Celeste Fremon

The 1999 shooting death of Margaret Mitchell, a 55-year-old homeless woman, by LAPD Officer Edward Larrigan looked like a classic example of excessive force. But, in a closed hearing last month, the department’s board-of-rights panel ruled that Larrigan’s actions were “within police policy” and required no disciplinary action at all......

It’s all over, including most of the shouting. The L.A. city budget has been revised and officially approved by the City Council. Mayor James Hahn and LAPD Chief William Bratton are not one bit happy about it. The rest of us should be unhappy as well — for different reasons......

To date, four separate investigations have examined the Rampart scandal. In February, LAPD Chief William Bratton announced that the issue needed yet one more look after the so-called after-action reports long promised by former Chief Bernard Parks were deemed all but worthless. Last week, the Police Commission named civil rights......

Photos by Slobodan Dimitrov TO MOST AMERICANS, the war in Iraq began the night of March 19 when the first $18 million GBU-31 "bunker buster" was dropped on a residential compound near Baghdad University with the hope of eliminating Saddam Hussein in one tidy strike. But for most Iraqis, the......

On April 1, the fliers began appearing around the North Central Animal Shelter, near 26th and Figueroa streets. "We Will Kill Our Pets To Protest the War," screamed the big block letters on 8-by-10 sheets stapled to fences and telephone posts. The loathsome sacrifice would occur at 6 p.m. Sunday,......

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, 200 Los Angeles police officers — most dressed in T-shirts and jeans, a quarter of them women — slouch into chairs in three different classrooms at the LAPD’s Westchester recruit training academy to stare at an instructional video involving goats wearing gas masks. Actually, only......

FLAVIO ARAGON WAS 19 WHEN HE BLED TO DEATH one overheated summer afternoon in 1994. Nine years later, Flavio's sister, Maria Lupita Sanchez, 33, still hasn't gotten over it, not by a long shot. The grief is bad enough, Lupita says, but the crazy-making doubts make it worse. "There are......

THE LAPD's DEPUTY CHIEFS and commanders shift restlessly when 44-year-old John Miller, the just-appointed head of the department's new Bureau of Homeland Security, walks to the microphone for his first address to the troops. It doesn't help that he looks exactly like what he was until a few weeks ago......

THE HERCULEAN JOB OF TRANSFORMING the Los Angeles Police Department took one more small step forward when the LAPD’s top-level cops got together last month for their three-day Staff Officers Annual Retreat at the Mandalay Beach Resort, within sight of the ocean in Oxnard. (The retreat is called “SOAR” for......

L.A.’s Police Chief Bill Bratton unveiled the first stage of what he promises will be a complete restructuring of the way the department deals with gang-related crime. “When I came to this department, it was totally out of the game when it came to dealing with gangs,” said Bratton when......