Gang members hold positions at ‘highest levels’ of LA Sheriff’s department
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
Pretty much everyone knows that the LA Sheriff's Department has been heavily infiltrated by gangs like the Compton Executioners. The phenomenon is extensively well-documented in the press and it even has a Wikipedia entry.
But … no one cares?
The federal government's Department of Justice just ignores it? ( https://raskin.house.gov/2022/2/chairman-raskin-rep-gomez-ur... )
At the state and county level, people just kind of ignore it?
And individuals can't do much about it, since after all the state has a monopoly on violence?
I mentioned the deputy gangs to a family member a while back and they were baffled that nobody is doing anything about it. But who would?
What is the word for "assuming someone else is going to do something about that, but there is no one"?
Would note that this isn’t infiltration by street gangs as much as deputies forming gangs.
> state and county level, people just kind of ignore it
I am from the Bay Area. This is the first I’m hearing about it. I do wish we had a more neutral source than the Rolling Stone.
The wikipedia article on this cites several reputable looking sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
Here's a 50-page summary from Loyola Law School: https://lmu.app.box.com/s/uci2ir4mkpudtvvfp7z8iu4kv1gre1dj
You can see that Rolling Stone skews left and is lower than the peak of reliability.
I dont understand how you can claim media bias is at the core of this story.
> Define "neutral" and I can find one
I think I misunderstood their comment to say "I don't understand why you are claiming Rolling Stone is not neutral". Sorry.
That said, I find it rather odd the absolute highest quality news achievable is...ABC15 in Arizona. Kinda feel they should leave local stations off altogether.
This list isn't exhaustive but many of these are civilian gangs, so it's probably a case of both.
There are of course corrupt members of law enforcement who collaborate with organized crime for various nefarious purposes, but the in-department gangs are a distinct issue.
It specifically mentions armed services, police, and firefighters are not civilians.
Civilian in law enforcement jargon means a non-sworn position: https://www.discoverpolicing.org/explore-the-field/civilian-...
To make this more interesting, Posse Comitatus employs the language to signal "non-Federal forces" eg: National Guard activated by a state to operate domestically are referred to as "civilian law enforcement".
In any of the above cases, calling LEOs civilians would be incorrect and would eschew them of many of their responsibilities.
It very much is gangs infiltrating LAPD and SO.
On top of that, they also have their own cliques or gangs that form within.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
I haven’t seen any reports in Bay Area papers but it’s been reported on in LA. It’s been local news. Similarly Californian don’t hear about >90% of the scandals in Chicago.
The corruption in southland policing departments is absolutely nothing new. Rampart comes easily to mind here, but the list is unfortunately a long one and wikipedia has many documented examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal
Rampart, for instance, was such a large media issue that they even made a movie about it. Not a small one either: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1640548/
EDIT: Dorner should also ring a lot of bells too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9a1v/im_woody_harrel...
How about that outstanding episode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_St...
Well documented and was the base for "GTA San Andreas" and "Training Day". And even though it has been 20 years now, the problem seems far from solved.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Riders-Come-Out-a...
Well, I’m sure not only in America-a lot of developing countries I wouldn’t be surprised if such things existed too-but not the countries the US would want to be compared to
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I can certainly speak to that effect as a Canadian aware of at least one similar 'police gang'
What’s it called? Where is it?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-a...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-justice-department...
[0]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a23080/spacex...
For those downvoting me, care to offer any counter? Even if you have no experience in this you should be able to tell from first principles you cannot get rid of gangs but you can have one gang to rule them all.
Either way, if its not these more local gangs, its the nationwide fraternities which arguably serve the same kind of function. So there isn't really like a way out either way.
I would say overcoming that mentality is one of the most important things for which our society could strive.
There is the idea of policing, and then there is the reality. They can only coincide so much, but if you talk to any cop or read an literature about this, it really is only "so much."
And it's not like we have any historical precedence for a police force being different than this either, its just how it always been. You can't blame them for doing their jobs!
Policing like we do it today in the West with state employees going looking for violations of law didn't exist before the surpluses of the industrial revolution enabled the high touch administrative state.
In the 18th and 19th century there were far, far fewer professional local/county "police", many of the duties were performed by other offices/officials and when needed they got their muscle from community volunteers or the state (usually from the national guard or army in the US). Consequently they didn't spend much time enforcing petty civil laws and enforcing social norms because the manpower simply wasn't there and you couldn't afford to piss off the fraction of people such enforcement pisses off.
