On Thursday, March 20, 2025, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna attended the monthly meeting of the county’s Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission—or COC. The sheriff was scheduled to give a 30-minute presentation to the commission, in which he would attempt to answer 27 previously submitted questions regarding what he and his staff are doing to address the ongoing problem of deputy gangs that has plagued the department for more than a half century.
But, before the commission members could turn their attention to the issue of deputy cliques, the meeting’s agenda was derailed when it became apparent that neither the sheriff, nor the LASD deputy designated as custodian of records, had brought three reports that the Oversight Commission had subpoenaed at the end of February, and that it was the commissioners understanding would be delivered at the March 20 meeting.
When Robert Bonner, who is, at present, the chairperson of the commission, asked Luna about the subpoenaed documents, the sheriff told Bonner and the rest of the commission that, “based on the advice of counsel,” the department would not be turning over the subpoenaed material, which consisted of reports on three high profile instances in which deputies beat or shot young men, one of them Andres Guardardo, who was fatally shot in the back by two deputies on June 18, 2020.
Yet, instead of bringing the documents, unbeknownst to the commission, the day before the March 20 meeting, “on the advice of counsel,” the sheriff’s department filed with L.A. County’s Superior Court in order to determine if they really, truly had to respond to the COC’s subpoena and fork over the reports, a question that the commission believed had been settled five years ago by a ballot measure known as Measure R.
Furthermore, a few months after the passage of measure R, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB1185, which granted subpoena power to oversight bodies statewide.
So it was confusing as to why County Counsel was giving the sheriff this advice.
“This isn’t an issue of trying to hide any information,” Luna said. “We just want clarification so we can follow the law. What you’re asking us to do right now violates the law, according to county counsel.”
When Luna referred to “the advice of counsel,” he meant The Office of County Counsel, which provides legal representation to the Board of Supervisors, County departments, and county agencies.
In response, Bonner told the sheriff that, with this advice, County Counsel “has committed malpractice, in my opinion. As a former federal judge I find this extraordinary!”
Later Luna gave the verbal report he had come to the meeting to give, regarding what he and the department are doing about the deputy gang issue, which has reportedly been escalating in certain areas of the county, in particular.
Then the commission vanished into a closed session to discuss how best to sue sheriff’s department over its failure to bring the reports that the commission subpoenaed, a subpoena that Los Angeles County’s head lawyer advised the sheriff to challenge in court.
Threats and legal briefs
The subpoena issue is far from the first disagreement between the COC and County Counsel but, of late, the conflicts have been escalating.
Things noticeably moved into a more adversarial arena on February 16, 2025, when Dawyn R. Harrison—who is the head of the Office of the County Counsel—sent a threatening letter to the COC.
The threat came in the form of an emailed letter from Harrison to Bonner who, as mentioned above is, at present, the chair of the commission, a position that he and his fellow commissioners do on a voluntary basis.
Harris did not threaten Bonner personally in the letter. Instead she threatened Sean Kennedy, who, like Bonner, is a founding member of the Oversight Commission, the legal purpose of which is to “improve public transparency and accountability with respect to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.”
A disagreement with the definition of the oversight commission’s raison d’etre appears to be among the issues that precipitated County Counsel’s threat, which came in response to an Amicus Brief that Sean Kennedy was preparing to file with California’s Second District Court of Appeal, which is located in Los Angeles.
The Amicus brief (which you can find here) pertains to an extremely controversial criminal case filed by California Attorney General Rob Bonner a little over a year ago.
The charges were filed against Diana Teran, a long-respected prosecutor who, in the past worked as the Constitutional Advisor for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, among other positions. Her case is at the appellate stage of the legal process, meaning appellate briefs are being accepted and could matter.
We’ll give you more on the Teran case in part 2 of this story, and why it matters to the COC. But suffice it to say that, from the time the charges were announced, the case that AG Bonner brought against Teran has been disputed by a list of legal experts, who believe that the charges are wrong-headed and that, if successful, they would set a dangerous precedent that is not in the interest of justice.
