A 

Abortion
Accounting
Advertising
Africa
African-American Studies
Aging
Agriculture
American Indian Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Architecture
Argumentative
Art: Artists (Alphabetized)
Art: General
Become an Affiliate and Earn $$$
Biographies (Alphabetized)
Book Reviews (Non-Fiction) (Alphabetized)
Business: Companies (Alphabetized)
Business: General
Business: Industries (Alphabetized)
Business: International
Business: Small
California
Canada
Caribbean
Child Abuse
China
Communication: Journalism
Communication: Language & Speech
Communication: Media
Communication: Non-Verbal
Communication: Television
Communication: Television & Children
Communism
Computer Science
Consumerism
Criminal Justice: General
Criminal Justice: Juvenile Delinquency
Criminal Justice: Police Science
Criminal Justice: Prisons
Cuba
Death & Dying: Euthanasia
Death & Dying: General
Death & Dying: Suicide
Drama: American
Drama: English
Drama: World
Drugs: Alcohol
Drugs: General
Economics: Banking
Economics: Economists (Alphabetized)
Economics: General
Economics: Inflation
Economics: International Trade
Economics: Macroeconomics
Economics: Microeconomics
Economics: Taxation
Education: Administration
Education: Curriculum
Education: General
Education: Higher
Education: Physical
Education: Psychology
Education: Reading
Education: Special
Education: Teaching Methods
Education: Theory
Energy: General
Energy: Nuclear
Energy: Solar
Environmental Studies
Evolution
Family & Marriage
Films: Artists (Alphabetized)
Films: General
Finance: Companies (Alphabetized)
Finance: General
Former Soviet Union: Post-1990
France
Gender & Sexuality
Geography
Germany
History: Ancient Greek & Roman
History: European
History: Great Britain
History: U.S. (After 1865)
History: U.S. (Before 1865)
History: U.S. Presidency
History: U.S. Presidents (Alphabetized)
Homosexuality
Immigration
India
Indonesia
International Relations: Arms Control
International Relations: Cold War
International Relations: Non-U.S.
International Relations: U.S.
Japan
Jewish Studies
Korea
Labor
Latin America
Law: Business
Law: Capital Punishment
Law: General
Law: International & Non-U.S.
Law: Supreme Court
Leadership
Literature, American: Authors (Alphabetized)
Literature, American: Faulkner
Literature, American: Fitzgerald
Literature, American: General
Literature, American: Hawthorne
Literature, American: Hemingway
Literature, American: Melville
Literature, American: Poe
Literature, American: Steinbeck
Literature, American: Twain
Literature, English: Authors (Alphabetized)
Literature, English: Chaucer
Literature, English: Conrad
Literature, English: Dickens
Literature, English: General
Literature, English: Joyce
Literature, English: Lawrence
Literature, English: Shakespeare
Literature, English: Swift
Literature, General: Children
Literature, General: Classic (Greek & Roman)
Literature, General: Russian
Literature, General: World
Management: General
Management: Japanese
Management: Motivation
Management: Theory
Management: Women
Marketing: Companies (Alphabetized)
Marketing: General
Marketing: Plans
Mathematics
Medical: Aids
Medical: Dentistry
Medical: Diseases & Disorders (Alphabetized)
Medical: General
Medical: Nursing
Mexican-American Studies
Mexico
Middle East: Egypt
Middle East: General
Middle East: O.P.E.C.
Military
Music: Classical
Music: General
Mythology
Nutrition
Parapsychology/Occult
Philosophy: Ancient Greek
Philosophy: Descartes
Philosophy: Eastern
Philosophy: General
Philosophy: Kant
Philosophy: Sartre
Poetry: American
Poetry: English
Poetry: Milton
Poetry: World
Political Science: Elections & Campaigns
Political Science: Foreign
Political Science: Lobbyists & Pressure Groups
Political Science: Machiavelli
Political Science: Mill
Political Science: Political Theory
Political Science: U.S.
