ted at more than 100 members of the infamous 18th Street gang. Then-District Attorney Gil Garcetti promised a continuing investigation into charges of murder, attempted murder, beatings, theft, and other criminal misconduct by officers. Mayor Riordan and other officials endorsed proposals to reinstitute the district attorney's "roll out team," which until 1996 had brought prosecutors to the scene of every shooting by Los Angeles police ("The LAPD: Over creative policing," 1999).
Courtroom testimony by Perez threw considerable light on the scandal at the Rampart Division:
Perez admitted that he and his partner had shot an unarmed, handcuffed 19 year old and planted a rifle on him to cover it up. And then in 2,000 pages of riveting testimony, Perez yanked back a curtain on a dark, dime store novel world in which cops routinely frame the innocent by planting ("throwing down") drugs and guns, smack around ("thump") citizens on the street for kicks and perjure themselves ("join the liar's club") to get convictions (Cohen, 2000, 30).
Some 40 people were identified as having been wrongly convicted, and authorities in Los Angeles had to review some 4,000 more cases. The officers in the CRASH program were acting more like gang members than the real gang members they were supposed to be policing, even to the point of decorating their bodies with tattoos of grinning skulls and awarding themselves gruesome plaques for shooting suspects (Booth, 2000, 48).
Since the scandal began, numerous police agencies have become involved. In February, the FBI joined the civilian police commission, the Los Angeles district attorney's office, the police department's internal affairs unit, and a
special task force in investigating these allegations. Also involved have been an army of private lawyers working for alleged Rampart victims, and by the time all the civil rights lawsuits are resolved, Los Angeles could face hundreds of millions of ...