Is It Time for a Special Prosecutor? Some academics and policing experts question whether OPD and the Alameda County DA can properly investigate law-enforcement misconduct. By Ali Winston EastBayExpress In theory, the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County District Attorney's Office are supposed to investigate allegations of misconduct and hold law-enforcement personnel accountable for their actions. But recent incidents in both departments have raised doubts about the abilities of each to do so, which raises the question: What happens when local law enforcement's checks and balances fail? Some academics and policing experts think it is high time for California to create a special prosecutor's office. For OPD, (Oakland Police Department), the problems within the department have been well documented. In recent weeks, OPD admitted, for example, that it couldn't properly investigate its own officers' conduct during violent clashes last fall with Occupy Oakland due to a high volume of complaints and serious conflicts of interest. Professor Samuel Walker of the University of Nebraska-Omaha, a national expert on police accountability, has closely monitored OPD's difficulties under the federal consent decree. He believes California's size and large law enforcement community warrants a permanent special prosecutor to handle investigations when police departments and DAs fail to do so. "A special unit in the state Attorney General's office is absolutely called for," Walker said. He added that the failure to properly scrutinize law enforcement is "a symptom of management dysfunction that endangers the civil rights and safety of the community" and must be taken seriously. "Usually, special prosecutors are pretty episodic and rare," said Walker, who will speak further on the matter at a May 19 meeting of the ACLU of Northern California's Paul Robeson chapter. "However, it's clear that in California something more is needed." Eugene O'Donnell, a former New York Police Department lieutenant who teaches criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY, believes a permanent independent entity would combat many of the conflicts of interest that arise when police and prosecutors are called on to suss out and punish wrongdoing amongst their own. "There are so many issues of accountability with district attorney's offices that a special prosecutor would be better equipped to deal with," O'Donnell said. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart scandal twelve years ago, current UC Irvine law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky issued a report for the LA Police Protective League, recommending aggressive independent reviews and the appointment of a permanent special prosecutor for police misconduct. Chemerinsky's recommendation, however, was never acted upon by the LA DA. Chemerinsky believes a standing office for law enforcement misconduct is necessary to supersede the tight relationship between police and prosecutors. "District attorneys are so loath to investigate and charge the police they work with every day," Chemerinsky said in an interview. "It's naïve to think that the district attorney is going to be that external oversight for the police." In 1973, the New York state legislature and Governor Nelson Rockefeller created the Special State Prosecutor for the New York City Criminal Justice System on the recommendations of the Knapp Commission, an independent body convened to root out the systematic police corruption exposed by NYPD officer Frank Serpico two years earlier. But the office did have its defenders: In a 1993 letter to The New York Times, John Kenney, the chair of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Criminal Law, argued that the special prosecutor's office should be reinstated because of a backsliding in NYPD discipline against officers accused of brutality. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/is-it-time-for-a-special-prosecutor/Content?oid=3204051 |
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