Fights, beatings and a birth: Videos smuggled out of L.A. jails reveal violence, neglect

The attack begins after less than a minute. Two dozen men are milling about a rec room in Men’s Central Jail when one of them takes a swing.

Others pile on, and soon half a dozen people are punching, kicking and stabbing. There are no jailers in sight — and no sign they even notice. Suddenly, after roughly a minute, the violence stops. The attackers seem to have grown bored, or maybe tired.

For the next 10 minutes, the victim paces and tries to clean up his own blood. A few onlookers go back to working out in the corner — until suddenly the beating resumes.

Finally, roughly 14 minutes after the attack began, deputies show up and order everyone to the ground.

The brutal 20-minute clip is one of a few dozen graphic videos from the past six years saved to a thumb drive picked out of the trash by one inmate, and later secreted out of the jail by another. Together they paint a picture of a jail system awash in far more violence and disarray than previously revealed to the public.

Several of the clips recently reviewed by The Times show stabbings and fist fights. One shows an inmate trying to kill himself, and another shows several jailers punching a man in the head as they try to subdue him. Still another shows a woman giving birth in the middle of a hallway, where her newborn falls out onto the jail floor in a puddle of blood.

Some of the videos, all apparently taken from the jails’ surveillance systems, show men so inured to violence that they continue on with their daily routine, working out and reading even as bloody brawls and beatings by deputies unfold feet away. Other clips highlight a troubling inattentiveness from jailers, who are slow to respond or leave vulnerable inmates unattended.

After learning of the thumb drive and reviewing two of the videos, Michele Deitch — a senior lecturer in criminal justice at University of Texas at Austin — said she was “utterly stunned” by the brutality and lack of oversight, particularly after watching the 20-minute clip.

“There was absolutely no supervision,” she said. “That that could be happening with cameras on and no one comes is mind-boggling.”

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, that was partly because the lengthy attack happened to take place between the guards’ regular rounds and partly because the cameras’ video feeds were not always monitored in real time.

Four years later, they still aren’t.

“We did not have the staff for that,” explained Assistant Sheriff Sergio Aloma, who oversees the jails. “We now have monitors in some staff stations but still do not have the staff to monitor them full-time.”

Officials were not immediately able to determine who made the compilation of videos or why, and Aloma said any investigation would be difficult without a copy of the drive that contained them.

“The safety and security of the people within our jails is of the utmost importance to us, and we will continue to provide the best care possible for them,” he added. “While these incidents took place before this administration, it is our duty to review these allegations and determine if the described events can be identified.”

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The origin story of the thumb drive — as told by the former inmate who came forward to The Times — is just as shocking as the videos on it.

By his account, it was more than a year ago that an inmate worker spotted the drive in the trash at Men’s Central Jail. With no way to know what it contained, the worker plucked it out of the garbage and began trying to sell it to other inmates.

The man who was interested offered him $50 of heroin, thinking the drive might contain movies that he and the other men could watch.

But once the men on his unit slipped it into the back of a TV, they realized that was not the case. They quickly took it out of the TV, and the man instead hung onto it, sometimes hiding it inside his body for weeks.

It was only once he was finally released that he was able to access a laptop and see everything on it. There were dozens of reports on arrests, crimes behind bars and uses of force — all authored by different people and stored in a folder labeled: “My Reports.” There were audio clips of assorted dispatch calls. Training manuals. Pictures of tattoos. And dozens of violent videos.

After spending time inside the jail, he wasn’t surprised by the violence — but he was surprised that someone had compiled so many videos of it over such a long time frame.

“There are things in there that could relate to training,” he said, noting that the surveillance clips were all stored in a folder labeled as training videos. “But what would be the training value of seeing a woman giving birth? Someone getting viciously stabbed? Someone trying to commit suicide? Stabbings? Riots? Does that all fall under the umbrella of training? I think they got a f— up sense of humor.”

Many of the videos cut off partway through fights and uses of force, seemingly making them less useful for some of the usual reasons jailers might need to review or collect such footage, including staff training, evidence retention or use-of-force review. Still, officials said at least one video — the clip of the woman giving birth — was used for training purposes at times.

At first, the former inmate — who has since been released but asked not to be named out of fear for his safety — wasn’t sure what to do with the drive. This year, he decided to allow a Times reporter to review close to two dozen of the videos, and publish excerpts from one.

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Some clips are unremarkable — if violent — but many are shocking. A few don’t include time stamps, but those that do are dated between 2017 and 2021. The majority feature different inmates and different deputies. Some are less than a minute long, but one of the longest is about 20 minutes.

A handful of the videos are from the county’s other jails, but most show inmate living quarters, recreation areas or hallways in the 60-year-old Men’s Central Jail, a persistently troubled dungeon-like facility that was at one time earmarked for closure by March of this year. That deadline came and went.

One of the videos from inside Men’s Central Jail shows footage of a hallway on the 2000 floor, where a shirtless man is seated alone on a bench with his back against the walls and his hands cuffed behind him. There’s a jailer standing watch as a line of inmates files past. Seconds later, a heavily tattooed inmate walks up and speaks to the handcuffed man.

