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Old February 16, 2013, 12:41 PM   #155
Evan Thomas
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Join Date: July 7, 2008
Location: Upper midwest
Posts: 5,631
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimpeel
In ‘Forces of Deviance: Understanding the Dark Side of Policing’, Kappeler, Sluder, and Alpert point out that corruption among police is not new or peculiar to the late 20th century. "To study the history of police is to study police deviance, corruption and misconduct." (Kappeler et al., 1994.)
Well, yes. In particular, the racist, corrupt culture of the LAPD dates from long before the Rodney King incident.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the '50's and '60's. The corruption, and especially the racism, of the police force were facts of life. The zoot riots of the '40s, and the police response to them (in which officers stood by as white servicemen assaulted blacks and Hispanics, and then arrested hundreds of the victims), were recent memories, and I was there during the Watts riots in 1965 (a reaction against police racism and brutality), when Chief Parker famously described the people in Watts as acting like "monkeys in the zoo."

It was common knowledge at that time that one of the main functions of the LAPD was to keep "those people" in particular geographic areas (South Central and East LA), and that they turned a blind eye to drug trafficking in those districts, as a way of keeping the residents pacified and under control.

It's a pity that after 8 years of Federal oversight brought on by these and subsequent problems, the underlying culture doesn't seem to have changed all that much.
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