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LOS ANGELES-- The Los Angeles Police Department has been released from a long running decree after a federal judge decided the department had reformed significantly from prior corruption charges. The city was forced into the consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice after the Rampart corruption scandal and brutality complaints. The agreement, which aimed to improve the LAPD's policing standards, meant more than 100 reforms to the department, the tightening of internal checks on officers' conduct, improved training, increased oversight of the anti-gang unit at the center of the Rampart corruption scandal, and a ban on racial profiling. The...

A federal appeals court upheld a $15 million jury verdict for three Los Angeles police officers who alleged they were falsely arrested and prosecuted as part of the Rampart corruption scandal. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said there was evidence to support the jury's verdict that the city and the Los Angeles Police Department violated the officers' constitutional rights by arresting and charging the men without an adequate investigation. The jury had awarded $5 million each to LAPD Officer Paul Harper, Sgt. Edward Ortiz and former Sgt. Brian Liddy. With interest and attorney fees, the city is now liable...

“Javier Francisco Ovando, who was awarded a $15-million settlement in the wake of the LAPD Rampart scandal in the 1990s, is arrested after leading police on a chase from Glendale to South San Gabriel.”

You may have heard about the Triple-killing on the Streets of San Francisco by a gang member(s) purported to belong to the infamous Salvadorian gang, known as MS-13. “A suspected gang member accused of killing a father and two sons escaped prosecution in a weapons case earlier this year when the San Francisco district attorney's office concluded it didn't have enough evidence to connect him to a gun that a passenger in his car was carrying…” Read report by Jaxon Van Derbeken of the San Francisco Chronicle, at link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/26/BAV711FM4F.DTL This same MS-13 gang member, Edwin Ramos, had been picked...

Scandal Erupts at the L.A. Times By Jan Golab FrontPageMagazine.com | December 2, 2005 Times are bad at the L.A. Times. Competition from new media and “a lingering feeling of bias” continue to plague the paper and drive down circulation. Editors John Carroll, Michael Kinsley and leftist icon Robert Scheer have all recently been sent packing. Now, the once venerable paper faces a scandal of Jayson Blair proportions, one that may topple key players—including a Pulitzer Prize winner—and permanently sully its reputation. The Times’ questionable coverage of the Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. (AKA Biggie Smalls) murders has long been...

Osama bin Laden doesn't seem nearly so cocky in the unedited version of a videotape aired on al-Jazeera, complaining that the manhunt against him has hampered al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's newest tape may have thrust him to the forefront of the presidential election, but what was not seen was the cave-dwelling terror lord talking about the setbacks al Qaeda has faced in recent months. Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape — of which only six minutes were aired on the al-Jazeera Arab television network in the Middle East on Friday — bin Laden bemoans the recent democratic...