Jack Dunphy writes at NRO about a recent report by a Civil Right attorney and her "blue ribbon" panel on the LAPD. The report is critical of what they term the "warrior cop" mentality in ghetto areas. Jack takes her and the report to task:
At about 4:30 in the afternoon on June 30, a dark-colored SUV pulled to a stop on 49th Street, just east of Central Avenue in south Los Angeles. While the driver waited in the SUV, two men armed with rifles got out and began shooting at a group of people gathered in the front yard of a home. Together the gunmen fired 38 rounds, and when they drove off moments later, two young men and a 10-year-old boy lay mortally wounded among the shell casings littering the street. A fourth victim, a 12-year-old boy, was struck by gunfire but survived. Despite the offer of $105,000 in reward money, no arrests have been made in the case.
But for the number of people shot and the age of the youngest victim, this shooting was in no way an unusual incident in South Los Angeles. There are 19 patrol divisions in the LAPD, but of the 253 murders committed in the city this year as of July 15, nearly half have occurred in the four divisions that cover South L.A., an area that makes up only 43 of the city’s 473 square miles. Over the same period, a total of 634 people were shot in these same four divisions, compared with 501 shooting victims in the 15 divisions that cover the rest of the city.
Against this backdrop of carnage comes (yet another) report on the LAPD’s Rampart scandal, this one produced by a specially appointed “Blue Ribbon Rampart Review Panel.”
[…]In addition to reexamining the Rampart scandal, the report’s authors make an effort at prognostication, all but predicting another riot in south Los Angeles if a number of sweeping changes (read: an infusion of tax dollars) are not instituted. After a predictable litany of the social ills afflicting south L.A., there appears on page 21 of the report this ominous sentence: “These are not just underclass poverty descriptors; they are the trigger conditions for the city’s next riot.”
Among the potential sparks to this looming riot, the report claims, is the persistence of a “warrior mentality” within the LAPD, characterized by “loyalty, silence, retaliation, control, and aggression.” This mentality has been replaced by a more friendly, problem-solving model of policing in Rampart Division, says the report, but it persists in the high-crime neighborhoods of south Los Angeles. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, effectively shredded this contention in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “As for the allegation that inner-city officers cling stubbornly to an arrogant ‘warrior mentality,’” Mac Donald writes, “the report offers no hint that any panel member ever rode along with officers or observed their interactions with the public.”
Indeed, the report is rife with anecdotes and innuendoes, but there is little in the way of hard data that would support its main thesis. A further quote from MacDonald’s piece illustrates the point: The panel's remaining conclusions are just as unsubstantiated. It charges that planting evidence "may not be a thing of the past" based on one sting that provoked questionable behavior on the part of a Rampart officer. The report does not disclose how many stings were conducted over what period of time before one proved fruitful — a data-free method of analysis that characterizes the entire report. This anecdote more accurately supports the opposite conclusion: that the LAPD is relentlessly monitoring itself to make sure Rampart corruption does not reoccur.
[…]The main problem afflicting south Los Angeles, at least as far as its police are concerned, is that of people shooting each other. Though the latest Rampart report decries what it describes as intimidation tactics among south L.A.’s “warrior” cops, it’s fair to say that the two men mentioned above who, in broad daylight and at close range, murdered a 10-year-old and two others, were not feeling overly intimidated.
May they feel it soon.
I also find it curious how they can spend huge amounts of money to write a report about a Police Department but spend little to nothing in trying to stem the violence by the various gangs. Maybe more "warrior cops" out on the street taking these scum of the earth to jail would fix the problem….but hey, according to the report the city needs more of the nice guys. I'm thinking they want the LAPD to become like Reno 911.
Sad.
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