Has the LAPD Really Gotten Better Since the '90s?

Decades after Rodney King, police brutality and accountability is still in the national spotlight. Has the LAPD really changed?

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Somehow, against all odds, FX miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson didn’t sate America’s thirst for the Juice. Against even greater odds, the latest injection of Simpson into the zeitgeist has been phenomenal. ESPN’s mini docu-series O.J. Simpson: Made in America chronicles the former athlete from his college ball days to his current imprisonment, and all that messy business in between.

One crucial element of Simpson’s story was the infamous low-speed white Bronco chase, in which the LAPD tailed Simpson from Orange County to his Brentwood home—the pursuit broadcast in real-time on every major network in the country. Though this chase would become the foundation of a now-beloved Los Angeles tradition of stopping whatever you’re doing to turn on the TV any time a police chase happens, it was much more dire for the citizens and department at the time. This was the third time in as many years that the eyes of the nation were focused on the LAPD. With this historical moment fresh in our minds, now is as a good a time as any to conduct a review of the LAPD's track record, spanning from the department's drama, brutality, and corruption of the early '90s to today. In the past couple of years, the public spotlight on police brutality and behavior, nationwide, has intensified. This scrutiny begs the question: Has the LAPD really gotten better since the '90s? Or do they remain, like many other departments across the United States, yet another broken institution? 

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Only a few years prior to Simpson’s 1994 chase, the Rodney King incident had dragged the reputation of the department through the mud and into the national spotlight. After a bystander video surfaced of officers beating King with batons, mayor Tom Bradley founded the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (also known as the Christopher Commission) to audit the department. Despite the commission finding a lack of accountability from commanding officers for excessive force used by their reports, the officers seen beating King on tape were acquitted in 1992 by a predominantly white jury, sparking city-wide riots that resulted in more than a billion dollars in property damage, and further straining relationships between the LAPD and Angelenos.

The department squandered what little of the public's trust it had when officers planted a gun on a suspect in 1996 after shooting him in the back, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. When one of the officers confessed, years later, that he and his partner had lied in their testimonies, the paralyzed man was released from prison, awarded $15,000,000 of taxpayer money, and a web of LAPD corruption years in the making began to unravel.

What would come to be know as the Rampart scandal—named for the law enforcement division where it transpired—involved the two gun-planting officers above, but would ultimately find 70 officers indicted on charges ranging from unprovoked shootings to drug dealing to bank robbery. With noble beginnings as an anti-gang endeavor, the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) Unit—formed in 1979—soon devolved into the very sort of gang it was meant to eradicate. But this gang had the funds, arsenal, and protection of the LAPD on its side. The unit was dissolved in 2000.

When one of the officers confessed, years later, that he and his partner had lied in their testimonies, the paralyzed man was released from prison, awarded $15,000,000 of taxpayer money, and a web of LAPD corruption years in the making began to unravel.

Trials over the scandal stretched into the new millennium—and though many officers involved were brought to justice—rapes and murders attributed to the unit remain unanswered for. Hell, some conspiracy theories tie the murder of Notorious B.I.G. to the scandal. Heads rolled amongst the LAPD brass in the wake of the exposure—most notably the ousting of Chief Bernard Parks, who was replaced by NYC’s Bill Bratton.

This is the point in the LAPD’s history where things ostensibly take a turn for the better. Bratton, a no-nonsense chief who subscribed to the broken window theory of policing, cracked down hard on corruption within the department and ushered in sweeping reforms that lowered instances of violent crime, and raised the department’s favorability percentages in minority communities. But asthe Nation points out in its 2013 dissection of Bratton’s L.A. tenure, the above statistics were mostly the result of a racist and draconian shift than an idyllic one. Unconstitutional “stop and frisks” (which Bratton keeps alive in New York today) were practiced across the department, instances of non-lethal force climbed (specifically in black and Latino communities), and, to cap it all off, Bratton seemed to be jet-setting out of the city constantly.

The Bratton era ended in 2009 with only a few unsavory incidents, and they paled in comparison to the scandals of ‘90s. L.A. was, by most accounts, a safer place for the average citizen. Concurrently, with the internet and cameras an increasingly integral part of officer and civilian interactions, corruption had fewer places to hide. But then a 2013 incident put a magnifying glass back on the LAPD and brought into question all the supposed progress Bratton and recent generations of LAPD officers had made.

Officer Christopher Dorner was let go for what the department deemed “false statements” against his training officer, who he’d attempted to turn in for excessive force. Dorner responded by releasing a manifesto against the department and killing two people in what was the start of a revenge killing spree.

The LAPD was apoplectic and started a state-wide manhunt for Dorner that even stretched into Mexico. In their frenzy to kill the man, spooked officers opened fire on a truck with two innocent women inside, neither of whom matched Dorner’s suspect description of black and male.

After 12 days of searching, a final standoff between police and Dorner took place in a mountain cabin in Big Bear Lake, Calif. The ensuing shootout resulted in the cabin catching fire due to pyrotechnic tear gas canisters. Naturally, the “take no prisoners” conduct and conclusion of the whole affair led conspiracy theorists to believe that the LAPD was not looking to take Dorner in alive, lest he talk to the media and expose corruption.

So, while they’re not the Wild West of the ‘40s or the corrupt, violent gangs of the ‘90s, how much better has the LAPD actually become at doing their job with both efficacy and integrity? That’s hard for a white male like me, residing well above I-10, to qualify.

Today, the LAPD is still battling demons, though these seem to come more in the form of "lone wolf" bad cops than systemic malfeasance. There is still some hemming and hawing over the issuing of department-wide mandatory body cams, which seem an inevitability for departments around the country at this point. The LAPD is, as far as one can tell, striving for accountability.

As union leader and police veteran Craig Lilly noted in a 2015 press conference, "We're still just one crisis away from people saying, 'See? There's the old LAPD again.'"

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