LAPD Corruption: From Bloody Christmas to Rampart to Mission Division

The history of LAPD corruption is a seventy-five-year loop: a major scandal exposes officers who beat, framed, or stole from the people they policed; outside investigators demand structural change; the department adopts some reforms and resists others; and within a decade or two, a strikingly similar scandal breaks inside a different unit. The through-line runs from the Bloody Christmas beatings of 1951, through the Rodney King crisis of 1991, into the Rampart scandal that put the department under federal oversight for more than twelve years, and on to the gang-unit investigations unfolding in 2025 and 2026.

Bloody Christmas, 1951

On Christmas morning 1951, roughly 50 officers at the Central police station beat seven young prisoners, five of them Mexican American, for about 95 minutes after a bar brawl had injured two officers. The prisoners were beaten again at Lincoln Heights Jail. A municipal judge described the case as “permeated with testimony of vicious beatings and brutality” that “stinks to high heaven.”¹

It produced the first grand jury indictments and criminal convictions for excessive force in LAPD history. Eight officers were indicted, five were convicted of assault under color of authority, 39 were suspended by Chief William Parker, and 54 others, including two deputy chiefs, were transferred.¹

Parker’s response set a template. He pushed a “police professionalism” model that prioritized departmental autonomy and internal discipline while suppressing outside investigations, attacking critics, and ignoring officer perjury.² The idea that the department would police itself, and that civilian oversight was a threat to professionalism rather than a check on it, became part of the institutional culture that every later reform would run up against.

Rodney King and the Christopher Commission

The March 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King triggered the most visible crisis in the department’s history before Rampart. The city established the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, chaired by Warren Christopher, which reviewed over a million pages of documents and interviewed hundreds of witnesses.³

Its July 1991 report documented a significant pattern of excessive force, a failure to discipline officers involved, and a pervasive culture of prejudice and bias, with departmental leadership often ignoring or actively discouraging complaints.⁴³

Some structural changes followed, including the creation of a civilian-led Board of Police Commissioners. But a 1996 report by the special counsel to the Police Commission found that five years in, the department had not reformed to the required extent. The recommended Inspector General position was not filled until July 1996. There was no comprehensive system to manage force or track officers with repeated complaints. A “tie goes to the officer” bias remained in internal investigations, and punishment for excessive force stayed low. What progress had been made, the 1996 report concluded, was largely attributable to “acts of dedicated individuals” rather than any coordinated plan.⁵ Within a few years, the consequences of that incomplete reform would surface at Rampart.

The Rampart Scandal

Rampart was the largest corruption scandal in LAPD history. It centered on CRASH, short for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, an elite anti-gang unit based at Rampart Division, which covered the dense, immigrant Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods west of downtown. CRASH officers were described as operating like a gang themselves, with matching skull tattoos and a pattern of unprovoked violence that supervisors reportedly celebrated rather than investigated.⁶

How It Came Apart

Three incidents between 1997 and 1998 set the scandal in motion. In November 1997, Officer David Mack robbed a Bank of America branch of $722,000. In February 1998, Officer Brian Hewitt beat a handcuffed gang member, Ismael Jimenez, inside the Rampart station house. In March 1998, Officer Rafael Perez was caught stealing three kilograms of cocaine from LAPD property. Chief Bernard Parks formed a special criminal task force in May 1998.⁷

Perez’s first trial for cocaine theft ended in a hung jury. Facing retrial, he took a plea deal in September 1999: five years in prison and immunity from further prosecution except for murder, in exchange for testifying about misconduct in the unit.⁸ Over the following months he sat for more than 50 interviews that generated over 4,000 pages of transcripts, reviewed 1,509 CRASH arrest reports, and identified 91 “bad” arrests involving about 160 people.⁹ In all he implicated roughly 70 officers in criminal or administrative misconduct.¹⁰

Perez described a unit where he said 90 percent of officers routinely falsified information, planted evidence, and committed perjury to secure convictions, and where supervisors tacitly supported questionable arrests and officers willing to lie to Internal Affairs were considered “in the loop.”⁹

The Case That Defined It: Javier Ovando

In 1996, Perez and his partner Nino Durden shot Javier Ovando, a 19-year-old unarmed gang member, during an undercover stakeout in a vacant apartment, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. They planted a rifle with a filed-off serial number next to him and testified he had attacked them.¹¹ Ovando was convicted and sentenced to 23 years.

