Residents' views mixed over Ramparts scandal

LOS ANGELES - On a warm summer afternoon along the streets of one of Los Angeles' toughest neighborhoods, Bertha Wooldridge began the daily ritual of shutting down her narrow hardware store, hoping to make it home with a few hours left of daylight.

But as she tidied up, four teenage gang members burst through the door. They forced Wooldridge to her knees with a gun to her head. They yanked off the wedding ring her husband bought 14 years earlier. They threatened to kill her employees.

"Everybody asked me, `Were you afraid? Were you afraid?' But I was mad," said Wooldridge, a Mexican immigrant who has run her store in the neighborhood called Rampart for two decades.

Her ordeal ended better than many: Police showed up and chased the young robbers off. They captured two without firing a shot.

Since that day, Wooldridge has treated the embattled Los Angeles Police Department like a savior. And that includes the cops of the Rampart Station, at the center of the worst corruption scandal in the city's history.

Those same cops are the enemy for George Torres.

A member of the fast-growing Mara Salvatrucha gang, Torres, 21, said he was busted for drug possession in March 1998 after police planted $10 of crack cocaine on him, a charge heard often in the Rampart scandal. In several cases, prosecutors have concluded such corruption claims were true.

Torres said he and a fellow gang member were defending their "turf," chasing away two trespassers who turned out to be undercover cops. No, said police in their report: Torres walked up to their car and offered to sell them drugs.

Torres pleaded no contest and accepted a one-year county jail sentence. But prosecutors now say his case could be re-examined as part of the corruption probe.

Torres' mother died of cancer while he was in jail. His final promise to her was that he would abandon street life. He's trying, he said. "If I had the chance, I'd go to school and change my life."

Meanwhile, he said, employers are spooked by the blue tattoos that wrap around his neck and run down both arms - and police still watch his every move.

In a city accustomed to tales of police abuse, the alleged misdeeds of the Rampart Station's anti-gang unit still have the power to shock. The first reports emerged last fall. Today, the alleged abuses read like a how-to for disregarding laws that limit power and authority - planting evidence, lying under oath and beating, framing and shooting innocent people.

Judges have overturned more than 90 convictions, the police department has fired, suspended or relieved of duty more than 30 officers, and five policemen face criminal charges.

Yet Rampart has caused little outcry from political leaders in the nation's second-largest city.

The Rampart Station, named for a street that bisects the neighborhood, covers 7.9 square miles just west of downtown. The area is populated largely by newly arrived Central American and Mexican immigrants. Many fear both the police and the gangs.

As immigrants in a city uneasy with its diversity, residents are wary of speaking up. And yet some do complain about police misconduct, increasingly since the scandal broke. At the same time, many are reluctant to condemn the officers who have cleaned up their streets.

In 1992, the worst year for gang violence in Los Angeles, Rampart led the city with 149 homicides. By 1998, 34 homicides were reported in the precinct. Last year, there were 32. Crime, however, is on the rise citywide, with 19 homicides reported in Rampart so far this year - a bump that police strongly hint is a repercussion of the low morale and dismissals that resulted from the corruption probe.

"People are really torn," said Adolfo Nodal, former general manager of Los Angeles' Cultural Affairs Department, and a resident of Rampart since 1983. "Nobody supports what they did. But the results were good for the neighborhood."

As Andre Rene Paz, sales manager at a vitamin and natural herbs store in a strip mall, put it, "They're in a war. And in a war, anything goes."

Such muted responses have been interpreted as a sign of Los Angeles cynicism, a deep-seated disenchantment with politics and a police department whose name is too often tied to corruption. And they are a sign of ambivalence in a divided community.

Wooldridge and Torres capture Rampart's shades of gray.

A native of Chihuahua, Mexico, Wooldridge owns Westlake Plumbing and Hardware with her husband, Robert. The store is in the middle of the Rampart district, a few blocks from MacArthur Park.

A hundred years ago, this was a fashionable neighborhood of hotels, theaters and stores. Families spent Sundays rowing in the park's sparkling lake. Today the lake is a murky green, a dumping place for old shopping carts, strollers and other debris.

The area began to deteriorate in the 1970s, as the city's upscale neighborhoods marched west. With the crack epidemic of the late 1980s, crime got so bad that corpses occasionally were fished from the lake and residents wouldn't go there even in daylight.

Since the police crackdown of the past five years, locals have seen a pronounced decrease in gang activity and graffiti. Although gang members and the homeless still congregate in MacArthur Park, now plenty of families are there, too.

While crime was so bad, Wooldridge's store was broken into 19 times, she said. The time in 1991 when gang members held her at gunpoint was the final straw.

Wooldridge, 52, who wears an LAPD lapel pin on her white sweater, became a crime fighter. She got involved in neighborhood watches and hosted police-community meetings.

"Let's face it - the police are your protection," she said. "Either we had to close the store or fight back."

Wooldridge said she wants to protect her neighborhood, and she sees the Rampart scandal as nothing more than the work of a few bad apples.

"It's not a very big thing," she said. "They're just blowing it out of proportion."

The LAPD, however, has long had a tense relationship with the Hispanic community.

It's tension well known to Torres, who remains bitter about his treatment by police.

"I think they're nothing but punks," he said.

A Los Angeles native of Guatemalan descent, Torres grew up in Rampart. He watched his "homies" get high when he was only 9 and learned early to avoid police.

After his mother died, he joined the gang intervention program Homies Unidos, which meets weekly in a Rampart church basement. "I'd rather be here than out on the street," Torres said. "Away from Rampart police and your enemies."

His wish, he said, is just to find a good job and stay out of trouble.

But Torres was one of Rampart's most recent victims of the violence. Shortly after speaking with The Associated Press, a gunman approached him and opened fire. A bullet struck Torres in the head, leaving him a quadriplegic. Rampart police are looking for suspects.