Los Angeles Police Department homicide detectives are legendary, having investigated some of America’s most notorious cases: the Black Dahlia, the Hillside Strangler, the Onion Field murders, and the Charles Manson family murders to name a few.
But these storied detectives have had their ranks decimated down to just 10 people in the vaulted Robbery Homicide Division due to a “defund the police” mindset that began long before George Floyd was killed in 2020, an LAPD insider told the Washington Examiner.
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The most prestigious detective unit in the department formerly numbered about 100 people, with approximately 25 assigned to handle homicides, a decade before Chief Michael Moore took office in 2018, according to one of its former members. And to make matters worse, a crime wave is gripping the city where homicides are at a 15-year high.
“When I come to LA, I’m carrying my gun 24/7 — I’m not going to be a victim,” said the detective, who declined to be named out of fear of repercussions. “It’s a scary time in L.A. I’ve never seen it this bad in my decades as a police officer, not even after the ‘92 riots.”
More people were murdered during the first half of 2022 than in any of the same time periods of the past 15 years, according to a study by Crosstown, a nonprofit news organization based at the University of Southern California. The data show 181 deaths this year. Last year, the city had 397 murders, the highest since 2007.
“This is very, very scary for our city, and it’s scary for the residents that we are supposed to protect,” Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz of the Los Angeles Police Protective League told ABC7 News.
Most of the crimes involved guns and were centered in Los Angeles’s low-income inner city. As crime has continued to rise going back at least a decade, so has the LAPD’s budget — from $1.17 billion in 2010 to $1.88 billion today, ABC7 reported.
Yet Moore has decided against having his homicide unit keep pace with the murder rate. He is not an elected official and supports the policies of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has publicly chastised the police, calling them “killers” at a church event after Floyd died. Moore even took a knee with Black Lives Matter supporters, creating ire among the rank and file.
“It starts someplace, and we say we are going to be who we want to be or we’re going to continue being the killers that we are,” Garcetti said in 2020, referring to his plans to cut the LAPD’s budget.
Moore did not respond to a request for comment.
The downsizing of homicide units is not limited to the LAPD. Over at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols unincorporated areas and contracts with numerous cities, 25% of the detective division is missing because county lawmakers have cut the budget and installed a hiring freeze.
However, Sheriff Alex Villanueva has made funding the homicide unit a priority, so he is forced to fill positions there at the expense of other detective units, said Cmd. Michael Hannemann.
In 2009, the agency had 98 homicide detectives, and today that number is 93. The crime rate for the sheriff’s jurisdiction is also high, but the number of homicides has decreased for the first six months of this year over the same time period last year — 97 compared to 153 in 2021.
The county had 212 homicides in 2009.
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“The sheriff has made homicide a priority. However, the bureau does not have the amount of investigators that it had this time 10 years ago,” Hannemann said. “Less detectives mean the investigator’s focus gets pushed in more directions. As a comparison, the FBI recommends working five cases a year. Our detectives handle 10 to 15 a year.”
Villanueva has pushed back against budget cuts to his agency, making him a thorn in the side of county lawmakers. As a result, the Board of Supervisors took the unusual step of voting to place a measure on the November ballot that would allow it to remove the sheriff from office if he engages in misconduct.
