The “Defund the Police” craze of 2020 is now five years in the rearview mirror, but the impact of that movement is still reverberating today in Los Angeles County. As I’ve said often, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department remains the most understaffed law enforcement agency in the entire nation. That was true in 2018, when there were 9,200 sworn within the LASD, and even after I hired over a thousand deputies to bring the number up to 9,986 – the highest ever recorded for the agency – in April of 2020, right before defunding became an obsession.
When the “Summer of Love” hit in 2020, along with the pandemic, we had sufficient staffing to weather violent protests AND pandemic quarantines. LASD deputies, working side by side with local police departments and the National Guard, thwarted efforts to destroy Beverly Hill’s Rodeo Drive, the Fairfax District, the Citadel in Commerce, and other commercial districts across the county. The pandemic forced the closure of the Superior Court system at the time, which allowed us to replace those lost to quarantine from our Court Services Division. Bottom line, having enough boots on the ground worked, period. We did not become another Seattle or Minneapolis.
Fast forward to 2025, under the Luna administration, the LASD has collapsed silently as the local media looks studiously the other way. With over 4,000 vacancies, sworn staffing levels are now below 8,000 – a figure not seen since the early 1980’s. As a point of reference, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2018 the national average per capita was 2.41 cops per 1,000 residents. In California that figure was 2.0 per 1,000 residents, while the LASD was at a frightening 0.9 per 1,000 residents. As we speak, our number has slipped to an unfathomable 0.7 deputies per 1,000 residents. That number represents a direct threat to public safety.
Perhaps having only 0.7 deputies per 1,000 residents has been the goal all along for the board of supervisors and the far-left activist crowd chanting for the outright elimination of law enforcement, prisons, and county jails. In real terms this is why there were insufficient deputies available in January to effect timely evacuations and we tragically lost 31 lives in the firestorms. Deputies are falling asleep at the wheel after enduring back to back double shifts and shouldering an unsustainable overtime burden. Under Sheriff Luna the LASD is on pace to spend half a billion dollars on overtime, a record amount that telegraphs his failed leadership.
Simply put, the good people of Los Angeles County and the LASD cannot survive another Luna administration. We have to get back to the business of fighting crime and saving people’s lives, and the only way to do that is to be fully staffed and prepared for natural disasters, crime, and the upcoming World Cup, Super Bowl, and 2028 Olympics. The first step is to hire 2,000 deputies in the next two years, something I have done before and if given the opportunity will do again.
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