Part 162: An LAPD Whistleblower – The Los Angeles Police Protective League vs. Commander Lillian Carranza

Published March 26, 2025.

Mar 27, 2025

LAPD Commander Lillian Carranza as seen in 2023 with K9 Bosco from her promotion to Operations-Central Bureau by Chris Haston (From X Post).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

In a stunning, if not surprising, and costly defeat, the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL) has suffered a major legal defeat in having its case against two high-ranking leaders in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) dismissed with prejudice on Monday, March 24, by Superior Court Judge Bruce Iwasaki. Despite prior setbacks last December, the powerful union, which represents the rank and file, had refiled its second amended complaint against Commander Lillian Carranza and Deputy Chief Marc Reina. Reina was an addition to the original filing made last August. The dismissal came after a challenge for a second time that its legal cause of action was defective, known as a demurrer. The lawsuit had tested the legal limits of California’s law on computer hacking and, more broadly, the relationship between LAPD’s progressive leadership and its union’s influence over public opinion.

The allegations announced at a press conference last August had been sweeping, including claims of violations of California’s computer hacking law, Penal Code Section 502, unfair competition, fraud, and conspiracy. Yet in the end, the claims proved to be a paper tiger with an exceptionally weak legal basis revolving around the completion of surveys issued by the union to Carranza and Reina by the union itself. This led to a counter that the case itself amounted to “entrapment” by private counsel for Carranza, with Reina’s city attorney arguing that the claim was akin to a case where a “teenager accesses Budweiser’s website” being “subject to criminal liability.” In the end, Carranza and Reina didn’t dispute so much that they may or may not have taken the LAPPL’s surveys emailed out in relation to contract negotiations, but rather that there was little harm in doing so. Why the LAPPL felt this was worthy of an outside investigation costing $150,000 plus the price of legal representation remains the big question worth asking. Still, there are many questions left unanswered.

In not proceeding, the case allowed the investigation report by the firm Sourced Intelligence to remain secret. At the center of the alleged intrusion was a commonly used software platform, Survey Monkey, used in workplaces around the country. A spokesman for the LAPPL didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling. What started with a bang, a full press conference led by the LAPPL’s General Counsel Robert Rico, ended with a whimper. This was just the latest muscle flex for the union, which has made more than $5 million in political expenditures in Los Angeles, including recent donations following the November election to the accounts of Councilwoman Traci Park ($1100) and Councilmember Tim McOsker ($900). Both face re-election in November 2026; spokespersons didn’t respond to requests for comment on their relationship with the LAPPL, a powerful force in local politics.

Lillian Carranza’s name had been in the mix for Chief of the LAPD before the selection of Chief Jim McDonnell by Mayor Karen Bass. A whistleblower, Carranza had sued the LAPD in 2017 over misrepresentation of crime statistics, alleging that they were underreported. The City of Los Angeles prevailed in 2019, going as far as to claim that she had not engaged “in a protected activity” and “did not blow any whistle.” Carranza was later harassed with a sexualized image meant to look like her, yet LAPD’s investigation wasn’t able to determine the source. A lawsuit over the harassment resulted in a $4 million judgment in her favor. It’s unclear if Carranza would have been a viable candidate given the intense competition, but undoubtedly the negative headlines generated by the LAPPL’s lawsuit were calculated moves done with the endorsement of union leadership that in recent years has been incredibly politically active. Except this time the LAPPL took a big loss even if no lesson was learned.

Since the November 2022 election of Mayor Karen Bass, during which the LAPPL expended significant sums on negative advertising in support of Rick Caruso, the union has sought better relations with the sitting mayor. Undoubtedly, they had much work to do after Bass’s campaign attorney had gone as far as calling their onslaught “defamatory” in writing. Last August, along with announcing its lawsuit, the LAPPL produced a YouTube video entitled “CARRANZA SHOES.” The video billed the matter as a “cheating caper.” It quoted Carranza’s survey response about herself: “She needs to stop caring so much about a department that does not care for her.” In legally attacking a victim of sexual harassment, the question may now be just how costly this could become for the LAPPL should Carranza pursue legal action beyond recovery of her attorney’s fees. California law has actually become stronger in this regard.

