LASD

The long anticipated report on the deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was released on Friday, Sept. 10.  And it has a lot to say. The 230-page report by the nonprofit RAND Corporation was commissioned by the LA County Board of Supervisors, who are fed up with the deputy gang issue, and it contains a list of interesting conclusions about what needs to be done about the problem of deputy cliques that has plagued the nations largest sheriff’s agency for approximately half century. “At their worst,” the authors write, these “sub-groups encourage violence, undermine the chain of command, and gravely harm relationships with the communities that LASD is dedicated to serve.” And, because these deputy gangs/cliques/subgroups have existed for so many decades, the report’s authors admit that efforts to change this deputy subgroup culture will likely be met with “internal resistance.”