Gangs in Blue

GANGS IN BLUE

The Secret gangs of THE

LA Sheriff’s Dept.

Last year, journalist Cerise Castle authored an investigation into gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She detailed the long history of these gangs and how prevalent they still are in Los Angeles, in an investigative series published by Knock LA. “There are at least 18 gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” according to the investigation, and they are allegedly tied to the deaths of at least 19 people, all of whom were men of color.

Castle’s reporting includes a database of names of deputies reportedly involved in these gangs.

The department did not speak to the journalism outlet for the series.

John Sweeney, a 70-year-old civil-rights attorney from Los Angeles, doesn’t have the name recognition of Ben Crump, who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd and appears, Zelig-like, seemingly whenever there is a major police shooting. Nor does Sweeney much resemble Johnnie Cochran, a mentor to the young Sweeney when they worked together at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in the late 1970s. Sweeney has built his career, as well as a sizable fortune, on exposing violent gangs that reside on the other side of the thin blue line — within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

These “deputy gangs,” as they are known, have been accused of hunting down Black men and framing the victims as instigators.

Times profiled the two deputies for a piece about the perils of policing Compton, “made famous by violence and gangster rap.”

In 2020, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors estimatedthat legal settlements related to deputygang misconduct have cost taxpayers $55 million.

On that late August night, the pair spotted Donta Taylor, a 31-year-old Black man, wearing a red hat with the letter C on the front on North Wilmington Ave., an area controlled by the Cedar Block Piru gang. Aldama and Orrego asked Taylor if he was on probation or parole. “No, I’m not,” Taylor said and then, according to the deputies, drew a semiautomatic, stainless-steel handgun and ran.

“I feel that I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish — get this out in the open,” Sweeney told me. “If history remembers my 40-year career, I hope it’s because my work began eradicating deputy gangs from the department.”

The deputy gangs have long been a problem, but Sweeney’s campaign was rooted in events that took place the night of August 25, 2016.

A pair of deputies with the LA Sheriff’s Department pulled their patrol vehicle to a stop at 401 N. Wilmington Ave in downtown Compton. Mizrain Orrego was at the wheel of the black-andwhite unit, and Samuel Aldama was in the front passenger seat. About one month earlier, the New York

The deputies radioed in a “417”— person with a gun—and gave chase on foot. Three minutes later, Aldama and Orrego cornered Taylor as he emerged from a hole in the fence that encloses a dirt path by the Compton Creek.

Orrego said Taylor pointed a gun at him, and Orrego fired three shots in response. Hearing the gunshots, Aldama fired approximately ten to 12 more rounds at Taylor, who Aldama said was holding something in his chest area. Orrego fired two or three

additional rounds at Taylor and saw him fall to the ground.

An autopsy determined that Taylor had six gunshot wounds to his upper and lower-right extremities and his left lateral back.

But contrary to the deputies’ claims, Taylor did not have a gun. There was not a gun anywhere on his person, near his body, or at the scene of his killing. And there was no purpose for the stop; Taylor was not a suspect in a crime, nor had he committed one.

An August 2017 review of the fatal shooting by then–Los Angeles County district attorney Jackie Lacey admitted that “it appears that Taylor was unarmed at the end of the foot pursuit because there was no gun located in the area of the shooting” and that it was evident “Taylor was not armed at the time of the shooting and Orrego was mistaken.” Nonetheless, the DA’s office concluded that “the available evidence is insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that Aldama and Orrego did not act in self-defense and the defense of others. The case was closed.

During the discovery process in the spring of 2018, Sweeney learned that Aldama and Orrego nearly killed another Black man just months before they gunned down Taylor.

The evidence of Deputy Mizrain Orrego’s Executioners tattoo was a major breakthrough for Sweeney’s case.

In a separate claim, Sweeney alleged the LASD failed to “properly hire, train, instruct, monitor, supervise, evaluate, investigate, and discipline” Aldama and Orrego.

Neither case received significant media attention.

That all changed on July 10, 2018, when the Los Angeles Times published a front-page story about Sweeney’s questioning of Aldama during a May 2018 deposition for Taylor’s case.

Under oath, Aldama admitted that he bore a tattoo on his leg of a deputy gang called the Executioners. The tattoo features a skeleton holding a Kalashnikov-style rifle encircled in flames. On the weapon’s magazine are the Roman numerals “XXVIII,” which stands for the LASD’s 28th substation: Compton. The letters “CPT”—short for Compton—are also part of the design. Aldama said that as many as 20 Compton deputies had the tattoo, but he denied that he was part of the gang.

“He lied, said he had them on his arms only.

And when he finished describing those, I said, ‘What about the one near your leg?’ He looked like he had seen a ghost, said Sweeney.

In June 2019, the LA County Board of Supervisors approved a $7 million settlement to the Taylor family, the largest legal payouts in LASD history.

