IN LAPD SCANDAL, CHECKERED PAST OF VICTIMS DAMPENS OUTRAGE

Corrupt police vs. gang members in public opinion

Los Angeles -- Raul Rodriguez remembers his 2 1/2 years in prison on murder
and drug charges as a journey through shades of blackness. He refused to
allow his youngest son to visit him. He lost a promising job as a salesman
at a software company. The gangs he had tried to escape by leaving central
Los Angeles surrounded him.

Deepening his despair was the ridicule that he endured from fellow inmates
when he talked about being exonerated.

``I told them, `I think I'm gonna beat this thing,' that I was framed by the
police,'' recalled Rodriguez, 30. ``They laughed and said: `Man, you don't
understand. Nobody beats the cops in this town. Nobody's gonna believe you!'
''

Eventually, Rodriguez indeed was acquitted of the murder charge. He
subsequently served time for drug possession, but he is now free and is
suing the police because, he said, they fabricated evidence against him and
conducted an illegal search. The trumped-up murder charge, he said, led to
his drug conviction.

More important, he has company. His is one of scores of lawsuits charging
the police with a range of abuses in what has already become the largest
scandal in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

With many of the most egregious examples of brutality disclosed, Rodriguez's
case underscores the complex course the scandal is now taking and helps
explain the surprisingly quiescent attitude of the public and many
politicians in response to repeated revelations of unjustified shootings,
beatings, lying and fabricating of evidence by police officers.

Most of the people filing lawsuits are, like Rodriguez, current or former
gang members with arrest records, precisely the kinds of people whom police
officers had been trained to intimidate.

Not only is the public reluctant to express outrage over the mistreatment of
such people, but many of the civil suits emerging are not as clear-cut as
some of the first cases that came to light.

Rodriguez admitted, for instance, that he had marijuana in his home when he
was arrested on the murder charge, but he has insisted the search was
illegal because it was based on evidence fabricated by the police.

In another case, Cynthia Diaz, who admitted that she was addicted to crack
cocaine, is suing the police for breaking into her apartment, stealing
thousands of dollars and various appliances, and forcing her to flee briefly
to Arizona in fear for her life.

In neither case have the police acknowledged wrongdoing, and if the cases
come to trial, they may rely on testimony from people who are still in
prison -- as Diaz's boyfriend is -- or people with criminal records, raising
the same troubling issues of credibility that Rodriguez once confronted in
the darkness of his cell.

No one doubts the depth of the corruption. Some 70 police officers
reportedly are under investigation, and more than 40 convictions have been
or are in the process of being overturned by the office of District Attorney
Gil Garcetti, with the promise of more to come. The city is preparing for
what some estimate could be over $200 million in settlements.

Yet there have been only a few calls for an independent investigation and
little in the way of public demonstrations.

``We're talking about people who belonged in prison, just not for those
reasons,'' a former police official said. ``The police may have stepped over
the line, but they had to be tough with these people -- let's be honest.''

A prosecutor said: ``The broad majority of citizens in this city don't care
that a bunch of drug dealers have been put in jail on trumped-up charges.
The guilty going free is more politically volatile than the innocent being
declared guilty.''

Some reform advocates expressed anger over such attitudes. ``That to me is
so utterly corrupt, so utterly corrosive,'' said Merrick Bobb, a special
counsel to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and a former counsel
to a police reform commission after the beating of Rodney King in the early
1990s. ``That's what's really frightening.''

Bobb and others say they are not optimistic about the prospects for changes,
because of the lack of public reaction.

``There was no video in this instance,'' he said. ``There was no personality
for this to coalesce around. The victims are gang members. They don't
command public sympathy. That has stopped the community from coming together
on this.''

Even so, many experts say the evidence shows he abuses were widespread, and
insist that reforms will be required.

``I don't think this was aberrational at all,'' said Paul Marks, a retired
police captain in Los Angeles, in response to assertions by some police
officials that the abuses were limited to the Rampart Division, a station
west of downtown. ``I was disappointed when this came out, but not
surprised. I'm telling you, this goes on outside Rampart. It's not just
going on at the lower levels of the department. It couldn't be.''

Rodriguez was raised in the Rampart neighborhood by his mother. She worked
two jobs, he said, and he was alone most of the time. He joined one of the
most notorious gangs in the city, the 18th Street gang, he said, in 1982. He
was 12.

He acknowledged that he constantly tangled with police officers from the
anti-gang division. But his problems began in 1996. He had moved in 1994 to
West Covina, a city about 15 miles east of Los Angeles, with his girlfriend
and three children. He got a job as a technical support officer and a
salesman at a software company. He was going to college at night.

But a phone call at 4 a.m. changed all that, he said. Police officers were
on the line, saying his house was surrounded, that they had a warrant for
his arrest and that they wanted him to come out, unarmed, with his hands up.

He said his arrest report was filled with police errors. And the police kept
referring to him, he said, as ``Clever,'' when his old street name had been
``Oso.''

Rodriguez said he came close to accepting a plea agreement and a 10-year
jail term, because of his doubts that the system could ever work for him.

But he decided to fight, and he eventually was acquitted on the murder
charge. But he was immediately imprisoned on charges that when he was
arrested, some marijuana was found. He accepted a plea bargain, he said. In
all, he was in prison from Feb. 5, 1997, until last July.