How do I know they have been murdered? Number one, there have been a significant number of cases in Los Angeles and elsewhere where the victim was not only unarmed but shot several times in the back. And if that wasn’t enough, in several of those cases there were independent witnesses to confirm that the shooting was unjustified. The further proof is that when the DA is almost criminally derelict and refuses to prosecute (see later discussion), the survivors of the murdered victims hire lawyers like Johnnie Cochran to sue the
LAPD
(or other police agencies) for wrongful death. And far more often than not, they win, receiving large awards from juries.
Suits brought against the police for excessive force resulting in injuries short of death are even more common, of course, and it seems as if every few weeks or so here in L.A. the newspapers are reporting a jury verdict or a large settlement for the plaintiff against the police. As I am writing this book, the January 6, 1996, edition of the
Los Angeles Times
reported that Los Angeles County had agreed to pay eighty black and Mexican-American plaintiffs $7.5 million to settle three lawsuits involving forty incidents in which members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were accused of “systematic acts of shooting, killing, brutality, terrorism, house-trashing and other acts of lawlessness and wanton abuse.”
At the time of my writing the article in 1992, I learned that from 1986 through 1990, the city of Los Angeles paid in excess of $20 million in judgments, settlements, and jury verdicts in more than three hundred lawsuits against
LAPD
officers alleging excessive use of force. And in 1991 alone, $14.7 million was paid. These figures don’t even include settlements and verdicts against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department ($15.5 million between January 1989 and May 1992) and the many other local police agencies in the county.
Although the standard of proof in a civil case is lower than in a criminal case (beyond a reasonable doubt), the plaintiff’s lawyer in a civil suit still must prove that the victim’s charges
are true
by a “preponderance of the evidence,” which in itself is a substantial burden. Civil lawyers in these cases routinely prove to juries that an officer caused unjustifiable injury or death (frequently with clear evidence of malicious intent, which qualifies for criminal responsibility). As indicated, many times, the evidence of guilt is so obvious that the city or county settles out of court, as in a relatively recent $1 million settlement described by one Long Beach police officer as a “sheriff’s execution.” Does anyone think the city or county would voluntarily pay amounts like this if it thought the officer or officers were innocent?
A month after the March 3, 1991, beating of Rodney King, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed a seven-member commission (later augmented by three members appointed by
LAPD
chief Daryl Gates) to conduct a comprehensive review of the excessive-force problem in the
LAPD
. The so-called Christopher Commission found “a significant number of
LAPD
officers who repetitively used excessive force” against the public, mostly members of the minority communities.
The commission reviewed eighty-three civil lawsuits against the police and concluded that “a majority of cases involved clear and often egregious officer misconduct resulting in serious injury or death to the victim. The LAPD’s investigation of these eighty-three cases was deficient in many respects, and discipline against the officers involved was frequently light and often nonexistent.”
In a survey conducted by the commission of 650
LAPD
officers, 24.5 percent agreed that “racial bias on the part of officers toward minority citizens currently exists.” And 27.6 percent agreed that prejudice sometimes leads to the use of excessive force.
Among the Christopher Commission’s more shocking findings were computer messages sent between patrol cars over the LAPD’s mobile digital terminals. Although they were obviously far from the norm, there were such transmissions as the following: “I would love to drive down Slausen [a street that runs through South-Central Los Angeles, a heavily black area] with a flamethrower. We would have a barbecue.” “I almost got me a Mexican last night but he dropped the damn gun too quick.” “Capture him, beat him, and treat him like dirt.” “If I find it, it will be [officer-involved shooting] time. God, I wanna kill something oh so bad.” “Wanna go over to Delano later and hand out some street justice.” “It was fun, but no chance to bust heads.” Only after a few of these messages were made public by the commission did the
LAPD
start auditing the system. The
LAPD
then found, per the commission, “260 patently offensive comments over a one-month period.”
