Lis­ten:
MP3 One Seg­ment

As 1999 drew to a close, the Los Ange­les police depart­ment and the city itself were rocked by rev­e­la­tions of endem­ic abuse of minor­i­ty cit­i­zens’ rights by LAPD’s anti-gang units. Alle­ga­tions of sys­tem­at­ic fram­ing of minor­i­ty cit­i­zens for mur­der, drug deal­ing and oth­er crimes began to bear sub­stance and to result in the over­turn­ing of a great num­ber of cas­es.

Offi­cer Rafael Perez of the Ram­parts Divi­sion CRASH unit (the divi­sion’s anti-gang unit) began to reveal the pat­tern of abuse, fol­lowed by a grow­ing inves­ti­ga­tion and the arrests of more LAPD offi­cers for alleged crimes sim­i­lar to those report­ed by Perez. Perez dis­cussed the man­ner in which offi­cers inter­faced with oth­ers over the insti­tu­tion­al­ized cov­er-up of police shoot­ings and the “rites of pas­sage” through which new recruits to the CRASH units had to pass in order to be accept­ed by their peers.

This de fac­to induc­tion process per­pet­u­at­ed and insti­tu­tion­al­ized the var­i­ous crimes the mem­bers of the units alleged­ly engaged in. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the alle­ga­tions by Perez cor­re­spond very close­ly to Mark Fuhrman’s rev­e­la­tions about sys­tem­at­ic abuse in which he per­son­al­ly engaged.

These claims were broad­cast all over the world dur­ing the course of O.J.‘s crim­i­nal tri­al, only to be sub­se­quent­ly ignored by the press, legal sys­tem and pub­lic. (Fuhrman’s state­ments were record­ed by doc­u­men­tary film pro­duc­er Lau­ra Hart McK­in­ney.)

The broad­cast notes the sim­i­lar­i­ty between what Perez and Fuhrman had to say about L.A. “law enforce­ment” and the over-looked fact that O.J. was framed.

The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of O.J.‘s attempt to get tele­phone records that would prove him inno­cent.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Fuhrman’s and Perez’s dis­cus­sion of offi­cers from the 77th precinct and their involve­ment in the alleged abus­es; the alleged plant­i­ng of “ali­bi guns” on inno­cent sus­pects killed by police; the alleged deal­ing of drugs by police; alleged beat­ings and tor­ture by police; a widen­ing probe of (among oth­er divi­sions) the 77th precinct impli­cat­ed in crimes by both Fuhrman and Perez; LAPD super­vi­sors’ alleged involve­ment in cov­er­ing up the crimes of those under com­mand; obser­va­tions by syn­di­cat­ed colum­nist Robert Scheer that the dis­clo­sures that the scan­dal has brought to light affirm the ver­dict of the jury in O.J.‘s crim­i­nal tri­al. (Record­ed on 4/23/2000.)