(2 of 6)
The Los Angeles Police Department has had a troubled history, from the pervasive corruption of the 1930s and '40s to the bitter feelings of the city's minority communities toward former chief Daryl Gates' department, culminating in the uproar over the 1991 beating of Rodney King. But the Rampart scandal has taken police misconduct to a new level of lawlessness and given currency to a new term: the gangster cop--not much different from the gang members the police are battling. As investigators work to get to the bottom of it all--and to separate the good cops from the bad--a city is wrestling with a larger question: Who will police the police?
The Rampart police station, in the shadow of downtown Los Angeles, is set in the middle of one of the city's toughest neighborhoods. It's a densely populated mix of Latino immigrants, Korean shopkeepers, down-on-their-luck drug addicts and gangs--lots of gangs. The 8-sq.-mi. area has 30 different youth gangs, with thousands of members among them, squaring off for turf.
To win the area back, the L.A.P.D. established a special antigang unit, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH. In addition to their weapons and swagger, CRASH officers were armed with a powerful legal tool--sweeping antigang injunctions (since lifted) that gave them free rein to push around suspected gang members. Among the offenses the injunction covered: blocking sidewalks and carrying pagers.
In their domain, Rampart's CRASH officers ruled. "The most powerful public official in the city of Los Angeles is not the mayor," says Robert Hansohn, the recently installed captain brought in to clean up the Rampart division. "It's the officer we put out there on the street in a black-and-white car with guns, badges, shotguns and assault weapons." In the '90s the CRASH unit certainly lived up to its name, with a confrontational style of policing that aggressively took back the streets. It seemed to be getting results. In the 1960s the area had 170 murders a year. Last year there were just 33.
There have long been complaints that Rampart cops were playing dirty. "It's been happening for years," says Alex Sanchez, a former gang member arrested by Rampart and facing deportation. "We've seen cops take drugs and let the youths go. We've seen them plant drugs on others. Youths have been saying, 'That wasn't mine. He planted it on me!' But who would believe them?" The fact was, as long as the complaints were coming from suspected gang members--some of whom had criminal records--no one much seemed to care. "If you peeled the layers back in a community and got down to the truth and asked, 'Do you mind what we do to get them off the street?' they'd say no," says Hansohn. "Just get rid of the six gang members on that corner."
That all changed when one of CRASH's own started talking. Perez says he was part of a tight-knit group of CRASH officers who played by twisted rules. This antigang fraternity acted a lot like a gang itself. When a new recruit joined the unit, CRASH members allegedly circled around and beat him--an initiation ritual that criminal gangs call "jumping in." In one case, a white CRASH officer leaving the scene of a police beating of a civilian--for which the city had to pay a $25,000 settlement--allegedly yelled out, "¡Puro Rampart! [Totally Rampart]," an imitation of a gang slogan.