LAPD rapped for lax oversight of anti-terror unit

Not that anyone had any high hopes for any program involving the Los Angeles Police Department. According to the LA Daily News, an audit of that agency’s Anti-Terrorist Intelligence Section has found a unit in organizational disarray, with officers being admitted without taking required polygraphs, confidential information bandied about without restriction, and management failing to excercise appropriate oversight. In fact, even the audit itself was indicative of the problems: it was the first in ten years, even though the law that created the anti-terror unit required them to be performed annually. The only good news, it seems, is that the audit did not find any civil liberties violations — a sign of improvement, we think.

The audit report detailed the problems: “In the past (anti-terrorism) personnel submitted to a lie-detector examination prior to being placed in the section,” it noted before explaining that the process had been eliminated due to limited resources and the need to move personnel quickly into key positions. (It has now been reinstituted for new transfers.) In addition, the unit failed to provide the department with annual certifications that intelligence operations had been reviewed internally — a requirement put in place after previous abuses. In addition, the audit found numerous cases where documentation failed to match reported investigative activity, a problem exacerbated by the decision to abandon the practice of keeping track of sensitive materials with time stamps and tracking devices. “The stamp was not present on a majority of documents contained in the working files for the investigations reviewed,” the audit reported.