Apathy Runs Rampart

A prominent national civil rights organization recently hosted a discussion at the Skirball Center on the Rampart scandal featuring some of the city’s leading civic voices. The event promised insightful community discussion about the most widespread police corruption scandal in the history of Los Angeles. It was an opportunity to question members of the LAPD, the media and the legal community about what went wrong.

Hardly anyone showed up.

The poor attendance may have reflected more about the problems facing this city than simply its apparent level of interest in the LAPD scandal. It may be a symbol of something larger, the ugly possibility that Rampart is something we partially brought on ourselves.

It is not a stretch to say that we have balkanized Los Angeles into geographically distinct enclaves and as a result have created psychological and social borders that inhibit us from viewing Los Angeles as one unified metropolis. We view our city and its problems only to the extent that they affect us. If they do indeed have an impact on our lives, we too often think of resolving these problems in the ways that work best for our individual neighborhoods.

This great divide has a tremendous impact on our city’s political and business leaders, who are products of the same neighborhoods in which the rest of us live. They cut their political teeth in structures that allow them to ignore Greater Los Angeles and focus on smaller, more limited constituencies. And those of us who look to our elected representatives to fix our city’s problems too often do not demand that they legislate with a Greater Los Angeles in mind.

So is it any great surprise that few Angelenos on the Westside came to listen to a distinguished panel talk about police brutality that has affected neighborhoods they rarely visit? Why should they have? No one has spoken up and said that Rampart is about more than the dangers of reckless police officers; rather, it is partially the result of sustained meager citizen interest in the police procedures for those neighborhoods we prohibit our children from visiting.

I wonder to what degree Rampart could have been avoided if Los Angeles was less about ZIP code and more about inclusiveness. If we used our energies to create a city whose fabric is not tattered and worn along ethnic and geographical lines but instead stitched to include the communities of all Los Angeles together, would Rampart still have taken place? If citizens had understood that CRASH’s actions in one neighborhood affect us all, would our elected officials have had the political will to closely oversee the LAPD’s CRASH policies?

How the Rampart debacle could have taken place is a complicated question that probably only can be fully answered by deeply considering the social, educational and political forces that have been at work in Los Angeles for the past 40 years. To do this, however, it requires an engaged citizen body that is willing to listen and consider its role in what has gone wrong.