From Luminary. This is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of your Dreams. I am Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminist, and I don't actually have any recommendations this week because a I've been too busy to enjoy anything, but also because the world was at war now, and it's hard to take pleasure and much of anything while you know that there are people suffering, and while you try and reconcile the reality that people have long been suffering from the effects of war. And this seems like one of the first times that people are paying attention. And I'm pretty sure we all know why that's strange. I wanted to talk a little bit this week about police culture. You know, when George Floyd was murdered, there was this moment where it seemed like enough people were finally horrified by the realities of police brutality toward black and brown people that we might see chain. And I'm never an optimist. I don't traffic and hope and even I thought, wow, enough people are finally taking notice. And it's appalling that this is what it took for them to notice. But okay, here we are. Corporations started pledging all kinds of money to vaguely worded diversity initiatives. Public figures said what a thought were the right things. Some people started to take this idea of defunding or reforming the police seriously, with actual conversations about what defunding means, what it could look like, and how it might work. Activists took a long, hard look at police budgets and we could clearly see what many of us already knew. A disproportionate amount of our tax dollars go to law enforcement. It's almost shocking, actually, it's very shocking. But it was only a moment, and there was not much follow up on all of that talk talk talk, and instead of any kind of improvement where policing is concerned, very little has changed. A former police officer and democratic name only as the mayor of New York Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is proposing a two million dollar increase to the three point two billion dollar police budget, and similar increases are happening in cities all across the United States. Is not to defund the police in Biden's State of the Union. This man who has always avoided saying anything even remotely critical of law enforcement proudly declared that we need to fund the police, as if that has not always been the case. He took time out of a very finite amount of time for his speech to fund the police. It's outrageous. I don't think most progressives expected much from Biden, and he has met our very low expectations by governing to the middle. But this one was another particularly bitter pill to swallow, because he could have just said nothing at all and sat there and ate his food, but he did not. Usually I write about these issues, I talk about how I don't traffic and hope, and this is exactly why all that talk, all the empty gestures, all the pledges with no accountability and no follow through. It's meaningless when nothing ever changes systemically. And for that systemic change to happen, I think we need to understand just how deep the problems with law enforcement go, and few people have a good sense of what's happening with police, especially in Los Angeles County. Then series Castle series is a young journalist who in broke a major story about how gangs have infiltrated the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department going back decades. The series came out on knock l a, a nonprofit community journalism project. The story is fascinating and horrifying, and it is incredibly thorough. So I wanted to bring series Castle onto the podcast and I wanted to talk to her about her work and how how she found I don't know the metal to take on the Los Angeles Sheriff's Apartment. Cerise, Welcome to the Roxane Gay Agenda. Thank you so much for having me. I'm truly honored to be here, and I just want to mention at the top here. While I was the first person to compile a thorough history of deputy gangs in the Sheriff's Department, there were several reporters that came before me that sort of laid the groundwork for this, and I definitely thanked them for their work and their contributions that were able to guide me on my path to create the fifteen part series that I did. That's amazing. It's so rare that people acknowledge the work that they build on, and so thank you for doing that. Of Course, you grew up in Los Angeles, so did you have experiences with the police before you started this investigation. Of course, I am a black person growing up in Los Angeles, so I had many encounters with police UM before starting this journey of investigating the Sheriff's Department. It was really an interaction with the police that spurred me UM jumping into this project. UM. I was covering the protests that were breaking out across the city in response to the murder of George Floyd, and in the course of covering the protests for radio station I was working at the time, I was actually shot by law enforcement with a less than lethal munition, and the resulting injuries UM put me on bed rest for about six months. I wasn't really able to walk at all. UM. I was really just stuck in my bed, going back and forth between the bed and the couch for a really long time. And I wasn't content in that moment too just sit down and not contribute to the conversation that was happening across the country, across industries around the world. Really, I really wanted to do something. The question of deputy gangs was something that had really intrigued me since childhood. It was something I had heard about from peers, from my older brother, from teachers, from my mom, and it's something that I think that most people of color growing up in l A County have heard about anecdotally, but there wasn't ever anything reviewing everything that we know, who these people were, what they were doing and why. And when I was stuck on bed rest, I realized, okay, this is my time to start answering those questions. Now. You said two things that are interesting here. But first, for people who are not living in Los Angeles, what is the difference between l A p D, which we all know has problems, and the l A County Sheriff's Department. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department patrols unincorporated l A County and l A p D is regulated within the city confines. So if you go to East Los Angeles, which is unincorporated LA County, you will find the area patrolled by Sheriff's as is the case in the Antelope Valley, South l A out in Malibu. They're also contracts cities places like Norwalk, Whittier, Compton, West Hollywood that have elected to hire the sheriff's departments to come in and provide law enforcement services. You also mentioned that for anyone young who grew up in l A, the Sheriff's department gangs were an open secret. I'm new ish to l A. I've been living in l A for about six or seven years now. It's shocking to me in some ways, but also entirely predictable that there are gangs in the Sheriff's department and that they're an open secret. So how does an open secret like this stay in open secret that no one does anything about? That's a really good question. In the course of my research for my series, I found that several government agencies from the county level all the way up to the federal level, had heard testimony about these deputy gangs dating all the way back to the early nineteen nineties and took no action. And as to why, I mean, I haven't really found a complete answer for that. But we do know about that. Police unions are incredibly powerful, right um. They spend tons of money and elections every year, and the people that we elect are responsible for putting laws in place. And while the California Penal Code does define a gang as a group of three or more people that share a tattoo, common hand gesture, and participate in a litany of things that fall under crime in the California penal Code and the death bed gangs meet those standards, nothing has been done. I've asked attorneys about prosecuting deputy gangs under you know, gang enhancements and then laughed at Frankly, it's just not something that's seen as a serious issue until very recently. Um, and I want to say that it's because of the series and the incredible response that it received from the community that this pressure has sort of come up. Journalism in action, folks. So you know, the thing that struck me the most about this article, which I first found on social media, was how extensive fifteen parts, and