California bars police from using LAPD records in gang database. Critics want it axed

As a scandal over false and inaccurate gang identifications by Los Angeles police officers widens, California’s top cop on Tuesday stopped law enforcement agencies around the state from using department records included in a controversial statewide database. “It should now be obvious to everyone: CalGang must change.” As calls for police reforms have intensified in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, criminal justice advocates have pushed Becerra to put a state moratorium on use of the system, citing the attorney general’s slowness to create new regulations meant to curtail abuses. On Tuesday, LAPD Chief Michel Moore presented an audit of the police department’s use of the gang database to the city’s civilian Police Commission, which found widespread inconsistencies in how officers were using the database and gathering information on subjects. The review found LAPD’s entries into CalGang to be “inconsistent, unreliable and unpredictable, and as such will, at the very least, be perceived of as unfair and untrustworthy.” The department’s “haphazard” use of the database in general, as the audit described it, was in addition to the more serious and willful misuses alleged by Lacey’s office — the scope of which are still not fully known.