A Los Angeles County ju judge awarded a former LAPD sergeant to $4.5 million after he discovered that department officials had retaliated against him when he reported another officer to claim a metro transit for overtime work that he had never been done.
The lawsuit by Randy Rangel, who spent 32 years in the department before resigning in 2023, was the latest in a series of lawsuits involving officers from the department’s Transportation Services division regarding overtime fraud, gender discrimination and LAX oversight claims. In many cases, the accused officers allegedly faced backlash from their superiors after pointing their fingers at their colleagues.
In the case of Rangel, he said his problems began in February 2018 when Sergeant Humberto Najera claimed he was reporting excessive overtime.
Rangel claimed it reported command chain issues at least twice in 2018 and 2019, but the department did not begin an investigation.
Instead, he said in his lawsuit that he became the target of a months-long retaliation and harassment campaign. He eventually loses his position as a captain’s aide, and considers a stepping stone for his promotion, suspecting that someone on the command staff has begun false rumors that he is sleeping with a private secretary.
Lengel said he filed anonymous complaint with the Home Affairs in February 2020, fearing further retaliation.
Rangel’s lawsuit returned to work in September 2020 after taking leave to recover from shoulder surgery due to a job injury and found his name circulating as the cause of the complaint. Department rules assume that such information is secret to protecting whistleblowers.
The lawsuit says the supervisor informed him that he was in the “crosshades” of Najera and Lt. Col. Leonard Perez.
The retired sergeant endured a sarcastic resignation about his labor injury and after an encounter where officers under his command were accused of using their force to not report it, his colleagues said they chuckled him for what he called the “Linger Incident.”
Perez wrote him for potential discipline. Perez denied the appeal of court documents.
Tamar Arminak, a lawyer for Rangel, said she felt her client had been proven in a ju-decision decision over the years trying to blow away the mouth about a division that was essentially carried out as its own territory.
In particular, Najera benefited from close relationships with Perez, the Chinese EU and other senior leaders, she said. Despite being overtime by the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, Najera has done some of his shifts to do homework and other activities that are not related to his work, she said.
“I don’t even give him his textbooks, listen to lectures at his desk and give them,” she said. “That means he [overtime] The time was unconventional. ”
When it arrived on Monday, Najera said she was told not to discuss the case and directed questions to the LAPD news agency. The City Attorney’s Office, which defended the officer listed as defendants in the suit, also declined to respond to a request for comment.
The final amount the city pays to Wrangel may change as such numbers are often appealed and later hashed out at post-trial hearings.
Some lawsuits are inevitable, but especially given the city’s tragic financial straits, the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent on police actions and paying settlements is becoming increasingly angry. On social media last week, city controller Kenneth Mezia reported that the city had so far paid more than $107 million to resolve police-related trials this fiscal year.
Department officials are said to be quietly studying the issue of increasing legal payments in the hopes of coming up with ways to crack down on actions that could lead to such lawsuits.
“The culture was terrible, and it all means it was greedy,” said Heather Roland, a former transit service detective. “It’s a good old boys’ club.”
Rolland himself sued the city and allegedly faced retaliation and gender discrimination during the time of transportation services, and the ju judge awarded $949,000 last year.
She said department leaders spent quite a bit of time hiding complaints from the MTA out of fear that they would nullify a lucrative contract with LAPD. The police department is one of several local law enforcement agencies that contract with the MTA to patrol the county’s vast bus and rail system.
LAPD is responsible for almost three-quarters of the system, with an average of 386 executives working daily, with overtime working.
Apart from Rolland and Rangel, many other current and former department officers have filed lawsuits in recent years. One female officer claimed that the department chased her after reporting that she was groped under her ballistic vest and other sexual harassment at work, but another officer claimed that he was harassed after his colleagues learned that he was bisecure.
Brian Pratt, the captain of the transportation services that overseen Lengel, filed his own retaliation lawsuit against the city.
And so were former interior detectives who say he was pressured to demonstrate allegations made against Pratt. Sergeant Ashraf Andy Hanna, listed as a defendant in several cases, took his own legal action against the city, claiming that he was discriminated against because of Egyptian heritage. Both Hannah’s case and the interior detective’s allegations are pending, and the city has denied any fraud.
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