Good Cops, Bad Cops

There’s nothing in society more odious than good guys going bad.

We’re a culture reared on being saved at the last minute either by a knight, the cavalry or someone responding to 911.

We revere the gun-totin’ marshal who cleans up the Old West, and the army that marches in to show some tyrant a thing or two.

We love good guys. And when the good guys reveal a darker side, the moral ground we’ve always trod upon seems to suddenly give way.

That’s the way L.A. is feeling today.

Our cops have suddenly become not the guardians of social order, but thugs and thieves. We feel betrayed and vulnerable. I hear it on the street and in my telephone messages. I see it in my e-mail.

Those who love cops mourn. Those who hate cops chortle. It’s best to neither a lover nor a hater be. That’s where I stand.

What I see is the possibility of maybe a dozen members of the LAPD who could be “dirty” in the sense that they might have squandered a public trust. Given guns and uniforms, they’ve used them, says a fallen cop, against us.

These are the words of Rafael Perez, caught with his fingers in the cookie, I mean cokie, jar and now singing like a cockatiel to cut a deal for himself.

The song he offers is about cops involved in illegal shootings, beatings, shakedowns and evidence planting. It’s the worst kind of song for a department already under investigation for recent cases of brutality and bad judgment.

But don’t start forming a vigilante committee just yet.

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What we have here, you see, is maybe a dozen out of about 10,000 members of the LAPD who might’ve turned rotten. And maybe there are a dozen more or even a hundred more we don’t know about. But there are still all those others who will risk their lives to save ours.

They’re the ones I’m writing about today.

Anyone who reads my columns knows that I’m not an apologist for cops. I’ve been around too long to play that game.

I’ve written about tainted badges in L.A., Long Beach, Riverside, San Bernardino, Claremont, El Monte and in other places I can’t even remember.

I’ve also written about cops who have stopped bullets in the performance of their duty and in adherence to their moral commitment.

There’ve been 191 L.A. officers killed in the last 50 years, including 17 in the last 10. The most recent was Brian Brown, a young, dedicated guy who wanted to do what was right for the people. He was gunned down by a gang member last December trying to catch a killer.

I remember television images of his 7-year-old son, Dylon, staring straight ahead as his father, an only parent, was buried. I remember him saying, “I love my dad and will miss him.” The memory of that boy continues to claw at the heart.

It wasn’t Brown the policeman then. It was a kid’s father.

And there was Filbert Cuesta that same year, and Steve Gajda. Before that, Joe Rios and David Schmid and Christy Hamilton and Raymond Messerly and Charles Champe and Tina Kerbrat.

So many, so young, so selfless.

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I know, there was Margaret Mitchell too, the fragile, mentally ill woman holding a screwdriver who was killed by a cop; Daniel Zarraga, armed with nothing more than a ballpoint pen, shot down by a cop; and Efrain Lopez, waving a broomstick handle, brought down with nine bullets fired by a cop. And more.

The LAPD hadn’t been in a position of such low esteem since the days of Daryl Gates and the beating of Rodney King . . . until we began hearing sordid tales of the alleged dirty dozen who had sold their honor for money and for tarnished glory.

And down went esteem another notch.

What happens now? We all know this is no time for the kind of “internal review” that cops love. Closed doors hide too many secrets. Whispers conceal unpleasant truths.

So everyone but the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is investigating the charges made by Rafael Perez. If the charges are true, we’ve got some rotten ones to deal with all right. If they’re false, God help Perez.

This is not a terrific time for L.A. Our social structure has been undermined at a critical juncture in our history. The good guys are in question. But even the worst crisis is eventually resolved. Hopefully, justice will prevail in this case and we can move on to other issues, other scandals, other indecencies. Everything passes. Life rolls forward.

But I can’t help thinking back to a veteran street cop who resigned in 1991 because of the Rodney King beating.

He looked at me and said, “We aren’t all that way.”

I know.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sunday and Wednesday. He can be reached online at [email protected]