Psychology: Behaviorism
Psychology: Child & Adolescent
Psychology: Disorders
Psychology: Dreams
Psychology: Experimental
Psychology: Freud
Psychology: General
Psychology: Jung
Psychology: Physiology
Psychology: Piaget
Psychology: Rogers
Psychology: Social
Psychology: Testing
Psychology: Therapies
Public Administration: General
Public Administration: Government Agencies (Alphabetized)
Racism
Real Estate
Recreation & Leisure
Religion: Eastern
Religion: General
Religion: Islam
Religion: The Bible
Research: Completed Studies (With Statistics & Results)
Research: Designs & Proposals
Research: Statistics & Methodology
Russia: Pre-1917 Revolution
Science: Astronomy
Science: Biology
Science: General
Science: Genetics
Sociology: Durkheim
Sociology: General
Sociology: Marx
Sociology: Social Problems
Sociology: Social Theory
Sociology: Social Welfare
Sociology: Weber
Soviet Union: 1917-1990
Sports: Drugs
Sports: General
Technology
Transportation: Automotive
Transportation: Aviation
Transportation: General
Transportation: Railroads
Urban Studies
Vietnam
Women Studies
 

LAPD SCANDALS.   Term Paper ID:28575 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Discusses civil rights vioilations by Los Angeles Police Department. Current Rampart Division scandal; 1941 Sleepy Lagoon case; 1992 Rodney King case. Political responses.... More...

5 Pages / 1125 Words 7 sources, 11 Citations, MLA Format $20.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Discusses civil rights vioilations by Los Angeles Police Department. Current Rampart Division scandal; 1941 Sleepy Lagoon case; 1992 Rodney King case. Political responses. Paper Introduction: Civil rights violations by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have been much in the news recently because of the scandal at the Rampart Division in which a number of officers were presenting false evidence and framing innocent citizens. This is not the first time that the LAPD has behaved badly with respect to the civil rights of citizens, and there have been numerous attempts over the years to correct these abuses. The department was corrupt in the 1930s and would be reformed only with the advent of the stewardship of Chief Parker in the late 1940s, though the elimination of overt corruption did not mean there were no problems between the police and the community. The Rampart scandal is raising these same issues once more. Racism is not only directed at blacks, in a city like Los Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. One difference is thatthe Watts Riots were seen as a black-white confrontation, while the 1992uprising after the first King verdict would be seen more as a minoritygroup protest, with the different minority groups often battling oneanother as occurred between blacks and Koreans. Los Angeles had experienced considerable racial tension in the 196 sleading to the Watts Riot. The 1992 riot was theculmination of forces extending back decades. Works CitedBooth, Cathy. For this reason, the ChristopherCommission was formed to investigate the matter and to examine the questionof racism and bias as it might affect the use of excessive force in caseslike that of Rodney King. The Rampart scandal is raising these sameissues once more. Studies show that many of the same tensionscontinued to be potent in the 199 s in spite of supposed changes andadvances in the intervening years. One of those forces was thenature of the police department, which had been professionalized and madepolitically independent since the 194 s. "Community Policing." CQ Researcher (February 5, 1993), 99-115. 15 (January 1, 1996), 36-2 .Ransford, H. In June 1943, a riot started in which forten days Anglo servicemen and civilians clashed in the streets with youngMexican-American zoot-suiters, a riot which at its height involved severalthousand people. Edward. The city has long had an ambivalent view of its police department.As one article noted, there has long been "a strong suspicion in popularculture--think Chinatown or L.A. Racial isolation was still a majorfactor, and police behavior remains a major factor. After theking incident, the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles PoliceDepartment (also known as the Christopher Commission) stated, Sergeants, lieutenants, and captains are expected to be leaders as well as administrators and should therefore receive formal leadership training. . The arrests made in theuprising showed broad categories of different minority groups and not justblacks as in 1965 (Ransford 1 2-1 7). Thisis not a new phenomenon. These riots were quite different from Watts and the 1992riots in that no one was killed and property damage was minimal, but theriots did generate antagonisms which would continue for decades. It is also a community that feels the effects of poverty atleast as much as the black community if not more. Race and Class in American Society. Riots. "L.A.'s Bandits in Blue." Time (28 Feb 2 ), 48.Christopher, Warren and John Arguelles. Prior to the recent scandal, the public was made most aware of thecivil rights violations of the LAPD by the Rodney King case in 1992. (Christopher and Arguelles 7 ).The Commission also noted that racism had been charged against the LosAngeles police before after the Watts riots and that it had been shown thatthere was a deep and long-lasting schism between much of the blackcommunity and the Police Department. These officerswere acting more like gang members than the real gang members they weresupposed to be policing, even to the point of decorating their bodies withtattoos of grinning skulls and awarding themselves gruesome plaques forshooting suspects (Booth 48). (Christopher and Arguelles 134).One year later, an independent analysis of the Los Angeles riots stated, The chief of police [should] make it a high priority to improve the training, experience and leadership skills of the command staff level of the department (Webster and Williams 182-183).Community policing was meant to