That was followed by a 2020 California Supreme Court decision restoring the full $8 million judgment reversed by an appeals court to the family of Darren Burley, who was killed by Compton deputies in 2012 after they pinned him to the ground, pressed a knee against his neck, put him in a headlock, hit him multiple times with a flashlight, placed him in a “hobble restraint,” and Tased him.

Perhaps his most significant misconduct case involved the June 2000 shooting of Charles Beatty, a 66-year-old Black man, by a pair of LAPD officers who were angered that Beatty pulled around them at a traffic light. In 2002, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Beatty, who was shot four times in the back and had a bullet stuck in his spine, $2 million.

In 2000, the Compton City Council disbanded its police department and replaced it with an LASD contract. It was meant to be a milestone for police reform driven by high homicide rates, gang violence, and most important, rampant misconduct and corruption by the Compton police, which brought the city unwanted international attention thanks to the anti-police anthems of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton.

But reform quickly proved illusory.

At around midnight on June 26, 2001, a Compton sheriff’s deputy stopped a van that was leaving the area of a burglary. A Black woman named Shanara Batiste pulled her car up to the scene, saying that the vehicle was her cousin’s and that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Things escalated from there, and Batiste ended up being slammed onto the hood with such force that she was left with two broken teeth and a broken jaw.

On July 5, 2009, Compton deputies stopped 16-year-old Avery Cody Jr. with a group of friends outside a McDonald’s. When the deputies or-

dered him to raise his shirt to check for weapons, Cody panicked and ran.

Deputy Sergio Reyes gave chase and shot him to death. Reyes said Cody was armed and took cover behind a newspaper rack to defend himself.

Surveillance video from a nearby store showed that Cody was holding a cell phone, not the revolver deputies said they recovered. Surveillance tape also showed Cody running from Reyes, not ducking behind a newspaper rack.

“They’re lying, basically saying that my son pulled a gun on them. But you can’t pull a gun with your back turned from them and get shot 12 times in the back,” Robert Thomas Sr. said. The LASD admitted that Thomas did not fire a weapon but claimed a handgun was recovered at the scene. Nobody believed that the cops could lie like this.

A pattern emerged about Compton deputies questionable stops, claims of a gun, fatal shootings, and framing of victims. ‘Something is going on.

There is a gang out here. We just don’t know it.’ Sweeney knew he had a gang because of the history

WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME GANG.

HBO’S We Own This City, tell the story of dirty cops that form a rogue gang within their own dept.

of deputy gangs within the sheriff’s department. From the Little Devils and the Regulators to the Vikings to the Jump Out Boys or the Grim Reapers. It stood to reason there was a gang at the Compton station.

The strange and sadistic subculture of the deputy gang has been a part of the LASD for more than 50 years.

The deputy was based at the East Los Angeles station, which had adopted a “Fort Apache” logo featuring an image of a boot with a riot helmet and the phrase “Siempre una patada en los pantalones,” Spanish for “Always a kick in the pants.” The East LA station has been the home of the Banditos deputy gang for decades.

In the early ‘90s, a group of residents They are often referred to by law in Lynwood, in LACounty patrolled by enforcement as social clubs or the LASD, filed a federal civil-rights “subgroups” that engage in proactive lawsuit claiming they were subject to policing. But Roger Clark, a former excessive force and warrantless arrests by high-ranking member of the LASD who deputies in the Vikings deputy gang, who joined a deputy gang called the Little “engage in racially motivated, anti-black, Devils in ‘65, wrote in a court filing in white-supremacist hate crime activities, the Lockett case, “I understood that use racist speech, and glorify & celebrate they were a group of white deputies the use of excessive force and other who were responsible for wreaking official misconduct by deputies.” havoc with the aggressive policing of largely African American and Hispanic One plaintiff said he was kicked in communities.” the face, choked into unconsciousness twice, and Tased by a group of deputies Clark’s contention about the true nature who told him, “Yeah n - - -, you ain’t of deputy gangs has been borne out got no rights. We are going to make repeatedly in LA history. On August 29, sure you don’t ask any more ques1970, LA Times reporter Ruben Salations!” A federal judge in the case zar was killed after being struck by a referred to the Vikings as a “neo-nazi, tear-gas canister fired by a sheriff’s deputy white supremacist gang.” during an antiwar protest.

The Kolts Report, compiled in the aftermath of the 1992 riots over the exoneration of Rodney King’s police assailants, devoted a chapter to deputy gangs. The report said certain “cliques” were “found particularly at stations in areas populated by minorities—the so-called ‘ghetto’ stations—and deputies at those stations recruit persons similar in attitude to themselves.”

These kinds of gangs have created decades of problems within the department and with how it deals with the citizens of Los Angeles, according to the civilian oversight board. Those problems include claims of discrimination, excessive force and even murder.

“Deputy gangs have fostered and promoted excessive force against citizens, discriminated against other deputies based on race and gender, and undermined the chain of command and discipline,” said Sean Kennedy, the commission’s chair. “Despite years of documented history of this issue, the Department has failed to eliminate the gangs.”