“I see it as the wrong message to a public that desperately wants to be close to us, desperately wants to trust us. “I cannot dismiss it as a little club or as a social group,” Baca said. And they literally destroyed their lives, many of them, with this nonsense of the drinking and the tattoos. “Many of them regretted it the day after, when they got a little sober,” said Baca, “especially when their wife saw the thing and was very upset.” He said the deputies were “caring, hard-working, not prejudiced. He thinks many deputies acquired the tattoos for reasons no deeper than peer pressure and heavy drinking. Civil Rights Commission-which is to address the issue in a report due in April-has called for the names of tattooed deputies to be cross-referenced with excessive force allegations.įor all his objections, Baca believes such a registry might actually absolve the groups of the most serious suspicions. “Obviously, it’s a lot more serious than getting a Boy Scout patch.”īut David Lynn, a private investigator who testified on the deputy groups to the U.S. They’ve been in a deputy-involved shooting and they’ve survived it,” he said.
#Grim reaper tattoo code#
One Viking tattoo displayed in court bore the number “998"-the code for “officer-involved shooting"-Reed said, giving the impression that such shootings were celebrated as a rite of passage.įormer Undersheriff Jerry Harper, who was Baca’s boss until he retired after the November sheriff’s race, said the 998 tattoos reflect a camaraderie not unlike that of soldiers who have experienced combat for the first time. “There is a bond, not just of being a fellow deputy, but being a Viking, that gives you the comfort that no one is going to write the report that will hang you out to dry,” Reed said. for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense Fund, who worked on the class-action suit involving the Vikings, thinks the deputy groups encourage a pattern of excessive force. Kevin Reed, an attorney with the National Assn. In one case pending in federal court, attorneys want two deputies who allegedly shot a man to death to show whether their ankles bear the Vikings insignia. Some of the lawyers now suing the Sheriff’s Department on behalf of clients who say they were beaten, shot or harassed have demanded that deputies accused of misconduct roll down their socks and reveal if they have one of the distinguishing tattoos. “It doesn’t seem to be good for morale or community relations.” “They are generally perceived as rogue cops who have often been accused of acting in very inappropriate ways in the street,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the city’s human relations commission. One deputy characterized the Lennox Reapers as “cowboys,” and another complained that the Regulators were “acting just like Vikings.” Some senior officers say the groups provide emotional support for deputies who contend with a grueling regimen of violent crime and an 11-to-7 overnight schedule that strains family life. A new group-the Regulators-has formed at Century station, and even suburban deputies are thinking about getting tattoos. The county paid $9 million in fines and training costs to settle the lawsuits in 1996.īut today, groups like the Grim Reapers are enjoying renewed popularity among young deputies, who say the groups are fraternities that bond on morale-building values, not race. Membership swelled in the 1980s at overwhelmingly white sheriff’s stations that were islands in black and Latino immigrant communities.Ī federal judge hearing class-action litigation against the department described the most well-known of the groups, the Lynwood Vikings, as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” and found that deputies had engaged in racially motivated hostility.
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Senior officers say they began with the creation of the Little Devils at the East Los Angeles station in 1971. The groups-with macho monikers like the Pirates, Vikings, Rattlesnakes and Cavemen-have long been a subculture in the country’s largest Sheriff’s Department and, in some cases, an inside track to acceptance in the ranks. Then a street cop at the Lennox station, this deputy has risen to a key position in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department-along with other members of his “club.” The somber image of Death’s hooded skull and scythe tattooed onto the inside of the deputy’s left ankle in 1989 initiated him into a select fraternity called the Grim Reapers.