3 Rampart Probes Lax, LAPD Says

Los Angeles Police Department detectives did not thoroughly investigate three shooting cases that corrupt ex-officer Rafael Perez said were unjustified and covered up, a top police official said last week.

Assistant Chief David Gascon, responding to inquiries from The Times, said he was “not satisfied” with the department’s efforts to investigate two shooting cases that left men injured.

He also acknowledged that a third shooting, in which Perez said he had been told about an officer who tried to cover up an embarrassing misfire, was never reinvestigated by the department’s Rampart Corruption Task Force.

In all three cases, department investigators did not interview witnesses or review other material that might have challenged the official police accounts.

Some officers involved in the cases remain on duty, patrolling the streets of Los Angeles three years after Perez accused them of lying and fabricating evidence to justify their actions in shootings.

City leaders said they had been assured repeatedly that the Police Department was thoroughly investigating all allegations of misconduct made by Perez about the incidents collectively known as the Rampart scandal. The LAPD has investigated five other shootings that Perez said were suspicious and concluded that, in at least two, he helped the department uncover officer misconduct.

“I’m just stunned,” Mayor James K. Hahn said Friday when he learned of Gascon’s comments. “It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that can just fall through the cracks. I can’t imagine what the explanation is.”

Police Commission President Rick Caruso agreed.

“This blows me away,” he said. “There’s no excuse for not doing everything possible to get to the bottom of those allegations.”

Referring to Hahn’s decision last week to nominate former New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton to head the LAPD, Caruso added: “Herein lies the reason it’s healthy to have somebody from the outside become chief of this department.”

Perez, a former anti-gang officer convicted of stealing cocaine booked as evidence, identified eight allegedly improper shootings more than three years ago during his debriefings with police and prosecutors. In return for a reduced sentence on the charges against him, Perez told investigators about some shootings that he said he knew about firsthand and others that he had heard about from other officers.

For months, LAPD officials have told The Times that they were trying to evaluate the status of the investigations into each of those eight cases. Last week, in response to repeated requests for information, Gascon, after consulting with Interim Chief Martin Pomeroy, acknowledged that the department had not done significant follow-up in three of the cases.

He said the department now intends to do that review.

“We hope to go back and make sure that the actual investigation is done to our satisfaction so we know that we have not only the quality that we need to make a determination, but [also] address any inconsistencies that may have been raised,” Gascon said.

Gascon said the three shootings were deemed “lower priorities” when detectives were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Perez’s allegations.

The statutory deadlines for filing criminal charges had either elapsed or were about to expire on two of the cases when Perez, as part of his plea deal, spoke to detectives in September 1999. Nonetheless, Gascon said, the department should have put more effort into investigating the criminal and administrative implications of Perez’s allegations in those two shootings, both of which were the subjects of previous articles in The Times.

Officials in the district attorney’s office declined to comment. One former prosecutor, however, said he was not surprised that the LAPD’s shooting investigations were less than thorough.

“The LAPD was extraordinarily recalcitrant. It was very difficult to get their cooperation in reviewing the shootings,” said Richard Rosenthal, the former deputy district attorney who prosecuted Perez and worked on the district attorney’s corruption task force. “They decided which shootings they wanted to review, and then gave us very few supplemental reports showing us what they had done.”

Rosenthal, who now works as the civilian monitor of the Portland Police Department in Oregon, said the alleged cover-ups would have been very difficult to prosecute.

“But that does not excuse not reinvestigating shootings,” he said.

Many of the officers implicated by Perez in improper shootings remain on the job and on patrol. One of the officers Perez accused of covering up a shooting was assigned to work on the department’s so-called board of inquiry report critiquing the Rampart scandal at the same time she supposedly was under investigation.

All but one of the officers involved in the cases identified by Perez failed to return phone calls, declined to comment for this story, or have previously declined to discuss their roles in the incidents. One officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, corroborated Perez’s allegations about one of the shootings.

One of those incidents that Gascon said did not receive sufficient investigation took place in the waning hours of Dec. 31, 1995. According to the official police account, officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang CRASH unit were attacked while looking for revelers firing guns into the air to celebrate the new year.

Two men on the balcony of an apartment building on Linwood Avenue opened fire on Officers Brian Hewitt, John Collard and Daniel Lujan, police said.

The officers, according to police documents, took cover and returned fire, wounding the two suspects. They were booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Both men admitted firing their guns in the air, but vehemently denied shooting at police. In court, they pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of negligently discharging a firearm and were sentenced to probation.

That was the end of the case until Perez spoke out, telling authorities that it was the suspects on the balcony who were attacked, not the officers.

According to transcripts of his debriefings with investigators, Perez said the officers watched as the men fired shots into the air. During a break in their shooting, Perez alleged, the officers, who had taken cover behind a car and a concrete column, opened fire on the suspects without warning.

Perez, who said he arrived in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, said he and the other officers began collecting their shell casings and were planning to leave without reporting the incident when they discovered blood and determined that a suspect had been hit.

