While youth street organizations are often portrayed as the face of disruption, violence, and crime in communities, in some cities, those who are actually charged with protecting, serving and helping in those same communities are seen as the real “gangs.”
Recently, the Los Angeles Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission called on residents to “Tell Us About Your Experience With Deputy Gangs” through an online survey.
“Deputy gangs and cliques have existed within the LASD for decades. Deputy gangs are groups that engage in egregious conduct, such as violations of law, excessive uses of force, threats to the public and/or their fellow LASD personnel, and more.
Deputy cliques include deputy gangs and other exclusionary subgroups that could impact LASD’s mission as well as the careers and morale of LASD personnel even when their activities do not violate specific laws,”
A commission press release stated. LASD is the acronym for Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Responses to the survey will be accepted through July 15. It was released in mid-June.
The commission was created in 2016 by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to provide independent oversight of the LASD, to investigate and provide ongoing analysis of its policies, practices, and procedures and to make recommendations to the board, the sheriff, and the public, toward transparency.
Its survey seeks firsthand experiences with alleged deputy gangs to gather qualitative data for reporting to the board, as required, according to a news release.
The issue of law enforcement overstepping its authority or even resorting to criminal behavior is nothing new. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan pointed out examples of this type of pattern of misbehavior when it comes from members of law enforcement.
“All too often, the Justice Department of the U.S. government is weak in pursuing the truth about what the Black community believes are wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
They fear our youth. They fear the gangs because prior to the gangs, the police were the only gang in town,” Minister Farrakhan wrote in his book, “A Torchlight for America,” published in 1993.
“This is not to say that all police are corrupt. But when we see so many incidences of police corruption, such as the Rodney King case and others, then the entire law enforcement system loses our trust. The youth have the basic qualities of what it takes for seeking liberation. The leader has to have helpers to fulfill the vision,” said Minister Farrakhan.
Brother Ansar Stan Muhammad, Student Coordinator of the Nation of Islam Antelope Valley Study Group, told The Final Call that he views the survey by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission as something positive.
It is good to get feedback from impacted residents, he noted, but he also expressed a strong opinion about eradicating the problem from the start.“When a deputy comes into the department.
They should be thoroughly vetted to determine whether or not they have any gang ties or (questioned on) do they have any desire to form such cliques and gangs in the Sheriff’s Department,” he stated. The survey will also be used to determine whether LASD has been responsive to community members’ complaints about deputy gangs.
According to the commission, although prior commissions have documented the existence of deputy gangs and cliques over several decades, it developed 27 Recommendations to Eradicate Deputy Gangs and Cliques in February 2023.
Recommendations were unanimously adopted on March 23, and now, the commission is tracking the sheriff’s progress to review, adopt and implement them using report cards, it said.
In November 2021, the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission directed its chair to engage pro bono special counsel to assist it with investigating the existence and activities of problematic deputy groups, often referred to as “deputy gangs” or “cliques,” within the sheriff’s department.
In 2021, the Center for Juvenile Law & Policy (CJLP) at LMU Loyola Law School released “Fifty Years of ‘Deputy Gangs’ in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department: Identifying Root Causes and Effects to Advocate for Meaningful Reforms.”
“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) has a long history of deputies forming secret subgroups at stations in minority communities. Some of these subgroups have tattoos, hand signals and rituals that are similar to a criminal street gang,” says the report in its introduction, noted a press release by the center.
“The concern is that these subgroups foster a culture that resists police reforms, such as community policing and constitutional policing, by encouraging and even celebrating aggressive tactics and excessive use of force against minority communities,” the press release noted.
The commission further indicated that deputy cliques addressed in several prior reports have been referred to as deputy “gangs,” “cliques,” “subcultures,” and “secretive” subgroups.
But how fruitful could survey results be when previous recommendations to eliminate the problem do not seem to be yielding transformative results? Los Angeles is not the only area of the country where law enforcement “gangs” are a concern, even if they are under the guise of special units aimed at addressing the very real issue of crime and safety in communities.
In Atlanta, the aggressive “Red Dog” unit operated from the 1980s to 2011. “The Red Dog gang unit in Atlanta, Georgia had a history of police brutality, violating protocol, and oppressing people, noted the article “The Red Dog Gang Unit Was Criminal,” published in 2023.
Current Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis oversaw the “Red Dog” unit for almost 18 months, in 2006 and 2007. She started the Scorpion unit in Memphis in late 2021 and several of those officers convicted on various charges stemming from the beating Tyre Nichols to death in January 2023.
The unit was disbanded, but the damage remains. Then there was the infamous “Goon Squad,” a group of officers in Mississippi who pleaded guilty to the torture and abuse of two Black men in 2023.
And in Chicago, the “Midnight Crew,” under the direction of former Police Commander Jon Burge for over a period of decades, tortured and abused Black men, coercing many into false confessions to crimes they did not commit.
Frank Chapman, educational director and field organizer for the Chicago Alliance Against Racist Repression, shared a historical context with The Final Call about the problem of Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy “gangs” dating back to the group’s 1981 conference on police crimes in Los Angeles.
“There’s been a long and torturous history in the sheriff’s department and the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) with regards to police gangs and all of that so I’m not at all surprised or shocked that this is coming up again because it’s never really been corrected,” he said.
Police reform advocates argue that the entire law enforcement system needs a complete overhaul.
Ansar Stan Muhammad emphasized that work must be done by individuals who have no interest in politics, are truly independent, and hail from each particular county district to review the surveys and determine next steps. “The sheriff department is a big department, but they need to be held accountable from the top to the bottom,” he said.