In passing Assembly Bill 933, which went into effect on January 1, 2024, victims in California gained a powerful legal tool to defend themselves, including against retaliatory lawsuits. The act specifies that its scope includes “cyber sexual bullying” within its provisions. Perhaps the biggest question would be whether the union’s surveys, which it just argued were highly protected communications, were covered since they didn’t directly employ or count Carranza as a member even as she was obligated to seek benefits from them through a separate union that represents LAPD leadership. This claim that she was ineligible to take their survey and arguably did so under credentials that didn’t directly line up with her name was the underpinning of the LAPPL’s legal arguments against Carranza. The overarching argument was weak.

AB 933 was designed to protect survivors from defamation lawsuits, but does it apply to a multi-count lawsuit, much less communications with a lawsuit that were defamatory? Even without proving the source of the image had a relationship to a sustained campaign of harassment against Lillian Carranza, does California’s defamation law protect her from legal intimidation even when the legal course of action hasn’t been defamation but rather a litany of claims such as those in this case: computer hacking, unfair competition, fraud, and conspiracy? A spokesman for the LAPPL previously denied that they were engaged in whistleblower retaliation against Carranza, much less Marc Reina, who leads the LAPD’s training bureau and has also seemingly run afoul of the LAPPL. The union routinely provides representation for officers accused of misconduct. It’d be difficult not to infer that this filing wasn’t an extension given the well-known pattern of retaliation against whistleblowers and especially in policing. What message did this send to others in LAPD and beyond?

That the motive of the lawsuit wasn’t more clearly exposed may be the one downside of having it dismissed. Lillian Carranza could potentially take legal action in this case against the LAPPL, but doing so would come with its own potential risks. The LAPPL would undoubtedly deny that the filing was malicious. Moreover, they wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Carranza might be seen as “litigious” for being a whistleblower. Former LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said as much about Carranza in 2017, stating that "she has a history of instituting litigation when she believes she is not being promoted." Yet in a city that has never had a female police chief, Carranza, in taking such legal action, would undoubtedly put the troubled department’s internal culture under a media spotlight. The growing power of the rank-and-file union isn’t so much that it advocates for members these days as it’s in the ability of the union to successfully lambast opponents.

Case in point was the 2023 showdown between the LAPPL and newly elected Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, as recounted by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. After one of Soto-Martinez’s aides called for an extra patrol to protect his car, in what was termed “Lexusgate,” the LAPPL came out strong against the “abolitionist” councilmember, with League Vice President Jerretta Sandoz stating unabashedly, “This is why some people don’t trust politicians.” The LAPPL similarly battled with former LA City Council President Nury Martinez before she resigned following the LA Fed Tapes scandal, which literally put a smile on the face of LAPPL Director Jamie McBride in a television interview with Fox Business News. In recent months, the union has gone after Carranza aggressively for allegedly failing to stop protestors who had assaulted police during an anti-Donald Trump protest over his immigration policies.

Critics such as activists with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles had charged that in selecting Chief Jim McDonnell to lead the LAPD, Mayor Karen Bass had sought to placate the LAPPL. To date, McDonnell, even in disputing the union’s claims about Carranza’s management of the January 26 protest, sought to avoid direct conflict. The imbroglio, which saw LAPD officers apparently unable to make arrests due to not having their citation books, left normally more-conservative journalist CeCe Woods writing in The Current Report defending Carranza, opining that “The public deserves to hear the full story, not just the version that LAPPL wants them to believe” after criticizing another commander for failing to control the protest. The LAPPL’s ability to simply pay for that version hit a major stumbling block, at least for now, in a judge that wouldn’t just play along in pushing an altered version of events. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

LAPD’s broken internal culture, hampered by a discipline system that nobody likes, a glaring lack of leadership in control right on up to the Police Commission, and a city that alternately distrusts and vocally endorses its actions seems unlikely to change. New Chief McDonnell’s leadership has focused more on the basics of policing than his predecessor, Michel Moore, who, in navigating the culture war that’s followed the Trump age into George Floyd and beyond, has largely avoided the integrity questions that hampered Moore’s leadership, whether on LAPD shootings or its relationship with special interests. McDonnell most certainly isn’t throwing Carranza under the bus, nor does he seem to want to be on the LAPPL’s, but how does a chief of the third-largest police force in the country deal with a troublesome department, much less a determined whistleblower? Perhaps the biggest challenge in the end might be the city’s finances, which are deteriorating and potentially threaten raises for LAPPL’s membership.

