Plan to Track Officer Complaints Stalled : Law enforcement: Critics say LAPD is dragging its feet on 2 1/2-year-old Christopher Commission recommendation. The department cites financial constraints.

More than 2 1/2 years after a blue-ribbon commission urged that the Los Angeles Police Department adopt a system for tracking personnel complaints, little progress has been made and it may be years before the system is in place, police officials said Tuesday.

The long delay in pushing ahead with OBITS--the Officer Behavior Indicators Tracking System--is intensely frustrating to some members of the Police Commission, and it has angered some Police Department critics, who maintain that the LAPD is dragging its feet in adopting a program that would make it easier to track complaints against police officers.

Commissioners acknowledged that those concerns are hard to rebut, given the slow progress.

“It doesn’t look to the community as though we’re acting in good faith when it takes this long,” Police Commission President Gary Greenebaum told department representatives at a meeting Tuesday. “It’s not that complicated.”

Commissioners were particularly surprised when an LAPD computer expert told them that it could take at least a year to design computer software for tracking the complaints. The commission’s surprise was shared by technology experts, who said the basic proposal--to create a database that would include each officer’s name and a list of complaints and commendations--could be developed with far less time and money.

According to those experts, certain aspects of putting the system in place could be time-consuming, but the basic technology is relatively simple.

“You could do the basic job with $2,000 on a personal computer,” said John McCarthy, director of technology research for Forrester Research in Boston. “The question you have to ask is: ‘Are we using an atomic bomb here to clear some debris?’ ”

William Russell, the newly appointed commanding officer of the department’s support services bureau, agreed that the basic database could be built with relative ease. But he said the program needs to go beyond supplying data to call commanding officers’ attention to subordinates with troubling patterns of complaints. Such a system, Russell said, would take several years to put in place, even if money were immediately available for it.

The city administrative officer has rejected the LAPD’s requests for money to fund a computerized tracking system three times, officials said. And department leaders say they do not have money within the department budget to pay for the system.

That response angers many advocates of the tracking system, who complain that it already has taken too long to put it into place.

“It’s a travesty to be this far from the Christopher Commission report and still be a year or two away from implementing that critical system,” said Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles. “We desperately need that system to be able to track that kind of behavior.”

Paul Hoffman, legal director of the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, agreed.

“Two-and-a-half years down the line, we’re essentially at square one,” Hoffman said. “It really calls into question their commitment to this system altogether.”

The program has been controversial since it was first proposed. Many rank-and-file officers believe it will unfairly punish them for complaints, many of whichultimately turn out to be unfounded.

Because of that, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file officers, has consistently expressed reservations about the tracking system. Danny Staggs, the league’s newly elected president, reiterated those concerns Tuesday, saying that many officers “perceive OBITS as a negative management tool.”

But the Christopher Commission--which studied excessive force in the LAPD in the months after the Rodney G. King beating--strongly recommended implementing a tracking system that would help supervisors identify officers with histories of complaints, whether the complaints were sustained or not.

“Although sustained complaints are certainly important to the decision-making process, a history of ‘not sustained’ complaints, especially if they involve a similar fact pattern, can be equally telling,” the commission found.

Members of the current Police Commission have vowed to press for the full implementation of the Christopher Commission reforms, but many of the reforms are stalled. Because of that, several police commissioners expressed frustration that the department seems unable or unwilling to move more quickly to adopt the program.

“My sense is that the department prioritizes what is important to it,” said Deirdre Hill, vice president of the commission and the commissioner who asked staffers to produce the update on the status of the project. “I am certainly not happy with the fact that funding was not identified at the outset.”

Greenebaum and Hill each directed department officials to produce a new cost estimate for a computer tracking system as soon as possible, and each pledged to lobby for that system with the mayor and City Council.

“We will not let go of this,” Greenebaum told staffers. “The department, the entire department, needs to know that.”

In other business Tuesday, Police Chief Willie L. Williams told commissioners that the LAPD’s investigative efforts have been hampered by shortages of detectives, a problem highlighted by an internal district attorney’s memo that came to light in recent days. The July 22 memo, obtained last week by The Times and the Daily News of Los Angeles, blamed low morale and understaffing at the LAPD for a decline in the quality of cases brought to the district attorney’s office for prosecution.

“The information that was in that letter was not something that was startling or new,” the chief said. He added that he does not believe morale will improve significantly until officers get a contract and the LAPD begins adding to its ranks.