The Brief

Warning: This story includes graphic images of bodily injury. 

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Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputies severely beat Joseph Perez in 2020, then arrested him. His mom Vanessa alleges that she had previously told law enforcement that Perez has a serious mental illness and would need to be placed in a psychiatric facility. Mother and son believe the deputies used unnecessary force on Perez and are the center of an ongoing legal battle, attempting to hold the sheriff’s department accountable for its actions. LAist Mental Health and Wellbeing Reporter Robert Garrova shares more about the case and discusses efforts for transparency around investigations into allegations of excessive use of force.

Deputies severely beat a man struggling with mental health issues. Where are the records?

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputies severely beat Joseph Perez in 2020, then arrested him. His mom Vanessa alleges that she had previously told law enforcement that Perez has a serious mental illness and would need to be placed in a psychiatric facility. Mother and son believe the deputies used unnecessary force on Perez and are the center of an ongoing legal battle, attempting to hold the sheriff’s department accountable for its actions. LAist Mental Health and Wellbeing Reporter Robert Garrova shares more about the case and discusses efforts for transparency around investigations into allegations of excessive use of force.

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For years, Vanessa Perez has presented pictures of her son's severely bloodied face at gatherings of Los Angeles County officials. At the Board of Supervisors, the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission and sheriff’s community meetings, Perez displays the disturbing images of her son, Joseph Perez, with his battered face on T-shirts, printouts and pictures on her phone.

With these images in hand, Perez continues to call attention to a July night nearly five years ago, when her son was severely beaten by a group of at least five L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies. Perez alleges the beating took place just hours after she informed the department that her son lived with mental illness and needed psychiatric help.

“At the time, I thought they were there to help,” Perez said. “What I know today is totally different."

After the beating, a doctor closed up lacerations on Perez’s scalp and face with 17 staples and 19 sutures, medical records show. Deputies alleged Perez was resisting arrest, attacked them and that they too were injured in the scuffle, according to partially redacted Sheriff’s Department records. He was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting deputies, and spent roughly two years incarcerated in L.A. County jail.

Vanessa Perez goes through photos of her son Joseph after his encounter with sheriff’s deputies.

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Perez believes that her son was the victim of excessive force at the hands of deputies. The Sheriff’s Department has released some records explaining their actions that night, but more than a dozen pages are fully redacted and do not include any documentation of an internal investigation to determine if the deputies acted appropriately. With the help of a local civil rights attorney, Perez filed a lawsuit in January alleging her son was “violently confronted and unjustifiably detained” by the deputies. The complaint seeks unspecified damages.

Now, Perez’s case is at the center of a legal battle between the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission and the Sheriff’s Department. The commission plans to file a separate lawsuit seeking records relating to Perez and two other cases. The commission wants the full, unredacted use-of-force report and other records, including witness interviews, summaries, exhibits, body camera footage, text messages and photographs or video recordings for all three cases. But so far, the Sheriff’s Department has not supplied the information.

The Perez case shows how people living with severe mental illness can fall through the cracks in systems that are supposed to offer help, leading to criminalization, criminal justice reform advocates told LAist. It also demonstrates the difficulty many families face in seeking law enforcement accountability, especially if they don’t have an attorney. If the commission is successful in its demand for additional records, the Perez case could also have implications for accountability moving forward.

In an emailed statement, the Sheriff’s Department said it “remains committed to working in good faith to support oversight efforts while upholding the legal protections established to ensure the privacy and rights of all individuals involved.”

The department also said its asking a court to decide whether the commission’s interpretation of the law is accurate.

“Should the court agree with the [Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission], the materials will be disclosed,” the department said. “Without judicial guidance or legislative amendment, disclosing confidential peace officer records could expose the Department to serious legal consequences — including potential civil or criminal liability — and, most critically, could erode public trust."

Robert Bonner, outgoing chair of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, told LAist that without being able to review full reports like this, commissioners “cannot provide effective and meaningful oversight of the Sheriff’s Department.”

