By Libor Jany
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles police officer Toni McBride, a gun rights influencer on social media and daughter of a high-ranking police union official, has been cleared of wrongdoing in a fatal shooting where she was previously faulted for continuing to fire bullets into a man who’d fallen to the ground.
McBride appealed an earlier finding by the five-member Police Commission — which rules on all police shootings and other serious uses of force — that found her first four shots in the 2020 incident were justified, but the fifth and sixth rounds were not.
She was allowed to keep her job and instead ordered to undergo retraining. Under the LAPD’s disciplinary process, her case was eligible for review by a hearing examiner, who overturned the commission’s findings last month. The examiner’s name is kept secret under state law, and the reasoning behind the decision has not been made public.
Hearing examiners are civilians drawn from a pool of lawyers, ex-law enforcement officials and arbitration professionals. Their role in determining officer discipline has faced fierce criticism from critics who say cops are not being held accountable for excessive force and other misconduct.
McBride was among several officers who responded in April 2020 to a chaotic scene at the intersection of San Pedro and 32nd streets in the Historic South-Central neighborhood, where Daniel Hernandez had crashed his truck into multiple other vehicles and was brandishing a box cutter. A 911 caller told police that Hernandez, later found to have been using methamphetamine, appeared to be cutting himself.
Video footage showed McBride shoot Hernandez as he walked toward her and her police partner while ignoring repeated commands to drop the box cutter. She opened fire in three volleys of two shots, with the final two rounds striking Hernandez as he rolled on the ground.
Following the hearing examiner’s reversal, all of McBride’s shots will be considered “in policy” by the department and any mention of the commission’s previous decision will be scrubbed from her personnel file.
McBride did not respond to an email to her workplace account this week.
The shooting sparked protests after it occurred, with critics citing McBride’s past gun-toting social media posts as proof of a propensity toward violence.
In response to an inquiry by The Times, the commission issued a brief statement repeating its previous ruling from December 2020: “The Board found the first four rounds fired by the involved officer to be in policy, and the fifth and sixth rounds fired to be out of policy.”
Interim Chief Dominic Choi, who has the authority to override the hearing examiner’s decision, declined to comment. An LAPD spokesperson said the department doesn’t discuss personnel matters.
News of the reversal decision was first reported on the website of the National Police Assn., a nonprofit supportive of gun rights.
McBride’s father, Jamie McBride, is one of nine directors of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the powerful union that represents the city’s rank-and-file officers. The elder McBride, who has publicly and privately expressed his disagreement with the commission’s ruling, told the site that Choi had signed off on the hearing officer’s decision.
“Over the last four years this has weighed heavy on Toni, which actually caused her to have some medical problems,” he was quoted as saying in the blog.
His daughter was cleared in January 2023 of criminal wrongdoing for shooting Hernandez by the state attorney general’s office.
Hernandez’s family later filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, with their case citing a forensic pathologist who claims Hernandez was killed by McBride’s last two shots.
The family is now pursuing the suit in state court after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their federal claim. The appellate decision has been widely seen as an affirmation of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields police officers from civil liability.
Arnoldo Casillas , an attorney for Hernandez’s estate, called the hearing examiner’s decision “another shameless example of the LAPD whitewashing officer misconduct.”
McBride filed her own suit against the city, accusing former chief Michel Moore of retaliating against her by ordering her to delete her social media accounts, which showed her firing guns at shooting competitions and on training ranges. She lost that case in April, when a federal jury ruled in the city’s favor.
After the Hernandez shooting, a department committee recommended that McBride be placed on short-term restricted duty, effectively taking her out of the field. The recent ruling could open the door to her return to active duty in another unit, such as the LAPD’s training division.
McBride has been on medical leave since November 2022 due what she described in court filings as “severe physical symptoms caused by and exacerbated by the stress.” She went back to work for a short time after the shooting, only to take another leave, according to testimony offered at her civil trial. She temporarily relocated to Northern California to seek treatment for ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease.
Earlier this year, Mayor Karen Bass vetoed a proposed ballot measure to rework the disciplinary process — resulting in its removal from the Nov. 5 ballot and delaying the possibility of any meaningful reforms for at least two years.
The proposal would have stripped officers accused of misconduct from having their cases heard by all-civilian panels — made up of the same individuals who serve as hearing examiners — while giving the chief of police the power to fire an officer outright for certain serious offenses.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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