The Brief

The primary watchdog of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sharply criticized a new policy that bans deputy gangs, saying it's unlikely to pierce the agency’s code of silence around the groups.

Independent research and department leader say the groups, whose members wear matching tattoos and have engaged in misconduct ranging from excessive use of force to intimidation of fellow deputies, have been around for decades.

“The real problem in the Sheriff’s Department is this 50-year code of silence,” Inspector General Max Huntsman told LAist. “These groups are secretive. It's not written down on paper anywhere. Nobody ever admits it under oath.”

Others, including some members of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, had mixed opinions about the policy.

Commission Vice Chair Hans Johnson said it “represents significant progress,” but he added that the department still has a long way to go to root out members of deputy gangs.

The policy

Sheriff Robert Luna released the new policy last week. It prohibits deputies from being in a gang or hate group and requires them to cooperate with investigations into such groups. Violation of the policy could result in termination.

The policy also requires that any allegations of deputy gang membership be referred to the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, which is responsible for certifying peace officers in California. POST also has the power to revoke certification if someone is found to have been involved in a deputy gang.

The policy comes three years after California enacted a law requiring police agencies to have such bans. The delay was largely the result of protracted negotiations with the Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, or ALADS, the labor union that represents deputy sheriffs.

Huntsman said another reason he was pessimistic about the new policy is that the department has a poor record of investigating deputy gangs, in part because members of deputy gangs and people sympathetic to them hold high ranks.

“The Sheriff’s Department as a whole, at the top level, has adjusted its discipline system to make sure it doesn’t run afoul of these groups,” Huntsman said. “That is corruption at the deepest level.”

Luna denied this, saying he already had disciplined two deputies for deputy gang involvement. The sheriff, who was elected in 2022 on a promise to eradicate the department of deputy gangs, hailed his new policy as “a big step forward” to changing the culture of the department.

In an interview with LAist, he also said another investigation is underway, but would not disclose what station it involved.

“I do not turn a blind eye to any misbehavior,” he said. “Obviously, it needs to be investigated.”

As for a code of silence, Luna said “bring me the facts and evidence — because I am not going to tolerate that.”

In an email to its members, ALADS said the new policy “will ensure that deputies are afforded their rights under the law and will require the Department to show that an employee knowingly engaged in misconduct with members of an established law enforcement gang.”

The union also said its willingness to negotiate over the issue “should not in any way be misconstrued as an acknowledgement that any group on the Sheriff’s Department meets the definition of any type of 'gang.'”

The gangs

A 2021 Loyola Law School report found 18 known deputy gangs that have existed at the department over the years. L.A. County has paid out about $55 million in settlements in cases in which sheriff’s deputies have been alleged to belong to a deputy gang, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Johnson, the civilian commission vice chair, said the new policy can only go so far.

“This policy, while laudable and long overdue, is not sufficient to extricate deputy gangs from the ranks of sheriff’s deputies,” he said.

Johnson pointed to a 2023 commission report on deputy gangs that made 24 recommendations. He said only six of them had been implemented, including one to assign two captains to increase supervision and mentoring of deputies at high activity stations where deputy cliques tend to be prevalent.

Commission member Patti Giggans sounded a more positive note on the new policy, saying she hoped it would lead to less excessive force and intimidation against residents in areas where the gangs exist.

“I am very pleased with the policy,” said Giggans, adding the panel had been urging such a move for eight years.

Giggans noted that Luna has only been in the top job for two years, and that he walked into a department in crisis where his predecessor Alex Villanueva downplayed the problem of deputy gangs. She said change will take time.

“You want to change an organization, you have to engage your workforce and you have to go by the rules of the system,” she said.

Vincent Miller represents a group of deputies who say they suffered physical assaults and intimidation by members of the Banditos gang at the East L.A. Station. The group has sued L.A. County and the Sheriff’s Department.

Miller echoed Huntsman’s concerns about the new policy.

“On the surface, it looks good. But will it get enforced?” Miller said.

He also represents deputies who alleged they have suffered from retaliation from the department for reporting on deputy gangs.

“As long as the department is aggressively retaliating against whistleblowers and anybody who reports misconduct within the department, it's impossible for that policy to have any effectiveness,” Miller said.

The department has denied the allegations in Miller’s lawsuit.

Huntsman, who lamented that he’d been excluded from the process of developing the new policy, said the department has “never had the will to fix itself.”

