LOS ANGELES _ Los Angeles first gave civilians a say in disciplining police officers during a time of crisis.
The city was reeling from the grainy video showing the pummeling of Rodney King, the acquittals of the four officers who carried out the beating and the riot that followed. Adding a civilian voice to the disciplinary process was proposed as an essential check against lenient decisions made in a department that often rejected complaints of excessive force.
Some Los Angeles Police Department officers bristled at the idea of outsiders judging them. But voters overwhelmingly chose to put a civilian on the three-person Board of Rights panels that decide the fate of officers facing termination or lengthy suspensions.
Twenty-five years later, Los Angeles voters on Tuesday approved an expansion of civilian influence over police discipline that was proposed under sharply different circumstances.
This time, it was the police officers union pushing for the change, believing more civilian involvement was better for officers than being judged by other cops.
Charter Amendment C allows officers to have their cases heard by all-civilian boards, an option long sought by the union representing the LAPD's rank and file amid complaints that the chief could unfairly influence a panel's sworn officers.
It's a remarkable turnaround in the decades-old debate over how to discipline L.A.'s police officers. In 1992, it was police reformers calling for more civilian oversight, believing outsiders would be more likely to hold cops accountable. But now, many department critics oppose the change, arguing that civilians have turned out to be more lenient in deciding discipline.
They pointed to a city report, prepared for lawmakers using LAPD data, that found that civilians on Boards of Rights were "consistently more lenient" than the sworn members. The numbers included 39 cases in which Police Chief Charlie Beck had suggested an officer be fired, but a board acquitted the officer instead. In all of those cases, the report said, the civilian voted to acquit.
Union officials countered that the cases were rarely decided by a divided vote. Out of 229 cases in which Beck recommended termination, just 7 percent involved decisions in which the civilian member was more lenient than at least one of his or her sworn counterparts.
There were no cases in which a civilian voted for a harsher outcome.
How officers are held accountable for their actions has become a focal point in the national debate about law enforcement, drawing extra scrutiny after high-profile police shootings. In L.A., the Police Commission is making a push to reduce shootings by officers and now takes into account whether officers did everything they could to avoid pulling the trigger when deciding whether a shooting was justified.
"The reason for more civilian oversight in 1992 was the belief that civilians were going to be tougher on officers," said Richard Drooyan, a former Police Commission president who served as an attorney to the panel that investigated King's beating and on another that reviewed the subsequent Rampart Division scandal. "More civilian oversight may swing the disciplinary pendulum in a different direction."
Charter Amendment C marks the latest attempt to revamp a disciplinary system that has long been accused of being either too soft or unfairly harsh toward officers _ and sometimes faced both accusations from different groups at the same time.
