Zinzun Reports Burglary

Political activist Michael Zinzun, who recently won a $3.8-million jury award against a top Los Angeles police official, said that thieves ransacked confidential files of his Coalition Against Police Abuse during a weekend burglary at his South-Central Los Angeles office.

Zinzun, a longtime adversary of the Los Angeles Police Department, said the burglars broke into his Western Avenue office either late Sunday night or early Monday morning. They stole a television set, a fax machine and an answering machine, and also removed some of the coalition’s files from drawers, he said.

The files contained data on the Police Department--including information about officer-involved shootings and the department’s internal affairs unit--as well as documents from Zinzun’s recent defamation lawsuit against Assistant Police Chief Robert Vernon.

Zinzun said he intended to give the documents to the Police Commission last Tuesday, but he canceled his appearance because of the burglary.

He said he knows of only one file that is missing, and it contained information on the district attorney’s procedures for investigating officer-involved shootings. Nonetheless, he said he found the break-in suspicious.

“I don’t know that somebody would take the time to (look through files) if they were just coming in to burglarize,” he said. “This happened, interestingly enough, a day before I was due to go to the Police Commission and . . . three days after I met with the Christopher Commission (investigating the department) and turned over some documents to them.”

A police spokesman declined to speculate on the break-in.

Zinzun also suggested that there might be a link between the break-in and back-to-back burglaries at the offices of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been highly critical of the Police Department in the wake of the March 3 police beating of Rodney G. King.

ACLU Executive Director Ramona Ripston said the organization’s offices on Shatto Place, west of downtown Los Angeles, were burglarized twice during the Memorial Day weekend. In addition, the Hollywood office of ACLU Foundation Chairman Danny Goldberg was burglarized that weekend. In those incidents, personal property--radios, cameras and video equipment--was stolen, but files were left untouched.

“I’m afraid to speculate,” said Ripston, when asked if she thought the burglaries were connected. “When you do this long enough, you develop a certain amount of paranoia. It could all be coincidence or it might be that Michael Zinzun’s is a political caper and ours is just a true burglary.”