-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Dave Hartley http://www.asheville-computer.com/dave The Globe and Mail TORONTO Monday, February 28, 2000 DOUG SAUNDERS How fierce war on L.A. gangs spawned police reign of terror Hundreds of cops may be implicated in probe of massive corruption Los Angeles -- Brian Hewitt was known on the streets of Los Angeles as a brutal criminal, a brawny, angry white man with pork-chop sideburns and club-like arms, a sadist who would administer terrible beatings. With no apparent provocation, black and Latino men would be dragged to his headquarters, where he and his companions would tie their hands behind their backs and beat them bloody, break their limbs, choke them to the verge of unconsciousness or batter their heads into concrete walls. Brian Hewitt was a police officer. According to testimony from his colleagues, his activities and those of dozens of officers like him were considered normal procedure for years at the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart station, home to an antigang squad known as Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH). If even a fraction of the allegations are true, the LAPD has become as criminal and menacing as the gangs it polices. The revelations are coming to a head: The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal authorities joined the LAPD's internal investigation last week and the Los Angeles mayor worried the scandal could bankrupt his city. According to LAPD interviews with rogue police officers and informants, whose leaked revelations have produced front-page headlines for the past month, the CRASH officers wore death's-head tattoos, and their commanders would reward them with plaques at drunken parties each time they shot someone. A red plaque was given for a wounding, a black one for a killing. Routine activities included beating or coercing confessions out of suspects, intimidating witnesses into false testimony or silence, planting guns or drugs on people, shooting people without cause, tampering with death scenes and planting guns on victims to justify improper shootings, paying informants with drugs, lying in court and selling seized drugs. The allegations, which could involve hundreds of officers across the city, form what could be the most widespread and serious police-misconduct case in recent history. The case carries grave implications for other U.S. cities that have employed the militaristic policing strategies that Washington's war on drugs encourages. "This seems to be on the scale of the biggest police scandals in U.S. history," said Merrick Bobb, a lawyer who has investigated police-misconduct cases and who was asked on Friday to lead a City Hall inquiry into the Rampart case. "I don't think anybody at this point can guess the depth and breadth of this particular scandal." Whatever its scope, experts describe this as a new kind of police corruption. Its roots are found in the militarization of U.S. police during the late 1980s and '90s as part of federally funded war-on-drugs initiatives, which have often valued arrest statistics over ethical behaviour. The Rampart station, in a squat modern building north of downtown Los Angeles and 15 minutes from Hollywood, is remembered by many for its part in the 1960s TV series Adam-12,which portrayed the sort of neighbourhood policing that came to an end with the Nixon-era drug-war initiatives. Today, Rampart sits in a community riddled with Latino gangs. It is one of a dozen stations that have hired hundreds of extra officers, often hastily and without the usual psychological and background screening, in antigang and antidrug programs. Those units seem to have ignored basic principles of civil rights and justice. According to an investigation published in the Los Angeles Times last week, the CRASH unit maintained a list of 10,000 Latinos living in California and other states who were thought to be members or associates of the notorious 18th Street gang. Neighbourhood sweeps would be conducted in which anyone whose name appeared on the list would be arrested, even if there was no evidence of criminal activity. If a plausible crime could not be produced, the individuals were often turned over to officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service for deportation, even though LAPD and INS rules prohibit the organizations from working together. So far, 21 officers had left their jobs because of allegations raised in the inquiry, although none have faced criminal charges to date. Judges have reversed indictments and freed at least 99 people from prison after learning that officers had arrested them without cause or provided false evidence in court. The city estimates the cost of settling wrongful-conviction lawsuits for those cases at $12-million (U.S.); most observers believe hundreds of other cases will be discovered after the police probe delivers its report to City Hall on Wednesday. