LA POLICE ROCKED BY NEW CLAIMS OF BRUTALITY

Seven years after police brutality triggered the worst riots in Los Angeles'
history, the city's police department is being rocked by a massive
corruption scandal. Former officers admit fabricating evidence against
suspected gang members, assaulting and shooting suspects without
justification, then framing them for crimes they did not commit.

Twelve officers have been suspended, suspected of crimes from drug dealing
to failure to report flagrant abuses of the law. Glaring questions have been
raised about city officials who gave police units carte blanche to crack
down on gang-infested neighbourhoods without regard for basic human rights.

The affair has reached staggering proportions in a few days, after a former
officer, Rafael Perez, convicted of stealing 8lb of cocaine at the police's
Rampart Division west of downtown, spilt the beans on colleagues in an
attempt to have his sentence reduced.

He said a young Latino man sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for
assaulting police officers during a gang shoot-out three years ago was
framed. Not only was the young man, Javier Ovando, unarmed, he was
handcuffed, beaten and shot at point-blank range in the chest and head.
Perez says his partner, Nino Durden, then planted a rifle on the
19-year-old, who had no previous police record, to make it look as though
the officers had been returning justified fire when they inflicted the
terrible wounds that left Mr Ovando severely paralysed.

The victim, now 22, was released from prison on Thursday and reunited with
the daughter born after he went inside. He will probably spend the rest of
his life in a wheelchair.

It is not known exactly what other evidence has been given by Perez and
others in the past few days, but it is clear the growing circle of officers
implicated by his testimony have themselves begun talking in an effort to
minimise the impact of future prosecution.

The Los Angeles Times, usually a staunch ally of the establishment, carried
allegations over the weekend that police shot the best friend of an alleged
gang member in the back then tried to frame him for the incident.

Perez has described the episode as "dirty", but further details of his
testimony remain unpublished. The highest-profile threat of the scandal is
to city leaders who have sought to gain electoral popularity by cracking
down on gang neighbourhoods and given the police a free hand to be as tough
as they wish.

A city-wide police unit known as CRASH (Community Resources Against Street
Hoodlums), has provoked widespread concern among civil rights groups, as has
a policy of imposing injunctions on suspected gang members, effectively
criminalising individuals and their families without due legal process.

One of the most sweeping gang injunctions in LA is in the Rampart district,
an impoverished, densely populated area roughly divided between Koreans and
Latinos. The new revelations suggest that much of the evidence behind this
and other injunctions might have been fabricated. The man who dreamt up the
injunction policy and turned it into a vogue across the United States is
City Attorney James Hahn. He had hoped to run for mayor next year by
trumpeting the success of his anti-crime initiatives. He is now fighting for
his political life.

The scandal is once again shaking public confidence in the LAPD at a time
when its reputation - left in besmirched ruins by the filmed Rodney King
beating and other instances of brutality that led to the 1992 riots - was
clawing its way back to respectability.

Police chief Bernard Parks, in office since 1997, won plaudits for stamping
out abuse in his first year and a half. But there have been increasing signs
of trouble, including a recent succession of questionable police shootings
now being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although
Chief Parks and his predecessor are African-Americans, the city's minority
populations say they have had little reason to change their view of the LAPD
as an overwhelmingly racist white force that shoots first and asks questions
later.

Many people in poor, crime-prone areas complain that evidence-planting,
harassment and police brutality are routine - an allegation supported
privately by some people in the criminal justice system.

An attempt to impose civilian oversight of the force, introduced in response
to the 1992 riots, has proved only half-successful because of the vagaries
of city politics and because of a sharp decline in the crime rate as the
Californian economy has swung back from depression to boom.

SORRY RECORD OF THE LAPD

* 'Bloody Christmas'

After drinking heavily at a Christmas Eve party in 1951 officers storm into
a cell at Lincoln Heights jail and beat seven young Mexican Americans so
hard the walls are covered with blood. The incident, known as Bloody
Christmas, inspired an episode in the book and film versions of L A
Confidential.

* Choke deaths

After the deaths of some African Americans caught in a police "choke-hold",
Los Angeles police chief Darryl Gates said in 1982: "We may be finding that
in some blacks when [the carotid choke-hold] is applied the veins or
arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people."

* King beating

The beating of Rodney King, an African American stopped for speeding in
1991, is captured on videotape. The four white officers involved are
absolved of wrongdoing in 1992. That sparks the worst riots in Los Angeles'
history.