Lupe Andrade has filed nearly 100 complaints against LAPD officers from the Hollenbeck Division in the last few years.
She has crashed undercover operations and taken photographs of officers. She has made T-shirts calling them corrupt, dangled a banner over the 10 Freeway decrying them and picketed the Hollenbeck station -- all in the name, she said, of protecting the community from bad cops. Citizen complaints are not available for public review, but Andrade said many of hers are for harassment and rude behavior -- not brutality or other more serious offenses.
"I'm just tired of seeing how the community is being abused by the LAPD," the 34-year-old single mother said. "It's time that people find out there are ways you can go about removing a bad apple."
But police accuse Andrade, a prenatal educator, of colluding with gang members in a campaign to "wrest control of the neighborhood" by scaring officers away from Boyle Heights' Ramona Gardens housing project, where she used to live.
In an unusual move that has drawn concern from civil liberties advocates, police -- acting independently of the department -- banded together and went to court asking a judge to order Andrade to stay away from them and their station.
Meanwhile, she has been charged with more than two dozen misdemeanors over the last few years, from driving without a license to more serious allegations.
Andrade is due back in court later this month to face misdemeanor charges that she hit a neighbor and threatened to hurt her children in a dispute over a ceiling fan. If convicted, she faces seven years in jail.
She and her lawyer deny the charges. They say authorities are on a witch hunt, so determined to silence her that they are trumping up charges.
Ultimately, both sides say, the courts will have to decide whether Andrade is an activist expressing her 1st Amendment rights or a criminal menace hurting her community's quality of life.
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Growing up in Ramona Gardens, a 32-acre collection of peach bungalows flush against the San Bernardino Freeway that is the city's oldest housing project, Andrade said her attitude toward the Los Angeles Police Department was sealed early on. One of her first memories, she said, is of officers knocking her little brother out of her father's arms into a concrete wall.
She also learned early the power of legal action. When Andrade was 13, she said, she went to the courthouse and successfully helped her mother get a restraining order against her father.
"Ever since then, I was fascinated by the courts," she said. "I love being in court. I love court. I just don't like being the one accused."
She had a memorable example in her father, who she said protested the LAPD on numerous occasions, even attaching a sign criticizing the police to his bicycle.
Her own campaign against Hollenbeck police began in earnest five years ago, she said, after an officer arrested her on an outstanding warrant for a traffic violation. The arrest was at 10:30 p.m. and her son, then 3, wept with fear, she said. She became convinced that the officer and others in the division were harassing her and her family.
Even some of Andrade's detractors in the Police Department said that, though she has no formal legal training "except getting arrested," she has a sophisticated understanding of how to use the legal system and the complicated federal consent decree that governs the LAPD.
In addition to filing her own torrent of personnel complaints, she has helped friends and neighbors to do the same. Under the consent decree, every complaint must be individually investigated -- at a cost of up to thousands of dollars to the city. Until a complaint has been cleared, it can stain an officer's record and make it more difficult to win promotions.
Andrade has also taken her protests to the streets, passing out dozens of the anti-LAPD T-shirts and dangling a giant banner denouncing an officer over the freeway for passing motorists to see. Other times she has picketed the Hollenbeck station.
Police said gang members all over the city have used a barrage of complaints as a tactic against officers -- but never to the same degree as Andrade. All but one of her complaints were unsubstantiated, they said.
Andrade, however, insists that every complaint she has filed was valid.
She concedes that she knows many of the gang members who police say terrorize residents daily. But the mother of an 8-year-old boy who works as a counselor for at-risk pregnant women and talks of one day becoming a lawyer swears that her goal is not to help the gang.
"They want to paint me out to be this deadly, notorious person," she said. "I'm not this person.... But I have the right as a citizen to file a complaint. Period."
Officers see things differently.
In September 2003, five officers, using funds from the police union, went to court seeking an injunction to keep Andrade at least 500 feet away from the Hollenbeck station and Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters.
