THE CRIME, according to the front page of The Los Angeles Times, was “an absolutely fiendish instance of malicious mischief”.

Few would argue with the newspaper’s conclusion. The incident took place shortly before 8pm on a Thursday night, at a well-known nightspot called the Centennial. Some 500 locals had turned up there for the weekly “Grand Hop” dance. The perpetrators — the number of them is still unknown — snuck up to the northeast gallery of the building, where they discovered a gallon of vitriol, or sulphuric acid. Perhaps out of boredom — perhaps in some strange protest at the mêlée below — the criminals dragged the jar to the balcony, heaved it up on to the railing (where drops of acid left pockmarks in the mahogany), then emptied it over the edge.

By the time the acid-throwers were seen escaping through a skylight, 42 men, women and children had been mutilated by burns to their necks, arms and faces.

If all crimes tell us something about the places in which they were committed, what did this one tell us about Los Angeles? The answer perhaps comes in the final paragraph of the newspaper report. “The police are not bothering themselves about the matter,” it said.

At this point, I should probably mention that all this happened a while ago — 1881, to be exact. But the reputation of the Los Angeles Police Department has not improved much in the 125 years since the Western cow-town became a 21st-century megatropolis.

Indeed, it is hard to think of a police force anywhere in America that has suffered a more damaging series of public relations catastrophes, beginning with the Watts riots of 1965 (in reality caused by the California Highway Patrol), and continuing with the LAPD shooting of Eulia Love, a young black woman, after she chased away a local gas company debt collector.

Those horrors were followed in turn by the Rodney King beating, the LA riots and the so-called Rampart scandal, which involved a small number of LAPD offices stealing and selling drugs, planting evidence and, in one case, shooting and paralysing an unarmed man before fabricating a report designed to pack him off to prison in his brand new wheelchair.

But times, allegedly, have changed. “This is a new LAPD,” as William Bratton, the city’s latest police chief, is fond of saying. So what has Bratton done to transform the LAPD’s community relations? What kind of tough, internally unpopular but much-needed reforms has he put in place to stop the kind of corruption that turned the LAPD into one of the world’s most reviled organisations? Has Bratton managed to establish, say, a vast new computerised system to keep track of his officers’ disciplinary records?

Er, no. Bratton’s focus has been elsewhere. More to the point: he has been busy launching his own blog.

In all fairness, the LAPD chief has helped to put in place 141 other reforms during his three-year tenure, but his blog has gained the most recent attention.

So what does LAPDblog.org offer the casual reader? A photograph of Bratton’s pet rabbit, Bobbins? An on-the-spot critique of the Mayor’s new hairdo, filed via the police chief’s BlackBerry from the latest town hall budget meeting? Not exactly. In fact, the LAPD blog is written by one of Bratton’s lieutenants, and contains the same PR guff that would normally be filed under “news” on the LAPD’s website.

The only difference is the inclusion of comments by members of the public. You get the feeling, however, that they are put through an industrial-grade sanitation process — especially the ones about why immigrants should be denied constitutional rights during May Day demos.

But I have to hand it to Bratton: the blog (which was itself the suggestion of an LA blog) has been a brilliant distraction when a US district judge is about to decide whether the LAPD still needs to be kept under Justice Department supervision. Bratton’s 141 reforms might sound impressive, but they fall well short of the 191 changes ordered by the Feds after the Rampart scandal in 2000. Civil rights groups are arguing for a two-year extension of federal oversight; Bratton wants to be left alone.

Whatever happens, Angelenos can at least be assured that, unlike with the acid-throwing of 1881, the LAPD is bothering itself about the matter. Just don’t expect to read the whole truth on LAPDblog.org.

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