A Los Angeles County jury has awarded a former LAPD sergeant $4.5 million after finding that department officials retaliated against him when he reported another officer for billing Metro Transit for overtime work that was never performed.
The lawsuit by Randy Rangel, who spent 32 years with the department before retiring in 2023, was the latest in a string of lawsuits involving officers from the department’s Transit Services Division over allegations of overtime fraud, gender discrimination and lax supervision. Often, the officers who sued alleged they faced backlash from their bosses after having pointed fingers at their own colleagues.
In Rangel’s case, he said his troubles started in February 2018 when he alleged a sergeant, Humberto Najera, was overreporting overtime.
Rangel claimed he reported the issue up the chain of command on at least two occasions in 2018 and 2019 but the department never launched an investigation.
Instead, he said in his lawsuit, he became the target of a months-long retaliation and harassment campaign. He eventually lost his position as captain’s adjutant, considered a springboard to promotion, and suspects that someone from the command staff started a false rumor that he was sleeping with a civilian secretary.
Fearing further retaliation, Rangel said, he filed a complaint anonymously with Internal Affairs in February 2020.
After taking some paid time off to recover from shoulder surgery for an injury sustained on the job, Rangel’s suit said, he returned to work in September 2020 and discovered that his name was circulating as the source of the complaint. Under department rules, such information is supposed to be secret to protect whistleblowers.
The suit says that a supervisor informed him he was in the “crosshairs” of Najera and Lt. Leonard Perez, whom Rangel had accused of failing to investigate the overtime fraud.
The retired sergeant said he endured sarcastic quips about his work injury and, after an encounter in which officers under his command were accused of using force and not reporting it, colleagues mocked him about what they dubbed the “Rangel incident.”
Perez, he said, wrote him up for potential discipline, a move that hung over Rangel’s head until department higher-ups cleared him. Perez denied the allegations in court documents.
Rangel’s attorney, Tamar Arminak, said her client felt vindicated by the jury’s decision, after spending years trying to blow the whistle about a division that was essentially run as its own fiefdom.
Najera in particular, she said, benefited from his close relationship with Perez, the lieutenant, and other senior leadership. Even though he was being paid overtime by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Najera spent some of his shifts doing homework and other activities not related to his job, she said.
“Having his textbooks out, listening to lectures at his desk, not even giving a s—,” she said. “I mean, his [overtime] hours were insane.”
When reached on Monday, Najera said he’d been told not to discuss the case and directed questions to the LAPD’s press office, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The city attorney’s office, which defended the officers listed as defendants in the suit, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The final amount that the city pays out to Rangel may change, as such figures are often appealed and later hashed out in post-trial hearings.
Although some lawsuits are inevitable, the tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money spent to pay verdicts or settlements over police behavior has increasingly angered city officials and the public, particularly given the city’s dire financial straits. On social media last week, City Controller Kenneth Mejia reported that the city had paid out more than $107 million so far this fiscal year to settle police-related court cases.
Department officials are said to be quietly studying the problem of growing legal payouts, with the hope of figuring out ways to clamp down on behavior that can lead to such lawsuits.
“The culture was terrible. I mean it was all about greed,” said Heather Rolland, a former Transit Services detective. “It’s a good ol’ boys club.”
Rolland herself sued the city, alleging she faced retaliation and gender discrimination during her time with Transit Services, and a jury awarded her $949,000 last year.
She said the division’s leaders went to great lengths to hide the complaints from the MTA, out of fear that it would void its lucrative contract with the LAPD. The Police Department is one of several local law enforcement agencies that contract with MTA to patrol the county’s sprawling bus and rail system.
The LAPD is responsible for nearly three-quarters of the system and deploys, on average, 386 officers daily, more than half of whom are working overtime.
Apart from Rolland and Rangel, numerous other current and former division officers have filed lawsuits in recent years. One female officer alleged that the department went after her after she reported being groped under her ballistic vest and other sexual harassment on the job, while another officer alleged in his lawsuit that he was harassed after his colleagues found out that he was bisexual.
Brian Pratt, a Transit Services captain who supervised Rangel, filed his own retaliation lawsuit against the city.
So did a former Internal Affairs detective who says he was pressured by senior department officials to substantiate allegations made against Pratt. A sergeant who has been listed as a defendant in several suits, Ashraf “Andy” Hanna, took his own legal action against the city, claiming he was discriminated against because of his Egyptian heritage. Hanna’s case and the Internal Affairs detective’s claim both remain pending, with the city denying wrongdoing.
The post Retired LAPD sergeant gets $4.5 million in overtime fraud whistleblower lawsuit appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
