Investigators Seeking To Expose Deputy Gangs Want Photos Of Tattoos. LA Sheriff's Deputies Union Says That's Unconstitutional

Last week, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna ordered his officers to submit interviews to Inspector General Max Huntsman in an ongoing investigation into alleged deputy gangs. Huntsman is requiring 35 deputies to answer questions about gang associations among deputies in the LA County Sheriff's Department, and to show photos of their tattoos to see if they're related to the two gangs.

The union representing the deputies is pushing back, and filed a lawsuit against the Inspector General and the department over this mandate.

Huntsman order stems from allegations by deputies who have worked in the Compton and East Los Angeles stations that some officers there have matching tattoos, and belong to two cliques: the Executioners and the Bandidos, each with a distinctive tattoo.

Back in March, the Civilian Oversight Commission (COC) issued a report that said gangs have existed in the LASD for over 50 years. Then, in April, a special counsel appointed by the COC released a scathing report on deputy gangs inside the department, calling them a "cancer" and providing more than two dozen recommendations for how to help root out gangs at LASD.

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So far, the COC says Sheriff Luna has not implemented any of those recommendations. But in a departure from his predecessor, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, Luna said he supports the investigation and will cooperate with the requests from the inspector general’s office.

Officers' rights and limitations

Luna, joining LAist’s public affairs show AirTalk, which airs on 89.3 FM, says that this serious issue cannot be addressed without support from the union, and that the department is open to bargaining on the terms of the investigation.

Sean Kennedy, chair of the COC, says this is a good step. There has not yet been a credible investigation of the issue, he says, as Villanueva had ordered many deputies not to comply with subpoenas from the COC.

Villanueva had argued that the deputies’ right to belong to a clique was protected by the First Amendment, as long as it remained non-violent. But Kennedy differentiates between private citizens, who can freely associate with any group, even those with extreme ideologies, and public servants.

“When you become a public employee with a law enforcement mission, you have to submit to a different standard in order for the department to meet its mission,” Kennedy says.

But Will Aitchison, lead negotiator for the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS), says that law enforcement officers are not relegated to a watered-down version of their constitutional rights: the Supreme Court reaffirmed their rights to free speech and to privacy.

That’s why Aitchison says that although an investigation should take place, Inspector General Huntsman’s methods are the problem. According to Aitchison, the COC’s definition of a gang would apply to any group of deputies that meets off duty and is discriminatory on the basis of race or gender. But Aitchison says this is so broad that it would include the women’s volleyball team at the Compton station.

Furthermore, Aitchison says the Inspector General has not met the requirements that would allow him to mandate that deputies reveal non-visible tattoos — which, he says, are constitutionally protected.

Personal freedoms, public responsibilities

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount Law School, says that public employees do have constitutional rights, but that they are in fact more limited than those of private citizens — particularly when they intersect with their official duties.

“Even something that somebody says or does on their off hours, which might be entirely protected for other members of the public, becomes troublesome when they're connected to the exercise of a police officer or sheriff's duties on the job,” Levitt says.

So the court will have to look at whether the deputies’ tattoos, visible or not, interfere with their ability to do their jobs or with public perception of that ability. Levitt, who is also a former deputy attorney general with the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, says it will also be important to have a procedure in place for determining the connection between a deputy’s tattoo and the ideologies that it communicates.

“We want to make sure that law enforcement officials who are authorized to carry weapons and to actually use force in the in the name of the state are carrying out those responsibilities on all of our behalves without undue bias,” Levitt says.

Kennedy says the Executioners are alleged to exclude women and African Americans — and biases like this can have serious consequences.

Deputies frequently testify in trials, Kennedy says, and accused people should know whether those testifying against them have tattoos that promote white supremacy or valorize violence. That way they can seek to understand whether those ideologies are affecting the deputy’s judgment or causing a conflict of interest.

“The concern that I have is that it's not just deputies who have rights,” Kennedy says. “Rights are balanced against other people's rights.”

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