(Obviously this all varies by country and year so I'm speaking generally)
It often used to be up to the victim to pursue justice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief-taker
There are obvious problems with this approach.
Imagine there wasn’t a rule of law at all and no police officers. A gang of “baddies” forms. What would be a natural response to the formation of that gang? Wouldn’t it be a gang of “also baddies but baddies whose interests align more closely with ours?”
No. There are other ways.
For example, mobbing with massively superior numbers, resulting in no harm to anyone, and a suspect getting the hospital care they needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY
I’d never be a cop personally because, well, many reasons, frankly, but the biggest one is I have better options. And I’m sure you do too. Almost everyone does.
I’m not saying there doesn’t exist a way to nonviolently deal with the US criminal populace but I’ve yet to see any good examples of it outside of sound socioeconomic policies and a penal system that focuses on rehabilitation. And those are indirect.
I don't have a clear conclusion here to wrap it up, but the multiple dimensions at play here intuitively reject the assumption that you have to embrace the same characteristics that you are trying to protect against.
But it absolutely is about men maiming and killing one another with terrible weapons. The logistics are required to fuel the battle royale and the strategy is required to kill and maim more of the enemy more cheaply than they are maiming and killing your people.
I've thought about this here and there too, with the framing of "how do we break the cycle of violence", or "if we always require a bigger bad to defeat a bad, aren't we doomed to depend on the bad?" My latest thought experiment was the dynamic where electorates sometimes make Faustian bargains with strongman dictators to solve an urgent problem (economic destruction, raids, social change) but then they get stuck with an even worse problem: a brutal dictatorship. A couple of things I think:
- Violence is downstream of trauma. Stop the trauma, stop the violence. Frustratingly this can be relative because status factors in (in 800 AD maybe you got called out for your jank farming tools, now you get called out for your year-old shoes), so there's a cultural component to solve as well. But yeah, generally avoid catastrophes (invest in mitigations like levees, heterogeneous crops, insurance, and a free press) and lean on your culture when you can't (community disaster relief for hurricanes, draft every capable person to kick Putin the fuck out of your country, etc.)
- If you can't nip trauma in the bud, you can mob a big bad with lots of small violent actions. Like it doesn't matter how good Putin is at judo; if 1000 clumsy townspeople show up he's going down.
But like, we know how these things happen, all the way down from dictatorships to street gangs. They're ancient human stories. But they're deeply entwined in our group psychology, so knowing how the dynamic works isn't sufficient to free us from the cycle. We have to collectively rise above. But, that's pretty hard so we haven't been able to do it yet.
There is no excuse for violence. There is always choice.
I think there are so, so many excuses for violence. If someone burst through my door looking to rob and victimize my family I would work pretty hard to do violence to them, and I think that's excusable. One doesn't have to think too hard to come up with other examples.
My theory here is that the people who would try and commit that crime against me are doing it for systemic reasons. Sure there are psychopaths or whatever, but broadly people are products of systems. We know this because people behave differently in different systems--if they didn't matter, we'd see similar aggregate behavior in all societies: crime rates, poverty rates, drug use, education rates, etc. Or to be more concrete: the US has more mass shootings than the EU because of its gun policies and culture, not because more people are randomly choosing to perpetrate mass shootings.
Russia is doing the same through the Wagner group, but they've learned to just use the convicts as first-wave cannon fodder so they're minced before they can get rebellious.
This "band of rogues" stuff makes for fun television but falls short in practice. Hence this article.
Yes, and this is so obvious I can’t believe you are being downvoted. If authorities do nothing, vigilantism will become the increasingly common response. This is exactly what happened in the Seattle CHOP zone- no police = adhoc armed groups claiming that authority for themselves.
In short, this is treated as an acceptable trade-off for enforcing the hierarchies of power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings...
How? Even a victim suit against department would likely be tossed out due to USSC 'qualified immunity'.
Why don’t you unpack that statement in the context of LA. The “hierarchies of power” you’re talking about here is the civilian government having control over organized crime.
edit: I misspoke, there is no data, but at least there is a claim with numbers that can or cannot be refuted for specific things. Your claim is really vague. How do you define "time in history"? How do you define safety?
I can make up numbers too.
Robbery is down 76% compared with 1928 and assaults are down by 22%! Incredible!
This nonsense is just reactionaries being scared, people love fear
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/excellent-beauty/201...
We are more connected now than ever and fear porn is streamed into homes 24/7. Perception may have changed due to a new influx of biased information and looking at historical trend is the only rational way to measure progress.