be a needed change, though the elitist wayit was implemented in the Rampart Division did not serve the localcommunity well. Civil rights violations by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)have been much in the news recently because of the scandal at the RampartDivision in which a number of officers were presenting false evidence andframing innocent citizens. July 9, 1991.Cohen, Adam. And then in 2, 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 3 ). Fromthe first, there was a degree of division along racial lines, with blacksseeing the beating as an example of "business as usual," while whites,appalled at the videotape, expressed surprise that such things could occur. An amateur video operator thus managed to delegitimize the actions of police officers against King, by bringing to witness the event millions of television viewers (Goldsmith 43).The LAPD was most directly involved in that the beating was administered byits officers. When damaging incidents do occur, thereare efforts to change the police culture, with varying results. After the King case, Los Angeles did not have to wait long foranother case that suggested that the police department did not hold thecivil rights of all citizens in the highest regard, and the O.J. How successful these efforts will beremains to be seen. The Sleepy Lagoon Case in 1941 was used againstHispanic zoot-suiters and made them into something to fear for theirforeign-ness during the war. Again, the videotape causedmany simply to state that this was a case of police abuse. Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992.Goldsmith, Andrew J. Thedepartment was corrupt in the 193 s and would be reformed only with theadvent of the stewardship of Chief Parker in the late 194 s, though theelimination of overt corruption did not mean there were no problems betweenthe police and the community. Numerous incidents had occurredbetween the police and minority group members, with numerous shootings andkillings that had been seen as suspicious by the minority community(Domanick 22-23). "Police Line Do Not Cross: Gangsta Cops." Time (6 Mar 2 ), 3 .Domanick, Joe. Some 4 people have been identified as having been wrongly convicted,and authorities in Los Angeles have had to review some 4, more cases.The case began when Rafael Perez, a Los Angeles cop, was accused ofstealing six pounds of cocaine from downtown headquarters to sell on thestreet and told his story, implicating as many as 7 to 8 members of hisantigang unit in questionable and illegal police practices. The move to community policing in Los Angeles did notproceeded smoothly under Chief Willie Williams (since replaced), and anattempt to expand the number of police in the city was rejected by voters(Worsnop 112). News & World Report (11 Sept 1995), 2 -22.Worsnop, Richard L. Simpsontrial included damaging testimony on this matter: As the courtroom fell into a shocked hush, the tapes of a screenwriter's interviews with retired Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman gave the country something new to think about: descriptions of police brutality and racism so virulent and cavalier that they raised troubling questions about not only the L.A. "Police Power." In Inside the L.A. Confidential--that Los Angeles cops werequietly up to no good" (Booth 48). Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department. Racism is not only directed at blacks, in a city like Los Angeles,Hispanics are also targeted by racist policies and racist officers. The Highway Patrol, whose officers were also on the scene,blamed the LAPD, and the patrol officers present said they had notparticipated and had complained to ranking officers at the scene. The LAPDresponse was always somewhat confused, both challenging what its officershad done and leaving the door open for a degree of justification based onKing's actions. "What's Wrong with Complaint Investigations?" Criminal Justice Ethics, Vol. In the King case, the videotape was the primary determinant of publicopinion: On this basis, [members of the public] were able to draw their own conclusions about the propriety of the police actions before any official post hoc accounts of events could be constructed and publicly disseminated. The political response was also mixed. The King beating refocused public attention on long-standing complaints by African-Americans, Latinos and Asians that LAPD officers frequently treat minorities differently from whites... Ito, Monika Guttman, Scott Minerbrook, and Jill Jordan Sieder. Police Department but law enforcement across the country (Witkin, Ito, Guttman, Minerbrook, and Sieder 2 ).More recent testimony in a different courtroom has thrown light on thescandal at the Rampart Division and has been even more damaging to theLAPD: 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. "When the Bad Guys Are Cops." U.S. Politicalpressure increased over time, however. TheMexican-American community has been viewed as even lower on the socialscale because of the perception that it is largely made up of illegalimmigrants. As subsequent events showed, public disquiet arising from this incident was not effectively cordoned or defused by later attempts by the legal process to deal with the issues raised by the video recording. It is likely that there will be efforts once more to reform thesystem and to avoid further scandal. This is not the first time that the LAPD hasbehaved badly with respect to the civil rights of citizens, and there havebeen numerous attempts over the years to correct these abuses. The Commission first noted the difference inperception between blacks and whites concerning the role of the police: Within the minority communities of Los Angeles, there is a widely-held view that police misconduct is commonplace. Rochester, Vermont: Schenkman Books, 1994.Witkin, Gordon, Timothy M. . The Mexican-American community was mobilizedin support of the defendants. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.