AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS Portrays an Investigation That Exposed Patterns of Excessive Force and Resistance to Accountability at the L.A.P.D., When POLICING THE FORCE Premieres Friday, October 13 on PBS.

NEW YORK -- In 1999, the Los Angeles Police Department was engulfed by a scandal that one city council member dubbed "the worst man-made disaster" in the city's history. Two reporters for the Los Angeles Times, Scott Glover and Matt Lait, filed hundreds of articles on the widespread police corruption that involved beatings, framings and cover-ups by the department's anti-gang unit known as Rampart. But as the Rampart scandal receded from national attention, the investigative duo only dug deeper into the L.A.P.D.'s suspect record of policing itself.

Their discoveries, including sanitized official reports of police shootings and the revelation that a small number of officers tended to be repeat shooters, are detailed when AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS presents POLICING THE FORCE, premiering Friday, October 13 at 10 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Award-winning broadcast journalist Sylvia Chase narrates.

In the years following Rampart, Glover and Lait investigated dozens of cases of officer-involved shootings that had been deemed "in policy" by the police commission, a five-member civilian panel charged with departmental oversight. The reporters found that many of these shootings had later resulted in either civil-litigation or out-of-court settlements, and asked: Why was the city paying out millions in taxpayer dollars to resolve shootings that the commission had ruled "in policy," i.e. justified?

By comparing the civil court case files with both confidential and publicly available reports presented by the L.A.P.D. to the civilian police commission, the journalists revealed that the police department repeatedly omitted crucial information, such as ballistics evidence and, in one case, a 911 recording of a man in his home claiming to be under attack by the police. Additionally, Glover and Lait revealed that the majority of deadly-force incidents in the L.A.P.D. involved a small number of the same officers - what the Times dubbed a "fraternity of repeat shooters."

In 2004, their years of reporting were featured in two extensive front-page stories that humanized statistics and in some cases spoke for victims who did not live to see justice.

Funders for AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS include Bernard and Irene Schwartz, Park Foundation, The Popplestone Foundation, The Jacob Burns Foundation, The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, Tracy and Eric Semler, and Scripps Howard Foundation.

AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting. Stephen Segaller, director of news and public affairs programming at Thirteen, is executive-in-charge of AIR. Tom Casciato is executive producer; Scott Davis is senior producer.