Constance Rice

Constance Rice’s panel went looking for an accounting Los Angeles had been promised. On March 1, 2000, the police chief had transmitted the Rampart Board of Inquiry as “the first of at least two reports.” The second would tell the public the exact nature and disposition of every corruption allegation. LAPD expected to issue it about a year later.

In July 2003, the Police Commission announced that Rice would head a blue-ribbon review. The commission wanted an assessment of earlier Rampart inquiries, the obstacles that had frustrated them, and whether remedies already operating or underway could prevent corruption and improve the department’s response when misconduct was uncovered. Rice’s panel would have to reconstruct the response after the opportunity for a timely accounting had passed.

Rice chaired a group whose members and emeriti brought experience in earlier Rampart reviews, criminal law, civil rights, and institutions. Executive director Kathleen Salvaty, lead investigator Brent A. Braun, additional investigators, and staff worked with the panel. Records custodians and interviewees helped supply the evidence.

By 2006, more than six years after the original promise, the second report still had not appeared. The panel concluded that LAPD would probably never release it and that its own report would be the closest available substitute. The missing account left Los Angeles unable to trace each allegation through investigation, resolution, and the lessons the department had drawn—or to identify where a reliable answer had never been reached.

Three Drafts and Scattered Files

Panel investigators interviewed a former commander responsible for the follow-up report. He remembered receiving three drafts: one about administrative investigations, one about criminal matters, and one about the disciplinary proceedings known as Boards of Rights. He had rejected them because their conclusions had little or no factual support.

But he said he could not remember who was responsible for completing the drafts or who had delivered them. The panel did not find that credible. He recalled the pressure to produce the report and his dissatisfaction with what he received, yet could not identify the people who had written it. That refusal limited the investigation.

The panel identified approximately 400 internal Rampart investigations and obtained information for eighty-six Boards of Rights. LAPD could not supply a complete count. With no centralized repository, investigators assembled complaint numbers, names, and disciplinary records from the District Attorney’s Office, the City Attorney’s Office, LAPD Risk Management, and private attorneys’ files. Professional Standards personnel then spent more than 300 overtime hours filling gaps.

Those records exposed recurring failures in supervision, investigation, discipline, and recordkeeping. They could not restore the definitive contemporary account that should have been made while evidence was fresher and responsibility easier to locate. Rice and the panel had to assess what the surviving material established and what the intervening years had made impossible to recover.

Following Each Allegation

Rampart Reconsidered examined both the failed accounting and the reforms that followed: which changes had taken hold and where the department remained vulnerable. A proper after-action report would connect each allegation to its investigation, evidence, criminal disposition, administrative findings, and discipline. Readers could then see how a matter had progressed and where an inquiry had stopped.

The earlier Board of Inquiry had relied on selected interviews and reviews of arrest and force reports. Investigators had not tracked complaints or conducted integrity stings. When they found a suspicious report, they took it to Rafael Perez before independently investigating the case, although his credibility was itself a central question.

The panel recommended acting on early warnings, adopting a conflicts policy, protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, and strengthening evidence-storage safeguards. Serious misconduct allegations should be investigated as possible corruption cases with wider implications, including failures of supervision and practices that could shield the officer involved.

For the next large corruption crisis, it proposed a properly resourced, independent investigation involving multiple agencies. Criminal investigations would take priority; internal analysis would follow once that work was largely complete. An unrestricted review of departmental systems, tested by outside experts, would culminate in a public account of the allegations, methods, findings, dispositions, and resulting reforms.

At a July 2006 Police Commission meeting, Chief William Bratton identified Rice as the report’s primary author and thanked her and the committee. He described his initial reaction as favorable. LAPD would review the recommendations within the departmental action plan already in place.

Two Years of Sustained Compliance

Rice’s panel worked alongside a separate system of federal oversight. The United States and Los Angeles had entered a consent decree in June 2001 after the federal government alleged a pattern or practice of unlawful police conduct enabled by deficient management. The decree required changes in police practice and independent review. Rice’s panel examined how the department had responded to Rampart and recommended further reforms; the federal court enforced the decree.

