Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (31 page)

Later, according to Ray, he would find out that investigators had recorded over four hundred of his telephone conversations and had put traces on his pager and cell phone. They knew every phone call he
made, every phone call he’d received. They even knew exactly where he was standing each time he made a phone call, down to the square block.

Two of the phone calls Ray made caught the attention of LAPD detectives. Both were to his girlfriend, Veronica Quesada, who had accompanied him to Las Vegas after the bank robbery, with Sammy and Mack. One of the calls was made right before he’d checked out that batch of missing cocaine, the other right after the deed was done.

In a drawer inside Quesada’s apartment, Detective Mike Hohan would later tell PBS’s
Frontline
, they found a photograph of
Ray dressed in a red running suit—the color of the Bloods—and making the hand signs of a Blood gang. In the course of their investigation, they also discovered that Ray and his wife had a
new home in the high-end middleclass African-American neighborhood of Ladera Heights, in addition to his old home. They also learned that Ray was driving a deluxe
Eddie Bauer–model Ford Explorer, and
his wife a BMW. That was a big nut for a low-level cop to pay off every month.

Then one day in late August of ’98, he was driving with a partner on patrol when a maroon-and-silver helicopter started following them. He was familiar with the type of helicopter used by the LAPD in surveillance, because he often coordinated with air support when he worked undercover narcotics. It would hover just above them, driving Ray crazy. He’d maneuver on one side of a building so the helicopter couldn’t see him. But once he reappeared, there it was again, waiting for him on the other side. But it didn’t matter. The discovery of that missing coke would get him arrested shortly thereafter for one count of possession of cocaine for sale.

Bernard Parks, August 1998, Parker Center

Ray wasn’t the only Perez that Bernard Parks had on his mind that summer. There was also
Edith
Perez, the president of the Police Commission and a downtown corporate lawyer who had a habit of casting awestruck looks at Chief Bernard Parks every time they held a joint news conference.
Short, broad, and quietly intense, she seemed to adore Parks even more than did Richard Riordan.

In August of 1998, she and Parks called a press conference with great fanfare to announce that
85 percent of the Christopher Commission reforms had been implemented and that it was now time to move on.

Yet while some reforms had indeed been put in place, the major Christopher Commission recommendations were never implemented. Among them, according to Merrick Bobb, a former deputy general counsel for the Christopher Commission, were several “that
[bore] directly on the current [Rampart] scandal,” including development of a tracking system to follow an officer’s use of force, civilian complaints and lawsuits generated, and the number of times an officer had been disciplined. The idea, Bobb continued, was to use the computerized information to evaluate officers’ performance and to select officers for specialized units such as CRASH.

At the very least, said Bobb, such a system would have engendered questions about exactly why so many officers were involved in “so many Rampart shootings, excessive-force complaints and other incidences.”

**************

The tracking system, however, was proving difficult to implement and Bernard Parks meanwhile was concentrating on something he seemed to regard as more pressing: ousting IG Katherine Mader from office. During Willie Williams’s tenure as chief, Mader had held his feet to the fire, vigorously pursuing the many tips leaked to her from within the department. And although Richard Riordan’s police commissioners were not, in general, interested in IG investigations that would embarrass the department, they and the mayor, according to Mader, were pleased that she was embarrassing Williams, whom they wanted to get rid of.

But what had gone around was now coming around for Parks, at least as far as Mader was concerned. Early in Parks’s administration Mader had made it clear that there might be a new chief, but the Inspector General’s Office remained on the job, ready to challenge the
department by issuing critical reports and holding the department accountable to the commission and the public, just as she had done when Williams was chief. But she was dealing with an entirely different man in Bernard Parks than she had been in Willie Williams. Parks had no interest in playing the game of compromise and could not abide being challenged. And now Mayor Riordan had a police chief whom he
wanted
to succeed, as did the commission, and not to be underminded by IG reports.

