In a police division with an extended custom of colourful nicknames — from “Jigsaw John” to “Captain Hollywood” — LAPD Sgt. Joseph Lloyd stands out.
“The Grim Reaper.”
A minimum of that’s what some on the power have taken to calling the veteran Inside Affairs detective, normally out of earshot.
In line with officers who’ve discovered themselves underneath investigation by Lloyd, he appears to relish the moniker and takes pleasure in ending careers, even when it means twisting info and ignoring proof.
However Lloyd’s backers preserve his dogged pursuit of the reality is why he has been entrusted with among the division’s most politically delicate and doubtlessly embarrassing circumstances.
Lloyd, 52, declined to remark. However The Instances spoke to greater than half a dozen present or former police officers who both labored alongside him or fell underneath his scrutiny.
Through the close to decade that he’s been in Inside Affairs, Lloyd has investigated cops of all ranks.
When a since-retired LAPD officer was suspected of working weapons throughout the Mexican border, the division turned to Lloyd to bust him.
In 2020, when it got here out that members of the elite Metropolitan Division had been falsely labeling civilians as gang members in a police database, Lloyd was tapped to assist unravel the mess.
And when a San Fernando Valley anti-gang squad was accused in 2023 of masking up shakedowns of motorists, in swooped the Reaper once more.
Just lately he was assigned to a division job power trying into allegations of extreme power by police towards activists who oppose the federal government’s immigration crackdown.
On the LAPD, as in most big-city police departments throughout the nation, Inside Affairs investigators are typically seen with suspicion and contempt by their colleagues. They normally attempt to function in relative anonymity.
Not Lloyd.
The 24-year LAPD veteran has inadvertently grow to be the face of a pitched debate over the LAPD’s long-maligned disciplinary system. The union that represents most officers has lengthy complained that well-connected senior leaders get favorable remedy. Others counter that rank-and-file cops who commit misconduct are routinely let off the hook.
A current examine commissioned by Chief Jim McDonnell discovered that perceived unfairness in inside investigations is a “critical level of competition” amongst officers that has contributed to low morale. McDonnell has stated he desires to hurry up investigations and higher display screen complaints, however efforts by previous chiefs and the Metropolis Council to overtake the system have repeatedly stalled.
Sarah Dunster, 40, was a sergeant working within the LAPD’s Hollywood division in 2021 when she realized she was underneath investigation for allegedly mishandling a grievance towards one among her officers, who was accused of groping a lady he arrested.
Dunster stated she remembers being interviewed by Lloyd, whose questions appeared designed to journey her up and catch her in a lie, quite than aimed toward listening to her account of what occurred, she stated. A few of her responses by no means made it into Lloyd’s report, she stated.
“He needed to fireside me,” she stated.
Dunster was terminated over the incident, however she appealed and final week a Los Angeles County Superior Courtroom choose granted a reprieve that permits her to doubtlessly get her job again.
Others who’ve labored with Lloyd say he’s considered a savvy investigator who’s unfairly being vilified for self-discipline selections which are in the end made by the chief of police. A supervisor who oversaw Lloyd at Inside Affairs — and requested anonymity as a result of they don’t seem to be approved to talk to the media — described him as good, meticulous and “a bulldog.”
“Joe simply goes the place the info lead him and he doesn’t have a difficulty asking the exhausting questions,” the supervisor stated.
On a couple of event, the supervisor added, Inside Affairs obtained complaints from senior division officers who thought that Lloyd didn’t present them sufficient deference throughout interrogations. Different supporters level to his willingness to tackle controversial circumstances to carry officers accountable, even whereas dealing with character assaults from his colleagues, their attorneys and the highly effective Los Angeles Police Protecting League.
Officers have sniped about his burly construct, tendency to smile throughout interviews and different eccentricities. He wears two watches — one on every wrist, a behavior he has been heard saying he picked up moonlighting as a highschool lacrosse referee.
However he has additionally been criticized as inflexible and uncompromising, seeming to fixate solely on particulars that time to an officer’s guilt. Individuals he has grilled say that when he doesn’t get the reply he’s in search of, he has a Columbo-esque tendency to ask the identical query in numerous methods in an try to elicit one thing incriminating.
