LOS ANGELES -- Since the movie business set up shop in an orange grove called Hollywood, the Los Angeles Police Department has furnished the model of America's image of the man, or woman, behind the badge.
From the Keystone Kops to the mean streets of film noir, from Sgt. Friday's 'Just the facts, ma'm,' to Starsky and Hutch, generations of Americans grew up watching movies and TV shows based on the officers of the LAPD.
In turn, Hollywood created an image that its real hometown cops lived up to: a reputation for being clean-cut, militarily courteous, dedicated and incorruptible -- above all, incorruptible.
Now the reputation is taking a battering.
Recurring charges of brutality and corruption have cast a shadow on the badge that was so long esteemed as the symbol of the honest police force.
Ten officers have quit or been fired -- and six face criminal charges -- in the aftermath of an investigation begun when two Hollywood division officers were nabbed burglarizing a store last December, the first such arrest in 26 years. An 11th faces a departmental hearing.
A 12th, whose arrest set off the scandal, died in a mysterious truck crash, and a prostitute who had connections to the case was stabbed to death, although investigators say they can find no links between the deaths and the scandal.
'It is curious that two of the people who could have been valuable witnesses have ended up dead,' commented Deputy District Attorney Gilbert Garcetti, head of the special investigations division.
The investigation turned up stories of regular sunrise parties with prostitutes in the parking lot of an outdoor theater in the Hollywood Hills.
The charges piled atop a series of problems for the department, most of them centered on the Hollywood station, including allegations that officers had sex with teenage girls who were Explorer Scouts in a program that was to give them law enforcement experience.
The principal scandal, which has grown a little more each time police officials declared it closed, began with the arrest of Jack Meyers and Ronald Venegas. The two patrolmen allegedly dedicated most of their efforts to committing burglaries as they cruised their Hollywood beat, filling 'orders' they took from other officers.
They started by scooping up items left behind in real burglaries they investigated. Later they fired marbles with a slingshot through plate glass storefronts and snatched the merchandise, returning later to 'investigate' their own crime.
Meyers had agreed to testify about crimes by other officers when he died May 12. His truck went off an uncrowded freeway at dawn at high speed and overturned. Investigators found no evidence of foul play.
Meyers' wife and a close friend, also a former policeman, said they believe Meyers was the target of guilty officers bent on preventing him from talking, who could have frightened him into running off the road.
The second fatality was Sandra Bowers, a prostitute whose body was found in the Crest motel in Hollywood in September. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the back and her neck slashed.
Again, police said there was no evidence the killing was meant to shut up a potential witness.
Police Chief Daryl Gates called it 'an isolated incident,' and said the department itself had cleaned up the problem.
By April there were four men involved. Gates replaced the captain who ran the scandal-plagued Hollywood station. He put in Capt. Robert Smitson, a tough disciplinarian, and gave him 'a free hand to clean that place up and make it run right.'
Under Smitson, Gates said, 'We've moved a lot of people out - we've moved all the lieutenants' and about half the 30 sergeants, in part because he thought they had been 'overexposed to the environment of Hollywood,' where some areas long ago decayed into squalid ghettos for prostitutes of both sexes, pimps, porno theaters and drug dealers.
The timing of this scandal could not have been worse for the department, coming when its image already had been eroded by a series of events.
Black groups accuse the department of being trigger-happy and of using controversial choke-holds to subdue violent prisoners. They say this caused 17 deaths, although the department says the number is four or five. A newspaper story said officers were developing chummy relations with bookies.
Gates set off a flap by treading into the politically sensitive area of the 1984 Olympic Games, saying the Soviets may be infiltrating trouble-makers into the city. This charge drew cries of outrage from Russian immigrant groups.
Investigators are looking at a claim by officer Carl Algee that other Hollywood division officers severely kicked a prisoner, Charles Hill, 40, as Hill lay helpless in the station, bound hand and foot. Hill was found dead in his cell. The death was officially attributed to sickle cell disease.
In September, three prostitutes complained to sheriff's deputies that a police officer had raped them, displaying his badge and gun and threatening arrest if they did not cooperate. One woman said the male officer also robbed her.
Several officers have been arrested on narcotics charges. In 1981 a veteran Hollywood Division officer was found guilty by a police board of helping run a brothel and obstructing a narcotics investigation.
A University of Southern California female student charged she happened into one of the Hollywood station's parties in a parking lot and was picked up by an officer who forced her to perform oral sex on him. She was hospitalized with slashed wrists, saying she had tried to commit suicide.
Four narcotics officers were accused of wrecking a city car in the desert, apparently while on an unauthorized, and still officially unexplained, trip to Las Vegas.
Other stories circulated that some officers had invented new sports to pass the time on the night shift, including attempts to reach Las Vegas -- 275 miles away -- and return by the end of their shift.
'We've had more problems in the last year than in the last 25 years -- no question about that,' Gates agreed, 'but most of it keys on the Hollywood issue.
'We've got 6,900 people, and that's the only kind of organized misconduct we've had on this department for the past 25 years.'
The most serious effect could well be a new lack of confidence among citizens of Los Angeles, who in the past bragged that no matter what happened in other big cities, their police were clean.
A letter in the Los Angeles Times noted the department's claim that horse patrols were reducing crime in Hollywood. 'Naturally,' quipped the skeptical writer. 'How much stolen electronic equipment can be hauled away on a horse?'