The handcuffed man does not acknowledge him, instead pointedly turning his head away. The deputy shoos the tattooed man away, then quickly turns and walks off himself, leaving the handcuffed man defenseless and unattended.

Within seconds, the tattooed man circles back, bursting into the frame and punching the handcuffed inmate repeatedly, knocking him off the bench. The handcuffed man tries to back away, but his attacker continues pummeling him until a deputy — the same deputy who left them unattended — intervenes.

There’s no date on the video, so it’s not clear when the attack took place, and the short clip gives no indication of what happened to either of the inmates involved.

Another video inside the same jail is dated 2019 with a timestamp that reads 1:25 a.m. Even though the footage appears to be taken in the middle of the night, the camera shows an inmate sliding open the gate to slip into another man’s cell. There’s a sheet hung up in the doorway, giving the cell’s inhabitants some privacy — and also obscuring what comes next.

Seconds later, both men tumble out of the cell and into the walkway, where the attacker beats and stabs his half-dressed victim in an assault that moves back and forth in front of the cells. A little before the four-minute mark, the men draw close enough to the camera that the bloodstains on the attacker’s stomach come into focus. A little over five minutes into the clip, a jailer finally intervenes, blasting pepper spray from off-camera to break up the fight.

Yet another video from inside Men’s Central Jail shows a shot of a law library, dated early 2019. When the clip begins, there are no jailers present, but several men are sitting at booths researching or working, and a few more are ambling around the room.

Suddenly, a brawl breaks out when two men jump a third, brutally stomping him for about a minute.

Even though no guards arrive to intervene, after about a minute the men back off and the target of the attack stands up. They exchange words, and then the beaten man rushes at his attackers, who begin pounding him again.

By that point, several of the other men in the room have stopped working and turned around to watch the chaos. A few are still attempting to work as the violence unfolds behind them. When the video clip ends, there are still no guards in sight and the beating has not ended.

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Though many of the videos show inmates fighting with one another, one — labeled “Deputy Nightmare” — shows inmates attacking a guard, and a few show jailers restraining, beating or punching the people in their care.

One of the earliest video clips, dated April 2017, shows a common room in the jail’s gay and trans dorm. Two deputies are standing in the crowded room, talking to an inmate who is leaning over a card game. It’s not clear what the problem is, but suddenly one of the deputies moves to grab the inmate from behind. Seemingly surprised, the inmate tries to squirm away.

The deputies tackle him, and begin throwing punches. One appears to punch the man in the head repeatedly, as several other jailers join in the fray. After wrestling him to the ground, a deputy holds down his head, while others work to restrain his arms and legs as he bleeds onto the floor.

The video was one of two the former inmate who obtained them allowed The Times to share with experts. Lance Lowry, who spent 20 years as a corrections officer and sergeant in Texas prison system, was shocked by jailers’ response to such minor provocation.

“If you’re being assaulted, then that’s OK, and staff should try to defend themselves,” Lowry said. “But this isn’t MMA fighting, you’re not trying to knock them out.”

Jailers’ use of so-called “head strikes” — the term typically used in court filings to describe deputies punching inmates in the head — has long been a sore point for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

Just over a decade ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit alleging that “degrading, cruel and sadistic deputy attacks on inmates” had become a common occurrence — one that they said top Sheriff’s Department officials had known about and failed to address. Eventually, that suit led to a 2015 settlement agreement, with which the county has never fully complied.

Though lawyers representing the county emphasized in recent court filings that the deputies are punching inmates in the head far less frequently than they used to, a surveillance video that came to light earlier this month showed apparently unprovoked brutality still occurring at the hands of staff.

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One of the few clips on the thumb drive that does not show any type of violence is labeled “Jail Baby Fetus.” The location and date are cut off, but the clip opens with a shot of a woman sitting in a wheelchair that’s been left in a jail hallway. Her head nods and lolls about, but she’s otherwise motionless.

Suddenly, she gives birth, and her newborn falls onto the jail floor. The woman doesn’t reach down to get the child or move her arms, which seem to be affixed to the arms of the wheelchair.

One guard responds immediately, picking up the baby and calling for help. Just as guards begin flocking to the scene, the video cuts off.

Jail officials told The Times that both the mother and her baby survived. Since then, Aloma — the assistant sheriff — said the video has sometimes “has been used for training purposes in hopes it never happens again.”

Though the clip doesn’t show staff giving any first aid or CPR, Aloma said the video was used as part of the first aid and CPR curriculum “to show anything can happen.”

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Though all of the videos on the drive predate the current administration, it’s not clear how much has changed. Allegations outlined in several major federal lawsuits continue to detail poor living conditions and persistent violence behind bars. And officials say there still aren’t enough staff to consistently monitor video.

But inmate advocates say there’s been some progress: On Thursday, the county agreed to create mental health treatment beds that could help divert people from jail and hopefully lead to better conditions for people still there.

The Sheriff’s Department said this week that after the 2019 attack, jailers began doing random checks between their scheduled rounds in the hopes of preventing such extended violence.

The victim of that attack was hospitalized but ultimately survived, Aloma said, and two inmates were criminally charged.

“The investigation did not find cause for staff discipline,” he added, “as procedures in place at the time were followed.”

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LA Times Today: Videos smuggled out of L.A. jails reveal violence, neglect

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