Rampart Scandal
The Rampart Scandal
When officers from the Los Angeles Police Department's Internal Affairs bureau began shadowing Rafael Perez, watching their fellow cop steal massive amounts of cocaine from evidence lockers in order to sell it on the street, investigators thought they had a major misconduct case on their hands. They didn't know the half of it.
The perception of the Los Angeles Police Department has ranged from being the best police force in the United States to being a blatant racist agency. The scandals that have surrounded the agency have taken a toll on the image of the department, The Rampart scandal added to community mistrust of the LAPD, overturned 100 criminal cases, cost the city upwards of tens of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of abuse and led to a federal consent decree, which places a series of restrictions on the way gang details operate, forcing gang officers and their commanders to do far more procedural work.
Introduction
One city councilman has described the Rampart scandal as "the worst manmade disaster in Los Angeles history". Finding out who was resposible for such a breakdown in an agency that is to "Protect and Serve" led to an outright blame game. Some blamed the LAPD Chief at the time Bernard Parks; others blamed the officer's attitudes and the police subculture that would allow such a debacle to take place.
Police Corruption
For as long as there have been police there has been police corruption (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 1.
Corruption has been documented as early as the 1800's, while police departments often had strong rivalries and political and religious factions, in this era, the officers banded together routinely committing perjury to protect fellow officers against civil complaints.
Since this time headway has been made to deter police corruption in the early 1970's the Knapp Commission 1973 report stated that there are two types of...
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