Furthermore, according to Kennedy and Bonner, the case against Turan has a direct bearing on the commission’s oversight function, in that the leadership of the LASD has begun using the pending prosecution as an excuse not to produce documents for the COC, which it is legally entitled to receive. This is reportedly particularly true when it comes to the COC’s requests for documents having to do with the LASD’s toxic deputy gang problem.
In any event, given the importance of the Teran prosecution, on Thursday, February 13, 2025—two days before Harrison would send her threatening email—the COC convened a special meeting for the purpose of discussing Kennedy’s brief, and whether or not the brief should be filed, not by him individually, but under the banner of the Oversight Commission, thus giving it more weight.
At the Feb. 13 meeting, after a brief but energetic discussion, all the commissioners present voted in favor of directing Kennedy to file the amicus brief in the COC’s name.
It appeared that the only interested party who did not agree with the plan was deputy county counsel Janssen Diaz, who, as usual, was present at the meeting Yet, his objections seemed mostly proforma, and were treated as such.
The response from head County Counsel Harrison—who did not attend the meeting, at least not in person—was another matter.
On February 16, three days after the COC meeting and the vote, Harrison e-mailed a four-page letter to Robert Bonner in which she said that Kennedy could only file the brief as a private citizen, but not on behalf of the COC.
And if Kennedy went ahead and filed the brief for the COC anyway, her office was “prepared to file a letter with the Court of Appeal clarifying that County Counsel is counsel for the COC and Commissioner Kennedy does not have authority to represent the COC in the filing.”
In her email to COC Chair Bonner, Harrison also wrote that the Civilian Oversight Commission did not have the power to file an amicus brief of any sort anyway.
Actions, consequences, and a resignation
Harrison went on to describe COC’s reason for being, which she mostly characterized as that of an “advisory body to the Board of Supervisors,” with very little purpose or power beyond that function.
Nevertheless, despite the threat from lead County Counsel Harrison, on February 17, 2025, COC Commissioner Sean Kennedy with Commissioner Robert Bonner co-signing, filed the amicus brief with the Court of Appeal of the State of California, Second Appellate District, Division Two.
Immediately following the filing, Kennedy resigned from the Civilian Oversight Commission he had helped to form nearly a decade ago.
“We can’t let County Counsel run oversight,” Kennedy told WLA when we asked him about his resignation. “They represent the sheriffs, which means that part of their job is to hide deputies’ misconduct. So, for her to continue to try to control the COC’s independent oversight decision making,” said Kennedy, “is a terrible conflict of interest.”
Two days later, finding that Kennedy and Bonner had not followed her orders, County Counsel Harrison made good on her threat and, on February 19, sent a four-page letter to the appellate justices, which contained the following:
“The COC did not seek or obtain Board approval; consequently, its actions in submitting the application are ultra vires and legally invalid,” she wrote, which was a remarkable accusation to level.
Harris then followed with a request that the court “not consider the COC’s application or its attached proposed amicus curiae brief.”
The conflict with the head of County Counsel did not end there.
However, before we go further, it helps to know a bit about the two people that County Counsel Harrison put in her gun sights, and the history of the commission that Harrison inexplicably describes as having almost zero power and purpose.
Kennedy, Bonner, and the creation of the COC
Sean Kennedy is highly experienced in the world of law in general, and criminal law specifically. He is the Kaplan and Feldman Executive Director of Loyola Law School’s Center for Juvenile Law and Policy, the former Federal Public Defender for the Central District of California, where he also served as Chief of the Federal Public Defender’s Capital Habeas Unit, all of which made him an expert in appellate issues. He’s won a pile of awards for his work as an attorney. He is also well known for his expertise in the realm of LA’s deputy gangs, which is one of the issues on which the COC has focused since its birth.
Commissioner Robert Bonner is a former U.S. District Judge for the Central District of California, the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (His appointments to lead the above two law enforcement agencies were made by two different Republican presidents.) Bonner is also a former U.S. Attorney, and a former prosecutor for California’s Central District.