He served two and a half years before Perez recanted as part of the plea deal. The conviction was overturned on September 16, 1999.⁸¹²¹³¹⁴

Who Was Actually Held Accountable

Given the scale of what Perez described, the institutional consequences were strikingly limited. Of the roughly 70 officers he implicated, 58 faced internal Boards of Rights proceedings. Of the 52 boards held, 36, nearly 70 percent, returned “not guilty” findings. Five officers were fired through the process, seven resigned, and 12 received suspensions ranging from a week to 30 days.¹⁵

Criminal prosecutions fared no better. The state indicted eight officers. Three, Michael Buchanan, Brian Liddy, and Edward Ortiz, were convicted at trial of perjury, filing a false report, and obstruction of justice, but Judge Jacqueline Connor overturned all three jury verdicts in December 2000. Those three later won a $15 million civil award against the city for malicious prosecution, upheld by a federal appeals court in 2008.¹⁵ Six former officers in all sued for malicious prosecution and collectively settled for $20.5 million in 2009.¹⁶

What did move: nearly 100 criminal convictions were overturned, including 64 writs filed by the District Attorney’s office, 22 by defense attorneys, and 13 involving juveniles.¹⁵ The city was sued more than 200 times. By 2005, 214 claims had been resolved for a total of $70.2 million, well below the $125 million originally projected by City Attorney James Hahn but still an enormous sum. Thirty people received settlements of $500,000 or more; the average was roughly $400,000.¹⁷

For the neighborhoods CRASH had worked in, the fallout was immediate. Gang injunctions credited with reducing shootings were suspended after it emerged that the sworn statements behind them came from corrupt officers, and residents reported a rise in crime, graffiti, and gunfire.¹⁸ A November 2000 report by the Rampart Independent Review Panel found the LAPD had no “bank of good will” in minority communities, that residents described interactions with police as “largely confrontational,” and that community policing was “more a slogan than a reality.”¹⁹

The Consent Decree

The LAPD’s own Board of Inquiry, released by Chief Parks on March 1, 2000, concluded the corruption was not the work of a few rogue officers but a product of institutional failure, identifying “mediocrity” as a primary contributor and finding that supervisors “provided the opportunity” for misconduct through failures to review reports, analyze patterns, and hold officers accountable. The inquiry produced 108 recommendations across officer screening, personnel management, investigative protocols, operational controls, audits, and ethics training.⁷

Externally, the U.S. Department of Justice had been investigating the department for excessive force since 1996. In May 2000, Acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee formally accused the LAPD of engaging in “a pattern or practice of excessive force, false arrests, and unreasonable searches and seizures.”²⁰ Rather than face a federal lawsuit, the city agreed to a consent decree, approved by the City Council and mayor in November 2000 and formally entered by U.S. District Judge Gary Feess on June 15, 2001.²¹

The decree mandated reforms in nine areas, including use-of-force documentation and review, gang-unit management, confidential informant protocols, training, integrity audits, and the operations of the Police Commission and Inspector General. It required an independent monitor, a computerized database to track officer activity (force, shootings, complaints, and the demographics of traffic and pedestrian stops), and regular audits reported quarterly to the Police Commission.²⁰²¹

Originally set for five years, it lasted much longer. In 2006, Judge Feess extended it, citing the department’s “slow pace of reform.” In July 2009, the original decree was terminated and replaced with a transition agreement that moved oversight from the independent monitor back to the Police Commission and Inspector General. Judge Feess dismissed the underlying federal lawsuit on May 15, 2013, after the DOJ and the city confirmed the transition agreement had been met.²²²³ Federal oversight had lasted more than 12 years.

A 2009 Harvard Kennedy School study concluded the LAPD was “much changed” compared with eight years earlier.²⁴ Whether the deeper culture had changed is a different question, and one the next decade would test.

The Pattern Returns: 2025 and 2026

More than a decade after federal oversight ended, familiar misconduct has resurfaced in the LAPD’s gang enforcement units.

Mission Division: A “Law Enforcement Gang”

An Internal Affairs investigation into the San Fernando Valley gang enforcement detail at Mission Division produced what the department itself labeled a “law enforcement gang,” the first time the LAPD applied that designation to its own officers. Under California Penal Code Section 13670, effective January 2022, a law enforcement gang is a group of officers who identify themselves by a name or symbol and engage in a pattern of on-duty behavior that intentionally violates the law or basic principles of professional policing.²⁵

The Internal Affairs report described a “rampant culture of misconduct” and an “overwhelming pattern of intentional policy violations.” Officers ran a “gun hunting competition” tracked on an office whiteboard, with top performers posing with a pro-wrestling-style championship belt reading “Mission GED Pistoleros.” They conducted dozens of improper traffic stops and systematically disabled their body-worn cameras. At least one supervisor pressured officers to prioritize weapon seizures, reportedly telling them to “get out there and bring me back a pistola.”²⁶

A majority of the unit’s officers and supervisors were fired or resigned. Officer Alan Carrillo faced criminal prosecution for theft and entered a 2025 pretrial diversion program that required him to surrender his law enforcement certification and complete 50 hours of community service. Sgt. Jorge “George” Gonzalez’s disciplinary hearing was scheduled for fall 2026.²⁶

