>>173174, >>173175
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The legal exposure facing Luna’s department continues to deepen. In September, the California Attorney General filed suit against LASD over inhumane jail conditions and rising in-custody deaths, citing failures in medical care, mental health services, and basic sanitation. Soon after, a federal class-action lawsuit filed by female inmates accused deputies of sexual abuse, voyeurism, and retaliation inside the women’s jail, allegations that point directly to systemic oversight failures at the highest level. The U.S. Department of Justice has also intervened over LASD’s chronic delays in concealed carry permit processing, further eroding the department’s credibility.
Layered on top of this are Luna’s ongoing battles with the Civilian Oversight Commission, allegations of patronage and loyalty-based favoritism, and repeated promises to dismantle alleged deputy gangs that remain unfulfilled. Accountability is proclaimed. Transparency is promised. Neither materializes.
On January 2nd, the Luna administration introduced the timeliest form of gaslighting – the ever-popular “Crime is Down” campaign – in an effort to lay the lies on thick for the start of the 2026 election year.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s glossy LASDHQ Instagram post touting “crime reductions” for 2025, is a textbook exercise in statistical sleight of hand and public narrative manipulation. By spotlighting selective, top-line percentages, the department ignores the realities driving those numbers: collapsing staffing levels, suppressed proactivity, and a command culture that actively discourages arrests and self-initiated enforcement.
Law enforcement operates on two metrics, hard stats and soft stats. Hard stats are immutable: every month brings predictable volumes of 911 calls, burglaries, stolen vehicles, and thefts. Soft stats, however, rise or fall based on leadership. Kill proactivity and the numbers follow. Bench aggressive deputies, slow-roll calls, punish self-initiated activity, and police ALPR searches to discipline deputies for looking for crime, and the message is unmistakable, sit back, take your calls, don’t hunt bad guys. Command staff rebrand this as “organizational risk management” or “liability control,” arguing that proactive policing invites pursuits, uses of force, and shootings, but in practice it is death by a thousand cuts, methodically stripping initiative from the line until arrests decline by design.
The contrast is evident in the data: under former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, staffing was higher, deputies were supported, and proactive enforcement was encouraged; under Luna, sworn staffing has cratered, county population and crime pressures have grown, proactive arrests have plummeted, and resentment between line staff and executives has intensified. Arrests are down at nearly every station, not because crimes have disappeared or 911 has gone quiet, but because deputies are understaffed, unsupported, and increasingly fearful of being administratively sacrificed for doing the job they were hired to do.
Even the department’s own post quietly concedes increases in reported rapes while celebrating drops elsewhere, offering no credible explanation for how crime is supposedly being deterred with fewer deputies, fewer arrests, and recurring system failures like CAD collapses. What LASDHQ markets as “data-driven deployment” is, in reality, a numbers game built on throttled enforcement and redefined success -an Instagram-ready narrative that bears little resemblance to what deputies and communities are experiencing on the ground under the Luna administration.
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