7 years is not a long time.
> You can see this playing out right now in cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, etc., where mayors have been defeated or come into power because people are outraged by the increase in crime.
We are talking about people voting because they are outraged due to recent crime
Chicago has much more to do with outgoing mayor Lightfoot's across-the-board negatives --- with her handling of the school system, with her COVID handling, and with her handling of the police department --- than it is a straightforward reaction to crime.
They're outraged due to recent outrage about crime, which has absolutely nothing to do with recent crime levels and everything to do with recent outrage levels. It's entirely manufactured.
Saying people are not outraged about crime, but are outraged about outrage of crime is a little silly. The other side of that coin would just be that people hear more about it and are more informed. So attributing outrage to a media coverage conspiracy is not really meaningful (not to mention difficult to prove) because people are allowed to be outraged at what they want. One could even say the news covers what people are interested in, which is a classic chicken vs. the egg case in this context.
The actual data is more important, and for many cities, it is trending up recently.
It's true that he won 67% of the vote in the actual election [0]. But this was effectively a foregone conclusion -- his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, was a man best known for owning 15 cats [1] and faking his own kidnapping [2].
The "real" election was the primary -- notably the first ever election in the city to make use of ranked-choice voting. Wiley and Garcia, the runners-up in the first round, effectively split the "progressive" vote 50/50. Morales was a significant progressive up until a few weeks before the election, at which time her campaign staff walked out citing poor working conditions, effectively ending her campaign.
Looking at the final-round vote tally [3], it was 404,513 for Adams and 397,316 for Garcia -- a difference of just 7,197. He won, but just by the skin of his teeth. The population of NYC in 2021 was 8,468,000, with 4,992,792 registered to vote [4]. That doesn't exactly paint the picture of a resounding victory and a mandate to crack down on ne'er-do-wells that the Post would have you believe. It starts to look a bit more like a perceived centrist barely squeaking through by merit of being the best-known/least-objectionable candidate.
This of course speaks to OP's point: do the public really crave a paternalistic figure who will come and "crack down on crime" (i.e. sign off on more... questionable overtime pay for the NYPD) or is there, for some reason, undue weight given to the narrative that just by happenstance sounds identical to SBA/PBA talking points?
[0] https://www.cnn.com/election/2021/results/new-york-city/mayo...
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/06/23/an-inside-look-into-curtis-sli...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-11-25-mn-1060-s...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/22/us/elections/...
[4] https://vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/vote/2021/county_fe...
edit: the obvious answer is there are few to none.
People are doing something and have made sure they can do more things.
https://abc7.com/la-county-sheriff-robert-luna-alex-villanue...
https://ballotpedia.org/Los_Angeles_County,_Measure_A,_Remov...
yes, you are reading this correctly, that Los Angeles County, starting in 2023 just received the power to do anything to Los Angeles Sheriff department
Villaneuva and the internal gangs were that unconscionable.
(Perhaps initially, as it went from mostly clean to compromised, there was bystander effect plus other effects)
An individual would be suicidal to join the LA Sheriff's force and try to solve it from within.
US military force needs to take control of the department, restructure the command, flush the compromised, and monitor as control is transferred back. That is what we would do if the force were compromised by a foreign force, and the same logic applies.
This is martial law. Los Angeles doesn't need martial law. What you're describing is the DoJ's job.
DoJ aren’t cops. (FBI are cops.)
The appropriate response would be for the county or state government to request assistance from the California Highway Patrol and/or Department of Justice.
They're shouted down for being "pro-crime" and "anti-cop".
I know this may be new to you (Welcome. We have a snacks.), but the least you could do is become a bit informed about this before spouting off.
It just seems like garden variety indifference/apathy/complacency...
The people who have all of the money don't give a shit. They have enough money to drown out the plebs rattling our cages.
As long as they crack the right heads, suppress any movement looking to challenge power, and enforce the laws they deem important the police can act with impunity.
In Southland, maybe. This is the first I'm hearing about it.
It's a big planet with a lot going on, you know.
> The report identifies at “least a half dozen” active gangs and cliques — and names them: the Executioners, the Banditos, the Regulators, the Spartans, the Gladiators, the Cowboys, and the Reapers.
Gangs proudly calling themselves "the Executioners" or "the Gladiators" likely have antisocial and violent tendencies. Think for a moment about the kind of person such names will attract. After reading about the horrifying things these gangs do, I'm left speechless. Reality truly can be stranger -- and more shocking -- than fiction.
