California Police Uphold Few Complaints of Officer Misconduct

The LA Times (September 23, 2018) reported: Angry that she had been falsely accused of a drug crime, Tatiana Lopez filed a complaint against a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who had arrested her on suspicion of possessing methamphetamine.

But when Lopez met with a sheriff’s lieutenant to discuss her accusation, he urged her to drop her complaint. After a preliminary investigation, the Sheriff’s Department ruled the deputy had done nothing wrong, without giving her any explanation.

It would take years of legal battles before a judge exonerated Lopez and a new internal investigation led the department to fire the deputy for lying about her arrest.

Lopez is one of nearly 200,000 members of the public who filed a complaint against California law enforcement officers in the last decade. Her initial complaint ended the way most did — with police rejecting it without saying why.

A Times analysis of complaint data reported to the California Department of Justice shows law enforcement agencies across the state upheld 8.4% of complaints filed by members of the public from 2008 to 2017.

In a state with some of the strictest police privacy laws in the country, those who make complaints against officers are entitled to learn little more than whether their allegations were found to be true or not. They are given no other explanation about how a final decision was reached, what was done to investigate their allegation or whether an officer was disciplined.

Police officials argue that a large number of the complaints they receive are frivolous, filed by suspects they have arrested or others who have an ax to grind. Some said the proliferation of body-worn cameras among California police agencies has helped disprove a larger number of allegations about interactions between police and the public.
--

So, what do these numbers tell us? Well, the average number of complaints filed against California police officers per year was 20,000 of which 8.4% or 1,680 were found by police internal investigation to have merit. California has roughly 77,000 sworn law enforcement officers (with full arrest powers). So, in any given year, 2% of California police officers had a founded complaint of misconduct conduct filed against them... or put another way 98% of California police did their jobs without out any founded complaints against them.

The question then is whether 92% of citizen's complaints against police in California are frivolous? There certainly are documented cases of police misconduct, as we saw with the above case of Tatiana Lopez, and in reports such as:  An LAPD officer accidentally filmed himself putting cocaine in a suspect’s wallet. But how many more complaints are just because someone has an ax to grind with the police?

How many videos and pictures of police misconduct, posted on-line, have more to the story than what we see? The picture, at the top of this post, of a police officer beating a black man with a sap is horrific police misconduct... except that it never happened. The photo is really actor Woody Harrelson filming a violent scene in Downtown Los Angeles for the movie "Rampart".

Does police misconduct occur? Yes, of course. Police departments are made up of people and sometimes people make mistakes, or even intentionally commit crimes. Is police misconduct common? No! And when we consider the repeated number of contacts that any police officer has with members of the public in any given year, police misconduct is far less common than even the 2% of founded cases mentioned above.