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OP/ED - Every budget season in Los Angeles, a familiar chorus plays out at City Hall. The city controller sounds the alarm about ballooning liability payouts. DSA-backed councilmembers point to the dollar figures as evidence that the LAPD is out of control, in desperate need of more oversight and reform. The numbers are alarming enough that it’s easy to nod along. Last fiscal year alone, LAPD-related settlements totaled $155 million, enough to fund the city’s entire animal services and street lighting departments combined.
But before we agree that those numbers indict our police department, we owe it to ourselves to look at what the cases actually involve. Because when you dig into the details, the story the DSA wants to tell largely falls apart. What you find instead is a legal and liability system that is actively bankrupting our city while demonizing some of our finest public servants.
Let’s look at four of the largest recent payouts.
The Costco Shooting $17.7 Million
A federal jury awarded $17.7 million to the family of Kenneth French, a mentally disabled man who was shot and killed by off-duty LAPD Officer Salvador Sanchez inside a Costco in Corona, a city that is not Los Angeles. The incident began when French struck Sanchez from behind without warning while Sanchez was holding his toddler son. Sanchez, who believed he had been shot, drew his weapon and fired.
There are legitimate questions about Officer Sanchez’s judgment that day, and the LAPD ultimately fired him for violating use-of-force policy. But why is the City of Los Angeles writing a nearly $18 million check for something that happened off duty, outside city limits, at a wholesale store in Riverside County? The jury found that Sanchez was acting “within the scope of his employment” because he was carrying his department-issued firearm, a legal theory that, whatever its merit, has nothing to do with whether the LAPD as an institution failed anyone. The department didn’t deploy Sanchez to Costco. He was shopping with his family on his day off. Framing this payout as evidence of systemic LAPD misconduct is a profound stretch.
The Jesse Murillo Shooting $25.2 Million
A jury awarded approximately $24 million, later settled at over $25 million to the family of Jesse Murillo, a 32-year-old Navy veteran killed by two LAPD officers responding to a domestic disturbance in Canoga Park. Officers found Murillo outside wearing a gas mask and carrying what they believed to be a machete; it turned out to be a metal pull bar, with a hammer in his pocket. When officers confronted him, he sprinted in their direction. They opened fire.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office reviewed the shooting and declined to file charges, determining that the officers were legally justified. The Los Angeles Police Commission also initially cleared them, finding no policy violation. A federal jury ultimately disagreed, awarding a staggering sum. Reasonable people can debate what officers should do when a man charges them in the dark holding a bar above his head. But the idea that this case, cleared by prosecutors, cleared by the commission is proof of an out-of-control department strains credulity. It is proof of an unpredictable litigation environment that can second-guess split-second decisions in the comfort of a courtroom months or years after the fact.
The Trader Joe’s Shooting $9.5 Million
In 2018, LAPD officers were in pursuit of Gene Atkins, an armed suspect who had already shot his grandmother and was leading police on a high-speed chase. When Atkins fled into a Silver Lake Trader Joe’s while firing his weapon, officers returned fire. Tragically, one of those rounds struck and killed Melyda Corado, an assistant manager who was inside the store. The city settled for $9.5 million.
Melyda Corado’s death is genuinely heartbreaking. She was an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time, and her loss is a tragedy that deserves acknowledgment. But the cause of that tragedy was a violent fugitive who brought a gun battle into a crowded grocery store. Officers were returning fire at an armed maniac. The city’s culpability here is, at minimum, deeply debatable and yet the taxpayers wrote a nearly $10 million check.
The Workplace Harassment Case $9.5 Million
A series of workplace harassment lawsuits involving LAPD employees including cases within the department’s canine unit resulted in verdicts and settlements totaling approximately $9.5 million. Racial slurs, hostile work environments, and retaliation are serious allegations, and anyone found to have engaged in such conduct should face real consequences, including termination. There is no excuse for that behavior, full stop.
But consequences for bad actors and multimillion-dollar taxpayer-funded windfalls are two very different things. The existence of workplace misconduct, which exists in virtually every large organization in America does not justify the scale of these awards. It certainly doesn’t justify them being used as a club to argue that the department as a whole requires the kind of aggressive political oversight the DSA and its allies are pushing.
Taken together, these cases do not paint a portrait of a rogue police department. The Costco shooting happened in another city, on an officer’s day off. The Murillo shooting was cleared by the district attorney. The Trader Joe’s tragedy was caused by a gunman, not the LAPD. The harassment cases, while real, reflect the kind of workplace dysfunction that exists across government and private industry alike and do not belong in the same sentence as “police brutality.”
What these cases do illustrate is a legal system that has grown wildly untethered from proportionality, and a political environment in which every payout is weaponized to advance a predetermined narrative about law enforcement. The DSA’s councilmembers will cite these figures at every budget hearing as though the numbers speak for themselves. They don’t. The details matter, and the details tell a very different story.
Los Angeles has real public safety challenges. What it doesn’t need is for its elected officials to exploit liability settlements, many of questionable validity or staggering size to undermine the morale and reputation of a department doing an extraordinarily difficult job. Our city is being bankrupted not by rogue cops, but by an out-of-control legal system and the politicians content to let it keep running.
(Tim Gaspar is a Businessman and Candidate for L.A. City Council - West Valley)
