The San Diego Union-Tribune

December 24, 2000, Sunday

SECTION: NEWS;Pg. A-1

LENGTH: 1148 words

HEADLINE: Database to let attorneys see conduct of officers

BYLINE: Greg Moran; STAFF WRITER

BODY: Think of it as a high-tech rap sheet for cops.

The county's Department of the Public Defender is compiling a database to help defense attorneys scrutinize the conduct and credibility of police officers and sheriff's deputies.

It will include information from thousands of criminal cases. And, in what appears to be a novel move, the department is gathering material from a variety of public records, including civil service hearings, divorce files and citizen complaints filed against officers.

Eventually, the department's nearly 200 lawyers will be able to access the information from desktop computers to aid in their defense of indigent people charged with crimes who can't afford a private attorney.

"We're not saying every police officer in the county of San Diego is bad," said Deputy Public Defender Gary Gibson, who is supervising the project. "The issue is if you have one in 100 acting unlawfully, that is a problem."

The scope of the research has ruffled feathers among law enforcement and some prosecutors. At a court hearing in November, San Diego Deputy City Attorney Carol Trujillo complained about the new "information bank."

"They're mining the court records from Family Court for tidbits of grief from child custody disputes, from marital settlement statements, to find whatever dirt they can dig up on officers who may be witnesses in their particular cases," she said.

Trujillo said in an interview after the hearing that searching out divorce records and other civil disputes "that had nothing to do with their observations and work as a police officer" amounts to an invasion of privacy.

But Gibson said such steps are needed because defense attorneys are frustrated by the legal limits on their access to information about officers' conduct.

"We know inherently that police misconduct is being denied exposure," Gibson said.

The project comes in a time of increasing scrutiny in the criminal justice system of police practices. The Rampart Division police scandal in Los Angeles -- where hundreds of convictions have been thrown out over allegations that police committed perjury, planted evidence and framed suspects -- has cast the longest shadow.

But similar cases in New Jersey, where state police are accused of using racial profiling in traffic stops, and most recently in Oakland have also caused concern.

Defense attorneys have long swapped information, but the sharing was more informal, said Irwin Schwartz, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He praised the San Diego project, saying it could become a model for other public law offices in the country.

"In one way this is a logical continuation of something that has been done for a while," said Schwartz, a former federal public defender now in private practice in Seattle.

He said the project is unique. "What they are doing in San Diego is harnessing the power of computers and technology to make this information more accessible (to other lawyers)."

While defense attorneys, almost as an article of faith, have long been suspicious of police officers, there is mounting evidence that the public is also growing more wary.

In a recent poll by The National Law Journal of potential jurors -- defined as adults over the age of 18 -- one-third of the respondents said they would be distrustful of police testimony if they were on a jury.

Paul Cooper, a deputy city attorney in San Diego who represents police officers in court, said defense attorneys are capitalizing on that sentiment.

"More defense lawyers and public defenders are taking advantage of weaknesses caused by perceptions of Rampart," he said.

Cooper said his office has been busier this year than in the past couple of years representing police in hearings in which defense attorneys seek information about past misconduct lodged in personnel files.

It is a pattern that officers around the state can expect, said Dave LaBahn, deputy executive director of the California District Attorneys Association.

"When you have something like Rampart, it has an absolute ripple effect across the state," LaBahn said.

It is also a trend seen in courthouses across the country, said Schwartz, who is overseeing a project tracking police misconduct scandals. Defense attorneys are aggressively examining police conduct, he said, and finding juries more receptive to it.

Bill Farrar, president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, said he is concerned about how the information the attorneys are compiling will be used.

"The police profession is probably the most watched-after, second-guessed profession there is, so we're used to this," he said. "I don't have a problem with them pulling information together. My concern is, what are they going to do with it? How are they going to use it?"

Steve Carroll, who heads the public defender's office, said the database project is not something that "should set off alarm bells."

Carroll said other public law offices have similar tracking programs in place. He cited the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, which has announced that it, too, will begin to internally track police officer conduct as a result of the Rampart scandal.

The police database is but one small part of a larger effort to electronically store the records from past cases, which now sit in storage boxes.

"All we're going to do is put everything into a computer database and then (attorneys) have access to anything they need for whatever purpose," Carroll said.

"Say we have a client who says, 'I was doing nothing wrong; I was just driving down the street and I got pulled over.' We could go into the database and discern any past patterns of profiling in stops (by the officer)."

That line of inquiry is not uncommon among defense attorneys, said Mary Broderick, executive director of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice. But, she said, the information has long been shared only informally.

"I'm glad to see the public defender doing this, because it will help them do a better job of representing their clients," she said.

Gibson also has been busy collecting information from public records. He recently scooped up 5,000 complaints about police behavior filed with the city of San Diego's Risk Management Department in the past five years.

He has also filed public records requests with police agencies asking for rosters and the badge numbers of all sworn officers.

The San Diego County Sheriff's Department balked, saying releasing the information could jeopardize the safety of deputies. But about a week later the department's legal adviser, Charles Ervin -- who is soon to take the bench as a Superior Court judge after winning an election in November -- changed course and handed over the information, Gibson said.

He said nine other police agencies in the county also complied with the request.

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