This September 16th will mark three years since the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department experienced one of its darkest moments in the agency’s more than 150-year history.
The devastating murder of Deputy Ryan Clinkunbroomer.
On Monday, August 17th, that painful wound was revisited as opening statements began in the murder trial of Kevin Cataneo Salazar, the man accused of pulling alongside the unsuspecting deputy at a traffic light and shooting him at point-blank range.
Clinkunbroomer was discovered mortally wounded in his patrol car by a passerby on September 16, 2023, near the Palmdale Station. He was transported to Antelope Valley Medical Center, where he died.
It was a traumatic event not only for Clinkunbroomer’s family and his fiancée, whom he had proposed to just four days earlier, but also for a department already struggling under the new administration.
Robert Luna had been at the helm of the largest Sheriff’s Department in the nation since winning the 2022 election, making numerous controversial changes and targeting deputies while pushing his “Deputy Gang” narrative, creating an increasingly hostile environment for the rank-and-file and accelerating an exodus that was already taking its toll on the department.
The result? A building tsunami of laterals and early retirements leading to what would ultimately become a historic staffing crisis that was already manifesting itself in unsustainable schedules of over 100 hours per week.
Clinkunbroomer was one of those patrol deputies carrying that heavy load that his family says led to decreased awareness and ultimately made him vulnerable to this heinous attack.
The motivation to capture the person responsible for murdering one of their own led to Salazar’s swift arrest approximately 36 hours later.
On September 18, 2023, LASD homicide detectives had identified Salazar, surrounded his family’s Palmdale home and, after an hours-long standoff, took him into custody.
At the press conference announcing Salazar’s arrest, Luna engaged in his typical political theatrics, delivering the tough-on-crime rhetoric he knew the public wanted to hear.
“We expect the maximum punishment available under the law for the murder of Deputy Ryan Clinkunbroomer.”
Anyone well-versed in LA County politics, especially in the anti-law enforcement environment fueled by the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd movement during the pandemic, was highly skeptical of his performative speech.
And two days later, our suspicions were proven to be right on the money – and then some.
On September 20, 2023, Luna stood next to then-District Attorney George Gascón at the DA press conference as Gascón announced the charges against Salazar and made it clear his office would not seek the death penalty.
“If I thought that seeking the death penalty was going to bring Ryan back to us, I would seek it without any reservation,” Gascón said. “But it won’t.”
Sheriff Luna stood silently behind him with no reaction, not even the slightest look of surprise, or more suitably, shock, when two days earlier he announced to the public that he expected Salazar to face the maximum charges the law would allow.
Ryan Clinkunbroomer’s mother Kim didn’t hide her outrage after Gascón made the announcement without so much as a private conversation warning the family before making the announcement on camera with the entire country watching.
“How dare you, on national TV, tell me you’re not seeking the death penalty because it won’t bring my son back?” she said. “My son’s not coming back, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your job.”
It wasn’t as if Gascón’s position on the death penalty was a secret. His refusal to seek it was part of the progressive platform he brought into the District Attorney’s Office in 2020 and one of many policies that had created an enormous divide between his administration and Los Angeles County law enforcement.
Sheriff Luna knew that. Which makes the political posturing and the September 18 press conference much worse… and much harder to defend.
The two men went back decades to their days at LAPD, but describing Gascón as simply one of Luna’s mentors doesn’t quite tell the whole story.
When Luna was a young commander at the Long Beach Police Department looking to promote, by his own account, no one was willing to help him. That changed after Luna read an article about mentorship in a law enforcement publication written by Gascón, who was an Assistant Chief at LAPD at the time, and reached out to him.
Gascón opened the door.
Years later, just months after becoming Sheriff, Luna publicly acknowledged just how important Gascón had been to his career during an event held in his honor by LA County political leaders.
“I may not be here if he hadn’t opened that door for me,” Luna proudly admitted.
That history puts Luna’s silence standing behind Gascón on September 20th in an entirely different light.
The man announcing that Ryan Clinkunbroomer’s accused killer would not face the death penalty wasn’t simply the elected District Attorney Luna was obligated to work with. He was the man Luna publicly credited with helping propel his career forward.
And when forced into a moment where loyalty to his mentor collided with his responsibility to stand up for a murdered deputy and his grieving family, Luna’s silence spoke volumes.
So what exactly did Luna think was going to happen when he announced that he expected the “maximum punishment available under the law?”
And if Luna already knew Gascón wasn’t going to seek the death penalty, why make the statement in the first place?
Luna had been Sheriff for less than a year when deputy Clinkunbroomer was murdered. He had spent the better part of his campaign promising to repair a department he claimed was broken under former Sheriff Alex Villanueva and restore relationships that he said had deteriorated.
Over the last four years, he has done exactly the opposite. He has abandoned his deputies, and under his leadership, what was once regarded as one of the most prestigious sheriff’s departments in the world has been sent into a death spiral.
The department boasted a sworn staffing level of approximately 10,000 deputies in 2020. Today, that number has fallen to a historic low of fewer than 8,000, a staffing level not seen since the 1980s. The staggering decline has left overworked deputies operating on skeleton crews amid a critical staffing shortage, jeopardizing their safety while placing the citizens of Los Angeles County at even greater risk.
Thankfully, Gascón was sent packing in 2024 when he was soundly defeated by Nathan Hochman. By then, even the LA County Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with another four years of his controversial leadership – and “controversial” is putting it mildly.
Gascón may be gone, but his protégé, Sheriff Robert Luna, now appears to be following directly in his footsteps, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering Gascón was his mentor.
With opening statements in Salazar’s trial reopening a deep, raw wound for Deputy Clinkunbroomer’s family and LASD personnel, we are also reminded that the department was already showing signs of trouble when he was murdered.
Three years later, those signs are flashing neon red, screaming “HELP!”
