We’ve Heard These ‘LAPD Blues’ Before

If the nation needs reminding that “Dragnet’s” pristine, strait-laced Joe Friday is an extraterrestrial who doesn’t really work for the Los Angeles Police Department, tonight’s “Frontline” hour will do it.

The point is that no one in L.A. should need that wake-up call, making “LAPD Blues” pretty much familiar news to viewers here. They’ve already gotten from this newspaper and local newscasts story after story about notoriously corrupt former officer Rafael Perez and the Rampart Division’s scandalous misconduct that his controversial, explosive allegations have helped bring to light.

And these loose ends have yet to be tied, with the federal court stepping in to oversee reforms in this beleaguered department that “LAPD Blues” notes was once regarded as the nation’s golden orb of local law enforcement.

Typical of “Frontline,” producer-director Michael Kirk and correspondent Peter Boyer (whose

companion piece on this appears in the current issue of New Yorker magazine) tell this story well. It’s surely engrossing, from the Rodney King beating and O.J. Simpson murder trial that helped sink the LAPD’s reputation to the Perez-driven overturning of scores of criminal cases, resulting in cop misconduct settlements that have cost the city millions.

This drumroll of trouble builds ominously with revelations of officer connections to the violence-ridden gangsta rap scene leading to the gradual emergence of Perez as the Darth Vader of this bad cop scenario. He starts things rolling by confessing in 1999 that he and his then-partner, Nino Durden, three years earlier had shot and framed unarmed 19-year-old gang member Javier Ovando, and testified falsely against him in court. Paralyzed from the waist down from the shooting, Ovando has since been freed from prison and paid a $15-million settlement by the city.

The program notes serious questions about Perez’s credibility, and that the pattern of criminality it cites is a surface symptom of a department that somehow became rotted at the base, and was not speedy in investigating its own.

Although a nice review, “LAPD Blues” essentially retraces the media footsteps of others. Viewers expecting new insights will be disappointed.

* “Frontline’s” “LAPD Blues” airs tonight at 9 on KCET, and at 10 on KVCR.