An Office of Independent Review similar to the one being set up for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has been in operation since 2001 in Los Angeles under the direction of former federal civil rights prosecutor Michael Gennaco.
In that time the office has reviewed about 1,500 cases involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and, virtually every case that has been investigated by the LASD’s Internal Affairs Bureau. Gennaco’s team has now entered its third three-year contract cycle providing oversight for LASD cases.
“As we have stated repeatedly, our role is not to ensure that management will “win” or that the system will “get” deputies in cases involving alleged misconduct. Instead, we promote the fairness and thoroughness and consistency of the process — principles that most deputies would seemingly find acceptable and desirable,” the OIR annual statement reads.
One of the findings that OIR has made in the years they have reviewed deputy conduct in Los Angeles is that discipline can be different for deputies working in different areas of the city. Area Commanders can impose up to 20 days suspension for deputies under their command and OIR has strived to see that similar offenses receive similar discipline, said Gennaco.
In Orange County, the suspension of a deputy must be approved by the Assistant Sheriff commanding the deputy’s unit. An Area Commander in the LASD is two levels below an Assistant Sheriff.
The OIR also reviews a case to determine whether it has been fully investigated.
“Our review has led to the discovery of exculpatory evidence or extenuating circumstances that have exonerated the deputy or resulted in a lesser level of discipline,” Gennaco said. “Our goal is to see that the decision makers are acting on the best information available. We want the department to get it right.”
The OIR recommends the level of discipline but the final decision is made by the department.
There are occasions when the OIR will recommend a lesser discipline than the LASD wants to impose.
Other times a commander will want to discipline a deputy who is “known” to have committed an offense but the OIR will find there is no evidence to support the discipline.
“In 90 percent of the case we agree with the discipline,” Gennaco said. “In four to five percent of the cases we disagree but we don’t contest it. There is only one percent that we disagree and take our disagreement to a high level within the department.”
In six years there have been only four cases that OIR has taken all the way up to the Sheriff.
The number of deputies in the 9,000 member department who have any contact with the OIR is small, Gennaco said.
There have been many occasions when the OIR has recommended that, as an alternative to suspension, the deputy be ordered to give “peer lectures” on the offense he or she had committed.
“We have also found occasions when a deputy is being disciplined but the departments’ policies do not provide sufficient guidance to the deputy. If the policy is ambiguous we work with department to change it so that it is clear,” said Gennaco.
Another finding has been that deputies had conducted themselves outside of policy because they had not been properly trained. In those cases, training is recommended, rather than discipline.
One of the biggest benefits to the OIR is transparency, Gennaco said. The county leadership and the public are less skeptical of department discipline when an outside review is conducted.
“We had a horde of paparazzi hounding the sheriff’s department after the Mel Gibson arrest but that also all disappeared when it was announced that OIR would review the case,” said Gennaco. “We reported that there were no serious violations of policy in the case. There were a few minor violations and there was discipline given to those individuals. Our report was accepted in a way it is not likely to have been accepted if it had been strictly conducted by the sheriff’s department.”
He added that virtually all of the deputy involved shooting investigations are concluded without discipline and that 60-70 percent of complaints investigated are unfounded.
Click here to see all of latest reports by the LASD’s OIR.