A Flawed Performance

LAKEWOOD —  In Los Angeles last week, powerful men were shown to be corrupted by their contempt for the powerless, the innocent were jailed and some condemned, and assassins and procurers were found on the civic payroll. Everywhere, the hot breath of revenge stirred injured men to act outside the law and withered confidence in those who should be the city’s protectors. Brutality became the common condition of our lives together.

Did you think of the officers and commanders of the LAPD’s Rampart Division and its anti-gang CRASH unit? I was thinking of the opera in rehearsal at the Music Center. The performers are preparing Verdi’s violent and despairing “Rigoletto,” another story of male pride masquerading as devotion. This being L.A., where the stories are always about us, director Bruce Beresford has recast Verdi’s Mantua as Hollywood, another place notable for its cynicism about restraining those in authority. “Rigoletto” being an opera, the story ends in a needless death, a private grief and no change at all in the manners of the city.

Verdi had a genuine hit with “Rigoletto,” whose memorable tunes make it easy to forget the opera’s dark convictions. Its opening run in 1851 was a sellout, as will be its revival later this week by the Los Angeles Opera. If only we could expect as much attention to the LAPD’s staging of its own tragedy of betrayal, vendetta and abuse on the streets of Pico-Union. That story ought to be more compelling, but it hasn’t played well in the L.A. that matters. Perhaps the Rampart story will be a critical but not a popular success. Perhaps audience boredom in the face of evil, when it’s in some other neighborhood, is our cruelest inheritance from the 20th century.

The officers in Rampart’s CRASH unit worked hard to make their performances work. Extracts from Rafael Perez’s interviews with LAPD investigators detail the theatrical elaboration of the deceptions the unit arranged: catsup-for-blood to explain a mistaken killing; scenes set with mirrors and scrap metal to produce a convincing scenario for investigating officers; ad-lib dialogues workshopped minutes before supervisors arrived; and the earnest professionalism of men delivering lies to lawyers and judges.

Beyond the satisfaction of adroitly produced evil, what was the motivation? Even Perez, the cop caught stealing cocaine who has been onstage for most of Rampart’s first act, is unsure of his reasons. “It hurts me to say it,” he told police investigators in more than 50 hours of interviews, “but there’s a lot of crooked stuff going on in the LAPD.” He did so much “crooked stuff” himself because, he said, so many others had been doing it, and no one told him not to. The interior structure of his dissolution from policeman to criminal still eludes him. (Perez was sentenced Friday to five years in prison.)

It eludes us, too, even though L.A. is the most mediated place on the planet and its crimes against its own body are made to play out as if they were scenes in a movie about itself: the Watts riots as the second half of “Full Metal Jacket,” the Rodney G. King beating video as a clip from “Blade Runner,” the 1992 civil disturbances as “Strange Days.” We think we know the entertainment industry better and are wise to the 15-second pitches that will fully script Rampart’s next scenes now in rehearsal before the L.A. City Council, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service:

* Blame the violent for violence. Rampart Division, mostly confined to the off-kilter framework of the city’s 1781 grid of streets, has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of Latino immigrants. This isn’t another fragment of Mexico-in-exile, but all Central and South America pressed into eight square miles. Every crisis of war, oppression and failed economic policy south of the Rio Grande has its refugees there. The worst prey on the weakest, as they always have, and on streets as mean as these, the weakest and the worst often trade places. Motivation: Rampart officers, lost in the “fog of battle,” had no time to make a moral distinction between the two.

* Blame the character of the men. People of questionable character act questionably. Real cops endure the dispiriting reality that they suppress only a fraction of the crime around them. Real cops do not succumb to the human weakness in their chain of command. Real cops do not have a code of silence to shield the lies of others and then their abuses. Motivation: Rampart Division is staffed by an unbelievable number of unreal cops. Naturally, bad men behaved badly.

* Blame those who managed the system. You have a choice of reasons: An LAPD culture of the equivalent of Vietnam-era “body counts” overwhelmed any supervisory checks on the means that achieved the pounds of cocaine seized, the number of arrests made and number of convictions that stuck. Or, the LAPD grew so fast, driven by unrealistic political and public pressures for safer neighborhoods, that standards could not stand, and unfit men became cops. Or, Proposition 13 dried up spending for managerial competence and cut the number of managers. (Chief Bernard C. Parks made these latter pitches.) Motivation: An essentially unmanaged system allowed some Rampart officers to take the law--and some very profitable crime--into their own hands.

* Blame the system. If police officers routinely lied on the stand, if deputy district attorneys willingly used fabricated evidence to secure a conviction, if judges accepted coerced guilty pleas from suspects, it’s only natural. Motivation: Wars on drugs, gangs and repeat offenders countenance what all wars allow.

* Blame you and me. We wanted those wars. We elected the men and women who wrote the laws allowing them. We traded off schoolrooms for prison cells and high school graduates for “three strikes” lifers and widened the gap between those who have and those who expect to have nothing at all. We targeted the police at Latino and African American teenage males, whom we see as predators. Motivation: Some of our hunters got overly enthusiastic.

These are cliches masquerading as conventional wisdom about Rampart and the culture of the LAPD, but the vain theatricality we’ve embraced for explanatory narratives believes passionately in the power of cliches. The men of Rampart CRASH were given an impossible cliche as the LAPD’s mission. “As a law officer,” the department manual intones, “my fundamental duty is to serve mankind . . .” They acquired a vicious cliche from their colleagues--in a city of pervasive disconnection between community and the exercise of power, where every loyalty is suspect, only surfaces matter.

A perfect surface, unmarred by claims of community, can be a man’s shield against a place as violent as Rampart was through the recession years of the 1990s. It also can be a shelter for the fabrication of an elaborate anti-narrative. “If we need to add something to the story to make it look a little bit better,” Perez told police interviewers, “that’s what we do. If we need to correct something . . . we fix it and correct it right there.” The flawed narrative of the LAPD cannot be so easily reworked between takes of the scene in which the gang member is gunned down, each time with different actors.

It’s not just the LAPD. The subtle training that the LAPD used, in preparing its officers for a performance of Rampart, distinguishes between the community we acknowledge and a brutal reality that is something else. In that failed narrative, the community to be protected is always somewhere else. It isn’t. The community is Pico-Union, too. In the performance of the law, when its players finally disconnect from any community except a fellowship of the brutal and corrupt, the overture to a tragic opera begins.