism which led to her death.

In Denver, Colorado, the Denver Post wrote an editorial praising the improvements made in outside oversight of the city's police department. It holds up the example of how the case involving Kenneth Rodriguez was handled after a videotape was found that showed him being tased in the neck by Officer Randall Krouse, which contradicted with a report written by Reserve Officer Lewis Cullar.

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Cullar was dismissed for filing a false report. Krouse was suspended for 60 days for using excessive force. Charges against Rodriguez were dropped. Rosenthal said he favored a suspension for Krouse rather than firing him because the officer had a previously "unblemished service record."

Thanks to the city's new police monitoring process, Krouse must consider himself on notice, and other officers should note the consequence if they use excessive force.

The public can be satisfied that officers will be held accountable when such incidents occur.