Rampart Scandal in the LAPD Department

While we all want to believe wholeheartedly in the “protect and serve,” theme we’ve been spoon-fed most of our lives regarding the upstanding character of all police officers, the reality is somewhat different. For those who have borne the brunt of police brutality, racial discrimination and profiling by police officers the reality is perhaps substantially different. The LAPD Rampart Scandal opened the door to the average citizen’s recognition of police corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department—other citizens had unfortunately already had firsthand experience.The blatant abuse of power granted these police officers exhibited brought shockwaves throughout LA County, showing racial profiling and racial discrimination at its very worst. What did take place during the Rampart Scandal and is it an aberration, or more likely the norm? To understand what took place during the Rampart Scandal, a sort of timeline is necessary.

On March 18, 1997 LAPD officer Frank Lyga shot and killed off-duty LAPD police officer Kevin Gaines in what appeared to be a classic case of road rage. (PBS, 2005 p. 1). Lyga, incidentally a white cop, maintained that Gaines, a black copy had threatened him with a gun.Lyga felt his life was being threatened, and responded with deadly force.

Notorious attorney Johnnie Cochran represented the Gaines family, filing a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles for $25 million. The city later settled the suit for $250,000. (PBS 2005 p. 2). In February of 1998 Officer Brian Hewett, member of LAPD’s anti-gang unit, called CRASH, brought gang member Ismael Jimenez to the Rampart police station for questioning. Hewitt allegedly beat the hand-cuffed Jimenez until he vomited blood.

Jimenez was awarded $231,000 in a civil settlement with the city. PBS 2005 p. 2).In March of 1998, officials in the LAPD property room discovered six pound of cocaine evidence was missing. Within a week the investigation became focused on LAPD officer Rafael Perez, a member of the Rampart CRASH unit.

LAPD Police Chief Bernard Parks became concerned about possible criminal misconduct within the department and established an internal investigative task force. Looking further at the evidence room, it was established that another pound of cocaine was missing; evidence that had been booked on a prior arrest made by Frank Lyga, the officer who shot Kevin Gaines.It was speculated that Perez stole the cocaine booked by Lyga in retaliation for the shooting of Gaines. (PBS 2005 pg. 3). The task force eventually identified at least eleven “dope switches” where Perez had ordered the cocaine evidence from the property room and replaced it with Bisquick.

Perez made a deal with prosecutors in which he pled guilty to cocaine theft and agreed to provide information about other Rampart CRASH officers involved in illegal activities.During the next nine months Perez met with investigators more than fifty times and proved more than 4,000 pages of sworn testimony, ultimately implicating 70 officers from everything to bad shootings to drinking beer on the job. (PBS 2005 p. 3).

Based on Perez’ allegations of wrongful arrests, nearly 100 convictions were eventually overturned. The Rampart CRASH unit was disbanded in March of 2000, and April of that same year brought the formation of the Rampart Independent Review Panel which was comprised of citizens, including attorneys, educators and business executives.A report was issued in November of 2000 which detailed 72 findings and 86 recommendations. The scandal continued through 2001, with cops, including Perez himself pleading guilty to an array of misconduct and illegal activities. (PBS 2005 p. 5).

What went wrong within the LAPD Police Department? Was it a fluke, or was it the standard operating procedure for these police officers? When the statistics were released regarding the ethnicity of motorists and pedestrians stopped and searched by LAPD officers was released, it seemed to be no great surprise, especially to the victims of the LAPD’s racial profiling and discrimination practices.The report showed that out of the drivers pulled over by an LAPD officer, only 7 percent of whites were asked to get out of their cars, compared unfavorable to 22 percent of Latinos and 22 percent of blacks. Of those who were asked to exit their vehicles, 67 percent of the blacks were patted down for weapons and 85 percent were subjected to some sort of search. The number of Latinos subjected to this behavior was comparable, while the number of whites was way down the pole.

(Dunphy 2003 p. 2).Unfortunately the racial profiling extends to other races as well; In December of 2002, Anaheim PD agreed to pay $50,000 to a Korean man who claimed racial profiling had caused him to be wrongly detained for two days on suspicion of killing an LAPD officer. A report compiled by Los Angeles Police department as part of a federal consent decree showed that city officers were three times as likely to stop and search other races than they were whites, leading to the conclusion that racial profiling is alive and well in Los Angeles.In Samuel Walker’s book, “The Color of Justice,” he studies the racial bias and discrimination of all minorities by the legal system, with the resounding conclusion that racial bias is an everyday fact of life for many Americans.

