EDITORIAL RAMPART, POST-MORTEM LEARNING LESSONS FROM AN UGLY CHAPTER IN THE LAPD'S HISTORY.

WHAT was once billed as the biggest scandal in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department has turned out to be what looks like the biggest letdown.

Three years after rogue cop Rafael Perez was found stealing cocaine from an LAPD evidence locker, District Attorney Steve Cooley has declined to file charges in some 82 Rampart cases, citing a lack of evidence and Perez's lack of credibility as a witness.

Far from unearthing the rampant corruption that critics once charged, the Rampart scandal has ended, as one activist put it, ``with a whimper.''

On the plus side, it seems that only a handful of dirty cops were behind the outrageous violations of law and order. Unfortunately, a handful of dirty cops was more than plenty to devastate the LAPD's morale and reputation, and put more than 100 innocent people behind bars.

For those keeping score, here's the final tally:

In total, two officers - Perez and partner Nino Durden - went to prison. Two others entered plea agreements, and three more had their convictions overturned. The LAPD fired 18 officers and suspended six, while nine resigned.

All in all, that's somewhere between 28 and 40 bad cops, and even one is far too many, especially in light of the power and responsibility with which police officers are entrusted.

But out of a department of nearly 10,000 it's a small fraction, suggesting that Rampart was more of an isolated problem than a systemic one.

As Cooley put it, ``There was tremendous speculation, some heavy doses of exaggeration and anticipation, and some result-oriented thinking all thrown into a big pot.'' The LAPD's professional critics and antagonists sought to bring the department down, and they saw Rampart as the perfect opportunity.

Still, those 28 to 40 cops managed to create a heap of trouble. In Rampart's wake, more than 100 people were released from prison, and city taxpayers had to cough up $40 million in legal settlements for the victims.

But the greatest costs of Rampart are incalculable - a loss of the public's faith in its Police Department, the evisceration of the LAPD's anti-gang units and the resulting spike in crime, and also a plummeting morale that has ravaged the department's ranks.

Then there's the federal consent decree, a bureaucratic albatross that binds the department's hands and subjects its officers to excessive scrutiny and second-guessing - at a price as high as $50 million a year in implementation costs - for as many years as the federal bureaucrats want to keep it in place.

For all that wreckage, there are some valuable lessons to be learned, chief among them the need for officers to obey the law as stringently as they enforce it and to speak up if they see wrongdoing by fellow officers.

Cooley has implemented a series of reforms to boost officer discipline, and these should go a long way toward preventing another Rampart-like scandal. Nonetheless, cops are human, and in a large department there will always be a few bad apples.

Another key lesson learned is the importance of not tarring good officers with the bad, and learning the facts before jumping to conclusions.

So now an awful chapter has come to an end. A new chief has taken over, and we can only hope a new era in the history of the LAPD has begun.