‘The sheriff who went rogue’: Alex Villanueva’s scandal-plagued tenure ends in LA

Villanueva was a lieutenant when he was elected in 2018 on a platform to clean up an agency that had repeatedly been the subject of investigations. More than a dozen LASD deputies had faced charges five years prior surrounding the beatings of incarcerated people; the top sheriff and his undersheriff were eventually imprisoned following federal obstruction and corruption cases. At trial, the undersheriff admitted he had a tattoo associated with a gang of officers that a judge said was a "neo-Nazi, white supremacist" group. 

 Villanueva has been accused of engaging in the same kind of cover-ups as his predecessors; while the county's inspector general has recently identified dozens of current deputies believed to be members of officer "cliques" and gangs, which are known for encouraging brutality, Villanueva has defied subpoenas to testify on the issue and issued legal threats aiming to prevent officials from using the term "deputy gang". He told the Guardian this year that the gangs were "a problem of perception, not reality", and that he didn't want to comply with "political subpoenas"...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/16/alex-villanueva-la-county-sheriff-loses-robert-luna