LAPD cops shot 21 bystanders in 10 years. How does it keep happening?
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- The Times analyzed 10 years worth of LAPD shooting data, finding 21 instances where officers hit fellow cops or bystanders, including three deaths.
- More than 100 times, police fired rounds in crowded areas, or struck occupied buildings or vehicles.
- Officers are rarely — if ever — punished for hitting or endangering bystanders.
Israel Hernandez heard the faint whine of sirens outside his Wilmington apartment and looked up just in time to see a minivan crash into another vehicle as police gave chase.
Two LAPD officers jumped out of their squad car and took cover behind its bulletproof doors, weapons drawn. Hernandez could hear them barking commands at the driver to come out with his hands in the air.
Instead, the suspected gang member behind the wheel stuck a handgun out of his window and squeezed off several shots in the officers’ direction. The cops returned fire.
One of the police bullets whizzed past the driver and punched through the wall of Hernandez’s second-story apartment several hundred feet away, passing in and out of his leg.
The incident was one of at least 21 in the last decade in which LAPD officers shot a fellow cop or bystander, including three who were killed.
The police sometimes aimed at people wielding guns, knives or blunt objects — but occasionally their targets were armed with nothing at all, according to a Times analysis of more than 350 cases over the past decade in which officers fired their weapons. In more than a quarter of those incidents, police shot with citizens or other officers in their line of fire.
Looking back on the 2017 incident where he was wounded, Hernandez said, he was shocked by how nonchalant officers were about his close call.
“One of those cops comes upstairs, and he goes: ‘Don’t worry, today was your lucky day. It just went through [your leg]. You should go buy a scratch-it lottery ticket,’” Hernandez recalled in an interview with The Times.
There is no national data on how many bystanders are struck by police bullets, and the LAPD’s own records on such shootings can be incomplete. The Times reviewed thousands of pages of police documents, body camera video, lawsuits, court testimony and dozens of interviews. The cases identified are likely a fraction of the true total, experts say, because police do not always keep track of stray rounds.
A complaint reviewed by The Times accuses officers of voicing open discrimination against potential recruits and colleagues based on race, sex and sexual orientation.
Despite policies and training meant to limit lethal force in crowded areas, cops are rarely — if ever — punished for hitting or endangering bystanders. Discipline records are private under state laws, making it unclear how often cops faced serious penalties for accidentally shooting a member of the public.
Department policy encourages officers to be mindful of their surroundings before pulling the trigger, but records show that LAPD officers have inadvertently fired bullets that shattered side-view mirrors, shot off a fellow officer’s gas mask and sent restaurant-goers diving for cover.
Bystander shootings sometimes play out at lightning speed at the end of pursuits. Roughly half of the incidents identified by The Times involved confrontations with people in behavioral crises.
Though police shootings are intensely scrutinized, they are relatively rare. In 2024, LAPD officers intentionally fired their weapons at people 29 times, falling from 34 the year before and far below levels seen in the 1990s. Officers have fired their weapons six times so far this year.
LAPD guidelines say that, with few exceptions, officers may only fire their weapons when there is imminent danger of death or serious injury. They are also permitted to shoot at fleeing suspects, but only those suspected of violence who pose a “substantial risk” if not apprehended.
The civilian commission that oversees the LAPD has given officers great leeway in deciding when to fire their weapons, even when they fail to take cover, communicate poorly and commit other tactical errors leading up to a shooting. In half of the cases where a bystander was injured or killed, the commission found the lethal force was within department policy.
LAPD spokesperson Jennifer Forkish responded to a detailed list of questions from The Times with a statement that said no “officer goes to work intending to use force — much less deadly force — but they are often forced to act swiftly to protect themselves and the public from imminent threats.”
Linda Becerra Moran, 30, had reported being held against her will in a motel room as a possible victim of sex trafficking. Police said they opened fire after she moved toward them with a knife.
The department offers “extensive training,” the statement said, including “virtual reality simulations that reinforce accuracy, situational awareness, and de-escalation tactics.”
“The presence of bystanders does not prevent an officer from defending themself or others in the face of an immediate threat of serious bodily harm or death,” the statement said. “In these critical moments, the priority is always the preservation of life — both the officer’s and the public’s.”
‘The round doesn’t care who it kills’
The families of those shot by police, civil rights lawyers and other police reform advocates argue many police shootings are preventable, the product of aggressive street-level tactics.
The LAPD’s training manual calls for officers to slow down encounters to give them time to accurately judge a situation before reacting, said attorney Brian Dunn. “A lot of that training goes out of the window when they’re involved in a high-adrenaline situation.”
