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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Infamy in the ramparts
By Colin Keaveney
A new scandal may have finally usurped the videotaped 1991 beating of Rodney King as the LAPD's worst affair. Taking its name from a police division in one of LA's poorer districts, "Rampart" has become a byword for corrupt, cynical and predatory policing. It has also prompted the United States Justice Department to step in, threatening city authorities with legal action for civil rights abuses ranging from racial profiling to the use of excessive force.
The Rampart affair began as the type of investigation that LAPD Police Chief Bernard Parks has always shown himself eager to pursue. Former LAPD officer Rafael Perez seemed to fit the bill of the lone, rogue cop blotting the copybook of an otherwise exemplary police force -- indeed, Perez did act alone on 2 March 1998 when he stole six pounds of cocaine from an evidence room. However, when his case came to trial in September of last year, Perez decided to offer evidence of wider, systematic police corruption in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Perez alleged that he and fellow police officers had framed suspects, committed perjury and planted evidence. He also admitted that he and another officer had shot an unarmed man, Javier Francisco Ovando, and later framed him for an assault on two other officers. Perez, it now became clear, was no loner.
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, another Rampart officer reported that he had personal knowledge of at least one case where evidence had been planted with the complicity of a police supervisor. He later corroborated Perez's allegations.
The fallout from the Rampart affair has been devastating. In the immediate aftermath of Perez's statements, Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti moved to overturn several convictions in which Perez had been involved. Ovando was thus released, but only after serving three years of a 23-year sentence. By the end of January, the shock waves from the affair were spreading rapidly outward. Garcetti moved to quash convictions involving officers other than Perez; and on 23 February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) joined the fray. So far, Perez's cooperation has resulted in the dismissal of almost 100 convictions and at least 70 police officers are under investigation. Last month, an LAPD lieutenant involved in the corruption probe said that they have been able to corroborate between 70 and 80 per cent of Perez's claims about cases of police abuse, the LA Times reported.
Meanwhile, Garcetti began investigating officers on charges of murder and attempted murder. By March, the investigation had broadened to cover divisions other than Rampart and the federal grand jury indicted four police officers from the 77th Street division on charges that they had framed a suspect.
Through all of this, Police Chief Parks remained adamantly opposed to oversight of police affairs and procedures. In this he was supported by LA Mayor Richard Riordan. Both men held that the LAPD was capable of undertaking and implementing its own investigations and reforms.
But the terms of the debate shifted dramatically a few months ago with the muscular intervention of the US Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. In a letter addressed to the LA attorney general, acting US Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee warned that the time had come for the city and its police force to accede to federal intervention. "We believe," wrote Lee, "that federal action is now required to eliminate the pattern or practice of police misconduct in the LAPD." In particular, Lee underlined the inadequacy of the LAPD's discipline and supervisory procedures.
Although the Justice Department is threatening to sue, the most probable outcome of the federal intervention is that the LAPD will be coerced into signing a consent decree. The first such decree was signed by the Pittsburgh Police Department in 1997 in response to similar federal threats of litigation over patterns of civil rights abuses. In essence, a consent decree sets a timetable and an agenda for reform to be overseen by a federal judge. Implicitly, signing a consent decree would amount to an admission on the part of the LAPD's top brass of the department's inability to police itself.
There is an irony here, too. The federal statute under which the US Justice Department can use the threat of legal prosecution as a lever to manoeuvre the LAPD into a consent decree was a direct consequence of the much-publicised 1991 beating of the black motorist, Rodney King, by the LAPD. In a turnaround of fortunes, it is now the LAPD that is facing the proverbial big stick, wielded by federal civil rights enforcers.
Earlier this month, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department decided to take a polite step away from the snowballing effects of the Rampart scandal. LA County Sheriff Lee Baca announced that a full-time independent review system, including civil rights lawyers and retired judges, would be adopted by the Sheriff's Department. But the LAPD Rampart scandal is only the tip of a very deep iceberg. In the past year alone, there have been a number of high-profile incidents across the United States that have focused public attention on the practices and racial attitudes of police from LA to New York. Most recently, the beating of a suspect by Philadelphia police caught on tape two weeks ago has raised yet another outcry about police brutality.
The gunning down of a West African trader, Amadou Diallo, by plain-clothes cops in New York on 4 February 1999 was the most inflammatory occurrence, receiving the most attention nationwide. But it was hardly the most grotesque police gaffe of the past 18 months. That prize surely goes to none other than the LAPD officers apprehending Margaret Mitchell -- a five-foot-one, 54-year-old black homeless woman -- for the misappropriation of a supermarket trolley on 21 May 1999, who shot her to death at close range. She had, the officers alleged, lunged at an officer with a screwdriver. In his report on the incident, Police Chief Parks criticised the police officers' tactics but refrained from further condemning their actions. Parks' report dwelled on the incident at some length, but failed to account for contradictory eyewitness evidence regarding the details.
It is inevitable in such cases that the question of race be raised. What was going on in the minds of those white New York cops when they unleashed a hail of 41 bullets in the direction of Amado Diallo -- a black man reaching for his keys in the vestibule of the building where he lived? One suspects, at the very least, that a number of negative and cynical racial stereotypes came into play. But what about the LAPD, with the considerable ethnic mix in its ranks? Parks is himself African-American.
It is obvious that such a racial blend is not sufficient to stamp out civil rights abuses, especially in poor neighbourhoods like Rampart. Perez, himself a member of an ethnic minority, has admitted to preying on other minorities. The pitiful circumstances of Mitchell's death suggest that the fundamental problem may lie elsewhere: in a deep-seated police culture of excessive force, exacerbated by the chronic breakdown of discipline and supervision. After all, neither Diallo nor Mitchell died primarily because of racial profiling, but because, on the spur of the moment, police officers deemed it appropriate to use overwhelming and fatal force against them.
This distinction remains academic, however. As two recent authoritative studies have demonstrated once again, America's racial minorities -- especially African-Americans -- continue to bear a disproportionate brunt of police and judicial attention. They thus remain on the front line, statistically more vulnerable to outbursts of police violence, whether accidental or premeditated.
The good news is that the ongoing federal investigation of the LAPD may lead to significant reform in police training and behaviour. The bad news is that the LAPD imbroglio is arguably only a symptom of a chronic nationwide malaise, treatable only on a case-by-case basis. The intransigence of the New York Police Department and the city's Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, in the face of continuing criticism sparked by the Diallo case is a reminder of just how slow and fraught the treatment may prove to be.
