LAPD Rampart Division Trial: 2000

During the 1980s, gang violence dramatically rose in Los Angeles. Various factors caused this problem, including high unemployment, a dramatic increase in rent and other living expenses, cutbacks in education and health care, and a 40 percent poverty rate among the city's youth. To combat the violence, the LAPD formed anti-gang units at each of its divisions, including the one in Rampart. These units were known as CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). The officers assigned to CRASH were to be the elite of the city's police force.

In 1996 Rafael Perez, a six-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police, joined the Rampart Division's CRASH unit. However, he was arrested two years later for stealing eight pounds of cocaine (worth approximately $1 million) from the Rampart station's evidence locker. On September 15, 1999, Perez pleaded guilty to the charge. In exchange for a reduced sentence and immunity for other crimes he participated in, Perez agreed to help investigators uncover widespread abuse in the Los Angeles Police Department's CRASH units.

Perez admitted to witnessing or participating in unjustified arrests, shootings, and beatings of suspects. He also claimed to have seen or taken part in the planting of drugs, guns, and other evidence on suspects, filing false police reports, witness intimidation, and giving false testimony in court to obtain convictions. Perez indicated that he and his partner, Nino Durden, framed up to 99 people for crimes that they did not commit. He also said that 75 percent of the convictions arising from the arrests by the Rampart Division's CRASH unit were tainted by police misconduct. Furthermore, according to Perez, such abuses happened not just at the Rampart Division, but at all of the CRASH units and that up to 90 percent of the officers assigned to CRASH were involved. (Indeed, the investigators quickly expanded their scope to look into the actions of the other LAPD divisions.)

According to Perez, he and the others who broke the law did so to wipe out gang violence in the city's toughest neighborhoods. "What we did was wrong" he admitted, but "we were out there fighting a war.… We felt that in our own way we saved lives." In one court hearing, Perez testified that "our mentality was, it's us against them.… They didn't play fair, so we didn't play fair.… One way or another, we were going to get the Rampart crime rate down."

During the next 18 months, over 100 criminal convictions were overturned and several people were released from prison on the grounds that, according to Perez' allegations, they did not commit the crimes that they were convicted of. (Some experts predict that, in the end, up to 30,000 other convictions may have to be reexamined and that the entire process will take years and millions of dollars to complete.) In addition, the city of Los Angeles agreed in November 2000 to pay $15 million to Javier Francisco Ovando for being unjustifiably shot and then falsely accused by Perez and Durden of assaulting a police officer. (Ovando was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for that alleged crime and he served 30 months before his conviction was overturned.) That same month, the Los Angeles City Attorney's office agreed to pay $10.9 million to 29 other people who had been falsely imprisoned for up to three years because of tainted evidence or perjured testimony from officers in the LAPD's Rampart Division. As of the end of 2000, 64 other lawsuits had been filed related to the scandal, more were being prepared, and up to 200 others are expected. Estimates of the eventual total of civil damages against the city go as high as $200 million.

Perez's revelations also raised the possibility that civil actions in federal court may be brought against the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police. On August 29, 2000, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that people whose civil rights have been violated by officers at the Rampart Division could sue the LAPD under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. One month later, the city agreed to allow the U.S. Department of Justice to review the LAPD's administration, training, and street operations for five years in order to avoid a lawsuit by the federal government against the Los Angeles Police for civil rights abuses and police wrongdoing.