“The kind of oversight, by the way, that the public, the voters, clearly said they want,” Bonner added.

What happened the night of the beating 

Sheriff’s Department records obtained by LAist tell the partial narrative of an arrest attempt turned violent.

According to sheriff department records, at around 2 a.m. on July 27, 2020, two deputies arrived on scene in the neighborhood of East Valinda, near the City of Industry. They were responding to a call reporting a possible car burglary.

That’s where they allegedly found Joseph Perez tampering with a car and tried to detain him.

Deputies claimed Perez tried to run away. After they tried to detain him, Perez allegedly began kicking and punching one of the deputies. According to a Supervisor’s Use of Force report, the ensuing fight caused one of the deputies to “severely injure his leg.”

Ultimately, six deputies arrived on scene, with five delivering dozens of blows to Perez’s face, head and torso. Deputies alleged they commanded Perez to stop fighting several times.

Perez said he felt like the deputies ganged up on him unnecessarily.

According to the complaint filed by Perez’s attorney, deputies “put him face first on the ground and began to climb on his back.” The complaint further alleges that “at all times during this encounter... [Perez] believed that he was going to die.”

Vanessa Perez goes through video of her son Joseph after his encounter with sheriff’s deputies.

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Vanessa Perez said her son was left with facial scars, ongoing pain and has suffered seizures lasting up to two minutes since the incident.

Perez questions why the arrest happened this way, especially since she claims she called the Industry sheriff’s station, where Joseph was being held just two days earlier for being under the influence of methamphetamine. Perez alleges she informed the station that her son lives with a serious mental illness and needed to be hospitalized in a psychiatric facility.

But hours later, Joseph was released anyway.

“There’s no way that those officers did not know who my son was,” Perez said.

Michele Infante, a criminal justice reform advocate formerly with the group Dignity and Power Now, said that after her extensive review of the case, she believes the deputies used excessive force.

She called the deputies' actions “horrific.”

“Everything about this whole case is completely wrong,” said Infante, who now works as a private consultant and has presented the Perez case to the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission. “This case is not just about the Sheriff’s Department beating Joseph terribly the way that they did. It’s about mental health."

Serious mental illness falls through the cracks 

Vanessa Perez said Joseph, now 27, started to show signs of serious mental illness shortly after he was hit by a car when he was 12.

Before the accident, Perez said Joseph had plenty of friends and hung out at a skatepark near their home in West Covina.

After the accident, Perez said he became more and more isolated. Over the years, Perez said Joseph suffered multiple bouts of psychosis, forcing her to call for help from local mental health crisis teams. He was diagnosed with multiple serious mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, Perez said.

Once Joseph turned 18, Perez said, the Department of Child and Family Services said that, due to multiple disturbances in the home, Joseph could no longer stay with her and her two minor daughters.

Perez said she had no choice but to file a restraining order on Joseph if she wanted to keep her other two children with her.

“It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make... And Joseph ended up on the streets,” Perez told LAist.

She said Joseph, who was unable to care for himself, would come to her home and bang on the doors, asking to come inside.

“And it broke me. It broke me to pieces. Trying to explain to him, ‘you can’t be here,’” she said.

Perez remembers looking for Joseph on the streets every night, trying to make sure he had a meal.

Just two weeks prior to the beating by sheriff’s deputies, Perez said her son was placed in a psychiatric ward. Just days later, he was back on the streets and attempted to light himself on fire, she said.

“I would have gave anything just for them to help me put him in a home,” Perez said.

But instead, he was released without access to supportive services, only to be arrested and incarcerated after the July 2020 incident.

Last year, thanks to the county’s Office of Diversion and Reentry, Joseph was living in supportive housing and trying to get his life back together.

Last September, sitting next to his mom at Magic Johnson Park in Willowbrook, Joseph said he was working toward getting permanent housing, a job and a driver's license.

Vanessa and Joseph Perez.

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As for the incident in 2020, Joseph, a soft spoken man of slight build, said he didn’t think he was treated fairly and hopes the deputies who beat him will be reprimanded.

