LAPD - Lessons Learned

The Los Angeles Police Department is in crisis.  Evidence has been accumulating that its anti-gang CRASH Unit has been out of control for several years with the knowledge, silent acquiescence, and sometimes active support of its supervisors and administrators.

How could this happen in a police department that prided itself on professionalism? 

There are three primary reasons:
 

1. The establishment of an autonomous unit like CRASH within a law enforcement agency requires administrative vigilance. 
   
   There is nothing inherently wrong with setting up special purpose teams or units within a police department.  They are most effective when they have specific objectives for which members of the unit need specialized training and/or familiarity with the perpetrators and their methods of operation.  
   
   However, precautions need to be taken when setting up and monitoring specialized units. Los Angeles police administrators should have known when they created a CRASH Unit, that the members of the unit would bond together, work to insulate themselves from the rest of the department, and establish their own informal "code of conduct" that might violate departmental standards and civil and criminal laws.  A myriad of studies on human subjects demonstrate the tendency of people who are working as a team to build a common perception of the environment in which they operate and establish a common view of appropriate and inappropriate behavior - in other words they build their own culture.  There is a tendency for members of special units to view themselves as "we" and people who are not part of the team as "them" even when they are part of a larger structure such as a police department. 
   
   LAPD administrators should have required trainings and exercises to build peer relationships between officers assigned to CRASH and other special units and those not assigned to special units.  The members of the CRASH Unit had their own tattoos, initiation rites, and ethics.  These are signs they felt they were a unique group that had only to live up to the expectation of their peers and not the department as a whole. As some of them are reported to have told youth gang members, they had become a gang of their own.
   
   Another problem that surfaced at LAPD was that the activities of line officers were covered up by their supervisors and, in some cases by their supervisor's supervisor.  Presumably no one at the top administrative level had a clue about what was going on since when it came to light at that level it was investigated. Procedures are needed to ensure administrators know how their specialized units are operating.  One way is to require high-level administrators to build a relationship with line officers, another is for administrators to do periodic "ride alongs" with officers in the special units. 
    
2.  An unbalanced system of justice that gives only lip service to justice for the indigent.
   
   Two breakdowns in the system of justice have come into question as a result of the Rampart Investigation, the first is the system for responding to complaints of police misconduct and the second is the system for prosecuting those accused of crimes.  In both cases the economic status of the individual who was mistreated or wrongly accused, as well as their race, ethnicity, and immigration status played an important role. 
   
   Officers in the CRASH Unit who broke the law would have been quickly identified and disciplined if there was an effective system to detect police malpractice.  They should have been identified through internal affairs investigations, reports from the Community Advisory Councils, and investigations by the Office of the Inspector General.  The overall goal of those systems is to provide people a readily accessible process for making complaints that will be objectively investigated and when justified, to discipline those who abuse their authority and make whatever changes necessary to department policies or procedures to prevent their recurrence.
   
   Had the indigent young Latino immigrants and Latinos who were abused by the CRASH Units accessed the complaint system, had their complaints objectively investigated, and had appropriate action been taken, the abuses of the CRASH Unit would have quickly ended.   While many departments have been strongly committed to an effective system of quality control, until now the LAPD has not recognized its critical importance. 
   
   The other arena where these abuses should have been uncovered was in the judicial system.  One needs to ask why so many (estimates so far exceed 100) victims of police frame-ups and perjury were convicted and incarcerated? 
   
   The defendants did not have the resources to hire attorneys to investigate the circumstances of the crime they were alleged to commit.  Instead they relied on public defenders and court appointed attorneys who barely had the time to meet their clients, let alone investigate the circumstances of their alleged crime. In the unbalanced system of justice it is not a surprise that the defense attorneys did not recognize the inconsistencies of the police versions of events and contest them.  It was the prosecutors who provided unheeded warnings of police set-ups to LAPD according to reports made to the LA Times.  
   
   This crisis provides evidence of the need to reform our adversary criminal justice system to ensure all defendants have access to the resources necessary to defend themselves from bogus charges. 
    
3. The demonization of youth gangs by the Los Angeles Times and other media create a "we-they" social hysteria that feeds into acceptance of a military mentality of taking out the enemy by any means necessary by law enforcement supervisors and administrators.
   
   The social climate fostered by a media that profits from creating fear of the activities of lower-income youth of color helped to create an environment conducive to the abuses of the CRASH Unit.  Articles on drive-by shootings, highly rated television shows on gang violence, "gangsta rap", create the erroneous impression that there is anarchy in low-income communities that threatens to engulf everyone unless extraordinary measures are taken to cage up lower-income youth of color who belong to gangs.
   
   The CRASH Unit apparently viewed themselves as  "the peoples' gang," the one put out there to make the streets safe for the rest of us.  What they did and how they did it was not of concern, the important thing was that they protected "us" from gangs.  There are many in the community who still support those knights in shining armor who killed innocent people, sent innocent people to prison, and perjured themselves on the stand because they do not perceive young people who join gangs as having basic human rights.

Finally, CAHRO works to build locally-based hate violence prevention networks that provide a base for the development of working relationships between community organizations, police and schools.   While these networks do not propose to address law enforcement training and practices that do not impact hate violence, they do open an avenue of communication that can expand to address a broad range of issues.