“There has to be external influence in order to actually change its behavior,” he said.

In a statement, the Sheriff’s Department said it had provided a draft copy of the policy “in recent months.”

The ongoing investigation

That kind of outside influence may be coming soon. For three years, the California Department of Justice has been conducting a wide-ranging investigation into an alleged pattern and practice of excessive use of force and civil rights violations at the Sheriff’s Department.

According to multiple sources, the state DOJ is currently negotiating a consent decree that would legally mandate reform at the department.

Twenty years ago, a Los Angeles DJ put out an album that asked a question nobody had quite answered yet: Could the turntable be a lead instrument?

Not just a tool, but the thing carrying the whole record?

Lucas McFadden, also known as Cut Chemist, said “yes.”

His debut solo album, The Audience’s Listening, dropped in 2006 after years of work, sample clearances and a clean break from the group that made him famous. He was a founding member of Jurassic 5, and before that, Ozomatli.

Two decades later, he's been revisiting that record in a series called Expert of None. It’s an intimate show at Only the Wild Ones in Venice, where he traces the records that shaped him right up to this album. The final installment of the series is scheduled for August 2.

“It's a record that I periodically revisit throughout my life just to kind of see where I've been and to know where I need to go next,” McFadden said. “I always like to do something different from what I've done before. This is the year where I really go back and trace the steps of the building blocks that made that record and who I was as an artist leading up to that.”

The art of mixing

Few fans know the behind-the-scenes work it takes for DJs and producers to track down sounds and then get the permission to use them. McFadden said finding and presenting music are two very different processes.

“I feel like a matchmaker, so to speak, because no one else would take things which are from completely opposite ends of the globe and put them together in the same composition,” McFadden said. “Then, you have to track down the artist to ask their permission. It's very interesting and rewarding when they say yes.”

McFadden walked away from the success of Jurassic 5 to devote his time to a solo career. He said the change gave him increased freedom but also increased pressure.

“It was very scary to leave something so successful and really at its peak to do something where I was responsible for both the failures and the successes on my own,” McFadden said. “I couldn't share that blame with anybody. It was all on me. So, I remember putting a lot of pressure on myself, because I was the one in the spotlight. Then the successes were twice as sweet in that regard as well.”

The result was his debut, The Audience’s Listening, which McFadden says is very much an L.A. record.

“I was raised on L.A. radio,” McFadden said.  "Being from here and being in groups like Ozomatli and Jurassic 5, I feel like those two groups couldn't exist anywhere else. They are such a byproduct of the city, coming from places like The Good Life in South Central. L.A. is such a melting pot, and I feel like my life in music is the same reflection of that as well.”

Revisiting the past to create the present

McFadden has been tracing the records that led to The Audience’s Listening during his "Expert of None" events at Only the Wild Ones in Venice. The immersive listening residency explores musical discovery and crate digging culture, revealing the records and influences that shaped the album.

“It's been incredible,” McFadden said. “There's so many things about my life that I didn't realize until I sat down and thought about them in the context of discovering music.”

McFadden says his younger self would be very pleased with the legacy of The Audience’s Listening.

“People still regard it as an album that’s important to them for the DJ culture,” McFadden said. “When it came out in the mid-2000s, DJs were kind of fading away, at least turntablists were. Another type of DJ was emerging, which was a laptop DJ. That opened the door for a lot of people that in some cases probably shouldn't be DJs, but wouldn't if this technology didn't exist. So, it was a very confusing time to put out a DJ turntablist record. I feel like I did well, and after 20 years of thinking about it and living in that world, I'm happy where it stands.”

Tickets for Cut Chemist’s Aug. 2 event at Only the Wild Ones are currently sold out, but fans can join a waiting list.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge ruled Monday that there is enough evidence to put singer D4vd on trial in the killing and dismemberment of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez after, authorities said, she had threatened to expose their relationship and crater his career.

Los Angeles Judge Charlaine Olmedo decided the evidence prosecutors presented at a preliminary hearing that spanned five days provided probable cause for a trial on charges of murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14 and unlawful mutilation of human remains.

“The people have met their burden on all counts,” Olmedo said. She ordered that Burke continue to be held without bail.

D4vd, the 21-year-old singer born David Burke whose career was steeply rising before the allegations emerged, has pleaded not guilty. He showed no emotion when the judge issued her ruling. Defense lawyers declined to comment outside court after the ruling.

