Word: cops
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what have you got for us? It's the question D.A.s always throw back at criminals looking to save their own hides. O.K., then, what bigger fish are you going to help us fry? In this case the perp, Rafael Perez, was a Los Angeles cop accused of stealing 6 lbs. of cocaine from downtown headquarters to sell on the street. If Perez wanted to plea bargain that, he'd better offer something pretty good...
...scandal in Los Angeles history. At the center is the Rampart division--a police station in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods--and its special antigang unit. In the six months since Perez started talking, lurid revelations about law enforcement Rampart-style have emerged almost daily: allegations that cops raped a woman while on duty; accusations that a cop interrogating a handcuffed man beat him until he vomited blood; a fast-growing list of prisoners who were allegedly railroaded with fabricated evidence and police lies...
...bitter feelings of the city's minority communities toward former chief Daryl Gates' department, culminating in the uproar over the 1991 beating of Rodney King. But the Rampart scandal has taken police misconduct to a new level of lawlessness and given currency to a new term: the gangster cop--not much different from the gang members the police are battling. As investigators work to get to the bottom of it all--and to separate the good cops from the bad--a city is wrestling with a larger question: Who will police the police...
Perez has recounted a stunning collection of illegal acts, many as bizarre as they are disturbing. He told of one officer whose car tires were slashed. The cop and his partner tracked down the gang member they believed was responsible and dropped him--naked--in a rival gang's turf. Perez tells of another CRASH officer who shot a suspect repeatedly with a beanbag shotgun--a nonlethal weapon used to knock suspects to the ground...
...feel mildly appalled and wonderfully smug. Whatever our own love life might be, we haven't sunk so low. We assure ourselves, as we watch the bevy of prospective brides, that we never will. Money, we think, isn't everything. And we wonder how much she'll cop in the divorce settlement...