Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (27 page)

And there was this:
in 1994, Bratton’s first full year in office, there were 1,561 homicides in New York City,
931 in Chicago,
and 850 in Los Angeles—the latter two cities with populations far less than half the size of New York’s.
By 2002, a remarkable inversion had occurred. Chicago recorded the highest number of murders of the three—656—
Los Angeles had 647, and
New York had just 587: almost one thousand fewer homicides than eight years earlier.

Today, leading criminologists like Frank Zimring and Jerome Skolnick point out that
New York City had 75 percent fewer homicides, robberies, and auto thefts in 2012 than it had in 1990, with basically, says Zimring,
“the same populations of schools, transportation, and economy.” By institutionalizing efficient policing tactics such as COMPSTAT—which mapped, tracked, and swiftly and skillfully massed officers in areas where crimes were occurring—and holding captains accountable for crime in their precincts, Bratton proved that cops could actually play an important part in long-term crime reduction, as opposed to simply reacting to individual crimes after they occurred, as they’d done in the past.

And he introduced quality-of-life policing, a concept with long-term benefits as well. “In New York,” as Bratton himself would tell it, “
we changed the culture of permissiveness in that city that for 30 years had said don’t bother people with the little things. You know, they’re poor, they’re black, they’re brown. It was a failure not to recognize that they were just like everyone else, they wanted peace, tranquility, and a civil environment to bring their kids up in.” And that was right.

Along with that success, however, was the potential for “broken-windows” policing to be seriously abused. The difference between promoting order and making communities livable and intrusive, invasive policing can be very small. Especially when beat cops are told it should be applied with “zero tolerance” or that consistently tight policing in poor black and brown neighborhoods was the key to keeping crime down. That potential was even greater with another Bratton innovation: stop-and-frisk—which would later allow for the tactic’s routine and astronomically frequent use in the ghettos and barrios of America. Bratton would not only reinstitute this old policing practice, he would re-pioneer it, and declare it an essential component in the mix of strategies he’d used to dramatically lower New York’s crime rate. In so doing, he
legitimized
the widespread use of stop-and-frisk, making the practice not just acceptable and routine but a
necessary
part of everyday policing. And that, as New York would discover, came with its own set of very real problems.

But at the time many New Yorkers viewed such tactics as necessary correctives to a deeply ineffective police department and saw Bratton as the miracle worker who was giving them back their sense of public safety, lifting the city’s spirit and helping to reignite its prosperity. As a result there was relatively little resistance.

In a sense, however, it doesn’t matter exactly how much of the extraordinary decline in crime that New York has experienced is attributable to Bratton’s policies and policing strategies. His undeniable contribution was to introduce modern, data-driven managerial concepts, practices, and strategies to American big-city policing in a high-crime era when they were desperately needed.

Rafael “Ray” Perez and Nino Durden, Sunday, October 13, 1996, 18th Street Territory, Rampart Division

Arriving at a boarded-up apartment building for a surveillance stakeout sometime after 10 p.m., Ray Perez and Nino Durden parked their unmarked
light-blue Taurus undercover car under a
large, low-hanging tree. In uniform and armed with their
9mm Berettas,
radios,
flashlights,
binoculars, and
radio earpieces, they
lifted a board covering a back entrance to the largely vacated apartments and began a cursory search, looking for gang members or others who might be crashing there or dealing drugs.

They’d been
briefed at roll call about the murder of two 18th Street gangsters by a rival gang right in front of this building, and warned to be on the lookout for retaliation killings. Ray and Durden and another two-man unit had been ordered to set up
observation posts in 18th Street territory and see what they could see.

After entering the building, they had begun walking to their stakeout spot in an empty apartment with a large
corner window overlooking the streets below when they decided to check out some other apartment units. In one, they
found a guy called “Nene” and a small, thin nineteen-year-old Honduran immigrant named
Javier Ovando, a member of the notorious 18th Street Gang. Ovando had joined the gang when he was sixteen and homeless, and he was crashing in the abandoned unit.
They had thrown him out of the building the night before and were unhappy to see that he’d returned.