“Because this is beyond what they should do,” he said. “Basically they just dog piled me and got on top of me and started hitting me on top of my skull... I was bleeding."

'Not set up to help them' 

Criminal justice experts told LAist Perez’s case is indicative not only of the struggles vulnerable people living with mental illness face in getting the proper treatment, but also how difficult it is for families like his to pursue any recourse when they feel like law enforcement uses excessive force.

“People with significant mental health issues are both deeply vulnerable and also incapable, often, of responding to the commands of law enforcement,” said Eric Miller, a law professor at Loyola Law School. “And when they don’t, [law enforcement] then escalate the use of force into physical violence."

Miller also regularly visits the county’s carceral facilities as a member of the Sybil Brand Commission, which is tasked with monitoring jail conditions. He said he checked in on Joseph when he was incarcerated at the request of Perez’s mother.

“If they are treated in this brutal manner and want to gain some measure of justice, the system, especially the oversight system, is not set up to help them,” Miller said.

Oversight bodies, like the Office of Inspector General and Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, aren’t tasked with representing individuals. These oversight groups are typically addressing systemic issues like deputy gangs or jail conditions, Miller said.

Finding an attorney willing to represent someone in Joseph’s situation can prove very difficult, he added.

Joanna Schwartz, a professor of law at UCLA, said that in her research, it's often only through a lawsuit that evidence is truly tested to see who was at fault in cases like this.

“Our law enforcement agencies are pretty uniformly miserable at capturing and making publicly available data about what their officers do,” Schwartz, author of the book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, told LAist. “When there’s not a lawyer who has taken on the case and not a lawsuit that’s been filed, we have no idea how many people there are in his situation and in his mother’s situation."

But thanks to Perez’s persistence in getting her son’s story in front of officials, a local civil rights attorney has recently taken up Joseph’s case.

Vanessa Perez goes through documents related to the case of her son Joseph’s encounter with sheriff’s deputies.

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Jamon Hicks, a partner at Douglas Hicks Law and a current member of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, filed a complaint in January against the county alleging “serious and unreasonable force” at the hands of sheriff’s deputies.

“I’m really curious to know what it is that the police are saying he did to warrant that kind of force being used to where he looks like that,” Hicks said. “It is incredibly painful to look at [the photos of Joseph] and to wonder what could possibly have happened to justify that level of force.”

Hicks added that he will first have to convince a judge to allow the lawsuit to move forward since filing deadlines were missed years ago.

Why the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission plans to sue 

By way of an official subpoena filed in March, the the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission demanded the Sheriff’s Department produce the full, unredacted use-of-force report package, including any body cam footage, witness interviews and text messages related to the Perez case.

The commission has also demanded records in two other incidents.

In the case of Emmett Brock, a teacher who was beaten by a sheriff’s deputy in a 7-Eleven parking lot, the commission is also seeking use-of-force reports, body-worn camera and bystander footage as well as witness statements. According to the subpoena, the deputy pleaded guilty in federal court to using unconstitutional force against Brock during the 2023 incident.

The commission is also seeking investigative reports and witness interviews in the case of Andres Guardado, a 23-year-old killed by a deputy in June 2020.

But so far, the commission has been unsuccessful in getting the additional records it requested.

In an emailed statement, Max Huntsman, L.A. County’s Inspector General who is tasked with promoting transparency and constitutional policing within the Sheriff’s Department, said the department's custodian of records failed to appear in response to the commission’s subpoena, “which mirrored conduct from the Villanueva administration and was deeply troubling as such a failure to appear is not justified by the assertion of privileges as to some items subpoenaed.”

Huntsman added that the Sheriff’s Department “has always been strongly resistant to oversight.”

“I do not think it is likely that will change any time soon,” Huntsman said.

Commission chair is dismissed 

Amid the commission’s efforts to enforce the subpoenas, the outgoing chair, Bonner, told his colleagues at their last meeting that Supervisor Kathryn Barger dismissed him “without so much as a phone call.”

