Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva speaks during a news conference on April 26, 2022, where he disputed allegations that he orchestrated a cover-up of an incident where a deputy knelt on a handcuffed inmate’s head last year.
In popular discussion on the left, the police reform debate has unfortunately settled into two camps: the abolitionists who supposedly want to entirely defund these agencies, and centrists and moderates who want to give them more money to fight crime (as President Biden recently proposed).
It must be admitted that this characterization of the pro-reform camp is partly a straw man. Centrists and mainstream media pay overwhelming attention to the most extreme proposals to abolish police and prisons, so they fail to grapple with the much more popular, plausible, and commonsense idea of reducing bloated police budgets (such as by cracking down on overtime scams) and plowing the savings into social services that can prevent both police shootings and crime.
In part because of this dynamic of arguing only at the extremes, the debate has obscured the most urgent reason to reform the police: the tendency for many police departments to leverage their power as armed agents of the state to interfere in politics. If America is to be a democracy worthy of the name, this simply cannot be tolerated.
Consider the case of Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva, first elected in 2018 on a progressive platform as the first Democrat to serve in that position in a century. As this 15-part investigative series by Cerise Castle of Knock LA shows in great detail, the LASD has been infested with literal criminal gangs for decades—at least 18 of them as of 2021. They’ve got matching tattoos, are notorious for excessive use of force, have allegedly killed at least 19 people, and the resulting lawsuits have cost Los Angeles County roughly $55 million. Eight non-gang deputies who said they were beaten and strangled by members of the “Banditos” gang sued the department in 2019.
A civilian commission was formed in 2017 to oversee the department, and Villanueva has steadfastly refused to cooperate, including ignoring a subpoena in 2021. In March this year, the commission finally opened an “full-scale” investigation into the gang problem, which the sheriff called an attempt at “finding Bigfoot.” Instead, he has used his own LASD investigative unit against critics like L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman. “He’s only targeting political enemies,” District Attorney George Gascón told the Los Angeles Times, explaining why he refused to cooperate with the unit.
Most recently, Villanueva’s “investigators” raided the home of L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, another prominent critic. Sheriff’s deputies simultaneously raided the home of the chair of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, Patti Giggans, along with the offices of Giggans’s nonprofit organization Peace Over Violence, and L.A. Metro, which Villanueva has been sparring with over gaining full control of security on city buses and trains. This is all allegedly part of a single investigation that happens to comprise multiple Villanueva critics.
Wouldn’t you know it, the judge who signed the warrant has a long-standing relationship with one of Villanueva’s investigators, who once tried to help the judge escape a battery charge by giving the victim’s arrest report to his attorneys. “This morning’s storming of my home by deputies with bulletproof vests & tactical gear was an effort to harass, intimidate & retaliate against a public figure who has been an outspoken critic of Alex Villanueva,” Kuehl wrote in a tweet.
Sheriffs in particular are key to this ongoing conspiracy against the American republic.
Los Angeles has a long, sordid history of cops going after their critics. In 1961, when Sam Yorty was elected mayor after a campaign in which he’d occasionally criticized the LAPD, the new mayor was reportedly visited by LAPD Chief William Parker, who showed Yorty the evidence the department had collected on him over the past 25 years when it had Yorty, among many other mainstream pols, under secret surveillance. Yorty immediately became the deparment’s leading defender.
Even more remarkably, until the Christopher Commission released its report on the Rodney King uprising and the LAPD in 1993, Los Angeles police chiefs routinely issued endorsements in mayoral and city council races, though the mayor and council were their employers. A 1992 survey in the LA Weekly found that Los Angeles was the only one of the nation’s 20 largest cities where this practice was permitted. In this context, Villanueva’s abuses are just one more entry in the long history of L.A.’s cop-ocracy.
Alternatively, you could consider the case of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was elected on a moderate reform platform. The local police department reacted with snarling outrage to his attempts to impose accountability, engaging in a quiet work slowdown in a clear attempt at inciting a “law and order” moral panic. For instance, when Boudin busted a burglary ring, the police refused to help him carry the evidence, forcing him to rent a U-Haul to cart out the criminals. This campaign from the police worked: Boudin was recently removed in a recall campaign heavily backed by police groups, and the new district attorney has dismantled most of his accountability measures.
Or consider when New York cops arrested the mayor’s daughter during the George Floyd protests, and a police union published her sensitive personal details online. Mayor Bill de Blasio got the message loud and clear—just one hour later, he instructed protesters that it was time to go home.
This kind of behavior should be a screaming emergency for any kind of democracy, regardless of its political coloration. It violates every principle of democratic legitimacy for the government’s armed agents to openly meddle in politics, conduct apparently fraudulent witch hunts into those who investigate their corruption, or threaten the families of elected officials who are supposed to control them.
The danger is well illustrated by documents from the Claremont Institute—basically the intellectual front of the quasi-fascist MAGA movement—obtained by Christian Vanderbrouk at The Bulwark. In mid-2020, the institute published a “79 Days to Inauguration” report, a bloody political fantasy amounting to an “instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen ‘posses’ of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office,” Vanderbrouk writes.
Sheriffs in particular are key to this ongoing conspiracy against the American republic. Claremont has a “Sheriffs Fellowship” it started in 2021, because, according to a fundraising letter, “our nation’s conservative movement needs a countervailing network of uncorrupted law enforcement officials … officers not beholden to the centralized … bureaucracies of federal or state governments, nor the vicissitudes of easily pressured city officials.”
In other words, they want Villanueva-style police insurrection all across the nation to subordinate elected officials, install a right-wing dictator, and carry out violent political repression against anyone who protests.
Luckily for Los Angeles, Villanueva is facing an election this year, and he is thus far polling behind his challenger, retired Long Beach police chief Robert Luna. But that is just one department among thousands. If centrists and moderate liberals knew what was good for them, they would stop fussing about abolitionists, stop proposing to give the police more money, and instead focus their attention on the people plotting to kill them.