Handcuffing the two men, Ray and Durden marched them into their stakeout apartment in unit 407. “I’m sending you out of here one at a
time, beginning with you,” Ray said, unshackling
Nene, who left immediately.

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

As Ray and Durden later described it, sometime after releasing Nene and Ovando, they heard
a loud knock on the door of darkened apartment number 407. As it opened, there stood Ovando, backlit by the hallway light, pointing a semiautomatic rifle at them. Durden yelled, “Police officer, drop the gun
!” and then pulled out his
double-action Beretta and shot Javier Ovando—who was standing directly in front of him—dead center in the chest.

Ray instantly reacted,
firing off three rounds so fast it felt like one, the blast of the muzzle lighting up the room in a weird orange glow. Ovando had been shot in the head, arm, chest, and back. Or at least that was Ray and Durden’s fabricated first, official account of the incident.

Initially Ovando himself had no recollection of the event, having been shot in the head. But later he would recover his memory and tell a
very different, very real story about that evening: Handcuffed, he was taken into 407, where Durden and Perez began interrogating him. When he didn’t know or would not offer up any information, Perez suddenly pulled out his Beretta and
shot him in the chest, quickly followed by Durden doing the same. Then, according to Ray himself, he reached down,
pulled Ovando off the floor by the front of his shirt, and
fired a round into the side of his head.

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

Using what Ray described as Rampart
CRASH’s secret radio code for a dirty shooting, Durden and Perez sent out a call for assistance. Only those in the loop, said Ray, understood the code, which always went out first, giving CRASH officers a heads-up while keeping outside supervisors away from a crime scene until everything could be properly arranged and a suitable cover-up story agreed upon.

CRASH officers understood, explained Ray, that when they arrived at the scene of an officer-involved shooting,
everybody had a role to play.
It could be discouraging potential witnesses who might have damning testimony to offer. It could be taking a door and guarding it, making sure to keep everybody—absolutely everybody—away from the crime scene until the CRASH officers involved inside got their story straight with a sergeant in the loop and made sure the crime scene reflected that story.

Once the story was decided on, said Ray, it never—ever—changed.

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

The sergeant in charge that evening soon arrived in room 407 and huddled with Ray and Durden, tying together all the loose ends of the story.

The tale Ray later told investigators—and the story the DA would promote as gospel—was that a wild-eyed Javier Ovando had kicked in the apartment door,
burst into the room, aimed the semiautomatic rifle at the two cops, and tried to ambush them. His motivation, as the DA would later explain, was to “
eliminate the police from [18th Street] territory, to intimidate the police and force the police to reassess the use of observation posts in their policing activity.”

Although Ray was the senior officer,
Durden did all the explaining to the sergeant, improvising on the basic story he and Ray had agreed upon. He didn’t tell the sergeant how he’d run down to their parked Taurus and returned holding a
filthy red rag wrapped around a chopped-down Tech .22 semiautomatic with a loaded twelve-round
banana clip protruding from its underside and a
serial number Durden had previously scraped off. Or that Durden had then
placed the weapon next to Javier Ovando’s fallen body. The sergeant didn’t need to know about the gun.

They then decided
where Ray needed to be when he fired his rounds:
a stuffed chair lying on its back, right next to where he actually
was
when he fired. That part of the story required no change; it was only to make sure, said Ray, that when he told his
official
story, the shooting position he said he was in was
consistent with the rest of it.

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

About three weeks after the shooting of Javier Ovando, Rampart CRASH held a big
mug party for Ray and Durden to celebrate. The word that a gang member had tried to ambush two officers and had himself been critically wounded had spread, and past and present CRASH officers showed up to give Ray and Durden a hero’s celebration.

The party, according to Ray, was held at “
the benches,” a secluded spot within the hills of the police academy containing picnic benches and a barbecue pit. There, as Ray would later describe it, the
Jack Daniel’s and cold beer flowed and steaks were grilled.

As usual, the party for Ray and Durden started early in the evening, right before sunset. Earlier, Ray’s workday had consisted of picking up the beer, steaks, chips, and ice over at the Glendale Galleria and getting the
award plaques from a sergeant who always made them.

