Gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are banned under new policy

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office announced a new policy Wednesday banning gang affiliation among officers in the department, a problem county officials say has been going on for decades.

Previous investigations by the county’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have identified 19 gangs within the sheriff’s department over the years. They have been linked to at least 59 legal claims dating back to the early 1990s that have resulted in more than $54 million in settlement payments for incidents linked to these alleged criminal groups.

The new policy, titled “Prohibition – Law Enforcement Gangs and Hate Groups,” prohibits participation in, or inciting others to participate in, a so-called law enforcement gang and requires LASD to investigate allegations of such groups and possibly refer them for prosecution.

It comes nearly three years after California banned so-called law enforcement gangs under Cal. Penal Code § 13670 and more than a year after the state’s Law Enforcement Accountability Reform began prohibiting hate groups within police departments.

“For the first time in the history of our department, tattoos are being asked about during the process for captain and above,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, referring to tattoos that department investigators say are linked to violent gangs of officers within the department.

However, Inspector General Max Huntsman said his office requested oversight of the creation of such a new policy and was denied. He said his office was not aware the policy would be announced Wednesday.

The LA County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, which includes community and faith leaders, a former federal judge, attorneys and a retired LASD lieutenant, released a scathing 70-page report last year calling the officer gangs a “cancer” within the department with a history dating back to at least 1973. The 3,000 Boys, Wayside Whities, Banditos and Reapers are just some of at least 10 named in the report.

The supervisory committee made recommendations for the department.

“And this policy does not appear to be at all in compliance with the recommendations of the Civilian Oversight Commission,” Huntsman said. “But it is legal compliance, so it is a step in the right direction.”

Huntsman has described the groups as highly secretive and said they operate under a “kind of code of silence, just like the Mafia.”

Tom Yu, a former LASD officer who now represents police officers as an attorney, said the tattoos in question were not caused by a gang.

“The unwritten rule is that you don’t get promoted if you have a tattoo from a station,” Yu said.

The new LASD policy will go into effect in 30 days.

The case stems from a legal tug-of-war over a recent lawsuit that blocked an OIG investigation after years of allegations of violent organized crime within the law enforcement agency that oversees a region of more than 9 million people.

Court order blocks county investigation

Last year the OIG a letter sent to 35 delegates requesting information about the “Banditos” and the “Executioners,” two of more than two dozen gangs that authorities say have been investigated over the years. In the letter, the inspector general asked the deputies — unless they planned to invoke the Fifth Amendment — to produce photos of tattoos on their left or right legs or tattoos that resembled those of the two gangs.

However, the OIG did not pursue the investigation because a court order blocked it.

The Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALDS), which represents officers within LASD, has sued LA County and the OIG, alleging that such an investigation would violate officers’ constitutional and privacy rights, as well as labor laws.

In July 2023, a court ruled in favor of ALDS’s allegations of labor law violations and issued a preliminary injunction halting the investigation.

Earlier this month, a hearing in that lawsuit was held in a Los Angeles courtroom. Ahead of the hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union, Check the Sheriff and other community groups gathered outside the courthouse and criticized the sheriff’s deputy group for filing the lawsuit, saying it protects violent organized crime within the sheriff’s department.

At the time, the president of ALDS issued a statement saying the organization “does not advocate misconduct” and that the delegates are entitled to due process under the law. He also called the ACLU and other advocacy groups opposing the lawsuit “anti-police radicals and other misguided people.”

“The ACLU’s own website states, ‘Everyone in this country should have the same basic rights,'” ALDS President Richard Pippin said in the statement. “Apparently, contempt for law enforcement has led some in their organization to conclude that this does not apply to police officers… Americans understand that due process protects our society from developing into a system in which no one’s rights are truly guaranteed.”

‘Bandits’ and ‘Executioners’ Take Center Stage in Recent Research

Last May, the inspector general’s letter to nearly three dozen lawmakers mentioned only two groups.