Dunn represents the family of Valentina Orellana-Peralta, a 14-year-old girl killed in 2021 when an LAPD officer charged ahead of his colleagues responding to what turned out to be a false report of an active shooter at a Burlington Coat Factory in North Hollywood. When the officer opened fire on a suspect wielding a bike lock, one of the rounds from his M-16 rifle pierced the wall of a changing room where Valentina hid with her mother.
The teen’s death drew widespread outrage, along with demands for Officer William Jones to be criminally charged.
A divided police commission concluded that Jones was justified in firing his first shot, but wrong to let loose subsequent rounds. Jones was cleared of wrongdoing by the state Justice Department, which ruled that he used reasonable force in order to end what he perceived as a deadly threat.
The Orellana-Peralta family has a pending civil lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, arguing Jones and LAPD officials should have known the danger of firing a high-powered rifle inside a store.
The department is down hundreds of officers from its 2019 ranks and projects that it will continue to dwindle in fiscal year 2025.
“Those rounds are designed to penetrate — they’ll go right through a wall, they’ll go right through a car, they’ll go through a window — any of that,” said Dunn. “The round doesn’t care who it kills.”
Barring a settlement, the family’s suit is set to go to trial on April 8, Dunn said.
If the city is found liable, the payout could rival the record set in the case of Melyda “Mely” Corado.
In 2018, police were chasing Gene Evin Atkins, who had allegedly shot two people and taken one of them hostage. As he fled, Atkins shot at officers while running red lights and colliding with multiple vehicles. He ended up outside the Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake where Corado, 27, was an assistant manager.
While the store was crowded with Saturday afternoon shoppers, police exchanged fire with Atkins and wounded him. Corado, who was inside, was killed by a stray bullet fired by officers.
A pending lawsuit alleges police bullet fragments hit a woman sitting nearby in her car; the city has denied responsibility in court filings.
The police commission found the shooting of Corado to be within department policy. But last year, the city paid $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit over her death — part of the nearly $30 million total the city has been ordered to pay over the last decade for police bystander shootings, The Times found.
Corado’s brother, Albert Corado Jr., recalled his anger at how city leaders’ tone changed after their family filed a wrongful death lawsuit, shifting from apologetic to defensive. “Now we have to actively find reasons for why our officers had to do what we had to do,” is how he put it.
That’s part of the reason why he agonized over accepting the settlement. As a result, he said, the city “will just never have to talk about it again.”
Bystanders hit while biking, shopping at Costco
In many of the cases reviewed by The Times, innocent bystanders appeared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. LAPD officers sprayed bullets through residential neighborhoods or busy commercial corridors while confronting a suspect, their rounds ripping into cars, houses and storefronts.
In November, a domestic violence suspect driving a white Maserati led police on a high-speed pursuit that ended in an armed standoff in the driveway of a West Adams apartment building where his family lived.
Body-cam footage showed officers shoot and kill the man, Aundre Jones, 37, as he walked toward them with a gun in each hand. His mother, who had walked outside the building during the commotion, was wounded — and promptly handcuffed by police.
The footage showed officers rush to apply a tourniquet to Jones’ mother’s arm, as she yelled that the cuffs were “too tight.”
A month later, on Dec. 28, officers accidentally shot two men who had tried to detain a man wielding an AK-style rifle outside a church in Watts who they said had tried to rob them.
The two men, who were not identified, had wrestled 54-year-old Kevin Doby to the ground.
“Drop the gun,” one of the officers yelled before opening fire, striking Doby, but also wounding the two men, who have since filed a claim against the city. An attorney for Doby has argued that his client was the victim, not aggressor, and was merely armed for protection.
Some bystanders emerge unscathed out of sheer luck. Such was the case in one 2023 incident, in which officers who came across a shooting at a medical marijuana dispensary in the Manchester Square neighborhood fatally shot the alleged gunman — but also sent bullets into a car occupied by a mother and her preschool-age son.
Capt. Silvia Sanchez claims her decision to review the arrest of a 16-year-old girl put her on a collision course with the union for more than 8,000 rank-and-file Los Angeles police officers.
Other times, police shootings came out of nowhere, turning mundane moments into near-death encounters. A British tourist received a $500,000 settlement after being wounded in 2016 by an errant police bullet while biking near the Venice Beach promenade.
Three years later, an off-duty officer got into a dispute with a mentally disabled man while standing in line for sausages at Costco in Corona, shooting and killing 32-year-old Kenneth French and also wounding his parents who stood 20 feet away. A jury awarded the survivors $17 million after a civil trial.
The mother of 15-year-old Jamar Nicholson sued the city in 2015 and received a $1 million settlement after an LAPD officer driving to a memorial for officers who have died in the line of duty jumped out of his vehicle and fired into a group of teenagers. The officer claimed he mistook one of the teens’ toy gun for a real weapon.
