O.J. JURY KNEW THE SCORE

The Occupying Army Of Police Became A Law Unto Itself, Spawning Cynicism In
The 'Hood.

Now we understand why O.J. was acquitted.

Now we know why a jury of his racial peers--drawn from a community with a
long history of abuse at the hands of the Los Angeles Police
Department--would take his word over the police and blithely accept that
damning evidence of guilt could have been planted by the cops.

The scummy truth seeping out of the LAPD's Rampart Division is a shocker to
most of us who have never experienced the dark side of law enforcement. But
others, particularly in the minority community, know well the double
standard, the racial profiling, the planting of evidence, the us-them
mentality in which the end justifies the means--and the end is framing you.

At the time of the O.J. Simpson verdict, it seemed bizarre to many of us
that a jury could conclude that officers of the law had conspired to frame
an innocent man. If that trial were held today, the once-scorned arguments
of Johnnie Cochran would appear far more plausible.

With nearly each new edition of The Times, there is further proof of a
police department routinely wreaking mayhem on a minority community without
the slightest adherence to the norms of judicial due process.

Already in the early stages of this investigation, at least 20 officers have
been relieved of duty and more than 30 convictions overturned. Police Chief
Bernard C. Parks has called for the dismissal of 99 defendants in 57 cases,
and the district attorney's office has conceded that the number of tainted
cases may run into the thousands.

Yet the tendency on the part of top city officials is to treat these
horrifying events--in which innocents were shot by the police and guns and
drugs were planted on suspects as evidence, resulting in long prison
sentences--as a minor blemish on the city's pattern of law enforcement. It
is nothing of the sort.

The Rampart Scandal Is Not An Anomaly.

What is unusual is that it only came to light thanks to a corrupt cop who
cut a deal and admitted to his and other officers' participation in
drug-dealing and the shooting of innocents. The story might have died there
if not for the reporting of Scott Glover and Matt Lait of The Times, which
has led to the unraveling of the most extensive practice of police abuse in
the history of the city and perhaps the nation.

As has occurred elsewhere in the nation, the war on drugs led to the
corruption of a cadre of police officers who could not resist the temptation
to cream off drug profits, even if it meant that innocent people were sent
to prison.

This war mentality, in which all young men in the neighborhood were lumped
together as drug-selling gang members, defined the local inhabitants as the
enemy.

The occupying army of the police became a law unto itself, free to steal and
sell drugs and, at least in one reported instance, to push this contraband
on one of their snitches.

The insanity of the drug war, with its bloated profits for dealers and
police alike, including the legally sanctioned asset seizures and lavish
government funding, has created a cesspool of corruption. In the fight for
the ill-gotten spoils, police-engineered mayhem came to set the prevailing
tone.

The culture of police violence is so pervasive in Los Angeles that,
according to The Times, "An organized criminal subculture thrived within the
Los Angeles Police Department, where a secret fraternity of anti-gang
officers and supervisors committed crimes and celebrated shootings by
awarding plaques to officers who wounded or killed people." But such a
culture, involving dozens of officers, could only fester in a larger sea of
contempt for the rights of a citizenry the department is sworn, according to
its motto, to serve and protect.

This is not a reality that the power elite of the city has been willing to
confront. Most top officials in law enforcement and government still want it
to just go away. It is a horror story barely acknowledged by local
television news.

But This Is A Story That Cannot Be Ignored.

What is occurring in Los Angeles is being replicated throughout the nation.

It is an inevitable outcome of the drug war that has taken civil liberty as
its first casualty. Much like the early 20th century war to prohibit the
sale of alcohol, the freedom of the citizen comes to be more threatened by
the zealotry of the police than the actions of the criminals they are
ostensibly pursuing.

The natural outcome is the cynicism toward police that we witnessed in that
O.J. jury.

Once cops get into the mood of framing the innocent, who's to say that
you're not next? Oh really, that wasn't your little bag of illicit drugs in
your car trunk?

Tell us about it as we put on the cuffs.