Oh, how the mighty have fallen – or, in the case of Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, how they never rose at all.
Take a look at LASD’s latest self-congratulatory infographic, blasted across social media like a desperate plea for relevance. “Substantial gains in recruitment, training, and retention in 2025,” it proclaims, complete with glossy numbers meant to dazzle the uninformed: eight academy classes, 401 graduated deputies, a 29 percent increase in class size, attrition magically reduced to under five percent, and a 50 percent jump in weekly applicants, from 190 to 300. Toss in more than 18,000 applications processed and over 250 recruitment events, and suddenly Luna wants you to believe he’s built a law-enforcement utopia in the middle of a nationwide staffing crisis.
Don’t believe the hype. This isn’t progress, it’s delusion wrapped in propaganda.
With election season looming, Luna needs shiny numbers to wave in front of voters, and his loyalists are working overtime to massage the stats, fudging them harder than a Hollywood accountant cooking the books on a blockbuster flop. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file deputies – the ones actually doing the job – are the ones paying the price.
LASD’s social media machine is selling Luna’s four years as “achievements,” but what’s really being marketed is a house of cards built on half-truths, omissions, and outright deception.
Right out of the gate, the graphic refers to 401 deputies who “graduated.” Yes, they walked across the stage, collected a badge, and smiled for the camera. What these manufatured stats conveniently leave out is what happens immediately afterward – the revolving door that starts spinning the moment Luna’s beloved photo op ends.
Sources inside the department, particularly disillusioned patrol deputies, describe a far grimmer reality: a shocking number of those fresh-faced graduates are walking out almost as fast as they walked in. Rather than stay trapped in Luna’s dysfunctional LASD, they’re defecting to agencies like Orange County Sheriff’s or smaller departments offering better pay, less political interference, and something increasingly rare at LASD, actual support from leadership. Deputies who survived months of academy grind are quickly realizing the grass isn’t just greener elsewhere; it’s safer. Unsurprisingly, Luna’s carefully curated infographics don’t account for these post-graduation defections, because if they did, his so-called “gains” would disappear faster than a fat kid caught in the cookie aisle at Walmart.
Under Luna’s watch, LASD is hemorrhaging experienced deputies at an alarming rate, losing more than 600 per year on average to retirements, resignations, burnout, and outright disgust. So while he brags about 401 new graduates, the department is still suffering a net loss of roughly 200 deputies annually. This isn’t complicated math. Hires minus losses. Luna comes up short every time.
Zoom out and the picture gets even uglier. Sworn deputy staffing has cratered from a high of roughly 10,000 in the spring of 2020 to around 7,900 by the start of 2025 – the latter levels not seen since the 80’s. So where, exactly, is this proclaimed “retention”? The numbers don’t lie – and a loss of more than 25 percent of sworn personnel doesn’t describe stability, it screams mass departure driven by failed leadership.
Response times are dragging, overtime has exploded to a record half-billion dollars in a single fiscal year, and deputies are burning out faster than a wildfire during peak Santa Ana winds – without the resources to put out the flames.
Luna calls this a “staffing crisis,” as if it were some act of God. It isn’t. It’s his crisis, born of incompetence, betrayal of the troops, and an utter inability to inspire loyalty.
The academy attrition rate Luna keeps bragging about? It’s under five percent. That miracle is courtesy of the GRIT program, which amounts to lowering the bar until almost anyone with a pulse can stumble across it. Historically, LASD academy attrition averaged 17 to 20 percent over two decades, with recent years reaching 20 to 40 percent, not because the department failed recruits, but because standards were high and only the best made it through.
Now, under Luna, it’s suddenly below five percent? That’s not improvement, it’s institutional self-deception. Recruits who would never have passed state academy standards are being pushed through to pad numbers and conceal the real retention collapse. The result is immediate: under qualified sworn personnel on the street today and a massive liability problem waiting to explode tomorrow.
Contrast that with the tenure of former Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Despite inheriting chaos, Villanueva ran up to eleven academy classes per year early on, graduating an average of 85 deputies per class and more than 1,100 in 2019 alone. He hired over 1,500 employees while sworn staffing peaked at 9,986, a record that held until the Board of Supervisors imposed a hiring freeze in April 2020.
That same Board defunded the department by $261 million over two fiscal years and froze over $143.7 million in the services and supply budget, all while sitting on a $2 billion surplus.
Fast-forward to 2026. Luna has enjoyed four years of full backing from the Board of Supervisors, no hiring freezes, and every political tailwind imaginable. And what does he deliver? A pathetic 401 graduates, padded with a “29 percent class size increase” that only sounds impressive if you ignore the fact that it’s still a fraction of Villanueva-era output.
Under Luna, the applicant pool collapsed by more than two-thirds – a 67.3 percent drop. Average class size shrank from roughly 85 to 50 deputies, a 41 percent decline. Rock-bottom numbers dressed up as growth.
And those 18,000 applications Luna keeps boasting about? Laughable. Villanueva processed roughly 55,000 applications in 2019 alone, without a compliant Board of Supervisors and without turning recruitment into a traveling circus. Luna, meanwhile, claims more than 250 recruitment events in his inflated infographic. We’re supposed to believe there was nearly one for every business day in 2025? If so, that would indicate some personnel were very busy staging photo ops while patrols were dangerously understaffed, and deputies went without a cost-of-living increase.
This isn’t progress. It isn’t leadership. It’s outright betrayal.
Luna preaches accountability while dodging it at every turn, turning LASD into a national punchline. Deputies are overworked, underappreciated, and fleeing at every level. Anonymous letters from “Just a Deputy” describe manipulation and retreat, and they’re not wrong. Crime victims wait longer for help, communities pay the price, and Luna pats himself on the back with cherry-picked stats that ignore the exodus.
Strip away the propaganda, and what remains is simple: Sheriff Robert Luna is a profile in failure, fudging numbers to disguise a mass exodus under his watch and presiding over the steep decline of what was once the most prestigious sheriff’s department in the country.
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