In a letter dated April 18, County Executive Officer Edward Yen stated that Bonner’s term had expired.

“If you are interested in being considered for reappointment to the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, please submit your resume within one week...” the letter states.

In an emailed statement, Barger said she appreciated Bonner’s service and contributions to the commission.

“I'm committed to broadening the diversity of voices and expertise represented on the Commission and believe it is important to provide others with the opportunity to serve," she said. "My decision reflects my desire to continue cultivating public trust in the oversight process by introducing new perspectives that support the Commission’s vital work."

At its most recent meeting, the commission said it still plans to take legal action demanding that the Sheriff’s Department supply in closed session the records it requested in the three cases.

“There are photos taken shortly after the arrest by Sheriff’s Department deputies that show that he was pretty severely beaten in the face,” Bonner, a retired U.S. District Court judge, told LAist in April. “The photos, by the way, are quite bloody. And his mother, who has appeared before us, has asked the commission a number of times — as the body that’s been given oversight over the Sheriff’s Department — to find out why there was no internal investigation."

The commission, Bonner said, thinks it can receive and review the confidential reports in closed session.

“The Office of the County Counsel has fully supported the COC, as an advisory body to the Board, in its efforts to seek the information it needs to play a powerful oversight role on behalf of L.A. County citizens,” L.A. County Counsel said in a statement. “This includes assisting with a declaratory relief action that will hopefully bring judicial clarity to the commission's ability to obtain the information it seeks and also drafting an ordinance to allow the COC to meet in closed session."

Bonner said he believes the commission will eventually get the Perez records.

L.A. County residents, he said, gave the commission this oversight power when voters overwhelmingly passed Measure R in 2020, empowering the body with the authority to directly subpoena the department.

“This power is meaningless unless we can actually get access and review things like use of force reports and death review reports,” Bonner said.

During public comment at the oversight commission’s May 20 meeting, Vanessa Perez thanked commissioners for trying to move forward with the subpoenas.

“The people voted for this commission to have subpoena power so it could get to the bottom of cases like Joseph[‘s] and make sure deputies are held accountable for their actions,” Perez said. “I encourage you all to do whatever is necessary to get this information.”

In April 2023, the FBI discovered that Rafael Silva, an officer with the Delano Police Department in California’s Central Valley, had made violent threats against transgender people on TikTok.

Under a pseudonym, Silva posted several comments that the FBI found imminently dangerous. One read, “You ain’t safe. We finna change your pronouns soon. Was/were.” Another said that Silva’s “AR will track y’all down.” And yet another read, “The only power you’ll see is the one from a barrel and a 9mm,” according to investigative documents.

Silva is one of the 148 California law enforcement officers who engaged in explicitly biased conduct between 2014 and 2024, according to an investigation by The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program. Records show the officers used racist, sexist and homophobic slurs; mocked transgender people; made violent comments about Black people; and demeaned members of the public, co-workers and incarcerated people, records show.

Yet only about 12% were fired because of their conduct. Silva was not one of them. After leaving Delano, he went on to work for police departments in Avenal and Wasco.

The news organizations reviewed thousands of pages of internal affairs investigations, disciplinary records and court filings obtained from nearly 500 law enforcement and oversight agencies. The records show that some officers accused of overtly biased behavior often faced limited consequences, such as a letter of reprimand or training.

The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, determines whether to decertify officers, barring them from working in law enforcement in the state. However, the responsibility to investigate misconduct and impose discipline generally falls to individual agencies and local oversight boards, according to POST.

An investigation of California law enforcement records found officers accused of racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ conduct often remained employed.

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Despite that system, more than 40% of officers identified by the news organizations still work in California law enforcement, excluding corrections officers.

Silva did not respond to requests for comment. The Delano Police Department confirmed that Silva worked there until 2023, but declined further comment.

Attorneys, law enforcement officials and academics said the behavior erodes public trust, raises questions about officers’ credibility in court and undermines efforts to recruit and retain diverse police forces.

Law enforcement officers stand guard during a protest on June 14, 2025, in Los Angeles. 