“The Office of the Inspector General is investigating law enforcement gang participation and police misconduct in the Sheriff’s Department pursuant to Penal Code Section 13670(b),” Inspector General Huntsman’s letter reads. “Your cooperation is requested because we believe you have information regarding one of two groups that may be law enforcement gangs, commonly known as the Banditos and Executioners.”

A 2021 OIG report describes the Banditos as a gang operating out of the East LA Sheriff’s Station, while the Executioners are believed to be a gang based in the Compton Sheriff’s Station.

The report, titled “50 Years of Police Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office,” was compiled by county investigators and researchers from Loyola Law School.

“Bandito leaders refer to themselves as ‘shot-callers,’ a term borrowed from prison gang leaders,” the report said, noting that officers who are part of the gang share a common leg tattoo depicting a skeleton wearing a sombrero and holding a gun and sporting a bushy mustache called a brocha. “If officers resist recruitment, the gang attempts to ‘roll out’ the officers and have them leave the East Los Angeles Station.”

The report alleges that the Banditos have been linked to attacks on other deputies and other violence that has gone unchecked by LASD leadership. The report describes the group as “gang-like” and promoting favoritism, racism, sexism and violence.

Eight delegates filed a lawsuit against LA County in 2019 over allegations that they were beaten, harassed or forced to pay off members of the Banditos. If they didn’t pay them, they would allegedly be denied backup on dangerous calls, the complaint said.

The Executioners operate out of the Compton Sheriff’s Station. Members share a common leg tattoo that is sequentially numbered and depicts a skull wearing a Nazi helmet with the words “CPT” on it and a rifle surrounded by flames, the OIG report said.

One officer interviewed in the report said the Executioners are a “violent gang” that has attacked other officers and dominates the station, and said it does not allow women or African Americans. He said members would hold parties after officer-involved shootings at bars, called “998 parties” or “998 debriefs,” and the officer who opened fire would get an Executioner tattoo.

Compton Mayor Aja Brown and other city leaders called for a federal investigation into the sheriff’s department in 2020. At the time, she said to the executioners are associated with “known organized gang activity” and “have gone rogue and are running the Compton Sheriff’s Department.”

Decades of allegations against gang members

Gangs within the department have been identified not only by county investigators, but also by advocacy groups like the ACLU. Just as the OIG report claims there is a 50-year history of gangs within the department, the ACLU has made similar findings.

In 2011, the ACLU published a report titled “Cruel and Unusual Punishment: How a Barbaric Gang of Cops Controls LA County Jails.” It featured interviews with inmates, prison chaplains, and even the officers themselves.

“Several officers shed light on the gangs of officers that flourish in prisons,” the report said. “They describe colleagues who regard violent acts by officers against prisoners as a badge of honor and encourage each other to commit violent attacks.”

In one of the alleged assaults detailed in the report, an inmate was repeatedly punched and kicked by steel-toed officers, resulting in him being brutally beaten and suffering a broken eye socket. He was then allegedly walked naked down a hallway and sexually assaulted by inmates, the report said.

The report states that former Sheriff Lee Baca, then head of the department, dismissed the gang auxiliaries’ allegations, saying law enforcement “knows how to take care of itself.” He was later convicted in 2017 of obstructing an FBI investigation into corruption in the prison system and sentenced to three years in prison for be released early.

Thomas Parker, a retired assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, oversaw the federal investigation into the 1991 Attack on Rodney King which led to riots in the city. In the ACLU report, he describes the violence seen in LA jails at the time of the 2011 report as “staggering,” with routine abuse in the jails “far more severe than the abuse at King’s hands.”

Parker said the problem with gangs of police officers in prisons is “significantly more systemic” than that infamous incident and has been going on for decades, the report said.

“Gang-like groups of officers have been active in the LASD since the 1980s, and perhaps even since the early 1970s,” the report states. According to Parker, these “gangs of officers” continue to operate “with apparent impunity, right under the noses of all levels of current LASD management.”