the depth of research that went in and the fact that the origins here go back to the nineties seventies. So we are going to put a link to the series in show notes, but series, I would love if you could tell us how the gang's start in the sheriff's department back in the seventies. So an interesting note about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is that, arguably for a very long time, from its inception all the way up until the mid nineteen forties, it functioned very much as an old Western posse or what we would call in modern times a gang. There was one elected sheriff and it was his job to deputize people that he felt fit the bill of upstanding citizens to enforce the law. And this ended up really being his but drinking buddies right. And this policy actually continued up until the nineteen eighties, I believe, or the sheriff was allowed to just deputize, you know, like celebrities that he liked or someone that maybe donated to his campaign. They got imagine a gun and were able to act as a peace officer going into the nineteen seventies. The first time we ever have reporting of any of these gangs is at the Chicano Moratorium and that was a protest held in East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War by a mostly Latino residence. And it started out as a very peaceful protests. I say peaceful because these sheriffs were not being aggressive. That quickly changed when the deputy started firing on the crowd and chaos ensued. People were actually killed at this protest. One of them was a journalist by the name of Ruben Salazar. He actually told his colleagues the night before that he suspected he was under police surveillance and that he thought there was a chance that he could be killed. Shortly after that instance, a memo came out of the Sheriff's department where several names were placed on a list and it was said that these were all people that had a Red Devil tattoo and we're members of a gang called the Little Red Devils. Beyond that list being created, it's not clear that any sort of disciplinary action was taken. So how many gangs exist within the Sheriff's department that you've been able to verify. I've been able to verify eighteen, but I've heard anecdotally of about twenty four. The number is staggering. So if there are eighteen gangs, how many people are in the Sheriff's department in total? There are about ten thousand people in the Sheriff's department. Wow, that's a lot. And so it's clearly not every member of the Sheriff's department that's in the gang. How many people are involved in this? Would you say, I think a lot of people have knowledge of it. Um. Many of the sources that I talked to say that they estimate nine of people in the Sheriff's department have some sort of working knowledge of the gang and in that may stand by when they see some sort of mouth feasance going on, and they would call them associates. Um I actually created a database of members and associates with the help of knock l A, which is available at the link you'll put in the show notes. Where we've been collecting this data. People that have been, you know, on the scene of something that went wrong, that have associated multiple times, have been associated multiple times in shootings, uses of force, that sort of thing, and have been accused of being or associated with deputy gangs. And what are the racial dynamics of these gangs because one of the things that struck me in reading this was that Latino officers are part of this. But in general, women and black people are not allowed to join these gangs. So who are the people who are in these gangs? Most of these gangs have white supremacist um beliefs or themes running through them. As you mentioned, women aren't generally allowed to join. Sometimes they're allowed to be associates, but they're not allowed to get full membership with a tattoo. And for the most part, yes, black people are not allowed to join Um. There are several exceptions that have been made. UM. In one gang that was noted as white supremacists, actually in a court ruling by Judge Terry Hatter, they did allow black people to join, but their tattoo is slightly different. Instead of having a Viking wearing a helmet with two horns pointed up, one horn would be pointed down if you were a person of color. UM. Not really sure what that means or why, but there are some exceptions like that, But you can see with who the gang targets like, there really isn't any sort of exception. When they're looking outward, they may make an exception for their brother in blue, because I think you'll find with police officers, law enforcement officers across the nation, there is this sort of like brotherhood, fraternity camaraderie that runs within that culture where they see each other's lives and relationships is sort of more inherently valuable than the people that they are sworn to protect. So they will target people of color while they may allow a black man to sort of participate in that action. G You know, the thing I often think about when I'm thinking about law enforcement is that entire police departments often feel like gangs, and you're either in the gang or you're not, and when you're not, you are incredibly vulnerable. And because they have a lot of unchecked power. So what are these gangs within the gang up to, because it doesn't seem like they're up to any good murder. Primarily in my series, I was able to uncover nineteen shooting deaths were officers that were either associated with or alleged to be full fledge members of deputy gangs killed nineteen men of color. Four of those people were suffering with mental health issues and were in the midst of a mental health crisis at the time they were killed. Several of them left behind children that were very young at the time of death. These cases of cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles County over one hundred million dollars in settlements alone. That does not include attorney fees. And at the end of the day, I mean, it's just money, right, that's not going to bring back their loved one that was taken. Yeah, you can't like these settlements, which when I was reading the settlements, I kept thinking, hey, that's not enough money, and be there is no amount of money that is going to bring back families that is going to make up for that kind of loss. So we know they're doing murders and quite a number what other things do they do, like is their corruption? Are they pushing drugs? Are they targeting people for harassment? And how do you get into these gangs? I think probably the most insidious thing about these gangs is that they are a symptom of larger issues within the Sheriff's department. You don't necessarily have to be a member of the gangs to participate in some of these things that I'm about to describe, but these things are all sort of seen as signs that you are apt for gang membership. One deputy former deputy that I spoke to, described a process called hunting where training officers instruct their trainees to go after people of color, black people, people of Central American descent, or minor traffic violations and essentially lie to them in order to search their vehicles and discover UND's drugs. It's I've been told by other deputies that sometimes these items are in fact planted by the deputies performing the search in order to generate a statistic. Those arrest statistics argused to justify more money for a particular station, if you have x amount of arrest statistics, that justifies crime being up in your district, and that means that you need more money. And that means that the sheriff can go to the county Board of Supervisors and say, hey, that three billion you give us every year, that's not enough. We're going to need more. So this has largely gone unchecked for years, and then you are sitting at home, injured from police brutality, and you go down this rabbit hole. When you started doing this investigation, did you think you were going to uncover something this extensive and this, as you say, pervasive and pernicious. No, I didn't. I knew that the problem was large. I didn't think it would be eighteen gangs large. I didn't think that so many people knew. I think that was the most disturbing thing to me was finding out how many people in power have known about this for longer than I've been alive and done nothing. Now, in general, prosecutors have a really hard time doing anything with regards to prosecuting law enforcement, and there's a real reluctance there. Do you see that reluctance in