Handling of ‘Problem Deputies’ Criticized : Kolts report: Panel finds ‘little or no discipline’ imposed on officers responsible for bulk of excessive force complaints.

Over the last six years, a group of 62 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies has been hit with hundreds of allegations of excessive force and harassment of civilians.

Seventeen of those deputies were named in lawsuits that cost county taxpayers $3.2 million in the last three years.

But the deputies--singled out as “problem officers” by the Kolts report on the Sheriff’s Department released Monday--remain on the job.

Most are street deputies. Some are training officers instructing less experienced deputies. Others have been promoted to choice assignments.

How could they have prospered in a law enforcement agency that prides itself on its professionalism?

They thrived, the Kolts panel said, largely because of a systemwide failure by sheriff’s officials to track deputies with a history of alleged brutality or to discipline those found to have engaged in excessive force.

The panel also concluded that the department did not adequately review the conduct of hundreds of officers named in excessive force lawsuits costing the county $15.5 million from January, 1989, through May, 1992.

In the 124 lawsuits resulting in settlements and verdicts of more than $20,000, the panel said about 400 deputies were named as defendants, although many did not use any force but were present when it occurred.

Some 35 deputies were named as defendants in more than one case, and six officers were named as defendants in three cases.

To their supporters, the unnamed “problem” deputies have been miscast as brutal cops and their appearance in the landmark report has unfairly tainted the 8,000 officers in the nation’s largest Sheriff’s Department.

“Every department has problem officers, no question about it,” said Richard Shinee, attorney for the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. “But the idea that the Sheriff’s Department has a disproportionate number of problem officers or the idea that sheriff deputies are sadistic is just not true.”

While the Kolts report did not suggest that sheriff’s deputies are more brutal than officers in other police agencies, the panel stated that the number of problem officers “illustrates clearly and dramatically how the (department) has failed to give them the close scrutiny they deserve.”

The panel found that the “problem” deputies had backgrounds showing “readily identifiable patterns of excessive force.”

In all, the deputies were the subjects of 495 investigations involving brutality or harassment allegations from January, 1986, to April, 1992, but that record has not barred them from obtaining promotions or coveted assignments, the panel said.

“These profiles illustrate that the (department) has failed to identify and deal with officers who appear to use excessive force and get away with it time and again--even when their actions end up costing the county hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the commission said.

According to the report, here are some of the reasons these officers--and other deputies--were able to survive repeated allegations of excessive force:

* While the personnel files of the 62 “problem officers” contained laudatory comments and commendations, there was “near silence” about investigations of excessive force. The files also did not include any references to lawsuits in which jurors concluded the deputies used excessive force.

* Although many department investigations into excessive force allegations were thorough, “many others were cursory and some appeared designed to exonerate the charged officer.” In some cases, key witnesses were not interviewed, injuries were not photographed and biased evidence was presented that supported the deputy.

* The department rarely sustained civilian complaints of excessive force, and some complaints were never investigated.

A former sheriff’s deputy told the panel he fielded a phone call from a citizen who alleged that a field sergeant beat a suspect with a leather-covered club, known as a sap. The deputy said he assured the caller that he would notify his watch commander but instead called the sergeant to warn him to “cool it.”

* Even when citizen complaints were sustained, the resulting discipline was often too lenient.

In one 1991 case, the panel said an inmate recovering from surgery was kneed several times by a deputy because the inmate unwrapped a throat lozenge instead of keeping his hands in his pockets as ordered. The blows reopened the inmate’s surgical wounds. The deputy said he kneed the inmate because the man had “tensed up” and seemed dangerous. The deputy received a four-day suspension.

The commission found that department files contained little usable information about trends and patterns of excessive force.

While the department has been moving toward a system that would computerize such information, the panel found that progress was slow.

“Driven by fears that data on use of force and citizen complaints would be used against it in civil litigation, the (department) followed legal advice from county counsel to avoid creating ‘paper trails’ when it could,” the report said. “When it could not, the information was scattered throughout the (department) and kept haphazardly.”

That lack of information helped prevent the agency from “identifying individual problem officers, or cliques of problem officers . . . possibly subjecting the county to millions of dollars in civil exposure,” the panel said.