ABC 7 Eyewitness News interviewed Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Silva Megerditchian on January 7, 2020, in an article entitled, “LAPD officers accused of falsifying reports, wrongly classifying people as gang members.” Turns out that some members of an elite division of the LAPD were creating false reports and misclassifying some innocent people as gang members.
ABC 7 quoted Megerditichian, “It is one of the most awful designations that a defendant can have, quite honestly, because being a gang member has harsher sentencing consequences.”
According to the article, Megerditchian notes how this calls so much of the officers’ history into question. “This follows them through every arrest, through every interaction with police officers, because if they’re going to lie on something like that, how can we trust them to write anything that’s factual and accurate.”
According to Megerditchian, the article quotes her saying “this will have lasting effects on the trust between the public, the department and future hires.