Regarding the COC, as longtime WLA readers will likely remember, the Sheriff’s Civilian oversight commission was voted into being by the LA County Board of Supervisors in 2016. This new oversight commission was created in response to the work of the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence (CCJV), which in the fall of 2012, presented a lengthy and meticulously researched report on problems inside the sheriff’s department, which prominently included a “culture of corruption and violence” in the nation’s largest jail system.
(It was this culture of corruption that would eventually result in the convictions of then sheriff Lee Baca, and his shadow sheriff, former undersheriff Paul Tanaka.)
In its detailed report, the CCJV’s most prominent suggestion for departmental reform was the creation of an independent oversight entity that would have “unfettered access” to “department records, witness interviews, video footage, data, personnel, and facilities.”
The creation of this new commission required an amendment of the LA County ordinance known as Title 3, which governs Advisory Commissions and Committees in the county.
Yet, the COC’s birth didn’t end with Title 3. Instead, in March of 2020, two years after the commission’s formation, the COC was given still more powers and more independence via Measure R, a ballot initiative backed by a coalition of local leaders and organizations, including the ACLU, Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and political strategist Jasmyne Cannick, plus a long list of activist community members impacted by the justice system. These powers include subpoena power.
Yet, despite the above well-documented facts, Harrison and her representatives continue to state that the COC had few purposes or powers, and was subject to the direction of the County Counsel.
All of the this brings us back to the topic of the Amicus brief, and the unusual criminal case that brought it into being.
To be continued
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Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, coming on Monday
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Editor’s Note – 4/3/2025 – To Pay or not to Pay:
When working on Part 1 of this 2-part series, it had gotten so long that I began making trims here and there. One of the things I trimmed was the fact that the COC commission members all serve on a voluntary basis. Given that some commenters appear to have mistakenly assumed otherwise, I figured that readers might wish to have the truth of the matter.
Luna and Villanueva tie for 1st place. What a continuous mess while taxpayers foot the bill.
The Pentagon has a term for systems that exist merely to exist. A bureaucracy whose sole function is to keep the bureaucracy going. They call it a self licking ice cream cone. The Sheriffs Civilian Oversight Commission is a self licking ice cream cone looking to expand and ensure its survival.
Since the SOC has no real responsibilities and isn’t accountable for anything (bureaucratic nirvana) it needs to come up with a problem that only it can solve but at the same time is unsolvable. Deputy gangs is the perfect crisis. It’s salacious enough to fire up the imaginations of the AWFLs (affluent white female liberals ) like Celeste and at the same time insure the game isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
Millions will be spent, show hearings held, careers ruined and made, and in the end nothing much will change.Because after all it’s not illegal to get tattoos and hang out together.
The good news is the County seems to recognize this and is trying to keep the parasites at bay. It’s also a good sign that one of the original gang that set this whole thing up (Kennedy) is ducking out the back door. I hope the county succeeds in scraping these barnacles off its hull.
Independent commissions have identified and voiced serious concerns about “deputy gangs” in the LASD long before the COC held hearings and concluded that such gangs/cliques existed to the detriment of the Department and the communities LASD is supposed to serve. In 1992, the Kolts Commission discussed extensive deputy misconduct associated with the Vikings tattoo and concluded that “some deputies at the Lynwood Station appear at least in the past to have engaged in behavior that is brutal and intolerable and is typically associated with street gangs.” In 1999, the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights took extensive testimony about deputy gangs and noted that “an organized vigilante group of LASD employees” called the Posse “made it their duty to punish inmates who they believed were being ‘coddled” in a special ward for mentally inmates.” Then-sheriff Sherman Block conceded that the Posse group existed and was hurting inmates. In 2012, the Citizens Commission on Jail Violence identified multiple “deputy cliques” in the jails and in patrol stations–the Vikings, the Regulators, the 3,000 Boys, the 2,000 Boys–and observed that “the existence of such cliques can erode a deputy’s moral compass and make the deputy more resistant to supervisory oversight.” More recently, the California legislature determined that the problem of “law enforcement gangs” in the LASD was significant enough to enact a statewide prohibition on all law enforcement officers joining such gangs. See Cal. Pen. Code section 13670. Each of these entities had different members and looked at the problem at different times; yet they all concluded that deputy gangs existed and should be eradicated from the Department. To date, the LASD leadership continues to close its eyes to the problem and resists any and all reforms to eliminate gang culture from its ranks.
