Protesters at 2 Stations Seek Reforms in LAPD, Courts

Protesters at two Los Angeles police stations Tuesday evening demanded sweeping reforms in the LAPD and criminal justice system, saying the corruption that has surfaced in the Rampart Division is more widespread.

“What we’ve been seeing all along is now coming to the surface,” said Michael Zinzun of the Coalition Against Police Abuse. He is a longtime police critic who organized a march of more than 40 demonstrators outside the Southeast Division station in Watts.

On the other side of town, across the street from the Hollenbeck station in Boyle Heights, activist Agustin Cebada led about a dozen marchers and said: “Hollenbeck is more corrupt than Rampart.”

The Rampart scandal broke last year, when disgraced former LAPD Officer Rafael Perez began telling police investigators and prosecutors of brutality and framing of suspects at his station west of downtown.

On Monday, two sergeants and an officer, the first to be charged in the scandal, surrendered to authorities.

“This is on the minds of a number of people, no doubt about it,” said Vermont McKinney, a mediator from the U.S. Department of Justice who was monitoring the Watts demonstration. “This has really hit a nerve in the community.”

Watts activists say police abuse and corruption are nothing new to them and rattled off names of suspects fatally shot by police over the years in what protesters said were unnecessary killings.

“This has been happening in our community for a number of years,” Perry Crouch said. “This is the training ground where they send all the rookies.”

The diverse group of Watts marchers--including a pair toting a sign reading, “Anarchists Against Police Abuse”--called for an independent prosecutor to probe police behavior, and for an investigation of the district attorney’s office and the judges who sentenced some of the victims of the Rampart scandal to prison.

LAPD Capt. Charlie Beck of the Southeast station, who stood with about a dozen officers watching the march, said he believes that the majority of people served by the station support police.

“If you would poll people in the Southeast Division, they’d be comfortable with their police,” he said.

Not Tracy Dodson, whose brother was fatally shot by officers in December in what she called an unjustified killing. “Who made you God?” she yelled at the officers watching the march, to the cheers of protesters.

Beck said the shooting was in self-defense.

On the Eastside, the smaller crowd marched to a Police Commission hearing in a community center to air its protest.