D.A.’s Office to Let Police Interview Perez

The district attorney’s office, responding to a Los Angeles Police Department assertion that access to Rafael Perez is being limited, will grant police an interview with the Rampart informant as early as today.

A spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Sunday that Perez, the disgraced former officer at the center of the Rampart corruption scandal, is scheduled to be interviewed by LAPD Internal Affairs investigators today or Wednesday, depending on the availability of his attorney.

In a March 21 letter to R. Dan Murphy, head of the district attorney’s Rampart investigation team, James McMurray, commander of the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, wrote that investigators from Internal Affairs last interviewed Perez on Feb. 23 and have since made several requests to talk with him again.

McMurray went on to write that the LAPD needs to talk with Perez about several more cases, and submitted a request for another interview but had not received a response as of March 14.

Murphy responded with a March 22 letter to McMurray, saying he had instructed Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Rosenthal to arrange an interview between Perez and LAPD investigators “as soon as possible.”

Murphy said his office is concerned that “repeated interviews on the same subject by different investigators dramatically increases the potential for inconsistent statements because of confusion or misunderstanding on the part of Mr. Perez.”

Garcetti spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons declined Sunday to comment on the exchange, but it comes at a time of rocky relations between Garcetti and LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks over the investigation into the scandal.

The Times previously reported that the LAPD had no longer cooperating with the district attorney’s investigation of the scandal. On March 17, the Police Commission ordered Parks to fully cooperate with all prosecutorial agencies involved in the investigation.

Under a plea agreement, Perez, in exchange for cooperating in the Rampart probe, was sentenced Feb. 25 to five years behind bars for stealing about $1 million in evidence cocaine.