A few years later, in 1999, one of the worst scandals in the history of the LAPD roiled the department and the city. The Rampart Division of the LAPD’s anti-gang unit was exposed by an officer within its ranks as a criminal enterprise. Some of the agents had been involved in gang-related moneymaking schemes of their own; to keep up appearances, and to curb potential rivals, many of them had been fabricating and planting evidence for years. At one point, when the department reopened cases to investigate, detectives were forced to fly to Central America to look for people who’d been wrongfully
...more
