[Ppnews] Tom Hayden supports Alex Sanchez

Tue Jul 7 15:13:23 EDT 2009

Has Bratton's LAPD Really Reformed?

by TOM HAYDEN

July 7, 2009

Retaliation is so integral to LAPD culture that 
judicial notice of its role is in order.--Blue 
Ribbon Rampart Review Panel, Rampart Reconsidered, 2007

Last week's arrest of Alex Sanchez on gang 
conspiracy charges raises fundamental questions 
about whether the Los Angeles Police Department 
has reformed itself, or whether extralegal 
tactics are still being employed on the streets of the underclass.
The question is extremely pertinent as a federal 
judge, Gary Feess, ponders lifting the consent 
decree imposed on the LAPD in 2000 in the wake of 
the Rampart scandal. Chief William Bratton, the 
Los Angeles Times and many city leaders are 
proclaiming the department reformed, and 
campaigning for an end to the federal oversight.

A compromise being floated would be to transfer 
oversight authority from the current 
court-appointed monitor back to the LAPD's own 
inspector general, a watchdog which is 
considerably weaker than the federal monitor. As 
a blue ribbon commission concluded in its 2007 
Rampart Reconsidered report, "the federal court 
is the only entity with the independence, power 
and sustained focus capable of ensuring that the 
City and LAPD maintain current reform efforts." 
The LAPD inspector general, they concluded, needs 
greater independence from the department.

The LAPD has managed to fight off an effective 
independent watchdog since the Watts riots of 
1965. Despite subsequent scandals, riots and blue 
ribbon commissions, the department has yielded 
only gradual reforms, and never any real power.

But the arrest of Sanchez, carried out by 
antigang units of the FBI and LAPD at dawn on 
June 24 after a secret three-year investigation, 
reopens the question of whether reform has been 
successful. The case revives the very 
controversies that lay at the root of the 
1999-2002 Rampart scandal, and that exposed 
patterns of extreme misconduct ranging from 
planting evidence to beating and shooting 
innocent people. As a result, 100 criminal cases 
were dismissed as corrupted by police misconduct, 
and $90 million in taxpayer funds were spent to 
settle civilian lawsuits. The Justice Department 
intervened, and the city and LAPD finally agreed 
to court-monitored reforms to avoid a jury trial.

Back in 1999 the LAPD antigang units argued, as 
they do today, that Alex Sanchez was a secret 
leader of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang 
(MS-13) while posing as a peacemaker in the 
streets. The argument failed to persuade US 
Attorney Alejandro Mayorkis, Superior Court Judge 
Larry Fidler or immigration Judge Rose Peters. A 
national movement demanded that Sanchez be freed 
on bail. Eventually Sanchez was cleared of all 
charges and was granted political asylum, the 
first time an ex-gang member was ever awarded such protection.

Sanchez readily admitted he was a former member 
of MS-13 with tattoos to prove it, and plunged 
into building Homies Unidos, a network struggling 
to prevent gang violence and to turn young lives 
around. His work necessarily meant direct 
dialogue with MS members and rivals in the 18th 
Street gang, both of which had exploded in Los 
Angeles among refugees from Central America's civil wars.

Since the peace work was extremely hazardous, 
efforts were made to provide Sanchez and other 
urban peacemakers with a license to operate from 
both police and gangs themselves, steps which 
bloomed into a movement to recognize, 
professionalize and subsidize the ranks of 
so-called gang intervention workers in Los 
Angeles. Such efforts paid off in increased 
political support, grudging acceptance from the 
LAPD, over $20 million in city funding and the 
hiring of over 100 former gang members by the 
office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Alex himself became a revered symbol of hope 
among thousands of young people. He developed his 
own "epiphany" project, a self-help 
transformation program that convinced young 
people to remove their tattoos, get an education 
and a job. He stepped in to quash rumors on the 
street, testified in trials as an expert witness, 
was interviewed repeatedly and spoke on college 
campuses and before United Nations panels. At age 
27, he was defined as the improbable hero who 
beat the system. He was a thorn in the side of 
the LAPD, however, with many in law enforcement 
remaining skeptical that former gangbangers could 
be part of the solution. Among them were elements 
of the LAPD who sought retaliation, a function 
"so integral to the LAPD culture that judicial 
notice of its role is in order," according to the 
voluminous, million-dollar Rampart Reconsidered report.