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Law enforcement officers should be held to a high standard, said Vida Johnson, a Georgetown University law professor who has testified before Congress on white supremacy and policing.

Johnson said people who express explicit bias have no place in law enforcement.

“With such an important job, if someone is exhibiting any type of bias against a member of their community, I just don’t think they should have that job,” she said.

How biased conduct can undermine public trust and the courts

When officers exhibit explicit bias, it erodes trust between law enforcement and the communities they are sworn to protect.

“It undermines our cohesion as a country when you have different perceptions of who our institutions work on behalf of,” Johnson said.

Experts said bias against protected groups — including Black people, LGBTQ people and immigrants — sends a clear message to those communities: We are not here to serve you.

A billboard put up by the Orange County District Attorney’s office that reads, “crime doesn’t pay in Orange County. If you steal, we prosecute,” stands on the southbound 710 Freeway near Del Amo Boulevard in Long Beach, California, on March 11, 2024.

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In a 2022 case, Orange County District Attorney’s Office investigator Eric Franke called a security guard who had asked him to leave a building an “angry Black lady.” In a separate incident, he remarked that Mexican people drink excessively. He received a letter of reprimand and still works for the DA’s office.

In separate cases in 2015 and 2018, Los Angeles Police Officer Armando Magana and San Diego Police Officer Alan Dyemartin ridiculed people for not speaking English. Both received letters of reprimand and kept their jobs.

The LAPD declined to comment on the incident for this story. Spokespersons for the Orange County DA’s office and the San Diego Police Department said the agencies take prejudiced behavior seriously and noted that both employees were disciplined. Franke did not comment. Magana declined to comment, and Dyemartin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The distrust created by explicitly biased behavior can have real-world consequences, experts said.

When people believe police are prejudiced against them, they are less likely to call 911 or seek help from law enforcement, according to Stefan Vogler, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Vogler and other experts refer to this as the “overpolicing, underprotection paradox,” a phenomenon they say is common in communities of color and LGBTQ communities.

“They’re not getting the services that they’re promised by the state,” Vogler said.

Explicit bias can also undermine trust in the courtroom.

“You become concerned about using their testimony without corroboration,” said Richard Drooyan, former Los Angeles police commissioner. Drooyan recalled the O.J. Simpson case, when defense attorneys used audio recordings and witnesses to discredit an officer who had been a key witness.

Under the Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, defense attorneys have a right to any information that impacts the credibility of officers who are called to testify.

For justice to be served, it’s imperative that information affecting an officer’s credibility makes its way before the court, said Joseph Trigilio, a Loyola Marymount University law professor and executive director of the Loyola Project for the Innocent.

“A fact finder should look at all that and consider it,” he said. “A jury should hear all of that and ask that question.”

Reporters requested lists of officers whose records must be disclosed to the defense if they’re called to testify, commonly called Brady lists, from every district attorney’s office in counties where the investigation found cases of biased behavior. One office — the Madera County District Attorney’s Office — said it does not maintain such a list. Several district attorneys said they could not locate Brady material on the officers in question, while most declined to say whether the officers appeared on their lists.

Bias extended beyond the public to incarcerated people and fellow officers

The investigation also revealed dozens of instances of biased behavior against Black people, including 23 officers who were disciplined for using the n-word.

“In our profession, there’s no room for us to be able to do that,” said Sheryl Victorian, the chief of police in Waco, Texas, who advocates for strong relationships between police and the communities they serve.

The cases include a number of officers who made comments or shared images mocking George Floyd in the wake of his murder by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Two weeks after Floyd’s death, an officer shared a meme congratulating Floyd on being “2 weeks drug free.” Another shared a photo of Floyd being held on his stomach with a photoshopped image of a naked man sitting on him.

Two children view a mural of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Friday, as a Hennepin County court weighed the sentence to impose on former police officer Derek Chauvin. 

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Ben Grunwald, a law professor at Duke University, said negative bias is especially troubling because of the vast power given to police officers. He described officers as “street-level bureaucrats” with the capacity to use force, arrest people and put them in jail.

