SQUADS THAT TRIPPED UP WALKING THE BAD WALK

Several days into the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as exhausted police officers
on 12-hour shifts had just about restored order, a patrol supervisor walked
into the Rampart District station house and encountered a scene that made
him angry.

Every member of the precinct's Crash unit, an elite and secretive anti-gang
squad of more than a dozen men, was playing cards or working out. So he
complained to his boss. Two days later his tires were slashed, and someone
confronted him about tattling on the officers of Crash (the acronym for
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). The officer replaced the
tires and they were slashed again. The message, of course, was clear.
Anyone who meddled with this squad would pay a price.

The incident was an example of the Crash culture that fostered such
widespread corruption that the Los Angeles Police Department moved to
disband all of the units last week.

It came just a week after four New York City police officers from a special
squad called the Street Crime Unit were acquitted in the death of Amadou
Diallo, a 22-year-old street peddler killed in a barrage of 41 bullets as
he stood, unarmed, outside his apartment building in the Bronx last year.
Critics have accused the Street Crime Unit of promoting a reckless, cowboy
culture that is separate from the rest of the New York Police Department.
Its unofficial slogan is "We own the night."

But where the New York unit may have been reckless, the Crash members at
the Rampart precinct were almost certainly premeditated criminals,
according to a chilling 362-page report released last week by the Los
Angeles Police Department. They committed widespread perjury, stole and
dealt in illegal drugs. They even shot a handcuffed and unarmed man in the
head. When he survived, they testified against him and he was sent to prison.

There is no indication that the Street Crime Unit was engaged in any such
lawlessness in New York City. Still, critics say that these units
frequently develop problems like those in Los Angeles and New York.

"These specialized units need very close supervision," said Samuel Walker,
a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
"They're just a thousand disasters waiting to happen. They loosen the bonds
of supervision, and it's an invitation to trouble."

Walker, who has written a book on civilian oversight of police departments
that is to be published in the fall, said there is a long history of
problems with special units, "whether it's vice units in the old days, or
street-crime units or gang units." Systemic corruption in New York City's
vice squad, for instance, was brought to light by Frank Serpico, an
undercover detective, in the 1970s, he said.

The current troubles in Los Angeles and New York are vastly different in
scale, but there is an important similarity, Walker said. "In both cases,
the real problem is with the political message they get: Get out there, get
tough and get results, and we're not gonna ask questions about how you do it."

And in both cities, he said, the reactions of the mayors have been weak.
"In New York and Los Angeles, there's sort of this 'drop dead' attitude --
'Go away. We don't have any problems."'

Since the Diallo shooting last year, the Street Crime Unit, which had
operated from a headquarters on Randall's Island, has been reorganized and
its members have been placed under the supervision of local police
commanders throughout the city. The unit had been established in an attempt
to combat the high rate of violent crimes like rape, robbery and murder,
and by all accounts it did just that. But the drop in crime came at a
price. Thousands of innocent people, mostly minorities, were stopped and
questioned, frisked and even arrested by the unit's officers, who dressed
casually in street clothes and rode around in unmarked cars. Officers
joined the unit by volunteering, a practice that, some critics say, can
draw in less mature officers.

In defending the Street Crime Unit last year, Police Commissioner Howard
Safir said that the "unfortunate truth is that communities of color are
disproportionately victimized by violent street crime."

The Los Angeles anti-gang units operated out of local police stations, but
they had little interaction with their colleagues. The Crash officers at
the Rampart Division even wore unique jackets and had special patches; some
of them got identical tattoos. They were so exclusive and stand-offish that
regular officers and supervisors eventually avoided having much involvement
with them, even when calling for backup, the report said.

It is not yet clear whether the problems extend to the Crash units outside
the Rampart area, said Zev Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles County commissioner.
But it is clear, he said, that the practices of the Rampart Crash Unit were
well known among many officers in other locations. "People all over the
place were trying to get into this unit," Yaroslavsky said. But officers
could join only if they were sponsored by someone already in the unit. "To
get into Rampart Crash, you had to pledge like a fraternity," he said.

The ultimate result of the Crash scandal will be a serious undermining of
the criminal justice system in Los Angeles and elsewhere, Yaroslavsky said.

Merrick Bobb, a special counsel to Los Angeles County on police matters,
said last week's report indicates that the Rampart squad was "essentially a
lawless unit." The problems in New York are different, he said. But the
combination of the Diallo shooting and the attack on Abner Louima, who was
assaulted by police officers in a station house bathroom in New York, as
well as the Rodney King beating and the current scandal in Los Angeles,
have "revived interest in the question of how we police and what the most
effective methods of civilian oversight are."