Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose tenure was largely defined by refusing to enforce local government’s vaccine mandates for deputies amid a soaring crime wave, deemed an oversight commission’s latest report on so-called “deputy gangs” just another “political hit job.”
Villanueva contends that a 70-page report by the Los Angeles County Civilian Oversight Commission, which comes several months after he stepped down in the wake of November’s election defeat, was meant as “character assassination” from defund-the-police supporters who are afraid he’ll pursue elected office again. The report found “deputy cliques,” which often devolve into “deputy gangs,” undermine the chain of command and operate as several active groups “engaged in harmful, dangerous, and often illegal, behavior.”
“They’re politically motivated. That’s all. They don’t care about the truth,” Villanueva told Fox News Digital about the commission in a phone interview this week. “It’s not just defund. . . . [T]hey want to discredit and they want to delegitimize law enforcement. What better way than to say, ‘Hey, they’re all a bunch of crooks’? That’s the implication when they’re trying to accuse people of being deputy gang members without a shred of evidence. Real evidence.”
Villanueva called on Special Counsel Bert Deixler, who led the county watchdog’s investigation, “to testify under oath about all the false information he provided.”
EX-LOS ANGELES SHERIFF ALEX VILLANUEVA BLASTED OVER ‘DEPUTY GANGS’ IN NEW SCATHING WATCHDOG REPORT
“I’ve been speaking to that oversight commission since I took office, and they grew increasingly hostile to the sheriff’s department, and they lost any legitimacy, because it became a political arm of the Board of Supervisors like an attack dog,” Villanueva said Thursday. “And I participated with their ad hoc committee about the issue. We gave them all the information that we had.”
“They deliberately excluded anything that…
Read the full article here