The black community knows that in these many cases of police brutality, the offending officer rarely, if ever, tells the truth; he lies, not just out of court, but on the witness stand. And in a very small number of these cases, particularly where they have unlawfully taken the life of a victim, they have planted a deadly weapon, such as a knife or gun, at the victim’s side.
“African-American jurors who live in communities where cops are the enemy don’t have to be educated that police lie,” says Peter Kirscheimer, a onetime Bronx Legal Aid attorney who is now a federal defender in Brooklyn, in an October 4, 1995,
Wall Street Journal
article.
Because of police brutality, and the police lies to cover it up, members of the black community naturally are distrustful of law enforcement. But when the officers lie and plant evidence in these cases,
it’s to protect themselves
when they have violated the law, i.e., it’s self-defensive in nature.
This
is the police misconduct that the black community has experienced throughout the years. Police framing blacks, on the other hand, for robberies, rapes, burglaries, murders, etc., is almost unheard of. In no way has it been a part of the black experience. If it happens at all,
almost invariably
it’s in the area of drug cases—for example, when the police know someone is complicit but he wasn’t in close proximity to the drugs found in the house, and they say he was. This is a very simple and easy frame-up to pull off, and the framing officers justify it in their minds because they feel the person is guilty anyway. Percentagewise, this type of behavior is very, very uncommon, but it does happen.
What is more common is police perjury to justify probable cause to conduct a search of a person or vehicle—again, usually for drugs. Like Customs and
INS
agents at our nation’s borders who become adept at spotting someone who is “dirty” among the vast majority of cars they almost routinely wave through, experienced narcotic officers sense when someone is in possession of illicit drugs. However, they know that what they see often is not enough to justify a search under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, so from time to time they fabricate a “furtive” move on the part of a suspect, such as throwing something out the window or reaching underneath the seat of the car, to justify the search, which turns up drugs, of course. The great majority of officers do not do this. However, prosecutors know that a certain percentage of drug cases they prosecute are most likely predicated on fabricated probable cause. But there’s virtually no way for the prosecutors to know whether the drug case they’re handling is one of them.
It should be added that even in the Deep South in the twenties and thirties, where many innocent blacks were prosecuted and convicted by white juries of serious crimes, according to the books on the subject it was never as a result of an elaborate and complex conspiracy, as would have had to occur even to attempt to frame Simpson for these murders. The convictions were usually in situations where the actual evidence against the black defendant was extremely weak, but aided by lies told on the witness stand by the local sheriff, it was enough for the white jury to convict.
When the Christopher Commission was formed in 1991 to investigate the
LAPD
, it was solely to investigate police brutality and excessive force, not police frame-ups. Why? Because police frame-ups, as I’ve indicated, are almost unheard of. When the black community erupted in violence after the not-guilty verdicts in the first Rodney King trial, Vernon Leggins, a black resident of South-Central Los Angeles, where the riots occurred, said at the height of the riots: “I knew this would happen. A lot of anger has been building up during the years. The way we have been beaten and talked to, this should have happened long ago.” He didn’t say “The way we have been beaten, talked to,
and framed
.” He wouldn’t say this because it is not part of the black experience.
If any of you readers don’t believe me, call Johnnie Cochran’s office in Los Angeles. For over thirty years in Los Angeles, Cochran has been representing black plaintiffs in lawsuits against the
LAPD
, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and other law enforcement agencies. Ask him or his secretary if he can furnish you with the name of just one case in those thirty years where the basis of his lawsuit was not excessive force or some other type of police misconduct, but that his client had been framed by the police on a burglary, robbery, rape, arson, murder, or any other felony.
Without thinking, blacks everywhere were confusing what the defense was alleging in the Simpson case with their own experience of police brutality. “The only thing O.J.’s case has done is it made the majority see what we’ve been saying for years about
police brutality
. They’ve wanted to put their heads in the sand and ignore it,” said Frank Holoman, the black owner of the Boulevard Café in South-Central Los Angeles. And before and after the verdict in the Simpson case, one heard blacks saying it was “payback time.” But payback time
for what
? Being framed? That’s absurd. If this had been a prosecution of a young black man for the killing of a white police officer, one would know what they meant by payback time. But that’s not what this case was.