If LAPD isn’t tearing itself apart, at least according to some, it’s on the path toward bankruptcy. Even as it keeps its secrets, the police union at some point is going to have to face the fact that the 8.1% budget increase it got in 2025-2026 on a $2.14 billion budget isn’t sustainable. Trying to make an example out of Lillian Carranza might be good red meat for its membership, but it’s not going to pay the bills. For years in an ongoing public debate about the appropriate size of the department, conservative voices such as Rick Caruso have called for a bigger department. Caruso wanted 1,500 more officers, which at the time would have put the force at 11,000. Now LAPD has less than 9,000 officers on the job, and yet crime is going down in a number of categories. Experienced leaders such as Carranza are inarguably valuable.

If the goal of a union such as the LAPPL is ultimately to secure a contract, which in its lawsuit against Carranza it argued had been undermined by her survey responses, you have to wonder what it’s going to cook up next. It’s one thing to have Fox News on speed-dial or to rain tweets on your opponents, much less litigation or campaign donations, but another to partner in effective leadership. Headlines can come relatively cheap, and those union dues will keep coming, but the real question might be the opportunity cost of alienating itself from leadership with failed lawsuits. LAPD took no public position on what was undoubtedly construed as a private matter.

It seems exceedingly unlikely that LAPD is going to issue some statement that Carranza, who just might be the most well-known senior leader in LAPD, is going to issue a statement that she prevailed in a legal hearing. If the goal here was reputational damage against Carranza to feed a machine-like approach to keeping the rank-and-file from questioning the thin blue line, it’s likely worked to a great degree.

Even as LAPD moves into the 21st century demographically, the ability of those who want the old-style of policing, and not really in a good way, to go unquestioned and ultimately un-professionalized does shedding a legacy of racism, much less sexism, mean that progress has been achieved? LAPD just might be the most internally complicated organization, public or private, in the entire country, even more so than in other major cities, where access to media markets is more restricted and the courts are less open to potential legal manipulation. Bad lawsuits still can get quite far.

With a degree of finality, the failed effort to tar Lillian Carranza and Marc Reina for being good cops by other cops who refuse to admit there are some seriously bad cops in their ranks might simply be a primely unsuccessful culture war battle. An expensive loss, the overarching claims made by the LAPPL in its lawsuit will leave many wondering whether they should complete its union survey honestly next time it comes time to negotiate contracts. Would you give information to a union that might leak your response in a YouTube video? Certainly, these actions deserve more scrutiny to make the LAPD an organization that functions at a higher-level.

In Los Angeles, the never-ending stew of politics, investigations, and media just becomes less transparent and even more fraught for those who, even in moments of frustration, say what they really think. Rick Caruso, famously, as President of the Police Commission, yanked Chief Bernard Parks in favor of William Bratton, a management decision he has publicly held as gospel. In response to a California Public Records Request for emails from Caruso regarding McDonnell’s selection, LAPD, after citing its ability to exempt records from disclosure, stated that there were no “responsive” records. Caruso’s influence with the union likely remains strong.

LAPD leadership’s ability to command its rank-and-file, much less the ability of its chief to operate independently, including in protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, remains the multi-million-dollar question. It’s one thing to have a weak mayorship, a dysfunctional city council, and a police department with more question marks than anyone would really like, but it’s another to have a police force with the full confidence of its population. While there has been arguably some progress in recent years in modernizing the department and improving its culture, the Police Commission under President Erroll Southers and Rasha Gerges-Shields has its work cut out, and for now you’ve got to wonder if they’ve already heard this news. Who’s really running the show at LAPD, steady leadership or an increasingly pugilistic police labor union?

Note: If you are a law enforcement whistleblower in need of assistance, know that there is helpful support available to you through great organizations like the Lamplighter Project and Whistleblowers of America that can be readily accessed.

Link: March 24, 2025 Ruling of Judge Bruce Iwasaki RE: Case 24STCV19837

Link: LAPD union sues police commander over allegations of fraud and unlawful computer data access

Link: Tim McOsker, former political aide and LAPD union lobbyist, launches bid for City Council

Link: Inside the LAPD chief search: Secretive meetings, surprise names, leaked details

Link: Sourced Intelligence

Link: LAPD Captain's Suit Over Alleged Crime Underreporting Dismissed

Link: $4-million verdict for LAPD captain over fake nude photo shared by cops

Link: Bass campaign calls police union ad ‘defamatory,’ demands that TV stations stop airing it

Link: CARRANZA SHOES

Link: AB-933 Privileged communications: incident of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination. (2023-2024)

Link: LAPD Chief Calls Crime Underreporting Claims 'Damn Lies'

Link: A police abolitionist City Council member and the LAPD union’s tense tango