Olmedo emphasized that the probable cause standard for a preliminary hearing like this is much lower than the threshold at trial. However, prosecutors asserted the evidence was overwhelming.

“Based on the mountains of evidence presented,” Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman said, “all of the allegations have been proved way beyond the standard required.”

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said outside court that prosecutors are still weighing whether to seek the death penalty. Burke is to be arraigned Aug. 31.

Prosecutors on Monday wrapped up their case by giving a moment-by-moment account of Rivas Hernandez’s last night, showing that after a stream of text messages with Burke, her phone went permanently silent when she arrived at his home.

As she neared his Hollywood home shortly after 10 a.m. on April 23, 2025, in an Uber he had sent to pick her up, she sent her final text: “girly pop i’m almost there open ur door if ur home.”

Prosecutors allege Burke stabbed her to death when she came through the door.

The night before, the two argued via text about his relationship with a woman. She sent him an angry and profane text saying she will tell her dad so many lies about him and “i will end ur career and ur life.”

Prosecutors said that Burke met Rivas Hernandez when she was 11, began sexually abusing her when she was 13 and he was 18, stabbed her to death when she threatened to report him and ruin his career, and cut up her body in his garage with chain saws.

Prosecutors said they have records showing Burke ordered chain saws and wading pools that he used to dismember her body in his garage, and that her DNA was found there on blood stains discovered when police served a search warrant.

They said he then drove around for weeks and even months with the body in the trunk. Her decomposing body was found in the Tesla registered to Burke that was towed from the Hollywood Hills in September, a little more than four months later.

Prosecutors said the car was parked around the corner from his house, and surveillance video will show he was the last person to drive it.

Defense argues there’s insufficient evidence for murder

After the final witness on Monday, the defense argued that the evidence was insufficient and the murder charge should be dismissed.

“There’s no evidence that Mr. Burke harbored a deliberate intent to kill Miss Hernandez,” said Burke’s attorney, Marilyn Bednarski.

She said the communications between Burke and Rivas Hernandez showed “no threat, no evidence of a history of violence” and that he had “the opposite of homicidal malice” toward her.

She argued that a medical examiner ruling that her death was a homicide from two puncture wounds was too vague and inconclusive to be evidence of murder. The defense did not directly give an alternative theory on how she died and isn’t required to.

The defense showed several other texts from Rivas Hernandez threatening him about their relationship, and saying she would go to Burke’s mother, talk to his friends and “leak” information about them.

Under questioning from defense attorney Blair Berk, Farrell said he saw no indication that she ever threatened to go to police or pursue any legal action against him.

The defense also established that she had asked seven times to come to see him in the days before her death, and he reluctantly agreed only after she demanded it, and that she had threatened to kill Burke and to mutilate him.

The defense argued that all of the malice had come from her.

Silverman told the judge that “the defense tried numerous times throughout these proceedings to dirty up the victim” despite her being a child.

The detective also said under questioning from Berk that the parents of both Burke and Rivas Hernandez knew about their relationship, that he had attended church with members of her family and that her parents had given their consent for her to go to London with him for a week.

Prosecution alleges D4vd immediately began covering up the killing

After her phone went silent, Burke sent her several other messages that night asking where she was, and expressing concern. Prosecutors allege those messages were sent as cover after he had killed her.

Prosecutors allege Burke dismembered the body in his garage. A police analyst testified earlier in the hearing that samples pulled from apparent blood stains there matched her DNA.

Her body was found in a Tesla registered to him nearly five months later.

Detective documents sexual abuse

In earlier testimony, Farrell recounted dozens of sexually explicit photos of Burke and Rivas Hernandez and years of text messages that described the same things, along with conversations that indicated she had gotten an abortion in 2024 at 13 after he got her pregnant.

Farrell described the photos that could not be shown in court, material so graphic that it left Rivas Hernandez’s mother in tears and prompted both parents to leave the courtroom on Friday. They were back in court Monday.

D4vd’s career was reaching new heights at time of killing

D4vd (pronounced “David”) became an online musical phenomenon as a teen with a blend of indie rock, R&B and lo-fi pop. He had huge followings on TikTok, Soundcloud and Spotify, where his top songs, including his 2022 breakthrough “Romantic Homicide,” have more than a billion plays.

In 2024 he played the Coachella music festival and released his first full-length album, “Withered,” two days after authorities say Rivas Hernandez was killed.