And as a substitute of asking officers to make clear any discrepancies of their statements, Lloyd routinely assumes they’re mendacity, some critics stated.
Mario Munoz, a former LAPD Inside Affairs lieutenant who opened a boutique agency that assists officers preventing employment and disciplinary circumstances, just lately launched a scathing 60-page report questioning what he referred to as a collection of troubling lapses within the LAPD’s 2023 investigation of the Mission gang unit. The report name-drops Lloyd a number of occasions.
The division accused a number of Mission officers of stealing brass knuckles and different objects from motorists within the San Fernando Valley, and making an attempt to cover their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body-worn cameras.
Munoz stated he obtained calls from officers who stated Lloyd had violated their due course of rights, which doubtlessly opens the town as much as legal responsibility. A number of have since lodged complaints towards Lloyd with the division. He alleged Lloyd in the end singled out a number of “scapegoats to protect higher-level management from scrutiny.”
Till he retired from the LAPD in 2014, Munoz labored as each an investigator and an auditor who reviewed landmark inside investigations into the beating of Black motorist Rodney King and the Rampart gang scandal by which officers had been accused of robbing folks and planting proof, amongst different crimes.
Munoz now echoes a grievance from present officers that Inside Affairs generally, and Lloyd specifically, function to guard the division’s picture in any respect prices.
“He’s the man that they select as a result of he doesn’t query administration,” Munoz stated of Lloyd.
Within the Mission case, Munoz pointed to inconsistent outcomes for 2 captains who oversaw the police division accused of wrongdoing: One was transferred and later promoted, whereas one other is preventing for his job amid accusations that he didn’t rein in his officers.
Two different supervisors — Lt. Mark Garza and Sgt. Jorge “George” Gonzalez — had been accused by the division of making a “working setting that resulted within the creation of a police gang,” in line with an inside LAPD report. Each Garza and Gonzalez have sued the town, alleging that though they reported the wrongdoing as quickly as they turned conscious of it, they had been as a substitute punished by the LAPD after the scandal turned public.
In line with Munoz’s report and interviews with division sources, Lloyd was nearly single-handedly accountable for breaking the Mission case open.
It started with a grievance in late December 2022 made by a motorist who stated he was pulled over and searched with out cause in a neighboring patrol space. Lloyd realized that the officers concerned had a sample of not documenting site visitors stops — exploiting loopholes within the division’s auditing system for dashboard and physique cameras. The extra Lloyd dug, the extra cases he uncovered of those so-called “ghost stops.”
A couple of months later, undercover Inside Affairs detectives started tailing the 2 concerned officers — one thing that Garza and Gonzalez each claimed they had been stored at midnight about.
As of final month, 4 officers concerned had been fired and one other 4 had pending disciplinary hearings the place their jobs hung within the steadiness. Three others resigned earlier than the division may take motion. The alleged ringleader, Officer Alan Carrillo, faces expenses of theft and “altering, planting or concealing proof.” Courtroom data present he was just lately supplied pretrial diversion by L.A. County prosecutors, which may spare him jail however require him to cease working in regulation enforcement. Carrillo has pleaded not responsible to the costs.
In an interview with The Instances, Gonzalez — the sergeant who’s dealing with termination — recalled a second throughout a recorded interrogation that he discovered so troubling he contacted the police union director Jamie McBride, to specific concern. McBride, he stated, went to Lloyd’s boss, then-deputy chief Michael Rimkunas, searching for Lloyd’s elimination from Inside Affairs.
The transfer failed. Lloyd stored his job.
Rimkunas confirmed the alternate with the police union chief in an interview with The Instances.
He stated that whereas he couldn’t talk about Lloyd particularly resulting from state personnel privateness legal guidelines, generally the division assigns higher-profile Inside Affairs circumstances to detectives with a confirmed monitor report.
Gonzalez, although, can’t shake the sensation that Lloyd crossed the road in making an attempt to crack him throughout an interrogation.
He stated that at one level whereas Lloyd was asking questions, the detective casually flipped over his cellphone, which had been sitting on the desk. On the again of the protecting case, Gonzalez stated, was a grim reaper sticker.
“After which as he turned it he checked out me as if to get a response from me,” Gonzalez stated. “It was undoubtedly a means of making an attempt to intimidate me for positive.”
