O.J. Jury Knew the Score

Now we understand why O.J. was acquitted. Now we know why a jury of his racial peers--drawn from a community with a long history of abuse at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department--would take his word over the police and blithely accept that damning evidence of guilt could have been planted by the cops.

The scummy truth seeping out of the LAPD’s Rampart Division is a shocker to most of us who have never experienced the dark side of law enforcement. But others, particularly in the minority community, know well the double standard, the racial profiling, the planting of evidence, the us-them mentality in which the end justifies the means--and the end is framing you.

At the time of the O.J. Simpson verdict, it seemed bizarre to many of us that a jury could conclude that officers of the law had conspired to frame an innocent man. If that trial were held today, the once-scorned arguments of Johnnie Cochran would appear far more plausible. With nearly each new edition of The Times, there is further proof of a police department routinely wreaking mayhem on a minority community without the slightest adherence to the norms of judicial due process.

Already in the early stages of this investigation, at least 20 officers have been relieved of duty and more than 30 convictions overturned. Police Chief Bernard C. Parks has called for the dismissal of 99 defendants in 57 cases, and the district attorney’s office has conceded that the number of tainted cases may run into the thousands. Yet the tendency on the part of top city officials is to treat these horrifying events--in which innocents were shot by the police and guns and drugs were planted on suspects as evidence, resulting in long prison sentences--as a minor blemish on the city’s pattern of law enforcement. It is nothing of the sort.

The Rampart scandal is not an anomaly. What is unusual is that it only came to light thanks to a corrupt cop who cut a deal and admitted to his and other officers’ participation in drug-dealing and the shooting of innocents. The story might have died there if not for the reporting of Scott Glover and Matt Lait of The Times, which has led to the unraveling of the most extensive practice of police abuse in the history of the city and perhaps the nation.

As has occurred elsewhere in the nation, the war on drugs led to the corruption of a cadre of police officers who could not resist the temptation to cream off drug profits, even if it meant that innocent people were sent to prison. This war mentality, in which all young men in the neighborhood were lumped together as drug-selling gang members, defined the local inhabitants as the enemy. The occupying army of the police became a law unto itself, free to steal and sell drugs and, at least in one reported instance, to push this contraband on one of their snitches.

The insanity of the drug war, with its bloated profits for dealers and police alike, including the legally sanctioned asset seizures and lavish government funding, has created a cesspool of corruption. In the fight for the ill-gotten spoils, police-engineered mayhem came to set the prevailing tone.

The culture of police violence is so pervasive in Los Angeles that, according to The Times, “An organized criminal subculture thrived within the Los Angeles Police Department, where a secret fraternity of anti-gang officers and supervisors committed crimes and celebrated shootings by awarding plaques to officers who wounded or killed people.” But such a culture, involving dozens of officers, could only fester in a larger sea of contempt for the rights of a citizenry the department is sworn, according to its motto, to serve and protect.

This is not a reality that the power elite of the city has been willing to confront. Most top officials in law enforcement and government still want it to just go away. It is a horror story barely acknowledged by local television news.

But this is a story that cannot be ignored. What is occurring in Los Angeles is being replicated throughout the nation. It is an inevitable outcome of the drug war that has taken civil liberty as its first casualty. Much like the early 20th century war to prohibit the sale of alcohol, the freedom of the citizen comes to be more threatened by the zealotry of the police than the actions of the criminals they are ostensibly pursuing. The natural outcome is the cynicism toward police that we witnessed in that O.J. jury.

Once cops get into the mood of framing the innocent, who’s to say that you’re not next? Oh really, that wasn’t your little bag of illicit drugs in your car trunk? Tell us about it as we put on the cuffs.