Rampart Scandal Case Study

The Rampart Scandal took place in the Los Angeles Police Departments jurisdiction. The scandal started to unravel when undercover officer Frank Lyga took off-duty officer Kevin Gaine’s life. Lyga justified the shooting by saying Gaines threatened him with a gun. Due to police policy, the incident had to be investigated. The investigation showed that Gaines was connected with Death Row Records, which is a recording label owned by Suge Knight. Knight was known for hiring off-duty officers to be security guards. Officer Lyga was eventually exonerated about a year after the incident with Officer Gaines. Nearly 8 months later there was a bank robbery that showed a connection to Death Row Records. Sadly the mastermind behind the bank robbery was

Five months later the L.A.P.D. notices that six pounds of cocaine evidence are missing. The finger was immediately pointed towards Officer Rafael Perez who was a part of L.A.P.D.’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. Internal affairs unit, otherwise known as the Rampart Corruption Task Force (RCTF), believed that a number of officers were involved with Death Row Records and were participating in criminal misconduct. Rampart Corruption Task Force was able to come up with probable cause and arrest Perez for the missing cocaine. Rampart was convicted but he filed for an appeal. As RCTF was gathering information for the appeal trial they found out that another 6 pounds of cocaine was missing. Needless to say Perez agreed to a plea deal. From this plea deal more than 100 convictions were overturned, and 70 officers were acting in

are pay, accountability, and lax management. You may be wondering how does pay or salary lead to corruption of a police department, the answer is simple. Police officers don’t make a lot of money, so when Death Row Records offered some of L.A.P.D. officers an off-duty security job, some jumped at the opportunity. I believe that some of the officers didn’t intend to be corrupt but slowly let the extra money get to them. The second thing that led to corruption was the lack of accountability. There were no rule or regulations that the L.A.P.D. had in place to prevent officers from working for business such as Death Row Records. Also in the evidence room, there was no one to check the evidence that checked out on a daily basis. I fully believe that if there was a requirement for someone to check the evidence daily that corrupt police officers such as Officer Perez would have known that he couldn’t get away with stealing cocaine from the L.A.P.D. The third factor that leads to corruption in the L.A.P.D was lax department management. If there were policies in effect to prevent corruption and police chief’s and sheriff's to enforce these policies the Rampart Scandal would have been prevented. By having these policies the management would have been forced to step up their game and actually enforce the