Los Angeles in terms of trying to address any of these gangs. Gosh. I mean, the reluctance is really the thing that confuses me the most. There are two cases that I have been working on as of late which are really just incredibly disgusting shootings, and I think that's says something about what is happening in Los Angeles where we have shootings like these occurring on average about once a month, and they are not showing up on the national news. These videos aren't going viral. It's so commonplace here. The two shootings that I'm thinking of the first is the killing of Jamal Simpson. Jamal was a twenty one year old black man who was riding in a car with his friend the sheriff's deputies. It's unclear why they attempted to stop the vehicle. The sheriff's deputy was outside of his jurisdiction, which is an important note that the sheriff's vehicle chase Jamal and his friend through three separate jurisdictions which were not the sheriff's and eventually and Jamal attempted to get out of the car um twice, which is his right as a passenger. Um and the sheriffs vehicle continued to pursue him when he exited the car. The sheriff stopped his car, got out of the car and shot at Jamal twenty one times. He was hit about seventeen times. This is all in the back, killing him, and they left his body in the street for hours. The deputy who killed Jamal, Gregory Vanhausen, actually had killed before about a few years prior, eighteen months prior. I believe he killed a sixteen year old boy who was standing in the breezeway of his apartment complex talking to a young lady on Super Bowl Sunday, and that deputy is still working for the sheriff's apartment. The district attorney in both instances found that the shootings were justified. I don't know how you can justify shooting someone in the back more than fifteen times. That just doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to anyone. You know. Whenever I think about, you know, the justifications they offer for these extra judicial murders, I always think, no matter what that person was doing, if they were doing anything, the punishment isn't the death penalty regardless. So why is your gun coming into this? Why did you pull it out in the first place. What's the other shooting that you're looking at? The other shooting that I'm looking at. This occurred just under a year ago in Norwalk. UM young man by the name of Frederick Holder, he had literally just become a father, was driving on a freeway on ramp. He was stopped by a red traffic light and he was being pursued, they say, for a traffic stop. Three deputies exited their vehicles, one armed with what appears to be on video is an assault rifle. They run up to Frederick, to his windows and open fire on him thirty three times. This man was sitting on a freeway on ramp, surrounded by traffic. I do not know how you justify that. And we know that's happened before. I mean, it happened three days before Christmas when lap D shot and killed the fourteen year old young young girl who was with her mother at Burlington coat factory. Right, it's just this recklessness that happens again and again. Like as I said before, these shootings happened about once a month. There was a man killed in January, Pedro Lopez, and there was a young woman killed in February. In these very similar shootings. In most of these cases, all of them are real, justified by the district attorney. So if anything, what I see is a hesitation on the part of our district attorney to hold these law enforcement officers responsible. You know, you have to wonder, how do you repair a system that is this corrupt, and that is this systemically corrupt. And so you know, we've been talking over the past two years a lot about police reform or defunding the police. Is reformed possible in this kind of a system. Well, we do have an election coming up in June of this year, you know, I think, unfortunately, I understand the need for people to say, let's just get rid of this um. For the time being. Things are very much on fire, and I think actually needs to be taken um at the ballot in the next couple of months. I think that's the first fire that we need to put out and tackle things. You know. From there, I definitely think there needs to be radical change in the Sheriff's department. I think that they need an independent investigation. At the very least. A lot needs to happen yesterday as far as the Sheriff's Department is concerned. Is there a candidate running for sheriff in June that we should be paying attention to because I know that the current sheriff is not great. Yeah, I've done some report dying. I've worked and been a part of some great reporting at knock l A on several of the candidates running. I think it's important for people to know that most of the candidates running have records of their own and associations of their own with these deputy gangs. At least two candidates are alleged to be deputy gang members themselves. Several candidates have shot people, you know, at least one of them has killed a child. So it's very important to do your research, and I recommend that all of your listeners check out our reporting at knock l A. Check out reporting at for the on Robert Luna, who is the former chief of the Long Beach Police Department. Interesting point about him is he brought back uh police operation that was used in the nineteen seventies to target um queer men um. I believe that those were called gay stings. He brought those back in his department in yes, yes, and those were only stopped because as a legal action that was taken. So I really encourage our listeners to read are reporting on these subjects because a lot of these candidates, unfortunately, are not much of an upgrade from the current sheriff that we have that has been enabling these people. Cecil Rambo, for example, was the assistant sheriff to Lee Bacca who went to prison for federal obstruction of justice. He's best friends with Paul Tanaka, who was the under sheriff of Lee Bacca. These candidates that are running, I mean, they are not great. They're not great. Well, this is cheerful, but you know, it doesn't need to be cheerful. It's just I think overwhelming to think that the person who's currently sheriff isn't great, and and and that's that's mild, and that everyone running. It's really like, what is the least evil of all of these evils? Well, not to sound so grim and dark, there is one candidate who I am very intrigued by. His name is Eric Strong. He has said that he is in favor of giving away money from the Sheriff's department budget. He is in favor of permanently closing Men's Central Jail Um. He supports a charter amendment that would give the Board of Supervisors the power to remove a sheriff. He has said that he would cooperate with subpoenas, which is really, I mean, just the bare minimum for ordinary people like you and me follow the law. A lot of the ideas that he Um is supporting, though, are coming from the community and are coming from people that have been victims of deputy gang violence. UM. He is committed. He has said he has committed to working with them and hearing from them, and that's a huge, huge change from all of the other people in the race. So he's a candidate that I would also recommend that people check out and find out more information on for sure, Eric Strong. Now, we talk a lot about accountability and social justice circles, and there isn't a lot of accountability oftentimes. Have any of these members of these deputy gangs been held accountable faced measurable consequences for their actions? Ah? Measurable? That's an interesting word. Um. The only real consequence they've faced is seeing their name in my articles. Really, UM. As far as internal discipline, it's incredibly rare for a deputy to be disciplined for something like this. I think probably one of my favorite cases. Will not favorite, that's sort of a dark way to describe it. But one of the cases I've looked at that sort of tells you about the just how they view these things is there was a deputy who got drunk at a family event and fired a gun at some balloons thinking they were an intruder and ended up injuring someone and face no discipline. Wow. You know, it's a little terrifying. I mean, they're already terrifying because we see what they do to our communities. We see what they do like you know, whenever I'm driving in I live in Englewood, you know, and you see them like you well, it's the l A. P D. But I mean these their cousins. You know, whenever you see law enforcement in l