After an exhaustive review, the Los Angeles Police Department said Monday that Mark Fuhrman had grossly exaggerated most if not all of his accounts of his racist brutality as a patrol officer but had been allowed to "act out his prejudices," especially against female officers at work.
Fuhrman is the former detective whose perjured testimony about his use of racial slurs gravely undermined the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The report on him was commissioned nearly two years ago, after Laura Hart McKinny, an aspiring screenwriter, produced tape recordings from the mid-1980s in which Fuhrman repeatedly used the word "nigger" and bragged about brutal exploits as a police officer.The tapes not only shattered Fuhrman's reliability as a witness in the Simpson case (he had earlier denied using the racial slur) but further shook public confidence in the police department, which already had a reputation for excessive force in the wake of the Rodney King case and the 1992 riots.
In interviews with McKinny, Fuhrman repeatedly said he and others beat, kicked and even fatally brutalized suspects.
Though the investigators reviewed numerous files and re-interviewed dozens of participants in decade-old cases, their report did not fix specific responsibility or fault individuals. It made only general recommendations, which led some women, minority members and other critics of the department to say the report was inadequate.
However, Chief Willie L. Williams said Monday as he released the report, "This report clearly shows that the statements Mark Fuhrman made regarding systematic misconduct are simply not true."
Of 29 incidents or "issues" on McKinny's tapes, 17 could not be connected to known events in the careers of Fuhrman or his contemporaries. Investigators did link 12 accounts to known events but produced no conclusive findings, except for Fuhrman's use of racial epithets and sexist attitudes toward female co-workers.
"Just about everything Fuhrman told McKinny, which could be connected to an actual event, was bigger, bloodier and more violent than the facts," the report concluded.