L.A.: City Under Siege

Few things are harder to fix than the tarnished image of a police force. The NYPD, for example, recently saw the p.r. efforts that followed the Abner Louima torture case nullified, first when Mayor Giuliani discarded a task force report that called for departmental overhaul and now with the trial of the cops who fired more than 40 bullets into unarmed Amadou Diallo. Mention of the Chicago Police Department, despite the absence of recent major scandals, still evokes images of protesters brutalized and hosed down by rampaging police outside the 1968 Democratic convention. But no American police department has been as criticized — or feared — as that of Los Angeles. The LAPD hadn't even recovered from the stigma of its handling of the 1965 Watts riots when it created international headlines for the beating of Rodney King, which inspired a fresh set of riots in the early '90s. Now a new investigation into rampant corruption, law-bending and lawbreaking among L.A.'s finest stands to become the department's biggest scandal yet, raising questions of whether it will ever be able to gain the trust of the citizenry it's charged to serve.

Since September, when the LAPD appointed a board of inquiry to investigate misdeeds in its anti-gang Rampart CRASH unit, a portrait has emerged of police power run amok on a horrifying scale. The investigation centers on the testimony of turncoat cop Rafael Perez, a Rampart CRASH officer who squealed after he was caught stealing cocaine from an evidence room. A cover story in Thursday's L.A. Times, for which the paper received exclusive access to Internal Affairs and D.A. documents of Perez's testimony, lists such police infractions as beating and framing innocent people, using deadly force against unarmed suspects and drug dealing. More than two dozen convictions of those jailed by the unit have already been overturned since September, and 70 officers are now under investigation. "This is a major blow to the LAPD's image and its respect among people in L.A.," says CNN producer Susan Reed, who's following the story for the network. "We're already seeing its ramifications in the judiciary. There are reports that juries are doubting any testimony given by LAPD cops."

Embarrassment isn't a strong enough word for what the department's top brass is feeling. While Police Chief Bernard Parks blames an undersized internal affairs budget for the LAPD's inability to self-police, the department has spared no expense investigating Perez's leads into erroneous convictions. Investigators visited jails throughout California and as far away as South America to corroborate Perez's stories with suspects he said were wrongly convicted, and they have thus far produced 99 cases in which they're confident Rampart CRASH produced bogus convictions. L.A. County D.A. Gil Garcetti believes there could be thousands more, while Parks estimates that the cost of the ensuing lawsuits could run into the hundreds of millions. "When this initially happened," notes Reed, "the people in the Rampart neighborhood came out and supported the police. The CRASH division had gotten gang activity under control and people began to feel they had gotten their neighborhood back. But once the details of the investigation started coming to light, that support quickly ended." While nothing as embarrassing or threatening as a federal investigation into the department has been launched, it seems the LAPD's attempts to forge closer ties with the community and gain credibility are once again at ground zero.