Crime, Poverty Test Rampart Officers' Skill

By ANNE-MARIE O’CONNOR, ANTONIO OLIVO and JOSEPH TREVINO

Nov. 10, 1999 12 AM PT

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

If there is any place that tests the character of Los Angeles police, it is in the neighborhoods west of downtown, where Rampart Division officers are sworn to protect many of the city’s most powerless residents against some of its most violent.

A complex mix of gangs, violence and poverty in the crowded Pico-Union and Westlake districts makes policing there an unmatched challenge. And now, officers asked to balance demands for tough enforcement with fair treatment are suspected of wide-spread brutality and corruption in the unfolding Rampart station scandal.

Two former Rampart officers are accused of shooting an unarmed 19-year-old Honduran immigrant--a gang member left paralyzed by his injuries and then falsely imprisoned. There is a widening investigation of other suspected shootings, as well as allegations that police ripped off neighborhood drug dealers for profit. So far, more than a dozen officers have been relieved of duty.

Despite the allegations, a vocal group of merchants and residents praises Rampart officers, giving them credit for reducing crime.

“There was a time when families and kids could not go outdoors because gang members were waiting to jump on them,” said Bertha Wooldridge, who has lived in Westlake for 37 years.

But others report long-standing troubles with Rampart police, including random stops and confrontations over minor offenses that they say escalate into beatings and detention. Rampart’s many Latino officers--about 40% of the station’s force--are supposed to bring increased cultural understanding to their job. But many citizens complain that they are among the most heavy-handed and capricious.

Some illegal street vendors say even Latino officers call them “wetbacks” as they confiscate their cash and goods. These vendors complain of police asking them, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?”

A few people allege that police have framed them for crimes they did not commit--ending their chances of obtaining or keeping legal immigration status.

High Concentration of Latino Immigrants

The eight square miles assigned to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division has one of the state’s highest concentrations of Latino immigrants, according to U.S. census data. Most are hard-working newcomers, vulnerable to mistreatment: An arrest can destroy the chances of getting U.S. citizenship; the wrong word to a gang member can draw a beating or a bullet.

The neighborhoods policed by Rampart officers are the city’s densest, marked by blocks of deteriorating apartments and storefronts, where drug dealers and fruit vendors often peddle their wares on the same crowded sidewalks. Unlike in other parts of the city, much of life here is conducted outdoors by thousands on foot.

Residents say they often feel they are walking a gantlet. As night falls, nannies, construction workers and gardeners trudge home from bus stops. They step carefully around drug punks who have converted MacArthur Park into a narcotics supermarket. They avoid eye contact with gang members who collect rent from pushers and shoot one another over trifles. Police helicopters drone overhead each night, pointing searchlights below.

Mexican-born Police Sgt. Rick Arteaga said many officers feel compassion for hard-working immigrants but must balance it with their duties. Police say that too often, Latinos breaking the law expect special treatment from Latino police.

“They feel you’re Hispanic and that you should take care of your own,” said Arteaga, a fluent Spanish speaker. “Oftentimes, these illegal vendors try to put some kind of guilt trip on our Hispanic officers--that you are harassing your own people. We’re just doing our jobs.”

Others allege that officers who would walk on eggshells in Brentwood run roughshod over the working poor here.

‘I Have Never Been So Offended’

Al Pina, 36, who moved to Pico-Union in August to become vice president of the Community Development Corp., said he was surprised to see police search young men seemingly at random. On Sept. 1 he was stopped by three officers who restrained him, held a gun on him and searched him, he said.

One officer, David Solis, told him he “fit the profile of a drug dealer,” Pina said.

“I have never been so offended in my life,” said Pina, a clean-cut former Air Force sergeant who supports police efforts to combat gangs.

Solis said he did not recall the encounter.

Sgt. Armando Perez, the community relations supervisor for Rampart, said, “Our guys don’t, as a practice, use profiling.”

Juan Jimenez, 20, a United Parcel Service stock clerk, said he has been stopped and handcuffed by police at least 12 times this year on the way to night school or en route to his volunteer job tutoring children.

Once he got mugged and called police. The officers who responded, Jimenez said, handcuffed and searched him.

“I’m used to it,” he said. “They ask me if I gangbang. I say no. They throw me in a car and run my name through a computer. It comes up clean. They let me go.”

Sgt. Perez said he is distressed “to think someone who was handcuffed and searched would say they’re used to it and it’s part of living in this area.”

For many Rampart-area newcomers, Los Angeles police officers are the face of American government, and their impressions have lasting effects, said Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.

“Migrants come bearing the American dream: Work hard, and with a lot of luck and skills you can make it all the way to the top,” he said. “When they run into situations where there is overt corruption and brutality, it tarnishes this dream.”

