Outspoken LAPD Critic a Gang Backer, Police Say

Lupe Andrade has filed nearly 100 complaints against LAPD officers from the Hollenbeck Division in the last few years.

She has crashed undercover operations and taken photographs of officers. She has made T-shirts calling them corrupt, dangled a banner over the 10 Freeway decrying them and picketed the Hollenbeck station -- all in the name, she said, of protecting the community from bad cops. Citizen complaints are not available for public review, but Andrade said many of hers are for harassment and rude behavior -- not brutality or other more serious offenses.

“I’m just tired of seeing how the community is being abused by the LAPD,” the 34-year-old single mother said. “It’s time that people find out there are ways you can go about removing a bad apple.”

But police accuse Andrade, a prenatal educator, of colluding with gang members in a campaign to “wrest control of the neighborhood” by scaring officers away from Boyle Heights’ Ramona Gardens housing project, where she used to live.

In an unusual move that has drawn concern from civil liberties advocates, police -- acting independently of the department -- banded together and went to court asking a judge to order Andrade to stay away from them and their station.

Meanwhile, she has been charged with more than two dozen misdemeanors over the last few years, from driving without a license to more serious allegations.

Andrade is due back in court later this month to face misdemeanor charges that she hit a neighbor and threatened to hurt her children in a dispute over a ceiling fan. If convicted, she faces seven years in jail.

She and her lawyer deny the charges. They say authorities are on a witch hunt, so determined to silence her that they are trumping up charges.

Ultimately, both sides say, the courts will have to decide whether Andrade is an activist expressing her 1st Amendment rights or a criminal menace hurting her community’s quality of life.

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Growing up in Ramona Gardens, a 32-acre collection of peach bungalows flush against the San Bernardino Freeway that is the city’s oldest housing project, Andrade said her attitude toward the Los Angeles Police Department was sealed early on. One of her first memories, she said, is of officers knocking her little brother out of her father’s arms into a concrete wall.

She also learned early the power of legal action. When Andrade was 13, she said, she went to the courthouse and successfully helped her mother get a restraining order against her father.

“Ever since then, I was fascinated by the courts,” she said. “I love being in court. I love court. I just don’t like being the one accused.”

She had a memorable example in her father, who she said protested the LAPD on numerous occasions, even attaching a sign criticizing the police to his bicycle.

Her own campaign against Hollenbeck police began in earnest five years ago, she said, after an officer arrested her on an outstanding warrant for a traffic violation. The arrest was at 10:30 p.m. and her son, then 3, wept with fear, she said. She became convinced that the officer and others in the division were harassing her and her family.

Even some of Andrade’s detractors in the Police Department said that, though she has no formal legal training “except getting arrested,” she has a sophisticated understanding of how to use the legal system and the complicated federal consent decree that governs the LAPD.

In addition to filing her own torrent of personnel complaints, she has helped friends and neighbors to do the same. Under the consent decree, every complaint must be individually investigated -- at a cost of up to thousands of dollars to the city. Until a complaint has been cleared, it can stain an officer’s record and make it more difficult to win promotions.

Andrade has also taken her protests to the streets, passing out dozens of the anti-LAPD T-shirts and dangling a giant banner denouncing an officer over the freeway for passing motorists to see. Other times she has picketed the Hollenbeck station.

Police said gang members all over the city have used a barrage of complaints as a tactic against officers -- but never to the same degree as Andrade. All but one of her complaints were unsubstantiated, they said.

Andrade, however, insists that every complaint she has filed was valid.

She concedes that she knows many of the gang members who police say terrorize residents daily. But the mother of an 8-year-old boy who works as a counselor for at-risk pregnant women and talks of one day becoming a lawyer swears that her goal is not to help the gang.

“They want to paint me out to be this deadly, notorious person,” she said. “I’m not this person.... But I have the right as a citizen to file a complaint. Period.”

Officers see things differently.

In September 2003, five officers, using funds from the police union, went to court seeking an injunction to keep Andrade at least 500 feet away from the Hollenbeck station and Parker Center, the LAPD’s headquarters.

They claimed that Andrade “continues to harass and threaten ... Hollenbeck patrol and gang enforcement officers in an apparent struggle to ... turn over the control of the streets to the local gang leaders.” They also accused her of trying to “gratuitously destroy the [officers’] professional careers” and “incite others to bring physical harm and violence down upon the [officers] and their families.”

