In Rampart, Reaping What We Sowed

“There was no mystery to any of this.”

--A former Rampart Division CRASH officer.

The Short Stop bar sits in a low, brick storefront, far from what people picture when you say a bar is on Sunset Boulevard. This is the Dodger Stadium end, the immigrant end, the end where the palm trees are tattered and the stucco is rust-streaked. The end in which Los Angeles remains, forever, as it ever was.

Inside, past the narrow entrance and the shadowed bar stools, what you notice are all the rules. “NO I.D., NO ENTRY.” “DO NOT HANG AROUND OUTSIDE AFTER HOURS.” “HAVE ONE TOO FEW, NOT ONE TOO MANY.” They are posted on sheets of paper, hanging like stations of the cross, like caution signs on a treacherous blacktop. Like prayers: Lead us not into temptation. It is only after the eye adjusts that it becomes clear who is being prayed for in the beery darkness. See the wooden gun lockers. See the bullet displays, the framed badges, the plaque reading, “Room Dedicated to Those Who Protect and Serve.”

The bartender, a middle-aged woman in a Dodger shirt, is angry. She is sick of the whole matter--the scandal, the newspaper, the politics, the looky-loos. The Short Stop is a cop bar. For five months now, since the Rampart scandal broke, one regular after another has been confined to home or run to ground by Internal Affairs people. “Out-sie!” she snarls, spotting a notebook. “You guys have dragged our name in s--- long enough.”

But then she relents. Rampart is, after all, a police-led investigation. The sickening revelations--the frame-ups, the dope dealing, the tales of brutality verging on murder--have come from the mouths of police. She says the one doing the most talking--”Ray” Perez, who, yes, came by the bar sometimes but not like they say--is an aberration. She says maybe he’s singing because one of his ex-partners is doing time for bank robbery and “there’s $700,000 out there, waiting for whoever gets out of jail first.”

Most of all, though, she wants to talk about the tough-on-crime drumbeat that landed the weakest among her patrons in this pit of shame. “Let me tell you something,” she finally bursts out, lighting a Camel Red in violation of the city’s no-smoking ordinance. “I don’t care if they have to hit some ‘Chuy’ upside the head to stop crime in this city, and the public doesn’t either. You think LAPD is the only department with the little secret tattoos? What’s going on here is no mystery. We’ve always stepped one toe over the line to put a--holes in jail.”

The grain of truth in that statement is, of course, the unspeakable part of the Rampart scandal, the part that has brought the city’s leadership up so short in their response to this grotesque tragedy. What can a serious person say, really, that doesn’t trivialize with hysteria a situation that has been known, for a long time, to be a crime waiting to happen? These allegations--if true--didn’t spring from a vacuum. These cops were young. Perez is barely out of his 20s. People that age don’t just haul off and decide that all’s fair in wartime. Someone had to declare the war.

Someone had to decide we needed a rush job on cop hiring, though the color of authority has, forever, been too alluring to people who are too worried about their own weakness. Someone had to send the message that the short leash on society’s watchdogs could maybe be lengthened, particularly in the quarters where people were too powerless or too guilty to fight back. Someone had to buy the reefer-madness rhetoric that depicted every feckless ghetto dropout as a gangbanging criminal genius. Someone had to elect all those Republican governors who demonized immigrants and poor people and made judges of one ex-prosecutor after another. Only 7% of the judges appointed by Govs. Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian had experience as public defenders. Who voted for that?

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Who voted for three strikes? Who gutted preliminary hearings? Who decided defendants were “clogging the courts” with all that tiresome defense? Who has thrilled at those ritual cop funerals that take over whole freeways? Who has winked at the temptation to rubber-stamp “officer-involved” shootings in which panicked police claim to have been threatened with, oh, screwdrivers and shopping carts?

No, there’s no mystery. Just the dawning--now that we’re richer and feel safer--that maybe something enormous has gone too far. Not us, mind you. Just something, out where the palms are tattered and the stucco is rust-stained, and the price of denial and temptation remains as it ever was.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.