Fighting to restore public oversight of sheriff's disciplinary hearings
By Matt Mundy
L.A. County Sheriff's Department misconduct hearings have been shrouded in secrecy since the removal last November of a civilian review panel, a move critics partly blame on a misreading of a California Supreme Court ruling. Sheriff Lee Baca, the county Board of Supervisors and the county's top lawyer are seeking to overturn the Civil Service Commission's decision to ban the Office of Independent Review (OIR), a group of six private attorneys contracted by the department to oversee discipline.
"The implications are significant," said OIR Chief Attorney Michael Gennaco. "We need oversight from the inception to the conclusion." He said the office was created to ensure that the public interest was being adhered to through a "full, fair and thorough investigation."
"[There will be] a significant decrease in transparency, particularly since the general public is no longer allowed to go," said Gennaco. "It has changed the landscape of the last 40 years of openness."
The County Civil Service Commission unanimously voted on Nov. 29 to bar the sheriff's watchdog group. Unlike the uproar that met a similar decision to keep the public from attending disciplinary hearings of Los Angeles Police Department officers, the county ruling did not get much play in the media.
Banning the public from LAPD disciplinary hearings became a high-profile political fight in light of a closed-door Board of Rights decision to absolve Officer Steven Garcia, who fatally shot 13-year-old Devin Brown in 2005 as the boy slowly backed a car toward Garcia. The details surrounding Garcia's exoneration were secret until Garcia himself released them to the public; they would have stayed hidden otherwise. A similar public outcry has not greeted the commission's decision to ban the sheriff's watchdogs from disciplinary hearings, despite the fact it is their job to examine misconduct proceedings on behalf of the public.
The sheriff's panel has played a significant role in highly publicized cases facing the County Civil Service Commission. It released a public report on its website critical of a May 2005 shooting in Compton, in which deputies were caught on videotape firing 120 rounds on a residential street.
Commission President Z.G. Kahwajian sought to downplay the significance of the ban, saying that the OIR will continue to have access to important documents after the fact. "The only thing missing is the drama of the proceedings," Kahwajian said. "The analysis is quite easy for them to make…whether these proceedings are public or not, it doesn't affect outcomes in any way."
Gennaco disagrees, arguing that the presence of the review panel at the hearings themselves are a necessary part of its oversight. "We try to provide transparency to the public and this will certainly impact our ability to do that," he said.
Melvin Snell, director of the Los Angeles Humanity Advocacy Group, said the public will lose its trust in the process: "I think it's a mistake to cut off any hearings to the public when the incident they're discussing directly involves the public."
The county Civil Service Commission voted 5 to 0 to boot the OIR after a debate that lasted just under half an hour. The vote was triggered by previous repeated objections by lawyers representing peace officers to the presence of the OIR in the hearings. The Sheriff's Department, the OIR and lawyers for the Association of Deputy Officers all submitted briefs about the issue; the OIR defended its presence, the lawyers argued for their exclusion and the Sheriff's Department was silent for the most part, up until Sheriff Baca's recent letter to the commission.
"If the Sheriff's Department filed a brief saying the OIR is acting in an official capacity of the sheriff or performing an essential role, it would have made me second guess my vote," said Kahwajian. "[Their] silence was deafening."
The California Supreme Court decision cited by those excluding the sheriff's watchdog panel and the public is known as Copley Press Inc. vs. Superior Court of San Diego County, in which the Supreme Court found to protect the secrecy of peace officers' personnel files. The case involved the release to a newspaper publisher of San Diego County Civil Service Commission records involving an officer's appeal of a disciplinary issue.
"The [Copley] case involved access to disciplinary records, not hearings," argued Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law and political science at Duke University. "The law does not require closure."
Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) has vowed to introduce legislation to reopen the police hearings to the media and the public. Other prominent opponents to the closed hearings include Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the City Council, the Police Commission, LAPD Chief William Bratton, and the ACLU.
Said Chemerinsky: "It is impossible for the press and the public to monitor such proceedings when they are done behind closed doors."
Matt Mundy is a USC Annenberg graduate student in print journalism.