A, especially in communities of color, they're not doing anything good, They're not doing anything nice. And to know that there are literally no consequences for anything that they do, you know, it's an overwhelming feeling. How has your reporting on this been received? Because I when I started reading the series, you know, at first I was like, oh, this is interesting, and then you realize there are fifteen parts to it and that it goes back forty years and that there's no checks or balances on this. So how has reporting been received. Well, it's been received in a really great way by the community. I've been really moved, frankly just seeing the community create the hashtag Google l a s D Gang since the stickers and graffiti that I've seen around the city with that phrase has been wonderful. Knowing that it's that the reporting is making this much impact. I mean, it's an incredibly long series, so the fact that this many people are reading and engaging with it is is incredible. UM. On the law enforcement side, it was received really terribly. Sheriff Yan Nueva in a press conference set in several press conferences, actually positive that I had made everything up um to get rich and that was from a correct There were a great organization, but I mean get rich from what exactly. Yeah, we're all donation funded and this series was I did not write this series to get rich. Um. Yeah. I I've also been threatened several times via phone call, um, social media, text message. I attempted to attend a press conference UM about two weeks after we completed the series, and the Sheriff's Department attempted to detain me. I've since had to hire a bodyguard when I do field reporting, which is a bit annoying for what I do, but it's a necessary precaution after Um, they attempted to arrest me for doing my job. So you have had to hire a body card to do journalism, which is protected by the constitution. Yes, yes, I have. Things are going well now, you know this kind of work is is dangerous in many ways as a journalist, especially when you know that there's no protection other than from yourself, your community, and your bodyguard. Did you worry about safety when you wrote this series investigation? Of course we took a lot of precautions that I can't really detail in case I need to use them again. But we thought a very long and hard about safety, and it did get scary at times. Definitely. There have been a few times where things have happened that have really shaken me. But at the same time, like I truly can't imagine doing anything else. Um, I've met a lot of really incredible people doing this work. I've been able to help people, which is really why I wanted to become a journalist in the first place. It's something that continues to demand attention. I mean, we have seen this come more into the zeite guys, but unfortunately we still haven't seen any serious action taken. So this definitely demands my attention and demands my reporting. When did you first know you wanted to be a journalist? I think I first wanted to know after I visited um A morning show when I was in the eighth grade and I got to talk to miss Anne Curry and yeah, of course, yeah, she came out and spoke to As we had gathered in the square with our signs, you know how they used to do back in the day, she came out and spoke to us, and she asked me how I was doing in school and what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I told her I wasn't sure, and she said that I might want to consider journalism. So I came back to California and joined the school paper and I've been reporting ever since. That's incredible. So what do you want for yourself as a journalist? You know, what's the next what's the goal for you? Where do you want to take your work? Oh? Yeah, I mean the goal for me is really to make an impact in my community and hopefully facilitates some some change that will better that community. That's what I hope to do with this series, UM was really bring awareness to the issue and through that awareness, inspire people to take action and demand change. I think we're still seeing what becomes of that, UM, and I'm going to continue the work, but I think that this was a very good It was a really good success on my I think, like my first big attempt to do something like this. So this was your first time doing such extensive long form reporting it was, and it was my first time doing a real, in depth investigation. A few months before I started the investigation, I took a investigative journalism class UM offered by the id B Well Society, and they it was an incredible, incredible class. I had some rudimentary skills on investigations, but that workshop really gave me UM what I needed to start the investigation. UM. So I completed the workshop, UM was shot and injured. Then, sitting on my couch, thoughts to myself, Okay, UM, perhaps there's something to do with these things. Looking ahead, what can we do to support you in this kind of work? Me meaning me, my producers, and of course all of the listeners of the Roxane Gay Agenda. I think the first thing to do, definitely is to question your representatives and ask them what they are doing about this issue and let them know that this is something that needs to be taken action on. When I say your representatives, I mean if you're here in Los Angeles, that's your city council person, your county supervisor, your state assembly person, your state senator, you're you know senator that is going to d C as well. Maxine Waters has been very outspoken on this issue, and any support that she receives definitely helps my work um and allows me to to continue to ask these questions and hopefully get some answers that haven't been given as of yet. And I would also recommend advocating for an end for things like the Peace Officers Bill of Rights, which allows police officers to examine all evidence before they're ever questioned in any incident like this, and they get to go over that evidence with a lawyer and a union representative and they have to answer those questions during their work day. Wouldn't it be great if that was the case when regular people were charged with the crime. Really, things like that make us all second class citizens and really doesn't give us a fair playing level playing ground when it comes to legal legal action with against law enforcement officers. It's also important to talk about things like qualified immunity, which make it so that when a law enforcement officer kills your loved one, you can't sue that officer. The officer isn't personally liable. So any settlement money that you may get doesn't come from the officer. It comes from the county. It's paid It's really paid for by you, right because it's your taxes that are funding it. So things like qualified immunity that needs to change too. I will add one thing that I know can be helpful, which is to support local journalism. Without local journalism, this piece would never have gotten the attention it has and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So please, UM, We'll put again the link to knock l A and they are entirely donation funded and so if you can contribute to this kind of reporting in the future, I'm sure that they would greatly appreciate it. We would. We would also know that, UM, all these record requests costs a lot of money. It costs about four thousand dollars to fund the research just for this series, and really this series is just scratching the surface. There are a lot more crimes that these deputy gang members have committed. I'm sure there are many more murderers that I've yet to discover, and I would like to continue doing this. Hopefully we'll be able to contribute to some of that reporting. And I know that I appreciate the journalism that you're doing so very much and look forward to reading everything that comes next for you. Cerise Castle, thank you so much for joining us on the Roxanne Gay Agenda. So once more. Serrese Castle's fifteen part series on gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department can be found online in Knock l A and you can keep up with me and the podcast on social media on Twitter at our Gay and Instagram at Roxanne Gay seven four. Our email addresses Roxanne Gay Agenda at gmail dot com, and we would love to hear from you from Luminary. The Roxanne Gay Agenda is produced by Curtis Fox. Our researcher is Yusena Moreno. Production support is provided by Caitlin Adams and Meg Pillow. I'm Roxanne Gay your favorite bad feminist, and thank you so much for listening.

