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McCain steps up attacks on Bush
In his official campaign kickoff, the Arizona senator comes out swinging against the Texas governor and GOP presidential front-runner.
By Jake Tapper
[09/28/99]

Let it be me
Wherein the author travels back in time to encounter "Morris" as he brushes up against "Reagan" -- and the rest is "history."
By David Corn
[09/28/99]

Don't mess with Texas
New evidence in the Waco firestorm may have been leaked as a result of a tiff between the FBI and the Texas Rangers.
By Robert Bryce
[09/27/99]

The myth weavers
Three leading leftist figures have been exposed this year as having lied about their backgrounds. Has the failure of their ideology forced them to fictionalize?
By David Horowitz
[09/27/99]

Columbine: We stand behind the story
Although sheriff's officials have downplayed their role in revealing details about the Columbine investigation, no one has challenged a single fact reported.

[09/25/99]

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In another incident nine cops crash a supposed gang safe house. Ten rounds are fired, all by the cops. One kid dies; another is shot through the chest. Now we find out he was really shot in the back, and the gang members were all unarmed.

The stories go on from there: Innocent suspects beaten till they vomit blood. Evidence fabricated to justify sweeping anti-gang injunctions. Cops dealing dope, perjuring and covering up for each other. An entire elite anti-gang unit running amok while police brass avert their eyes.

One more L.A.-based neo-noir movie? A sequel to "L.A. Confidential"? No such luck. Barely seven years after the most serious domestic civil disturbance in a century, and an equal number of years into what was supposed to be profound police reform, the LAPD is once again bleeding blue all over the evening news.

The cop who got caught with the coke is no fictional character. Former LAPD officer Rafael E. Perez is single-handedly obliterating the infamous code of silence -- dishing all the dirt he can in a frenetic attempt to save his own butt. The result? It's what the Los Angeles Times has called the biggest LAPD corruption scandal in 60 years. But it's worse than that.

What we see in Los Angeles today is the result of the LAPD's persistent refusal to submit to civilian oversight. "You can draw a straight line from the Watts riots to Rodney King's beating right up to the events of last week," says former Police Commission president, Rabbi Gary Greenebaum. 

So far a dozen cops have been suspended and as many as 50 are under investigation. The kid shot through the head, Javier Ovando, has escaped his 23-year prison term -- though he's confined to a wheelchair since the shooting. Two phonied-up gang injunctions have been lifted. And multi-million-dollar civil suits are piling up against the offending officers and the city. 

In what might be the greatest understatement yet mumbled in this affair, City Attorney James Hahn, a leading mayoral candidate, says "this could wind up being very expensive." Literally hundreds of criminal convictions could be overturned by what now appears to be serial police perjury. Meanwhile, internal LAPD investigators, as well as federal and state officials are widening their probe of the department. Former Officer Perez is expected to fill the week of Sept. 27 by continuing to name names and the city fathers are nervously bracing for the worst.

Civil rights attorney Leo Terrel, for example, says he's trying to arrange federal protection for three other cops who want to sing. "They want to talk about planting evidence and about 'kill parties' -- officers getting together to celebrate police killings."

At the epicenter of the scandal is the rough-and-tumble unit known as CRASH -- Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. They now look like some of the biggest hoodlums in the city -- macho police gunmen who rumbled through their mostly Latino territory competing with and shaking down the drug dealers they were supposed to be arresting. Published reports portray the CRASH unit as little more than another gang itself.

New unit members were "jumped in" -- a gang term used for initiation beatings. Other reports tell of CRASH officers shouting gang-like slogans and hanging handcuffs on their rear-view mirrors as a taunt to the local gang-bangers. The "war" on gangs, on crime, on youth was apparently so internalized by CRASH that its members saw themselves as elite warriors exempt and above the normal rules of engagement.

It's all part of what reform-minded former San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara calls a frightening new trend in policing: "A drift toward a military mind set on the national level," he calls it.

Next page | The best hope for reform quit in frustration