Trish, you think you’re so funny, but a little investigation on my part throws everything into a different light. What everyone has conveniently failed to mention is that all 320 complaints last year were filed by one person, some guy named Rodney King, who is famous for just not getting along with the LAPD. Now that you know that, don’t you feel bad about how you treated the LA cops?

Okay, I’ll bite, but first would clarify that my adopted hometown du jour is West Hollywood, which is policed under contract with the LA County Sheriff’s Dept and where the LAPD is verbotten to enter due to their record of extra-jurisdictional abuses going back to ancient times when they crossed the city limits to close down bordellos and illegal gambling joints on the Sunset Strip and gay establishments on Santa Monica Blvd.

There is no doubt that the LAPD has a history of racism, and that there is, and always has been, institutional and social racism in Los Angeles.The Rodney King episode John Woods referenced was simply the only time LAPD officers had been videotaped beating a black motorist. But the practice had been going on since at least the 1930s. It was this long history of unprovable abuses that sparked the riots when the cops were acquitted (in part because the trial was moved to the faraway soulless suburb of Simi Valley, where the African-American population was/is statistically zero).

As in other places, the “offense” the folks who are racially profiled have committed is called “driving while black” or DWB.

In the LAT article, there was a full panoply of reaction to the findings, and as it is in the politics of any city, where the speaker stood depends on where he (all quoted are male) sat.

One small thing to understand — in LA, unlike most cities where the police chief reports to the mayor, the police chief reports to the civilian police commission, which is appointed by the city council. The LA City Council is completely 100% free of Republicans, so you can surmise that the commission is pretty liberal, and the chief — William Bratton — is a Dem.

So, ironically, the conservative position in what follows is taken by the union guy:

“A big, fat zero,” said a visibly flummoxed Commissioner John Mack, who is African American and the former president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “In my mind, there is no such thing as a perfect institution . . . I find it baffling that we have these zeros.”

His disbelief, echoed by other commissioners, drew a quick response from Police Chief William J. Bratton. Unsolicited, he told the commission he would have his staff conduct a survey of other large, urban police departments, as well as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, to back up his belief that the findings in the LAPD are similar elsewhere.

Allegations of racial profiling, he said, hinge on what the officer was thinking at the time and, so, are nearly impossible to prove without a confession.

“It goes to the officer’s state of mind. How do you get inside someone’s mind?” he said in a brief interview.

Bratton rejected the notion that some allegations, while not proven, were legitimate. “This is not a racist department. It is not a homophobic department. It is not a brutal department,” he said. “Does it have some officers that may be those things? Possibly. But we search very hard for them, and their numbers are very small.”

Tim Sands, president of the union that represents the department’s 9,300 rank-and-file officers, had harsher words for the commissioners. “I am really outraged. They are using a circular logic that just because someone makes an allegation, then the officer has to be found guilty. That’s mid-century thinking,” Sand said. “They are supposed to be in a role of leadership. I’m sorry but that is not an attitude of leadership.”

Sands, who himself was cleared of a racial profiling accusation about 20 years ago, said he plans to demand a meeting with commissioners to discuss the issue.

And:

[Despite guidelines adopted last year that include a checklist to ensure that officers are asked basic questions, such as whether they knew the race of the motorist before making the traffic stop and whether race was a factor in the decision to pull over the motorist, conclusive] figures that might indicate whether systemic racial profiling is a problem in the LAPD have remained elusive. Department and city officials early on acknowledged that the raw data collected by officers when they make a stop are unhelpful because they do not include factors such as the race of the officer, the predominant race of the neighborhood in which the stop was made, and whether the stop resulted in an arrest and conviction.

In 2006, the city contracted with an outside consulting group to look into the issue. The study found that Latino and African American motorists in most areas of Los Angeles are significantly more likely than whites to be asked to leave their vehicles and submit to searches when stopped by police. The firm concluded, however, that its analysis of the data was too broad to determine whether the disparities were a sign of racial profiling.

After years of delays, the first phase of a project to install video cameras in police patrol cars is expected to start in coming months. The cameras are expected to provide more telling information.

You know I was just being a smartass, right? The idea of the LAPD investigating themselves is ludicrous, on a par with an internal investigation at the DOJ.They say the number of bad cops is very small, but how many does it take to wreak havoc on the minority population and ruin community respect? And these clowns can’t even come up with a scapegoat?

The only real check on the abuse to minority communities is this:

Hiring quotas began to change this during the 1980s, but it was not until the Christopher Commission reforms that substantial numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian officers began to join the force. Minority officers can be found in both rank-and-file and leadership positions in virtually all precincts, and the LAPD is starting to reflect the general population. As of 2002, 13.5 percent of the LAPD was black [the city is about 10 percent African American], 34.2 percent was Latino, and 6.9 percent was Asian or Pacific Islander. In February 2008, the number of Hispanic police officers surpassed the number of white officers.

The Christopher Commission was headed by Warren Christopher, a local eminence grise who went on to be Pres. Clinton’s secretary of state. The commission was empaneled to investigate LAPD abuses after the King beating and recommend reforms.

Police Chief Darryl Gates was attending a fundraiser to fight implementation of the commission’s reforms when the riots broke out. He pulled the cops out of the neighborhood around the intersection of Florence and Normandy in South LA, where the riots started, and let the violence escalate for nearly 24 hours out of pique over the reprimand by the commission.

Gates should have been fired for dereliction of duty but he was never even reprimanded, opted to take early retirement instead.