11/22/2023 0 Comments Compton courthouse tattoo![]() About one month earlier, the New York Times profiled the two deputies for a piece about the perils of policing Compton, “made famous by violence and gangster rap.” As Aldama and Orrego approached a group of young people outside what they claimed was a hangout for the South Side Compton Crips, Orrego told the reporter, “Every time you get three of these guys together, you know they have a gun somewhere.” Yet while the deputies boasted that they had seized 18 guns from the streets during a nine-week period, they admitted they found no weapons when the reporter rode along with them on their shift. ![]() Mizrain Orrego was at the wheel of the black-and-white unit, and Samuel Aldama was in the front passenger seat. A pair of deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department pulled their patrol vehicle to a stop in front of 401 North Wilmington Avenue in downtown Compton, a gray stucco building housing Flamingos Beauty Salon and González & Luis Lawn Mower Shop & Repairs. The deputy gangs have long been a problem, but Sweeney’s campaign was rooted in events that took place the night of August 25, 2016. “If history remembers my 40-year career, I hope it’s because my work began eradicating deputy gangs from the department.” “I feel that I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish - get this out in the open,” Sweeney told me. “I’m not saying this in a self-aggrandizing fashion,” Sweeney said in November, “but $30 million of that $55 million have been my verdicts and settlements against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department just in the last seven or eight years.” In 2020, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors estimated that legal settlements related to deputy-gang misconduct have cost taxpayers $55 million. Sweeney has built his career, as well as a sizable fortune, on exposing violent gangs that reside on the other side of the thin blue line - within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. These “deputy gangs,” as they are known, have been accused of hunting down Black men and framing the victims as instigators. “I mean, what’s the last time you see somebody at the DA’s office driving a Rolls-Royce?” Sweeney- who is tall, walks with a careful grace, and has freckled skin, a thin mustache, and closely cropped hair-is more like the Atticus Finch of the world of police-misconduct litigation: a gentleman who is brutally effective. “He was a real peacock,” Sweeney remembered recently. Nor does Sweeney much resemble Johnnie Cochran, a mentor to the young Sweeney when they worked together at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in the late 1970s. John Sweeney, a 70-year-old civil-rights attorney from Los Angeles, doesn’t have the name recognition of Ben Crump, who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd and appears, Zelig-like, seemingly whenever there is a major police shooting.
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