Pubdate: Sat, 04 Nov 2000
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2000 San Francisco Chronicle
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Forum: http://www.sfgate.com/conferences/

CONGRESS URGED TO GET TOUGH ON ABUSIVE POLICE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Washington -- Police misconduct remains an ``incessant'' problem in the
United States, and the failure to wipe out abuse and brutality requires
wholesale changes, such as giving citizens the right to sue renegade
departments, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded yesterday.

The commission, reviewing the progress and setbacks in police reforms of the
last two decades, found that better policing has often come ``at a terrible
price'' for minority communities, ``which seem to bear the brunt of the
abuse.''

Los Angeles and New York were singled out as two major examples of cities
that have ``made great strides in lowering crime rates,'' the commission
said.

``These departments have not developed into `world class' forces, however,
due to lingering concerns over the number and type of police misconduct
charges they must address,'' the report's executive summary said.

Among its major recommendations, the report said combatting racial profiling
should be given the ``highest priority,'' with departments urged to collect
data on race and ethnicity in stops to document the extent of the problem.
While some departments have begun collecting such data, others have
resisted.

Congress also should outlaw racial profiling, and ``any officer found to
have engaged in racial profiling should be subject to immediate dismissal
from the police force,'' the commission suggested.

The report also said Congress should change the law on prosecuting police in
federal court so that prosecutors no longer have to show ``specific intent''
by an officer to violate someone's civil rights. That standard has made it
nearly impossible to win convictions, the report found.

The commission, appointed by the president and Congress, approved its report
yesterday on a 5- to-1 vote. It is an update of the commission's seminal
1981 study on police abuse entitled ``Who is Guarding the Guardians?'' The
full report will be released publicly in a few weeks.

In the last several years, the commission has held hearings in numerous
cities to probe the issue of police misconduct, delivering reports on
specific cities where it found problems.

In Los Angeles, for instance, the commission 18 months ago cited civil
rights abuses at the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff's
Department -- months before the Rampart scandal shook the LAPD with evidence
of police corruption.

That scandal triggered an agreement this week between the city and the U.S.
Justice Department that gives the federal government unprecedented oversight
powers in forcing reforms at the police department.

``We've made a lot of progress'' since the commission's initial report in
1981,'' Commission Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said in an interview.

Citing Boston and San Diego as ``major success stories,'' Berry said that
``there are places where crime has been reduced and controlled and civil
rights problems have not emerged at all. Unfortunately,'' she added, ``this
progress has been uneven and is not evident in some of the major
metropolitan areas,'' such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Civil rights groups yesterday applauded many of the commission's latest
findings, but police groups questioned the report's conclusions -- and the
timing.

``I'd question the motivation of the civil rights commission in putting out
their summary four days before a presidential election,'' said Jim Pasco,
executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's
largest police union. He predicted that liberal groups will use the report's
``inflammatory'' language to portray Vice President Al Gore as a guardian of
civil rights because of the administration's efforts in taking on police
abuses.

``What the civil rights community has done is to make people believe that
there's an epidemic of police brutality and shootings and so forth, when
exactly the opposite is true. The numbers are at historic lows,'' he said.

The civil rights commission's findings are advisory in nature, but they
carry the weight of a high-ranking panel with a long history of championing
civil rights reforms.

COMMISSION'S CALL

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission report calls for:

- -- Making it easier for people to sue abusive police officers.

- -- Greater diversity on police forces.

- -- The federal government to collect national statistics on racial
profiling.

- -- Better training for officers, perhaps based on models in San Diego and
Boston, where crime rates have fallen without an increase in brutality
allegations.

- -- Giving citizen review boards new tools and more authority to investigate
misconduct allegations.
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MAP posted-by: Don Beck