Long Beach Police use of force stats defy transparency
How many use-of-force complaints were filed against Long Beach Police Department officers in 2017?
The answer: 31 … or 35 … or 39 … or 104. Why so many possibilities? Because in the City of Long Beach there is no consistent definition of what constitutes “force” or a “complaint,” so tracking such incidents from the outside is highly convoluted, if not impossible.
A bit of background on my numbers: Each year, the Citizen Police Complaint Commission, or CPCC, a chartered commission which “investigates allegations of police misconduct” in order to “provide feedback and input to the City Manager, Mayor, and City Council,” is required to issue a report generally documenting its investigations and recommendations. Although the CPCC failed to meet this requirement within the past four years, in July 2020 it finally issued the missing reports, along with 2019’s. For 2017, under “Allegation Breakdown for Cases Opened,” we find “Use of Force - 104.” (An additional number, 39, also emanates from the CPCC, but we’ll get to that.)
While the LBPD does not issue annual reports on such items, I obtained their number, 31, via a Public Records Act Request for “the total number of use-of-force complaints filed against LBPD officers between Jan. 1, 2017 and Dec. 31, 2019.” However, a portion of an LBPD document published by The Long Beach Post in August lists the number of “Complaints Alleging Force” as 35.
The year 2017 is no fluke: the same variety of numbers exists every year. Why? From conversations with CPCC Manager Patrick Weithers and four members of the LBPD (Commander Dina Zapalski, Lt. Darren Lance of Internal Affairs, and Public Information Officers Allison Gallagher and Arantxa Chavarria), I came away with a sense that inconsistent bureaucracy is muddying the transparency that the city and its police force promise in the post-George Floyd era.
A snippet of my conversation with the LBPD as I questioned the difference between the numbers they gave me and those printed by The Post:
Me: I’m looking at a row [in The Post article] that says “Complaints Alleging Force.”
Lance: Right. What does that mean?
Me: I think that’s a use-of-force complaint. Lance: No.
To illustrate, he explains that an officer using “improper handcuffing technique […] would result in an allegation of force, because it’s related to our force policy — but it is not an excessive-force complaint. […] You’re asking [in the PRA Request] about ‘use-of-force complaints,’ so, a complaint about a use of force. That could mean a lot of things. For us, it means: somebody has alleged excessive force.”
Lance himself sees problems with the terminology. “An excessive-force complaint is not a ‘Complaint Alleging Force,’” he repeated. “That term we are not going to use anymore, I hope, because it’s confusing people.”
“It’s very convoluted,” added Zapalski of the LBPD reporting methodology in general. “It took me 10 months to understand it.”
Linguistic ambiguity aside, to some degree this explains why The Post’s numbers are higher than the ones the LBPD gave me. But then why are the CPCC numbers so much higher than both, even though (as the CPCC notes) “two, independent, concurrent investigations […] take place with every complaint filed[:] the CPCC investigation and the LBPD Internal Affairs (IA) investigation”?
It’s because the LBPD and the CPCC use conflicting, counterintuitive methods for tallying complaints. To illustrate, let’s say I am pulled over for suspicion of DUI, and despite my compliance Officer Krupke tases me, while Officer Mayberry clubs me over the head with his flashlight and then shoots me in the leg. When I file my complaint, the LBPD will count this as a single complaint despite the fact that I’m complaining about the actions of two officers, while the CPCC will count this as three complaints, since I’m complaining about three separate actions (use of taser, flashlight, and gun).
During my initial conversation with the LBPD, both Lance and Chavarria stated that the LBPD’s methodology is state mandated. However, in response to my request for supporting documentation, the LBPD provided me with the State of California’s Civilians’ Complaints Against Peace Officers guidelines, wherein the only instruction for counting methodology is as follows:
The primary unit of count should be the actual event. An event is defined as an occurrence of alleged misbehavior which has unity of time, place, and behavior. In some circumstances where there are multiple alleged victims, consideration should be given to modifying the counting procedure to account for the number of victims.
In response to my suggesting that this could also be interpreted to mean that during a given incident each officer’s action is “an occurrence of alleged misbehavior” (in my example, Krupke’s tase would be one such occurrence, while Mayberry’s clubbing and shooting would be either one or two more) and asking whether the LBPD could provide me with its rationale for believing and acting otherwise (for example, an opinion from the city attorney), Gallagher replied only that the LBPD’s methodology is employed “[in order] to remain consistent to the greatest extent possible and to remain objective in how we count the numbers.”
Convoluted as all of this may be, considering that both the LBPD and CPCC generate their numbers from the same set of complaint narratives, by boiling the CPCC number down LBPD-style — that is to say, every complaint filed counts as one incident, regardless of how
many uses-of-force or officers are named therein — in theory we should still be able to arrive at a consensus for how many complaints are filed during a given calendar year. At least that’s what the CPCC’s Patrick Weithers told me when we first spoke. Weithers is the person who clued me in to the differences between the LBPD’s and CPCC’s tabulation methods, and he was willing to take a deep dive into the CPCC numbers in an effort to retabulate them in the LBPD style, saying that once he did so, “Overall, they should be pretty similar.”
But they’re not. For 2017, he found the CPCC’s number (104) came from 39 total incidents — eight more than the LBPD list. For 2018, he found 54 incidents — 12 more than the LBPD. And for 2019 (data set incomplete for reasons I still don’t understand), 23 — six more than the LBPD.
“Unfortunately, I am not sure if the LBPD numbers are accurate or not, as I am unsure how they track their numbers,” Weithers stated when shown that the numbers still didn’t add up. “Looking at the chart [supplied to Random Lengths News by the LBPD] that mentions ‘Excessive Force,’ that could possibly be one of various categories of force that are tracked by them. Again, I am not sure if they may track uses of force in different ways.”
The CPCC’s methodology has its own problems. For example, Weithers says “case opened” is basically synonymous with “complaint filed,” both of which refer to “allegations” as per the CPCC method — and so my Krupke/ Mayberry example would generate three “cases opened”/“complaints filed”/“allegations.”
However, elsewhere in the CPCC annual reports “case” is synonymous with “incident” à la the LBPD methodology — in which case my Krupke/Mayberry example counts as one “case” with three “allegations.”
“They [i.e., the CPCC] classify their complaints, and we classify our complaints,” Lance said. “It’s very subjective. […] If a citizen says it’s excessive force or if they’re complaining about the force that was used, we categorize it as an excessive-force complaint. […] The CPCC gets the same complaint, and they categorize it how they categorize it. We don’t get their category, they don’t get our category; all we get is the narrative, ‘The complainant says this and that,’ and a phone number to call them.”
While both the LBPD and CPCC say they recognize the convolutions in their methodologies and agree that consistency across investigative bodies would aid transparency, neither seems poised to change. Chavarria says that although she agrees “100%” that consistency would be beneficial, “that is not up to us. […] We follow the [state] mandate. If [the CPCC is] not, that’s something you would need to explore with them, not us.”
Weithers offers a more mixed answer: “Without understanding our processes … [the inconsistency] causes a lot of confusion for people. [But] I don’t see anything wrong with us tracking things in different ways. We are supposed to be independent from the LBPD and therefore have our own processes when it comes to doing things, including tracking.”
For now, at least, the answer to the question of how often citizens complain about the LBPD’s use of force wholly depends on who you ask and the verbiage you choose. Perhaps this is not the best path to increased transparency.