Regular readers will remember our old pal Robert C. J. Parry, a staunch LAPD defender who published an extensive essay on this site in May about the LAPD disciplinary system. Mr. Parry has an Op-Ed in this morning’s L.A. Daily News, which relies on statistics to show that federal oversight has not improved the LAPD in ways the activists predicted.

News reports of the day show that many predictions were made about the Advertisement decree’s benefits, but few were quantifiable. The only concrete promise was that the decree would provide definitive proof of LAPD racial profiling.

The message in the undercurrent was unmistakable: Things will change — fewer shootings and uses of force. Fewer public complaints [and] more complaints sustained . . .

Mr. Parry shows that in most of these areas, the opposite has happened.

Federal oversight has not resulted in fewer shootings. Instead, with federal oversight, shootings are up (although very few are found out of policy).

Nor has federal oversight reduced the number of public complaints. On the contrary, public complaints are up: in the 1990s, there were never more than 4000; now that number approaches 7000 some years.

The increase in complaints, interestingly, appears to have been almost wholly due to an explosion of unfounded complaints. The statistics show that the percentage of sustained complaints is way down. Notably, Mr. Parry’s statistics show that the absolute number of citizen-generated sustained complaints is about the same now as it was in the 1990s — perhaps slightly lower.

This isn’t for a lack of investigation, Mr. Parry notes:

All complaints against officers are now thoroughly investigated and subject to triple audits — by the LAPD Audit Bureau, the inspector general and the consent decree monitor. The complaint’s plausibility is disregarded. Just ask the cop who was investigated for stealing a woman’s ovaries.

In short, with shootings up, illegitimate complaints way up, and the percentage of sustained complaints down, federal oversight appears to have produced the opposite of what was intended. At the very least, it has been no panacea, serving to do little other than drive officers away from the Department.

Mr. Parry provided the Daily News with extensive charts detailing his raw data, but the Daily News declined to publish that data. (His piece, by the way, was declined by the L.A. Times. Is anyone surprised? Anyone?)

So Robert graciously allowed me to publish the raw data for his report here. All of it came from the LAPD itself — though as he explains below, not without a struggle. In the end, Mr. Parry says, after a month-and a half of begging, he still didn’t get everything he wanted.

Here is Mr. Parry’s data:

Finding the Truth in the LAPD Fog

Things the Consent Decree Should Reduce

Things the Consent Decree Should Increase

Environmental Factors

All three of the above charts are available in .pdf form, for magnification and closer scrutiny, at this link.

In addition, Mr. Parry has painstakingly compiled a very useful chart of consolidated statistics for the LAPD from 1996-2007, showing officer-involved shootings, assaults on officers, complaints, discipline, crime, and arrests.

Click on the chart or this link to get the chart as a .pdf, which you can magnify to read the statistics clearly. For example, I took a clip of the top left-hand side of the file, with magnification at 200%, to show you how readable the statistics are at that magnification:

Concerning this data, Mr. Parry writes:

While statistics reveal many claims about the “Gang in Blue” to be baseless, getting them confirms one allegation: The LAPD greatly needs improved transparency and public insight on its operations.

Data for this report came largely by sifting deep into publicly available multiple-hundred-page reports. Some came from department sources on condition of anonymity.

However, the Department’s primary provider of information, the Media Relations Section, proved disturbingly unhelpful. Six weeks of effort to obtain two basic blocks of information – use of force and public complaint data- proved to be an shocking litany of unreturned phone calls, denials, misdirection, and obfuscation.

At one point, the department claimed its Complaint Management System hadn’t tracked a particular set of statistics. Yet, someone had already provided the allegedly non-existent figures. In another case, an officer said providing the department’s 2006 arrest figures would require research. Apparently so. It took more than a month to get them.

Does anybody believe the LAPD didn’t readily know how many people it arrested last year?

The actions of cops on the streets may be quite different from perception, but the department’s primary source of information doesn’t help them.

I applaud Mr. Parry’s doggedness and thoroughness. I know that I’ll be referring to these useful charts — especially the final consolidated chart — again and again.