WE PLANTED THE SEEDS FOR RAMPART

In a fit of crime hysteria, we licensed cops to wage battle, then we
ignored what they were doing.

Compared to the Rampart Division gangster cop scandal, the Rodney King
beating is a misdemeanor. But, given Los Angeles' past history of police
corruption, Rampart should shock no one. Just call it a year 2000 update of
"L.A. Confidential," the fictional account of L.A.'s all-too-real police
corruption in the 1950s. Nor should anyone be surprised at the limp
response so far of civic and elected officials to the systemic corruption
that Rampart signals.

While fingers are rightly pointing to outlaw cops and every inept body
charged with LAPD oversight, the engines of this injustice did not churn
without the silent assent of the public.

It is arguably the voting public that set those engines in motion.

In a fit of crime hysteria, we licensed cops to wage battle, but only in
poor neighborhoods that aren't ours. And, except for momentary glances
forced by inconvenient videotapes, riots or murder confessions by L.A.'s
finest, we have largely ignored what goes on in the war zone created at our
behest. The same war zone where schools don't work. Where gunned-down kids
evoke no outpouring of concern as did the kids murdered in Columbine. The
same war zone whose residents have gone to prison in droves for drug
offenses that celebrities and politicians chat about with Larry King. The
same war zone whose kids may or may not cross our minds next month when
most of us vote on Proposition 21 to put 14-year-olds in adult prisons.

The predictable corruption and police abuse verdicts are simply the cost of
containing crime within the poor areas miles from our gated enclaves.
Through crime legislation and propositions, we have unleashed a juggernaut
in underclass neighborhoods. Responsive politicians, many of whom rode into
office with Willie Horton strapped to their Hum-Vees, heeded our mandate.
We launched the futile war on drugs not in the cocaine canyons of corporate
and suburban America but in the ravaged alleys of the inner city. In Los
Angeles, we lobbed up the related and equally ill-conceived war on gangs
that spawned the Rampart scandal and branded L.A.'s poorest teenagers
predators.

Even that was not enough.

Californians have passed "three strikes," inflated prosecutors' powers and
imposed rigid minimum sentences that have poor people serving life for
possessing less dope than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush didn't inhale.

We have reduced legal representation for the poor, removed hearings that
safeguarded constitutional rights and limited federal review so that in the
future the execution of innocents on death row will be more likely than
their release.

We have revved up the war-on-crime machine and given our warriors the green
light to search and destroy.

So what? Outlaw cops and mass imprisonment is what. So many urban men are
now in jail that demographers in Los Angeles created a new migration
category called "out-migration to institutions." Whatever you call the
jailing of two-thirds of black and Latino males, most for nonviolent
crimes, it is not something that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have left
unchallenged. And since crime dropped more in places without these
policies, we can't even justify them as necessary.

Voters may not have intended Rampart to happen or foreseen the impact of
our crime wars on our poorest neighborhoods, but we can't claim ignorance.
When a conservative Republican appointee to the 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals concludes that cops routinely lie on the stand and when defense
lawyers commonly encounter police fabrication of evidence against
defendants, the public clearly has chosen to overlook these constitutional
violations.

But are we going to quietly accept the framing of scores of innocent
people? The beating brigades?

Police murder?

Where are our anti-crime crusader politicians now? Where is this city's
Christopher Commission leadership?

In particular, what explains the anemic response from black and Latino
leadership? Except for a few commentators, the response has been
conspicuously muted.

Perhaps Rampart and underclass devastation are beyond minority middle-class
concern.

Perhaps we resent that our strenuous efforts to escape Willie Horton's
shadow are insufficient to escape pullovers for "driving while black."
Perhaps our brilliant, charismatic and African American chief of police has
dazzled us with the illusion that things are being handled.

If Daryl Gates were still chief of police, and the two lead renegade
officers had been white, African Americans would have been marching in the
streets over Rampart. The African American and Latino communities have
known about renegades in CRASH and other specialized units for years.

But so have the LAPD's current leaders--black, white and Latino, all
prodigies of Gates. There is no free pass on systemic corruption just
because the current chief is black.

The silence is deafening.

There should be loud objections. The same LAPD management that aggressively
fights civilian oversight and undermines the commission's inspector general
currently calls the shots in the Rampart investigation. Cops bound by codes
of silence and district attorneys who presided over the imprisonment of
innocent citizens should be disqualified from investigating their friends,
colleagues and themselves. Until a special prosecution team with expertise
in police culture takes over this investigation, we will never know the
scope of corruption or the extent of the metastasis.

Rampart should rock our civic souls.

Instead, it looks like we may pause, but not long enough to see to it that
the engines of injustice we set in motion are finally turned off.