The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD), officially the County of Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, is a law enforcement agency serving Los Angeles County, California. The LASD is the largest sheriff's department in the United States and the third largest local police agency in the United States, following the New York Police Department, and the Chicago Police Department. The LASD has approximately nineteen thousand employees—9,915 sworn deputies and 9,244 unsworn members. It is sometimes confused with the similarly-named but separate Los Angeles Police Department, which provides law enforcement services within the city of Los Angeles, which is the county seat of Los Angeles County, although both departments have their headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.
The department's three main responsibilities are to provide municipal police services within Los Angeles County, courthouse security for the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, and housing and transportation services of inmates within the county jail system. In addition to providing municipal police services to the unincorporated communities within Los Angeles County, it has contractual arrangements to provide police services for 42 of the 88 independent cities within Los Angeles County. The LASD also has contracts to provide police services for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Metrolink.
In 2021, it was confirmed that numerous separate gangs of deputy sheriffs within the LASD had been known to be operating since the 1970s. These gangs engaged "in a pattern of on-duty behavior that intentionally violated the law or fundamental principles of professional policing," including racial profiling, police brutality, police corruption, and other misconduct.
History
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which was founded in 1850, was the first professional police force in the Los Angeles area. The all-volunteer, Los Angeles-specific Los Angeles Rangers were formed in 1853 to assist the LASD. They were soon succeeded by the Los Angeles City Guards, another volunteer group.
On December 15, 2009, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4–1 to merge the Los Angeles County Office of Public Safety into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The merger took place on June 30, 2010.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the LASD refused to enforce mask mandates. LASD Sheriff Alex Villanueva also refused to enforce a vaccine requirement for LASD staff, stating that large parts of the LASD would refuse to comply with it and he would "...lose 5, 10% of [the LASD] workforce overnight on a vaccine mandate." In November 2021, Villanueva said only 42% of LASD staff were vaccinated against COVID-19.
List of sheriffs
County jail system The Los Angeles County Jail provides short-term incarceration services for the entire county, including Los Angeles, Glendale, Burbank, and Long Beach, all of which have their own police departments. The Men's Central Jail (MCJ) and Twin Towers Correctional Facility (TTCF) are located in a dense cluster next the rail yard northeast of Union Station. The North County Correctional Facility (NCCF) is the largest of the four jail facilities located at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, California. The Los Angeles County Women's Jail, known as the Century Regional Detention Facility or the Lynwood Jail, is located in Lynwood, California.
Concerns and challenges The Los Angeles County Jail incarcerates about 200,000 individuals each year, and with such large numbers, the jail has faced numerous problems with its facilities.
In 1988, a scandal erupted after a Los Angeles jailhouse informant demonstrated that he was able to engineer false confessions to murder from inmates he had never met before. In California, jailhouse informants have most frequently been used in murder cases.
In May 2013, the Men's Central Jail and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility (taken together) ranked as one of the ten worst jails in the United States, based on reporting in Mother Jones magazine.
One of the issues the jails faced was with visitation, exemplified by an event in the Men's Central Jail. Twenty-three-year-old male Gabriel Carillo was severely beaten and pepper sprayed by a deputy in Men's Central Jail on Saturday, February 26, 2012. Carillo was there with his girlfriend, Grace Torres, to visit his younger brother. Both Torres and Carillo illegally brought their cell phones into the jail and were caught in possession of the phones. Torres hid her cell phone in her boot and snuck it into the visitor's lobby despite signs prohibiting doing so, while Carillo claimed he forgot to remove his cell phone from his pocket. The deputies confiscated both phones shortly after, handcuffed Carillo, and took both Carillo and Torres into the break room. Carillo got into a verbal altercation with officers and claimed he was then assaulted by them.
Following the incidents, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca announced that the Men's Central Jail could be closed. Construction of a new jail has been proposed to replace the Men's Central Jail.
Another challenge that the Los Angeles County Jail faces is violence within the jail community.
Related to this issue is Los Angeles County Jail's K6G unit, which is intended to be a separate unit for gay-identified men and transgender women. Although it has been shown that this unit is successful through its lower rates of sexual violence, the creation and systematics of this unit have sparked controversy. In order to be admitted into the K6G unit, inmates must prove that they are gay. However, those who identify inmates as homosexual individuals eligible for the K6G unit rely on stereotypes constructed by society about gay men. This procedure prevents homosexual men who are not open about their sexuality, particularly those of color, from coming out as gay for fear of abuse if they do so.
