Word: rampart
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...heart of the scandal is the Rampart division's Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH. Perez is reportedly claiming that 70 to 80 members of this antigang unit were "in the loop," that is, acting a lot like gang members. Among their rituals: decorating their bodies with tattoos of grinning skulls and awarding themselves gruesome plaques for shooting perps...
...Since September, when the LAPD appointed a board of inquiry to investigate misdeeds in its anti-gang Rampart CRASH unit, a portrait has emerged of police power run amok on a horrifying scale. The investigation centers on the testimony of turncoat cop Rafael Perez, a Rampart CRASH officer who squealed after he was caught stealing cocaine from an evidence room. A cover story in Thursday's L.A. Times, for which the paper received exclusive access to Internal Affairs and D.A. documents of Perez's testimony, lists such police infractions as beating and framing innocent people, using deadly force against unarmed...
...department has spared no expense investigating Perez's leads into erroneous convictions. Investigators visited jails throughout California and as far away as South America to corroborate Perez's stories with suspects he said were wrongly convicted, and they have thus far produced 99 cases in which they're confident Rampart CRASH produced bogus convictions. L.A. County D.A. Gil Garcetti believes there could be thousands more, while Parks estimates that the cost of the ensuing lawsuits could run into the hundreds of millions. "When this initially happened," notes Reed, "the people in the Rampart neighborhood came out and supported the police...
Fiercely protective of their reputation, longtime hackers are locked in a love-hate relationship with web site designers, who grudgingly appreciate hackers' talent for pinpointing serious security lapses. "Hacking is generally accepted to be the arena of very smart people," says Stuart McClure, president of Rampart Security Group in Irvine. "Denial of service attacks, like what happened to Yahoo and eBay, are seen as bottom-of-the-barrel assaults; they don't require a lot of brains...
...worst disclosures may be to come. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that in 1996 nine Rampart officers took part in a shoot-out that left one suspected gang member dead and two people wounded. A review board said those shootings were justified, but now Perez says they were "dirty"; cops may have planted guns on those suspects as well. Federal authorities have joined the investigation, which could stretch to Las Vegas, where some Rampart officers may have partied with a fellow cop after he committed a bank robbery. "Sooner or later, the truth will come out," says Gloria...