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has announced that the city's $300-million share of the federal government's tobacco-lawsuit settlement will be spent entirely on settling Rampart claims. That money was originally to have been spent on such initiatives as making the city more accessible to the disabled. Although the allegations stretch back to the early 1990s, the corruption would not have come to light had it not been for the arrest last August of Rampart officer Rafael Perez, who admitted stealing 3 1/2 kilograms of cocaine from an evidence room and selling it on the street. In a plea bargain, he agreed to testify against fellow officers. Mr. Perez's own crimes typify the CRASH unit's ethos. He admitted that he and a fellow officer picked up 22-year-old gang member Javier Francisco Ovando, handcuffed him, shot him in the head, planted a rifle on him and arrested him for assault. Mr. Ovando, now paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, was jailed on a 23-year sentence for crimes he did not commit; he was the first Rampart victim to be freed this year. Shooting Mr. Ovando earned a red plaque for Mr. Perez, who has admitted that he routinely carried crack cocaine to plant on suspects so he would have cause for arrest. Last Friday, Mr. Perez was sentenced to five years on the drug-theft charge. In a long speech to the court, he described an environment where the ethical codes of policing disappeared entirely in the drive to wage war with gangs. "In the Rampart CRASH unit . . . the line between right and wrong became fuzzy and indistinct," he said. "The us-against-them ethos of the overzealous cop began to consume me. And the ends justified the means. We vaguely sensed that we were doing the wrong things for the right reasons." The scandal has come as a shock to many Los Angeles residents and politicians, who believed that the police force had been purged of its distasteful tactics in the wake of race riots that paralyzed the city eight years ago. Those were triggered by the acquittal of LAPD officers in the savage beating of Rodney King, the most serious in a string of apparently race-based incidents. The scandal has led to accusations of incompetence aimed at Mayor Riordan and at Bernard Parks, who, as the LAPD's first black chief, was appointed with a mandate to clean up the force. An inquiry led by former U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher recommended extensive changes to the structure, leadership, composition and oversight of the police force. Many of those changes were made, most notably in the force's membership, which had been overwhelmingly white and male. (Today's LAPD is 13.7 per cent black, 31.5 per cent Latino, 4.9 per cent Asian. Eighteen per cent of officers are female.) The new scandal does not appear to involve widespread racism, although some individual officers such as Mr. Hewitt appear to have had racial motives. He was quietly fired from the force last year after one particularly severe beating was exposed to high-level officials, but his case came to light in the latest corruption revelations. Not only does the current scandal appear to have little racial motive, it is not founded on the sort of high-level greed that motived cases such as New York's Serpico scandal in the 1970s. In those cases, police received regular cash payoffs from drug dealers, pimps and organized-crime bosses in exchange for tolerating their activities; the proceeds were divided among police and political officials. There is no evidence that this is happening in Los Angeles. Rather, experts say that the CRASH unit and similar divisions appear to have organized spontaneously into militaristic, lawless vigilante units, largely because a martial mindset permeates U.S. policing. This vigilante mindset has also surfaced in less extensive scandals in the New York Police Department. "What I've found is that the men in this scandal represent the matrix of policing," said Joseph McNamara, former chief of the Kansas City and San Jose police departments and now a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He pointed out that many of the L.A. officers involved "are all different ranks; they're all different races." Some are rookies; "many of them have 30 years of experience" and are decorated officers. According to Mr. McNamara, author of a study, soon to be published, titled Gangster Cops, the war on drugs has changed the focus of many police from protecting members of a community to defeating an enemy. "You don't worry about the Bill of Rights if you're in a war. If you're a soldier you need to kill the enemy." The ethically dubious practices involved in fulfilling quotas of drug arrests often blur the lines between policing activity and criminal activity. "This is a national problem," Mr. McNamara said. "The cops who are caught in Los Angeles say the same things as the cops who are caught in Brooklyn: They are saying that the departments have pressured them to make arrests, and when they find the drug law cannot really be enforced legally, the cops have to conduct illegal searches and offer coerced and perjured testimony. "That's perfectly okay, they say -- the means justify the ends in a holy war -- but the gangster cops use this as a justification for any kind of illegal activity." Last week, the former head of the CRASH unit was suspended for 20 days for having ignored officers who reported one of Mr. Hewitt's beatings to him. This is the most severe sentence delivered in the scandal so far. ================================= *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. *** <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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