Having lived in LA county when I was younger (and poor, nearly homeless, etc.), I've seen plenty of gang-like behavior from the police: I doubt this article is exaggerated at all.
The UVA rape story was blatantly obviously false to any male who read it (no man is going to intentionally put his junk near a bed of broken glass, frat-bro gang rapist or no) but this particular article is simply about the details of a report created by the LA County Civilian Oversight Commission, so I'm not sure what attacks on Rolling Stone's (admittedly poor) credibility have to do with that.
> The UVA rape story was blatantly obviously false to any male who read it
That feels like 20/20 hindsight. There were certainly plenty of males who did believe it. I'll fess up, I was one of them. I believed it for 2 main reasons:
1. The story was outlandish, but I thought "you'd have to be insane to lie about this, with this much detail". Well, yeah, in retrospect, insane people exist.
2. Since there was so much detail, I thought there was plenty of stuff that could have been easily vetted, and given Rolling Stone's reputation, thought "for sure they have researched this." I honestly didn't realize at the time about the story being "too good to vet" phenomenon.
Yes, I learned a valuable lesson about consuming information with a more critical eye, and mea culpa. But I know I definitely wasn't the only male who originally believed the story.
At least for me, I immediately doubted the story and any of my friends that I discussed it with (most of whom hadn't actually read the article) did as well the moment I pointed out the broken glass. So probably a bit of bias on my part to assume everyone else felt the same way, sorry that you got taken in by their lies.
> this particular article is simply about the details of a report created by the LA County Civilian Oversight Commission, so I'm not sure what attacks on Rolling Stone's (admittedly poor) credibility have to do with that
This article dances around these “gangs” being deputy cliques with allegedly violent tendencies, not actual infiltration by LA street gangs. That smudging makes the lack of evidence for those violent tendencies or refusal to provide back-up easier to digest.
Is there any publication that has never published a false story? You need to accept stories from all media outlets on the merits of the story itself. There is clearly a lot of corroborating evidence with regard to gangs in the LASD.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-02/la-me-de... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-03/civilian...