A Major Lesson for USC and the LAPD

Everyone at the University of Southern California knows crime is a problem there--but they usually assume it’s a problem rooted in the low-income neighborhoods surrounding the campus. A recent investigation by The Times challenges that assumption and raises troubling questions about how campus and Los Angeles police officials handle crime reports when the alleged perpetrators are USC students.

The article by Times reporters Tracy Wood and Richard A. Serrano detailed how members of USC’s fraternity Alpha Tau Omega were singled out for special treatment by campus authorities and city officials in Los Angeles Police Department investigations into the alleged rape of a female student and the beatings of two male students.

ATO is known on the USC campus as a house that’s full of the sons of the well-connected. The members of ATO also cultivate a raucous image as USC’s “party” fraternity. There’s no law against that, of course. Almost every college has an “animal house.” But the alleged violent attacks that brought ATO to the LAPD’s attention were no college pranks.

The alleged rape took place in the ATO house. LAPD detectives who took the case complained that it got kid-gloves treatment. The deputy chief overseeing them at the time, William Rathburn, is an active USC alumnus, and one of the alleged witnesses is the son of a USC trustee.

Among the suspects in the two beating incidents were the son of an LAPD officer, the son of a former USC professor and a manager of the USC football team. It took USC officials six months to hold a disciplinary hearing into the first incident, by which time the alleged perpetrator had graduated. The second beating was never investigated by campus authorities, despite the fact police suspect that it was related to the first and that the victim was an innocent victim of mistaken identity. The lame excuse offered by a USC official was that the victim did not make a formal complaint.

That suggests an obvious challenge for newly installed USC President Steven Sample: getting campus officials to be more involved when a student accuses another of a crime. Last week he appointed a six-member panel to review USC procedures on student crime. Sample bears no responsibility for past problems on the campus, but he will surely want to avoid any future embarrassment.

Meanwhile, the LAPD should undertake a review of all the things that went wrong in these investigations; Los Angeles citizens deserve to know with certainty that LAPD investigations are not influenced just because the people involved can pick up the phone and call a high-ranking police official. The charge by LAPD detectives that they weren’t allowed to complete their investigations without interference from higher-ups is deeply disturbing.