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LA police panel clears Indian officer

Nirshan Perera

An Indian police officer accused of killing an unarmed man in 1996, planting a weapon by his prone form, and then lying with other cops about the incident has been exonerated by a police disciplinary committee.

Officer Kulin Patel, who was taken off active duty in September 1999 pending a departmental investigation, will return to work immediately.

Patel, 37, was accused by fellow police officer Rafael Perez of shooting suspected gang member Juan Saldana as he was running down the hallway of an apartment building. When he and other officers realized than Saldana was unarmed, they placed a pistol by his dying body and conspired to cover up the incident, Perez said.

Cooperating with authorities in exchange for a lenient sentence on a drug theft charge, Perez, another member of the Los Angeles Police Department's elite anti-gang CRASH unit, opened a virtual Pandora's Box of horror stories about the police department's now defunct squad.

The Rampart Scandal, as it has come to be known, has purged the LAPD of numerous police officers accused of routinely beating, framing and killing suspects. It is the latest nightmare to rock the LAPD since the 1991 Rodney King beating.

Patel was one of eight former CRASH members implicated in Perez's corruption revelations.

Another CRASH cop, Michael Montoya, shot another unarmed suspect in the building during the same bust, Perez alleged.

But the prolonged hearings into the two shootings ended suddenly on Tuesday when the LAPD's disciplinary board cleared both officers of the charges and reinstated their salary and position.

Patel, who migrated to the US from India in 1983 and served in the Marine Corps before joining the LAPD in 1989, was taken off paid leave in July 2000. He and his wife have a five-year-old son.

"I'm very pleased that justice has prevailed in this matter and the specious allegations made against him by disgraced former police officer Rafael Perez have been proven false," Patel's attorney Mark MacCarley told rediff.com

"This man intentionally and viciously maligned the reputation of a great officer and dragged him through a series of hearings. But Officer Patel has been cleared on all counts and as a result is going back to work to continue to protect and serve the community he loves."

But in the wake of Patel's exoneration, critics of the LAPD again questioned the impartiality of the department's disciplinary committee. The board, which has already cleared several other officers implicated by Perez, comprises two LAPD captains and one civilian who alone weigh the merits of the case and recommend action.

It was naïve to think that fellow cops could fairly police a corruption-riddled department, LAPD critics said.

"I think it's very difficult for an officer who has spent the vast majority of his career in an organization to really be objective about the systematic problems in the department," Winston McKesson, Perez's attorney, told The Los Angeles Times.

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