Rampart Scandal
So LAPD Chief Bernard Parks and his friends at City Hall will put on their sack cloth, pour ashes over their heads and say a few mea culpas and we can all forget about the Rampart scandal (“LAPD Condemned by Its Own inquiry Into Rampart Scandal,” March 1). Except that we’re going to be paying for that scandal with lost services for generations to come. I think the citizens of this community deserve more than a whitewash of this mess.
You referred to “political leadership” being on the spot. That’s an oxymoron. Our city has very little political leadership and an abundance of political incompetence and corruption. In “New Probe of Police Rejected” (March 1), Chief Parks is quoted as saying “We need to allow the system to work.” Hasn’t that been our problem all along?
The citizens of this community deserve to have this scandal investigated by an independent body and to have the recommendations of that investigation forced upon the department. Anything less undermines the confidence of the citizenry.
WAYNE D. KERR
La Crescenta
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Badges? We got badges. We don’t need no stinking management! Quotes from the report: “The problems . . . boil down to people failing to do their jobs with a high level of consistency and integrity,” and “Pride in one’s work and a commitment to do things correctly the first time seems to have waned.” Anyone with common sense understands that managers have to manage or the organization will run wild.
RICHARD A. HEIN
Fullerton
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Thomas A. Saenz (“Linkage to the INS May Prove the Most Dangerous Rampart Revelation,” Commentary, March 1) deplores the fact that “some Rampart officers regularly collaborated with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to target Latino residents innocent of any state crime for deportation.”
If these residents are subject to deportation, they’re guilty of a federal crime, entering the country illegally. Personally, I’m angry that the police aren’t allowed to turn illegals over to the INS as a matter of course. They are lawbreakers.
ANN ALPER
Pacific Palisades
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What am I missing here? If the simplistic solution during Chief Daryl Gates’ tenure was to dump Gates, what is Parks doing hanging around?
BURTON W. SMITH
Pasadena
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