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The man at the center of the deportation controversy is Alex Sanchez, who is being held for deportation to his native El Salvador. A former gang member, Sanchez works with a group called Homies Unidos that fights gang violence. Sanchez also is an alibi witness for Jose Rodriguez, a 15-year-old charged with murder (and later acquitted). Sanchez says the police want to deport him because he was with Rodriguez at the time of the killing--at a Homies Unidos function--and because he knows how the cops operate. "They felt I was a threat," he says. "I knew how they beat up kids in alleys and threatened deportation. So I was a target."
But the heart of the scandal remains the thousands of convictions that have been placed in doubt. In words that defense lawyers will be citing for years, Perez told authorities that "90% of the officers who work CRASH, and not just Rampart CRASH, falsify a lot of information." Defense attorneys claim to be working from a list of 17,000 convictions that could possibly be tainted, involving 71 L.A.P.D. officers.
Los Angeles is only now hearing many of those stories--like Rafael Zambrano's. Zambrano was at a party when 15 Rampart cops, including Perez, burst through the door. While Perez was arresting Zambrano, he found a gun, which Zambrano says was planted. Zambrano was familiar with Rampart officers. Before his arrest, he says, they regularly showed up at his home and harassed him and his family. Once, he alleges, they held his brother over a rooftop ledge and threatened to drop him. Zambrano, who served 16 months in prison, is suing the city.
Zambrano's lawyer, Gregory Yates, has an additional 30 clients with police-misconduct complaints against the city. He says the cases he has seen so far point to "systematic corruption" in the ranks of the L.A.P.D. One disturbing pattern: many of his clients have told him arresting officers tried to recruit them to sell drugs. Another lawyer, Steven Yagman, has filed 10 lawsuits against the city and says he expects to file 190 more in the next month. Not all involve Rampart directly, but most of the defendant officers spent some time there. Yagman says the current predictions for how much the scandal will cost are grossly low. "I think it will bankrupt the city," he says.
What went wrong in Los Angeles? A lot of the blame seems to lie with poor hiring practices. Analyzing the scandal for the city council, Chief Parks admitted that four of the officers on official leave because of the scandal should never have been hired because of prior arrest records, bad debts or inability to handle financial problems.
L.A., like many other cities, is finding it hard to attract good talent. Police salaries are generally low, and in a tight labor market, there are lots of easier ways to earn a living. The L.A.P.D. is understaffed by some 700 officers. Although it has been advertising heavily, including on the Internet, the department has been falling short of its recruitment targets lately, hiring only 20 or so candidates a month when it needs more than 100.
Getting good recruits is particularly difficult when departments bulk up quickly, as the L.A.P.D. did in the late '80s and early '90s--so-called binge hiring. L.A. isn't alone on this score. In the early '90s Washington hired 1,000 police in a hurry for political reasons. Since then, 25% have been discharged for misconduct or indicted.