From Luminary. This is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of your Dreams. I am Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminist, and I don't actually have any recommendations this week because a I've been too busy to enjoy anything, but also because the world was at war now, and it's hard to take pleasure and much of anything while you know that there are people suffering, and while you try and reconcile the reality that people have long been suffering from the effects of war. And this seems like one of the first times that people are paying attention. And I'm pretty sure we all know why that's strange. I wanted to talk a little bit this week about police culture. You know, when George Floyd was murdered, there was this moment where it seemed like enough people were finally horrified by the realities of police brutality toward black and brown people that we might see chain. And I'm never an optimist. I don't traffic and hope and even I thought, wow, enough people are finally taking notice. And it's appalling that this is what it took for them to notice. But okay, here we are. Corporations started pledging all kinds of money to vaguely worded diversity initiatives. Public figures said what a thought were the right things. Some people started to take this idea of defunding or reforming the police seriously, with actual conversations about what defunding means, what it could look like, and how it might work. Activists took a long, hard look at police budgets and we could clearly see what many of us already knew. A disproportionate amount of our tax dollars go to law enforcement. It's almost shocking, actually, it's very shocking. But it was only a moment, and there was not much follow up on all of that talk talk talk, and instead of any kind of improvement where policing is concerned, very little has changed. A former police officer and democratic name only as the mayor of New York Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is proposing a two million dollar increase to the three point two billion dollar police budget, and similar increases are happening in cities all across the United States. Is not to defund the police in Biden's State of the Union. This man who has always avoided saying anything even remotely critical of law enforcement proudly declared that we need to fund the police, as if that has not always been the case. He took time out of a very finite amount of time for his speech to fund the police. It's outrageous. I don't think most progressives expected much from Biden, and he has met our very low expectations by governing to the middle. But this one was another particularly bitter pill to swallow, because he could have just said nothing at all and sat there and ate his food, but he did not. Usually I write about these issues, I talk about how I don't traffic and hope, and this is exactly why all that talk, all the empty gestures, all the pledges with no accountability and no follow through. It's meaningless when nothing ever changes systemically. And for that systemic change to happen, I think we need to understand just how deep the problems with law enforcement go, and few people have a good sense of what's happening with police, especially in Los Angeles County. Then series Castle series is a young journalist who in broke a major story about how gangs have infiltrated the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department going back decades. The series came out on knock l a, a nonprofit community journalism project. The story is fascinating and horrifying, and it is incredibly thorough. So I wanted to bring series Castle onto the podcast and I wanted to talk to her about her work and how how she found I don't know the metal to take on the Los Angeles Sheriff's Apartment. Cerise, Welcome to the Roxane Gay Agenda. Thank you so much for having me. I'm truly honored to be here, and I just want to mention at the top here. While I was the first person to compile a thorough history of deputy gangs in the Sheriff's Department, there were several reporters that came before me that sort of laid the groundwork for this, and I definitely thanked them for their work and their contributions that were able to guide me on my path to create the fifteen part series that I did. That's amazing. It's so rare that people acknowledge the work that they build on, and so thank you for doing that. Of Course, you grew up in Los Angeles, so did you have experiences with the police before you started this investigation. Of course, I am a black person growing up in Los Angeles, so I had many encounters with police UM before starting this journey of investigating the Sheriff's Department. It was really an interaction with the police that spurred me UM jumping into this project. UM. I was covering the protests that were breaking out across the city in response to the murder of George Floyd, and in the course of covering the protests for radio station I was working at the time, I was actually shot by law enforcement with a less than lethal munition, and the resulting injuries UM put me on bed rest for about six months. I wasn't really able to walk at all. UM. I was really just stuck in my bed, going back and forth between the bed and the couch for a really long time. And I wasn't content in that moment too just sit down and not contribute to the conversation that was happening across the country, across industries around the world. Really, I really wanted to do something. The question of deputy gangs was something that had really intrigued me since childhood. It was something I had heard about from peers, from my older brother, from teachers, from my mom, and it's something that I think that most people of color growing up in l A County have heard about anecdotally, but there wasn't ever anything reviewing everything that we know, who these people were, what they were doing and why. And when I was stuck on bed rest, I realized, okay, this is my time to start answering those questions. Now. You said two things that are interesting here. But first, for people who are not living in Los Angeles, what is the difference between l A p D, which we all know has problems, and the l A County Sheriff's Department. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department patrols unincorporated l A County and l A p D is regulated within the city confines. So if you go to East Los Angeles, which is unincorporated LA County, you will find the area patrolled by Sheriff's as is the case in the Antelope Valley, South l A out in Malibu. They're also contracts cities places like Norwalk, Whittier, Compton, West Hollywood that have elected to hire the sheriff's departments to come in and provide law enforcement services. You also mentioned that for anyone young who grew up in l A, the Sheriff's department gangs were an open secret. I'm new ish to l A. I've been living in l A for about six or seven years now. It's shocking to me in some ways, but also entirely predictable that there are gangs in the Sheriff's department and that they're an open secret. So how does an open secret like this stay in open secret that no one does anything about? That's a really good question. In the course of my research for my series, I found that several government agencies from the county level all the way up to the federal level, had heard testimony about these deputy gangs dating all the way back to the early nineteen nineties and took no action. And as to why, I mean, I haven't really found a complete answer for that. But we do know about that. Police unions are incredibly powerful, right um. They spend tons of money and elections every year, and the people that we elect are responsible for putting laws in place. And while the California Penal Code does define a gang as a group of three or more people that share a tattoo, common hand gesture, and participate in a litany of things that fall under crime in the California penal Code and the death bed gangs meet those standards, nothing has been done. I've asked attorneys about prosecuting deputy gangs under you know, gang enhancements and then laughed at Frankly, it's just not something that's seen as a serious issue until very recently. Um, and I want to say that it's because of the series and the incredible response that it received from the community that this pressure has sort of come up. Journalism in action, folks. So you know, the thing that struck me the most about this article, which I first found on social media, was how extensive fifteen parts, and