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.

The Economy

The current economic downturn has seriously hurt local communities.  This loss of revenue has direct consequences for local law enforcement agencies.  One of the unexpected consequences is the potential for some police employees to find themselves in financial difficulty.  This [...]

Conduct Unbecoming

Law enforcement personnel are held to personal standards higher than other members of our communities. Conduct unbecoming has been a common and historical charge used in controlling and censuring police officers and other public employees, for both on and off [...]

Reasonable Training and Policy Direction:

In Walker v. City of New York i, the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit gave law enforcement some direction for determining what training officers must be provided with to do their jobs professionally and with lower liability exposure. [...]

Preparing a Defense in Law Enforcement Litigation

Any significant law enforcement event has the potential to develop in a claim made against the agency and the officers involved. The likelihood of a lawsuit is enhanced when individuals involved in the event are injured or claim a violation [...]

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