Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (33 page)

Nothing in the report pointed to why Parks, having led Internal Affairs and then the entire department during years of Rampart CRASH’s crime rampage, had not sought a wider investigation. Nothing in the report touched on the LAPD’s other CRASH units and what might have been occurring in those units, even though Nino Durden, for one, had told Ray Perez that similar crimes and abuses where taking place in 77th Street CRASH. Nor did the inquiry ask or answer how deep and wide the abuse had gone on throughout the department’s other seventeen divisions and special units, or how high up the chain of command knowledge of the abuse had gone.

Bernard Parks’s inquiry, in short, had been focused on telling reporters and the public what they already knew, and nothing more.

Connie Rice, 2003, NAACP’s Advancement Project Offices, Los Angeles

Even in 2010, a decade after the event, civil rights attorney and police reform activist
Connie Rice was still irate as she talked about the questions investigators put to Ray Perez during his nine-month interrogation by the LAPD and the DA’s Office. In 2003, Rice, who heads the Los Angeles branch of the Advancement Project, was asked by a new LAPD chief to chair a “Blue Ribbon Rampart Review Panel” to revisit lessons learned from the Rampart scandal, and how those lessons could be applied in the future.

As part of her investigation and report, recalls Rice, she and her office went through all
seventy volumes of Rafael Perez’s testimony transcripts. An associate attorney named Kathleen Salvaty was helping her. One day Salvaty walked into Rice’s office and said, “
Connie, am I crazy or are there pages missing?”

Rice was finding not only missing pages but also transcripts rife with problems: seemingly dozens of people had been asking Ray Perez questions, but often they’d failed to identify themselves. “
Perez is answering
willy-nilly all these questions coming at him from what seemed like twelve different interrogators,” remembers Rice, “when one of them says: ‘But you don’t have any direct, firsthand knowledge that other CRASH units were involved in the same thing [as Rampart CRASH], you are not saying that. . . .’ And Perez interrupts, and essentially says: ‘Oh, but I am. I was loaned out to other CRASH units . . . and they were doing the same thing.’ This is at the end of the page. The next page goes on to a separate topic. No follow-up. No nothing! Nothing! They made a mistake in asking a critical question that they did not intend to ask, got an answer they really never wanted, changed the subject, and shut it down.”

“
That
question was one of the things that
frustrated me very much about Rampart,” Bill Boyarsky would later say. “I remember Perez’s answer, and I believe he was right. It had to be happening in other divisions. Maybe not in [the white, wealthy] Pacific Division but certainly in Newton, 77th Street, and all those other [similar] divisions. You had the same dynamic. The same kind of guys.”

“Were the same kinds of things done in other divisions?” Deputy Chief Patrick Gannon would later ask and answer. “
Absolutely. Absolutely. Do I think for a minute that it was widespread throughout the department and that there was this underlying theme of guys out there stealing drugs and selling them and beating the crap out of everybody they came in contact with? I don’t think so. But there was some of that.”

**************

While all this was happening,
Gerald Chaleff, then the president of the Police Commission, was having deep concerns about the limits placed on the Rampart investigation—particularly a procedural one that Bernard Parks insisted on applying.

According to LAPD regulations, an officer can be punished not only for what he does but also for witnessing a fellow officer break a law and not reporting it. Chaleff, who had had a long career as a defense attorney, wanted to open up the investigation, to enable LAPD officers to corroborate Perez’s allegations.

So he
asked Bernard Parks to grant departmental immunity to Rampart CRASH officers who hadn’t reported unlawful conduct to their commanding officers, as they were required to do. Period. Only that. Not immunity for misconduct an officer himself might have committed, as Chaleff would later explain, but for witnessing a fellow officer violating the law or department policy and not reporting it.

Parks’s reply, says Chaleff, was essentially “
Nope, can’t do that.” Chaleff needed Parks’s permission to grant the immunity. He had asked for and gotten the city attorney’s opinion on the subject, and been told that “by city charter statute the power to
discipline lay solely with the Chief of Police.”