the depth of research that went in and the fact that the origins here go back to the nineties seventies. So we are going to put a link to the series in show notes, but series, I would love if you could tell us how the gang's start in the sheriff's department back in the seventies. So an interesting note about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is that, arguably for a very long time, from its inception all the way up until the mid nineteen forties, it functioned very much as an old Western posse or what we would call in modern times a gang. There was one elected sheriff and it was his job to deputize people that he felt fit the bill of upstanding citizens to enforce the law. And this ended up really being his but drinking buddies right. And this policy actually continued up until the nineteen eighties, I believe, or the sheriff was allowed to just deputize, you know, like celebrities that he liked or someone that maybe donated to his campaign. They got imagine a gun and were able to act as a peace officer going into the nineteen seventies. The first time we ever have reporting of any of these gangs is at the Chicano Moratorium and that was a protest held in East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War by a mostly Latino residence. And it started out as a very peaceful protests. I say peaceful because these sheriffs were not being aggressive. That quickly changed when the deputy started firing on the crowd and chaos ensued. People were actually killed at this protest. One of them was a journalist by the name of Ruben Salazar. He actually told his colleagues the night before that he suspected he was under police surveillance and that he thought there was a chance that he could be killed. Shortly after that instance, a memo came out of the Sheriff's department where several names were placed on a list and it was said that these were all people that had a Red Devil tattoo and we're members of a gang called the Little Red Devils. Beyond that list being created, it's not clear that any sort of disciplinary action was taken. So how many gangs exist within the Sheriff's department that you've been able to verify. I've been able to verify eighteen, but I've heard anecdotally of about twenty four. The number is staggering. So if there are eighteen gangs, how many people are in the Sheriff's department in total? There are about ten thousand people in the Sheriff's department. Wow, that's a lot. And so it's clearly not every member of the Sheriff's department that's in the gang. How many people are involved in this? Would you say, I think a lot of people have knowledge of it. Um. Many of the sources that I talked to say that they estimate nine of people in the Sheriff's department have some sort of working knowledge of the gang and in that may stand by when they see some sort of mouth feasance going on, and they would call them associates. Um I actually created a database of members and associates with the help of knock l A, which is available at the link you'll put in the show notes. Where we've been collecting this data. People that have been, you know, on the scene of something that went wrong, that have associated multiple times, have been associated multiple times in shootings, uses of force, that sort of thing, and have been accused of being or associated with deputy gangs. And what are the racial dynamics of these gangs because one of the things that struck me in reading this was that Latino officers are part of this. But in general, women and black people are not allowed to join these gangs. So who are the people who are in these gangs? Most of these gangs have white supremacist um beliefs or themes running through them. As you mentioned, women aren't generally allowed to join. Sometimes they're allowed to be associates, but they're not allowed to get full membership with a tattoo. And for the most part, yes, black people are not allowed to join Um. There are several exceptions that have been made. UM. In one gang that was noted as white supremacists, actually in a court ruling by Judge Terry Hatter, they did allow black people to join, but their tattoo is slightly different. Instead of having a Viking wearing a helmet with two horns pointed up, one horn would be pointed down if you were a person of color. UM. Not really sure what that means or why, but there are some exceptions like that, But you can see with who the gang targets like, there really isn't any sort of exception. When they're looking outward, they may make an exception for their brother in blue, because I think you'll find with police officers, law enforcement officers across the nation, there is this sort of like brotherhood, fraternity camaraderie that runs within that culture where they see each other's lives and relationships is sort of more inherently valuable than the people that they are sworn to protect. So they will target people of color while they may allow a black man to sort of participate in that action. G You know, the thing I often think about when I'm thinking about law enforcement is that entire police departments often feel like gangs, and you're either in the gang or you're not, and when you're not, you are incredibly vulnerable. And because they have a lot of unchecked power. So what are these gangs within the gang up to, because it doesn't seem like they're up to any good murder. Primarily in my series, I was able to uncover nineteen shooting deaths were officers that were either associated with or alleged to be full fledge members of deputy gangs killed nineteen men of color. Four of those people were suffering with mental health issues and were in the midst of a mental health crisis at the time they were killed. Several of them left behind children that were very young at the time of death. These cases of cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles County over one hundred million dollars in settlements alone. That does not include attorney fees. And at the end of the day, I mean, it's just money, right, that's not going to bring back their loved one that was taken. Yeah, you can't like these settlements, which when I was reading the settlements, I kept thinking, hey, that's not enough money, and be there is no amount of money that is going to bring back families that is going to make up for that kind of loss. So we know they're doing murders and quite a number what other things do they do, like is their corruption? Are they pushing drugs? Are they targeting people for harassment? And how do you get into these gangs? I think probably the most insidious thing about these gangs is that they are a symptom of larger issues within the Sheriff's department. You don't necessarily have to be a member of the gangs to participate in some of these things that I'm about to describe, but these things are all sort of seen as signs that you are apt for gang membership. One deputy former deputy that I spoke to, described a process called hunting where training officers instruct their trainees to go after people of color, black people, people of Central American descent, or minor traffic violations and essentially lie to them in order to search their vehicles and discover UND's drugs. It's I've been told by other deputies that sometimes these items are in fact planted by the deputies performing the search in order to generate a statistic. Those arrest statistics argused to justify more money for a particular station, if you have x amount of arrest statistics, that justifies crime being up in your district, and that means that you need more money. And that means that the sheriff can go to the county Board of Supervisors and say, hey, that three billion you give us every year, that's not enough. We're going to need more. So this has largely gone unchecked for years, and then you are sitting at home, injured from police brutality, and you go down this rabbit hole. When you started doing this investigation, did you think you were going to uncover something this extensive and this, as you say, pervasive and pernicious. No, I didn't. I knew that the problem was large. I didn't think it would be eighteen gangs large. I didn't think that so many people knew. I think that was the most disturbing thing to me was finding out how many people in power have known about this for longer than I've been alive and done nothing. Now, in general, prosecutors have a really hard time doing anything with regards to prosecuting law enforcement, and there's a real reluctance there. Do you see that reluctance