A group of Los Angeles police officers assigned to the department’s recruitment office have been “assigned to home” with no police powers while the department investigates audio recordings of alleged racist and derogatory comments allegedly made by them over nearly a year, LAPD Police Chief Jim McDonnell said Tuesday.
Providing an update during a Board of Police Commissioners meeting, McDonnell said the department became aware of the alleged comments several weeks ago and immediately removed the employees off the unit, notified the commissioners, Mayor Karen Bass and the Office of Inspector General “and moved forward with the investigation.”
“We’re in the process of backfilling all of those individuals so we can keep the job going of recruitment and bringing people on board,” McDonnell said, “but it’s certainly a major setback for all of us and (we’re) just disgusted with what we heard, but the investigation will go on, appropriate action will be taken.”
The allegations came less than three months after McDonnell was sworn in as the LAPD’s 59th Police Chief, where he laid out his goals for leading the department, among them building up department morale and personnel strength.
The update, asked for by Commissioner Maria Lou Calanche, came after a Monday report from the L.A. Times detailing a Jan. 5, 2025 complaint filed with the LAPD’s Professional Standards Bureau that included roughly 90 recordings, which McDonnell Tuesday said were on “audio tape.”
The alleged participants, a lieutenant, a sergeant and four officers, were accused in the complaint of making comments against Black applicants as well as female, lesbian and gay colleagues, the Times reported.
The Office of Inspector General on Monday declined a public records request by the Southern California News Group for the complaint, citing, among other reasons, a penal code section in which peace officer personnel records and personnel complaints can remain confidential. Requests for a copy of the report filed with the LAPD and an attorney representing the anonymous complainant went unanswered.
The Times report names four officers — Lt. Louis Lavender, Sgt. Denny Jong, Officer Shirley Burgos and another identified only as McKay – as either making remarks or not intervening to stop them. The other two officers were not named.
Among the comments, Burgos, a Latina officer, was identified in the report as offering advice in one conversation about how to fight Black individuals, allegedly saying “You hit black people in the liver; I heard they got weak livers,” according to the L.A. Times’ story on the complaint. She also allegedly described a Latina janitor to others as a “wetback” after the janitor complained about her.
In another conversation, an unnamed Latina officer allegedly said “black people enjoy grape soda,” before another unnamed Latino officer replied “black people enjoy watermelon between basketball,” according to the L.A. Times story.
Jong, who is Asian, was accused of leading the banter, according to the complaint, and at one point following the death of Dodgers baseball pitcher Fernando Valeznuela, allegedly said “I know why he died, he ate too much tacos.”
The complaint, according to the Times story, accuses Lavender, who is Black, of witnessing and hearing the conversations, but doing nothing about them, though he did allegedly acknowledge after one such comment, “Man, we’re going to end up in the L.A. Times the way you all talk in here. You all can bring down the whole department.”
McDonnell Tuesday said the department has dedicated “significant resources” into the investigation and that it will be expedited as quickly as possible.
Teresan Sanchez-Gordon, another police commissioner, said the comments were “totally unacceptable” and “don’t really allow for the serious consideration of those wanting to join the LAPD.”
“It’s disheartening in the sense that it’s coming from everyone, Black officers, women, Latinos, Asians and I hope that this investigation is really one that will have impact and will also send a message that our department cannot continue with that toxic environment,” Sanchez-Gordon said.
Erroll Southers, board president, said the revelation of the comments will make it more difficult for the department to recruit officers.
“As applicants apply to this department they want to believe that there’s a level playing field and it would appear that when you hear comments allegedly made like that by the people who are doing the hiring here, that certainly doesn’t give that perception,” he said.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, said in a Monday statement it was “appalled by the reports of officers speaking in this manner about potential recruits, co-workers and supervisors,” calling the language “beyond unacceptable.”
“Those identified to be on these recordings should question their own ability to conduct themselves to the high standards we, as police officers, must abide by,” the statement read.
The union also questioned why the department did not remove Deputy Chief Marc Reina, who is in charge of the recruitment unit.
“We question why Reina has not been relieved of duty for what appears to be his complete lack of oversight of this unit,” the statement read.
The allegations surfaced more than two years after another scandal in City Hall, in which a secret recording of a conversation between three Los Angeles City Council members and the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor over redistricting in October 2021 was made public.
Nury Martinez, then City Council president, resigned shortly after the comments were made public in October 2022, as did Ron Herrera, the L.A. County Federation of Labor president. Some of those comments included racist slurs at colleague Mike Bonin’s young son.
Also part of that conversation were former council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de Leon. Cedillo had lost a bid for re-election by the time the audio was leaked, while de Leon resisted calls for resignation and lost a re-election bid in December.
The LAPD investigated and identified a married couple as having unlawfully recorded the conversation. About two years after the recording came to light, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office and the city prosecutor’s office declined to file any criminal charges against them.
Under California law, all parties must consent to the recording of a private conversation or phone call, otherwise the person who made the recording could face criminal and civil penalties.
Whether investigators were looking into any charges against the complainant who recorded the conversations among the LAPD’s recruitment unit was not known.