The officers then entered the building and arrested the wounded men, Perez said.

Police officials acknowledge that there are several pieces of circumstantial evidence that raise serious questions about the account given by officers the night of the shooting.

For one, despite the officers’ claim that they came under heavy fire from at least two suspects, the LAPD’s officer-involved shooting report makes no mention of any bullets or damage in the area where the officers were.

In addition, if the officers had been attacked by suspects who then holed up in the building, LAPD protocols would have suggested that officers then call for a SWAT team to take over. No such call was placed.

Two officers involved in that incident, Hewitt and Collard, have since been fired from the LAPD for misconduct unrelated to the shooting. Lujan was found guilty of misconduct at an internal LAPD proceeding earlier this year in another case brought to light by Perez, but the officer’s only punishment was an official reprimand because the proceeding was not completed within the one-year statute of limitations, according to department sources.

Additionally, one officer who was at the scene that evening told The Times in an interview that Perez was telling the truth and that officers were not provoked when they opened fire on the suspects.

After Perez’s statements to authorities, however, police never interviewed that officer.

The second shooting that has raised new questions occurred Oct. 15, 1995. In that incident, rookie Officer Daniel Widman and his partner were dispatched to a domestic violence call in the 1700 block of South Catalina Street.

As Widman searched the apartment for a man who had allegedly hit his wife, he saw what he thought was a large amount of blood smeared on the walls, police documents state.

“That is when the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I was thinking that this was serious,” the officer would later tell investigators.

He drew his gun. Seconds later, the suspect opened the bedroom door, emerging with a shiny object near his waist, according to police. At the same moment, the officer said he heard a loud boom and saw a flash of light, which he believed to be a muzzle flash.

Officer Widman, concluding that he had been shot, fired at the suspect. The bullet hit him in the abdomen.

But when police searched for the weapon Widman believed the suspect was holding, they found only a hand mirror.

The scenario that Widman, other officers at the scene, and ultimately shooting investigators pieced together was that the “boom” Widman heard was the sound of the bedroom door being flung open by the suspect and striking a dresser; the shiny object the officer saw, they concluded, was the hand mirror; and the flash was light from Widman’s flashlight bouncing off the mirror.

The “blood” turned out to be ketchup.

In a tape-recorded interview shortly after the incident, a shooting team investigator seemed skeptical of the account given by Widman, repeatedly asking the officer if he was sure the shooting had not been an accident.

When Widman insisted that it had not, the detective pressed on.

“OK, Dan. We are going to go over this again,” the detective said. “Wait till two or three years down the line and you get in front of the judge and the jury ... and you are going to have to explain to them why you shot this guy.”

In the end, the case never made it to a jury. The city paid the victim, Jose Vega, $425,000 to settle a lawsuit he filed as a result of the shooting.

When Perez told investigators about the shooting in 1999, he said he wasn’t there and didn’t even recall the name of the officer involved, just the circumstances, which he said were an open secret in the Rampart Division.

“They wanted to save the kid’s career,” Perez said. They asked him, ‘What do you got?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. I just shot him.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ ”

Perez said he was told during a CRASH meeting that sergeants who responded to the scene that night helped concoct a story to justify Widman’s alleged mistake.

“They came up with some idea of a little mirror,” Perez told investigators. “They made it very clear to us that that was just what they did to save [Widman’s], you know, his job ... covered it up. Fixed it.”

LAPD officials now concede that the department has not taken adequate steps to determine whether Perez’s account was true. Gascon declined to comment on specifics of the department’s work.

Widman and his partner continue to work at the LAPD.

The third shooting that Gascon said last week has yet to receive attention by the department involves a May 14, 1998, incident in which an officer allegedly fired his gun by accident.

According to the official police report on the incident, Officer Sonny Garcia chased down a drug dealer whom he thought might have been armed. As Garcia tried to arrest the suspect, the man struck a hard blow to Garcia’s hand, which was holding his service weapon. Garcia said he lost control of his gun for a moment and then fired it by accident.

Perez said he heard about the alleged cover-up of that shooting from other officers, but did not witness it.

According to Perez, officers discussing the incident said Garcia had accidentally fired his gun during the chase, not because of a physical altercation.

“It was just simply a mistake. But he didn’t know how to explain it,” Perez told investigators. “Instead of saying, hey, I was running and my gun accidentally went off, things are made up and--and added to the story to make it sound like, ‘OK, I can--we can understand how that happened.’ ”

One LAPD official said the case might have been assigned a lower priority partly because the alleged cover story the officer told would not have subjected him to any less criticism than the version he gave.

“It just didn’t make sense,” said the high-ranking LAPD source. “For that reason, I don’t think it was a top priority.”

Caruso, the Police Commission president, said he has been asking department officials to produce a long-promised report that is supposed to account for the LAPD’s investigation of all allegations arising from the Rampart scandal. That report is more than two years overdue.

“If this is how they treated cases with such a high profile, how did they treat cases that didn’t get so much attention?” Caruso said. “That’s what scares me.”