Lou Reiter, Author at LLRMI - Police Training and Expert Services for Law Enforcement, Jails & Corrections, Insurance Pools, Risk Managers, and Attorneys

About Lou Reiter

Lou Reiter currently is a police consultant. He offers three (3) separate professional services to the law enforcement community. He provides training to police groups in the high liability areas of use of force, emergency vehicle operations, high risk operations, investigations of citizen complaints, Internal Affairs procedures, investigation of critical incidents, and liability management.Each year, Lou conducts an average of 5-10 agency management audits and liability assessments. These have been for state, county and municipal police operations. The size of these agencies has been from 3 persons to 39,000 employees. These audits allow him to be in police cars up to 100 hours each year. He has been a consultant on 8 U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section, investigations of agencies involving patterns and practices of Constitutional violations. He was selected as a Federal Court monitor for the Consent Decree of Colln v. Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, CA.Lou provides litigation consultation to attorney firms involved in police civil actions. Since 1983, Lou has been retained in over 950 such cases in nearly every state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. This has been on both sides of the table with approximately 60 percent being for plaintiffs.Lou Reiter was a member of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1961 to 1981. During that tenure he had 22 different assignments and rose through to ranks to retire as Deputy Chief of Police. About 70 percent of his time was spent in uniformed operations while the bulk of the remainder was in Internal Affairs, use of force review, training and personnel administration.Lou has been published throughout his professional career. He was one of the principle researchers and authors of the 1973 Police Task Force Report of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Standards and Goals, where he authored the chapters on Internal Discipline, Training and Management-Employee Relations. In 1993 he authored and published the Law Enforcement Administrative Investigations a Supervisory and Agency Guide to handling citizen complaints of misconduct, conducting administrative investigations, managing the Internal Affairs Function, and creating reasonable and defensible discipline.

WITNESSES: A CRITICAL ELEMENT IN ADMINISTRATIVE INVESTIGATIONS

©2012 Lou Reiter, Co-Director, PATC Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute (www.llrmi.com) Witnesses: A critical element in administrative investigations When your law enforcement agency conducts an administrative investigation you usually have a complainant and your agency employee. Frequently, the complainant has [...]

THE NEED FOR IA/OPS AUDITS

©2012 Lou Reiter, Co-Director, PATC Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute (www.llrmi.com) Generally law enforcement agencies have operated their IA/OPS system with little oversight. That’s coming to an end. More communities, particularly those in large urban areas, are instituting some form [...]

OCCUPY AND BEYOND : Practical Steps For Reasonable Police Crowd Control

The “Occupy Movement” is really a precursor to the near future for many of our police agencies. There are many other forms of protest we should expect to encounter: political demonstrations, union protests, sports celebratory events, immigration rallies and other [...]

SOCIAL NETWORKS AND PUBLIC SAFETY EMPLOYEES

©2011 Lou Reiter, Co-Director, Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute (LLRMI.COM) At the Legal and Liability Risk Management Institute (LLRMI) we have been receiving requests from various law enforcement agencies, insurance pools and individual officers regarding social network usage. We [...]

Why You Should be Concerned About the U.S. Department of Justice Consent Decrees

©2010 Lou Reiter, Co-Director, Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute (LLRMI.COM) In 1994, tucked into the Crime Bill, was an innocuous two paragraph Section 14141. It was an outgrowth of the clamor after the Rodney King incident. In essence it [...]

NARCOTICS / SPECIAL ENFORCEMENT UNIT CONTROL AND AUDITS

©2010 Stephen Campbell, Steve Rothlein, Lou Reiter, Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute (LLRMI.COM) It is almost becoming a common occurrence when the news reports that some law enforcement special unit’s personnel are indicted or being investigated for criminal misconduct. These [...]

NEPOTISM AND FRATERNIZATION WITHIN PUBLIC SAFETY AGENCIES

©2010 Lou Reiter, Co-Director, Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute (llrmi.com). Recently LLRMI/PATC polled members of the Public Safety community on issues of nepotism and fraternization within their agencies. Within one week over 2700 responses were received - comprised of 48 [...]

SEARCH OF OFFICER’S TEXT MESSAGES FROM DEPARTMENT ISSUED PAGER WAS REASONABLE

©2010 Lou Reiter, Jack Ryan, J.D., Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute, (llrmi.com). U.S. Supreme Court, City of Ontario v. Quon, 560 U.S.___ Slip op. 08-1332 (2010), Decided June 17, 2010 (Download Decision pdf). In October of 2001, the City of Ontario, [...]

BRADY – The Next Step for Law Enforcement

©2010 Lou Reiter, Co-Director, Legal & Liability Risk Management Institute - Some of you probably have never heard of Bradyi or Giglioii cases. Neither case has had much direct impact on your police tasks. Or maybe you’ve just been lucky. These cases and subsequent cases [...]

Taping & Transcribing Interviews In Administrative Investigations

I’m asked frequently whether you need to tape record and transcribe all interviews conducted during administrative or Internal Affairs investigations. The simple answer is yes to taping and maybe on the on transcription. Those agreements between the U.S. Department of [...]