Building with a rap sheet

For sale: One police station in the middle of Los Angeles. Slightly used.

Looking for an office building with bulletproof windows, mirrored interrogation rooms and a big vault? It could be yours for just $4.5 million. The seller is motivated.

The two-story structure west of downtown is also rather notorious. Among its previous occupants were members of the Los Angeles Police Department's anti-gang CRASH unit (short for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), who were accused of running a rogue operation that framed suspects, administered beatings, stole drugs and committed other crimes.

A few officers were fired after investigations, and former policeman Rafael Perez went to prison for stealing cocaine from an evidence locker.

Now the former station's longtime private owners would like to let go of it because tenants like the LAPD are hard to come by in the depressed real estate market and an empty office gathers no rent. Perhaps another institution will buy it, they hope.

For most of its existence, the white building at the intersection of 3rd Street and Union Avenue was an outpost of civility in an indisputably rough part of town.

The Rampart Division station a few blocks away was long regarded as one of the toughest assignments in the LAPD, where officers faced a crush of felonies in a neighborhood plagued by poverty and gangs.

"There was a time when Rampart's murder rate led the city," department spokesman John Romero said. "It's a night-and-day difference now."