Sean Kennedy
Thank you for your input but all of this is already known to those who would denigrate the good work of the C.O.C..
What is it, we must ask ourselves, that they want to accomplish?
The answer sends shivers up my spine.
In the meantime thank you for your service.
The Beauty of the “Deputy Gang” label is that it conjures a specific image while being ambiguous enough to apply to all sorts of group behaviour. Notice how Sean and Celeste slide between the terms Deputy Gangs and cliques. Are cliques necessarily gangs? Is it illegal to be in a clique?
Sean goes on to remind us this Punch and Judy show has been going on for 33 years. Media scandals, blue ribbon commissions, special attorneys hired (remember good ol Merric Bobb) special attorneys fired, and apparently laws created making Deputy gangs illegal. And after all that, here we are.
According to Sean what’s needed is more commissions just bigger and more powerful.
Looks like the county’s had enough, Sean’s going to have to make his money the old fashioned way, by selling his services as a “Deputy Gangs” expert in civil court or some such.
GJ
Tip of the iceberg, as you well know
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lawsuit-over-alleged-banditos-deputy-203930245.html
Here the County Counsel is requiring plaintiff signature on a non-disclosure agreement before settlement approval.
In other words–a cover-up.
By the County Counsel.
The ACLU is actively fighting this. The ACLU takes cases not to make money but to change policy & this is one policy that the ACLU wants changed.
The judge overseeing the case is holding a meeting May 22–next month–to discuss this particular matter so….
Good read. It is disgusting that the “Deputy Gangs/Cliques” have festered for DECADES within LASD. That is quite simply the case because we have yet to find a Sheriff and/or an executive command staff with the backbone to do what needs to be done. They are all political cowards and the employees of LASD know it. Either the FBI or the media will have to step up, again, and clean the Sheriff’s house. Get on with it.
The commissioners serving on the COC are all volunteers, not county employees. The COC recruited private lawyers to serve as pro bono “special counsel” to conduct the questioning of witnesses in the special hearings on deputy gangs. They weren’t paid for their legal services. Loyola Law School provided the moot courtroom where the special hearings were held without charge. No COC commissioner has ever acted as a paid expert on deputy gangs. I am not saying the COC gets everything right; civilian oversight issues are complex and involve many competing considerations. But the commissioners’ motivation for doing this difficult work is not profit but instead a commitment to reducing the number of deputy-involved shootings and advancing constitutional policing in L.A. County. Change will not occur until and unless the LASD leadership faces the reality that unchecked deputy gang misconduct has hurt the department and community, and that something must be done to eradicate gang culture from the department.
Sean, interested in your opinion on what’s causing the friction developing between the COC , Luna, and county council. And the Board of Supervisors, where are they on this?
Looks like they’ve lost interest in giving the COC what they want, and these people are hand picked by progressives in a progressive state, hardly the stereotypical Bull Connor types, so what gives?
@ Sean Kennedy,
In your initial post, you stated, “such gangs/cliques existed to the detriment of the Department and the communities LASD…” Is it a gang or is it a clique? You further stated, “some deputies at the Lynwood Station appear at least in the past to have engaged in behavior that is brutal and intolerable and is typically associated with street gangs.” Based on your training and expertise, what kind of behavior did the deputies employ that was “typically associated with street gangs?” Furthermore, you once again stated, “deputy cliques” in the jails and in patrol stations…” Once again, is it a gang or a clique?
I fully comprehend the concern at hand with these so called “deputy gangs.” In my opinion, it is quite evident that the language being used is to achieve a desired effect on an audience that has been programmed to believe that there are dangerous deputy gangs running amuck within the L.A.S.D. Moreover, the recently enacted legislation by the California legislature was enacted in an effort to add credence to the narrative that is being perpetrated by the COC, Citizens Commission on Jail Violence and other anti-police activists’ groups.
