The LAPD Built Gang Units to Fight Gangs. The Units Became Gangs.
Officers in the LAPD's San Fernando Valley gang enforcement detail posed with a pro-wrestling championship belt labeled "Mission GED Pistoleros," tracked firearm arrests on an office whiteboard, and systematically disabled their body cameras before conducting traffic stops, behavior so closely mirroring the street gangs they were supposed to dismantle that the department's Internal Affairs division applied a label it had never used before: "law enforcement gang" [1][2]. The designation isn't metaphor. Under California state law, a law enforcement gang is defined as a group of officers who engage in a pattern of on-duty behavior that intentionally violates the law or fundamental principles of professional policing [1][2]. The Valley unit met that threshold.
How does a police unit designed to suppress gang activity become indistinguishable from one?
The transformation began with isolation. Gang enforcement details operate semi-autonomously, separated from the supervision structure that governs patrol officers. That distance creates space for a unit to develop its own internal culture, its own measures of success, its own rituals. In the Valley unit, success meant guns seized, quantifiable, promotable, trackable. Officers launched a "gun hunting competition," recording firearm-related arrests on a whiteboard visible to the entire squad [1][2]. The officer with the most seizures earned the right to pose with the championship belt, a physical trophy that turned constitutional policing into a scored game [1][2].
Internal Affairs investigators found an "overwhelming pattern of intentional policy violations" and concluded that poor management allowed a "rampant culture of misconduct" to fester [1][2]. The body camera shutoffs weren't occasional lapses, they were systematic, a shared practice that allowed officers to conduct stops without creating evidence of what happened during them [1][2]. When supervision is weak and the unit's identity depends on metrics rather than legitimacy, the group begins operating by its own rules. That's when a specialized enforcement team crosses into gang territory: shared rituals, internal loyalty that supersedes external accountability, behavior that exists outside the law.
The investigation began with a single complaint. In December 2022, Valley gang officers detained a driver suspected of having expired registration [1][2]. The driver later filed a complaint alleging that an officer told him he had no rights as they searched his belongings [1][2]. That stop, a minor traffic violation escalated into a search, unraveled the entire unit. Internal Affairs traced the pattern backward: dozens of improper traffic stops conducted in 2023, officers switching off body cameras to hide their actions from supervisors, a competitive culture that rewarded volume over legality [1][2].
A majority of the Valley unit's officers and supervisors have either been fired or resigned [1][2]. Resignation became the escape route. Officer Alan Carrillo faced criminal prosecution over allegations of theft, but he entered a pretrial diversion program that required him to surrender his law enforcement certification and complete 50 hours of community service [1][2]. Fifty hours. Then the case closes, the record stays clean enough, and the question of where resigned officers go, whether they're hired by other departments, whether California tracks their misconduct across jurisdictions, remains unanswered by the available record.
The Valley unit isn't an isolated failure. In late May 2026, the LAPD temporarily disbanded the 77th Street gang squad amid an internal investigation into nearly identical misconduct [1][2]. Officers in that unit were accused of systematically disabling their body cameras to conduct "ghost stops", detentions that leave no official record [1][2]. Fourteen officers and two sergeants from the 77th Street squad have been barred from public contact and assigned to administrative duties [1][2]. The LAPD's civilian watchdog demanded an audit of the unit's actions [1][2].
Two gang units, same pattern, same breakdown. When the same structural conditions produce the same outcome in separate divisions, the problem isn't personnel, it's design.
The institutional tension is now explicit. City leaders are seeking to limit minor traffic stops over concerns of racial bias [1][2]. LAPD leaders have said traffic stops are key to getting illegal guns and drugs off the streets [1][2]. But the Valley unit's gun hunting competition reveals what happens when that enforcement priority operates without accountability: constitutional rights become negotiable, traffic stops become pretexts, and the officers conducting them begin to resemble the groups they're tasked with suppressing. The driver detained in December 2022 for expired registration was told he had no rights. That's not an officer misspeaking under stress. That's what the unit believed, or at least what it practiced.
The LAPD has now used the term "law enforcement gang" on its own officers for the first time [1][2]. The label forces a question the department can't avoid: if two specialized units independently evolved into gangs, what does that say about the structure that produced them? Gang units are built for aggressive enforcement, rewarded for measurable results, and insulated from the oversight that applies to general patrol. Those conditions don't accidentally create misconduct. They incubate it.
The championship belt is still evidence somewhere. So is the whiteboard with its tally of arrests. They're artifacts of a system that turned policing into a competition and then lost control of what the competition rewarded. The 77th Street investigation is ongoing, which means more officers may be reassigned, more may resign, more may face diversion programs that end in community service hours. But the Valley unit already showed how that ends: the officers leave, the unit disbands, and the question of whether anyone is actually safer goes unasked. When the enforcement mechanism itself becomes a gang, accountability isn't about individual discipline. It's about whether the LAPD can redesign the structure that keeps producing the same failure, or whether it will keep building units that eventually require the label it just applied for the first time.
