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Despite promises from sheriff’s officials to crack down on deputy cliques, fresh allegations have arisen of deputies in the department’s Compton station adorned with matching skull tattoos.

In January of 2016, high school student Sheldon Lockett was standing with a friend outside his godmother’s home in Compton. That’s all. Just standing there. But he is African-American, so naturally two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies drove up, leapt out of their vehicle, and pulled their guns on him. He fled. The deputies chased him. Lockett was unarmed, but the deputies radioed (falsely) that they were pursuing a suspect with a gun.

Lockett tried to hide. The deputies found him, grabbed him, used a stun gun on him, and beat him. “They were like beating me, kicking me, calling me [n-word], [n-word].” They then arrested him, and charged him with “resisting arrest and two counts of attempted murder.” Lockett sat in jail for eight months before he was released. He is now suing.

A few months later, 31-year-old Donta Taylor was walking to a corner store in Compton. That’s all. Just walking along the sidewalk. But he was African-American, so naturally two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies drove by, immediately pulled over, and (in their words) tried to “engage in conversation” with him. Taylor fled. The deputies chased him, radioed that they were pursuing a suspect with a gun, and shot him multiple times and killed him.

The deputies claimed they chased Taylor because he allegedly “pulled a silver handgun out of the waistband of his shorts before starting to run.” They also claimed they ultimately shot Taylor to death because he had allegedly “pointed the gun” at one of them.

There were no witnesses. And no gun was ever found.

Still, the deputies were not charged. The District Attorney decided that, even though Taylor “was unarmed when the shooting occurred,” there was “insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Aldama and Orrego did not act in self-defense and the defense of others when they fired their service weapons at Taylor.”

Dd I mention that both of these incidents involved the exact same two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies?

It appears they learned their lesson from Sheldon Lockett: When you’re planning to try to frame an unarmed African-American for attempted murder to justify aggressively attacking him for no reason, don’t make the mistake of leaving your victim alive to contradict your story.

Just to make things more interesting; These two deputies, and around 20 of their colleagues, all have matching tattoos: “a skull with a rifle and a military-style helmet with flames surrounding it. On the helmet are the letters ‘C P T’ for Compton.” Now, they can’t just go out and get these tattoos; they have to earn it for “working hard,” and their colleagues have to approve it:

“When deputies in the station determined someone in their ranks was deserving of the honor, they passed along the contact information of an artist who would make the tattoo.”

At this point, it is worth noting that for over thirty years--since 1971--the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has been dealing with secret cliques of deputies with names like Little Devils, Pirates, Vikings, Rattlesnakes, Cavemen, Grim Reapers, Regulators, and Jump Out Boys. They were usually “at overwhelmingly white sheriff’s stations that were islands in black and Latino immigrant communities.” They “bonded over aggressive, often violent police work and branded themselves with matching tattoos.”

These tattooed cliques generally featured unusually high incidences of discrimination complaints, excessive-force lawsuits, and officer-involved shootings. And their hostility was pretty much always racially motivated; in one case, the city had to pay $9 million in fines to settle a lawsuit after a federal judge formally determined that the Lynwood Vikings was literally a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.”

So gosh, I wonder what made these new skull-tattooed deputies in Compton “deserving of the honor”? And whether it could possibly have anything to do with, oh, I dunno, maybe beating or killing innocent young black men?

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