11:06am | In response to my June 2 detainment and pat-down search at the hands of eight Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies for suspicion of photographing the Long Beach County Courthouse, the National Press Photographers’ Association (NPPA) wrote a letter to Sheriff Lee Baca expressing concerns about police policy with regard to photography.
In a reply to that letter, the Sheriff’s Department told the NPPA that the matter “has been thoroughly investigated” and claims that, excluding lead officer Sgt. Maurice Hill, “three deputies and a supervisor” responded to the call about my “suspicious activity” (as it’s regarded under Los Angeles Police Department Special Order No. 11), that I was in fact taking pictures of the courthouse, and that “the article written by Mr. Moore corroborates these facts.”
The problem is, these claims are false.
The question, then, is simple: Was the matter actually “thoroughly investigated,” and yet the department — either intentionally or accidentally — has reported inaccurate findings, or did the department not actually conduct a thorough investigation and simply tell the NPPA that it did?
That is exactly the question I asked Sheriff Baca — for the reply letter bears his signature — in a September 14 e-mail to his office. As of press time, I had received no reply.
The August 18 letter from Baca to the NPPA (read it here) also makes no mention of the detention and pat-down search to which I was subject, saying only that I was asked and did agree to show the pictures in my camera (true), and, “After a brief conversation, the deputies determined that no crime had occurred.”
When contacted concerning the inaccuracies in Baca’s reply to the NPPA, Sgt. Hill — the lead officer on the scene at the time — confirmed having read my article; and concerning my representation of the number of officers who responded, said, “Your numbers were accurate.”
Hill stated that he was unsure whether he was part of the investigation, being able to verify only that “my lieutenant talked to me” about the incident. Hill referred me to Captain Steven M. Roller —identified in Baca’s letter as the person to which the investigation was assigned — for all further questions.
When I spoke with him on August 25, Capt. Roller, who identified himself as the “unit commander” of the courthouse (though he does not work on site), could not confirm the cause of the so-called investigation’s inaccuracies, but was willing to speculate: “I’m sure that the inaccuracies came from the interpretation of the lieutenant. I think what happened was [that] he probably paraphrased the whole incident, to be honest with you. … Hill probably said, ‘You know, hey, there was four or five of us out there, six or seven,’ and the lieutenant goes, ‘Um, probably four.'”
Roller speculated that the lieutenant (whom he declined to name) may have done this because seven officers initially responding to such a call is an unusually high number.
As Roller noted, “Our inquiries into these incidents are not formal investigations.”
Then there is the matter of the Sheriff’s Department misrepresenting my behavior to a third party.
There’s nothing illegal about or wrong with photographing the courthouse — and so should I care if the Sheriff’s Department says I did? And does it matter whether Sheriff Baca signs a letter saying four officers initially responded when the actual number was seven?
I mean, it’s not like this is a case of officer abuse. No one was harmed or even handcuffed.
My point is simple: If you’re a law-enforcement organization1 and you’ve got objectively verifiable facts at your disposal, you ought to be able to avoid promulgating inaccuracies. And when you make claims about a citizen’s actions — no matter how innocuous those claims are — those claims should have the merit of being true.
It was seven officers that showed up initially, not four. And I wasn’t photographing the courthouse — a fact that those officers and their sergeant could verify, because I not only told them so, I showed them the pictures to prove it.
Clearly this incident truly wasn’t “thoroughly investigated” — if it were and these were the results, God help us residents of L.A. County! — and so the Sheriff’s Department shouldn’t tell anybody it was.
Postscript: During our conversation, Capt. Roller discussed police policy and training as regards a “suspicious activity” such as photographing a courthouse. That conversation will be documented in a follow-up piece that will appear in this space next week.
1 Or anybody else, of course. But considering how much power we cede to law enforcement, perhaps it goes double for them.