(Walker 2003). While studies show that white people and African Americans abuse illegal drugs equally, there is a hugely disproportionate share of African Americans in prisons for drug related convictions.Michael Tonry’s belief is that it is more difficult to police drug use in the white community because it typically occurs indoors, while the poorer sections of the African American communities live in crowded communities and buy their drugs on the streets, making them much easier arrest targets. (Tonry 1996). This leads to the question, is the LAPD targeting minorities or are they targeting the poor? The number of white police officers using excessive force against black males is showing little signs of declining.

In the 1970’s blacks were seven times more likely than whites to be killed by police. By the 1980’s, blacks were nine times more likely than whites to be killed by the police. In the decade from 1991 to 2001 there were at least twenty-two high profile cases of white police using excessive force against black males. (Jeffries 2001 pg. 2).

Former Los Angeles Detective Don Jackson was so convinced that there was a strong correlation between being black and being the victim of the use of excessive force by white police officers that he set up his own undercover “sting” to obtain visual evidence.What he obtained was a white Long Beach police officer shoved his head through a plate glass window and charged him with resisting arrest and damaging property. (Jeffries, 2002 p. 3). While no driver or pedestrian welcomes being stopped by the police, “for blacks such incidents contain a potential for harm and abuse seldom experienced by whites except those who are actually wanted by the law.

In the world in which black males live, the prospect of being accosted by a white police officer is a real, everyday threat. (Jeffries 2002 pg. 8).The LAPD has earned the reputation of the nation’s most brutal police force, and many think it is well-deserved.

Claiming they were provoked when they fired rubber bullets and concussion grenades at more than 2000 protesters who marched on LAPD headquarters, the videotapes and eyewitness testimony told a completely different story. The videotapes showed clear unprovoked police brutality with the police even firing on the rally stage where families of police murder victims had gathered to speak. (RW 2000 p. 1).

Several protesters were injured, some of them seriously, as “…a result of the wanton assaults by these totally out-of-control officers on the scene. These injuries resulted from the unauthorized and criminal use of rubber bullets and other weapons, as well as from the brutal use of billy clubs. ” (RW 2000 pg. 2). Consider this: Officer Jeff Nolte was leading a drug raid on a motel in Gardena when a suspected cocaine dealer pointed a shotgun at him.

In defense of his life, Note fired two shots, disarming the suspect, Leonard Robinson.At least this was the “official” story released. Four years later at Robinson’s civil right trial the facts came out that Robinson in fact had his hands in the air when Nolte opened fire. Robinson, a black man, was not aiming a weapon at the officer, but rather attempting to surrender. (Lait 2004 p.

1). Unfortunately black males are not the only victims of the LAPD violence. In 1979, Eulia Mae Love, 39, a widow from South Los Angeles became enraged when a gas company employee threatened to turn off her gas because of a $22 past due bill. She chased the employee away with a shovel.Utility works returned with police backup.

“After a brief standoff, Love threw a kitchen knife at the two officers, at which point they emptied their revolvers, killing her instantly. While the Police Chief called the shootings justified, saying the officers had fired in self-defense, the commission launched their own investigation and concluded Love had been killed unnecessarily. (Lait 2004 p. 1). From this point on, for whatever it has been worth, the commission reviewed all police shootings to determine whether or not the use of force was justified.

The Rampart Scandal seemed to bring the seedier side of the LAPD to light, even though higher-ups in the police department did their best to downplay the obvious issues. When Chief Daryl Gates was asked what kind of cops went into the CRASH unit, his answer was, “You try to select the very best—individuals who are not afraid—people who are willing to work, people who are willing to get out and mix with the gangs, and get a better understanding of the gangs, who are not intimidated by the gangsta…. ”(PBS 2005 p. 2).Chief Gates went on to say that he felt the CRASh unit was effective, overall, and when asked if there were ever the “occasional stretch about probable cause, for example,” he unequivocally replied that “It’s not accepted within the Los Angeles Police Department in any unite. Of of the greatest things about the Los Angeles Police Department is that it holds its head up high, because it doesn’t have any real corruption problems…It’s an honest police department.

