An Old-Fashioned Scandal in the New L.A.

There wasn’t much room on the sidewalk outside Parker Center, what with the TV cables and satellite trucks. No matter. The crowd managed. They gossiped and complained in Spanish and Japanese and Korean, making their way to and from the immigration office that sits just up the street from the famed LAPD headquarters: Well-dressed couples carrying naturalization files, cowboy-booted campesinos, a Central American grandmother pushing two babies in a stroller, her gray braids swaying--the new L.A. going about its business as the traffic roared in the downtown morning. The new L.A. bustling past the headquarters of the same old Los Angeles police.

Inside, the place was abuzz. This was Wednesday. Uniformed cops outside the auditorium were distributing 362-page binders titled “RAMPART AREA CORRUPTION INCIDENT.” Some of the cameramen hadn’t seen each other since Rodney King, or was it Mark Fuhrman? No, the police spying scandal! Chief Bernard C. Parks was late--as usual. People milled. Capt. Richard Meraz, the mustachioed supervisor whose men beat an 18th Street gang member until he vomited blood all over an LAPD office, was there, still in uniform despite his suspension. A gray-templed colleague clapped him on the knee as he sat down: “Howya doin’, Rich?”

In the back row, a protester in flannel shirt held a sheet of cardboard that read “LAPD Corruption 20 Years Later.” “They were doing this same stuff when I was 17,” he told every reporter who passed. “Making raids, setting people up.”

Geraldo Rivera strode in, wearing his producers like campaign ribbons. Meraz muttered that he’d seen Rivera on TV interviewing two INS agents who claimed they’d been roughed up by Rampart cops who mistook them for immigrants--extras in the new L.A. street scene. “I watched for a while,” the graying cop offered to no one in particular, “and then I just clicked it off.”

*

So it went as the chief finally strode to the old podium--the police at one end of the room, the press at the other, the changed face of this city hovering like the sky of a new morning in the open air beyond. Though Parks would insist that Rampart was a shock and an aberration, in fact, its real novelty--aside from its deepening cost and attending political chaos--has been its setting. Rampart is the first old-fashioned LAPD scandal to hit the new L.A. and is the clearest sign yet that yesterday’s policing by intimidation no longer applies.

You could feel it just crossing the threshold into the Parker Center lobby: On one side of the door, the sidewalk teemed with the working poor, foreign-born masses who, in recent decades, have transformed this city. Inside, people walked and talked a culture that came out of a Los Angeles of 50 years ago. Rampart was among the first quadrants of Los Angeles to morph under the pressure of the great migration of Central Americans and Mexicans here in the 1980s, among the first not to get those references about “Dragnet.”

People in Rampart weren’t around when this city cut the postwar deal with police that they didn’t mention on “Dragnet”: Keep down the costs and corruption, maintain that military efficiency, keep those “response times low” and we’ll wink, within reason, at whatever bullying needs to be done. People in Rampart came from places where bullying was taken for granted and the deal with the police was always the one the powerless have with the powerful. Which is to say the police would, of course, be brutal and corrupt.

*

“Why should the public trust you?” the reporters shouted.

“Chief! Have you seen ‘L.A. Confidential’? Have you stopped to think of the image of the LAPD?”

“CHIEF! Don’t your findings SCREAM the NEED for an outside agency to TAKE OVER this INVESTIGATION?” Ah, the voice of Geraldo. The police in the back of the room perked up, smirking.

“No,” the chief snapped. “Next question.”

“Is that an answer?” Talk about a TV moment! Now it was Geraldo’s turn to smirk.

So it went, with much self-congratulatory pride in the thoroughness of the department’s self-examination and much insistence that, though there surely were larger problems, “the facts so far” only damned “a small minority of officers.”

That, of course, was inside the building. Outside, the taint of Rampart was spreading like one of those tule fog pileups--to the courts, City Hall, the federal government, the very future--leaving less and less room for old deals in the new Los Angeles.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.