Pretty much any “gang database” is a vehicle for abuse. While there’s some investigative value in maintaining a database of affirmed gang members, most of these data collections are run without oversight or guardrails, allowing officers to add almost anyone they want to the collection, so long as they happen to live, work, or travel through any area these same cops have unilaterally declared to be gang territory.
You’d think a data collection like this would be far more useful if it was carefully curated and regularly pruned to ensure fewer resources were wasted by targeting people who weren’t in gangs but just had the misfortune of being near them from time to time.
But that’s not how law enforcement thinks. Apparently, agencies ranging from local PDs to the NSA still believe quantity is better than quality and do whatever they can to keep the data stores fully stocked. And when it comes to cop shops, it’s always handy to have a reason to harass or arrest someone, even if that “reason” is nothing more than falsified data that’s easily accessible.
Adding all of this together results in ridiculousness, rights violations, lawsuits, and — in this case — criminal charges for the officers who falsely added Los Angeles residents to the LAPD’s gang database. It’s not just a US problem either, despite this nation being home to several extremely large gang databases. An Australian police officer was labeled a gang member simply because he happened to be seen on the same street as two gang members who were passing through the neighborhood.
Closer to home, things get worse and more stupid. The Chicago PD’s gang database has at least 15,000 people who the city’s Inspector General determined to have “no specific gang membership” and “no reason provided” by officers for their inclusion in the database. Boston’s gang database has designated people as gang members for acts as innocent as “wearing Nike shoes” or being beaten up by gang members. The database at issue here — CalGang — has allowed cops to “nominate” literal infants as suspected gang members.
Fortunately, someone decided to start doing something about this abuse. Six months after reports surfaced that LAPD officers were falsely adding residents to the gang database, prosecutors started getting busy. In the end, it was more performative than game-changing. Six officers were hit with criminal charges. Of those six, only one will actually be convicted of a crime.
An officer accused of falsifying records as part of an L.A. Police Department gang-framing scandal pleaded no contest Thursday to six felony counts.
Prosecutors alleged Braxton Shaw falsified dozens of interview cards that police fill out while in the field, labeling as gang members 43 people who had made no such admission or had outright denied affiliation. Some of those people ended up in a state gang database.
The 41-year-old officer entered the plea as part of a deal with prosecutors to resolve multiple felony counts that could have seen him sentenced to decades in prison.
Officer Shaw got hoisted by his own petard — his body cam footage that showed him falsifying gang database reports. The other five officers facing similar charges were at least smart enough to not create permanent video records of their wrongdoing.
Shaw isn’t a scapegoat, though. He’s the sacrificial lamb — the one offered up by the city as evidence it actually cares about overseeing a department that has done little more than wander from scandal to scandal since its inception.
And, while’s it far more than likely that people falsely named as gang members spent some time in lock up (either pre-trial or after pleading guilty to false association charges), Officer Shaw won’t have to spend a day behind bars, despite pleading no contest to multiple charges. As the Los Angeles Times reports, Shaw’s six felony charges will be converted into two year’s probation and 250 hours of community service. The only upside is that Shaw will have to surrender his cop certification, which means he can’t be hired by other law enforcement agencies in California. But that certainly won’t prevent him from plying his corrupted trade elsewhere in the nation after satisfying his probation requirements.
Will this be enough to deter other LAPD officers from adding people to CalGang just because they want to? Oh my no. The state decided to only go after six cops and it only managed to talk one of them into accepting criminal convictions. The LAPD is home to around 9,000 officers. The very eventual punishment of one officer isn’t going to change a thing. Police misconduct remains the heavy favorite going forward.