In the past decade, the officially designated US 
wars on gangs and drugs exploded across borders. 
A 2005 Foreign Affairs article was headlined "How 
the Street Gangs Took Central America," as if 
Mara Salvatrucha ran the region. El Salvador, 
according to the analyst, had 10,000 "core" 
members and 20,000 "associates," though in 
reality there were no such organizational 
categories. In January 2005, the FBI "quietly" 
created an MS-13 task force; the following year 
they commenced the three-year surveillance 
project that led to the dragnet indictment of 
Alex Sanchez and twenty-three others. In 
addition, the task force began informing Central 
American police of the identities of new 
deportees. The Foreign Affairs article, citing 
the LAPD as its recommended model, advised that 
police "should focus heavily on hard-core gang 
members who refuse to give up their criminal 
lives," while also endorsing the idea that 
"unconvicted" gang members should be included in 
a nationwide database. Echoing the run-up to the 
Iraq War, the article reported the sighting of an 
Al Qaeda operative in Honduras and cited "rumors" 
of meetings between Al Qaeda and Central American 
gang members. Terrorists might soon be smuggled 
into the United States by gang members, according to the article.

The charges against Sanchez reflect a complete 
throwback to the pre-Rampart mentality--despite 
LAPD reforms and a new administration in the 
White House. In order to prove Alex Sanchez's 
secret status as an MS-13 shot-caller, the 
federal prosecutors have introduced a photo 
showing gang tattoos on his chest, a poem by 
Sanchez found during a raid of someone's house, a 
1990 photo of a smiling Sanchez throwing gang 
signs during a Barrios Unidos conference in San 
Francisco, and a recent field investigation (FI) 
card filled out on Sanchez for hanging at night 
on a street corner (there was no warrant or 
arrest). Sanchez's appointed attorney, Kerry 
Bensinger, called these charges laughable and weak.

During the same bail hearing, the prosecutors 
also introduced an LAPD detective, Frank Flores, 
to testify that multiple federal wiretaps in 2006 
included the voice of Sanchez saying "It's gonna 
be a war" as proof that he conspired to kill a 
hostile gang member in El Salvador in May 2006. 
Prosecutors supplied no copies of the tapes or 
transcripts as required under normal discovery 
procedures. There was no context or link provided 
between the recorded statement and the subsequent murder.

 From a legal viewpoint, that evidence is thinner 
than someone on a Pritikin diet. Yet criminal 
charges of conspiring to violate federal 
racketeering laws remain on Sanchez, and bail was 
denied. He now sits in an isolation chamber in 
federal prison twenty-three hours a day. Such 
high-security cells have been denounced as cruel, 
inhuman and psychologically destabilizing by many human rights groups.

The Sanchez case recalls the statement by 
disgraced LAPD officer Rafael Perez that "I would 
say that 90 percent of officers that work CRASH, 
and not just Rampart CRASH, falsify a lot of 
information, they put cases on people." It also 
recalls the "thin blue line" policing denounced 
by the Rampart Reconsidered report and by other 
blue ribbon commissions going back two decades:

In low crime neighborhoods, the public enjoys 
relative safety and the absence of brutality. In 
the high crime hotspots of LA's underclass, the 
public receives crime suppression and violent 
containment:...persistent pretextual stops of 
residents, sweeping dragnets, repeated roundups, 
put down and prone out stops, random searches, 
constant questioning, entering names into the 
gang data base, photographing tattoos, ordering people off their porches...
There is no question that the LAPD has vastly 
improved its image since Chief Bratton took over 
in October 2002. Current approval ratings for the 
LAPD are 77 percent citywide, including 68 
percent in the black community and 76 percent 
among Latinos. A recent Los Angeles Times op-ed 
headline implored "Set the LAPD Free," as if the 
cops were slaves and the judge was Pharaoh.

