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There's A Riot Goin' On: Tales of Police Misconduct Pile Up in Unfolding Los Angeles Scandal

2/11/00

Like a newly discovered river whose every twist and turn is a revelation, the full course and end point of the fast-developing corruption scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department are impossible to know.

But it's clear that the win-at-all-cost mindset of the war on drugs and gangs disposed the Los Angeles police department for years of extraordinary misconduct, the details of which have been unfolding for five months. Reporters Scott Glover and Matt Lait have led the Los Angeles Times' ongoing coverage of the story, and their reporting provided much of the basis for this account. Glover and Lait have had a lot to cover.

 

Last September, Officer Rafael Perez pleaded guilty to stealing eight pounds of cocaine from an LAPD evidence facility. Perez had been attached to the anti-gang unit called CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) at the Rampart Division, west of downtown Los Angeles. He agreed to cooperate with investigators in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence and, according to the ex-officer, in an effort to clear his conscience.

Perez has claimed that he and his former partners at the Rampart Division framed 99 innocent people between 1995 and 1998. For the last five months, Perez has made extraordinary allegations of police on a rampage: planting drugs and weapons on innocent people, perjury, unjustified shootings and beatings, false arrests, witness intimidation and bogus police reports.

In late January, reporters Glover and Lait published a story in which a police officer who worked with Perez in the CRASH unit corroborated the allegations. "Everybody (in Rampart CRASH) kind of knows it happens," the officer told the LA Times. This officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was relieved of duty in connection with the ongoing probe. He said he could corroborate a number of Perez's allegations, and he told the reporters that some Rampart officers carried drugs to plant on suspects. The officer also said it was understood within the CRASH team that officers involved in a "problem" arrest or shooting would huddle to get their story straight before meeting with supervisors.

As of early February, 32 convictions have been overturned and 20 officers have been either fired, relieved of duty or have quit in connection with the ongoing investigation. On February 4th, according to the Alameda (CA) Times-Star, Los Angeles city council members learned in a private session that the city could be facing a bill of $125 million in legal settlements with people who were framed or injured by police.

Javier Francisco Ovando might be a candidate for such a settlement. According to the LA Times, Perez claimed that he and his partner, Nino Durden, deliberately shot Ovando, who was unarmed, and then planted a gun on him. Ovando was paralyzed in the incident, and he received a 23-year jail sentence that was later overturned. Ovando has been released from prison and has filed a lawsuit against the city.

"(The scandal) is the most important case I have seen this office handle in my 31 years here," said Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti told the Associated Press. "It goes to the heart of the criminal justice system."

Beleaguered Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks agrees. "These terrible events have forever changed the department and the city," Parks wrote in a report to the Los Angeles Police Commission on February 8th, according to the LA Times. Parks' report states that the department will need at least nine million dollars and hundreds of new positions in the next year alone to fix what went wrong at the Rampart Division.

Part of that effort will be the department's ongoing internal investigation. "The one positive light is the work of those officers on [the LAPD's] task force," Parks told the LA Times. He said detectives have worked tirelessly to "clear the names of suspects who were convicted of crimes who should not have been." Parks said his task force now numbers 46 officers, and they have conducted more than 300 interviews with defendants and witnesses. Parks has said that 57 cases have been "tainted," and he has urged District Attorney Garcetti to move quickly to void those convictions.

It's anyone's guess as to the full scope of the scandal. In early January, Duncan Campbell of The (UK) Guardian Weekly wrote that "up to 3,200 criminal cases in Los Angeles may have to be reviewed" as a result of the ongoing inquiry. DA Garcetti disputed this figure, which had been suggested by defense lawyers, and said at the time that it was impossible to say how many cases would ultimately be involved.

What is less mysterious is how the climate created by the war on drugs can impel the kinds of behavior seen in Los Angeles. "The drug war has conditioned some cops to disregard the Bill of Rights and due process," said Joseph McNamara, a retired 25-year police veteran and former police chief in San Jose, California, who is now at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto. "The whole system breaks down when you can't believe a police officer on the witness stand and think that he may have planted evidence and framed innocent people." McNamara says that his research for his upcoming book, entitled "Gangster Cops: The Hidden Cost of America's War on Drugs," shows that "the LAPD scandal is replicated thousands of times throughout the country."

Peter J. Christ (rhymes with "wrist") retired from the Tonawanda (NY) police force as a captain in 1989 after 20 years in law enforcement. He now heads up ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug Policy, an advocacy group. "We want (drug) policy to work at all costs, but it's impossible to win the war," he said.