Rampart scandal

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Los Angeles Police Department: Rampart Division

Rampart scandal

United States history

Written by Todd E. Bricker

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Date:: 1998 - 2000

Location:: California; Los Angeles; United States

Key People:: Daryl F. Gates

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Rampart scandal, official inquiry (1998–2000) into corruption among officers of the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). More than 70 officers were implicated in misconduct, including unprovoked beatings and shootings, planting and covering up evidence, stealing and dealing drugs, and perjury.

The Rampart Division of the LAPD, located west of downtown Los Angeles, was the most populous area of Los Angeles and had a primarily Latino population. It was also one of the busiest divisions in terms of calls for service and criminal activity. In the late 1970s and 1980s the area experienced an increase in violent crime, particularly crime involving gangs, drugs, and weapons. To combat the rising violent gang crime, the department, then headed by Chief Daryl Gates, created a group of elite antigang units called CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). The type of officers who were selected for those units were those not afraid to talk to gang members; Gates intended the officers to mix with gang members in order to gather intelligence to be used for the prevention of violent crime.

According to some measures, CRASH was very successful in reducing crime, and CRASH officers were gratified because they were no longer tied to the radio (handling calls for service) and no longer had to wear uniforms. CRASH developed a culture of its own in which officers began emulating gang members in dress and manner. They had a reputation among Los Angeles street gangs as being tough and promoting violence and, it was later to emerge, many of them succumbed to the temptation to engage in corrupt behavior such as stealing and selling drugs.

Such illegal behavior continued for several years until it came to official notice. In May 1998, after concerns surfaced about the actions of some officers, LAPD Chief of Police Bernard Parks named an investigative task force. Its attention came to focus on one CRASH officer in particular, Rafael Perez. Perez was arrested in August on suspicion of having stolen 8 pounds of cocaine valued at more than $1 million from a police evidence locker in 1998. As a part of a plea agreement for a reduced sentence, he agreed to cooperate with investigators and provided information on more than 70 officers, including police supervisors who committed corrupt acts or allowed them to occur.

Perez testified in court that CRASH officers essentially became a gang. They wore skull tattoos with cowboy hats and poker cards portraying the dead man’s hand of aces and eights. In addition to reporting the theft of money and drugs, Perez described some of the horrific actions that he claimed police officers in the CRASH unit committed. Some of the more chilling allegations were that officers had murdered or attempted to murder innocent people and planted weapons on them to cover up the crimes. One example was the police shooting of a man, Juan Saldana, while he was running in an apartment hallway. Saldana fell to the floor and the officers planted a gun on him to justify the shooting. Officers then fabricated a cover-up story while Saldana bled to death. Other innocent victims were paralyzed or served time in prison on trumped-up charges. These crimes, according to Perez, were celebrated and rewarded by CRASH supervisors.

Officers were able to operate undetected because they insulated themselves from “by the book” officers and supervisors. For an officer to become a CRASH member, he or she needed to have a CRASH member as a sponsor. Even after being selected, a new member’s behavior was monitored to make sure that he or she was not a snitch. There were also tests of planting weapons in which new members had to participate in order to show their loyalty to the CRASH unit. Eventually the corruption within the Rampart Division became well known within the force, and law-abiding officers transferred out of the division while corrupt officers requested transfers in. Little was done to curb the corruption because the units were reducing crime in the area. Because of Perez’s cooperation with investigators, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison and received immunity from further prosecution. He was released from prison in July 2001.

The racial and ethnic implications of these events were evident to many observers. The victims of the police killings and woundings, and those who were routinely arrested on fabricated evidence and charges, were young, poor, working-class, African Americans or Latinos, some of whom were recent immigrants. Members of those minorities consistently felt victimized by the police. Racial tensions were already running high between citizens and police in the aftermath of the 1991 Rodney King beating by several Los Angeles police officers and the subsequent acquittal of three of the officers in 1992, which sparked 4 days of violent riots in Los Angeles.

During the entire Rampart investigation—conducted by a board of inquiry convened in September 1999 by Chief Bernard Parks—there was, however, no mention of race or ethnicity as factors contributing to the corruption. The board’s report, issued in March 2000, named a lack of managerial oversight and a failure to properly review reports as the primary causes of the Rampart corruption. Policy recommendations called for an increase in the number of internal affairs officers and the increased use of the polygraph during the hiring process in order to weed out corrupt applicants.