“The idea that these decisions that are really high stakes might be influenced by things like racism, sexism, homophobia — those should raise really serious concerns for everyone,” he said.

More than half of the 61 correctional officers identified by the investigation were still employed at the end of 2024, according to state controller data. CDCR, which employs more law enforcement officers than any other state agency, would not confirm whether they remain employed today.

In two cases at Pelican Bay State Prison, officers made casual comments about killing or shooting at Black people, and both received reprimands. At the California Men’s Colony, an officer taunted a transgender inmate to put lipstick on before going out to the yard, and the officer’s salary was temporarily reduced.

In response to questions from The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, a CDCR spokesperson said the agency takes corrective and disciplinary action when appropriate and that it has “implemented new staff misconduct regulations, designed with the goals of eliminating bias, increasing transparency and improving staff accountability.”

Correctional officers wield immense power over incarcerated people, who depend on them for their basic needs and access to programs that can help them successfully reenter society, said James King, program director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a criminal justice reform organization.

“It becomes much deeper than mere words because there’s so much power and authority behind those words,” King said.

Witnessing prejudiced behavior, even when it happens between officers, undermines rehabilitation, he said.

James King stands for a portrait outside the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, on June 9, 2026. King, who is formerly incarcerated, is now Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center, where he oversees and works on legislation that provides opportunity for communities that have historically been left out of policy considerations. 

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“If we are really committed to creating a safer world for all of us, then it starts with how we treat people, even as they are incarcerated and preparing to return to society,” he said.

Most of the cases we analyzed — 79% — involved comments or actions between police officers and other members of the criminal justice system, including fellow officers, court clerks, civilian employees and even a judge while court was in session.

In the case files, officers described how explicit bias in the workplace impacted them.

In the Southern California city of Orange, a Black officer reported applying to a different law enforcement agency due to Orange Police Sgt. Darrin Hall’s use of racist jokes and homophobic slurs in the workplace between 2020 and 2022. Hall received a letter stating that he would be demoted and retired later that month.

The Orange Police Department declined to comment on the incident, as it was a personnel matter.

A Los Angeles police officer wears an AXON body camera.

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Drooyan, the former L.A. police commissioner, said prejudiced behavior can create difficult working relationships between officers, leading to a morale problem, and even physical danger in high-risk or volatile environments.

“When they get into a tough situation, if they can’t trust each other, I think it becomes problematic,” he said.

Grunwald said fraught relations among law enforcement officers pose an existential problem as law enforcement leaders are trying to diversify their ranks.

“At a time when police departments are really struggling to retain good officers, and especially at a time when [departments] are struggling to attain officers of color, you’d think that this could be an important area of policy,” he said.

Uneven discipline allowed many officers to remain on the job

Despite the seriousness of explicitly biased behavior — and the fact that it can get an officer decertified — discipline varied across the 148 officers in the investigation.

Of these officers, 39% were demoted, suspended or had their pay reduced. About 20% received a letter of reprimand or were ordered to undergo training — discipline that may not permanently remain in their personnel files.

Experts said the cases uncovered by the investigation likely represent only a fraction of incidents involving explicit bias.

“We have every reason to believe that most of these types of incidents go unreported,” Johnson, the Georgetown law professor, said. “The Blue Wall of Silence. The fact that people are fearful of police. Making a police complaint isn’t easy.”

Even with those barriers, people filed more than 19,600 complaints alleging prejudiced behavior by California law enforcement officers between 2016 and 2024, according to data submitted to the state. Agencies sustained just 349 of those complaints. The figures do not include racially biased traffic stops.

Reporters were only able to examine cases that fell within a narrow band of misconduct dictated by California’s public records laws.

King said officers like Silva, the Delano police officer who threatened to shoot and kill transgender people, are not simply just “a few bad apples.”

“Law enforcement [officers] develop deep-seated cultures that you cannot train away, you cannot address through the hiring process or through the selection process,” he said.

