The crime map for the neighborhood from 9/9 to 9/16. Personal theft is by far the most common crime noted.

Then, last night, some guy goes to the Pan American on Temple, gets in a fight, and shoots and wounds three men outside the club. Soon we will have more blue dots to mark the occasion. The police don’t know yet who the shooter was, and all we know about the men who were shot is that they were between the ages of 20 and 25. The police told an independent news crew that one man was shot in the back, another in the chest and the other in the arm.

I’ve never been to the Pan American, but I do frequently stare at it when I drive by. Mainly I am mesmerized by the six-inch, jelly platform heels the women wear and the signage, in classic Spanglish. I did once suggest that a few friends and I go there after bookclub (we read They Shoot Horses Don’t They? about dance marathons and it seemed the most relevant spot in the area to tie the theme in), but my friend Molly said we no, because we’d need bodyguards.

update, 9/22 — Not so fast on the no yellow dots. Two men were shot yesterday in MacArthur Park, one of them fatally. The men were apparently sitting, chatting on a park bench near the corner of 6th/Alvarado at 10:30 in the morning, when another man approached them and started shooting at them in the head and all over their body. From the LA Times:

The incident at MacArthur Park marked the first shooting there since January 2008 and the first fatal shooting at the park since August 2006, [LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio] Diaz said.

Once considered a magnet for violence, drug dealing and other crimes, the park has undergone a revival in recent years as the LAPD beefed up patrols and city leaders invested in the site. Among the features of the revived park is a new soccer field that has been popular with Westlake District residents.

“Anytime we are talking about a crime in MacArthur Park, there’s an added dimension,” Diaz said. “It’s pretty bold to do this in the day when there’s lots of people around.”

Not entirely by coincidence, today is also the day I ordered Pepper Spray to carry with me on my key chain.

Javier Ovando, Officer Rafael Perez, Officer Nino Durden

Shortly after Javier Ovando won his first settlement, in 2000, against the City of LA and the LAPD, for $15 million, he sued the County of LA and public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice. It was announced this week that he has finally settled, for $750,000.

Ovando was shot, paralyzed, and then framed by police officers later disgraced in the Rampart scandal in October of 1996. In his trial a year later, he was charged with felony assault on a police officer, assault with a deadly weapon with the intent of committing great bodily injury, and exhibiting a firearm in the presence of an officer and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He would have likely served all 23 years, had Officer Rafael Perez — one of the officers whose false testimony had put Ovando in prison — not been caught stealing a million dollars of cocaine from an evidence locker in the LAPD property room. Perez’s arrest implied a serious and lengthy sentence that he bartered his way down by offering to testify about a number of cases officers in the CRASH unit had “put on” people, one of which was Ovando’s. (These allegations of widespread police misconduct effectively broke open the Rampart scandal, in which more than 70 police officers were implicated in everything from unprovoked shootings to drug-dealing, perjury to bank robbery. The scandal is one of the most widespread cases of documented police misconduct in US history.)

Ovando’s conviction was overturned two-and-a-half years into his sentence, in 1999. Not long after, he sued the County of LA and his prior public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice, alleging that she represented him incompetently during his trial. He claimed that Toister did not call two witnesses who could have confirmed that he was unarmed the day he was shot. In Toister’s defense, County lawyers said that she had used “reasonable litigation strategy” and that if she had called the witnesses Ovando wanted, damaging evidence about his gang affiliation would have surfaced.

When the case originally went to trial, a jury found in favor of Ovando and awarded him $6.5 million. But this decision was overturned — one of the jurors failed to disclose in the selection process that she was an actress who had starred in “Gang Warz,” a movie about the Rampart scandal, and the judge felt it unfair that all blame had been placed on Toister, and not on Perez and Durden. Ovando’s lawyers appealed this to the State Supreme Court and lost. They were set to start trial again on July 22nd, but will no longer have to since the case was formally dismissed, after the settlement agreement was reached, on the 3rd of last month.

Epilogues:

Rafael Perez was sentenced in 1998 to five years in prison for stealing cocaine from the LAPD. He served three years, and was released on parole in 2001. According to PBS, federal prosecutors have cut a deal with Perez’s former partner, Nino Durden, whose testimony may now be used to bring further charges against Perez.

Nino Durden was sentenced in 2002 to five years in prison, and served less than three.

Tamar Toister is still a public defender. She wrote her account of what went wrong at the trial, in 2000, here.

Javier Ovando has other cases in the works. He was arrested last year for apparently making criminal threats to the new couple that bought his Topanga Canyon mansion. And in that same week, he lead police officers in his Hummer on a high-speed chase from Glendale to South San Gabriel. The case is still open.

LAPD officers near MacArthur Park on May Day 2008, a year after the Melee. Photo by Tom Andrews.

All the police officers accused of using excessive force in the 2007 May Day protests will keep their jobs, the LA Times reported this morning:

Of the four officers Bratton sent to the boards, one received an official reprimand for being guilty of unauthorized force but was found not guilty of misleading statements. A second officer charged with seven incidents of unauthorized force was found guilty of two of them and given a 12-day suspension. A third officer was found guilty of unauthorized force, conduct unbecoming an officer and misleading statements and given a 20-day suspension. A fourth officer was found guilty of two of seven counts of unauthorized force and received an official reprimand. Citing police personnel privacy rules, the department has not named the officers. Deputy Chief Mark Perez reported the panels’ decisions to the Police Commission. He said that officers repeatedly defended themselves by citing a “lack of training.” An internal investigation into the incident that left more than 200 demonstrators and journalists reporting injuries blamed poor leadership, overly aggressive tactics and lack of training.

Since both the investigators and the officers mentioned “a lack of training,” I asked a spokesperson at the LAPD what sort of new training will be given to officers who work with large crowd-disperal situations. I’m told it will take 10 days to get a response.