So he, with the help of Edith Perez, began to vilify Mader, undermining her power and forcing her to resign. “
There were comments made about Mader at staff meetings, chief-of-police meetings, bureau meetings,” says former Internal Affairs officer Captain David Smith. “The atmosphere was that we did not need her. They treated her like they had treated Chief Williams. Nobody cooperated with him either.” “
Two directors of the Police Protective League,” says Mader, told her “that the president of the Police Commission [Perez] had requested that they go after me, and if they did, they’d be supported by the Police Commission.”

The strategy barely got off the ground, however, before the
Times
discovered the source of
anonymous brown envelopes containing letters and press clippings sent to political leaders and the press condemning Mader and praising Perez and the Police Commission. It was none other than Edith Perez herself who had sent them marked with the postal meter of Perez’s very own high-powered downtown law firm.

Nevertheless, the result was that Mader was effectively stripped of her power, particularly the right to initiate investigations. Later, Perez and Parks doubled down and tried to limit Mader’s scope of work to examining only “adjudicated complaints”—that is, to those
already
investigated, ruled on, and disposed of by the department before coming to her desk. Eventually they backed away from imposing such a limitation, but only after the attempt was exposed in the
Los Angeles Times.

Finally forced to resign, Mader was replaced by Jeff Eglash, a former federal prosecutor. He too promptly found himself battling with Parks, publicly complaining that the department was “
unilaterally . . . putting restrictions on [him] and the Inspector General’s Office.”

Parks’s resistance to the IG’s office was an indication of his autocratic belief that he and
only he
ran the police department—a belief and attitude modeled for him by Bill Parker, Ed Davis, and Daryl Gates. This was time-warped thinking. It was now post–Rodney King, post–’92 riots, post–Christopher Commission, and also post–Willie Williams. And the city was still waiting for the LAPD to change. Parks, however, seemed incapable of accepting the hard truth that police chiefs throughout America were being forced to swallow: that you had to be a police chief for your time; recognize the political landscape and complement that landscape.

Bernard Parks, Summer 1998, Parker Center

Bernard Parks was in office for just a year when Police Protective League vice president Gary Fullerton told the following story to a reporter: “A woman walked into the Rampart Division Station recently and accused an officer of
stealing her ovaries. Not that [the officer] had sex with her or anything like that, just that he’d taken her ovaries. Obviously she was crazy. But it was even crazier when the desk sergeant wrote it up and placed it in the officer’s permanent file, where it will now be looked at every time he goes up for promotion or special assignment. That’s how absurd the discipline system has gotten under Chief Parks.”

Coming from a highly political official in a highly political union, the story sounded apocryphal—just what one might have expected in the bitter, constantly escalating war between the LAPD’s rank-and-file union and Parks.

But strange things
were
indeed happening. Bernard Parks’s laudable efforts to curb “yellow-sheeting” had resulted in a
25 percent increase in the number of civilian complaints against LAPD officers for using excessive force, and a
400 percent rise in civilian complaints against officers overall. As a result, there were close to
two hundred Board of Rights disciplinary hearings pending—
compared to eighty-one two years earlier—and
thirty-five officers had been fired
as opposed seventeen in Willie Williams’s last year as chief.

For many LAPD observers, the change from the lax discipline of the Daryl Gates era to a chief finally holding his officers accountable was long, long overdue. The credit, moreover, belonged solely to Bernard Parks, who was making it all happen and taking intense union heat for doing so.

But there was a flip side. Because Bernard Parks was squeezing so tight, he was losing his moral authority to lead his troops.

**************

By July of 2001 it had become apparent that Bernard Parks, like Willie Williams before him, was not going to achieve Mayor Richard Riordan’s stated goal of adding thirty-five hundred new officers to the department. In fact, the situation was quite the opposite. The number of
applications to join the LAPD had dropped from fourteen thousand in 1995 to under seven thousand in 1999, while the number of
LAPD officers had declined by eight hundred during Parks’s first two years in office.

