In Pico-Union, Broken Trust Hurts

A pistol-wielding man threatened to kill me a few years ago on Bonnie Brae Street in Pico-Union. Rampart Division police officers responded quickly and saved my life.

That same year, I waited for Rampart detectives to show up after Salvadoran death squad operatives shot at my colleague while she sat in her car. They never came.

Historically, Central Americans have had a difficult and contradictory relationship with men and women in police uniform. Here in the L.A. area, we have denounced them for choking and harassing a 55-year-old female street vendor, but we have also worked shoulder to shoulder with them to develop and implement a much-needed street vending ordinance.

The Pico-Union area--the heart of the Rampart district--is home to thousands of Central Americans. Among them is Javier Ovando, a Honduran native who was the first person to be released from prison when ex-cop Rafael Perez told investigators that he and his partner had shot Ovando multiple times, planted a gun on him and testified falsely that he had attacked them. Also among the Central Americans in Pico-Union is Alex Sanchez, a Salvadoran youth leader who has done much to bring peace among gangs in the neighborhood. Sanchez was arrested Jan. 21 by Rampart CRASH officers and turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in a high-profile case that is galvanizing Central Americans and others around his defense. Members of Sanchez’s gang intervention organization, Homies Unidos, have accused members of the CRASH--Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums--unit of arranging the arrest and deportation of Sanchez in order to prevent him from testifying in the murder trial of a youth.

In the past few years, community-based policing efforts in Pico-Union have built some trust with the area’s residents. That has been shattered by the Rampart scandal. I’m wondering, for example, if the officers who provide security at, and even participate in, parades and festivities in and around MacArthur Park are trustworthy. Were the plaques that Rampart officials gave organizers of Nicaraguan, Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadoran Central American independence festivities simply propaganda, like the toys I saw the Salvadoran army give war-wounded children around the same time that it was bombing civilians and killing priests?

Erasing the specter of doubt among Central Americans in Pico-Union will require radical measures.

As survivors of some of the worst institutionalized violence and abuse in the Western Hemisphere, the Central Americans who now live in Rampart’s service area fear they are hearing echoes of their past. Previous attempts at police reform, such as L.A.’s Christopher Commission recommendations, have led to unfulfilled expectations. It’s back to the future: After so many years, and so much talk about reform, nothing has changed, or perhaps things are even worse.

Some of us also are asking how the top brass could not have known what we knew all this time, which was that, although there were some good police officers in Pico-Union, there were some really bad cops who were abusing people and their authority in ways resembling police methods in Central America. Others in the community are asking why the city doesn’t establish a truth commission, such as been done in Guatemala and elsewhere, or why the LAPD is resisting new structures for civilian control that have at least made a dent in places like El Salvador.

Few believe that the LAPD can clean itself up. The word impunidad (impunity) again has entered the chess board conversation in el Parque MacArthur, and it’s not being used to speak about El Salvador or Guatemala.

The safety of the community, the morale of those who really do protect and serve Pico-Union and the integrity of the entire city rest on finding out who are the good cops and who are the bad cops at Rampart.