Playing the Class Card in Rampart Police Scandal

There’s a character missing from the cast of the Rampart morality play. Have you noticed?

A repertory company’s worth of bad cops and nasty shakedowns, faked scenes and real beatings has paraded before us--all but this one.

It’s been a stock player, and a major one, in most of Southern California’s law and order dramas, from a Riverside gas station to a freeway exit in Lake View Terrace.

It’s that well-known actor, race.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the now months-long Rampart outrage has been the conspicuous absence of accusations of racism that have characterized so many other police controversies, from Rodney King to the Riverside shooting of a young black woman.

To date, race’s biggest role in Rampart has been a walk-on appearance in a late scene when the CRASH crowd colluded with immigration officers to deport scores of Latino immigrants and deny citizenship to others.

Apart from that, a virtual silence, and a visual blank of news video of angry leaders demanding justice. One planned protest fizzled. Rampart residents showed up with cookies and cheers for the cops who cleaned up their neighborhoods, by whatever means. The usual choreography of race politics hasn’t stepped onto the dance floor this time. Why?

“Had the officers been white,” says civil rights attorney Connie Rice, “the Latino community would have been up in arms.” But they weren’t, not all of them. Of the 21 Rampart cops against whom some action has been taken so far, eight are Latino (Rafael Perez is Puerto Rican), nine are Caucasian, two are African American and two are Asian Pacific. This is the long-promised LAPD that at last looks something like the city it serves.

Yet just because it isn’t all white cops running amok in a division populated by Latinos does not mean that the subtleties of corruption packed up and left with the Wonder Bread boys. In an LAPD recruiting poster of years past were faces of races and a phrase like “We’re all blue.” Well and good--but what color does that make the rest of us?

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Last century it was race; this century, the social slicer and dicer promises to be class, and that cuts every which way.

Class is rearranging the traditional idealized solidarity of minorities. The historical pecking order among Latinos puts poor, darker-skinned, more Indian-looking Latinos--often Central Americans--at the bottom, along with new Mexican illegal immigrants. The residents of Rampart, as well as the people beaten and set up by the LAPD, fit this class.

At the top of the pecking order are Mexican Americans of generations’ standing--like Latino police who are U.S. born and bred, sometimes college-educated, earning a middle-class wage and living in middle-class suburbs, and sometimes perhaps making little distinction among Rampart’s deserving and the undeserving poor.

A Latino sergeant in Rampart told The Times that Latino residents who get stopped or arrested sometimes tell Latino officers that they “should take care of their own” and “try to put some kind of guilt trip on our Hispanic officers.”

Put class in the equation and Latino cops have more in common with white cops than with poor Latino immigrants selling fruit on the streets of Rampart. Still, Thomas A. Saenz, regional counsel for MALDEF, points out that “for a lot of middle-class Latinos it’s not so long that they or their families were poor, so I hope there’s a greater understanding of what that experience is like.”

On a recent radio show, a caller told Rice that she hated what happened to Rodney King--hated having to empathize with him, with “people like him.”

“It’s the same phenomenon here,” Rice says. “The entire [Rampart] area is viewed as ‘there’s nothing but lowlifes there, people who are threats to me, a middle-class person.’ So you’ve got this empathy barrier,” an indifference that “also extends to the black middle class and the Latino middle class,” and the white middle class, and threatens to engulf them all, to everyone’s peril.

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Poor L.A. All these years we’ve been working through one set of inner conflicts only to turn a corner and see another one rearing up in front of us.

Class biases seem easier to live with than color biases. Class fits more comfortably because it is founded in the national presumption that anyone can grow up to be president, metaphorically at least. Class isn’t supposed to be about skin color, it’s about bootstraps, it’s about character, and if you don’t make it, well, maybe there’s something wrong with yours. So are we better for substituting “poor” for “black” or “brown,” or are we just rearranging the insulation in the attic of our consciences?

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com