http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/rampart-scandal-continues-to-reverberate/?singlepage=trueThe 1998 Rampart Scandal Continues to Reverberate in the LAPD
As is often the case when government inserts itself where it has no business, the best of intentions can yield disastrous results. For L.A., this means more people will be murdered this year than last. (Also read J. Christian Adams at the Tatler: "Steve Rosenbaum: foe of LAPD, friend of New Black Panthers")
January 27, 2011 - 12:00 am - by Jack Dunphy
In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department investigated a staggering 1,092 murders, the most in the city’s history. The number had risen more or less steadily through the late ’80s and into the ’90s with the advent of the crack cocaine trade and the gang violence that accompanied it, but since that high-water (high-blood?) year of 1992, homicide in the city has declined in almost every year, with the LAPD recording 297 murders in 2010.
Last year was the first in which Los Angeles saw fewer than 300 murders since 1967, a time when the city had 1.5 million fewer residents. The only interruption to this long, steady decline came in the years 1998 through 2002, when the tally rose from 419 to 647. We may soon see another rise in killing on the streets of L.A., and for reasons very similar to those that engendered the one that began in 1998.
In August 1998, LAPD internal affairs investigators arrested Rafael Perez, at the time an officer assigned to the gang unit at the department’s Rampart Division, for stealing cocaine from evidence storage. After being arrested, Perez supplied information on what came to be known at the Rampart scandal, in which, Perez alleged, he and his fellow officers in the gang unit engaged in all manner of misconduct, including planting evidence, perjury, excessive force, and even unprovoked and unjustifiable shootings.
Though Perez implicated dozens of officers in misconduct, criminal charges were ultimately brought against only nine. Of these, five pled guilty, one was acquitted by a jury, and three were convicted at trial. And those who were convicted at trial were later vindicated when their convictions were overturned by the trial judge, a decision upheld through the appellate process. And it is worth noting that those same three officers were later awarded $5 million each when a civil jury concluded that they had been arrested and charged despite the absence of probable cause. That verdict has also been upheld through a long series of appeals. (I wrote about this aspect of the Rampart scandal for National Review Online in 2008. You can read that column here.)
In addition to those officers who faced criminal charges, administrative charges were brought against 93 officers, most of whom were cleared. Seven officers were fired or voluntarily resigned, and 24 received punishments ranging from a reprimand to a suspension. In short, though Perez and another officer were shown to have committed some truly despicable acts, the so-called scandal was confined to a handful of officers at a single police station.
And yet, despite the lack of evidence of misconduct elsewhere in the LAPD, then-LAPD Chief Bernard Parks made the decision to shut down the gang units at all of the department’s 18 police stations (there are 21 today). One might speculate that the rise in murders that followed was coincidental, but such speculation is rebutted by the fact that murders resumed their decline in Los Angeles when Parks was ousted as chief and the gang units were re-established. Though the Rampart scandal broke thirteen years ago, its effects are still being felt in the LAPD today. The scandal resulted in the imposition of a consent decree (.pdf) agreed to by the city of Los Angeles and Janet Reno’s Justice Department. The consent decree, intended to last five years, governed virtually every aspect of the department’s operation, subjecting it to inspection by a court-appointed monitor who demanded an impossibly high standard be met for the department to be found in compliance. It was finally lifted in 2009, though some vestiges remain, including a provision that officers assigned to gang and narcotics units be required to disclose their personal finances so as to detect any who might be deemed inordinately wealthy. The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents rank-and-file officers (and of which I am a member), filed suit seeking to block this provision, but the effort failed in the courts and the financial disclosure rules went into effect in March 2009.
The final version of these rules allowed for a two-year grace period for officers already assigned to these units, with only those newly assigned required to disclose their finances. But that two-year grace period is now coming to an end, and LAPD managers are discovering to their great discomfort just how unpalatable these new rules are to street cops. Rather than disclose their personal financial data (and those of spouses or anyone else with whom an officer might own an asset), many officers are choosing to accept reassignment to patrol or other duties in which these new rules do not apply. The result has been the complete shutdown of the gang units in some areas, and the understaffing of the units at every police station in the city.
For example, at Southeast Division, which patrols Watts and nearby areas of South Central L.A., and where 46 murders were reported last year, the gang unit was shut down in January. At the adjacent 77th Street Division (39 murders in 2010), the gang unit will cease to operate in February. Department managers lamely attempt to claim that this will not affect public safety in Los Angeles, as the officers and their accumulated expertise will remain at the same stations. “The community should not be concerned,” said Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger. “We haven’t backed away from our gang enforcement posture.”
To put it as politely as I can, this is what you might find scattered in a cow pasture after the cows have left. The gang officers remained at their same stations back in 1998, too, but that didn’t prevent the city’s gang members from taking advantage of the diminished enforcement posture, with the result being a significant rise in bloodshed. If the earlier decline in murders had persisted in those years, or even if the rate had but remained constant, hundreds of murder victims in Los Angeles would have been spared.
To be fair, the information required on the financial disclosure paperwork is anything but intrusive. It asks only for the most general details on an officer’s assets and liabilities. Where the trouble arises is in the random audits demanded by the consent decree, at which officers will be required to provide much more detailed information. Despite the repeated assurances of Chief Charlie Beck that the information will be safeguarded against unauthorized disclosure, many officers simply do not trust the department to keep their personal information confidential. Added to this is the fact that no living soul believes these measures will have even the slightest deterrent effect on corruption, so officers have little incentive to take the risk of having their financial information fall into the wrong hands, however minimal that risk might be.
But there is another reason officers are refusing to cooperate with the financial disclosure rules. For more than nine years, LAPD officers watched helplessly as millions of dollars and countless hours of their time were poured down the bureaucratic rathole that was the consent decree. For all that time they had no choice but to follow every one of its byzantine provisions. But now gang officers have a choice, and many of them are choosing to say no. (For an examination of another corrosive remnant of the LAPD’s consent decree, see Heather Mac Donald’s “Targeting the Police” in the Jan. 31 issue of the Weekly Standard.)
I credit the authors of the consent decree with good intentions in their desire to avert corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department. But as is most often the case when the federal government inserts itself where it has no business, the best of intentions can yield disastrous results. The outcome here is as predictable as the tides: More people in Los Angeles will be murdered this year than last. And what a shame that will be.
“Jack Dunphy” is the pseudonym of an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.