This “deputy gang” narrative has been an ongoing issue for several years, which has not resulted in any worthwhile outcome. Multiple Sheriffs have been lambasted over this and nothing has been resolved. Individuals who have been handpicked by the B.O.S. to be Sheriff, have also come up empty handed. However, if we really delve into the desired goal of the CoC and the B.O.S. it is basically to take control of the L.A.S.D. To add validity to my statement, why did the B.O.S. add Measure A as an initiative? So that the B.O.S. can terminate, for cause an ELECTED official? Measure A initiative was put forth with a lot of propaganda and horrible optics because the B.O.S. Squad felt they should not be challenged and or disagreed with. The B.O.S. has always had a contentious relationship with every Sheriff and Sheriff Villanueva was the proverbial last straw. Since when does any government body, usurp the voting power of the people?
I will speculate that this “deputy gang/clique” narrative will continue to fester within the halls of the B.O.S. and the CoC as well as every other anti-police activist group until the B.O.S. becomes the marionettists and the L.A.S.D. becomes the marionettes.
@LA County voter, again with the “anti-police activist” attacks to divert from facts. Read Penal Code – PEN § 13670. Voters passed Measure A and R. LA voters elected Luna after the incompetent Villanueva played Democrats and the Department. And eradicating gangs is not about being anti-police. You know that!
Regarding GJ’s questions, I think that meaningful civilian oversight of law enforcement often creates a healthy tension between the oversight body and the law enforcement agency being overseen. This is because an independent oversight body’s job is to ask tough questions and raise issues that the leadership of the law enforcement agency might not want to explain or otherwise deal with. In the model used by L.A. County, the oversight body only shines a light on what is going on inside the LASD; the commissioners cannot force the Sheriff to do anything except explain himself. In the specific case of COC, the commissioners want to review internal reports of use-of-force investigations so that they can intelligently evaluate and make recommendations about LASD policies and procedures. The LASD leadership argues that the requested documents are “confidential” and that giving them to the commissioners would be illegal and risk making them public. The COC has given the County Counsel and the LASD leadership legal authorities holding that a law enforcement agency may give an ad hoc committee confidential documents without violating the law or making them public; however, the LASD never addresses those legal authorities, arguing instead that they are just following the advice of the County Counsel. The Office of County Counsel–which purports to simultaneously represent COC and the LASD–refuses to confirm LASD’s “advice of counsel” defense. So there is a stalemate regarding this issue, which the courts will have to decide. That’s not a bad thing, in my view. I don’t know whether the Board of Supervisors currently supports or opposes the COC because the supervisors never communicate with the commissioners. When I was on the COC, the commissioners guarded their independence, and on the rare occasion that the COC asked to Board to do something, the supervisors never gave the commissioners an answer one way or another. They just sat silent on the sidelines.
Thanks for the answer Sean, doesn’t sound all that unreasonable the way you explain it. Celeste pumped it up as some big show down between you, the COC and the County. She gets a little carried away with her advocacy.
@ John Kingsley
Did you read & comprehend what I wrote? Or did you just cherry pick certain words and or phrases so that you could post something?
@Sean Kennedy
A healthy tension? Give me a break. LASD’s tree has been shaking since the FBI incident of 2009. While efforts will not completely rid LASD of those foolish enough to be part of anything resembling a gang/clique… the comprehensive oversight has ravaged LASD.
The efforts of all involved in this witch hunt has been far more detrimental than beneficial. Now, LASD’s operating on less than a skeleton crew… and to say recruitment has been dismal would be a tremendous understatement.
To top it all off, we have a bumbling spineless leader at the helm who has buckled since his swearing in. This leads to a power grab by those execs who know he’s not spry enough to catch ulterior motives. We as a department are broken; waiting for a true leader with the right intentions to right this ship.
@LA County Voter. Did comprehend. And it appears you fail to see the long history and what it has taken to expose.