‘Be very cognizant of your background’
Nearly 20 years ago, the accidental police shooting of a 19-month-old girl who was being held hostage prompted furious criticism of the department and calls for better training.
But while the methods the LAPD uses to school officers have changed over the years, department rules remain clear: Even if police see bystanders in their background, they still can open fire if they believe it could prevent an “imminent threat” of further bloodshed.
Several recent cases have involved officers accidentally shooting people they were trying to save.
In June 2018, police responded to a homeless shelter, where a man named Guillermo Perez was holding a knife to a woman’s throat and using her as a human shield.
After a beanbag round failed to disarm Perez, officers shot him as many as 20 times, killing him. The woman, Elizabeth Tollison, was also struck twice, in the head and the left shoulder. One officer who didn’t fire his weapon later explained his hesitancy to department investigators by saying he didn’t want to “jeopardize” Tollison’s life.
In 2021, an 11-year-old boy who was being stabbed by his mother was struck by “bullet fragments” when police opened fire to stop the attack. The boy’s mother was wounded.
Police officials say that most encounters with armed suspects are fluid, unpredictable events over which officers have little control.
Django Sibley, the police commission’s executive director, said there has been a marked decrease in bystander shootings from the past as the department has embraced policies aimed at limiting the types of situations under which officers can draw their weapons.
Officers are taught to keep their finger off the trigger until they are ready to fire, and then only after assessing their target. And the presence of officers with less-lethal weapons such as Tasers and beanbag shotguns is supposed to avoid high-volume gunfire incidents, he said.
“If you go back, 10 to 15 years ago, you would see a lot more officer-involved shootings where you had a large number of rounds fired,” he said.
In addition to enhanced training, officers are now required to attempt to de-escalate tense situations and account for every round they fire — explaining to a review board in detail why their actions were warranted.
Deputy Chief Marc Reina, who oversees the training bureau, said in an interview that officers have to qualify at the weapons range, both at the Police Academy and then every few months after graduation. They are also instructed to go through a mental checklist to overcome the tunnel vision that often occurs in life-or-death situations, in which an officer becomes hyper-focused on their target.
“Yes, you’re dealing with a threat, but also be very cognizant of your background and your foreground,” said Reina.
While at the Police Academy, officers can earn bonus pay for high marksmanship. They are tested on their ability to think and act under stressful situations — which can include forcing officers to make decisions with sirens blaring or drill instructors yelling at them, or after their bodies are fatigued from doing pushups, sit-ups and jumping jacks.
‘The importance of target acquisition’
Despite the LAPD’s efforts to improve officer training, bystanders like Hernandez — the Wilmington man shot in the leg in 2017 — said they were no safer when the bullets actually started flying.
Hernandez was home with his then-fiancee and her two young daughters, ages 4 and 5, and a brother who was visiting from Mexico.
They heard sirens, followed by screeching tires and a big thump outside on West Opp Street.
Gang officers from the Harbor Division were chasing Pedro Gudino, who police said was an admitted Southsider gang member nicknamed “Tweeker.” Less than two minutes into the pursuit, Gudino veered into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with another motorist. Then the shooting started.
Hernandez recalled lunging to close the front door and searing pain as the bullet passed in and out of his leg, and blood began seeping through his black sweatpants.
An armed officer was stationed outside of his hospital room after the shooting. He felt the LAPD detectives on the case treated him like a suspect, asking questions about gang colors: “‘Why they use blue, why they use red?’”
“And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. Go ask them. I’m the victim here,’” he said.
Hernandez claims one Spanish-speaking investigator dangled the offer of a U-visa — which gives immigrant victims of crimes the chance to live and work in the U.S. — if he agreed to testify that the round that hit him was fired by Gudino, not police.
“And I started laughing, like, ‘Dude, I’m a citizen,’” he said.
Hernandez told department investigators that he understood “police opened fire to try to defend themselves.” But in his lawsuit against the city of L.A., he argued officers Andres Martinez and James Welch had been firing indiscriminately. The suit was settled out of court for $300,000.
He said the experience left him deeply distrustful of law enforcement. Sirens still make him jumpy. He recalled getting pulled over once for having tinted windows, his hands were shaking so bad that he couldn’t sign a ticket. And he lost his job as an iron worker, his leg injury preventing him from lifting heavy beams he used to have to carry around work sites.
Gudino, the van driver, still has felony charges pending.
The police commission found that the officers’ decision to fire adhered to department policy, despite the shots that had sailed past their intended target.
“The officers were reminded of the importance of target acquisition, background, sight alignment, and sight picture while firing their service pistols,” the commission’s report read. Otherwise, the report concluded, there were no “significant issues of concern.”
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