We Planted the Seeds for Rampart

Compared to the Rampart Division gangster cop scandal, the Rodney King beating is a misdemeanor. But, given Los Angeles’ past history of police corruption, Rampart should shock no one. Just call it a year 2000 update of “L.A. Confidential,” the fictional account of L.A.’s all-too-real police corruption in the 1950s. Nor should anyone be surprised at the limp response so far of civic and elected officials to the systemic corruption that Rampart signals. While fingers are rightly pointing to outlaw cops and every inept body charged with LAPD oversight, the engines of this injustice did not churn without the silent assent of the public.

It is arguably the voting public that set those engines in motion. In a fit of crime hysteria, we licensed cops to wage battle, but only in poor neighborhoods that aren’t ours. And, except for momentary glances forced by inconvenient videotapes, riots or murder confessions by L.A.’s finest, we have largely ignored what goes on in the war zone created at our behest. The same war zone where schools don’t work. Where gunned-down kids evoke no outpouring of concern as did the kids murdered in Columbine. The same war zone whose residents have gone to prison in droves for drug offenses that celebrities and politicians chat about with Larry King. The same war zone whose kids may or may not cross our minds next month when most of us vote on Proposition 21 to put 14-year-olds in adult prisons.

The predictable corruption and police abuse verdicts are simply the cost of containing crime within the poor areas miles from our gated enclaves. Through crime legislation and propositions, we have unleashed a juggernaut in underclass neighborhoods. Responsive politicians, many of whom rode into office with Willie Horton strapped to their Hum-Vees, heeded our mandate. We launched the futile war on drugs not in the cocaine canyons of corporate and suburban America but in the ravaged alleys of the inner city. In Los Angeles, we lobbed up the related and equally ill-conceived war on gangs that spawned the Rampart scandal and branded L.A.’s poorest teenagers predators.

Even that was not enough. Californians have passed “three strikes,” inflated prosecutors’ powers and imposed rigid minimum sentences that have poor people serving life for possessing less dope than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush didn’t inhale. We have reduced legal representation for the poor, removed hearings that safeguarded constitutional rights and limited federal review so that in the future the execution of innocents on death row will be more likely than their release. We have revved up the war-on-crime machine and given our warriors the green light to search and destroy.

So what? Outlaw cops and mass imprisonment is what. So many urban men are now in jail that demographers in Los Angeles created a new migration category called “out-migration to institutions.” Whatever you call the jailing of two-thirds of black and Latino males, most for nonviolent crimes, it is not something that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have left unchallenged. And since crime dropped more in places without these policies, we can’t even justify them as necessary.

Voters may not have intended Rampart to happen or foreseen the impact of our crime wars on our poorest neighborhoods, but we can’t claim ignorance. When a conservative Republican appointee to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concludes that cops routinely lie on the stand and when defense lawyers commonly encounter police fabrication of evidence against defendants, the public clearly has chosen to overlook these constitutional violations.

But are we going to quietly accept the framing of scores of innocent people? The beating brigades? Police murder? Where are our anti-crime crusader politicians now? Where is this city’s Christopher Commission leadership?

In particular, what explains the anemic response from black and Latino leadership? Except for a few commentators, the response has been conspicuously muted. Perhaps Rampart and underclass devastation are beyond minority middle-class concern. Perhaps we resent that our strenuous efforts to escape Willie Horton’s shadow are insufficient to escape pullovers for “driving while black.” Perhaps our brilliant, charismatic and African American chief of police has dazzled us with the illusion that things are being handled.

If Daryl Gates were still chief of police, and the two lead renegade officers had been white, African Americans would have been marching in the streets over Rampart. The African American and Latino communities have known about renegades in CRASH and other specialized units for years. But so have the LAPD’s current leaders--black, white and Latino, all prodigies of Gates. There is no free pass on systemic corruption just because the current chief is black.

The silence is deafening.

There should be loud objections. The same LAPD management that aggressively fights civilian oversight and undermines the commission’s inspector general currently calls the shots in the Rampart investigation. Cops bound by codes of silence and district attorneys who presided over the imprisonment of innocent citizens should be disqualified from investigating their friends, colleagues and themselves. Until a special prosecution team with expertise in police culture takes over this investigation, we will never know the scope of corruption or the extent of the metastasis.

Rampart should rock our civic souls. Instead, it looks like we may pause, but not long enough to see to it that the engines of injustice we set in motion are finally turned off.