The coolest possible use of a regulator is maybe scuba diving?
I suspect this is a different group.
I think you are correct. You gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean.
https://knock-la.com/lasd-gang-regulators-shooting-zabala/
> Jason Zabala, an inked Regulator, is responsible for the deaths of at least two people and cost the County $4 million.
...
> In October 2011, an on-duty Zabala ran a red light and was involved in a collision. Sonya Benton, 49, was inside the other car. The impact gravely injured her spine, causing long-term damage and prompting a fusion surgery. At the beginning of the case, the County’s counsel asserted that Benton’s injuries weren’t serious and the surgery wasn’t necessary. The case settled for $80,000 before trial. Taxpayers picked up the bill for her award and everyone’s attorney fees. Zabala remained a deputy.
...
> The deputies later claimed Laffitte had a gun. However, Zabala said in his deposition that he never saw a weapon on Laffitte. A handgun was recovered from the scene, but it tested negative for Laffitte’s DNA, according to court documents. The testing did conclude, however, that at least two other individuals handled the gun. Shortly after the incident, Cotton said in a press conference, “I want revenge for my brother’s death. There will be no justice in Los Angeles until my brother’s murderers go to prison… I want them jailed for killing my brother and brutalizing my family.”
> That didn’t happen. Laffitte’s family settled the case for $1,500,000 before it went to trial. Taxpayers, of course, footed the bill. But the deputies who killed Terry Laffitte were never charged, and it does not appear they were disciplined. It appears as if Barrios was still a member of the department as recently as 2019. Horrifyingly, Zabala went on to kill another man in front of his family.
A sibling comment mentions the 2018 film Den of Thieves - that's the Regulators. Their tattoo's even on screen.
Probably named after a previous gang:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal
Yes, I think OJ was “framed”. But I also believe he was guilty.
...its a gang. Of course it has antisocial and violent tendencies. That's part and parcel of it being a gang. If it wasn't violent and antisocial it would just be a club or organization.
But what's the internal monologue of someone who styles themselves a deputy and an Executioner really like?
Do they genuinely believe themselves to be doing smart or good things? Do they hate themselves, do they hate the flawed world they're in? Is this an unfortunate but temporary state of affairs, ends justifying the means until they can fully replace the flawed system? Are they stuck in their position, wishing they had said no when/if they had the chance, but now unsure how to safely exit?
Could you or I, with a few different life choices, have been not a software dev but a law enforcement deputy who's also a member of a violent, antisocial gang? I'd like to think I could not, but I have no clue what actually goes on inside the mind of someone in that situation.
The root of all evil is pride when you really analyze it.
It's a lot harder to sneer when you see what the movement is up against.
Listening to the LA sheriff debate was interesting:
They both have connections to gangs? And one is denying they exist.
It makes you wonder if hiring for these top positions would be nearly impossible if you had to exclude gang-connected (directly or indirectly) because almost all of the seniority probably had some connection to it in order to get where they are.
Some organizations are so deeply rotted it's nearly impossible to do an internal clean up without getting rid of the bulk of the staff.
And I'm sure the difficulty of hiring new police officers since 2020 is a big excuse for keeping them, because who is going to replace them? You almost have to a) choose the less bad ones or b) spend a lot of time/money to import senior police from other states or counties.
2. You probably almost certainly do not want martial law.
3. The military is not an intelligence organization.
Gangs would have a hard time forming in battalions mixed by people from all over the country.
MPs have jurisdictional limits. Their jurisdiction can only be expanded to broad civilians under martial law conditions (there are some weird exceptions here like posse comitatus but those remain exceptional).
Nor do you want MPs broadly enforcing the law. Handcuffing someone to a radiator for a half day because they mouthed off is not aligned with a civilian led culture.
Part of me wonder if issue may be (at least partially) a result of the fact that the FBI themselves are "cops", and it can be unsettling to prosecute illegal conduct in which you and your fellow officers also engage.
The only news is that an official report is directly calling them "gangs". Previous official reports had merely called them "cliques", like this one in 2012 from the LA County's Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence: https://ccjv.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CCJV-Re...
The Executioners are the Compton station and known white supremacists; the county paid out $7M over a fatal shooting tied to the gang in 2019: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-20/lasd-gan..., https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/los-angeles-county-compto...
The Banditos are the East LA station: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fbi-investigating-...