Parks’s refusal to temporarily grant immunity for not previously reporting the misconduct of a fellow officer effectively stopped those officers from corroborating Ray Perez’s testimony. Their fear of being punished for not coming forth at the time of the offense trumped all other concerns. Bernard Parks’s decision was certainly right in tune with his general disciplinary philosophy. But it also played a huge part in successfully limiting the Rampart investigation.

Without the corroboration of those officers, it proved extremely difficult to bring a substantial number of allegedly dirty cops to trial, and harder still to gain convictions for those who were prosecuted. It was a given that any defense attorney cross-examining Ray Perez on the witness stand would say to him: “Tell me, Mr. Perez. You’ve admitted that you’ve committed perjury more than a hundred times during previous trials. Why should we believe you now?” It was a situation that seemed designed to fail. But why?

One explanation comes from Connie Rice, who later headed an LAPD-sponsored investigation into Rampart. “
They couldn’t follow up on widening the investigation into other divisions or grant immunity in order to get corroboration because Rampart meant one of two things. It was either containable to Rampart CRASH, or it was the end of our criminal justice infrastructure, because you can’t survive a thousand overturned verdicts. You can survive a hundred, maybe two hundred. Not more than that. The entire system could have collapsed.”

Bernard Parks, May 2000, Parker Center

Bernard Parks sat stone-faced during a closed-door meeting with city officials and lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department as a press release summing up the reason for Parks’s grim demeanor was being distributed. “
The LAPD,” read the release, “is engaged in a pattern or practice of constitutional violations through excessive force, false arrests, unreasonable searches and seizures, and . . . management deficiencies that have allowed this misconduct to occur . . . on a regular basis.”

The U.S. Justice Department (USJD), it turned out, had been monitoring the LAPD for the past four years. But it was Rampart CRASH, Ray Perez, and the
Los Angeles Times
who’d finally tipped the scales and caused them to fly into L.A. and lay down the law.

In 1994, in the long wake of Rodney King’s beating, the federal government had passed a statute permitting the Civil Rights Division of the USJD to sue cities where local police agencies had regularly discriminated against racial and ethnic minorities in enforcing the law. If the city refused, they had to go to trial; if not, the city had to enter into a consent decree or agree to other oversight by the USJD. In the process of addressing police abuse in Los Angeles, lawyers from the USJD had made it abundantly clear that if necessary they would force a trial—a trial that would be embarrassingly revelatory.

Most of the city government quickly saw the writing on the wall. The twenty-year-veteran city attorney,
James Hahn, led the city’s negotiating team. Hahn was a nice guy, but no one ever accused him of having an excess of vigor in the performance of his duties. He readily, regularly, paid tens of millions of dollars of the city’s money to settle police abuse lawsuits against the LAPD, without publicly saying to the LAPD, “What the hell is going on?”

But when it came to Los Angeles signing on to a federal consent decree, James Hahn told the City Council that they couldn’t possibly win in court. He may have lacked what it took to stand up to the LAPD for two decades, but he was well aware that lifting the rock that was the LAPD and the Los Angeles criminal justice system in the 1980s and ’90s and turning it over in court would reveal the rot beneath it.

Accepting the decree, however, was serious business. It mandated that the LAPD make a series of fundamental structural reforms aimed at permanently ending the department’s systemic constitutional violations—a process that would include ongoing monitoring by a federal judge.

Nevertheless, on September 19, 2000,
the City Council voted 10–2 to accept the consent decree. It was a stinging, unequivocal rebuke to L.A.’s political establishment, its criminal justice system, and especially its leadership. Both Bernard Parks and Richard Riordan had hated the idea of agreeing to a consent decree, and firmly believed that the decree was the result of a hysteria stirred up in large part by the
Los Angeles Times
. But once the City Council overwhelmingly voted to approve it, Mayor Riordan had little choice but to go along, and he soon signed it into law.

Steve Cooley, Wednesday, November 7, 2001, Parker Center

“
With every book, when you read it, you close it,” Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley said in November of 2001. That was his way of announcing that his office was shutting down its Rampart investigation by the end of December. Cooley, a tall, florid-faced career prosecutor, then added that he expected no new indictments between now and then.

