officers - The Black Vault

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dicate page, name of
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I LAPD: Confide.nt ,
1
.Brutality Character:
or
ANGELES TIMES
PERSPECTIVES ON POLICE Editionf'HURS • MAR 21 , 1991.
The independence that
salvaged the department
from corruption now
causes its troubles. The
cure is accountability.
By JAMES FYFE
Police chiefs know that brutality is·,·- them answerable only to him, and, with
an occupational risk of the profes- ~eat succes~, unleashe~. them on bansion
because they cannot abso- dil:S a~d Naz1 sab~teurs. He too~ great
lutely control their officers' behavior.· pams to see that his agency .and Its ~en
To prevent brutality, the best ·chiefs · were ~rtrayed favorably 1~ both the
avoid any signal that it is excusable or . entertainment and news me?ia.
that any group of people is a legitimate Eventually, the F~I ran mto p-ouble.
target of excessive police force. / In the name of national secunty and
When brutality is alleged, good
chiefs investigate thoroughly
and objectively. When brutality
is found, examples are made of
those who committed it, those
who failed to stop it and those
who covered it up. If brutality
exists at all ip well-run departments,
it is the deep, dark secret
· of outlaw officers.
There is no secretiveness in
· · the Rodney G. King videotape or
in the half-joking computer conversations
that followed it. Instead,
we see officers who had to
be confident that their colleagues
would remain silent and
that their department would reject
any citizen's account of their Daryl Gates defends his officers at LAPD lunch~on.
STEVE DYKES I Los Angeles T!mea
conduct. Their great confidence
is evidence that this brutality was no
aberration. The aberration memorialized
on this tape is the Los Angeles
.terns of abuse-illegal sur­