By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna issued a big, bold, seemingly zero tolerance pronouncement that racist hate gangs within the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department will be eradicated.
Luna said last week that any evidence of gang membership by a deputy will be promptly referred to the police watchdog agency, the Commission on Peace Officers Standard and Training. If the commission finds the officer involved with a gang the commission is empowered to suspend and/or terminate the officer.
Luna’s tough talk on cracking down on gangs within the Sheriff’s Department is welcome. The existence of gangs has been the long-standing cancer in the department. Luna’s predecessors paid much lip service to getting rid of them but did nothing about them.
Luna showed much promise when he took office that he would fulfill his promise to eliminate deputy-involved gang activity. He set up an impressively labeled Office of Constitutional Policing, which he said would be tasked with not only ridding the department of gangs but also ridding the department of its other long-standing hideous plague, misconduct and abuse.
Luna ran hard and won on the promise to rein in the abuse, misconduct, refusal to bow to oversight, and out-and-out warfare that had been the trademark of his predecessor, Alex Villanueva. County supervisors sought to get a handle on a department that for decades served totally at the dictatorial whims of often stubborn, tin-ear sheriffs.
Still, the issue that tormented the department the most was the racist gang cliques within the department. That was always the true litmus test of reform.
The facts are beyond dispute about the existence of gang cliques in the department. A parade of former sheriff’s deputies and officials have publicly said under sworn testimony that the gang cliques existed within the department.
A Rand study in September 2021 re-confirmed their existence. There is no firm evidence that much has changed since then.
The study, though, did credit department officials with at least addressing the problem and taking some steps to eliminate them. But it also blasted the department for not being clear, firm and initiating a strong policy to eliminate them.
Another undeniable fact is gang cliques within the department have been around for a long time. Successive sheriff’s officials have not only known about their existence and tacitly condoned them, but some have also been members of gang cliques.
They have sported gang tattoos, flashed signs and other gang clique trappings. The names they dubbed themselves hardly are harmless choir member fraternal stuff — the Banditos, the Grim Reapers, the Spartans, the Cavemen, the Jumpout Boys and the Regulators. The names sound like a cross between the Mafia, a frontier armed posse and street thug gang monikers.
The gang clique plague was especially galling given that some deputies at some stations sport tattoos that look suspiciously like gang, white supremacist or violence promos. This was dramatically confirmed in testimony from a top sheriff’s official who admitted that he and another top-ranking sheriff’s official sported their gang clique tattoos.
It was only a short step for deputies in gang cliques to engage in racial profiling, harassment and using excessive force against citizens. The victims almost always were young African American and Hispanic males.
It was also a short step from gang clique deputies to lying and shading testimony in criminal cases. There has been a lot of that.
There is a database of deputies who have testified in criminal cases and their testimony is suspect, to say the least. Former Sheriff Jim McDonnell tried to turn over the names of the officers who give tainted testimony but was blocked. He also promised to rein in the high number of excessive force actions by sheriff’s deputies, almost all unpunished. He didn’t get the chance.
Now the ball is back in Luna’s court. Tackling this problem means more than just implementing new training and conduct standards. It means immediate and vigorous implementation of reform recommendations such as a fully empowered independent civilian oversight commission, getting rid of deputies who brutalize prisoners at the jails and administrators who look the other way, total transparency and accountability in the reform process. And most importantly, it means firing and where warranted recommending prosecution of deputies that overuse deadly force.
Luna said all the right things to oust the former sheriff. And judging from the overwhelming crushing voter support he got in his big win; the public enthusiastically bought his reform pitch.
That translates into a firm mandate to make good, and make good fast, on his reform pledge. The crackdown on excessive force use along with the elimination of the gang cliques must remain his priority. Anything less poses a grave danger to department credibility, public safety and balanced, fair constitutional policing.
Any deputy in a gang betrays his or her sworn oath to be fair and impartial in the enforcement of the law. One can hardly expect that from a gang member, particularly one with a badge and a gun.
Now that Luna has again made the pledge to crack down on racist hate gang members who masquerade as sheriff’s deputies we’ll watch closely to see if he makes good on his word. It’s a matter of credibility.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of “President Trump’s America” (Middle Passage Press). He also is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on Facebook.