“What happened to O.J. has been going on for years in our country to black people,” Bonnie Beasley, a fifty-five-year-old black woman in San Francisco told a reporter for the
New York Times
. But
what
has been going on for years? Police brutality, but certainly not frame-ups. Yet, throughout the land, to support their belief that Simpson was framed, blacks could be heard saying things like “If they [the police] did it to me, they probably did it to O.J.” They wouldn’t say “If the police framed me,” just “If the police did
it
to me.” “We always reach out to another black person we perceive as being mistreated by [white police officers] because it has happened to so many of us,” says Darlene Powell Hopson, a black clinical psychologist. But what is
it
that has happened to so many blacks? These blacks and the black Simpson jurors
didn’t bother to stop and think or realize
that the police misconduct being alleged by the defense in the Simpson case, planting evidence and a frame-up, is not what they and their families have been experiencing throughout the years. It was all “police misconduct” in their minds, and the prosecutors never distinguished for them these two very different types of police misbehavior.
How could the prosecutors? As I indicated earlier, the issue completely escaped them, even Darden, who of course is black himself. Not only didn’t Darden see the issue, and therefore was incapable of knocking it down, he made it worse by telling the jury in so many words that what the black community had experienced in the past was no different from what the defense was alleging in this case. Remarkably, he told the jury in his summation: “If you mistrust the police, I understand why you mistrust the police. Perhaps you ought to, but I think we have to take every case on a case-to-case basis”—i.e., just because the police have been framing blacks throughout the years doesn’t mean they framed Simpson in
this
case. Unbelievable.
And in an October 28, 1995, speech at the University of Miami Law School he said the reason for the not-guilty verdict was “the black community’s
bad experiences
with the
LAPD
.” But Chris, what have these bad experiences been? If you think it’s been the
LAPD
framing black people, you’re dead wrong. But of course you don’t think that. The problem, Chris, is that you just weren’t thinking, period, when you said what you did in Miami, and more important, when you let Cochran get by with his exquisite deception at the trial. If the obviously intelligent black prosecutor (and the equally intelligent Marcia Clark) didn’t see this deception at the trial, how could anyone expect the Simpson jurors to have?
The prosecutors in the Simpson case, during their rebuttal, should have pointed out the obvious distinction between the two types of police misconduct and simply told the jurors to look back into their own lives and experiences to see if they or anyone else close to them had ever been framed by the police for a serious crime like rape or murder. It would have been a moment of inevitable enlightenment for the jury. As pointed out earlier, so often in life things are only obvious once they are pointed out.
Just to test my instincts on what happened in this case, I have purposefully engaged several blacks in a conversation about the Simpson case. Whenever they have said that they agreed with the verdict because of all of the trouble they or those close to them have had with the police, or that they didn’t trust the police, or what have you, I have asked them, “
What
trouble?” and “
Why
don’t you trust the police?” The word “frame-up” not once has come from their mouths. What they invariably refer to is police brutality, excessive force, being pushed around, cursed at, and spoken down to. When I then remind them that what the police were supposed to have done in the Simpson case was to frame Simpson, there’s always an uneasy silence. One black man I spoke to at the public tennis courts where I play has a master’s degree in communication from Howard University, perhaps the leading black university in the country. This particular black
does
believe Simpson is guilty, but when I asked him why he believed the predominantly black jury had bought the defense argument that the
LAPD
had framed Simpson, his exact words were: “Sure, they know the police do this type of thing. Look at the beating they gave Rodney King.” When I reminded him that the defense didn’t claim the
LAPD
beat Simpson, they claimed the
LAPD
had framed him, and he wasn’t drawing any distinction between the two types of police misconduct, there was a thoughtful silence.