The changes were substantive, not simply 
symbolic. Bratton supported the consent decree 
and even served as a consultant on the process 
before becoming chief. Incidents of "categorical 
force" (use of a firearm, choke hold, head strike 
with a weapon, injuries requiring 
hospitalization) have declined over the past 
eight years--a good thing. The department became 
notably more interactive with the leadership of 
the black and Latino communities. Gang 
intervention workers gradually were brought in 
from the cold, though their acceptance by police 
varied from precinct to precinct and the LAPD was 
provided with no policy directive to cooperate with them.

But there continued to be another side to the 
LAPD, only occasionally revealed. When the LAPD's 
Metro unit abruptly stormed into a large 
immigrant rights assembly on May Day 2007, 
beating, gassing and using rubber bullets, even 
trampling on many in the media, for a brief 
moment it appeared that the "old" LAPD was back 
in full force, coupling overreaction with 
overkill. But the blossoming public relations 
problem was contained and framed as an "isolated" 
one--as if the huge paramilitary Metro unit had 
been overlooked in the march to reform. So 
powerful was the civic desire to believe in 
reform that the May Day episode gradually faded 
away. Yet it could not have been a clearer 
indication that the "old" LAPD lurked below the 
surface. In the aftermath, a deputy chief was 
removed and quickly retired, but none of the 
nineteen officers originally accused of using excessive force were fired.

The riot by Metro was a visible suggestion that 
the LAPD pursues a two-track approach, a velvet 
glove toward the public and an iron hand toward 
the underclass. Bratton privately calls those 
sympathetic to ex-gang members "thug huggers," 
while still endorsing the city's funding for gang 
intervention work. The analogy is a stretch, but 
the policy is akin to the Pentagon's effort to 
distinguish between "reconcilables" and 
"irreconcilables" on the battlefield. In 
defending these policies, Bratton often has 
spoken of "the head that needs to be cut off," 
street gangs as "much more of a national threat 
than the Mafia was" and a menace requiring "an 
internal war on terrorism." That perspective 
allows little, if any, police tolerance of 
constitutional rights of accused gang members. They are the new untouchables.

This policy is illustrated in the gang 
injunctions that blanket most of Los Angeles, and 
that are based on building secret databases and 
providing jail penalties for mere "association" 
or loitering between gang members, the use of 
cellphones, possession of alcohol, wearing of 
"gang attire" and other lifestyle crimes. The 
state Senate recently approved a bill to allow 
suspected gang members to remove themselves from 
the lists if they remain clean for five years. 
The measure is opposed by law enforcement and stalled in the Assembly.

The two-track approach by the LAPD arises from 
the nature of the federal consent decree itself, 
which says remarkably little about the gang 
issues that were at the center of the Rampart 
history. The CRASH units were dissolved and 
repackaged with more supervision. Otherwise the 
decree was based on a civil liberties model, not 
opposition to the "war on gangs" model. Based on 
a 1993 Congressional amendment to a 
tough-on-crime bill, the 191 mandates of the 
consent decree are aimed at "patterns and 
practices" which lead to constitutional 
violations. It is focused on racial profiling 
while the Rampart issues were about gang 
profiling. Similar to McCarthy-era laws, the 
consent decree provides little protection to gang 
members, who form the core of a new suspect 
class. The ACLU, in calling for the consent 
decree, looked only for plaintiffs who were 
clean, young inner-city youth without records, 
not young people with criminal records or 
immigrants like Sanchez who were the chief targets of CRASH policing.