In addition, they asked that she be ordered to stop filing personnel complaints and to stop “interfering” with officers “during their performance of field duties.”

That attempt at an injunction, which the officers’ attorney said would have been the first of its kind in the state, failed.

But months later, authorities found another way of keeping Andrade away from Hollenbeck. After she pleaded guilty in 2004 to driving with a suspended license, the city attorney’s office persuaded a judge to order her to stay 50 yards from the station as a condition of probation. In return, the office agreed not to prosecute her on eight counts of interfering with police officers after she interrupted a vice raid at an AM/PM minimarket.

But Andrade continued to file complaints.

So last month, four different officers filed another lawsuit, this time charging Andrade with intentionally filing false reports. The suit seeks an injunction to stop her from filing more and monetary damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Civil liberties advocates are aghast.

“I think this is a real abuse of power,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke University.

But Marc Berger, the officers’ lawyer, said Andrade is making it “much more difficult for the department to function and more difficult for the officers to do their daily duty.”

Claudia Bracamonas, a friend from childhood, said she admires Andrade’s courage and outspokenness -- but also worries about her.

“It’s so draining for her, and it’s traumatizing for her son,” she said. “She won’t let it go, and then ... [the police] won’t let it go.”

Against the backdrop of Andrade’s civil and street battles with Hollenbeck officers, she has also been charged with more than two dozen misdemeanors in the last few years, including assaulting neighbors with a pen.

She was convicted of some of those offenses. In other cases, charges were dismissed. She has never been convicted of a felony, according to one of her lawyers, although she does have a rap sheet going back to her teens for stealing a car.

Andrade and her lawyer see the arrests as a form of LAPD harassment.

“They are trying to silence her,” said attorney Luis Carrillo, who represented Andrade in the first police lawsuit against her.

Police and prosecutors have declined to discuss the charges in detail. But Capt. William Fierro, commanding officer of the Hollenbeck Division, denied that his officers have targeted Andrade. In fact, he said, the opposite is true.

“We do not have the time, nor the desire, to harass her,” he said. “My officers would rather not see her, because they know she will file a complaint, and they don’t want to deal with that.”

In the latest case, according to police reports, Andrade stormed into her old apartment a block from Ramona Gardens, now occupied by a new family, and said she was taking the ceiling fan.

When the new tenants objected, Andrade allegedly threatened to kill them. Later, she allegedly punched the neighbor and told her daughter, “Your mother better move out of the apartment or something is going to happen to your brother and sister.”

Andrade said her neighbor attacked her.

“I don’t have it in me to hurt someone,” she said.

In the past, Andrade has vigorously fought the criminal charges against her, in many cases representing herself. She has returned again and again to the downtown law library to research criminal procedure.

Her closet is full of nice suits purchased solely for appearing in court. Her foot-thick file -- so big, Andrade quipped, that it is harder to carry it than it is to be nine months pregnant -- is full of motions written in her loopy, neat handwriting.

She was back in court Friday with her mother, who is also charged in the current case. Waiting to be called, Andrade tenderly braided her mother’s hair, gossiped about public defenders she knows and greeted a woman from the neighborhood who had accompanied her nephew to court.

Andrade nodded approvingly at Superior Court Judge Alex Ricciardulli. “Oh, Alex,” she said, as if he were a personal friend. “He’s really nice.”

Contemplating the current charges, Andrade pinched her eyes, trying to hold back tears that escaped anyway, slipping down her cheeks. She wants to get on with her life, she said. She wants to go back to school, become a lawyer. She is afraid of having to leave her son.

But she said it’s hard to walk away when she believes she sees the police doing something wrong.

Even now, when she is working so hard to keep a low profile that she won’t even jaywalk, she rushed out on a recent night when she saw a police helicopter near her house. Still, last week she said she resisted when she saw police gathering -- telling her son, “We have better things to do.”

Officers are unsympathetic.

“Her community activist activities seem to be more in support of the gang than it is these poor victims of the gangs,” said Det. Chuck Markel.

“If you have a gang-infested territory where people are living in fear, should you be talking about police misconduct or police presence?” he asked.