It was a stunning public pronouncement, given the magnitude of what had been left uninvestigated, made more stunning by the fact that Cooley had vowed to take the Rampart probe “
as high, wide, and deep as the facts indicated.” Back then there was no reason to doubt him.

During Cooley’s hard-fought campaign to unseat his predecessor, Gil Garcetti, he’d run as a reformer who was going to come into office and change the widespread assumption that LAPD officers could do pretty much what they wanted without fear of indictment.

But it was not to be. As district attorney, the Republican Cooley had been a good, often principled chief prosecutor, and certainly a vast improvement over the Democrat Garcetti, who never saw a law-and-order
political wind to which he did not bend opportunistically rightward. Once in office, Cooley proved to be a stand-up guy, courageously bucking those winds and refusing to prosecute small-time thieves, junkies, and others for petty crimes under California’s three-strikes law, as Garcetti had made a public point of doing. But on the issue of comprehensively investigating Rampart and the LAPD, Cooley’s loyalty proved to be firmly with L.A.’s political and law enforcement establishment—despite the fact that the anterooms of civil rights attorneys in the city were still filled with victims of Rampart-style LAPD abuse.

But an open-ended investigation of the sort he’d promised would have risked alienating a huge portion of the city’s political establishment. And for what? He might have won kudos from civil rights organizations and the press, but any kind of sustained, full-scale investigation would surely have led right back to Cooley’s office. Not to him personally, but to many of his office’s deputy DAs, who ignored and/or missed the pattern of police abuse that was so evident. For decades the DA’s office had allowed itself to be subservient to the LAPD, while its criminal prosecutors became deliberately ignorant or complicit in the lies LAPD officers like Ray Perez were telling on the stand.

Now Cooley’s refusal to pursue a wider probe, like Bernard Parks’s limiting of the Rampart investigation and the missing pages in Ray’s transcripts, smelled like something in that movie
Chinatown
: if you were rich enough, or if the stakes were so big that something
needed
to be covered up, it would be.

**************

Richard Riordan got along fine with Steve Cooley, but he disliked James Hahn even before the consent decree. According to then
L.A. Times
editor Tim Rutten, he thought that Hahn was a weak city attorney, that he lost too many cases, and that the city was paying out too much as a result.

So it was ironic that, when Riordan was termed out in 2001 after eight years in office, it was James Hahn who replaced him as mayor, and that after Riordan had a friendship-breaking dispute with his political guru, William Wardlaw, it was Wardlaw who ran Hahn’s winning
mayoral campaign. Equally ironic was that Wardlaw then helped Hahn manage the big decision about whether or not to rehire Bernard Parks for a second five-year term.

Before Riordan’s Police Commission had selected Parks as chief, he had been Wardlaw’s favorite candidate. But as it became time to punch Parks’s ticket for a second and final five-year term, it had become clear to Wardlaw that Parks had become a liability.

For one thing, Parks would not work cooperatively with James Hahn. He’d become increasingly independent and thought of himself, in Wardlaw and Hahn’s view, as having his own political base. Worse, he treated James Hahn like he did most everyone else—with intellectual condescension. “
Every time I talk with that guy,” Hahn once said, “I feel like I should get college credit.”

Secondly, it was highly probable that Parks might never implement the consent decree, or at the very least was going to drag his heels, causing the city to be in court every other month. That, in turn, would very likely cause the federal judge overseeing the implementation of the decree to impose even more intrusive oversight—a potential disaster that any public official would want to avoid.

So Hahn publicly announced to the city, and most especially his Police Commission, that he would not be supporting another term in office for Bernard Parks. And in April of 2002 an obliging
Police Commission voted 4–1 not to rehire Parks, and shortly thereafter initiated a nationwide search for a new chief.

Summing Up

In July of 2001 Ray Perez was placed on parole after serving two years of his five-year sentence in state prison. He then signed another plea deal, this one with the U.S. Justice Department for violating the civil rights of Javier Ovando and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number, and was sentenced to two additional years in federal prison.