in Los Angeles in terms of trying to address any of these gangs. Gosh. I mean, the reluctance is really the thing that confuses me the most. There are two cases that I have been working on as of late which are really just incredibly disgusting shootings, and I think that's says something about what is happening in Los Angeles where we have shootings like these occurring on average about once a month, and they are not showing up on the national news. These videos aren't going viral. It's so commonplace here. The two shootings that I'm thinking of the first is the killing of Jamal Simpson. Jamal was a twenty one year old black man who was riding in a car with his friend the sheriff's deputies. It's unclear why they attempted to stop the vehicle. The sheriff's deputy was outside of his jurisdiction, which is an important note that the sheriff's vehicle chase Jamal and his friend through three separate jurisdictions which were not the sheriff's and eventually and Jamal attempted to get out of the car um twice, which is his right as a passenger. Um and the sheriffs vehicle continued to pursue him when he exited the car. The sheriff stopped his car, got out of the car and shot at Jamal twenty one times. He was hit about seventeen times. This is all in the back, killing him, and they left his body in the street for hours. The deputy who killed Jamal, Gregory Vanhausen, actually had killed before about a few years prior, eighteen months prior. I believe he killed a sixteen year old boy who was standing in the breezeway of his apartment complex talking to a young lady on Super Bowl Sunday, and that deputy is still working for the sheriff's apartment. The district attorney in both instances found that the shootings were justified. I don't know how you can justify shooting someone in the back more than fifteen times. That just doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to anyone. You know. Whenever I think about, you know, the justifications they offer for these extra judicial murders, I always think, no matter what that person was doing, if they were doing anything, the punishment isn't the death penalty regardless. So why is your gun coming into this? Why did you pull it out in the first place. What's the other shooting that you're looking at? The other shooting that I'm looking at. This occurred just under a year ago in Norwalk. UM young man by the name of Frederick Holder, he had literally just become a father, was driving on a freeway on ramp. He was stopped by a red traffic light and he was being pursued, they say, for a traffic stop. Three deputies exited their vehicles, one armed with what appears to be on video is an assault rifle. They run up to Frederick, to his windows and open fire on him thirty three times. This man was sitting on a freeway on ramp, surrounded by traffic. I do not know how you justify that. And we know that's happened before. I mean, it happened three days before Christmas when lap D shot and killed the fourteen year old young young girl who was with her mother at Burlington coat factory. Right, it's just this recklessness that happens again and again. Like as I said before, these shootings happened about once a month. There was a man killed in January, Pedro Lopez, and there was a young woman killed in February. In these very similar shootings. In most of these cases, all of them are real, justified by the district attorney. So if anything, what I see is a hesitation on the part of our district attorney to hold these law enforcement officers responsible. You know, you have to wonder, how do you repair a system that is this corrupt, and that is this systemically corrupt. And so you know, we've been talking over the past two years a lot about police reform or defunding the police. Is reformed possible in this kind of a system. Well, we do have an election coming up in June of this year, you know, I think, unfortunately, I understand the need for people to say, let's just get rid of this um. For the time being. Things are very much on fire, and I think actually needs to be taken um at the ballot in the next couple of months. I think that's the first fire that we need to put out and tackle things. You know. From there, I definitely think there needs to be radical change in the Sheriff's department. I think that they need an independent investigation. At the very least. A lot needs to happen yesterday as far as the Sheriff's Department is concerned. Is there a candidate running for sheriff in June that we should be paying attention to because I know that the current sheriff is not great. Yeah, I've done some report dying. I've worked and been a part of some great reporting at knock l A on several of the candidates running. I think it's important for people to know that most of the candidates running have records of their own and associations of their own with these deputy gangs. At least two candidates are alleged to be deputy gang members themselves. Several candidates have shot people, you know, at least one of them has killed a child. So it's very important to do your research, and I recommend that all of your listeners check out our reporting at knock l A. Check out reporting at for the on Robert Luna, who is the former chief of the Long Beach Police Department. Interesting point about him is he brought back uh police operation that was used in the nineteen seventies to target um queer men um. I believe that those were called gay stings. He brought those back in his department in yes, yes, and those were only stopped because as a legal action that was taken. So I really encourage our listeners to read are reporting on these subjects because a lot of these candidates, unfortunately, are not much of an upgrade from the current sheriff that we have that has been enabling these people. Cecil Rambo, for example, was the assistant sheriff to Lee Bacca who went to prison for federal obstruction of justice. He's best friends with Paul Tanaka, who was the under sheriff of Lee Bacca. These candidates that are running, I mean, they are not great. They're not great. Well, this is cheerful, but you know, it doesn't need to be cheerful. It's just I think overwhelming to think that the person who's currently sheriff isn't great, and and and that's that's mild, and that everyone running. It's really like, what is the least evil of all of these evils? Well, not to sound so grim and dark, there is one candidate who I am very intrigued by. His name is Eric Strong. He has said that he is in favor of giving away money from the Sheriff's department budget. He is in favor of permanently closing Men's Central Jail Um. He supports a charter amendment that would give the Board of Supervisors the power to remove a sheriff. He has said that he would cooperate with subpoenas, which is really, I mean, just the bare minimum for ordinary people like you and me follow the law. A lot of the ideas that he Um is supporting, though, are coming from the community and are coming from people that have been victims of deputy gang violence. UM. He is committed. He has said he has committed to working with them and hearing from them, and that's a huge, huge change from all of the other people in the race. So he's a candidate that I would also recommend that people check out and find out more information on for sure, Eric Strong. Now, we talk a lot about accountability and social justice circles, and there isn't a lot of accountability oftentimes. Have any of these members of these deputy gangs been held accountable faced measurable consequences for their actions? Ah? Measurable? That's an interesting word. Um. The only real consequence they've faced is seeing their name in my articles. Really, UM. As far as internal discipline, it's incredibly rare for a deputy to be disciplined for something like this. I think probably one of my favorite cases. Will not favorite, that's sort of a dark way to describe it. But one of the cases I've looked at that sort of tells you about the just how they view these things is there was a deputy who got drunk at a family event and fired a gun at some balloons thinking they were an intruder and ended up injuring someone and face no discipline. Wow. You know, it's a little terrifying. I mean, they're already terrifying because we see what they do to our communities. We see what they do like you know, whenever I'm driving in I live in Englewood, you know, and you see them like you well, it's the l A. P D. But I mean these their cousins. You know, whenever you see law enforcement in l