As a result of the scandal, the City of Los Angeles faced more than 140 civil lawsuits with an estimated settlement cost of $125 million. The investigation resulted in the overturning of more than 100 cases and the uncovering of corruption in many more.

Todd E. Bricker

police brutality in the United States

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Los Angeles Riots of 1992: National Guardsman standing watch

police brutality in the United States

Written by Leonard Moore

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Last Updated: Jun 17, 2025 • Article History

police brutality in the United States, the unwarranted or excessive and often illegal use of force against civilians by U.S. police officers. Forms of police brutality have ranged from assault and battery (e.g., beatings) to mayhem, torture, and murder. Some broader definitions of police brutality also encompass harassment (including false arrest), intimidation, and verbal abuse, among other forms of mistreatment. See also list of race riots and massacres in the United States.

African Americans and police brutality

Americans of all races, ethnicities, ages, classes, and genders have been subjected to police brutality. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, poor and working-class white people expressed frustration over discriminatory policing in northern cities. At about the same time, Jewish and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe also complained of police brutality against their communities. In the 1920s many urban police departments, especially in large cities such as New York and Chicago, used extralegal tactics against members of Italian-immigrant communities in efforts to crack down on organized crime. In 1943 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were complicit in attacks on Mexican Americans by U.S. servicemen during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, reflecting the department’s history of hostility toward Hispanics (Latinos). Regular harassment of homosexuals and transgender persons by police in New York City culminated in 1969 in the Stonewall riots, which were triggered by a police raid on a gay bar; the protests marked the beginning of a new era of militancy in the international gay rights movement. And in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans began to voice complaints about police brutality, including harassment and racial profiling. Many local law-enforcement agencies launched covert operations of questionable legality designed to surveil and infiltrate mosques and other Muslim American organizations in an effort to uncover presumed terrorists, a practice that went unchecked for at least a decade.

Notwithstanding the variety among groups that have been subjected to police brutality in the United States, the great majority of victims have been African American. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of African Americans among victims of police brutality is antiblack racism among members of mostly white police departments. Similar prejudices are thought to have played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups.

Whereas racism is thought to be a major cause of police brutality directed at African Americans and other ethnic groups, it is far from the only one. Other factors concern the unique institutional culture of urban police departments, which stresses group solidarity, loyalty, and a “show of force” approach to any perceived challenge to an officer’s authority. For rookie officers, acceptance, success, and promotion within the department depend upon adopting the attitudes, values, and practices of the group, which historically have been infused with antiblack racism.

Because African Americans have been the primary—though certainly not the only—target of police brutality in the United States, the remainder of this article will deal mainly with their experiences, both historically and in the present day.

The Great Migration

Interactions between African Americans and urban police departments were initially shaped by the Great Migration (1916–70) of African Americans from the rural South into urban areas of the North and West, especially following World War II. Most white communities, including white police departments, were unaccustomed to the presence of African Americans and reacted to their increasing numbers with fear and hostility, attitudes that were exacerbated by deeply ingrained racist stereotypes. Reflecting the beliefs of many whites, northern police departments acted upon the presumption that African Americans, and especially African American men, possessed an inherent tendency toward criminal behavior, one that required constant surveillance of African Americans and restrictions on their movements (segregation) in the interests of white safety. Accordingly, by the mid-1950s many urban police departments had implicitly reconceived their missions as essentially that of policing African Americans—i.e., protecting whites against Blacks.

The forms of police brutality to which this situation gave rise were variable and generally not limited to physical assault (e.g., beatings) and excessive use of force. They also included unlawful arrests, verbal abuse (e.g., racial slurs) and threats, sexual assaults against African American women, and police homicides (murders of civilians by police). Police were also sometimes complicit in drug dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling within African American neighborhoods.

Although police brutality against African Americans had become a serious problem in many urban areas by the mid-20th century, most whites remained unaware of it until about the mid-1960s, in large part because most large-city newspapers (whose readerships were primarily white) did not consider it newsworthy. In contrast, incidences of police brutality were regularly covered in the Black press from the early 20th century, frequently in front-page articles. Likewise, local and national civil rights organizations collected thousands of affidavits and letters from African Americans documenting their direct experiences of police brutality.