The Beat Goes On

A May 2009 Harvard University study, requested by 
Bratton, contains relevant evidence on the 
continuing disparities in policing under the LA 
consent decree. While very favorable to the LAPD, 
the sixty-eight-page report never mentions gangs. 
It is more concerned with the question of whether 
the consent decree has undermined police work. 
The authors' answer is no: reform and "law and order" go hand in hand.

A careful reading reveals the following:

•On the issue of non-categorical force (stun 
guns, bean bag shotguns, non-lethal use of force 
to gain compliance, etc.), there was a 17 percent 
increase in the LAPD's Central Bureau between 2006 and 2009.

•"A troubling pattern in the use of force is that 
African Americans, and to a lesser extent 
Hispanics, are subjects of the use of such force 
out of proportion to their share of involuntary contacts with the LAPD."

•Stops by LAPD officers rose from 587,200 in 2002 
to 875,204 in 2008, a jump of 49 percent. Total 
pedestrian stops doubled in six years while the 
number of vehicle stops rose 40 percent.

•The greatest increases in stops took place in 
gang territories, the Central, Southeast, Newton 
and Hollenbeck divisions. Times columnist Tim 
Rutten tries to explains this surge as "the 
department's attempt to ensure that black and 
Latino Angelenos have equal access to public 
safety." But as Rampart Reconsidered points out, 
these are the zones where the gloves are most 
likely to come off. The LAPD inspector general, 
Andre Birotte, said last year that "they are 
still beating heads" in South Central Los 
Angeles, while police violence had declined in 
the heavily monitored Rampart precinct.

•Hispanics were 43 percent of all persons stopped 
in 2002 and 48 percent in 2008. Blacks made up 36 
percent of all pedestrians stopped.

•Between 2002 and 2008, the likelihood of arrest 
"nearly doubled" for both pedestrians and car 
stops. The total number of LAPD arrests increased 
18 percent from 2002 to 2008, from 147,605 to 173,742.

•Part One index crime offenses (non-negligent 
homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, 
burglary, car theft) declined to 15 percent of all LAPD arrests in 2007.

•"Steep increases" in arrests occurred in 
so-called Part Two (less serious) offenses such 
as disorderly conduct, prostitution, DUI, etc.

•In conclusion, "these steep increases in Part 
Two arrests represent police management decisions 
to use arrest powers more aggressively for less 
serious crimes." This leads to 395 arrests per 
day in Los Angeles, including ninety-eight drug 
arrests, plus another 298 arrests per day for 
what the Harvard report deems "minor crimes."

This innocuously phrased conclusion should set 
off alarm bells among decision-makers. The LAPD's 
choice to crack down on at-risk underclass youth 
for minor infractions means the department is 
setting social policy. "The number of juveniles 
arrested for Part Two offenses...is about twice 
what it was in 1990." Instead of funding youth 
programs like sports, tutoring, training, 
therapy, drug treatment and decent jobs, the 
paramount policy in the inner city is aggressive 
policing for the purposes of containment and 
populating the database. According to city 
figures, last year there were 93,000 young people 
between the ages of 18 and 25 who were out of 
work and out of school. Aggressive policing 
without alternatives only aggravates their 
alienation. These are the neighborhoods where Alex Sanchez grew up.

As an example, two months ago, the LAPD made out 
a field investigation card on Alex Sanchez for 
simply standing on a street corner; the FI card 
made its way into the prosecution's argument that 
Alex was leading a large racketeering 
organization. All is fair, apparently, in the war on gangs.

Rampart Reconsidered concluded:

In the most dangerous neighborhoods, children 
test at civil war levels for Post Traumatic 
Stress Disorder. Incarceration rates in these 
poorest communities are high. And with no 
rehabilitation, two-thirds will fail the parole 
gauntlet and return to prison--repeatedly. Not 
that there are many jobs anyway. The economy in 
these areas is largely underground with much of it illegal.
Bratton's policing doctrine places a primary 
emphasis on numbers of stops, frisks and arrests, 
creating a further pressure on cops to pick up 
stray youth to meet their quotas. Police officers 
interviewed for Rampart Reconsidered emphasized 
the need to increase "the arrest numbers they 
believe are needed for promotion." That meant 
numbers in the inner city, not among Westside youth.

