Vindicarre wrote:
I disagree - Rampart, Christopher Commission, L.A. Riots. When the Police Chief is alleged to have been involved in large-scale cover-ups of corruption, that speaks powerfully to the entire organization. When it's consistently associated with corruption and brutality in popular media, it shows how the dept's reputation is viewed by the public-at-large. When the city council votes to allow U.S. Department of Justice to oversee and monitor reforms within the LAPD, rather than handle it internally, it speaks for itself.
I don't believe that it does. This all stems from one incident, now 20 years old. That hardly provides a compelling case for the status now, or even 10 years ago. The LAPD may have had a problem with corruption
at the time, but that does not say much about matters now, or even in recent years. The City Council's vote says little, as well, except that it speaks to the degree of national attention surrounding the entire series of events.
As to popular culture, that's highly problematic. Popular culture ideas about the LAPD stem almost entirely from the entire Rodney King series of events, and tend to ignore the behavior of those supposedly outraged over the incident and the corruption it alledgedly represented represented. Although there is good cause to believe that the LAPD suffered a serious internal discipline problem at that time, there is
also good cause to believe it has been severely exaggerated, and that the popular culture image of the LAPD is heavily that of a black LA population that simply resents the police, as well as other races, as the heavy targeting of Latinos and Asians during the rioting attest. Part of the racial tension of the time was between Asians and Blacks, in incidents such as the Soon Da Ju shooting of Latasha Harlins, but popular culture tends to gloss over the issues almost entirely in favor of oversimplifying the entire matter down to white cops beating a black man.
In any case, this persistence of this image over 20 years represents a problem with popular culture in general these days: Images from any time since.. 1985, more or less, tend to remain "current" in popular imagining in ways that they did not back at those times. For example, people still tend to think of Desert Storm as a recent war, even though it, like the Rodney King incident is now 20 years in the past. In 1991, however, people did not think of Viet Nam in such terms of recency, even though it was approximately the same distance in the past at that time. 9/11 is 10 years old next month, but people seem to think of it as something that just happened (although the lengthy intervention in Afghanistan makes that rather understandable).
Even the Stanford sexual assault procedures thread hints at this problem: In the past 25-30 years enormous societal progress has been made in dealing with the issues faced by sexual assault victims. It is no longer socially acceptable to blame the victim, nor use the short skirt defense, and legal processes have reformed as well - witness rape shield laws. Yet we see idiocy like the Stanford sex code or whatever we're calling it because we are still hearing this mantra about how poorly rape victims are treated, how they are stigmatized and nother such nonsense - claims that were valid 25 or 30 years agao but no longer reflect reality. Instead, much like a claim that the LAPD is notoriously corrupt, it is based on an idea from decades ago, but which people have held onto out of nothing more than habit.
Not that I have any particular liking for the LAPD, but really one would think that more recent incidents could be cited if they had problems that even approached those of places like New Orleans or Chicago.
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