” (PBS 2005 p. 5). Whew, what fantasy land was he living in?Detective Mike Hohan, LAPD detective, and principal investigator on the Rampart Corruption Task Force had a substantially different story to tell. Perez related to Hohan that when he and the other officers found narcotics on the street, they routinely held back some, using it to give to informants as pay, and using it to plant on people they couldn’t otherwise get a case against. (PBS 2005 p. 8).

Perhaps the most shocking detail Perez gave was when he detailed the system of reward and recognition within the CRASH unit. Apparently the officers of the unit all shared a tattoo with a cowboy hat with a skull, then aces and eights on it.The aces and eights, obviously, stood for the dead man’s hand that Wild Bill Hickock had. Whenever an officer was involved in a shooting where he had a “hit,” he would receive a plaque with the aces an eights on it, along with the appropriate amount of shell casings for the number of times the officer hit the person he was shooting at. There were two types of plaques: one for a fatal shooting, and the other for the simply wounded.

(PBS 2005 p. 9). Ultimately, the Rampart Scandal broke the LAPD in a way that even the Rodney King beating had not.Returning to the beginning of the Rampart Scandal, or the shooting of Kevin Gaines by Frank Lyga, when Johnnie Cochran was hired by the Gaines family to investigate, Cochran immediately requested records of Lyga’s former job performance. There were many “use of force” incidents noted in the file, however four had prompted complaints of unnecessary force.

Cochran then painted Lyga as an “aggressive and dangerous police officer,” who had failed to even summon immediate medial assistance for the injured Gaines and who had conspired to “hide and distort the true facts concerning the incident. ” (Boyer, 2005 pg. ).Consider these bits of LAPD history when pondering on the racial politics of the department. In the nineteen twenties, the department had a chief, Louis Oaks, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The demographic profile of Los Angeles changed from 1940 to 1960—the black population quadrupled. In 1965 Johnnie Cochran filed his first claim against the LAPD, and by the time of the Rodney King incident, some twenty-six years later, Cochran had become the “dean of a flourishing police brutality bar, which portrayed the department as a congenitally brutal police force given to victimizing minority citizens. (Boyer 2001 p. 10).There was an old saying at the time that the NYPD was corrupt but not violent, while the LAPD was violent but not corrupt. (Boyer 2001 p.

10). Unfortunately, as time went on , the LAPD turned out to be both violent and corrupt. In 1980 the city settled two discrimination lawsuits against the LAPD by signing consent decrees that mandated quotas for the hiring of women and minorities.The Rodney King beating in 1991 caused the LA riots, and by the time 1995 rolled around, Johnnie Cochran elicited from Mark Furhrman, a testifying officer in the O. J. Simpson case, the fact that “nigger” was a regular and standard part of his vocabulary.

(Boyer 2001 p. 11). In the Rampart Scandal, Perez, the police “snitch,” if you will, related that he had “gone bad,” while making his very first drug bust on the CRASH team. He said he and his partner had seized money from a drug dealer, and decided to keep some for themselves. After that, he related, he and his partner had botched a shooting in a confrontation with a nineteen year old gang member.The two officers shot the man, Javier Francisco Ovando, hitting him in the head and chest before they realized he was not carrying a weapon.

As Ovando lay bleeding, Perez and his partner planted a “drop” gun they carried with them for just such an event. Ovando was a Honduran, who spoke little English, and ended up partially paralyzed by the shooting. At trial he protested that he had no gun when Perez shot him, but Perez took the stand and calmly said otherwise, convincing the jury and sending Ovando to state prison for twenty three years.The results of the Rampart Scandal indicated beyond the shadow of a doubt that the LAPD was, at least in part, a racist group of rogue cops who covered one another’s backside whenever they were close to being caught and continued their practice of police brutality directed specifically at minorities. While the official story is that clean-up within the force is full steam ahead and ongoing, it appears to the citizens of LA, most especially the minority citizens, that if an LAPD officer pulls them over they should be very afraid of the consequences regardless of their innocence or guilt.