Code of Silence Persists

While citizen complaints have fallen, according 
to the Harvard report, LAPD internal 
investigations upheld not one of 1,200 complaints 
of racial profiling between 2003 and 2008. Of 
2,368 complaints of officer discourtesy, the LAPD 
sustained only 1.6 percent of them. Fully 85 
percent of LAPD officers believe that most civilian complaints are "frivolous."

The infamous code of silence has not been broken 
by the consent decree. Nor has the LAPD's 
"doctrine of infallibility", according to Rampart 
Reconsidered, which quoted one officer as saying 
"it gets to the point when we don't even know when we're lying anymore."

These festering legacies could be resolved by an 
independent inspector general or a genuine 
civilian review commission, which the LAPD has 
opposed for three decades. The current Office of 
Inspector General (IG) was created only in 1996, 
and two the first IGs resigned in frustration. 
The office has gradually achieved "standing," but 
only to speak, at the real decision-making 
meetings of the Use of Force Boards. "Adoption of 
the Inspector General's recommendations and 
advice is optional and its formal powers are 
modest." In a case involving police brutality, 
the IG cannot find the behavior "out of policy" 
unless it is "substantially" out of policy, a 
higher and undefinable standard. Moreover the IG 
"does not possess independent sources of routine 
information about Department practices," cannot 
conduct independent or parallel investigations" 
and is forced to rely on information supplied by the department itself.

In conclusion, without the oversight of a federal 
judge and a consent decree road map, the system 
of police reform in Los Angeles will remain ad 
hoc, ineffective and even broken. The mayor, City 
Council, police commission and inspector general 
have lacked not only the political will but the 
mandate, the powers and the funding to perform 
independent oversight and enforcement. Beneath 
the layers of reform added to the department over 
three decades, it remains the fact that the 
police predominate in policing the police.

Whole generations of young people have been 
scarred by the police and by the criminal justice 
system in the process. Both the juvenile justice 
system and the state prisons--incarcerating over 
150,000 people on any given day--have been placed 
under federal consent decrees for their 
unconstitutional abuses for years. Taxpayers have 
been hit with astronomical costs, usually hidden 
in undecipherable budgets. Using the available 
data from the state attorney general's office, 
between 1997-98 and 2005-06, Los Angeles County 
taxpayers spent $101.8 billion on police, 
sheriffs, probation officers and jails. Throw in 
the prosecutors for another $2.4 million in the 
same years. Criminal justice budgets for Los 
Angeles County continued to rise every year 
between 1997-98 and 2005-06, from $4.4 billion to 
$6.3 billion. Statewide, criminal expenditures 
rose from $15.4 billion to $23.3 billion in the 
same period, for a total of $169 billion dollars, 
largely driven by incarceration rates in Los Angeles.

The odd thing about these budgetary numbers is 
that they rose over those eight years while crime 
kept going down. Before anyone leaps to credit 
either Bratton's techniques or LAPD reform, a 
Harvard report footnote acknowledges that "rates 
of recorded crime decreased throughout the state 
of California as a whole in this period [the 
1990s] by 48 percent." While the number of 
recorded index crimes decreased 33.5 percent in 
Los Angeles between January 2003 and the end of 
2008, there were sustained reductions in crime 
across the United States as well.

Long before Bratton became chief and before the 
Rampart scandal, gang slayings in South Los 
Angeles fell from 466 in 1992 to 223 by 1998. 
Drive-by shootings were down 27 percent citywide, 
and gang-related homicides by 36.7 percent 
compared to theprevious five-year average. The 
Times gave partial credit to gang intervention 
workers in a 1998 article headlined "Ex-Gang 
Members Work to Bring Peace to the Streets," at 
the very time Alex Sanchez was joining Homies 
Unidos. For whatever mix of reasons, gang 
homicides declined despite national rhetoric, 
from Reagan to Clinton, filled with warnings of a 
new generation of six-year-olds who would become 
"superpredators." Those predictions proved 
politically successful in justifying the war on gangs, but were simply false.