Swift, appropriate action — via verbal reprimand, retraining or more severe discipline — is key to creating a culture of service to the community, according to Victorian, the Waco police chief.

“If nobody actually addresses the behavior when it occurs, then they continue to talk that way, and that behavior becomes acceptable,” she said.

Some officers appealed discipline and succeeded in having penalties reduced at least 38 times. Others resigned before agencies completed disciplinary proceedings.

Silva was allowed to resign rather than be terminated. The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training declined to decertify him.

The city of Wasco confirmed that Silva was still one of its police officers as of June 24, 2026.

Nicole Nguyen of Stanford’s Big Local News and Marquis Mahone-Chambers, Katey Rusch, Elizabeth Santos and Julian Wray of UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program contributed to this story. A grant from the Google News Initiative supported the project.

About the data analysis

The Police Records Access Project obtains records from law enforcement and oversight agencies across California involving cases in which agencies determined that officers violated certain policies, including policies prohibiting prejudice against members of protected groups. Project staff compile those files and use algorithms to identify cases in which agencies found policy violations. Staff then review the records to confirm that an agency sustained the allegation.

Reporters from The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program searched the text of the files and AI-generated summaries of misconduct cases using slurs and terms such as “racist” and “prejudice” to identify cases for further review. Reporters consulted academics, attorneys and law enforcement officials to develop a definition of explicit bias. Three journalists analyzed the cases to determine whether officers exhibited explicit bias against members of a protected group. Experts also reviewed a subset of cases.

To determine whether officers challenged discipline or sought to seal misconduct records, reporters searched local courts for civil lawsuits. Staff also obtained certification and employment records from POST and the state controller’s office to determine whether officers remained employed in law enforcement, including those working for CDCR.

Reporters reached out to district attorneys in the counties where we identified officers who were disciplined for biased conduct to determine if they were on Brady lists. While a few offices confirmed that the officers did not appear in their Brady materials, most said those records are exempt from public disclosure and declined to provide the information.

Los Angeles city property owners voted down a fee increase that sought to address a massive backlog of streetlight repairs.

The L.A. city clerk certified the results Wednesday: Just under 80% of the weighted votes cast rejected the idea.

The city sent ballots to owners of more than 580,000 public, commercial and private parcels in April. They were asked if they would pay more in a yearly assessment to boost the city’s streetlight budget, which has essentially been frozen since the 1990s.

Currently, it takes about one year to repair streetlights from the time the issue is reported.

In a joint statement, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and other leaders said they remain committed to improving the city’s streetlighting network.

“Every Angeleno deserves to feel safe walking their dogs, returning home from work and parking their cars at night, and the city is committed to delivering the reliable street lighting that makes that a reality,” the statement said. It was signed by Bass, L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Katy Yaroslavsky.

The background

Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property near streetlights pay on their county property tax bill.

The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights.

According to a report from the city, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the needs of the city’s streetlights in the upcoming fiscal year is nearly $112 million. That's well over double the amount the city will collect during that time period now that property owners rejected the fee increase.

Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights. This year’s vote was the first attempt to increase the fees.

What happens now?

Nothing changes, really.

According to the Bureau of Street Lighting’s website, the city “will operate within its parameters, including funding … in other words, status quo.”

Had property owners voted in favor of the higher assessment, the extra funds would have been used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and to procure solar streetlights, according to Miguel Sangalang, the head of the Bureau of Street Lighting.

In previous interviews with LAist, Sangalang said that with a larger budget, the timeline to repair simple fixes could be brought down to a week.

What else is the city doing to turn the lights back on?

In March, Mayor Bass announced an initiative to convert 60,000 streetlights to solar power over the next two years. The Mayor’s Office has said the partnership with LADWP will not have an impact on the city’s general fund.

Then in May, she said hundreds of solar streetlights had already been installed as part of the initiative near city parks, including those hosting World Cup watch parties.

City Council members have also used discretionary dollars to convert lights to solar technology, which are less vulnerable to theft, and also to fund overtime for repair teams.