CRASH parties were always boozy affairs. Sometimes there would be officers on duty and in uniform with drinks in their hands, which was no problem, according to Ray.

They’d bring a thirty-two-ounce mug, fill it up with beer, and throw in three or four shots of Jack Daniel’s. It was always Jack, the hard-man’s drink, nothing else. They’d drink casually for a while and then sit around a blazing bonfire while each of the guys gave the honorees their props. They’d toast them, tell a little war story about working together, or about the shootings they’d been involved in and how it happened—how it
actually
happened, said Ray, not the way it was written in some official report.

The honorees’ plaques—their
awards
—consisted of
two framed playing cards with red hearts and red bullets—if, that is, the wounded victim lived. If he
died
, the playing cards were black hearts—by far a more prestigious color.

The celebrations, the unit logos for sale at the police academy, and the attitude on the street were, after all, no secret. The warning flags were everywhere. There were also the doctored civilian complaint reports and tainted shooting scenes that were routinely accepted by the department’s officer-involved-shooting teams and never questioned by the DA’s Office.

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

Miraculously, Javier Ovando survived his shooting, although he was
paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. In February of 1997, he was
brought into L.A. County Superior Court on a gurney. The prosecutors presented a choreographed dance to the judge, who might as well have been part of the prosecution’s team.

No round was in the gun’s chamber when Ovando arrived at the door of room 407, according to the prosecution’s story. Nevertheless, according to the deputy DA, within a few seconds Ovando had burst through the apartment door, paused long enough for Ray to yell “Gun, gun, gun!” and for Durden to get his bearings and yell “Police officer, drop it,” and then for Ovando to point the weapon directly at Durden. Durden, in turn, was able to reach into his holster and shoot him before Ovando could squeeze off a round from the unchambered weapon. Then as he was falling to the ground, as if in a slow-mo scene in an action movie, he continued to point the gun at Durden while
rotating
to then point it directly at Perez.

“
The defendant,” the DA told the jury, “[had] equipped himself with a weapon especially adapted for this crime, and tried to sneak up on the officers and murder them. This indicates planning, sophistication, and professionalism.” When Ovando’s deputy public defender, Tamar Toister, argued that the scenario was far-fetched, the prosecutor replied: “
What would defense counsel have you believe? That they found this guy on the street, dragged him up there, and shot him for some obscure reasons of their own?” (Ovando may have been doing some small-time dealing on Ray and Durden’s turf, although that was never officially established.)

Then,
as his pregnant girlfriend watched from the courtroom, an emaciated, wasted-looking
Javier Ovando was found guilty of two counts of assaulting a police officer with a semiautomatic rifle and one count of brandishing it in the presence of a police officer.

Although Ovando had that number “18” tattooed on the back of his neck,
he had no felony arrests on his record and was, at best, a very, very minor member of a very large local gang. Moreover,
LAPD detectives had never even bothered to interview him.

Nevertheless, the presiding judge,
J. Stephen Czuleger, swallowed the story whole, in one long, greedy gulp. And why not? He was a former federal prosecutor appointed to the bench during the 1980s by the extraordinarily conservative law-and-order California governor George Deukmejian. Throughout the trial J. Stephen Czuleger ruled against Toister at almost every turn.

“
What happened was dirty,” Toister later told journalist Lou Cannon. “I did all I could, but I wasn’t allowed to put on a defense.” Czuleger then sentenced Javier Ovando to the maximum sentence—
twenty-three years, four months in state prison—because, as he said, “
the defendant has no remorse.”

Richard Eide, Spring 1997, Los Angeles Police Academy

If further evidence was needed of Willie Williams’s failure to begin transforming the LAPD, it came in on a sunny spring afternoon in 1997 as
Captain Richard Eide stood on a roadway at the Los Angeles Police Academy, deep in conversation. Behind the stiff, tailored, sandy-haired Eide was one of the academy’s slightly off-kilter brick buildings constructed by jail labor during the hard-luck 1930s.