A group of eight Los Angeles County Sheriffs’ Deputies have amended their civil rights and workplace harassment lawsuit filed against fellow deputies to include another 47 members of the Sheriff’s department. The addition of these defendants marks a significant expansion of the suit, which was initially filed against only four fellow deputies and the County of Los Angeles. Defendants to the suit now include several captains, commanders, and lieutenants, along with 41 additional deputies.

The lawsuit, originally filed in September 2019, is based on harassment, bullying, and assault by what the plaintiffs allege is a “criminal gang” of Sheriffs’ deputies. The original individual defendants are four members of the alleged gang, known as the Banditos. The Banditos are a group of largely-Latinx sheriffs’ deputies based in the East LA Station of the LA County Sheriffs Department. According to the lawsuit, members of the gang all have an identifying tattoo of a skeleton with a mustache decked out with a sombrero, bandolier, and pistol.

The eight plaintiff deputies in the lawsuit described the Banditos members as running the East LA station “like inmates running a prison yard,” assert a litany of abhorrent behavior committed by the gang’s members. According to the lawsuit, the group targets Latinx deputies with the types of recruitment strategies frequently used by street gangs, and retaliates against deputies who refuse to join. The eight plaintiffs are a group of deputies who declined to join the Banditos and, they assert, paid serious consequences for their choice.

According to the lawsuit, Banditos members refused to provide backup to the plaintiffs and other nonmember deputies, putting their lives at stake on challenging calls. The plaintiffs also assert that they were overloaded with calls toward the end of their shifts, threatened and bullied them and other deputies who refused to join the group, prevented earned promotions, demoted nonmembers without good cause, and in one instance physically assaulted two of the plaintiffs based on their failure to join the gang.

The plaintiffs allege that the newly-added defendants are either themselves members or prospects of the Banditos, or are members of leadership who failed to stop the Banditos from harassing and bullying nonmembers. The attorney for the plaintiffs, Vincent Miller, explained that the additional defendants include members of the department who “rigged internal affairs bureau investigations” and who were “put in leadership positions who were basically there to hide and minimize and cover up the extent of the deputy gang problem.” Two of the newly-added defendants are close associates of LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva; one, his head of security, and another, his driver. Villanueva began his career as a deputy at the East LA Station.

The plaintiff deputies have all requested transfers and moved to different Sheriff stations since filing the lawsuit in September 2019, but not before Banditos members allegedly attempted to interfere with their transfer requests and prevent them from relocating.

LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is currently fighting a subpoena issued by an independent watchdog of the LA Sheriffs’ Department, Max Huntsman, issued to question Villanueva about the cliques and gang-like groups within the department. Villanueva has long been facing criticism of his approach to the proliferation of gangs within the department, and announced in August 2020 that he would follow a zero-tolerance policy towards “deputy cliques/subgroups engaging in misconduct.” However, Villanueva stated at a December 2020 meeting of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission that no deputies had yet been disciplined for joining such a group.

In a report published by Professor Sean Kennedy of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, there have been 18 different gangs operating within the LA County Sheriff’s Department over the last 50 years. Seven of these gangs are still active, according to Kennedy’s report. While some of these groups were harmless social groups, others had a reputation for encouraging violence against inmates, community members, or other deputies who challenged the groups. The Sheriff’s Department dismissed this report when it was published in January 2021, calling it a “non-peer reviewed report containing non-academically acceptable citations and unproven allegations.”

This is not the first time that the Banditos have been targeted by civil litigation. In 2014, a female deputy who had accused Banditos members of harassment and bullying received a $1.5 million settlement of her claims from the County of Los Angeles.