The decree required managers to assess risk and evaluate officer performance. It set rules for documenting force and arrests, investigating complaints, imposing discipline, and running internal affairs. It also governed gang units, informants, responses to people with mental illness, training, integrity audits, public outreach, and independent monitoring.

These requirements produced information that supervisors and reviewers could use: force reports, complaints, stop records, disciplinary outcomes, and audits could be examined across personnel and over time. A written policy could be tested against what the department recorded and what its managers did with that information.

The agreement was to end after five years unless the Justice Department sought an extension. If Los Angeles contested that request, the City had to demonstrate substantial performance of every material provision and at least two years of maintained compliance. Materiality depended on the agreement’s overall objectives. A technical lapse, or a temporary failure during otherwise sustained compliance, would not defeat termination; a brief period of compliance amid continuing failure would not satisfy the standard.

For reforms to last beyond outside scrutiny, the department needed records, personnel, audits, and officials responsible for using them. LAPD’s Constitutional Policing and Policy Bureau traces its lineage to the Rampart response and consent-decree era; its functions include policy, risk management, and audit.

The Force Investigation Division began in 2004 to conduct the administrative investigations of categorical force required by the decree. It continues to investigate deadly force, force causing injuries that require hospitalization, and deaths in LAPD custody. A function established under outside oversight became a named internal unit with continuing review duties.

Preparing the Ground for Prevention

Rice had helped establish Advancement Project in 1999 with Penda Hair, Molly Munger, and Stephen English after working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The organization combined litigation with research, organizing, and policy design to change the policies and practices of public agencies. In Los Angeles, her work on police accountability developed alongside an effort to address the violence facing neighborhood children.

In 2005, she met with City Council member Martin Ludlow about a community strategy. He led nine months of public meetings where residents described life amid gang violence. The City later commissioned Advancement Project to examine anti-gang efforts scattered across twenty-three programs costing about $82 million a year.

Rice assembled the policy team. With Susan Lee, she organized experts into seven working groups, giving each questions and responsibility for its own recommendations. Their subjects included education, public safety, and demographics. Rice and Lee brought the groups’ work together in A Call to Action.

Before the report appeared in January 2007, Rice sought support from officials who would be important to its reception: Police Chief Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, District Attorney Steve Cooley, and California Attorney General Jerry Brown. She had worked with—and sued—law-enforcement leaders. Persuading them required a different kind of engagement.

Rice later described deciding to “learn to love these cops if I was ever going to get them to follow me in change.” Bratton held a press conference to endorse A Call to Action.

Coordinating the City’s Response

A Call to Action identified fragmented responsibility, weak measurement, and a failure to connect suppression with prevention and intervention. Rice would later tell Congress that the “war on gangs” was the wrong organizing principle. Police still had a central role in removing people committing serious violence. Enforcement alone could not reduce recruitment, trauma, or the neighborhood conditions that repeatedly exposed children to harm.

The proposed approach treated violence as a public-health problem. Police, schools, families, service providers, intervention workers, and community organizations would coordinate their work, directing resources to residents living amid violence. The report also proposed a research and policy institute to evaluate programs. Public spending, service responsibilities, and results had to be visible enough to support evaluation, termination, and redesign.

The Mayor’s Office established Gang Reduction and Youth Development, or GRYD, in 2007. Today it contracts with community-based providers for prevention and intervention in twenty-three zones. It also works with schools on safe passage and intervention and with the county’s probation department on juvenile reentry. Rice and Advancement Project helped shape the research and build support; the City and its partners built and operate the program.

The Children in Each Neighborhood

The two undertakings required different kinds of evidence. Police accountability followed force, complaints, discipline, supervision, and audits after officers exercised state power. Violence prevention required an understanding of geography, trauma, access to services, and patterns of conflict before another injury.

In July 2012, Representative Bobby Scott asked Rice what the services she advocated would involve. She began with the neighborhood: identify the dynamics of violence and the people involved, then design a response for each group of children. The aim was safety for children throughout the area, including those at risk of joining a gang.

Her prepared testimony described the everyday freedom she wanted those children to have: walking to school, playing in a park, and going to the corner store without fear of being shot or accosted. The civil-rights lawyer who had investigated how police used their power was asking public agencies to organize their work around those journeys.