Deputies eager to join a gang are notorious for “chasing ink” — or engaging in violence toward county residents... This has led to a rash of “excessive force or other forms of unconstitutional policing,” the report says.
I'm more worried about white supremacists gang members in law enforcement: https://whyy.org/articles/oath-keeperes-membership-data-poli...
Cops killing cops and their families in gang initiations and power struggles makes for nice FX shows, but it is bad for communities, no matter what race the cops are.
Why? Does it feel nicer to be beaten or murdered by cop depending on their political affiliation?
The language might be a bit confusing to outsiders but the gang problem in the sheriff's department is well known to angelenos and isn't confused with street gangs. It's been going on for years.
The LASD is not the LAPD.
These are police gangs that are not directly under street gangs in terms of culture or leadership structure. These aren't former or current street gang members who became cops.
There are white supremacist LASD gangs. Google "Lynwood Vikings".
Tell me you need police reform without saying it.
I suspect the LASD will very successfully resist reform efforts.
If the issue is police and sheriff's departments having roots in the crime world of LA, then perhaps the appropriate mitigation strategy is for those departments to be wholesale swapped out with ones that were previously operating in, say, Idaho. The idea is that what these regions need are law enforcement, and any PD or sheriff's department educated on local laws should do. All of the reasonable arguments against this that I can anticipate are ones that involve so-called problems that either have trivial solutions, or are actually just a collection of tremendous upsides only dressed up to seem bad.
Change my view.
Only if you're not paying attention.
Corrupt departments getting swapped out for others limits their impact in the affected region. The same principle is at play at the next location.
Additionally: corruption thrives (e.g. in the first location) because it has the necessary preconditions to tolerate it; courts and the local folks at the next location are not going to take up a passive posture if the new guys show up and their town is plunged into corruption.
Both factors should lead to the corrupt departments being discouraged to the point that they recognize the futility.
Alternatively, you could limit it to only swapping out the LA units for the ones that were in Idaho, sending the LA ones nowhere—they're just gone. The problem, after all, is the inability to get rid of all law enforcement headcount in an entire region, even if it is by and large thoroughly corrupt. The Idahoans coming in make that a non-issue.
I’m shocked that people with tattoos are even allowed to serve in the sheriff’s department. It’s like an open invitation to gang members, skinheads, etc. These taboos exist for a reason. Tattoos have always been used to express this sort of group. loyalty and solidarity. Controlling tattoos allows society to control a key signaling mechanism these groups use.
Go get a tattoo. They're fun! You can get one of Ronald Coase.
You're talking about something the country is actually united about. I'm really not sure what your concern is.
I will pay for your Ronald Coase sleeve. Just tell me where to show up with a check.
Lots of “widespread” and similar quotes such but no solid numbers. Not much but lots of weighted / non specific language…
According to my half-assed googling: "Consent decrees are intended to promote police integrity within the Department and prevent conduct that deprives individuals of their rights, privileges, or immunities protected by the Constitution of the United States." Probably the best way to start addressing Sheriff's gangs is to start complaining to the L.A. District Attorney [1], the CA Attorney General [2] and the US Justice Department [3].
[0] https://www.lapdonline.org/consent-decree-overview/
[1] George Gascón, https://da.lacounty.gov/contact/email
[2] Rob Bonta, https://oag.ca.gov/donotcall/complaint
I'm just speculating at this point, but naming your specialized unit the "Scorpion Unit" probably also resulted in these guys working as a internal cell, with their own unwritten rules and definitely a propensity to not talk about or work collaboratively with other's outside the unit. Essentially the definition of a gang.
People name their gangs the "Outlaws" or "Vipers" or "Scorpions" etc because they are intending to send a message of fear or strength. It's Gang 101 activity.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/politics/louisville-pattern-a...
Disappointing that this is still a thing (as well as my attitude towards it at the time)
They were probably pulling my leg (or so I thought at the time), but now I wonder...
> Last week, at a public hearing, the Civilian Oversight Commission presented new evidence to suggest that the investigators’ diminishing focus on the Banditos was directed from above. (Villanueva denies giving any orders that discouraged investigation.) Throughout the inquiry, the lead investigator kept a detailed log of his work. While votes in the election for sheriff were still being counted, in early November, he wrote that he was told to ask witnesses “additional questions about subcultures at East LA.” In a deposition for the case of the eight deputies, parts of which were read into evidence at the hearing, the investigator said that, after Villanueva’s victory, his supervisor had mentioned needing to “check with the sheriff” about the Banditos inquiry. Ten days later, the investigator noted a new instruction from his supervisor: “I do not need to ask about subculture groups at ELA Station.” He explained in his deposition, “We’re a paramilitary organization. He gives me an order; I follow through.”
