Los Angeles police officers have opened fire 25 times so far this year, nearly matching the total number of shooting incidents for all of 2024 in less than seven months.
After the latest incident, in which police fatally shot a man with a replica rifle in Boyle Heights on Monday, LAPD officers have shot 21 people, killing nine, according to Police Department records.
It’s the highest total at this point in the year since 2018, the records show. Last year by mid-July, officers had opened fire 18 times — striking 14 people and killing eight. The year ended with 29 shootings.
The Boyle Heights shooting capped a series of four LAPD shootings in two weeks that one oversight official called a “troubling trend.”
At Tuesday’s meeting of the Board of Police Commissioners, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said the uptick in shootings by officers has been driven in part by increasingly combative suspects, most of whom appear to be armed.
The police shootings come even as violent crime has been dropping citywide. McDonnell said more incidents are stemming from calls for service rather than “self-initiated” police activity.
The chief said he asked the department’s Critical Incident Review Division to analyze cases from 2025 and 2024. The internal review found an increase in the use of so-called “intermediate force” weapons designed to incapacitate individuals, which McDonnell called a sign that officers were trying to de-escalate violent encounters before resorting to deadly force.
McDonnell said this year’s rise in shootings is linked to more people being armed with firearms or replica weapons. There were 10 such cases in all of 2024 but already seven this year, he said.
The presence of weapons — real or fake — “makes it incredibly difficult for officers to assess the threat in the moment,” McDonnell said.
Without offering numbers, the chief also pointed to a rise in assaults on police officers. He cited a July 5 incident in Exposition Park in which an officer sustained gunshot wounds to the legs and a graze wound to the cheek during a shoot-out with an armed suspect.
In that incident, Southwest Division gang officers had been on patrol when they noticed that a man, later identified as Ernesto Sepulveda, 26, appeared to be riding a bicycle while armed. Officers tried to detain Sepulveda, but he fled and a foot pursuit ensued, McDonnell said.
At some point during the chase, McDonnell said, the man turned and fired at officers. The suspect’s gun jammed as he fled into a nearby park, where officers arrested him.
Prosecutors have since charged Sepulveda with two counts of premeditated attempted murder against a peace officer. The wounded officer is expected to make a full recovery, McDonnell said.
Another police shooting occurred on July 10, when 77th Division gang officers killed James Tullous, 63, after seeing him emerge from a car with a gun in his hand. Police learned that Tullous has been involved in an earlier confrontation that ended with him shooting at another man.
Three days later, Newton officers were called to a report of man who had stopped his car in middle of intersection and began “swinging a sword” around. When police arrived, they encountered 36-year-old Gurpreet Singh, who led them on a brief pursuit that ended in the area of Crypto.com Arena downtown.
Several bystander videos posted on social media showed Singh getting out of a vehicle encircled by police cruisers and moving toward an officer while holding a machete. The footage captured the moment when police opened fire and Singh crumbled to the ground.
LAPD shootings bottomed out with a 30-year low of 26 in 2019. The annual tally has been uneven in the years since — rising as high as 34 in 2023. Department officials say that total is far below levels seen in the 1990s.
Critics argue that, still too often, LAPD officers needlessly escalate encounters through aggressive tactics to the point where deadly force becomes necessary.
On Tuesday, the increase in shootings drew stinging criticism from some speakers at the Commission, as well as the concern of at least one commissioner, Teresa Sanchez-Gordon, who noted that the increase is coming while homicides are on pace to reach their lowest levels since the 1960s.
As of June 28, the city had recorded 116 slayings compared with 152 in the same period last year — mirroring a national trend that has seen homicide rates falling the years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I find that to be a troubling aspect of all of this,” she said.
After McDonnell promised that the department would take a hard look at each shooting, she requested that the commission be provided with reports to inform a decision on whether the incidents were in or out of policy.
LAPD guidelines say that, with few exceptions, officers may only fire their weapons when there is imminent danger of death or serious injury.
The post Shootings by LAPD on the rise as officers open fire 4 times in 2 weeks appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