Serious health concerns have begun to arise with the issue of mass incarceration in the Los Angeles County Jails. Several organizations and scholars have analyzed random samples of prisoners with illnesses and the healthcare that they receive while incarcerated. The American Public Health Association claims that some of these prisoners suffer from a variety of other disorders. They also state that more than 30% of their sample group had a severe mental disorder or a substance use disorder. The detainees that were diagnosed with severe mental disorders or substance use were often in jail because they had committed nonviolent crimes. An issue that arises with the incarceration of individuals with mental disorders is that they must be tested for competency before they can be put on trial, which can leave inmates in jail for longer than necessary.
Richard Lamb and Robert W. Grant conducted a similar study of 101 women that are imprisoned in the Los Angeles County Jail system. In this study, they concluded that 70% of them had traumatizing experiences of physical violence, 40% of these women were involved in prostitution, and 84% of the women with children were incapable of taking care of them. In addition, there were more mentally ill men in jail than there were women. In a study of male inmates, there appeared to have been issues of the "criminalization" of those whom were mentally ill.
An issue that resides in these studies is that there is uncertainty when trying to determine if these prisoners receive any beneficial treatment. In response to this issue, Dr. Terry Kupers mentions that when considering the large proportion of prisoners with significant mental illness, few of these Los Angeles County Jail inmates receive adequate mental health treatment. However, mental illnesses have been and are currently being studied in the Los Angeles County Jail. For instance, several researchers studied Bipolar I disorder and found that a way to decrease the number of inmates with the disorder is by having them participate in longer psychiatric hospital stays.
One solution to this issue could be opt-out screening and vaccinations for STIs and other infectious diseases, which has the potential to improve health conditions in jail and in surrounding communities. This can be accomplished by providing health care that many inmates, especially impoverished blacks and Latinos, would not receive otherwise. In addition, the implementation of this action would decrease the spreading of diseases from the jail to home communities. Using opt-out screenings and vaccinations can be used as a mechanism to reach out to inner city community health issues as well as provide a new area for research in the effectiveness in vaccinations and screenings.
The Los Angeles County Jail system incarcerates a large number of minority inmates. Victor Rios argues that a new era of mass incarceration has resulted in the development of a youth control complex. This complex resulted from a network of racialized criminalization, and the punishment arrived from institutions of authority that patrolled and incapacitated black and Latino youth. Rios concludes that it is not policing but the harsh policing of inner cities that marks young people from their early years, effectively stigmatizing them through negative credentials before they have an opportunity to acquire the more positive forms demanded for participation in mainstream society.
In 2021, a Los Angeles Times analysis found that in 44,000 bike stops for drugs and weapons (since 2017) that 85% were searched without reason and that the overwhelming majority of stops were non-white individuals.
Deputy gangs
There are at least 18 active deputy gangs within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. The 1992 Kolts Commission report said they were found "particularly at stations in areas heavily populated by minorities—the so-called 'ghetto stations'—and deputies at those stations recruit persons similar in attitude to themselves."
During his tenure as Sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who according to Los Angeles County Court documents, was a member of the "Banditos" deputy gang himself, announced a "zero tolerance" policy to curb what he referred to as "deputy cliques." Villanueva has never acknowledged membership in the Banditos deputy gang, but did admit to being a member of the "Cavemen" while stationed in East Los Angeles. A 2020 county inspector general report concluded that the Banditos gang at the East LASD station were "gang-like and [that] their influence has resulted in favoritism, sexism, racism and violence."
The first deputy gang acknowledged by the LASD was the "Little Devils" in an internal memo in 1973, although they are believed to have been involved in the death of Los Angeles Times reporter and law enforcement critic Ruben Salazar during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War on August 29, 1970. They operated out of the East Los Angeles station and sported tattooed caricatures of a small, red devil on their left calves. They were known at the time to have at least 47 members.
The "Wayside Whities" operated out of the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center throughout the 1980s, their alleged mission being to "bring to heel" any incarcerated black men, especially those who fought with white prisoners.
Following years of police violence in the city of Lynwood, over two dozen civil rights attorneys compiled claims and filed a class action lawsuit in 1990, in which they asked the federal court to take over the Lynwood Station, home of a deputy gang known as the Lynwood Vikings. A federal judge described the Lynwood Vikings as a neo-Nazi and white supremacist gang.