The financial cost is more well known:
> Since 1990, according to the Office of the Inspector General, settlements involving deputies with gang affiliations have cost taxpayers at least $54 million.
That New Yorker story also describes several ex-deputies with gang connections, including the Paul Tanaka trial (Vikings) and Villaneuva reinstating "Creepy" Carl Mandoyan (Grim Reapers).
Depending on the state, they may be limited to almost exclusively those roles, or they might be equivalent to a full police department that also happens to have those roles. In LA, it's closer to the latter.
I mean, it makes sense having the distinction between the FBI and municipal police forces and state police forces when the state forces primarily police non-municipal areas like expressways and can provide some more mobile backup when there's a local crisis that exceeds a local force's ability to manage.
But I don't understand the logic of having so many overlapping police service organizations beyond that.
It seems that each entity starts out performing a specific function, but policing is important and we don't want them to just not enforce the law because it's "not their jurisdiction", so we'll just give them more jurisdiction... and the funding to match... and eventually you have 3-5 departments doing basically the same thing in basically the same area.
It's terrible. It leads to budget bloat and overpolicing, complicates oversight, and makes it harder for locals to manage police interactions because they're dealing with discordant department policies and ethos. (edit: It may be important to note that the police departments themselves seem to consider all of these things a feature, not a bug.)
Edit (to the downvoters):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...
just think of the money
Decades later, and it’s only worse. This is where the “abolition” language comes from. How do you fix this? Unclear. Wholesale replacement seems tempting in the face of any direct path to reform.
LA police organizations are rotten from fruit to root. Incrementalism won’t work.
That ended with him being voted out finally and pardoned of ongoing lawsuits for years of racial profiling by the supreme racist in charge Donald Trump himself, but wonder who will bail Villaneuva and the cronies out now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio
The actual report is found here (and linked to by the Rolling Stone article): https://www.scribd.com/document/629758526/ladeptygang
This article dances around these “gangs” being deputy cliques with allegedly violent tendencies, not actual infiltration by LA street gangs. That smudging makes the lack of evidence for those violent tendencies or refusal to provide back-up easier to digest.
It never explicitly makes that point nor backs it up, which is typical Rolling Stone. It’s a fun read. But a better source is warranted.
That feels like 20/20 hindsight. There were certainly plenty of males who did believe it. I'll fess up, I was one of them. I believed it for 2 main reasons:
1. The story was outlandish, but I thought "you'd have to be insane to lie about this, with this much detail". Well, yeah, in retrospect, insane people exist.
2. Since there was so much detail, I thought there was plenty of stuff that could have been easily vetted, and given Rolling Stone's reputation, thought "for sure they have researched this." I honestly didn't realize at the time about the story being "too good to vet" phenomenon.
Yes, I learned a valuable lesson about consuming information with a more critical eye, and mea culpa. But I know I definitely wasn't the only male who originally believed the story.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-02/la-me-de... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-03/civilian...
NPR, March 2022: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/25/1088905429/lasd-gangs-investi...
Reuters, March 2022: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
NBC Los Angeles, June 2019: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/los-angeles-county-compto...
BuzzFeed, August 2018: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/la-co...
Fox News, 18 hours ago: https://www.foxnews.com/us/ex-los-angeles-sheriff-alex-villa...
Fox 11, 3 days ago: https://www.foxla.com/video/1189078
NBC News, 5 days ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/deputy-gangs-cancer-los...
Fox 11, Feb. 20: https://www.foxla.com/news/banditos-la-county-seeks-dismissa...
LA Times, Feb. 10: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-08/new-depu...
Loyola Law School, 2022: https://www.lls.edu/academics/centers/centerforjuvenilelawpo...
Governments are way too comfortable with gangsters/mobsters, many of whom are regular donors to politicians. These gangsters are famous and everyone know who they are and what they do yet they only rarely get arrested let alone charged with anything. And in the rare cases they do get charged they walk. The way I see it the gangsters are paying govt for the privilege to rob the people unmolested which is another way that govt vicariously robs the people. I consider it a more violent arrangement and that govt has with big companies where big companies rip off people and get away with paying fines.
Communities have to police themselves first.
My larger point was that apparently people without morals or ethics are being attracted to the police force for some reason. And that could be because there's no way to attract moral/ethical people to do that job.