Unarmed Man Shot by Officers

Re “Ex-Officer Says He Shot Unarmed Man,” Sept. 16: And the Los Angeles Police Department is trying to set new limits on civilian oversight? I can see why. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

It’s time the whole upper echelon is replaced by a management team hired from agencies outside the LAPD.

LARRY MAZUR JR.

Santa Clara

* Some who read the story will say the system worked, because an innocent man will go free (although he is confined to a wheelchair as the result of the police shooting and lost three years of his life). But if the system had worked, the officers would not have believed (rightly) that they could shoot an unarmed man, frame him for crimes he did not commit and get away with it. If Officer Rafael A. Perez had not been arrested on drug charges, Javier Francisco Ovando would have served his full sentence.

Those of us with intimate knowledge of the system know that police perjury and other government misconduct are pervasive and that “justice” is an illusion.

MARY BRODERICK, Exec. Dir.

California Attorneys for Criminal

Justice, Los Angeles

* It was a sad morning as I read your front-page story on the LAPD Rampart Division officers under investigation for criminal conduct. The day could have been brightened a little, however, if you had not buried the article about the 18 LAPD officers being honored for valor inside the Metro section. I’d like to hear as much about the LAPD heroes as the villains.

STEVEN PINGEL

Hacienda Heights

* Re “Cloud Over Police Unit,” editorial, Sept. 7: Despite editorial arguments to the contrary, the fact is that the city repeatedly examines LAPD’s Special Investigations Section operations and such factors as total number of arrests, training standards, tactics, a decreasing crime rate, increasing numbers of officers on the street and cost.

While crime and, in particular, violent crime have decreased dramatically over the past five years, our communities continue to be victimized by violent criminals. All too frequently, these include takeover robbery “crews” who roam the streets looking for the opportunity to victimize our citizens.

When the Police Department receives a lead on these kinds of cases, it makes every effort to identify the suspects and connect them to the crimes. However, on occasion, the traditional methods of police detection do not work. In those cases, SIS is assigned to watch the suspects and either eliminate them as suspects or connect them to a prosecutable crime.

As your editorial points out, this results in about 50 arrest situations a year. Given those circumstances and the violent, predatory nature of the suspects they investigate, it is not unusual for one of those incidents each year to result in an officer-involved shooting. Fifty-four shootings resulting in 26 fatalities over a 35-year period seems conservative. During the same period, 71 police officers lost their lives in the line of duty.

The city’s payouts on litigation involving SIS over the past 10 years have been extremely minimal, with only one case lost in court for an award of less than $50,000 and another case settled after it was won at trial but overturned on appeal. That hardly constitutes a record of excess and speaks well for the operations of the SIS.

JOHN FERRARO, President

Los Angeles City Council