Conviction secured for LAPD officer who falsely added individuals to police gang database

of the ‘lawbreaker’-replace-in-‘law-enforcement’ department

Virtually every “gang database” is a vehicle for abuse. While there is some investigative value in maintaining a database of confirmed gang members, most of these data collections are conducted without oversight or restrictions, allowing officers to add almost anyone they want to the collection, as long as they live, work, or travel in an area that these officers have unilaterally declared to be gang territory.

You would think that such a data set would be much more useful if it was carefully curated and pruned regularly, so that fewer resources would be wasted targeting people who were not gang members but who had the misfortune of being around them occasionally.

But law enforcement doesn’t think that way. Apparently, agencies from local PDs to the NSA still believe that quantity is better than quality and will do whatever it takes to keep their data stores full. And when it comes to police departments, it’s always helpful to have a reason to harass or arrest someone, even if that “reason” is nothing more than easily accessible falsified data.

When you add it all up, it results in ridiculousness, rights violations, lawsuits, and—in this case—criminal charges against the officers who falsely added Los Angeles residents to the LAPD’s gang database. It’s not just a U.S. problem, either, despite the fact that the country has several extremely large gang databases. An Australian police officer was labeled a gang member simply because he happened to be seen walking down the same street as two gang members walking through the neighborhood.

Closer to home, things get worse and dumber. The Chicago Police Department’s gang database contains at least 15,000 people who have been designated by the city’s inspector general as “not a specific gang member” and “given no reason” by officers for their inclusion in the database. Boston’s gang database has designated people as gang members for acts as innocuous as “wearing Nike shoes” or getting beaten up by gang members. The database in question here — CalGang — has allowed officers to literally infants as suspected gang members.

Fortunately, someone decided to do something about this abuse. Six months after reports surfaced that LAPD officers were wrongly adding residents to the gang database, prosecutors went to work. In the end, it was more performative than groundbreaking. Six officers were charged with criminal offenses. Of those six, only one will actually be convicted of a crime.

An officer accused of falsifying documents in a gang fraud scandal at the Los Angeles Police Department pleaded guilty Thursday to six felony charges.

Prosecutors alleged that Braxton Shaw falsified dozens of interview cards that police fill out while in the field, labeling as gang members 43 people who either made no such confession or outright denied being members. Several of those people ended up in a state gang database.

The 41-year-old officer filed his request as part of a deal with prosecutors to settle multiple crimes that could have sent him to prison for decades.

Officer Shaw was lifted by his own petard — his bodycam footage that showed him falsifying gang database reports. At least the other five officers facing similar charges were smart enough not to keep permanent video records of their crimes.

Shaw, however, is no scapegoat. He is the sacrificial lamb — the one the city holds up as proof that it actually cares about overseeing a department that has done little more than lurch from scandal to scandal since its creation.

And while it’s more than likely that people who are falsely accused of gang activity have spent some time in jail (either before trial or after pleading guilty to false association charges), Officer Shaw won’t have to spend a day behind bars, despite pleading guilty to multiple charges. As the Los Angeles Times reports, Shaw’s six felony charges will be commuted to two years of probation and 250 hours of community service. The only catch is that Shaw will have to surrender his police certification, meaning he can’t be hired by other law enforcement agencies in California. But that certainly won’t stop him from plying his corrupt trade elsewhere in the country after he completes his probation requirements.

Will this be enough to deter other LAPD officers from adding people to CalGang just because they want to? Oh no. The state only went after six officers and only managed to convince one of them to accept a criminal conviction. The LAPD has about 9,000 officers. The eventual sentence of An agent is not going to change anything. Police misconduct remains the big favorite for the future.

Posted under: braxton shaw, fake data, gang database, lapd, los angeles, los angeles police department