Charles Rappleye

Photo by Tina Burch/Daily News An LAPD disciplinary board ruled Monday that the captain formerly in charge of the Rampart CRASH unit should serve a 20-day suspension for mishandling an officer who volunteered information on a station-house beating. But the board also found that the department failed to prove its......

To the list of jurists, prosecutors, defense attorneys and cops who ignored early warning signals of corruption at the LAPD’s Rampart station, you can now add Judge Judy. The sharp-tongued family-court judge with the hit television show aired, last May, an unusual twist on the question of police misconduct --......

For more than a year, the street cops of the Rampart CRASH anti-gang unit have waged a quiet but determined campaign against a gang-peace project called Homies Unidos. Apparently believing the project was a ruse, Rampart officers harassed Homies members on the street and in their homes, and even pursued......

District Attorney Gil Garcetti is scrambling to clear dozens of defendants wrongly accused by the LAPD‘s Rampart Division, but his office continues to take a hard line against Jose Luis Frutis, convicted of murder in 1982 after being shot in the chest during a station-house interrogation. Frutis, then a member......

Photo by Ted SoquiBRIAN HEWITT WAS THE QUINTESSENTIAL CRASH officer, according to the cops who worked with him. Fair-haired, with light eyes and a slim, buff build, Hewitt was known for brusque arrogance and a short fuse. He was in high demand as a training officer who invested intense personal......

It predates the current Rampart scandal by more than a decade, but the case of Jose Luis Frutis, a gang member who was shot while handcuffed inside an LAPD interview room by a member of the CRASH anti-gang squad, has been ordered reopened. Superior Court Judge William Pounders ordered the......

It‘s been a week since L.A. Times publisher Kathryn Downing delivered an unprecedented mea culpa to an assembly of several hundred editors and reporters in the paper’s cafeteria, but the journalistic uprising there seems only to be accelerating. On Tuesday, Downing and Times editor Michael Parks told a monthly meeting......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov The day after Police Chief Bernard Parks announced that a corrupt officer had implicated others in a scandal involving unprovoked shootings and false testimony, the District Attorney’s Office filed court papers seeking the release of Javier Ovando, a gang member who’d been shot, framed and sent......

Courtesy Irma Madera Nineteen years ago, LAPD Detective Steven R. Miller shot a handcuffed suspect in the chest during an interview in the police interrogation room. Miller says it was an accident. The suspect, Jose Luis Frutis, says the enraged detective helped frame him for murder. Three weeks ago, the......