Rudy de Leon, a former LAPD captain who ran the Hollenbeck station in Boyle Heights and is now the county’s law enforcement ombudsman, said problems often stem from inexperienced officers, most of whom grew up in more affluent neighborhoods.

“Then they graduate from the academy and go to an ethnic, minority area and walk into a house with dog feces or something in the frontyard,” he said. “They go home and say: ‘It’s a jungle out there. Those people are animals.’ ” If someone questions their authority, he said, young officers “want to show bravado and power. And that power slaps people in the face.”

Although they share a Latino ancestry with residents, most Latino officers who work at Rampart grew up in the United States, live in distant suburbs and earn incomes that put them a world apart.

Illegal Vendors Can Create a Quandary

Few residents seem to test the LAPD’s community policing skills more than the illegal vendors. The unlicensed food stalls, which are banned by health authorities, support many families on the economy’s bottom rung. Storefront merchants complain that they create unfair competition.

“All the reasons these people have for selling on the street are admirable,” said Sgt. Arteaga. However, “we’re caught in the middle,” he said. “If your mom and dad owned a restaurant in the area and worked hard all their lives selling Mexican food, is it right for someone to start selling tamales on the corner in front of the restaurant?”

Neighbors say they have seen some vendors sell marijuana and other illegal drugs. Police say some vendors hold cash for drug dealers or illegally sell over-the-counter drugs.

While on patrol recently, Arteaga approached Julia Saravias, 57, a tropical fruit seller.

“I know it’s against the law,” said Saravias, who supports a disabled 14-year-old grandson. “But what else am I going to do? Look how old I am. Nobody is going to hire me.”

Arteaga seemed moved.

“I look at her and I see my own mother,” Arteaga said. Colleagues, he said, have told him, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Vendors report less sympathy.

Elena Chacon fled to Los Angeles after her mother and her two sisters were killed by a death squad in San Salvador 20 years ago. She has grown accustomed to L.A. police officers yelling at her for illegally selling her bags of sliced mangoes.

“One woman [officer] is very polite, and says, ‘Please, respect me, move your stand,’ ” she said. “But many of them throw your fruit in the street and say, ‘Vieja mojada, [old wetback], why don’t you go back to your country?’ ”

More serious troubles began when Officer Rafael A. Perez, a central figure in the LAPD scandal, asked her to introduce him to cocaine dealers, Chacon said. She said that she told him she did not know any and that he became angry. One day in February 1998, she said, Perez dropped cocaine in her cashier’s apron at a diner and arrested her. Stopping at her house, she said, Perez took her $300 savings.

Chacon said she told her lawyer that she was innocent, but that he persuaded her to plead guilty, saying, “Who is the court going to believe--you, or the word of a police officer?” In exchange for her guilty plea, she got a reduced sentence. But her green card and chance at citizenship were forfeited--meaning she will always be labeled an illegal immigrant by authorities.

Perez recently pleaded guilty to stealing cocaine and told authorities of two unjustified police shootings of innocent men in the Rampart district. One resulted in the crippling and false imprisonment of Javier Francisco Ovando. A second man framed by Rampart police is expected to be freed from prison this week.

Winston Kevin McKesson, Perez’s attorney, declined to comment on Chacon’s allegations, saying they are part of the investigation of his client.

Residents like Ruben Vives say they face enough trouble without having to dodge police. Vives moved to Pico-Union from Guatemala when he was 8.

At first he was upset that Americanized Latinos treated illegal immigrants like him “the same way a rich person treats a poor person. They make them feel like less.

“ ‘Go back to your own country.’ Everyone told you that: your own people, Americans, African Americans,” he said. “I got used to it.”

He was not tempted to join a gang. A friend joined and died playing Russian roulette to impress his girlfriend. Another buddy quit a gang, “and they went looking for him and killed him, [because] once you’re in, you’re in,” Vives said.

But walking home from school, he said, he was often stopped by police, searched, questioned, handcuffed and taken to the station. Once he was suspected of theft. But another kid confessed--sparing Vives disqualification from citizenship.

Vives, 20, is now a freshman at Cal State Fullerton. His family has since moved to Whittier.

“It was so hard just being safe,” Vives said, recalling his old neighborhood. “You never knew who to trust.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rampart Division

The LAPD’s Rampart Division is home to some of the most crime-plagued streets in Los Angeles and about 30 street gangs. With its densely packed neighborhoods and heavily immigrant population, the area is considered one of the toughest policing assignments in the city. The division’s anti-gang unit is the focus of a corruption investigation.

TOTAL SERIOUS CRIMES 1997*

Central Bureau

Rampart: 11,622

Northeast: 10,354

Newton: 9,756

Hollenbeck: 8,178

Central : 8,137

South Bureau

Southwest: 12,874

77th Street: 11,564

Southeast: 10,245

Harbor: 9,442