Sheriff problems continued…
Gang Members Hold Positions at 'Highest Levels' of LA Sheriff's Department, Investigation
Reveals Tim Dickinson March 7, 2023
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/gang-members-hold-positions-highest-154740696.html
A blistering new official investigation decries violent, lawless
'deputy gangs' that continue to wield extraordinary power within the
Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. The report delivers a call to action
for new Sheriff Robert Luna: 'It is time to eradicate this 50-year
plague upon the County of Los Angeles.'
The report identifies at 'least a half dozen' active gangs and cliques
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and names them: the Executioners, the Banditos, the Regulators, the
Spartans, the Gladiators, the Cowboys, and the Reapers.
https://www.scribd.com/document/629758526/ladeptygang
These groups pose a threat to the general public - deputies hoping to
prove themselves worthy of gang membership routinely seek out violent
encounters with the public, the investigation reports - as well as to
the internal command-and-control structure of LASD. The gangs
'undermine supervision, destroy public trust, are discriminatory,
disruptive, and act contrary to … professional policing,' the report
concludes.
Perhaps most alarming, the investigation reveals that in recent years
'tattooed deputy gang members' have risen to 'the highest levels' of
department leadership. It calls out recent former Sheriff Alex
Villanueva (who lost his 2022 reelection bid) for betraying promises
of reform by installing gang members as his right-hand men.
Villanueva, the report says, 'at minimum tolerated, if not rewarded
deputy gangs.'
The new investigation describes a deputy-gang culture that is 'deeply embedded' within LASD, calling it a 'cancer' that 'must be excised.'
Conducted by the special counsel to the Civilian Oversight Commission
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the county body that watchdogs LASD - the 70-page investigation
relied on interviews with nearly 80 witnesses as well as dozens of
depositions, court exhibits, and civil lawsuits.
LASD is the nation's second-largest municipal law enforcement agency.
Its deputies are sworn to 'serve and protect' more than four million
residents - as well as to operate America's largest county jail
system. Yet LASD has long been riven by lawlessness. Gangs and cliques
were first decried in LASD in 1973, with the identification of a group
called the Little Devils. A landmark report by the Kolts Commission,
issued in the wake of the Rodney King beating, denounced the problem
of deputy cliques publically in 1992. A 2021 report commissioned by
L.A. County underscored that deputy-gangs had cost taxpayers at least
$55 million in court judgments and settlements, and it excoriated
leadership that 'can't or won't' implement gang reforms.
https://coc.lacounty.gov/
https://clearinghouse.net/doc/10910/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/los-angeles-sheriffs-department-gangs-rand-report-1225982/