Civil rights violations by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have been much in the news recently because of the scandal at the Rampart Division in which a number of officers were presenting false evidence and framing innocent citizens. This is not the first time that the LAPD has behaved badly with respect to the civil rights of citizens, and there have been numerous attempts over the years to correct these abuses. The department was corrupt in the 1930s and would be reformed only with the advent of the stewardship of Chief Parker in the late 1940s, though the elimination of overt corruption did not mean there were no problems between the police and the community. The Rampart scandal is raising these same issues once more.
Racism is not only directed at blacks, in a city like Los Angeles, Hispanics are also targeted by racist policies and racist officers. This is not a new phenomenon. The Sleepy Lagoon Case in 1941 was used against Hispanic zoot-suiters and made them into something to fear for their foreign-ness during the war. The Mexican-American community was mobilized in support of the defendants. In June 1943, a riot started in which for ten days Anglo servicemen and civilians clashed in the streets with young Mexican-American zoot-suiters, a riot which at its height involved several thousand people. These riots were quite different from Watts and the 1992 riots in that no one was killed and property damage was minimal, but the riots did generate antagonisms which would continue for decades. The Mexican-American community has been viewed as even lower on the social scale because of the perception that it is largely made up of illegal immigrants. It is also a community that feels the effects of poverty at least as much as the black community if not more. The 1992 riot was the culmination of forces extending back decades. One of those forces was the nature of the police department, which had been professiona...