Send Proper Signal, Chief : It’s a test of his leadership to comfort an LAPD wounded by serious allegations and at the same time respect and reassure a public raising important concerns.

The investigation into the Los Angeles Police Department is being treated by Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Bernard C. Parks as an isolated aberration by a handful of bad cops. We’re confident that Parks will get to the bottom of what went wrong at the Rampart Division, some of which occurred before he was chief. But what is worrisome is Parks’ limited vision of what is rotten in the LAPD. Beyond the horrendous details of alleged crimes now under investigation by the department and the FBI, a fundamental question must be asked: What is it about the culture of the Los Angeles force that allowed ex-Officer Rafael A. Perez and others to even think they could get away with such outrageous violations--stealing evidence, committing perjury, and shooting, crippling and sending to prison an innocent man?

The Police Commission, appointed by the mayor and the City Council to oversee the department; Parks, its chief and manager, and Inspector General Jeffrey Eglash, who under the city charter has the power to initiate audits and investigations of the LAPD, must raise an obvious if difficult issue: Did these alleged crimes occur in Rampart because the division area is home to thousands of illegal immigrants, who are less likely to speak out against police abuse? Perez, in an interview with The Times, talked about an atmosphere in which officers routinely abused their power in order to impress superiors. Even when an officer tried to tell the Rampart captain at the time about the alleged beating of a suspect inside the station, the captain allegedly said he did not want to hear the details. That would be a classic and chilling example of the code of silence, attacked by the Christopher Commission in 1991 after the Rodney King beating.

The Police Department so far has enjoyed a reputation of being generally corruption-free--corruption-free defined as a department without cops on the take. It is a distinction that the department and the city have worn with pride. Unlike in other major cities, waving cash at an LAPD officer in hopes of getting a traffic ticket fixed was unheard of. That zero tolerance for graft was what tripped up Perez: He was originally nailed not for shooting a suspect unjustly but for stealing cocaine from the evidence locker in 1998.

What has plagued the LAPD instead is corruption of a different kind: abuse of power and brutality. Whether it was its past routine harassment of black and Latino men or the police shootings and beatings that too often left minority members dead or severely injured (infamous cases include Leonard Deadwyler in the early 1960s, Eulia Love in the 1970s, Rodney King in the 1990s and some would add Margaret Laverne Mitchell this year and now Javier Francisco Ovando), there’s no question that the LAPD has a lot of history to overcome. The internal cultural message that the LAPD must send--just as strongly as it inculcates its antigraft message--is that abuse of Los Angeles residents, legal or illegal, white skin or brown skin, well connected or unconnected--is repugnant.

As the department’s leader, Chief Parks could help that message seep deeper by doing everything he can not to encourage a defensive us-versus-them mentality. It’s a test of his leadership to embrace and comfort a department wounded by serious allegations and at the same time respect and reassure a public raising important concerns. This week he referred to a former police commissioner offering constructive criticism as one of the “self-proclaimed activists.” And he sought to place lawyers trying to defend the rights of people against police abuse as those who are at odds with the police. “Who are you going to believe . . . the lawyers . . . or Mr. Ovando and the police?” the chief asked. Intentionally or not, these were us-versus-them statements that send precisely the wrong signal. The lawyers trying to help the victimized Ovando and the police ought to be on the same side: in the search for truth and justice.