Gangsta Cops.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Police corruption in Los Angeles, California - Brief Article

While police brutality in New York and-finally--law enforcement abuses at Waco have attracted national press coverage, a massive cop scandal in Los Angeles has garnered relatively little attention outside Southern California. Within L.A., however, the expanding circle of revelations and allegations is regarded as the worst police scandal since the 1930s, when the thin blue line essentially served as the enforcement arm of the city's infamous patron age system.

At the center of the new scandals is Rafael Perez, an officer in the antigang CRASH unit. (The now-ironic acronym stands for "Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.") Perez had been convicted of stealing $1 million worth of cocaine from the evidence room and, in exchange for a lighter sentence, he implicated fellow cops in a host of other crimes. The most notorious: the time Perez and his partner handcuffed an unarmed teenager, shot him in the head, planted a rifle near his body, and then claimed they had acted in self-defense. Their victim...