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Peter J. Boyer is a writer for The New Yorker and FRONTLINE
correspondent for "L.A.P.D. Blues." This article was reported with Rick Young, co-producer of "L.A.P.D. Blues." Copyright The New Yorker, 2001; reprinted with
permission.
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On September 8, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles police officer named
Rafael Perez, who had been caught stealing a million dollars' worth of cocaine
from police evidence-storage facilities, signed a plea bargain in which he
promised to help uncover corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department.
Perez hinted at a scandal that could involve perhaps five other officers,
including a sergeant. Later, Perez began to talk about a different magnitude
of corruption -- wrongdoing that he claimed was endemic to special police units
such as the one on which he worked, combating gangs in the city's dangerous
Rampart district. Perez declared that bogus arrests, perjured testimony, and
the planting of "drop guns" on unarmed civilians were commonplace. Perez's
story unfolded over a period of months, and ignited what came to be known as
the Rampart scandal, which the Los Angeles Times called "the worst
corruption scandal in L.A.P.D. history."
Eventually, Perez implicated about seventy officers in wrongdoing, and the
questions he raised about police procedure cast the city's criminal-justice
system into a state of tumult. More than a hundred convictions were thrown
out, and thousands more are still being investigated. The city attorney's
office estimated the potential cost of settling civil suits touched off by the
Rampart scandal at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. A city
councilman, Joel Wachs, said that it "may well be the worst man-made disaster
this city has ever faced." The Rampart scandal finally broke the L.A.P.D. in a
way that even the Rodney King beating, in 1991, and its bloody aftermath had
not...(continue: read the full article on The New
Yorker web site.)
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