Days after Austreberto Gonzalez anonymously reported a fellow Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy to internal affairs for assaulting a colleague behind the parking lot of the Compton station, a text popped up on his phone.
It was a photo of graffiti scrawled on a dial pad at the station’s parking lot entrance: “ART IS A RAT,” it read.
It was one of the first instances of
retaliation that continued for months, exacted by the Executioners, a band of deputies with matching tattoos that wields vast power at the Compton station, he alleged in a claim filed against Los Angeles County. The claim says the group — sporting tattoos of a skull with Nazi imagery and an AK-47 — celebrates deputy shootings and the induction of new members with “inking parties.”
In recent years, the claim says, its members were involved in setting illegal arrest quotas and threatening work slowdowns — which involve ignoring or responding slowly to calls — when they did not get preferred assignments.
The allegations have revived long-standing concerns that inked deputy groups — with monikers such as the Spartans, Regulators, Grim Reapers and Banditos — operate out of several Sheriff’s Department stations and represent what many in the community see as criminal gangs within law enforcement. The existence of such fraternities has sparked multiple internal investigations and recently a
federal probe by the FBI, but the groups have remained entrenched, with many civil liberties advocates accusing the Sheriff’s Department of turning a blind eye.
“We have a gang here that has grown to the point where it dominates every aspect of life at the Compton station,” said Alan Romero, an attorney representing Gonzalez in the claim, which is a precursor to a lawsuit. “It essentially controls scheduling, the distribution of informant tips, and assignments to deputies in the station with preference shown to members of the gang as well as prospects.”
shit. Let me highlight part of that again...