Charlie Beck experienced the retention-rate problem after being promoted to captain and assigned back to Watts to run the Southeast Division. “
I was having the best [young officers] come into my office,” says Beck, “and tell me they were resigning to go work in freaking Manhattan Beach [and other small cities surrounding L.A.]—in places where I thought their talents would be wasted. And I mean I was losing a lot of them. Every week I would lose one. And I think [they] thought that the discipline system was completely skewed in disfavor to the officers.”

What was primarily causing the problem, as Beck saw it, was “
the ludicrous nature of the kind of prioritization that was taking place. We catch the guy who took the Coca-Cola can [that wasn’t his], and in the meantime, freaking Rafael Perez is taking out dope by the kilo and we don’t catch that. So what the F? You can’t spend the same amount of resources on each case. That’s insane.” That kind of discipline system, Beck summed up, “is what I think drove the
wedge between Parks and the rank and file.”

Unquestionably the new emphasis on discipline and accountability was an honest, even courageous attempt by Bernard Parks to halt the LAPD’s abuse of the public. But unfortunately for him and his officers,
Parks’s rigidity had something in it of Captain Queeg in the book and movie
The Caine Mutiny
, who demands a full-scale investigation to discover who ate some missing portions of leftover strawberries in the officers’ mess. People hate that in a boss. And Parks began to be really hated.

“Parks wasn’t a popular chief,” says LAPD deputy chief Patrick Gannon. “He really wasn’t. He had the ability. He was
the smartest guy I have ever met. He knew this police department left and right. . . . But he was arrogant to the degree that he was the only one who knew how to do things—there was nobody better. . . . [So] he lacked the leadership to take his institutional and encyclopedic knowledge of the department and transfer that into the leadership skills he needed to change the LAPD into a high-energy functioning police department.”

Parks, however, never seemed to understand that his rank and file and middle management weren’t up in arms because he was stupid or black or an incorrectly perceived liberal but because he was treating them really badly at a time, as Pat Gannon pointed out, when “we were
begging for leadership as an organization, just begging for it.”

The tragedy of Bernard Parks was that he truly believed that by imposing such rigid discipline on
nine thousand strong-willed men and women, he was doing the right thing. The LAPD’s top-down paramilitary managerial model was all he knew. But once that merged with his obsessive personality and operational style, the resulting brew became toxic, and he ended up with much of the department essentially despising him—and what made matters worse, the Police Protective League, in a frantic manner it had never displayed with other chiefs, was at his throat, trying to take a fatal bite out of it.

Rafael “Ray” Perez, Wednesday, September 8, 1999, Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office

Ray Perez’s first trial in December of ’98 ended in a 8–4 hung jury, and about a year later, just as he was set to be retried with new evidence making for a stronger prosecutorial case, he decided to make a deal
with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office: plead guilty to the cocaine theft and agree to a five-year sentence. In exchange he received immunity from prosecution for all other crimes he’d committed except murder.

But there was a second part to the plea deal. Ray would have to tell the DA everything he did in Rampart and everything he knew about Rampart CRASH. They did not, however, require him to tell them anything about Mack and the bank robbery, about the killing of Biggie Smalls, or about any relationship he and the others might have had with the Bloods—
the part of the probe, according to Lieutenant Russell Poole, once the lead detective in the investigation, that Parks had ordered shut down.

Nevethless, Ray Perez still had a lot to say.

**************

It took nine months of his sworn testimony during secret interrogations by a task force of LAPD detectives and prosecutors from the DA’s Office before Ray Perez was finished telling his tale.
Meeting over fifty times in two secret locations, beginning in early September 1999, Ray gave them
more than four thousand pages of answers to their questions, totaling almost five hundred thousand words. Investigators marveled at his extraordinary memory and eye for detail, and one later testified that “
70 to 80 percent of Perez’s allegations had already been corroborated.”