A, especially in communities of color, they're not doing anything good, They're not doing anything nice. And to know that there are literally no consequences for anything that they do, you know, it's an overwhelming feeling. How has your reporting on this been received? Because I when I started reading the series, you know, at first I was like, oh, this is interesting, and then you realize there are fifteen parts to it and that it goes back forty years and that there's no checks or balances on this. So how has reporting been received. Well, it's been received in a really great way by the community. I've been really moved, frankly just seeing the community create the hashtag Google l a s D Gang since the stickers and graffiti that I've seen around the city with that phrase has been wonderful. Knowing that it's that the reporting is making this much impact. I mean, it's an incredibly long series, so the fact that this many people are reading and engaging with it is is incredible. UM. On the law enforcement side, it was received really terribly. Sheriff Yan Nueva in a press conference set in several press conferences, actually positive that I had made everything up um to get rich and that was from a correct There were a great organization, but I mean get rich from what exactly. Yeah, we're all donation funded and this series was I did not write this series to get rich. Um. Yeah. I I've also been threatened several times via phone call, um, social media, text message. I attempted to attend a press conference UM about two weeks after we completed the series, and the Sheriff's Department attempted to detain me. I've since had to hire a bodyguard when I do field reporting, which is a bit annoying for what I do, but it's a necessary precaution after Um, they attempted to arrest me for doing my job. So you have had to hire a body card to do journalism, which is protected by the constitution. Yes, yes, I have. Things are going well now, you know this kind of work is is dangerous in many ways as a journalist, especially when you know that there's no protection other than from yourself, your community, and your bodyguard. Did you worry about safety when you wrote this series investigation? Of course we took a lot of precautions that I can't really detail in case I need to use them again. But we thought a very long and hard about safety, and it did get scary at times. Definitely. There have been a few times where things have happened that have really shaken me. But at the same time, like I truly can't imagine doing anything else. Um, I've met a lot of really incredible people doing this work. I've been able to help people, which is really why I wanted to become a journalist in the first place. It's something that continues to demand attention. I mean, we have seen this come more into the zeite guys, but unfortunately we still haven't seen any serious action taken. So this definitely demands my attention and demands my reporting. When did you first know you wanted to be a journalist? I think I first wanted to know after I visited um A morning show when I was in the eighth grade and I got to talk to miss Anne Curry and yeah, of course, yeah, she came out and spoke to As we had gathered in the square with our signs, you know how they used to do back in the day, she came out and spoke to us, and she asked me how I was doing in school and what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I told her I wasn't sure, and she said that I might want to consider journalism. So I came back to California and joined the school paper and I've been reporting ever since. That's incredible. So what do you want for yourself as a journalist? You know, what's the next what's the goal for you? Where do you want to take your work? Oh? Yeah, I mean the goal for me is really to make an impact in my community and hopefully facilitates some some change that will better that community. That's what I hope to do with this series, UM was really bring awareness to the issue and through that awareness, inspire people to take action and demand change. I think we're still seeing what becomes of that, UM, and I'm going to continue the work, but I think that this was a very good It was a really good success on my I think, like my first big attempt to do something like this. So this was your first time doing such extensive long form reporting it was, and it was my first time doing a real, in depth investigation. A few months before I started the investigation, I took a investigative journalism class UM offered by the id B Well Society, and they it was an incredible, incredible class. I had some rudimentary skills on investigations, but that workshop really gave me UM what I needed to start the investigation. UM. So I completed the workshop, UM was shot and injured. Then, sitting on my couch, thoughts to myself, Okay, UM, perhaps there's something to do with these things. Looking ahead, what can we do to support you in this kind of work? Me meaning me, my producers, and of course all of the listeners of the Roxane Gay Agenda. I think the first thing to do, definitely is to question your representatives and ask them what they are doing about this issue and let them know that this is something that needs to be taken action on. When I say your representatives, I mean if you're here in Los Angeles, that's your city council person, your county supervisor, your state assembly person, your state senator, you're you know senator that is going to d C as well. Maxine Waters has been very outspoken on this issue, and any support that she receives definitely helps my work um and allows me to to continue to ask these questions and hopefully get some answers that haven't been given as of yet. And I would also recommend advocating for an end for things like the Peace Officers Bill of Rights, which allows police officers to examine all evidence before they're ever questioned in any incident like this, and they get to go over that evidence with a lawyer and a union representative and they have to answer those questions during their work day. Wouldn't it be great if that was the case when regular people were charged with the crime. Really, things like that make us all second class citizens and really doesn't give us a fair playing level playing ground when it comes to legal legal action with against law enforcement officers. It's also important to talk about things like qualified immunity, which make it so that when a law enforcement officer kills your loved one, you can't sue that officer. The officer isn't personally liable. So any settlement money that you may get doesn't come from the officer. It comes from the county. It's paid It's really paid for by you, right because it's your taxes that are funding it. So things like qualified immunity that needs to change too. I will add one thing that I know can be helpful, which is to support local journalism. Without local journalism, this piece would never have gotten the attention it has and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So please, UM, We'll put again the link to knock l A and they are entirely donation funded and so if you can contribute to this kind of reporting in the future, I'm sure that they would greatly appreciate it. We would. We would also know that, UM, all these record requests costs a lot of money. It costs about four thousand dollars to fund the research just for this series, and really this series is just scratching the surface. There are a lot more crimes that these deputy gang members have committed. I'm sure there are many more murderers that I've yet to discover, and I would like to continue doing this. Hopefully we'll be able to contribute to some of that reporting. And I know that I appreciate the journalism that you're doing so very much and look forward to reading everything that comes next for you. Cerise Castle, thank you so much for joining us on the Roxanne Gay Agenda. So once more. Serrese Castle's fifteen part series on gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department can be found online in Knock l A and you can keep up with me and the podcast on social media on Twitter at our Gay and Instagram at Roxanne Gay seven four. Our email addresses Roxanne Gay Agenda at gmail dot com, and we would love to hear from you from Luminary. The Roxanne Gay Agenda is produced by Curtis Fox. Our researcher is Yusena Moreno. Production support is provided by Caitlin Adams and Meg Pillow. I'm Roxanne Gay your favorite bad feminist, and thank you so much for listening.