77th Street Division: “Ghost Stops”

In late May 2026, the LAPD temporarily disbanded the 77th Street Division’s gang unit amid an investigation into strikingly similar misconduct: officers systematically disabling body cameras and conducting undocumented “ghost stops” to improperly search motorists’ vehicles. Undercover officers from the LAPD’s Special Operations Division caught unit members in the act.²⁷ Fourteen officers and two sergeants were pulled from public contact and assigned to administrative duties. In 2026 alone, the unit had performed 1,296 stops, 962 of them involving Black residents.²⁸ As of mid-2026, no criminal charges had been filed, and the LAPD’s civilian watchdog was demanding an audit to determine whether the problem extended beyond the two known units.²⁹

A Lock Screen Photo

In February 2026, the LAPD opened an investigation into a San Fernando Valley gang unit officer after supervisors reviewing body-camera footage from a vehicle pursuit noticed that the officer’s personal cellphone lock screen displayed a photo of Rafael Perez. When confronted, the officer expressed “admiration” for the disgraced former detective and was investigated for “conduct unbecoming.” Civil rights attorney Carol Sobel and longtime department observer Connie Rice both said the incident reflected a failure to learn from the past.³⁰

Where Oversight Stands Now

The LAPD in 2026 has 8,677 sworn officers, its lowest staffing level in nearly 25 years, with Mayor Karen Bass shifting from a goal of expanding the force to preventing further shrinkage. Chief Jim McDonnell has said roughly 8 percent of employees are unavailable at any given time due to sick leave or work restrictions, driving overtime and limiting responses to low-level crime.³¹

Use of force rose sharply in 2025. Police shootings jumped roughly 70 percent over the prior year to 47 incidents, the highest annual total in a decade, killing 15 people.³² In May 2026, the City Council voted to limit “pretextual” traffic stops that critics argue drive racial disparities in policing.²⁶

The civilian oversight structure itself is under strain. The five-member Police Commission lost three members through resignations in 2025 and early 2026, and a lack of quorum forced the cancellation of about a third of scheduled meetings in 2025. A proposed city charter amendment, potentially on the ballot in November 2026, would give the City Council authority to override certain Police Commission decisions and final say over officer discipline. Both the Police Commission and Chief McDonnell have opposed it, arguing it would erode the commission’s independence.³²

Crime in most categories is lower than at the same point in 2025, and homicides have fallen to levels not recorded since the 1950s. The city has introduced unarmed mental health response teams and an Office of Community Safety to support gang interventionists.³¹ But the picture inside the gang units in 2025 and 2026 — officers disabling body cameras, running undocumented stops, competing over gun seizures, one of them keeping a photo of Rafael Perez on his phone — looks very much like the picture Perez himself described a quarter century ago. The scandals change names and divisions. The pattern has proven harder to dislodge.

1
Los Angeles Times. Bloody Christmas Beatings of 1951
2
Arizona State University. Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism
3
USC Libraries. Records of Riots: Christopher and Webster Commission Records Collections
4
LAPD Police Commission. Christopher Commission Chart
5
Columbia University. Human Rights Watch: LAPD Reforms
6
Britannica. Rampart Scandal
7
LAPD. Board of Inquiry Into the Rampart Area Corruption Incident
8
PBS Frontline. LAPD Rampart Scandal Timeline
9
PBS Frontline. LAPD Rampart Scandal Audio Evidence
10
PBS Frontline. LAPD Rampart Scandal Connections
11
Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Settles Ovando Case for $15 Million
12
New York Times. Los Angeles Settles Lawsuit Against Police
13
Los Angeles Times. Nino Durden Sentenced in Rampart Case
14
CNN. Rampart Officer Sentenced
15
PBS Frontline. Rampart Scandal Outcomes
16
National Registry of Exonerations. Rampart Scandal Group Exonerations
17
Los Angeles Times. Rampart Scandal Settlement Costs
18
PBS Frontline. Rampart Scandal Impact on Streets
19
Stanford Law School. Report of the Rampart Independent Review Panel
20
PBS Frontline. LAPD Consent Decree
21
LAPD. Consent Decree Overview
22
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Consent Decree Formally Ends
23
CBS News Los Angeles. Civil Rights Consent Decree Over LAPD Lifted After Almost 12 Years
24
Harvard Kennedy School. Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree
25
Los Angeles County. LASD Legal Compliance: Deputy Gangs
26
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Gang Unit Internal Affairs Report
27
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Gang Unit Investigated for Ghost Stops
28
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Gang Unit Body Camera Investigation
29
News Tribune. LAPD Gang Internal Report
30
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Officer Investigated for Perez Photo
31
Police1. L.A. Mayor Recruitment Goals Shifted
32
Los Angeles Times. LAPD Police Commission Civilian Oversight Charter Change