Bratton's emphasis on using arrest powers "more 
aggressively for less serious crimes," while 
popular with the public, shows little result in 
terms of the resources expended: ten years ago, 
gang-related crimes in Los Angeles totaled 7,053 
incidents compared to 6,877 in 2008, a decline of 
2 percent, or 183 incidents in a decade. The war 
on crime and gangs is not succeeding, or it is going to be a long war indeed.

The Numbers Game

A little-noticed police scandal is the danger of 
manipulating numbers when the police themselves 
are in charge of tabulating the results of their 
war. All the gang-homicide numbers are derived 
from officers on the scene. The term 
"gang-related," used by the LAPD, is more elastic 
than the "gang-motivated" definition used in 
Chicago and other cities. A "gang-related" 
killing can be one in which someone is killed in 
a lover's quarrel, or a liquor store is robbed, 
if one of the parties sports a tattoo. The number 
of "gang-related" crimes can rise or fall by 
making an accounting mistake or massaging the 
numbers. Just like fabricated evidence in a 
trial, numbers can be manufactured to create 
headlines about either crime scares or 
celebrations of crime declines, as the John Jay 
College researcher Andrew Karmen has shown. 
Karmen questioned the claims of Bratton and Mayor 
Rudolph Giuliani in New York, writing that young 
men who had turned their lives around "were still 
treated indiscriminately as potentially dangerous 
persons by the NYPD," a pattern that would repeat 
when Bratton came to Los Angeles. Both Bratton 
and Giuliani dismissed such questioning as coming from "intellectuals."

The same arrogance has reappeared in Los Angeles. 
Bratton recently took to claiming that Los 
Angeles is "as safe as 1956," an assertion 
sharply questioned by the dean of LA gang 
researchers, Malcolm Klein at the University of 
Southern California. Bratton replied: "That's his 
opinion and what the hell do I care about his 
opinion. Nobody is listening to him anyway. I 
don't know who he is, and if you walked down the 
street and asked the first 100 Angelenos do they 
know who he is, they're not going to know."

The most crucial step in police reform may be 
information reform. The federal court could order 
the city to contract with a reliable 
university-based research team to develop 
independent data on gang-related crime patterns 
in Los Angeles. The inspector general could be 
empowered to conduct independent or parallel 
investigations. In the current fog, police 
budgets go up automatically whether crime rates 
rise or fall, based on pre-set budget formulas that are mostly Xerox-based.

Alex Sanchez and the Globalization of Gangs

California now leads America, and America leads 
the world, in locking people up, holding an 
astonishing 25 percent of all inmates on earth. 
That's more than any dictatorship, and rather 
resembles our disproportionate military budget, 
which vastly exceeds that of any comparable 
country. The war-on-gangs-and-drugs paradigm is 
being fused with the "war on terror" into a 
template for suppression-first policies without 
end. Despite these military expenditures, the 
globalization of gangs is proceeding apace, with 
street gangs mushrooming everywhere that 
neoliberal policies have left a hopeless 
underclass behind. The lack of real checks and 
balances guarantees that the voices of "law and 
order" will dominate the discourse. Ending the 
consent decree in Los Angeles, if it happens, 
will allow the LAPD to resume its antigang wars unmolested.

The epicenters of this new war are the border 
regions of the United States, Mexico and Central 
America, where Alex Sanchez comes from along with 
tens of thousands of immigrants who are deported 
and return again every year. To break the cycle, 
the paramilitary model of war will have to be 
replaced with a model that includes space for 
ex-gang members that want to help restore the 
communities they once ravaged. But the politics, 
for now, favor the police. The Alex Sanchez case 
will open a window into practices that police, 
politicians and the public have avoided or denied for a decade.

Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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